Month: October 2016

Samsung Ends Production of the Note 7 ⇥ bloomberg.com

Yoolim Lee and Sohee Kim, Bloomberg:

Samsung Electronics Co. is ending production of its problematic Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, taking the drastic step of killing off a device that became a major headache for South Korea’s largest company.

Samsung had already recalled the Note 7 once last month after early models exploded and the latest move comes after customers reported that replacement phones were also catching fire. Samsung will be without its highest-end smartphone that was supposed to compete against Apple Inc.’s iPhones and other premium devices during the holiday shopping season.

After even the replacement phones started catching fire, I’m not surprised by Samsung’s decision. Based on Lee and Kim’s report, it seems that they don’t have a satisfactory resolution yet, and it’s far riskier to keep trying new things when the Note 7’s reputation is so damaged.

I’m not sure I really believe that Samsung will have nothing like the Note 7 to show for the all-important holiday quarter. If they manage to find the fault and fix it within the month, they could easily re-launch the phone under a different name — all of the tooling and production capabilities are already in place. The question is: would anyone buy it, or, indeed, any Samsung phone at this rate? No Android OEM has the name recognition or marketing prowess of Samsung’s Galaxy line, so where do all of those sales go now that their brand is in the toilet?

On a somewhat related note, it happens to be National Fire Prevention Week in the United States and Canada. Stay safe and promptly return your Galaxy Note 7.

An Update on the Dash App Situation ⇥ marco.org

Last time we discussed Apple’s removal of Dash from the App Store, the situation around it was murky and still unfolding. Today, some of that confusion has ended with two articles. First, Rene Ritchie of iMore received a statement from Apple:

“Almost 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected across two accounts and 25 apps for this developer so we removed their apps and accounts from the App Store,” an Apple spokesperson told iMore. “Warning was given in advance of the termination and attempts were made to resolve the issue with the developer but they were unsuccessful. We will terminate developer accounts for ratings and review fraud, including actions designed to hurt other developers. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, on behalf of all of our customers and developers.”

That’s quite the accusation. A second account explains why nobody found the low-quality utility apps allegedly from the same developer, and why so many people rallied behind the developer, Bogdan Popescu: there’s just no need to create fraudulent reviews for a well-regarded niche app like Dash.

However, Popescu provided an explanation for the secondary account today:

What I’ve done: 3-4 years ago I helped a relative get started by paying for her Apple’s Developer Program Membership using my credit card. I also handed her test hardware that I no longer needed. From then on those accounts were linked in the eyes of Apple. Once that account was involved with review manipulation, my account was closed.

Popescu recorded a call on Saturday with an Apple developer relations representative. In the call, the representative says that Popescu would have his account reinstated if he wrote a blog post that stated that his account was linked to another that was involved in fraudulent activity, and that he was working with Apple to unlink the accounts and get back into the program. That seems fair. Popescu apparently sent a draft of the post to Apple that night, and heard nothing back until today, when Apple sent the statement to iMore and other press outlets.

John Gruber:

Popescu concludes his response by publishing a recording of a phone call with an Apple representative. Popescu did himself no favors by doing so. For one thing, it’s a breach of trust. But for another, I think Apple comes off well in this recording. They’re bending over backwards to give Popescu another chance and have his account reinstated.

Marco Arment:

It’s also notable that Apple investigated this and tried to resolve it as well as they did. If it were any other company — say, Google for a suspended AdSense or YouTube account — I suspect the amount of effort devoted to it would be much lower.

Agreed on all points.

I don’t think the reaction to the initial news of Dash’s removal was a waste, nor was it outsized. If a developer’s livelihood is largely dependent on the App Store and their apps are well-regarded, any decision from Apple that affects that ought to be scrutinized.

A public fight isn’t ideal from a PR perspective, but it seems like that it’s what it can take to get an adequate answer. In his first post on the subject, Popescu said that he asked developer relations why Dash was removed and didn’t receive an answer initially. They later contacted him and told him about fraudulent activity on his account — something which he maintains that he’s never participated in.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple bans dozens of developer accounts every week for fraud, and almost none of those will be reported because there’s no disputing the facts. Popescu’s case is much more unique: from Apple’s perspective, he was operating two accounts, one of which was dabbling in fraud. Popescu said that he knew nothing about the fraudulent operations of the second account and was unable to see any of Apple’s warnings.

Based on everything released so far, I don’t think Apple made a mistake. As far as they knew, it was the same account with a lot of black marks on its record. However, their process remains opaque enough that it has taken a rather public back-and-forth for Popescu to clarify fundamental aspects of why Dash was pulled. Everyone ought to have learned something here. I do hope Popescu gets his developer account back.

Update: “Frumpsnake” on the MacRumors forum found compelling evidence that Popescu used to manage all of the apps in his two accounts, and that he placed Dash into its own account to try to appear legitimate. Apple would surely have access to his account history, too.

I was clearly too optimistic about the situation with these two accounts, but I stand by what I wrote earlier: I think it’s right to assume the best from the developer, especially since Apple has mistakenly removed apps before. But this is not one of those circumstances.

AnandTech’s iPhone 7 Review ⇥ anandtech.com

Joshua Ho and Brandon Chester subjected the iPhones 7 to the rigorous battery of tests unique to AnandTech, and it’s a screamer: insane performance jumps over the already-fast iPhones 6S met with big leaps in battery life. Yet:

As Apple has rapidly added new features, UI performance has taken a hit, and the nature of the performance problems is such that throwing more hardware at them won’t make them go away because they’re often due to circumstances where rendering is blocked or is being done in a manner such that even large improvements in performance would not bring things back to 60fps. While I’m not going to comb through the entire OS to find all the cases where this happens, it happens enough that it’s something I would describe as a significant pain point in my experience as a user.

It’s nowhere near as egregious as the performance hiccups on Android phones, but iOS is increasingly adding instances where animations aren’t as smooth as they should be. Activating Notification Centre, scrolling through widgets in the Today view, and pulling down to show Spotlight are all instances where it’s reliably easy to cause a suboptimal animation.

Samsung Introduces the DP700C6A-X01US ‘ArtPC’ ⇥ pcworld.com

Catchy name aside, the DP700C6A-X01US is distinguished from a lot of its competitors because it’s cylindrical. Jon Phillips, PC World:

It would be easy to call the ArtPC Pulse a rip-off of Apple’s Mac Pro, but that position just ignores another competitor in the “let’s make a computer shaped like a cylinder!” race. The HP Pavilion Wave is currently for sale in HP’s online store, and, frankly, it looks way more sophisticated that Samsung’s bid for exactly the same market.

Go ahead: click on that link and tell me that the Samsung DP700C6A-X01US looks more like HP’s extruded Reuleaux triangle than it does a Mac Pro. I dare you.

On the plus side, perhaps the introduction of the DP700C6A-X01US will remind Apple that they do still sell the Mac Pro, and maybe it might be a good idea to, you know, update it.

Control

To celebrate their fifth anniversary, the Verge is publishing several interviews with key members of their staff, culminating in a redesign set to launch November 1. The first of those interviews was published today, with “engagement editor” Helen Havlak, who’s basically in charge of getting as many Verge readers as possible.

Nilay Patel, who conducted the interview, thought he’d help out by tossing in a particularly inflammatory statement, because there are no better readers than baited readers:

It was a good run, open web! So sorry that Apple killed you by turning Safari into the new IE and forbidding alternative browsers to innovate on iOS.

Not this shit again.

Since Patel left this hanging in the air with no supporting context, I assume he’s referring to Nolan Lawson’s whining and moaning about Safari’s then-lacklustre IndexedDB support. No matter how valid Lawson’s point may have been, to compare Safari to Internet Explorer is laughable at best.

But IndexedDB doesn’t really apply to a news site like the Verge. In fact, I can’t think of any features or APIs missing from Safari that will help the Verge deliver largely text-based articles. Even Lawson admits that the features he’s looking for in Safari are mostly there for web-based applications. A news site doesn’t — and, arguably, shouldn’t — need the same level of resources as Google Docs.

So what’s the solution that the Verge has come up with to enhance the way they deliver pages to mobile visitors?

“AMP is coming to eat our mobile page views,” says Helen, “But AMP loads super, super quickly and is simply a better experience right now. So can we add enough design to make an AMP page feel like The Verge? […]”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but first, a quick refresher on AMP. The Accelerated Mobile Pages project is an open-source fork of HTML, largely controlled and maintained by Google, that uses a master JavaScript file to control the prefetching and lazy loading of resources, and predetermine page layouts to speed up the load time of a page. It also disallows most JavaScript, requiring only scripts loaded asynchronously from certain components provided by AMP, and form elements aren’t available on AMP pages.

In theory, this is something I’d like: webpages stripped back to just the core elements, with as little JavaScript as possible. But, as I wrote earlier this year, I have significant concerns about the forking of HTML to a version that, while open-source, is largely built and controlled by one of the largest and most influential companies on the web.

In just two sentences, though, Havlak effectively admitted that the Verge’s mobile web experience is far worse than AMP’s. Why would that be? Well, it could be something to do with the typical weight of a Verge article: this article is about 1,200 words and includes just one visual of substance, yet it downloaded over 12 MB of stuff, most of it in the form of 56 different scripts, a bunch of ads, and a 2.6 MB decorative GIF at the top. This is not atypical — Google reportedly uses the Verge as part of a series of automated performance tests for Android.

The message here is simple: AMP may provide a better reading experience right now, but Patel and Havlak have control over that. They can improve the way that the Verge loads by removing third-party scripts and comments, just like AMP does. They can make the choice to include a small JPEG at the top, if they want to decorate their articles, instead of a large animated GIF. They can choose to reduce the number of different analytics scripts on any given page. All of these options are available for them to improve the reading experience of a typical Verge article while retaining the building blocks of the open web, as Patel so clearly would prefer:

You could also make a fine wine out of the tears I weep each night as the open web dies anew, but that’s neither here nor there.

Instead, they’ve chosen to embrace AMP, a technology that fractures the web. Why?

Our search traffic largely comes from Google, which already serves our AMP pages in Google News. Google is also switching mobile search results to AMP links, and that means almost all of our search visitors will see AMP pages instead of the mobile web.

In short: revenue.

To a certain extent, that’s fair. The Verge is a business and, like most others, they’re going to continue to try to expand in as many ways and generate as much money as they can.

But the Verge isn’t just adding support for AMP. They’re going all-in on it (emphasis mine):

So if we aren’t going to deliver The Verge on the mobile web, what do we have to figure out in order to deliver our brand to the digital audiences of the future?

It sounds like they’re making a conscious choice to skip most typical optimizations for the open mobile web, instead embracing platform-specific distribution to Facebook, Google, Apple News, and the desktop web. More than that, it sounds to me like Patel will stand up for “open” and “free” until it impacts business. Remember when he published that diatribe against the headphone jack-less iPhone 7 prior to its announcement?

Restricting audio output to a purely digital connection means that music publishers and streaming companies can start to insist on digital copyright enforcement mechanisms. We moved our video systems to HDMI and got HDCP, remember? Copyright enforcement technology never stops piracy and always hurts the people who most rely on legal fair use, but you can bet the music industry is going to start cracking down on “unauthorized” playback and recording devices anyway.

The message here is simple: the headphone jack was free and open, while digital audio has the potential for being closed and proprietary. It becomes dependent on the whims and business models of providers, labels, and technology companies.

The Verge has shifted their business model, too. Instead of relying upon traffic from third-party sources, they’re now entirely reliant upon third-party platforms. That seems pretty risky to me. What if, for instance, the Verge pursued a new initiative that was largely dependent on Facebook and, in particular, Facebook Video? And then what if, say, Facebook inflated the success of your video venture by 60–80%? That would make you re-think your strategy, no?

And here’s the trend: almost all of our growth is in video, particularly Facebook video. In particular, look at those Circuit Breaker numbers — most of the content posted to the Circuit Breaker Facebook page never makes it to The Verge’s website, but it’s still way out ahead of YouTube and our custom player, all of which get boosted when we embed them on article pages on the web.

Anyway, back to this article about the headphone jack. Point number six on the list:

No one is asking for this

Raise your hand if the thing you wanted most from your next phone was either fewer ports or more dongles.

I didn’t think so. You wanted better battery life, didn’t you? Everyone just wants better battery life.

Raise your hand if the thing you wanted from a website was more tracking, more ads, and greater consumption of your allotted mobile data or using a third-party platform to access the site through a proprietary language.

I didn’t think so.

We’re so out of ideas that actively making [phones] shittier and more user-hostile is the only innovation left.

Replace “phones” with “websites” and it kinda holds true, doesn’t it?

Poor Reporting on Yahoo’s Email Snooping ⇥ blog.erratasec.com

Robert Graham of Errata Security posted a well-considered critique of Joseph Menn’s blockbuster report on Yahoo:

My point is this: the story is full of mangled details that really tell us nothing. I can come up with multiple, unrelated scenarios that are consistent with the content in the story. The story certainly doesn’t say that Yahoo did anything wrong, or that the government is doing anything wrong (at least, wronger than we already know).

A few details from Menn’s report were somewhat clarified by a separate Reuters article, published the next day, from Mark Hosenball and Dustin Volz, and a New York Times article by Charlie Savage and Nicole Perlroth.

Menn’s initial article, while revelatory, should have been clearer from the time it was posted. Vague reporting on the details of security matters damages our ability to argue for better privacy protections in the long term, because we will be unable to accurately address specific violations of it.

Purgeable Space in MacOS Sierra ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

Free space is what we’ve always known it to be. It’s space on disk where there’s nothing, that’s ready to have data poured into it. Purgeable space is different. Purgeable space is a collection of files that are really on disk, ready to be read or modified or added to at any time—stuff like files stored in iCloud, dictionaries you haven’t used recently, certain large fonts (especially of Asian languages) that you may never or rarely use, movies and TV shows you’ve already watched (and are re-downloadable from iTunes), and photos and videos in that are synced with iCloud Photo Library (if the Optimize Mac Storage setting is turned on in Photos preferences).

These are real files, but Apple considers them expendable. They can be deleted immediately, without warning, in order to free up disk space, because they can always be downloaded again later.

I don’t remember hearing about the handling of purgeable space when Sierra was launched, but that’s okay. Most users won’t notice anything different going on under the hood; MacOS will, probably, just do the right thing.

Samsung Acquires Viv ⇥ techcrunch.com

Remember Viv, that amazing next-level virtual assistant that was previewed back in May? Samsung just bought the company.

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:

Ubiquity, [Viv cofounder Dag] Kittlaus said in an interview, is the reason Viv is trundling into Samsung’s bosom. Specifically, when I asked him why Samsung, he said this:

“They ship 500 million devices a year. You asked me onstage about what our real goal is, and I said ubiquity.

If you take a look around what’s going on in the market these days, and our readiness to really expand on our distribution, it made perfect sense when we discovered that our visions are so completely aligned, and our assets using the core technology in this huge distribution, the opportunity that now is the right time, and Samsung’s the right partner.”

Kittlaus previously helped build Siri, both pre- and post-acquisition, but Viv is a leaps-and-bounds improvement. If the future of mobile technology is, indeed, through virtual assistants, and if Viv behaves in the real world anything like it did in its first demoes, this is a critical acquisition for Samsung. It also happens to decrease their reliance upon Google.

Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phone Catches Fire ⇥ theverge.com

Jordan Golson, the Verge:

[Brian Green, the owner of the phone] said that he had powered down the phone as requested by the flight crew and put it in his pocket when it began smoking. He dropped it on the floor of the plane and a “thick grey-green angry smoke” was pouring out of the device. Green’s colleague went back onto the plane to retrieve some personal belongings and said that the phone had burned through the carpet and scorched the subfloor of the plane.

He said the phone was at around 80 percent of battery capacity when the incident occurred and that he only used a wireless charger since receiving the device.

Running the phone’s IMEI (blurred for privacy reasons) through Samsung’s recall eligibility checker returns a “Great News!” message saying that Green’s Galaxy Note 7 is not affected by the recall.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 recall keeps getting worse, especially for customers who must now be extremely wary of even their replacement phones. How does anyone trust any Samsung phone after this?

iCloud Storage Pricing

Yesterday’s hardware announcements from Google came with some pretty intriguing updates to their software, as well. Chief among them: Google says that Pixel owners will be able to back up their entire photo and video library in full resolution, for free. As far as I’m concerned, that’s huge. Regardless of the misgivings someone — me — may have about giving my entire photo collection to Google, it’s probably one of the most precious libraries of data I have. I never want to lose my photos.

Among all of Apple’s iCloud offerings, iCloud Photo Library has been the most successful for me, and I generally trust that it will remain more secure than Google Photos. It’s one of the few iCloud products that I actually trust, the others being iCloud Keychain and Contacts syncing. However, this peace of mind comes at a price: a price.

Thomas Ricker wrote about iCloud’s storage and pricing for the Verge:

Most of the time I’m happy to have gone all-in on Apple. But I feel backed into a corner when it comes to paying for even more iCloud storage when it’s necessitated by Apple’s increasingly cloud-centric app bundles. See, the best way to live inside of the Apple ecosystem is to use the company’s free (as it loves to remind us) apps. But Apple caps its free iCloud storage tier at a paltry 5GB — capacity that’s quickly filled with Live Photos, iOS app data, 4k video, GIFs everyone’s sending you in the new iMessages; and critically, iOS device backups. So in reality, Apple’s apps are not free — Apple charges you for them indirectly by requiring you to purchase more and more storage over time.

I don’t agree with Ricker’s assertion that iCloud storage fees make these apps not free, nor that Apple is being deceptive by marketing them that way — nobody ever complains that free computer programs are not actually free because their data takes up hard drive space, and it’s possible to use many of these apps without touching iCloud.

I do think that the iCloud storage tiers become increasingly stingy with every passing year. iCloud launched with 5GB of free storage, and it has remained so for five years. Over that same time period, Apple has introduced tiered storage upgrades that are priced more competitively than they used to be, but I bet most Apple users are still on the free tier and simply tolerate the messages that say “iCloud Storage Full”, particularly when Apple’s online services efforts occasionally feel half-assed.

There are, I think, a few things Apple could do to make iCloud feel like a serious commitment: increase the space allotted at the free tier, exclude iOS device backups from iCloud storage limits, and improve its reliability to Google or Amazon levels. Apple’s executives may put on a brave face when speaking to the press, but if they’re not concerned about iCloud internally, I find that deeply worrying.

Dash App Removed From Mac App Store ⇥ blog.kapeli.com

It’s high time that Apple made up for a recent dearth of dumb App Store rejections and removals.

Bogdan Popescu:

Yesterday I sent Apple a request to migrate my account from an individual one to a company one. Once I verified my company with its D-U-N-S Number, they notified me that some features in iTunes Connect won’t be available during account migration.

A while later my iTunes Connect account started showing as “CLOSED” and my apps were removed from sale. I thought this was normal and part of the migration.

Today I called them and they confirmed my account migration went through and that everything is okay as far as they can tell. A few hours ago I received a “Notice of Termination” email, saying that my account was terminated due to fraudulent conduct. I called them again and they said they can’t provide more information.

This is clearly a mistake, but it’s causing real impact to Popescu’s livelihood, as he’s the sole developer of Dash. To make matters worse, poor communication from Apple’s developer relations team — something we’ve discussed many times before — is preventing him from understanding what happened or what he can do to fix it.

Update: Popescu just updated the post with some followup from Apple developer relations:

Apple contacted me and told me they found evidence of App Store review manipulation. This is something I’ve never done.

Apple’s decision is final and can’t be appealed.

Either something is awry with Apple’s automated processes for detecting fraudulent reviews, or someone is screwing with Popescu. Regardless, a final decision from Apple with no opportunity for recourse is indefensible, as far as I’m concerned. The Mac App Store has been an awful place for developers for a long time; this is not making it better.

Phil Schiller, in an email to 9to5Mac reader Matthew Els:

I did look into this situation when I read about it today. I am told this app was removed due to repeated fraudulent activity.

We often terminate developer accounts for ratings and review fraud, including actions designed to hurt other developers. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, on behalf of all of our customers and developers.

I don’t see why Popescu would lie about his alleged involvement in manipulating reviews. Dash is a widely-used and highly-regarded developer resource.

Joel Cieplinski:

The accusation from Apple of “repeated fraudulent activity” is a pretty serious one. Not sure we’re getting close to the whole story here.

Not OK, Google ⇥ techcrunch.com

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

The scope of Alphabet’s ambition for the Google brand is clear: It wants Google’s information organizing brain to be embedded right at the domestic center — i.e. where it’s all but impossible for consumers not to feed it with a steady stream of highly personal data. (Sure, there’s a mute button on the Google Home, but the fact you have to push a button to shut off the ear speaks volumes… )

In other words, your daily business is Google’s business.

This is not a new argument, but it is astonishing to reflect on how far the goalposts have been moved for what is considered a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Treating Data Like Waste ⇥ aclu.org

Before news broke today that Yahoo was searching through mass amounts of user data by government request, the ACLU posted an article about a client they have been defending — Open Whisper Systems, makers of the Signal messaging app — against a government user data request.

ACLU attorney Brett Max Kaufman:

As the documents show, the government’s effort did not amount to much — not because OWS refused to comply with the government’s subpoena (it complied), but because the company simply does not keep the kinds of information about their customers that the government sought (and that too many technology companies continue to amass). All OWS was able to provide were the dates and times for when the account was created and when it last connected to Signal’s servers.

A policy of not collecting or retaining user data remains a very effective way of protecting users’ privacy. It’s really quite simple.

Other Tech Companies Respond to Yahoo’s Snooping ⇥ theintercept.com

Sam Biddle of the Intercept asked EFF attorney Andrew Crocker what he thought of the all-encompassing directive served to Yahoo:

Crocker said the Yahoo program seems “in some ways more problematic and broader” than previously revealed NSA bulk surveillance programs like PRISM or Upstream collection efforts. “It’s hard to think of an interpretation” of the Reuters report, he explained, “that doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t being asked to scan all domestic communications without a warrant” or probable cause.

Biddle also asked other major tech companies if they had been subjected to a similar directive. Responses are still coming in, but this one from Twitter is pretty telling:

Asked whether Twitter had ever received such a directive aimed at its messaging system, Nu Wexler, the company’s public policy communications chief, replied that “Federal law prohibits us from answering your question, and we’re currently suing the Justice Department for the ability to disclose more information about government requests.”

Only Microsoft issued an outright denial on the record, while Apple quoted a previously-issued statement. Google, Yahoo, and others have yet to respond.

Update: Google says they’ve never received a similar request.

Yahoo’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year Gets Worse ⇥ reuters.com

Joseph Menn, Reuters:

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

According to Menn, the demand was issued by an intelligence agency just last year, and was complied with by Marissa Mayer without legal objection. Unlike the 2014 breach of a Yahoo user database, I very much doubt this will affect Verizon’s proposed acquisition, for obvious reasons.

But, like security breaches, it’s likely that the biggest civil liberties breach since Snowden is not this, but something else that we don’t yet know about. As Menn points out, it’s likely that similar demands were made of other email providers.

Dropbox’s Finder Toolbar ⇥ sethvargo.com

Seth Vargo:

You would think less than a month after a very popular HackerNews article on how Dropbox Hacks Your Mac, the file sharing company would be careful about the activities they are performing in their software distribution. Nope, not Dropbox. Today they released an update that adds a hacky overlay UI element to finder that cannot be disabled!

Ben Newhouse of Dropbox:

This is an experiment that is being tested with a fraction of users primarily on beta releases (which Seth is on, as evidenced by the version number in his screenshots). We haven’t shipped it to everyone so that we can continue to iterate and incorporate feedback. I checked with the team about the “Finder Toolbar” drop down and it looks like it requires a restart of the Dropbox client in order to take affect — let us know if that doesn’t work.

Both of these links via Michael Tsai, who writes:

Vargo said that [the Finder Toolbar preference] didn’t work. (And does “primarily” mean some non-beta users?)

I’m not on the beta stream for Dropbox, yet I recently received an update that enabled the toolbar.

It seems increasingly clear to me that one of the primary reasons Dropbox feels so magical is because it messes with aspects of the system that typical developers wouldn’t dare touch. Dropbox has a history of excelling at this, despite the risks inherent to modifying low-level aspects of an operating system, but what happens when they screw up? A history of haxies and swizzled kernel extensions says that Dropbox’s relatively stable run isn’t likely to last forever.

In the DRC, Mining Cobalt for Lithium Ion Batteries ⇥ washingtonpost.com

As a component of lithium-ion batteries, cobalt has become one of the single most important contributors to modern industry. However, the conditions in which it is mined are often dangerous, cramped, and frequently use child labour.

Back in January, Amnesty International released a heartbreaking report (PDF) describing the brutal conditions many cobalt miners face, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

Not only are state officials aware of the mining activities taking place in unauthorized locations, but they also financially benefit from them. Officials from a range of different government and security agencies control access to unauthorized mining sites and demand illegal payments from artisanal miners. During their visits, researchers saw officials wearing uniforms and others who identified themselves as working for governmental agencies at three unauthorized mining sites. In Kasulo, they saw uniformed police and were approached by two men out of uniform, and one in uniform, who said that they were members of the mines police. These men told the researchers to leave the area as foreigners were not allowed to visit mines sites without official permission, and demanded that the researchers pay a fine. Artisanal miners at these and other sites complained that the mines police and other officials demand payments from them for each sack of ore or to work on the site.

A Ministry of Mines official confirmed to researchers that none of these agencies are authorized to collect payments (referred to in the mining areas as “taxes”) from artisanal miners. The evidence suggests that the state officials are extorting illegal payments from artisanal miners, while turning a blind eye to the unsafe conditions in which miners work that breach DRC’s own laws, including the prohibition on child labour in mines.

As with other, similar, reports of human rights abuses deep within the global supply chain, I assumed that this would rapidly be forgotten. After all, cobalt has been on the U.S. Department of Labor’s rather depressing “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor” since 2009 (PDF), and very little has come of it.

However, Todd C. Frankel recently investigated cobalt mining for the Washington Post and it’s making headlines all over again:

The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world’s biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world’s largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple’s iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.

These raw materials are extremely hard to trace — I encourage you to read both reports. This is particularly true when there is effectively one large company controlling much of the global supply of cobalt, and there is financial incentive to make the cobalt as difficult to trace as possible.

There are lots of ways to address this, but something that may prove most effective is to treat cobalt as a conflict material. Under Dodd-Frank, any products from American companies that use tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold are required to be certified conflict-free. Amnesty International notes how powerful an adjustment to that legislation could be:

Yet it is clear that these companies are currently failing to operationalise the OECD’s five step due diligence process beyond whatever measures they have put in place for 3T and gold. One company explicitly admitted and others implied that this is because cobalt is not covered under US legislation, clearly underscoring the value of law in influencing corporate behaviour.

Unlike with Amnesty’s report, some major tech and automotive companies responded to the specific allegations within the Post’s story. Just one — Apple — has committed to conflict-free certification:

Starting in 2017, Apple will internally treat cobalt as a conflict mineral, requiring all cobalt refiners to agree to outside supply-chain audits and conduct risk assessments. The company also will soon, for the first time, include cobalt in an annual update of due-diligence efforts for its conflict-minerals supply chain. This goes beyond what current OECD guidelines call for. Apple also supports adding cobalt to the U.S. conflict-minerals law, which currently requires American firms to try to verify the source of tin, tungsten, titanium and gold used in their products.

As the American consumer electronics industry is one of the world’s largest, this policy change could have a significant positive impact on the worldwide cobalt industry.

But, while there are people working in tremendously awful labour conditions around the world in many industries, we should expect that every company practices due diligence and ensures that the raw materials used in its products were not unearthed by slaves, children, or people risking their lives. This should not need to be stated, nor should Apple’s commitment feel like something that differentiates their products from their competitors’. This is basic human decency: an expectation, more than anything.

What the Twitter Sale Reveals About Twitter ⇥ vanityfair.com

Nick Bilton, writing for Vanity Fair:

This isn’t to say that Twitter isn’t worth billions. As this election cycle makes evident, it is unquestionably the place to talk politics and the media’s coverage of it, among other things. Twitter may have struggled to keep up with the growth of other social-media companies, but when was the last time that you heard someone say, “Did you see what Trump said on SnapChat?” Or, “I can’t believe Clinton posted that on Instagram!” Instead, the conversation is all taking place on Twitter. (One of my morning stops for Trump news isn’t FiveThirtyEight or The New York Times; it’s Sopan Deb’s Twitter feed.) But for investors, the question is whether people will still be ready to slurp up the service after November 8th. (My take: if Trump wins, yes; if it’s Clinton, probably not. And, please God, let’s not let Trump win.)

Twitter is still the place that’s synonymous with real-time public commentary. It’s where TV anchors tell you to follow them for updates, and where news gets made and discussed. There’s nothing else quite like it for information junkies, regardless of whether it’s an election year.

But Twitter — the company — has failed to make Twitter — the product — a compelling story, while allowing abusive users and communities of hatred to fester. There’s the core of a good idea and a good product in there, but it’s squandered by a lack of leadership.