Courtesy AdWeek, here’s the Grey Group’s statement:
During Cannes we said the app was real and its creator, Grey for Good in Singapore, is a highly respected philanthropic unit that has helped numerous non-profit organizations. Moreover, Grey is one of the most creatively awarded agencies in the world with the highest ethical standards. We won over 90 Cannes Lions this year alone so there is no need for scam projects. However, given the unwarranted, unfair, unrelenting attacks by unnamed bloggers, we are putting an end to this and returning the Bronze Lion so there is not even the hint of impropriety or a question of our integrity. The saying no good deed goes unpunished is apt in this case.
Translation: “We know the app doesn’t really work and we were caught, but we’re such gigantic assholes that we’ll blame those who pointed this out instead of apologizing. Also, we won a shitload of other awards. Please don’t let our complete inability to show contrition affect your next campaign with us.”
From the (lengthy) release notes:
BBEdit 11.6 introduces a new demo model in which its complete feature set is available for the first 30 days of use.
At the end of the 30-day evaluation period, BBEdit will remain permanently functional with a revised feature set that includes its powerful text editing capabilities but not its web authoring tools or other exclusive features. BBEdit’s exclusive features may be re-enabled at any time with a purchased license.
If I’m reading this right, the most powerful text editor available for the Mac is now — effectively — free. Even with the limitations they cite, that’s astonishing.
Jonathan Stearns, Bloomberg:
The European Parliament endorsed legislation that will impose security and reporting obligations on service operators in industries such as banking, energy, transport and health and on digital operators like search engines and online marketplaces. The law, voted through on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, also requires EU national governments to cooperate among themselves in the field of network security.
The rules “will help prevent cyberattacks on Europe’s important interconnected infrastructures,” said Andreas Schwab, a German member of the 28-nation EU Parliament who steered the measures through the assembly. EU governments have already supported the legislation.
This is a good-natured law that I think will significantly improve security protocols used by major companies, and encourage them to more readily report breaches. That’s desperately needed — recall that LinkedIn was a public company with 200 million members four years ago, when their systems were breached. Over 100 million passwords were stolen, yet LinkedIn only acknowledged “some” at the time. It wasn’t until this year when they admitted to the full scale of the theft. If LinkedIn covered it up for PR reasons, that’s bad; if they didn’t know about the theft in 2012, that’s arguably worse.
But more needs to be done. Not only should systems be hardened and reporting procedures be set in place, these companies ought to be collecting and storing less personal information. That’s the kind of decision that would reduce the incentive for this kind of crime while improving all of our privacy and security, regardless of the chance of a corporate-level breach.
Postscript: I adjusted Bloomberg’s headline because the word “cybersecurity” makes me feel like I should switch on some Eiffel 65. I asked on Twitter and Victor Pope suggested “information security”, but it doesn’t feel quite right in this context. Sonya Mann’s choice, “network security”, seems more right, but still a little clunky to me. If you have a suggestion for a better phrase, please let me know. Together, we have already bid farewell to CSI: Cyber; now, it is time for us to rid the world of the word “cyber” in all its forms.
Glenn Fleishman writes for TidBits on Eye-Fi’s decision to drop support for many of their products this September:
I have long been dubious about devices that require the continuous operation of Internet-connected services to function. I don’t expect relatively inexpensive hardware to remain useful and work forever, of course. But while Eye-Fi says it began to phase out the last products that are affected starting in 2012, it allowed them to remain in retail sales channels until March 2015. The company should have taken more ownership of the situation around products sold in the last five years.
It’s not just hardware — the products and services we use are increasingly dependent on a monthly or yearly subscription fee to retain their usability. Streaming music and movies, the software-as-a-service model, and “internet of things” devices have all made us more comfortable with paying small amounts of money over time instead of a lump sum for a lifetime of use.
There are good arguments to be made for subscription pricing. It allows software developers to have regular cash flow; prior pricing models encouraged a surge in sales upon the release of a new version, followed by a slow trickling off as the version increases in age. Such a model presses developers to think in terms of monolithic releases, which seems outdated when software doesn’t need to be packaged and shipped to be updated.
It also means that we, as consumers, feel the cost impact a lot less. Many people listen to the same songs and albums repeatedly in Spotify, which they could own forever for $10 per album, not per month. But having a subscription instead allows users to experiment with new and more diverse music choices without expending any additional cost. Lots of people don’t take full advantage of this, but that’s okay too — it all evens out.
However, we’ve seen instances where music becomes no longer available due to a licensing expiration. Movies and TV shows appear and disappear from Netflix on a frequent basis, which makes its selection unreliable. Free software you rely on can simply disappear, while paid software requires an ongoing cost for as long as you’re using it. If the software utilizes a proprietary file format, you have a choice to pay for a very long time, or hope that you’ll be able to recover your data should you need it in the future. Most of these problems are not new, but they are exacerbated by the rise of the subscription pricing model.
Google:
Starting June 30, 2016, you’ll no longer be able to upload display ads built in Flash. And, starting in January 2017, AdWords will stop running display ads in the Flash format.
If you use Flash ads in your AdWords campaigns, there are 2 ways to switch to HTML5 ads […]
Amazon stopped accepting Flash ads last year, but they’re clearly nowhere near as significant a provider as is Google. This policy change affects both AdWords and DoubleClick.
I don’t have Flash installed on my personal computer, but I do on my office computer. A recent update introduced a resource-eating bug where loading a page in Safari with a poorly-built Flash ad (read: almost any Flash ad) would bring the browser to a halt.1 It’s the kind of thing that would strike by surprise, though most news sites could reliably reproduce the bug due to their significant number of ad placements. This issue completely went away after I activated ClickToPlugin to block Flash in Safari.
HTML5 video ads are as annoying as Flash video ads, but at least they aren’t resource hogs. Those who champion the recent upsurge in autoplaying video with sound, though, can go straight to hell.
This year’s collection of sketchy Vancouver, Washington-area fireworks from Cabel Sasser is strangely heartwarming at times. Happy American Canada Day, American readers.
Kirk McElhearn writing for Macworld:
But things get complicated when music that you have added to your iCloud Music Library from Apple Music is pulled. Labels can withdraw the right to stream certain songs and albums at any time, but you won’t be notified. You may see albums and songs in your library, but their titles are a slightly lighter color (depending on the view), and their iCloud status is No Longer Available.
It’s understandable that record labels make this decision at times. They may realize that enabling streaming for a certain album leads to lower sales, and the lost revenue isn’t compensated by the meager moneys they get from streaming. But it’s frustrating as a user to find that, for example, one or two songs of an album you’ve been listening to for a while are no longer available to stream. Or that an entire album is missing from your library.
Yet another terrific reason to use streaming services as a complement to — rather than a replacement for — a local music library. Unlike Spotify, however, saving playlists and music on Apple Music to your local library requires an iCloud Music Library subscription, which tends to cause problems like this. Conceptually, I still prefer the idea of one library that contains both, but Apple’s implementation of iCloud Music Library has been a widespread disaster. I’m not one for hyperbole or exaggeration, but there are few things more personal than my music library, and I don’t trust it to survive an iCloud transition unscathed.
Victor Luckerson writing for the Ringer on the hidden fees within Uber-style apps and services:
[…] A growing number of apps that fulfill an ohhhh, I really want rather than a basic I guess I need are masking their pricing structure in hopes that users will mash “I accept higher fare” on their phones ever faster, regardless of the price tag’s details. Postmates, for example, connects consumers to couriers who will hand-deliver everything from a panini to an Xbox. You just have to pay tax, a 9 percent service fee that goes to the company, and a delivery fee that varies based on distance to pay the courier (who is a contract worker, not an employee). And you’re supposed to tip. And, sometimes, there’s Uber-style surge pricing. Add it all up and you get a nightmare known as a $26 Chipotle burrito.
David Streitfeld writing for the New York Times on Amazon’s deceptive pricing practices:
With a majority of Amazon products, the presentation of a bargain used to be front and center. Take, for example, the Breville Infuser Espresso Machine. A few months ago, Amazon said this was an $800 machine that it was offering for $500, a discount of 38 percent.
[…]
The problem with list prices or, as they are sometimes called, manufacturers’ suggested retail prices, is that they are regularly more of a marketing concept than what anyone is actually charging. When Amazon was saying the list price of the Breville Infuser was $800, Breville itself was selling the machine for $500 — about the same as Amazon. Other retailers sell it for $500, too. Breville confirmed the price was $500.
We are, of course, willing to pay for convenience and efficiency. But both of these authors raise a good point: this pricing should be transparent and known to consumers.
Uber’s recent decision to bury the amount by which they’re increasing the fare during “high demand” makes it hard for users to know whether it’s a reasonable deal. Of course, we may well choose to take the Uber instead of a cab, even if it costs far more, but we should be fully aware of how the rate is calculated. Similarly, Amazon’s displayed list price should be reflective of the actual list price for the item in stores, not a hypothetical number.
All of the prospective buyers in this case seem to have one thing in common: they’re all interested in expanding their collection of user data. Google and Facebook aren’t interested in engineering talent that can presumably only be found at LinkedIn, but the company’s collection of data on over 430 million users must have been appealing. Microsoft — the eventual buyer — has, of late, been accelerating their own collection of user data, too.
Charles Thaxton, writing for the Awl:
So to what extent does the way a site looks impact what a site is? This question might have to be re-legislated again. What seems certain is that fewer discrete pages means fewer discrete voices, and further ensures that the internet becomes primarily a vehicle for reaction (and all the ugliness of a purely reactionary culture) rather than creation.
Nostalgia for the way the web looked is really a sublimated nostalgia for how it felt, for a time in almost everyone’s life when discovery and openness and joy were all more operable. As much as we want to preserve the early internet in amber, we want to hold on to the feeling of the early internet even more.
It fascinates me that there are Tumblr blogs belonging to teenagers who never experienced the early, lo-fi web, but seek to emulate its style. They’re also partially responsible for the resurgence of animated GIFs over the past few years. I wonder if they are trying to create their interpretation of a romanticized ideal.
Bruce Sewell is not mincing words:
Our team has been incredibly responsive. Shortly after Spotify submitted its app on May 26, our team identified a number of issues, including that the in-app purchase feature had been removed and replaced with an account sign-up feature clearly intended to circumvent Apple’s in-app purchase rules. That feature exists only for the purpose of avoiding having to pay Apple for your use of the App Store by emailing customers within hours, directing them to subscribe to Spotify on its website. A clear violation of the terms every other developer adheres to. During a number of discussions between our team and Spotify, we explained why this sign-up feature did not comply with our guidelines and requested you resubmit a compliant version of the app. On June 10, Spotify submitted another version of the app which again incorporated the sign-up feature directing App Store customers to submit an email address so they could be contacted directly by Spotify in a continued attempt to get around our guidelines. Spotify’s app was again rejected for attempting to
circumvent in-app purchase rules, and not, as you claim, because Spotify was simply seeking to communicate with its customers.
I had a little too much trust in Peter Kafka’s original report. Spotify may have “turned off its App Store billing option”, but they also introduced a clear attempt to circumvent Apple’s requirements.
Spotify is lobbying pretty hard for Apple to be investigated for anti-competitive behaviour, and it sounds like they’re getting their way — an investigation is apparently ongoing. But that doesn’t mean that regulators are going to find anything; and, in this case, Spotify was whining about their clear violation of App Store rules.