Month: October 2019

Bloomberg: Apple Is Reviewing Rejection of App That Allows Users to Track Protests in Hong Kong ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s App Store is reviewing a recent decision to reject a Hong Kong app designed to track police activity in the midst of increasingly violent pro-democracy protests in the city.

The app, known as HKmap.live, is a mobile version of a website that helps users avoid potentially dangerous areas, according to the developer, who uses the alias Kuma to remain anonymous. It was rejected from Apple’s App Store because it “facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity that is not legal,” Apple told the developer, according to a copy of the rejection notice seen by Bloomberg News. “Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement,” Apple wrote.

At this stage, it seems just as likely to me that this rejection was due to an App Review failure as it was a way to appease the Chinese government. Either way, it’s a problem of Apple’s own creation.

If it’s the former, it just goes to show how accurate App Review needs to be, and the gaping chasm between where it is now and where it ought to be. Facebook and Twitter take flak for moderation failures1 on their platforms; Apple’s equivalent is in App Store mistakes. Apps that abuse subscriptions sail through App Review, but this gets summarily blocked? Nonsense.

But if it’s deliberate, it suggests a far worse situation. The reason Apple gave for preventing HKmap.live from being available in the App Store is that it “allowed users to evade law enforcement”. But that’s not its sole purpose:

The developer said the app is built to “show events happening” in Hong Kong, but what users choose to do with that information is their choice. “We don’t encourage any advice on the map in general,” the developer told Bloomberg News. “Our ultimate goal is safety for everyone.”

Plenty of apps could be illegitimately accused of the same thing. As Jane Manchun Wong noted on Twitter, Waze is still available in the App Store, despite alerting users of speed traps and DUI checkpoints. Meanwhile, law enforcement has been complaining that encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Apple’s own Messages app prevent interception. There are even “vault” calculator apps that are explicitly designed to secrete user data.

What it suggests, then, is that Apple is perhaps complying with oppressive Chinese laws that restrict protestor activity in the “second system” separately-governed region of Hong Kong. This isn’t the first time that Apple has made a decision that gives the appearance of appeasing an authoritarian government that’s important to the company for its sales and manufacturing.

Let’s hope it’s App Review being its unduly sensitive, mistake-ridden self. The other option is unconscionable.

Update: Apple has now approved HKmap.live.

  1. A fun one from today comes to mind. ↥︎

Jesus Diaz Writes the Inevitable Article About Microsoft’s Apple-Beating Though Not-Yet-Shipping Innovation ⇥ tomsguide.com

Jesus Diaz — sigh — writing at Tom’s Guide:

Yesterday, as I finished watching Microsoft’s presentation on my iPad Pro, I thought that Redmond had crushed its old archnemesis in just half an hour. The Surface Neo and the Surface Duo made me think that Microsoft is now the king of innovation and industrial design. They have beaten Apple at its own game.

This take — that future Microsoft products beat current Apple products — is so trite that you can search the Macalope’s default quip, which I stole for the aside in this paragraph, and get eleven years’ worth of uses.

It’s even a cliché for Diaz: he previously said that Mountain Lion was out-innovated by Windows 8, and that the then-not-yet-shipping Surface “made the MacBook Air and iPad look obsolete”. And, like the 2008 article in which the Macalope coined its “future Microsoft products” line, Diaz also claimed that Windows Phone 7 beat iOS in a piece published eight months before the first Windows Phone would ship.

That was easy.

Media Relations Firms Are Faking Public Policy Comments With Personal Details From Data Breaches ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

An impressive investigation by Jeremy Singer-Vine and Kevin Collier of Buzzfeed News:

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on an analysis of millions of comments, along with court records, business filings, and interviews with dozens of people — offers a window into how a crucial democratic process was skewed by one of the most prolific uses of political impersonation in US history. In a key part of the puzzle, two little-known firms, Media Bridge and LCX Digital, working on behalf of industry group Broadband for America, misappropriated names and personal information as part of a bid to submit more than 1.5 million statements favorable to their cause.

The FCC proceeding is not the only public debate to have been compromised. BuzzFeed News also found that LCX, an obscure advertising agency based in Southern California, has worked on at least two other campaigns that raised similar impersonation allegations — issues that were so alarming that state legislators in South Carolina and Texas referred the matters to law enforcement. Media Bridge, a political consultancy based in Virginia, also participated in the South Carolina campaign.

Buzzfeed correlated nearly two million formulaic comments submitted by Media Bridge with identifying details from a 2016 database provider breach. Several of the comments are attributed to people who either did not support the repeal of Obama-era FCC Title II classification — like, say, Barack Obama himself — or were dead at the time “they” commented.

These findings are similar to those published by Gizmodo earlier this year, but this is the most concentrated and attributable data set that has been reported so far.

There clearly needs to be a way for the public to provide feedback on policy proposals, but this is so ineffective as to be meaningless. A Stanford University study found that non-bot comments overwhelmingly favoured Title II classification (PDF), but the researchers behind that proposal were only able to say that about 646,000 of the 22 million comments submitted were unique. And even if a comment was unique, it didn’t matter because the FCC ignored all comments unless they articulated a legal argument.

The system in place right now is basically the comments section at the end of a news article, except it’s supposed to provide influence over policy — but it doesn’t, unless you’re well-versed in law and can make a counterargument on those terms. Oh, and comments obviously submitted in bulk are not screened or rejected, so organizations can flood a proposal with countering form letters that do nothing to enable discussion.

Like all comments sections, it should be scrapped.

Microsoft Announces New Surface Products, Including Dual-Screened Devices for End of Next Year ⇥ wired.com

Panos Panay of Microsoft:

Today in New York we announced our broadest Surface lineup ever – with five new products coming this holiday and two new dual-screen devices, Surface Neo and Surface Duo, coming in Holiday 2020.

As far as I can tell, the updates Microsoft announced today have been well-received by those who know their products well. The Surface line has, generally, seemed very successful — I see them all the time when I’m in coffee shops or at the library.

But there were still traces of the old Microsoft during today’s announcements which became most obvious when they introduced the Surface Neo and Surface Duo — two products that, while intriguing, won’t be available until the end of next year. Why show them now?

Lauren Goode of Wired got to interview Panay and Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s headquarters last week. There isn’t a rationale in her report of why these products are being shown over a year before anyone can buy them; the closest she gets is explaining that Panay can’t talk about where the camera is going to be because it might give competitors ideas. The piece starts with this strange request:

No matter what you do, do not call the new Surface phone a phone. You can call it a Surface, a mobile product, a dual-screen device, a new kind of 2-in-1, a pathway to the all-important cloud. But Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, doesn’t want you to call it a phone.

Never mind that the thing slips in and out of the pocket of Panay’s salt-and-pepper tweed blazer exactly the way a smartphone would. Or that one of the earliest scenes in the marketing video for the thing, with its slow, fetishized swirls of the gadget, shows a woman picking it up to her ear and saying “Hello?” the way you would with, well, you know. Or that Panay himself admits he makes what are universally known as a “phone calls” from it.

A few companies have weird stylistic conventions, but people are gonna call this phone-sized, phone-shaped product that has general phone functionality a “phone”.

That phone, by the way, runs Android, and it speaks to the company’s radical transformation since the Steve Ballmer era that this is how Satya Nadella responded when Goode asked if the company would ever make another Windows-based phone:

Later on I ask Nadella the same question, and he zooms out even further. “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” he says. “What is most important for us is the app model and the experience. How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it’s going to be about the Microsoft graph.”

Could you imagine a previous Microsoft CEO saying that they do not consider the operating system nearly as important as the app ecosystem?

Regardless of how bizarre it is that these devices were introduced a year out, I’m fascinated by the Surface Neo. I’ve always liked the Microsoft Courier, especially some of its weirder UI ideas that leaned heavily on maximizing its book-like form. I’m not sure how any of this stuff will translate into real life — the marketing video doesn’t give a good impression and neither do the hands-on videos I’ve seen — but it’s interesting, and I dig that.

Appeal Court Upholds Repeal of Net Neutrality Laws, but Permits States to Set Their Own Rules ⇥ theverge.com

Adi Robertson, the Verge:

The court said the FCC exhibited “disregard of its duty” to evaluate how its rule change would affect public safety. Public safety was a key issue in a hearing earlier this year, with net neutrality advocates arguing that the FCC’s decision let ISPs throttle first responders’ data — something that happened in California last year. “The harms from blocking and throttling during a public safety emergency are irreparable. People could be injured or die,” reads the ruling, which orders the FCC to address these safety concerns.

The FCC also didn’t sufficiently explain what the rules would mean for utility pole access — which can make it easier for new competitors to set up internet service networks — and didn’t address concerns about how the change would affect the Lifeline internet access program for low-income Americans.

And most notably, the court vacated a section of the rules that let the FCC preempt any stricter state net neutrality laws. The FCC has previously filed suit against states that passed their own net neutrality rules.

The court was not persuaded of the wrongness of the FCC’s arguments that Title II classification suppressed ISP investment; you can read their ruling on those claims starting on page 74. However, several studies have found no evidence to support reduced ISP investment in broadband. The court’s ruling today did not explicitly support the FCC’s position — coincidentally, I’m sure, the same as that of ISPs — only finding that it was “reasonable” for them to argue that. Which, well, sure. But it certainly isn’t borne out by the evidence so far.