Month: May 2017

iCloud Is a Magical Black Box ⇥ morrick.me

Riccardo Mori:

iCloud has indeed got better over time, but perhaps the main reason that’s still keeping me from going all-in with it is that the service is too out-of-the-way, too invisible to the user, while I require a certain degree of transparency from a service that’s supposed to sync a lot of my files and information over the air. Yes, it’s nice that iCloud feels like magic when everything works. The problem is that ‘magic’ becomes ‘black box’ when something doesn’t work.

I don’t frequently see errors in iCloud but, when I do, there’s virtually no way to debug them other than hitting the “Try Again” button.

I’ve told this story before, but back when I was setting up iCloud Photo Library, I ran into a strange error where none of my devices would upload my photos. Toggling iCloud off and back on would briefly show a message saying that it was waiting for an iCloud backup to complete — I don’t use iCloud backups on my phone. After toggling everything I could think of, rebooting my iOS devices and Mac several times, trying different WiFi networks, and even restoring my phone, I resorted to filing a bug report. That’s a step almost no users would take.

The nice people who handle bug reports wanted me to install a logging profile. Users would struggle with this despite Apple’s straightforward instructions.

A week later, I received an email from someone in iCloud engineering. She scheduled a call and worked on my case personally. She was able to resolve the bug on my iPhone remotely, but found that a similar bug with Photos on the web wasn’t fixed yet. She filed an internal ticket; nearly a month later, it was fixed, too.

A system like this isn’t scalable. iCloud bugs are such a mysterious black box that a technician at an Apple Store or typical phone support would not be able to assist with resolving them. A typical user would no more consider firing up Console than they would think about filing a radar, but at least the system log can assist a more advanced user with debugging on their own.

Trust in Apple’s Services

One of the most captivating story lines at Apple over the past fifteen years or so is the growth of their services business. It’s now booking over $7 billion in revenue per quarter for the company, and its tight integration with the first-party software that Apple ships on its product lines helps build a case for customer loyalty, but only if they make their cloud services truly great. And, for a long time, that wasn’t the case.

But today, Ryan Christoffel makes the case in MacStories that Apple’s services are actually, well, good:

The Apple of today has made services a core part of its business. Not only from a financial standpoint, but also in the area of user experience. The experience Apple sells is not merely one of hardware, or software – it includes services. And it’s that Apple experience that helped make the iPhone one of the most successful products in the history of the world.

[…]

You can draw your own conclusions from this story, but mine is that Apple’s services get a bad rap they generally don’t deserve; the company’s reputation for not doing services well is outdated. Are things perfect? Of course not. But they’re a lot better than the common narrative says.

Of the fourteen services Christoffel says he relies upon, I am a frequent user of eleven: iCloud Calendar syncing, iCloud Drive, Photos, Maps, Apple Pay, iTunes, Apple Music, News, iMessage, Siri, and the App Store. I also use a few services he doesn’t mention, like Reminders and Contacts syncing, and iCloud Keychain.

And, much like many of you I’m sure, I’ve had shaky experiences with pretty much all of these. iCloud Drive files take forever to show up on different devices, for example, and Maps data is still incomplete and occasionally incorrect where I live.1 iTunes preorders are still buggy,2 while Siri remains painfully obtuse when it comes to following context.3

But a few years ago, I went practically all-in on Apple’s services and I’ve reached a similar — if less enthusiastic — conclusion as Christoffel: they’ve become quite good. iMessage notifications, for example, go to the device I’m currently using without lighting up every device at once. Apple Music has performed reliably, and the For You recommendations strike a good balance between discoverability and familiarity. Much to my surprise, iCloud Keychain and Photos have been bulletproof over the past couple of years, in particular.

I don’t blame anyone for their skepticism of Apple’s cloud services offerings; for a very long time, these services were entirely deserving of their lacklustre reputation. Next to Google’s established and reliable offerings, Apple was playing a fast game of catch-up in public, and it showed. Despite their presently-good state, however, I get a wary look whenever I recommend many of Apple’s services to someone who asks. A lot of people have been burned before by bad experiences with Maps or iTunes, and are reluctant to trust in more Apple services.

And that’s unfortunate, because I’ve found that Apple’s products — much like any other tech company’s — work a lot better when you invest deeper into their ecosystem. Getting users to trust in doing so, however, is going to be as hard for Apple as were the technical improvements to their services.

  1. Recent highlights include an entire stretch of businesses that were placed on 10A Street instead of 10 Street, a car dealership marked as a golf course, and areas marked as parks contradicted by the aerial view. ↥︎

  2. When my preorder of Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.” became available for download, iTunes failed to update the tags on the lead single “HUMBLE.” for accuracy. ↥︎

  3. My girlfriend’s conversation with Siri, not too long ago:

    “Remind me to send in my application tomorrow at 9 PM.”

    Did you mean Sunday or Monday?

    “Sunday.”

    Okay, I found this on the web for Sunday. ↥︎

Microsoft Launches Surface Laptop ⇥ mjtsai.com

The long-rumoured Surface Laptop is, at last, a reality, and it looks damn good. Michael Tsai’s roundup is, as usual, a terrific summary of early media impressions.

I’d love to take a closer look at this thing. It seems to slot in between the MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, if those products shipped with Gatekeeper switched to allow apps only from the App Store.

See Also: Jack Wellborn’s excellent 2015 article on Microsoft building the reference designs for Windows OEMs.

Analysis of Internal Facebook Code Submissions Reveals Gender Bias ⇥ theguardian.com

Deepa Seetharaman, Wall Street Journal (paywalled, but you can click through from Twitter):

Last year, a longtime engineer at Facebook Inc. gathered data that revealed a controversial finding: Code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues, according to people familiar with the matter and screenshots of internal discussions viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Julia Carrie Wong, the Guardian:

In October, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, told engineers internally that the company had conducted its own analysis of the code review process “using confidential employee data so we could gain a better understanding of what is happening”.

The Facebook analysis took into account engineers’ “level” within the company and found “no statistically significant difference” between female and male engineers within the same level.

Parikh attributed the difference that the original analysis found to “the difference in gender distribution between levels”, meaning the fact that Facebook has more female engineers at lower levels than higher levels.

While Parikh’s comment might sound like it disputes the engineer’s analysis, it doesn’t necessarily do either and it provides support for the engineer’s claim that there is significant gender bias within Facebook — and, likely, throughout most tech companies. He’s basically saying that female engineers are not promoted as frequently as their male colleagues to higher positions within the company.

This isn’t entirely new information — a 2016 study found that female contributors to open source project on GitHub were more likely have their contributions accepted when they had gender neutral names, but less likely when they had more typically feminine names. This data lends further support to a pervasive gender bias in the tech community. A band-aid solution would be to require all code reviews to be anonymous; a more comprehensive solution is to value women.

Travis Kalanick Cancelled His Code Conference Interview ⇥ recode.net

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Recode:

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is not the first exec to deal with sexual harassment and sexism issues. And he’s not the first to be accused of stealing technology. He’s also not the first to anger customers through cloddish statements. And he’s not the first to face significant doubts about his ability to manage a fast-growing startup.

But he is the very first speaker in the 15 years we have been putting on our tech and media events to cancel his interview due to the many embarrassing issues at his company. In this case, because the report from former Attorney General Eric Holder on Uber’s culture and management problems has been delayed until the week of Code at the end of May.

Without Swisher and Mossberg hammering Kalanick about Uber’s stormy past few months, this should alleviate a potential PR problem. Yet, the PR problem is not the concern.

‘Dok’ Malware on MacOS ⇥ blog.checkpoint.com

Ofer Caspi of Check Point Software:

People often assume that if you’re running OSX, you’re relatively safe from malware. But this is becoming less and less true, as evidenced by a new strain of malware encountered by the Check Point malware research team. This new malware – dubbed OSX/Dok — affects all versions of OSX, has 0 detections on VirusTotal (as of the writing of these words), is signed with a valid developer certificate (authenticated by Apple), and is the first major scale malware to target OSX users via a coordinated email phishing campaign.

Once OSX/Dok infection is complete, the attackers gain complete access to all victim communication, including communication encrypted by SSL. This is done by redirecting victim traffic through a malicious proxy server.

Glenn Fleishman, Macworld:

Apple confirmed that Gatekeeper wasn’t bypassed. That developer certificate has been revoked, which will prevent it launching in the future without a warning. Apple has confirmed that it updated XProtect, its silent malware signature system, to ward it off as well. There’s no indication about how many users might have been infected, as Check Point’s research team encountered it in the wild.

The malware is only able to execute its payload by requiring the user to jump through a lot of manual steps — including, of course, typing an administrator’s password. MacOS requires administrator-level privileges on a semi-regular basis; a user might type their admin password into a prompt at least a few times every week without really thinking about it. As much as all of us are aware that we shouldn’t open sketchy email attachments, we should also be very cautious of any request for a system admin password.

Fortunately, Apple has an existing asset that would make the Mac far more secure: the Mac App Store. Apps there are vetted and, because of the store’s rules, would never ask a user for an admin password. If the Mac App Store were part of a healthier ecosystem, I think more users would see it as their first choice and, consequently, be more concerned when any app requests an admin password.