Month: April 2017

Photographers Used iPhones to Shoot New Condé Nast Covers ⇥ techcrunch.com

Anthony Ha, TechCrunch:

Creative Director Alex Grossman said it made sense to finally put an iPhone pic out front with the May travel issue, particularly given the connection between photography and travel. The cover was shot on an iPhone 7 Plus, in the Tlacolula Market of Oaxaca, Mexico, and it combines people and food, with a woman showing off a strawberry Paleta.

You and I both know that these kinds of articles are a mix of well-placed PR and interesting news, but I’m linking to it because I really love the idea of using an iPhone to shoot a travel magazine. The context is just so appropriate. Magazine photos tend to look just a little too good to be true, especially when they’re shot with a professional DSLR or medium format rig, but a smartphone camera makes the same photos feel that much more grounded in reality.

Via email, I asked Peden and Munk — the photographers behind the Bon Appétit cover — about their shooting process, and it’s a lot simpler than I thought. They told me that they used Portrait mode with the phone on a tripod, triggered the shutter with a Bluetooth camera remote, and adjusted their selects in VSCO. Pretty remarkable.

Phishing With Unicode Domains ⇥ xudongz.com

Xudong Zheng:

Punycode makes it possible to register domains with foreign characters. It works by converting individual domain label to an alternative format using only ASCII characters. For example, the domain “xn--s7y.co” is equivalent to “短.co”.

From a security perspective, Unicode domains can be problematic because many Unicode characters are difficult to distinguish from common ASCII characters. It is possible to register domains such as “xn--pple-43d.com”, which is equivalent to “аpple.com”. It may not be obvious at first glance, but “аpple.com” uses the Cyrillic “а” (U+0430) rather than the ASCII “a” (U+0041). This is known as a homograph attack.

Unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari displays the punycode version of domains that use characters from the extended Unicode set — that is, instead of displaying “аррӏе.com”, it shows “xn--80ak6aa92e.com”. However, this is arguably problematic for domains that legitimately use homographic characters. The Cyrillic alphabet is full of characters that look identical to Latin letters.

The way this bug was fixed in Chromium is to see if the entire domain is a Latin lookalike and uses a TLD like .com, .net, or .org.

Update: My description above is inaccurate. Safari has a security check in place to prevent fraudulent non-Latin Unicode domains from displaying; punycode won’t display when the domain is valid and legitimate on a TLD belonging to a Cyrillic-lanaguage country. Thank you to a reader for the correction.

Today’s Next-Generation iPhone Clickbait Brought to You by Gizmodo ⇥ gizmodo.com

Alex Cranz of Gizmodo responded to Mark Gurman and Min Jeong Lee’s report about the next-generation iPhone:

The phone will be a nearly bezel-free slab of glass and stainless steel (or possibly aluminum), the home button will be dead, and a gorgeous OLED display will be the focal point.

If you’re having a sense of deja vu, that’s because the Galaxy S8 had the exact same series of redesigns from the previous iteration when Samsung announced it last month. While Apple has been popularly viewed as the big smartphone innovator, this year it’s undoubtedly chasing Samsung.

The headline for this article said it even more succinctly:

The 10th Anniversary iPhone Sounds Like a Samsung Clone

One of three things happened here. Maybe Apple has become so efficient with their design process that they went all the way back to May of last year to begin copying the Galaxy S8; or, perhaps, Samsung was aware of that rumour and rushed their version of the phone to market; or — most likely — this is a natural evolution of the smartphone form factor as every major manufacturer has been trying to reduce the bezels on their devices for years now.

The American Retail Shift ⇥ theatlantic.com

Derek Thompson, the Atlantic:

The number of malls in the U.S. grew more than twice as fast as the population between 1970 and 2015, according to Cowen Research. By one measure of consumerist plentitude — shopping center “gross leasable area” — the U.S. has 40 percent more shopping space per capita than Canada, five times more the the U.K., and 10 times more than Germany. So it’s no surprise that the Great Recession provided such a devastating blow: Mall visits declined 50 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to the real-estate research firm Cushman and Wakefield, and they’ve kept falling every year since.

Michael Corkery, New York Times:

E-commerce players, led by the industry giant Amazon, have made it so easy and fast for people to shop online that traditional retailers, shackled by fading real estate and a culture of selling in stores, are struggling to compete. This shift has been building gradually for years. But economists, retail workers and real estate investors say it appears that it has sped up in recent months.

The Times has a small photo gallery that helps illustrate the difference in scale between the operations of an online-focused warehouse-only retailer like Amazon and the space required for a mall, and it’s as dramatic as you might expect. Imagine what can be done with the space left by the hundreds of malls anticipated to close within the next ten years.

Corkery again:

Retailers have hoped that their traditional stores, by offering catchy displays and top-notice service, can lure shoppers away from their screens. Some of the best evidence that brick-and-mortar retail is still viable may be Amazon’s experimentation with operating physical stores of its own.

Something I was unable to find is a recent comparison of the retail environment in shopping malls compared to that of high streets. I do a considerable amount of my shopping online, but I still prefer visiting my local bookstores to browse what they have on the shelves. I still want to try clothes on, and see what an iPhone accessory is really like before I buy it. It looks like Amazon is counting on blending that experience with the kind of data that’s only available to one of the world’s biggest online retailers.

A Time Capsule for the Web ⇥ kottke.org

Tim Carmody in a guest post on Kottke:

More than ever, what the web serves up on its own is the very worst things that have just happened. It’s an active shooter livestreaming a snuff film on Facebook — or something not as bad, but not much better.

And hey, focusing on very recent, very bad news makes a lot of sense. If there are awful things happening right now, I want to know about them. If some overpaid someone wrote something stupid and everyone I know is slamming it on Twitter, I want to get in on it. We’re only human.

But sometimes, I wonder, with all the abundance and ephemerality of the web, whether we indulge the opposite impulse enough. I don’t mean sharing more new things that are funny, or heartwarming, or relatable. I mean going out and finding or rediscovering the things that are The Very Best We Have to Offer, gathering them together, and saving them, forever.

I love the idea of this project. It’s simple to participate — you just have to fill out a short questionnaire, and not every question needs an answer.

Something that Carmody hasn’t addressed, as far as I can see, is what how he’ll present the final product. I hope that the results show an earnest attempt at finding the best of the web, but I also foresee the potential for abuse. What does that editing process look like, and what is the result? I’m not being a pessimistic skeptic here; I’m intrigued.

Update: Carmody has shared a collection of the best tweets nominated by readers so far.

The Moderators ⇥ vimeo.com

A truly heartbreaking film from Ciaran Cassidy and Adrian Chen:

In an office in India, a cadre of Internet moderators ensures that social media sites are not taken over by bots, scammers, and pornographers. The Moderators shows the humans behind content moderation, taking viewers into the training process that workers go through in order to become social media’s monitors.

This film is twenty minutes long, but it needs that kind of length to tell the story of the people who filter out the worst of the web. Many of us are so far removed from the sewage — both conceptually and physically — that we can forget how much of it has been cleaned for us from our feeds. Per one moderator in the film [sic]:

We have to maintain the speed of two thousand photos per hour, we have to moderate. 20% of that photo are vulgarity photos.

In a span of eight hours, a moderator will see over three thousand photos of various levels of offence, from using a middle finger in a profile photo, to child abuse and physical violence. And I doubt these moderators are limited to a standard forty-hour work week.

This film is, naturally, very difficult to watch. There are occasional not-safe-for-work moments throughout, and it gets particularly heavy at around 13:00. I totally get that some of you may not feel comfortable with it, but I imagine that even if you don’t see the film and just read what I’ve described here, you can empathize with how mentally-tasking a moderator’s job must be.

How to Make a Backup of a FFFFOUND Account

Andy Baio:

Next month, two seminal image-sharing communities, FFFFOUND! and MLKSHK, will close their doors within a week of each other.

[…]

These two communities shared a lot in common. Both were very creative, focused on curating imagery, but how they’re shutting down are very, very different — how it was communicated, the tools for saving your contributions, and the future of the community.

FFFFOUND provides no export or backup tools. A handful of user-created scraping scripts exist for those tech-savvy enough to use them, but in general, most users will be unable to preserve their contributions.

More upsetting is the fact that FFFFOUND only allows Google, Bing, and Yahoo to crawl their archives in their robots.txt file, which outlines which crawlers can access their site and how frequently.

I frequently used FFFFOUND between 2008 and 2013, bookmarking nearly two thousand images in that time. I somehow accumulated 703 followers on the site, and I loved its close-knit communal feeling. It was a really cool little service — like Pinterest without the commercial focus. I know a lot of photographers, designers, and other creative types who used it for collecting inspiration wherever they found it on the web. So you can imagine how much it stings not to have an export feature.

I was determined to create a backup of my collection tonight. I tried fiddling with wget first, but the site is built in such a way that scraping it is beyond my expertise — though, much to my amazement, it doesn’t appear to be against the site’s terms of service. I really didn’t want to manually create a webarchive file of every page in my profile.

Thankfully, Baio sent me links to a few scripts for saving FFFFOUND profiles. Because I’m a complete idiot when it comes to command-line software that requires a bunch of dependencies, I’ve been struggling with this all evening.

But, at last, I think I found a relatively straightforward way to archive the images in your FFFFOUND profile on MacOS:

  1. Open Safari and copy Aaron Hildebrandt’s excellent ffffind.py script.

  2. Open your favourite plain text editor and paste it into a new file. Save it as ffffind.py in the directory of your choice. I went with a new “ffffound” directory in my Pictures folder.

  3. Open a Terminal window. You’re going to download and install a copy of the Python virtualenv package by running the command sudo pip install virtualenv. You’ll need to type your administrator-level password to do this.

    I’ve found installing it at the system level is more reliable than it is at the user level, likely because of SIP in recent versions of MacOS. You can try installing it at the user level by omitting sudo, however.

  4. Once that’s installed, navigate to the folder you created earlier for this project. That’s cd ~/Pictures/ffffound for me.

  5. We’re going to set up a virtual environment. First, run virtualenv ffffind to get the basics set up. Next, type source ./ffffind/bin/activate and press return to enter the virtual environment. The command line should now begin with (ffffind) instead of $.

  6. Next, within this virtual environment, we’ll need to install the latest release of Beautiful Soup, an HTML scraper. To install it, just run pip install BeautifulSoup and wait until it confirms that it has been installed.

  7. Now, just run python ffffind.py USERNAME with your FFFFOUND user name. Sit back, because this is going to take a while.

There are, of course a few caveats with this script. First, while I don’t believe it violates FFFFOUND’s terms of service, please don’t get annoyed at me if that changes. Besides, they’re the ones who didn’t provide an export function.

Second, while this will give you a copy of every image you saved to FFFFOUND, it won’t preserve page numbers or creation dates. If the order in which you saved the images is important to you, you’ll have to try to get ffffexport to work for you. It only downloaded my most recent 32 images, and I’m not sure why.

Third, ffffind doesn’t work perfectly. I saved a few images from a museum’s search engine. Their URLs included a .exe in the string, and that made ffffind very confused, so it stopped working. The easiest way to resolve this is to open the FFFFOUND page it stalled on and save that image manually, then delete it from your FFFFOUND. Unfortunately, the ffffind script doesn’t have the provision to restart on a specific page, so you’ll have to run it again from the start.

I hope this guide is helpful if you’re a FFFFOUND member hoping to save your bookmarks from annihilation. Many, many thanks to Andy Baio and Aaron Hildebrandt.

Update: I tried to make a Workflow for this but couldn’t. Dean Young made one quickly, though, and it seems to work really well. It only scrapes the FFFFOUND-cached versions of the images, and you may wish to adjust the /post/ part of the URL to /found/ for a more complete archive, but if you don’t want to mess around with the Python nonsense above, it’s a terrific option.

iTunes Podcasts Directory Rebranded as Apple Podcasts ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

On its own this is a minor change, and one that makes sense: In its most popular context, Apple’s podcast directory is accessed from the Podcasts app on iOS. iTunes is not a brand that needs to be associated with that product at all—it was only there because more than a decade ago, Apple extended the iTunes Store infrastructure and added podcast support to iTunes on the desktop. It was a long time ago. (Podcasters can get new badges to reflect the change.)

Looking at the larger picture, though, I have to assume that this is one part of a long, inexorable de-branding of iTunes. It proved to be a brand that was capable of having all sorts of non-tune-related things stuffed inside of it, but it was always an awkward fit and at some point it needed to be addressed.

The death of “classic” iTunes has been in the cards for quite some time, especially after the introductions of Apple Music and iCloud Music Library. Many of the pieces are in place for Apple to pull the trigger on iTunes, create discrete Mac apps for music, podcasts, and video, and rely upon iCloud-based syncing for iOS devices.

I’m still not ready for that future.

Apple Music Adds New ‘House of Strombo’ Video Show ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Brad Wheeler, Globe and Mail:

It was announced on Thursday by Apple Music that the CBC Radio 2 host will bring House of Strombo, a 10-episode concert series he hosts from his downtown Toronto home, to the U.S.-based subscription service. [George Stroumboulopoulos] will also provide exclusive playlists.

For Apple Music, the recruiting of Stroumboulopoulos gives the service a Canadian beachhead and a presence in Toronto, a musically thriving metropolis. For Stroumboulopoulos, the move provides the former MuchMusic VJ a measure of international exposure.

For the uninitiated, George Stroumboulopoulos was one of the best interviewers ever employed by the CBC. He spent ten years hosting a seemingly-straightfoward chat show on the network, always asking questions that provoked a depth of conversation that was unlike anything else you’d find on similar programs. His three-hour radio show consistently delivers a killer blend of music and talk.

Quite simply, this is one hell of a get for Apple Music.

“House of Strombo” premieres tonight with A Tribe Called Red. Trust me: it’s going to be good.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Numeric Ratings

Caroline O’Donovan wrote for Buzzfeed about how star-based ratings for Uber and Lyft drivers affects their livelihood:

In a San Francisco Lyft car, there’s a chart taped to the back of the front passenger seat: “The Rating System Explained.” It details — in exaggerated terms — what Lyft’s one- to five-star rating scale really means to drivers.

[…]

Though tongue-in-cheek, this rating system explainer touches on an essential truth of the gig economy: When companies like Lyft, Uber, and Postmates penalize workers who have low ratings, anything less than five stars feels like a rebuke.

“The rating system works like this: You start off as a five-star driver,” Don, a San Francisco Lyft driver told BuzzFeed News. “If you drop below a 4.6, then your career becomes a question. Uber or Lyft will reach out to you and let you know that you are on review probation. And if you continue to drop, then you’re going to lose your job. They’ll deactivate you.”

I stand by what I wrote four years ago:

Make no mistake: there is a need to have reviews of the new products, new music, and new whatever that competes for our attention and money. But the idea that they need to be judged on a numerical scale is completely ridiculous. A much simpler and more honest approach would be to either “recommend” a product, or to “not recommend” it.

I maintain that star ratings are a poor way to rate pretty much anything. As a method of grading an opinion or experience, it’s inherently dishonest: its equivalence to a numerical ranking system makes it feel like it should be somehow impartial or objective, when a rating is anything but.

I think that impression has given “gig-economy” companies the false confidence that they can rely upon these ratings, with real consequences for their emplo— I’m sorry, independent contractors. O’Donovan:

This sort of rating anxiety extends well beyond Uber and Lyft. “The rating system is terrible,” said Ken Davis, a former Postmates courier, who noted that under the company’s five-star rating system couriers who fall below 4.7 for more than 30 days are suspended. Said Joshua, another Postmates courier, “I really don’t think customers understand the impact their ratings have on us.”

I get that Postmates might just want their couriers to provide exceptional service every time, but that’s unreasonable due to users’ wildly differing standards.

Furthermore, this shows just how dishonest these rankings are. If you’re aware of the preposterously high standards Postmates, Uber, and Lyft set, you’re much less likely to give a three- or four-star rating if your experience is imperfect — you don’t want to be the user who causes the contractor to lose their job.

In general, it’s far clearer to present a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating. Apple Music’s “love” and “dislike” options are exactly what I need to tell it, and nothing more: it’s either “play more like this” or “play less like this”. Likewise, everyone I’ve ever spoken to has assumed that Netflix’s old star ranking system were the ratings from either users or critics, but that wasn’t the case: it was a guess as to how likely Netflix thought you — the user — might like that TV show or movie.

Some people might argue that reducing quality ratings to binary options — like or dislike — lacks context, but I don’t think star ratings provide greater context in the real world. I can easily understand whether a product or service was acceptable to me, but I’m certain I’m not the only person who freezes when they need to figure out just how acceptable it was.

Besides, there’s an appropriate way to build context around a rating: a simple, optional, and private comment box. It might be filled with unfair criticism or utter nonsense, but at least words aren’t usually interpreted as a constant metric in the same way that numbers are. Even if a comment box is filled with complete lies, there isn’t the impression that it’s a calculated and inarguable score.

Our crime, as users, is not knowing whether we can be honest with our ratings. But tech firms have created this problem by assuming that users will be honest after implying that anything less than five-star service is unworthy, and then tying contractors’ livelihoods to users’ ratings. That’s unfair to everyone.

Robbing a Bank by DNS ⇥ wired.com

Andy Greenberg, Wired:

The traditional model of hacking a bank isn’t so different from the old-fashioned method of robbing one. Thieves get in, get the goods, and get out. But one enterprising group of hackers targeting a Brazilian bank seems to have taken a more comprehensive and devious approach: One weekend afternoon, they rerouted all of the bank’s online customers to perfectly reconstructed fakes of the bank’s properties, where the marks obediently handed over their account information.

Yet another reminder that the infrastructure of the web is old and fragile, but it’s what we’ve got. I remain bewildered that it works as well as it usually does.

Big Tech Companies Lobby FCC to Preserve Net Neutrality Rules ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Hamza Shaban, Buzzfeed:

Top officials from the Internet Association, a trade organization that represents Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, among others, urged Pai to keep and enforce existing open internet rules. “The internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online,” the group’s officials said, according to a summary of the meeting filed with the FCC.

The Internet Association also told the FCC chair that, according to their own preliminary economic research, net neutrality rules did not negatively impact broadband investment, which contradicts claims from the telecom industry that the regulations would stymie innovation.

It’s in the interests of even the biggest tech firms to preserve these rules, as I explained last week, in response to Bloomberg’s report on Comcast’s coming Netflix competitor:

With the FCC’s current attempts to dismantle net neutrality regulations, don’t be surprised if this service doesn’t count against Comcast subscribers’ bandwidth caps or limits. Also don’t be surprised if, at some point, NBC’s news channels — NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC — become part of something like this, thereby making it more expensive to watch other news networks. Netflix would also become more expensive under such a scheme, too.

ISPs are attempting to exert tight control over the creation and distribution of media; to compete at the same level, tech companies would also have to become ISPs across the United States. As Google found out, that’s unfathomably difficult due to the permits, time, and infrastructure required. Since it’s unlikely that Comcast and AT&T will be deconstructed à la Ma Bell, tighter regulation is necessary.

Zac Hall’s WatchOS 4 Wishlist ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Zac Hall:

WWDC 2017 is just around the corner and we’re eager to see what Apple has planned for watchOS 4 and Apple Watch. While we don’t expect to see an update that addresses every opportunity left for watchOS in one year, there are certainly a lot of areas ripe for improvement considering how new Apple Watch and watchOS are.

[…]

Finally, watchOS 4 could improve customization by adding the ability to have custom tones for alerts like new messages and phone calls. You can already do this on iOS of course, but watchOS doesn’t offer the flexibility. This is something I regularly see readers mention and one of my first complaints when first using Apple Watch at launch.

I’d go even further and hope for a way to match different alert tones to vibration patterns. I don’t push too many notifications from my phone to my Watch, but the few third-party apps that do — Slack, Outlook, and NY Times — all make the same sound with the same vibration pattern. As I almost always have my Watch muted, it would be great to have different vibration patterns for new emails and news alerts, as they don’t have the same priority.

Facebook Faces Increased Publisher Resistance to Instant Articles ⇥ digiday.com

Lucia Moses, Digiday:

The Times is among an elite group of publishers that’s regularly tapped by Facebook to launch new products, and as such, it was one of the first batch of publishers to pilot Instant. But it stopped using Instant Articles after a test last fall that found that links back to the Times’ own site monetized better than Instant Articles, said Kinsey Wilson, [EVP] of product and technology at the Times. People were also more likely to subscribe to the Times if they came directly to the site rather than through Facebook, he said. Thus, for the Times, IA simply isn’t worth it. Even a Facebook-dependent publisher like LittleThings, which depends on Facebook for 80 percent of its visitors, is only pushing 20 percent of its content to IA.

Enthusiasm has cooled elsewhere. It’s an about-face from two years ago, when publishers were champing at the bit to join the party. “It’s just a matter of time,” Hearst Digital president Troy Young said at the time. Cosmopolitan was the first Hearst brand to launch, in October that year. Now, Hearst is absent from the program, having determined the monetization isn’t paying off. Hearst declined to comment on the record.

Instant Articles was seen by many as the future of news distribution, much like Apple News and Google’s AMP Project. However, while more people have been using Apple News after its iOS 10 redesign — as the Verge noticed — and AMP has become popular thanks to Google’s promise to elevate the format in search rankings, Instant Articles doesn’t really have the same kind of draw. And then there’s Facebook’s complicated relationship with publishers and their cagey attitude towards data collection, according to Moses:

There are also a lot of details to be worked out when it comes to subscription signups on Instant, such as who owns the customer relationship, what data the publisher gets and how the revenue is shared, Wilson added. “The devil’s in the details.” (A Facebook rep said that for now, with the free digital trials, the publisher owns the relationship once the user signs up.)

Facebook and Google, alike, have a habit of making big changes that dramatically alter publishers’ relationships with them. I’d love to know why they’re far less hesitant to adopt the AMP format than they are Instant Articles.

Samsung Says Bixby Voice Assistant Is Delayed ⇥ axios.com

Ina Fried, Axios:

One of the key signature features of Samsung’s Galaxy S8, its Bixby voice assistant, won’t work out of the box, when the device goes on sale later this month. Other parts of Bixby, including its visual search and reminder abilities, will ship at launch, a Samsung representative told Axios in a statement.

On Twitter, Fried said that Bixby crashed in her demo; Business Insider’s Steve Kovach said much the same.

Bixby is derived from Viv, which premiered at Disrupt NY in May of last year, running fairly smoothly on an iPhone. Samsung acquired the company in October, so they’ve been working to build it into the Galaxy S8 presumably since then. Just goes to show how hard it is to take an existing piece of software, port it to another platform, and make it a core part of the system.

Update: A correction: though some functions of Bixby are enabled by Viv, the core of it is apparently Samsung’s own effort, according to Dan Seifert of the Verge:

Though Bixby is a product of Samsung’s own internal development, the company’s recent acquisition, Viv, will be put to work making Bixby play nice with other third-party services. Viv has a pedigree here: the company was founded by the creators of Apple’s Siri assistant, which had many third-party integrations before it was folded into iOS itself. If there’s a bull case to be made that Bixby will be successful, Viv will be central to it.

Thanks to “sciwizam”.

The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners ⇥ longreads.com

Matt Giles has compiled links to many of this year’s Pulitzer-winning works. I’ve read many of them, and one of the things that struck me as I worked through this list is just how many of them I remember clearly. I think this illustrates an important quality of a Pulitzer-worthy work: its ability to get stuck in your brain and sit there long after you read the piece.

Spotify, Apple Boost Music Business to Best Year in Two Decades ⇥ bloomberg.com

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg:

In 2016, U.S. music sales grew 11% to $7.7 billion, the Recording Industry Association of America said Thursday. That’s the biggest jump since 1998, when the industry sold almost six times as many CDs. Streaming, a category that includes Spotify, Pandora and YouTube, accounted for 51 percent, the first time it has contributed the majority of revenue.

Who would have thought that making media widely accessible in a clearly-articulated pricing structure disincentives illegitimate copying and downloads? Wild.

Unfortunately, very little of the $120 per year that many of us pay for these subscription services actually makes it into artists’ pockets. The industry may be doing better, but musicians are still dependent on multiple income streams, from gruelling tour schedules to merchandise sales.

Comcast Reportedly Planning a Netflix Rival ⇥ bloomberg.com

Lucas Shaw and Alex Sherman, Bloomberg:

Comcast Corp. plans to introduce an online video service offering hit shows from its NBCUniversal TV networks in the next 12 to 18 months, an effort to compete with rivals Netflix Inc. and CBS Corp., according to people familiar with the matter.

The new service will include programs from the NBC broadcast network, and could include shows from Comcast cable channels Bravo, SyFy and USA, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Comcast is still determining many of the particulars of the service, including whether it will have a live feed of the broadcast network and whether it will include sports, the people said.

With the FCC’s current attempts to dismantle net neutrality regulations, don’t be surprised if this service doesn’t count against Comcast subscribers’ bandwidth caps or limits. Also don’t be surprised if, at some point, NBC’s news channels — NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC — become part of something like this, thereby making it more expensive to watch other news networks. Netflix would also become more expensive under such a scheme, too. This will be particularly detrimental in areas where only Comcast provides broadband internet speeds.

It might seem silly that I keep repeating posts on this topic, but that’s because I truly believe that this FCC administration — in combination with the Congressional leadership and White House — will be instrumental in the devastation of the web as we know it by reducing choice to a handful of very powerful companies, and allowing subscribers’ personal information to be sold to advertisers without their consent. I’m not being hyperbolic.

Walt Mossberg Will Retire in June ⇥ recode.net

Walt Mossberg, writing in Recode:

It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of the Wall Street Journal and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970. That’s not a typo.

So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.

Mossberg has had an incredible career. He really was the first mainstream technology columnist, and he set the formula for the genre’s followers, successors, and imitators — myself included.

Ben Thompson wrote a thoughtful tribute to Mossberg:

There have always been grumblings that Mossberg is “biased” towards Apple. In fact, though, while Mossberg did by and large favor Apple products — Apple made five of Mossberg’s 12 most influential products — the bias was right there in his first column:

Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.

Mossberg was Steve Jobs’ favorite columnist — and Mossberg a frequent admirer of Apple’s products — because both had the same vision: bringing these geeky, impenetrable, and rather ugly boxes of wires and chips and disks called personal computers to normal people, convinced said computers could, if only made accessible, fundamentally transform a user’s life.

I think that opening salvo was what made Mossberg the original technology columnist for companies to impress, and for readers to look up to. Though there are still those who believe that high technology trumps all, the vast majority of writers have come around to realize that ease-of-use for all users is what makes for a great product or service.

Details Begin Leaking About FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s Plans for Net Neutrality ⇥ reuters.com

David Shepardson, Reuters:

The rules approved by the FCC under Democratic President Barack Obama in early 2015 prohibited broadband providers from giving or selling access to speedy internet, essentially a “fast lane”, to certain internet services over others. As part of that change, the FCC reclassified internet service providers much like utilities.

Pai wants to overturn that reclassification, but wants internet providers to voluntarily agree to not obstruct or slow consumer access to web content, two officials said late Tuesday.

The officials briefed on the meeting said Pai suggested companies commit in writing to open internet principles and including them in their terms of service, which would make them binding.

Hands-up, everyone who thinks their ISP is so great that they’d voluntarily promise not to shape traffic to preference their own subscription service over, say, Netflix.

Didn’t think so.

Also, terms of service regulate an agreement between customers and the ISP; my understanding is that this is not an agreement between the ISP and the law. Even though it’s a contract, individual clauses in those agreements have been ruled to be non-binding — most famously, the 1996 decision finding “shrink-wrap” agreements unenforceable.1 More to the point, ISPs would totally put up a fight and sue the FTC or FCC — depending on who ends up regulating ISPs — claiming that their First Amendment rights have been violated. Don’t believe me? In 2015, prior to the introduction of the FCC’s net neutrality rules, Alamo Broadband did exactly that.

Pai’s dogmatic mistrust of regulation is terrible for the neutrality of the web. I am not optimistic for the state of the web in ten years’ time if the proposals described here become reality.

Update: Nilay Patel has an astute point:

Second, let’s say Pai manages to thread the needle and gets every ISP in the country to agree on the exact same open internet language in their terms of service, and further secures a commitment that the language will remain in their terms in perpetuity. Isn’t that functionally identical to… a law? Shouldn’t we just have… a law? And don’t we already have that law? What specifically is Pai trying to accomplish if he agrees that open internet principles are important?

Ah, the old trick of replacing a law with a-pinky-promise-that’s-not-a-law-but-still-legally-binding.

  1. This link is from May 1996, likely making it the oldest article I’ve ever linked to here. ↥︎