Month: March 2020

The Pit of Bad Decisions Made by Clearview AI Simply Has No Bottom ⇥ nytimes.com

A unique quality of companies that are inherently unethical is that once the narrative thread starts to unravel, the whole thing collapses pretty quickly. As reporters begin digging into it and those with insider knowledge begin to speak up, it’s hard for their public relations teams to keep everything in a nice well-packaged story.

So, let’s look at a few developments regarding Clearview AI.

Dave Gershgorn, OneZero:

Clearview AI worked to build a national database of every mug shot taken in the United States during the past 15 years, according to an email obtained by OneZero through a public records request.

[…]

It’s unclear how many images a national database of mug shots would add to the online sources Clearview AI has already scraped. For context, the FBI’s national facial recognition database contains 30 million mug shots. Vigilant Solutions, another facial recognition company, has also compiled a database of 15 million mug shots from public sources.

Caroline Haskins, Ryan Mac, and Logan McDonald, Buzzfeed News:

Clearview AI, the secretive company that’s built a database of billions of photos scraped without permission from social media and the web, has been testing its facial recognition software on surveillance cameras and augmented reality glasses, according to documents seen by BuzzFeed News.

Clearview, which claims its software can match a picture of any individual to photos of them that have been posted online, has quietly been working on a surveillance camera with facial recognition capabilities. That device is being developed under a division called Insight Camera, which has been tested by at least two potential clients according to documents.

On its website — which was taken offline after BuzzFeed News requested comment from a Clearview spokesperson — Insight said it offers “the smartest security camera” that is “now in limited preview to select retail, banking and residential buildings.”

Kashmir Hill, New York Times:

In response to the criticism, Clearview published a “code of conduct,” emphasizing in a blog post that its technology was “available only for law enforcement agencies and select security professionals to use as an investigative tool.”

The post added: “We recognize that powerful tools always have the potential to be abused, regardless of who is using them, and we take the threat very seriously. Accordingly, the Clearview app has built-in safeguards to ensure these trained professionals only use it for its intended purpose: to help identify the perpetrators and victims of crimes.”

The Times, however, has identified multiple individuals with active access to Clearview’s technology who are not law enforcement officials. And for more than a year before the company became the subject of public scrutiny, the app had been freely used in the wild by the company’s investors, clients and friends.

Those with Clearview logins used facial recognition at parties, on dates and at business gatherings, giving demonstrations of its power for fun or using it to identify people whose names they didn’t know or couldn’t recall.

Any one of these stories would, in isolation, be worrying. But seeing all three together — particularly with the context of the things I’ve linked to about Clearview over the past several weeks — shine a light on a distressing nascent industry. I strongly suspect that there are other companies exactly like Clearview that are taking steps to avoid exposure.

This industry simply should not exist.

Reading Newsletters With Feedbin ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci:

The problem: despite automatic filing of newsletters performed by SaneBox into a folder called ‘SaneNews’ in my Gmail account, I realized that I don’t really like reading newsletters in an email client. I don’t like spending time in an email client these days, period. For professional reasons, I receive a lot of email on a daily basis, so I find it hard to concentrate and read a longform newsletter in an app that is filled to the brim with messages and not exactly built around focused reading.

As I was thinking about ways to improve this (I considered using a second email app just for newsletters, for instance), I remembered that Feedbin, my RSS service of choice, offers the ability to give you a unique email address you can send newsletters to. Emails sent to your personal Feedbin email address will end up in the service’s queue alongside your other regular RSS subscriptions, and you can then choose to file the “source” behind a newsletter however you see fit – for example, by creating a folder in Feedbin called ‘Newsletters’. Feedbin has more details on this functionality here. Given how I’ve been trying to consolidate all my reading into Reeder by way of the app’s support for RSS and a read-later account, I thought it’d be interesting to try throwing newsletters at it as well.

I subscribed to Feedbin last month for a few reasons, but being able to receive email newsletters as, effectively, news feeds has been a wonderful thing. I know it’s only March, but this may be the best decision I make all year.

Viticci uses Reeder, but I’ve been using the new version of NetNewsWire on everything I own and I cannot recommend it enough.

Apple Formally Begins Permitting Ads in Push Notifications ⇥ axios.com

Orion Rummler, Axios:

Apps on Apple products can now send push notifications for ads and promotions as long as customers explicitly opt in to get those alerts, according to the company’s updated App Store guidelines.

Ads delivered by push notifications were once verboten, but some developers ignored that rule and Apple didn’t police it. The company softened its stance a few years ago by updating the text of section 4.5.4 to read (emphasis mine):

Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

So, while Apple would not reject or pull an app if it uses the push notification system to send ads, it was frowned upon. But now, this same section reads:

Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

Realistically, Apple is simply giving in to what many developers already do. It sucks; I wish this section became more strict, not less so.

The rules are ambiguous about whether users must be able to opt out of push notification ads without entirely disabling notifications for an app. While there is the ability for developers to set some notifications as critical, this feature is designed for emergency apps and requires a special entitlement. iOS does not make it easy for developers to separate notification types otherwise, which means that every developer is going to have to build a way to categorize notifications — or, more likely, users will simply have to switch off notifications for an app to disable advertising.

Notably, there is also no requirement that push notification ads be a promotion for the app or its features. It seems perfectly legal under these rules for unscrupulous developers to sell push notification ad slots to third parties. Gross.

There’s good news in this update to the guidelines, too. Mike Peterson, Apple Insider:

The company has also implemented a blanket ban on apps used to commit or attempt to commit crimes by evading police. Previously, it only barred apps that tracked DUI checkpoints.

[…]

There’s also an entirely new section dedicated to App Store reviews. In it, Apple instructs developers to “treat customers with respect when responding” to comments. The same section bans custom review prompts, requiring developers to use Apple’s official review API.

It’s probably because those custom review prompts are irritating and it’s impossible to opt out of them.

Sounds familiar.

Update: Stuart Breckenridge points out that it isn’t technically difficult for a developer to create multiple notification types. Twitter clients, for example, often allow you to decide whether you want to see notifications about mentions, new followers, messages, and so forth — all independently of each other. So why don’t many developers allow more granular control in more of their apps? I suspect the kinds of apps that will take advantage of this rule change won’t create a separate category for advertising — if you want to know when your food delivery will arrive, you will also put up with promo code notifications and enticements to use the app.

I would love if App Review became simultaneously more consistent and more careful. Apps should be meeting a higher bar for quality; the App Store needs less junk, not more.

Also, I wasn’t thinking when I wrote that the ban on apps that help users evade law enforcement was a good thing. For one, it formalizes the rule used to ban the HKMap Live app last year; for another, it’s subject to extraordinarily broad interpretation. However, when I went to check this out in section 1.4.4, Apple appears to have reverted the language here to a previous version. Compare the live version to how it read previously.

A Profile of the People Resurrecting Old iPods ⇥ onezero.medium.com

Melanie Ehrenkranz, writing for OneZero:

Apple may have discontinued the last of the click-wheel iPods years ago, but Pichi is part of a growing community of tinkerers giving the devices new life. It’s not just for nostalgia (though that’s part of it): iPod modders say they earnestly view the devices, with a few modern tweaks, as a superior way to listen to music. That this elite audio quality is packaged in a device that is also dear to their heart makes it even better.

The more popular modifications are relatively simple: updates like adding more storage or battery life, or installing firmware that allows for customization of the user interface or downloading games outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Few iPod modders are injecting the music players with wild features or stark new aesthetics.

A well-known modification for the past fifteen years or so has been to swap the iPod’s hard drive for a Compact Flash card. After I got my 60 GB fifth-generation iPod, I thought I’d give it a shot with the iPod Mini it replaced. The Mini was aluminum, except for the glued-on plastic caps on the top and bottom planes. When I tried to pry one of those caps off to get at the logic board, I immediately snapped it — and that was the end of my iPod modding hobby.

I approve of the efforts of Pichi to keep these things alive.

Google Begins Rolling Out a Software-Based Clone of 3D Touch to Pixel Devices ⇥ theverge.com

Dieter Bohn, the Verge:

But there was one line on Google’s support page for the update that caught my eye (emphasis mine): “In addition to long press, you can now firmly press to get more help from your apps more quickly.”

[…]

Tap your screen right now, and think about how much of your fingertip is getting registered by the capacitive sensors. Then press hard and note how your finger smushes down on the screen — more gets registered. The machine learning comes in because Google needs to model thousands of finger sizes and shapes and it also measures how much changes over a short period of time to determine how hard you’re pressing. The rate of smush, if you will.

I have no idea if Google’s machine-learning smush detection algorithms are as precise as 3D Touch on the iPhone, but since they’re just being used for faster detection of long presses I guess it doesn’t matter too much yet. Someday, though, maybe the Pixel could start doing things that the iPhone used to be able to do.

As of last year, the hardware-based version of 3D Touch no longer exists; new iPhones do not have the component that registers touch pressure, and iPads never did. It’s kind of interesting that Google decided that now was an ideal time to replicate in software the ability to detect pressure — something which, as far as I can figure out, iOS does not do. I do not believe features like the context menu measure anything other than how long a finger has been touching the screen; I don’t think there’s a smush algorithm in iOS.

Adios, MacSurfer ⇥ sixcolors.com

From the message posted to the MacSurfer homepage:

Dear MHN Readers:

Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease operations effective immediately. Please allow a few weeks to process forthcoming refunds. If need be, subscription inquiries can be addressed to the Publisher at the bottom of the Homepage.

Thanks kindly for your support, and thanks for the memories…

MacSurfer’s Headline News Team

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

I don’t remember how I started reading MacSurfer — I’m sure Jason or one of my other Macworld colleagues mentioned them to me as a place to check in my earliest days of blogging at MacUser. For many years, they were an invaluable resource, a manageable way to quickly see what was going on in the Apple world without having to subscribe to hundreds of sites and spend literally all of your time trawling headlines.

But as social media and podcasting grew in popularity and RSS and “visiting actual websites” ebbed, MacSurfer struggled to adjust. They attempted a subscription plan, as the above note mentions, but it seemed like it never really caught on. I still loaded up MacSurfer once or twice a week, especially when digging for a topic for my weekly column, but the coverage had gotten much sparser.

Being slow to change with the times may have been MacSurfer’s downfall, to some extent, but I love how stubbornly it stuck by its formula, even refusing to give up its <table>-based layout. I’ll miss it.

Cable TV’s Dumbest Habits Will Make the Leap to Streaming ⇥ techdirt.com

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

In many ways, the streaming TV revolution is finally delivering many of the things that consumers had been begging for for years — more flexibility, better customer service, and cheaper overall packages. Thanks to increased competition, streaming is finally forcing the sector to adapt and actually listen to customers. At least for now, when a flood of competitors are jockeying for market share.

At the same time, many of the same annoyances that have frustrated consumers for years will also be making the jump to streaming, including a steady parade of price hikes with little in the way of notable improvements for your purchasing dollar. Annoying “retrans disputes” — where a broadcaster and cable TV provider will bicker over programming and blackout out user content (without refunds) in the process — have also come along for the ride. That’s before you get to ISPs abusing their monopoly power over broadband to disadvantage competitors, the whole reason for the entire net neutrality fracas.

As soon as cable TV providers figured out that they, too, could put a bunch of video files in an Amazon S3 bucket, streaming services stopped seeming like the future of entertainment and instantly became just a mild adaptation of legacy providers’ existing models. Even cost-wise, I’m not sure streaming services really are that much cheaper. It depends on where you live, but in Canada, you’ll have to stitch together offerings from half a dozen subscription services to get a similar selection as a typical cable TV bundle, and it works out to a similar price. At least you can choose to a more granular degree what you want to pay for.

Facebook Announces New Messenger App, Discovers That Not Rebuilding System Frameworks Makes Apps Simpler ⇥ engineering.fb.com

Facebook Engineering:

We started with the premise that Messenger needed to be a simple, lightweight utility. Some apps are immersive (video streaming, gaming); people spend hours using them. Those apps take up a lot of storage space, battery time, etc., and the trade-off makes sense. But messages are just tiny snippets of text that take less than a second to send. Fundamentally, a messaging app should be one of the smallest, lightest-weight apps on your phone. With that principle in mind, we began looking at the right way to make our iOS app significantly smaller.

[…]

In the end, we reduced core Messenger code by 84 percent, from more than 1.7M lines to 360,000. We accomplished this by rebuilding our features to fit a simplified architecture and design. While we kept most of the features, we will continue to introduce more features over time. Fewer lines of code makes the app lighter and faster, and a streamlined code base means engineers can innovate more quickly.

I mean, it’s great that Messenger isn’t gigantic any more, but anyone could — and did — point out that rebuilding system features is terribly inefficient. Kudos; but, also, duh.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Did Facebook just kill off React Native? Either way, it’s funny that I actually agree. We write all our hybrid shells with the native platform tooling (and then fill them with server-rendered HTML using Turbolinks!). Full control to level up UI to native.

Josh Constine, TechCrunch:

Chat bots were central to Facebook Messenger’s strategy three years ago. Now they’re being hidden from view in the app along with games and businesses. Facebook Messenger is now removing the Discover tab as it focuses on speed and simplicity instead of broad utility like China’s WeChat.

I cannot find a clear answer confirming whether Messenger was at all written in React Native. But, just a few years ago, both React Native and Messenger Bots were being pushed hard by Facebook. Now, it seems like the company is being more circumspect in its tacit acknowledgement that neither is so wonderful. Neither is dead, however.

Vox Media’s Video, Audio, and Motion Graphic Professionals Review the New Mac Pro ⇥ theverge.com

Nilay Patel, the Verge:

At the same time, the Mac Pro is not a single product. There are no stock configurations aside from the it-has-to-start-somewhere $5,999 base setup, and the machines won’t be sold in the company’s retail stores. Apple’s expectation is that customers will configure almost every Mac Pro to order, all the way up to a top spec with a 28-core Intel Xeon W processor and two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs that hovers near $54,000. Simply figuring out which Mac Pro to review in a way that reveals something interesting has been a process.

Making things more complicated, while Apple did provide Mac Pro units to a few excellent YouTubers who use Final Cut Pro, it has not offered any traditional review units to the press, citing the above-mentioned difficulties in picking a representative spec sheet. So we ended up buying our own Mac Pro. (Apple did seed reviewers with the Pro Display XDR, which we also reviewed; you can find that here.)

So to get this right, we needed to find a configuration that is broadly representative of what pro users might actually buy, allows us to investigate Apple’s performance claims, and hopefully reveals something interesting about what pro users might experience if they upgrade to this machine. And we needed to do all of this knowing that we wouldn’t just send this machine back when the review was done, like we do with every standard review unit. This one was going to be ours to keep.

Happily, we have a bit of an advantage: The Verge is part of Vox Media, a company full of media professionals who use a huge variety of software to work on everything from Netflix shows to print magazine design. And of course, The Verge’s own art and video teams make illustrations and motion graphics for our site and YouTube all day long. So we called in a few friends, let everyone use the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR to work on their various projects, and had them report back.

I thought this was a good review of how the new Mac Pro works by dropping it into an existing environment. Vox staffers seemed a little underwhelmed by its performance at this time, but that’s mainly because their Adobe Creative Cloud apps have not yet been updated to take advantage of the Mac Pro’s power, and partly because the Afterburner card currently only works with ProRes video files.

The hardware is, as Patel says, just one piece of a much more complex professional workflow. But the fact that this piece even exists — especially with its level of care and attention to detail — is remarkable in its own right.

Google’s Flaky Reputation Is Impacting Development for Its Stadia Gaming Platform ⇥ businessinsider.com

Ben Gilbert, Business Insider, after explaining that some developers felt like there isn’t enough financial incentive to port their game to Google Stadia:

But Stadia doesn’t have a large audience to reach — at least not yet — so Google must create that incentive for developers. And the people we spoke with said, outside of money, there wasn’t much reason to put their games on Stadia.

“If you could see yourself getting into a long term relationship with Google?” one developer said. “But with Google’s history, I don’t even know if they’re working on Stadia in a year. That wouldn’t be something crazy that Google does. It’s within their track record.”

This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.

Why would any developer see a viable partnership with a company that introduces and kills products at Google’s rate?

James Lipton Dies Aged 93 ⇥ hollywoodreporter.com

I was not the best student in college; I semi-frequently pulled all-nighters to finish projects and papers that I should have started much, much sooner. At around 3:00 in the morning, and with several cups of coffee in my system, I’d start to feel like I was vibrating from the inside, so I would take a break and fire up an episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio. There is something superhuman about James Lipton’s calming voice as he interviewed someone in a way I have never heard elsewhere. I think everyone who watched that series had their own answers to his infamous survey — I know I did.

$500 Million Settlement Proposed in Class Action Suit Over iPhone CPU Throttling ⇥ news.bloomberglaw.com

Julie Steinberg, Bloomberg Law:

A proposed class settlement calling for Apple Inc. to pay up to $500 million to resolve allegations it throttled the battery performance of older iPhones should get tentative approval, plaintiffs told a federal trial court in California.

Apple agreed to pay at least $310 million, up to a maximum settlement of $500 million, with plaintiffs calling it “an excellent recovery,” according to Feb. 28 court filings.

This follows a €25 million fine issued last month by France’s competition bureau. In that case, at least, lawyers weren’t skimming 30% off the top and pocketing nearly $100 million.

Five Year Flop ⇥ fastcompany.com

Mark Wilson of Fast Company does not like the Apple Watch. You can see his many, many screeds about how awful he thinks it is if you just search the web for "mark wilson" "apple watch" site:fastcompany.com; it is not a delightful series. He probably never will like the Watch, and that’s fine.

But there is a big difference between disliking something and calling it a failure. I am not one of the Watch’s biggest fans, but even I know better than to call it a dud. Last year, Apple sold an estimated thirty million of the things and, in recent years, dozens of reports have credited the ECG feature with saving lives. Even a more cynical person would, I think, find it hard not to give it credit for that.

However, on this day five years ago, Wilson made a prediction:

Few analysts or writers will outright say it, but I will: the Apple Watch is going to flop. And I bet a lot of other people are thinking the same thing for many good reasons.

Wilson runs through a whole list of reasons the Apple Watch would fail, all of which were reactions to the first-generation product which, as of his writing, was nearly two months away from its release. It is fair that he could only consider the Watch by what he was presented with. But Wilson’s myopia reveals itself when he writes that it would be indistinguishable “from any other fitness band on the market”, and that Apple Pay was also going to flop, so the only thing the Watch would actually be able to do was show notifications. Even at its debut, it was hailed as helping people walk more; closing the activity rings became something to do every day. And, five years on, it clearly does more than the limited scope of tasks Wilson imagined. “Jony Ive’s Newton” it is not.

A Look at YouTube’s Recommendations of Conspiracy Theories, One Year After the Platform Vowed More Aggressive Action ⇥ nytimes.com

Jack Nicas, New York Times:

For years it has been a highly effective megaphone for conspiracy theorists, and YouTube, owned and run by Google, has admitted as much. In January 2019, YouTube said it would limit the spread of videos “that could misinform users in harmful ways.”

One year later, YouTube recommends conspiracy theories far less than before. But its progress has been uneven and it continues to advance certain types of fabrications, according to a new study from researchers at University of California, Berkeley.

YouTube’s efforts to curb conspiracy theories pose a major test of Silicon Valley’s ability to combat misinformation, particularly ahead of this year’s elections. The study, which examined eight million recommendations over 15 months, provides one of the clearest pictures yet of that fight, and the mixed findings show how challenging the issue remains for tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

This is impressive, but the limitations of YouTube’s strategy are revealing:

One video, a Fox News clip titled “The truth about global warming,” which was recommended 15,240 times in the study, illustrates YouTube’s challenge in fighting misinformation. YouTube has said it has tried to steer people to better information by relying more on mainstream channels, but sometimes those channels post discredited views. And some videos are not always clear-cut conspiracy theories.

Fact-checking this video is not YouTube’s responsibility, but whether it should appear in recommendations is entirely its purview. Does YouTube want to be known as the frame around users’ descent into an alternate universe of disinformation and miseducation?

The company faces similar problems outside of the world of conspiracy mongering. There are loads of life-hack compilation channels on the site pushing videos that reach millions of people. But many of them are peddling information that is not just wrong — it’s dangerous. Chris Fox of the BBC recently interviewed Ann Reardon of the How to Cook That YouTube channel. In addition to showing viewers how to cook and bake, she also tests many of these tip compilations.

One of the videos advised teens to put milk in cola, for some reason, and to create white strawberries by bleaching red ones in actual bleach. The tips video is still online, but, based on its comments, it appears that the video file has been replaced with one that does not feature the strawberry bleaching trick. According to Reardon, when people tried reporting the bleached strawberry video, YouTube found that it did not violate any of its rules. Another video shows viewers how to make a delicate caramel bird’s nest garnish by drizzling hot molten sugar into a spinning motorized beater. Reardon tried this and, predictably, found that it would be a terrific way to get seriously burned. The original video remains on YouTube.