Month: May 2020

Over Employee Protests and Frustration, Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Facebook Will Not Remove Trump Post Inciting Violence ⇥ theverge.com

Casey Newton, the Verge:

Facebook will not remove or take any other action on a President Trump post that Twitter removed for “glorifying violence,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday. “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” Zuckerberg said.

Newton, in a separate piece from earlier today:

Facebook’s decision not to take action against recent posts about mail-in ballots and the Minnesota protests by President Trump is roiling employees, some of whom are calling on executives to reconsider their stance. In response to an internal post explaining the company’s rationale, some employees criticized the company’s neutral posture.

“I have to say I am finding the contortions we have to go through incredibly hard to stomach,” one employee wrote in a comment about the shooting post. “All this points to a very high risk of a violent escalation and civil unrest in November and if we fail the test case here, history will not judge us kindly.”

[…]

Wrote another: “It’s been said previously that inciting violence would cause a post to be removed. I too would like to know why the goals shifted, and where they are now.”

Mark Zuckerberg, testifying earlier this year in response to a line of questioning from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the limits of Facebook’s policy regarding political advertising:

If anyone, including a politician, is saying things that can cause — that is calling for — violence, or could risk imminent physical harm, or voter or census suppression […] we will take that content down.

In statements cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter this week, Trump lied about voter fraud in mailed ballots, insinuated that the Governor of California was rigging an election, and referenced a 1960s Miami police chief in threatening to send in the National Guard to shoot protesters in Minneapolis. All of those statements remain on Facebook.

Update: New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, live tweeting an internal Facebook-wide question-and-answer session (punctuation and capitalization sic and typical for Isaac):

it’s only been minutes but the majority of employee responses to Zuckerberg’s decision thus far are….not very positive

[…]

so the way these Q&A’s work, Zuckerberg’s video streams and employees ask questions of him in a text box, sort of like a twitch stream.

employees have taken to sharing clips of MZ’s testimony to @AOC last year as a way to push back, wondering if the guidelines still truly exist.

As I wrote previously, I can see the cynical financial rationale for Zuckerberg’s stance. I can even understand the more banal angle — that he truly believes Facebook should only be a conduit for whatever users post, with exceptions only for pornography and clearly illegal material. I disagree with this angle: Facebook is comfortable in drawing the line in other situations, and Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony illustrated a few reasonable examples where anyone would be subject to fact-checking or removal.

But his and Facebook’s position is clearly leading to discontent amongst the employees who are good and ethical and more careful. If they are unhappy, they can leave — though many won’t — leading to a higher concentration of less scrupulous staff.

Trump’s Executive Order Is About Facebook, Not Twitter ⇥ theatlantic.com

Zeynep Tufekci, the Atlantic:

In reality, Trump’s salvo on social-media companies has primarily an audience of one: Mark Zuckerberg. And it is already working. After the executive order was issued, Facebook’s CEO quickly gave an interview to Fox News in which he said, “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” He added, “Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

It’s important to pay attention to what the president is doing, but not because the legal details of this order matter at all. Trump is unlikely to repeal Section 230 or take any real action to curb the power of the major social-media companies. Instead, he wants to keep things just the way they are and make sure that the red-carpet treatment he has received so far, especially at Facebook, continues without impediment. He definitely does not want substantial changes going into the 2020 election. The secondary aim is to rile up his base against yet another alleged enemy: this time Silicon Valley, because there needs to be an endless list of targets in the midst of multiple failures.

It would not benefit the Trump campaign if Facebook’s management grew a spine, as Twitter’s management apparently did, and began to more closely scrutinize Trump’s posts. In turn, that would be pretty bad for Facebook’s ad revenue. Conversely, keeping the 2020 campaign similar to the one from four years ago would be highly beneficial to such a shameless, untrustworthy company — in the intervening years, Facebook’s value has doubled. Facebook has every reason to maintain the status quo, and its poor trust with the public means it has very little to lose.

Mark Zuckerberg, Proud of Facebook’s Fact Checking Work, Says That Fact Checking Is a Bad Idea ⇥ arstechnica.com

Kate Cox, Ars Technica:

Almost exactly two weeks ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was touting the success his platform has had with fact-checking and false-content warnings on posts. This week, however, Zuckerberg told Fox News that, really, he doesn’t think Facebook should be in the fact-checking business at all.

“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Dana Perino. “Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

Perino, George W. Bush’s final press secretary, is now a Fox News host. Twitter has long been known as Trump’s favourite social media network and Fox has long been his favourite television network, so this smells like a cynical way to ingratiate Facebook with him.

Melissa Ryan:

I’ve been a frequent critic of [Twitter] and [Jack Dorsey’s] leadership. I’ll be a critic again in the future. But I really appreciate Twitter’s actions this week, and the months of policy changes that went into making it happen.

Well said.

The Trump Executive Order Claiming to Regulate Social Media Networks Is Legally Meaningless and Distracting ⇥ techdirt.com

I suppose it’s worth taking a few minutes to read about the Trump administration’s “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship”, which you can find in full on the White House website. It is a tantrum-grade piece of rush work, hastily cobbled together from old drafts of similar orders that misrepresent Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and legitimize the myth that social media networks are somehow biased against American conservatives.

Timothy B. Lee and Kate Cox, Ars Technica:

The centerpiece of the order is an effort to strip big technology companies of protection under Section 230, a federal law that immunizes websites against liability for user-submitted content. That would be a big deal if Trump actually had the power to rewrite the law. But he doesn’t. Rather, his plan relies on action by the Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency that has shown no inclination to help. Even with FCC help, the most that will happen is a slight reinterpretation of the law—one that the courts might choose to ignore.

The story is similar for other parts of Trump’s executive order. Trump wants the Federal Trade Commission to ensure companies are following their own policies on content moderation. That’s the same approach the FTC takes with privacy now, and it has proven toothless in practice. Perhaps the most significant change would be redirecting federal ad spending away from big technology platforms. At worst, that would be a modest hit to the bottom lines of technology giants that rake in billions of dollars every quarter.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

To be clear: the executive order is nonsense. You can’t overrule the law by executive order, nor can you ignore the Constitution. This executive order attempts to do both. It’s also blatantly anti-free speech, anti-private property, pro-big government — which is only mildly amusing, given that Trump and his sycophantic followers like to insist they’re the opposite of all of those things. But also, because the executive order only has limited power, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in there for very little actual things that the administration can do. It’s very much written in a way to make Trump’s fans think he’s done something to attack social media companies, but the deeper you dig, the more nothingness you find.

Stephen T. Stone, a frequent Techdirt commenter, wrote an excellent tangental piece about the difference between moderation, discretion, and censorship:

A platform the size of Twitter or Facebook comes with a built-in potential audience of millions. Anyone banned from Twitter loses the ability to reach that audience. For some people, such a loss can feel like censorship — even though it isn’t. No one has the right to an audience. No one has the right to make someone listen. But entitled people think they do have those rights, and any “violation” of those “rights” is “censorship”.

So, here are the facts: conservatives are not being censored on the basis of their political beliefs; the President of the United States is certainly not being censored — he’s the president; Section 230 of the CDA helps protect companies like Twitter from liability when a user threatens violence, posts something defamatory, or similar; the First Amendment allows social media companies to determine what kind of posts they will allow, prevent, or remove; and, finally, this Executive Order will have virtually no effect.

This topic distracts from far more pressing concerns. In the real world, there is a pandemic that is causing thousands of deaths every day, many of which are in the United States because its federal government took almost no action through February and much of March. The response to that pandemic has caused economic activity around the world to slow down, leading to unprecedented job losses that threaten the livelihood of millions. Politically, the remaining positivity in Trump’s poll numbers has been declining, which sucks for him; a more pressing concern is that Americans’ trust in their federal government keeps dropping.

Whenever something like this Executive Order is described as a “distraction”, it should not carry the implication that it is deliberate. This administration is so readily engaged in scandalous, unethical, and legally dubious behaviour that it becomes a distraction creating machine without necessarily trying. It’s not really a strategy; it’s what happens when the people in charge are gleefully nihilistic and joyous in their spite. We cannot digest this force-fed all-you-can-eat buffet of cruelty.

MacOS Catalina’s Hidden Additional Typeface Families ⇥ typography.guru

Ralf Herrmann (via Michael Tsai):

Apple has recently licensed fonts from type foundries such as Commercial Type, Klim Type Foundry and Mark Simonson Studio to be used as system fonts on Mac OS Catalina. But since these fonts are an optional download, many users of Mac OS X are not even aware they have access to them for free.

I had no clue that so many great type families were made available for free to Catalina users. Interestingly, they aren’t stored in the typical folders for fonts — /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts; instead, they are downloaded to /​System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font6. However, they appear to be saved as standard TrueType containers, and I don’t see any restrictions on their use for commercial projects in their metadata or the Catalina EULA (PDF).

Grubhub Should Be Thriving Due to the Pandemic’s Restrictions — But It’s Not ⇥ themarkup.org

There is a lot in this report from Adrianne Jeffries, writing at the Markup, about the ways that food delivery services are struggling during the pandemic, but I wanted to direct your attention to this:

Grubhub has acknowledged that it makes more money from independent restaurants and small chains. A February 2020 shareholder letter explained that a typical order from an independent restaurant that uses Grubhub for marketing and delivery generates $4 of profit for Grubhub, while an order from a national chain generates $0. 

The independent restaurant “values our demand generation capabilities and utilizes our delivery services; we have a higher take-rate and collect the diner delivery fee,” Grubhub wrote, while the profit from the national brand “is significantly lower because the commission rate is lower AND the order size is smaller.”

For the independents, though, the delivery fees were too high “even in a strong market,” said Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York Hospitality Alliance. In a pandemic, they could put restaurants out of business — which would in turn put delivery apps out of business.

The letter illustrates the difference by comparing a $38 order from an independent restaurant and a $25 order from a chain. Grubhub’s commission on the first order is apparently between $6 and $8; its commission on the chain order is $2 to $4. Perhaps the delivery model doesn’t work as well for fast food chains, and perhaps you believe Grubhub’s argument that the attraction of a big chain will draw some customers to also order from places they otherwise wouldn’t. The effect is the same, however: Grubhub uses the higher fees paid by independent neighbourhood restaurants to subsidize deliveries for huge chains.

Three-Judge Panel Dismisses Nonsense Lawsuit Alleging Infringement of First Amendment Rights by Tech Companies ⇥ bloomberg.com

Erik Larson, Bloomberg:

A federal appeals court rejected claims that tech giants Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google conspired to suppress conservative views online.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington on Wednesday affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit by the nonprofit group Freedom Watch and the right-wing YouTube personality Laura Loomer, who accused the companies of violating antitrust laws and the First Amendment in a coordinated political plot.

[…]

Larry Klayman, a lawyer for Freedom Watch and Loomer, said in an interview that he’d file a petition to have the case reheard by an enlarged, “en banc” panel of the court’s judges and take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. He said he believes the court chose Wednesday to issue its decision as a response to President Donald Trump’s threat to regulate or shutter social media companies for their alleged anticonservative bias.

Klayman is an entire jackass who has been banned from several courtrooms, and has repeatedly faced the prospect of having his law license suspended — most recently for pursuing a romantic relationship with a client. Meanwhile, the U.S. President thinks that he has the capacity to “close down” companies because they dare attempt to correct his dangerous lies that delegitimize this year’s election. Twitter, meanwhile, has decided to allow the use of its platform by the President for slandering a television host by accusing him of murder.

This “flooding the zone with shit” tactic is disastrous at any time, but is contemptible without compare during a pandemic that has now killed a hundred thousand Americans and over three hundred thousand worldwide.

Recent Firmware Updates for Texas Instrument Graphing Calculators Removes ASM Support ⇥ inputmag.com

Matthew Wille, Input:

Texas Instruments is pulling support for C-based and assembly-based programs on both the TI-84 Plus CE — the most popular calculator for sideloading — and the TI-83 Premium CE, its French sibling. The latest firmware for each completely removes the capability and leaves users with no way to roll back to previous versions of the firmware.

This will pose a huge shift in the TI-calculator community — a relatively small but ultimately very dedicated group of programmers. Texas Instruments has shown love for this community in the past, and the company even provides advanced copies of firmware for them to beta test. Now it seems the company is ready to rebrand as more secure, even if that means leaving behind its most passionate fanbase.

Before every math and physics exam, I remember a teacher going around the room to make sure all of us cleared the memory on our graphing calculators. One of the very first programs I created was a lookalike version of the TI-83’s “RAM cleared” screen — similar to Fake but nowhere near as clever — so that I could keep all of the games I had installed and, occasionally, contraband notes. I am sure that my calculator helped me learn more about programming than it did my actual schoolwork. This is a pretty lame move on the part of Texas Instruments.

WWDC 2020 Wish Lists ⇥ beckyhansmeyer.com

Becky Hansmeyer included a bunch of SwiftUI wishes, but I picked a couple of things from the “Everything Else” section that I am also hoping to see this year:

A system-wide color picker in iOS. It’s bananas that I can’t select some text in Apple Notes on my iPad and change its color. From what I can tell, every single Mac app has access to the color picker.

The MacOS colour picker is a gem of a system component and something I miss dearly when working on any other operating system. Yes, please.

A revamped iPad multitasking system (yep, just do it again until it’s right) that isn’t big ol’ hot mess. Make it so my 4-year-old can figure it out.

I desperately want to see this cracked. I wonder how many users of moderate technical literacy can figure out how the current multitasking system works — not many, I bet. I’m not sure it will ever be usable by young children, but I’m not confident that I fully understand the current system, and I use my iPad a lot.

Stuart Breckenridge (via Michael Tsai):

  • Messages should have feature parity with its iOS counterpart, and improved search

  • FaceTime Group Calling needs an overhaul to match group calling features of competitors (at the very least, a static grid view)

These are both off Breckenridge’s MacOS wish list, which he guesses will be named Anacapa. My money is on Avalon.

Gus Mueller kept it simple:

My WWDC 2020 MacOS Wishlist

It’s now spelled with a capital M.

The true crime is the capitalization of “iPadOS”.

For what it’s worth, there are a couple of things that I would like to see this year:

  • Some indication — anything — that Siri is a priority. The wholly-generated voice that shipped with iOS 13 is a welcome improvement; it sounds so much better, particularly with more complex words.

    But Siri’s ability to respond accurately and as expected remains terrible. I know that all voice-based assistants have their weak spots, but my experience with Siri is that it cannot be trusted to do anything more than set timers and create reminders.

    Also, given its intentions and promised capabilities, Siri ought to be a tentpole feature for accessibility. Given its proclivity to behave unexpectedly, it’s just not there yet. Voice Control is wildly impressive; Siri ought to be, too.

  • An indication that “iPadOS” is more than just a name. It seems to me that a great reason to rename the iPad’s operating system is to indicate that it is no longer a bigger and slightly different version of the operating system that’s used on the iPhone. I’d like to see evidence of this.

    A great place to start might be in the management of background tasks. Here is an example I’m sure I’ve used before but cannot seem to find right now: I had three tabs open in Safari when an email came in with an attached contract I needed to sign. I switched over to Mail to save the PDF locally, switched to Files to put it in the correct place, signed it using the Markup extension, then switched back to Mail to reply with the signed copy. And then I switched back to Safari and all my tabs had to reload.

    I try to be cautious with how Mac-like the iPad should be. I recognize that it is a different platform with different expectations, so I don’t necessarily think that the iPad should just clone everything the Mac does. There are plenty of great reasons this does not happen and ought to be avoided. But, still, I have never switched between a few Mac apps and had Safari behave as though it was freshly launched. I would like to be able to switch between apps on my iPad without frequently triggering full reloads.

    Another pet peeve of mine is how poorly many system features use the space offered by today’s giant iPad displays. Siri should not consume the entire screen; neither should Notification Centre, for that matter, with a single column of summarized banners.

These are two areas that Apple often pushes as being emblematic of its strategy for the future, but which it has struggled to move forward in my view. My experiences with Siri and my iPad are not nearly as optimistic as Apple projects.

My other wish for WWDC is a noticeable focus on quality: fewer bugs, less waiting, better fit and finish, and no catastrophes when upgrading. The tick-tock cycle of feature-heavy releases followed by refinement versions is a horrible strategy that does neither effectively. I would like to see this acknowledged in some regard as an ongoing priority for every release. That’s not going to happen, but that’s what wish lists are for: the things you really want.

Local U.S. News Stations Aired an Amazon-Produced Promotional Video, Most Without Acknowledging Its Source ⇥ couriernewsroom.com

Zach Rael of KOCO 5:

Just got an email from Amazon’s PR team with a pre-edited news story and script to run in our shows. They are selling this as giving our viewers an “inside look” at the company’s response to COVID‑19.

Tim Burke, Courier:

While most TV news professionals have scoffed at the idea of running Amazon-provided content as news, at least 11 stations across the country ran some form of the package on their news broadcasts. The package — you can view the script Amazon provided to news stations here — was produced by Amazon spokesperson Todd Walker. Only one station, Toledo ABC affiliate WTVG, acknowledged that Walker was an Amazon employee, not a news reporter, and that the content had come from Amazon.

[…]

Amazon responded by stating the video and script were published to Business Wire as are many other companies’ in-house produced content for media organizations.

While it’s true that many companies use Business Wire to distribute press releases, it’s rare to see news-lookalike materials for broadcasters to simply drop in. It’s kind of gross for Amazon to be creating material that is clearly intended to be used, in full, as a news item, but that’s nothing on how unprofessional and embarrassing it is for even a handful of broadcasters run it without disclosing its source.

Update: Al Tompkins, Poynter:

In the TV business, these so-called video news releases, or VNRs, are so 1998. Frankly, I have not heard of anybody using such things on the air in years because they have been around since the early 1990s and have been loudly condemned as commercials disguised as news stories.

[…]

Journalism organizations like the Radio Television Digital News Association have spoken to the problems that come with VNRs for years. It is not to say a station can never ethically use a company-supplied video or even a statement, but the public has to understand where the video came from and why we are using it rather than verifying the content with our own eyes and lenses. But even using the video with attribution does not release journalists from pointing out that Amazon’s safety claims are at odds with warehouse worker’s claims.

David Barstow and Robin Stein, reporting for the New York Times in 2005:

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The “reporter” covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department’s office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

It is sometimes hard to remember the failures of past administrations when the current one eagerly sheds itself of all ethics.

Amnesty’s Security Lab Finds Qatari Mandatory Contact Tracing App Exposed Sensitive Data Such Like Name and Location ⇥ amnesty.org

Amnesty, in an un-bylined report:

The investigation by Amnesty Security Lab found Qatar’s EHTERAZ app requested a QR code from the central server by providing the national ID the user registered with. No additional authentication was required, so anyone could have requested a QR code for any EHTERAZ user.

The lack of authentication and the fact that Qatari national IDs follow a consistent format meant it was possible to automatically generate all possible combinations of national IDs and retrieve the sensitive data that EHTERAZ stores.

[…]

Before the authorities took action to address the vulnerability, sensitive personal information contained in the QR code included names in English and Arabic, location of confinement, as well as the name of medical facilities in which an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 is being treated. Last Friday, the authorities immediately took action to mitigate the exposure of data by stripping out names and location data. They subsequently released an update for the EHTERAZ app on Sunday which appears to add a new layer of authentication to prevent harvesting of data. While these changes appear to fix the issue, Amnesty International has been unable to verify whether these changes meet sufficient security standards.

This app is mandatory for everyone in Qatar, and its poor centralized design meant that highly sensitive information was trivial to look up. I remain stumped why Apple and Google chose to create the framework for decentralized systems that do not allow location data collection, contrary to the suggestions of the Washington Post.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Announces Canada Will Adopt Apple–Google Exposure Notification API ⇥ iphoneincanada.ca

Gary Ng, iPhone in Canada:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today revealed during his daily COVID-19 press conference the Canadian government is working with Apple and Google in regards to a contact tracing app, or Exposure Notification solution.

Trudeau mentioned how other jurisdictions, such as Singapore and Australia, have contact tracing apps running in the foreground, which can drain battery life. But Apple and Google’s next June update will bake the joint COVID-19 contact tracing solution into the mobile operating systems, allowing Bluetooth to be used anonymously in the background.

The existing app being promoted across Alberta is based on Singapore’s TraceTogether app, but it has notable problems. If the Canadian app gains widespread adoption, it seems like it could be helpful to human contact tracers.

Ng:

Apple and Google are limiting one API use per country to so apps aren’t fragmented and also increase adoption. The Exposure Notification API will not use a device’s location services.

I must have missed this announcement from a few weeks ago but it makes sense and ought to clean up the current mess of incompatible exposure notification apps.

The Early Build of iOS 14 That’s Floating Around Was Likely Extracted From a Stolen Development iPhone ⇥ vice.com

Remember when, a few months ago, MacRumors and 9to5Mac independently dropped a whole bunch of iOS 14 details without disclosing a source beyond “leaked code”? Even for a necessarily discreet acknowledgement, that barely counts as explaining how much of the OS had leaked and why either publication believed the code to be genuine.

A new report today from Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Vice helps answer those questions:

Motherboard has not been able to independently verify exactly how it leaked, but five sources in the jailbreaking community familiar with the leak told us they think that someone obtained a development iPhone 11 running a version of iOS 14 dated December 2019, which was made to be used only by Apple developers. According to those sources, someone purchased it from vendors in China for thousands of dollars, and then extracted the iOS 14 internal build and distributed it in the iPhone jailbreaking and hacking community.

[…]

Leaked Apple code, documentation, and hardware is often traded on Twitter using a hashtag called #AppleInternals. The people trading or selling this information are often pseudonymous, but have proven time and time again to have legitimate Apple information or hardware. This particular version of iOS 14 has been traded on Twitter but also among networks of jailbreakers and security researchers. Two security researchers told Motherboard they have (and are probing) iOS 14, and two said they heard it was being offered but were staying away from it, fearing repercussions from Apple.

For what it’s worth, the hashtag is #AppleInternal, not #AppleInternals. Also, I don’t think it’s a big shock that Apple is not too thrilled that a stolen copy of a very early build of iOS 14 is being shared publicly and probed by unauthorized people. It’s one thing for a public or semi-public copy to be explored for vulnerabilities; it is entirely another to be researching an unfinished build intended solely for internal use.

Last year, a Motherboard investigation revealed the existence of a gray market where smugglers steal early prototypes, or “dev-fused” iPhones from factories in China and then sell them to security researchers and collectors around the world. In the past, Apple has gone after leakers and even a Gizmodo journalist, who found a prototype of an iPhone 4 in a San Francisco bar. It’s unclear what the company will do about this incident, but some in the industry are expecting the worst.

This whole article paints Apple as unreasonably protective of its confidential property, verging on vindictive. This paragraph, specifically, ties the purchase of the unreleased build of iOS 14 to the Gizmodo iPhone 4 case, implying that Apple will, I guess, exact revenge upon MacRumors and 9to5Mac reporters who wrote about the code they obtained.

But the angle of this article depends on how the Gizmodo case is described — and, here, it is reported inaccurately. A Gizmodo journalist did not find a prototype. Gizmodo bought the prototype for $5,000 after being contacted by the guy who stole it from an Apple engineer’s bag. Is it such a surprise that a company — any company — does not take kindly to having its stolen goods trafficked?

I would be surprised and dismayed if Apple attempted to search or press charges against the reporters writing about the iOS 14 builds that were leaked to them. I do not think it is outrageous for Apple to go after whatever source bought the stolen iPhone that contained the code, nor do I think it was wrong when the police investigated Gizmodo’s purchase of a stolen prototype. Those are vastly different things from both a reporter’s ethical perspective, as well as a more obvious legal perspective.

Sandwich Made a New Ad for Slack, Using Slack ⇥ adweek.com

Don’t miss the behind-the-scenes video with the Sandwich team explaining how they made all this happen without being able to leave their houses.

If you look closely at Adam’s jacket, you’ll see that he has his iPhone upside down in his chest pocket with the Voice Memos app used to record his audio. I don’t know if that audio made the final cut or if it was a backup, but it would not surprise me if it’s from the iPhone. (Update: The iPhone was a backup.) At my day job, I sometimes have to make videos, and there have been plenty of times I’ve used cleaned-up recordings from an iPhone positioned like that, with perfectly acceptable quality.

It’s amazing how far all of these tools have come. The ad is a video that requires no caveats or asterisks to excuse its work-from-home production, and the behind-the-scenes video shows how much is possible with the tools many of us already have.

Siri Turns Nine This Year ⇥ twitter.com

Nilay Patel asked his Apple Watch what time it was in London, and it responded with the current time in London, Ontario. Assuming Patel asked in New York, where his Twitter bio indicates that he lives, that would be the closest London, but almost certainly not the one he’s thinking of.

John Gruber asked the same question on two different devices. His iPhone also responded with the time in London, Ontario, but his HomePod told him the time in London, U.K.

This is clearly madness on every possible level. Why would Siri respond differently on different devices? Why would it not choose the more obvious geographic choice, rather than the small Canadian city that is in the same time zone as where Patel was asking from? If you want to be absolutely pedantic about it, Siri already has a way of clarifying ambiguity — but it should just assume that you want the time in one of the world’s most well-known cities.

What bugged me most about this, though, is that searching Maps locations through Siri and by keyboard entry frequently requires an unnecessary amount of precision. For years, getting directions to the Ikea location here in Calgary required typing “Ikea Calgary, Alberta”, otherwise it would consistently get directions to Ikea in Edmonton, about three hours away. Apple has fixed that now, but there are plenty of other times where it has directed me to similarly-named pizza joints and dry cleaners in the southern United States instead of mere blocks away. Why is Siri so eager to prioritize proximity for a query that is about time difference by distance, yet Maps search reliably thinks I want to travel many hours to get furniture or dinner?

Most egregious to me was that time, earlier this year, when Siri suggested an inconceivable day-long road trip instead of a route to my office. It got every possible aspect wrong of something I do with scheduled regularity. Given its age, inconsistency, slow response times, and unreliability, there is little doubt in my mind that Siri is one of modern Apple’s greatest software failures. I do not understand how, after a decade of development, it still struggles with fundamental expectations.

Contact Tracing App Used by North and South Dakota Shares Location Data With Foursquare and Google ⇥ fastcompany.com

Steven Melendez, Fast Company:

The app, called Care19, and produced by a company called ProudCrowd that also makes a location-based social networking app for North Dakota State sports fans, generates a random ID number for each person who uses it. […]

According to the app’s privacy policy, “location data is private to you and is stored securely on ProudCrowd, LLC servers” and won’t be shared with third parties “unless you consent or ProudCrowd is compelled under federal regulations.”

But according to the Jumbo report, the app sends the random ID number, along with a phone ID used for advertising purposes and apparent latitudes and longitudes of places visited by the user, to Foursquare, a leading location-data provider. The app also sends the random ID to servers run by Bugfender, a Barcelona-based service used by app makers to track and diagnose software malfunctions, according to Jumbo, which monitored internet traffic generated by the app. It’s accompanied by the phone’s name, which often includes the device owner’s first name, according to the report. The phone’s advertising ID is also sent to Google servers that appear to be affiliated with Google’s Firebase service, Jumbo found.

Hard to imagine why Apple and Google designed an API specifically for contact tracing with stricter privacy provisions instead of simply allowing indiscriminate location data collection like that recent Washington Post story suggested they ought to do.

Twitter Is Testing Settings That Allow Users to Limit Who Can Reply to Individual Tweets ⇥ cnet.com

Alison DeNisco Rayome and Queenie Wong, CNet:

Twitter is testing new settings that let you choose who can reply to your tweet and join in on your conversation, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Before you send a tweet, you’ll be able to choose who can reply from three options: everyone on Twitter (which will be the default setting), only people you follow, or only people you mention. 

If you choose one of the latter two options, your tweets will be labeled and the reply icon will be grayed out, so people will see that they can’t reply. However, those that can’t reply will still be able to view, retweet, retweet with comment or like your tweets. 

Only a limited group of people on Twitter’s iOS and Android apps as well as its website can currently send tweets that limit replies, but everyone can still see those conversations. It’s unclear if or when the feature would roll out more generally.

This seems like yet another Twitter feature that will sharply bifurcate discussion on the site rather than assisting it. Those making bad faith arguments can avoid being fact-checked. Those who are more honest can eliminate trolls in direct replies, but their post can still be quote-tweeted by bad actors.

Sure seems like it will appeal to public figures and companies that want to treat Twitter as a pure broadcast platform, though.

How to Decode a Data Breach Notice ⇥ techcrunch.com

Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

Data breach notifications are meant to tell you what happened, when and what impact it may have on you. You’ve probably already seen a few this year. That’s because most U.S. states have laws that compel companies to publicly disclose security incidents, like a data breach, as soon as possible. Europe’s rules are stricter, and fines can be a common occurrence if breaches aren’t disclosed.

But data breach notifications have become an all-too-regular exercise in crisis communications. These notices increasingly try to deflect blame, obfuscate important details and omit important facts. After all, it’s in a company’s best interest to keep the stock markets happy, investors satisfied and regulators off their backs. Why would it want to say anything to the contrary?

The next time you get a data breach notification, read between the lines. By knowing the common bullshit lines to avoid, you can understand the questions you need to ask.

A good guide to the language used in these announcements. Data breach notifications are, after all, just a form of press release, and should be viewed through the same skeptical lens.

National Advertising Review Board Recommends AT&T Discontinue Fake 5G Branding ⇥ venturebeat.com

Jeremy Horwitz, VentureBeat:

[…] Based on challenges brought by T-Mobile, the NARB said that AT&T should discontinue references to both “5G Evolution” and “5G Evolution, The First Step to 5G,” which a panel determined would “mislead reasonable consumers into believing that AT&T is offering a 5G network” when it was undisputed that AT&T’s 5GE was “not a 5G network.”

[…]

While AT&T said that it “respectfully disagrees” with the NARB’s decision, it will apparently comply with the decision, though it’s unclear at this point whether it will discontinue both the 5G Evolution advertisements and on-device branding, or just the ads. In addition to its 4G network, the carrier currently advertises “5GE,” “5G,” and “5G+” services that continue to be confusing and in some cases elusive to consumers, as there are still no maps for AT&T’s millimeter wave-based 5G+ in cities or states a year and a half after the service supposedly launched.

In addition to being half-baked pixie dust, 5G is also confused by AT&T’s deliberately misleading branding.

Update: AT&T confirms that it will not change the “5G E” symbol on phones. Though the NARB has a very official sounding name, it is merely a wing of the private Better Business Bureau organization, and has no regulatory power. The term “5G” has an unambiguous definition, but AT&T’s misuse of it to falsely advertise its 4G network withstood a Sprint lawsuit and has not been meaningfully objected to by any regulatory body.