Month: July 2021

Gojek Drivers Use Third-Party ‘Tuyul’ Apps to Improve Their Working Conditions ⇥ vice.com

Rida Qadri, Vice (via hamba_biasa91 on Twitter):

Over the last six years, a burgeoning underground market for unauthorized, third-party Gojek apps has emerged. Named after a child-like spirit in Indonesian folklore that helps his human master earn money by stealing, each tuyul app responds to specific needs of drivers to help make their jobs less miserable.

[…]

Despite Gojek’s adversarial relationship with tuyul, the company has benefited by adopting some of the features originally created by unauthorized apps. For instance, the “automatic bidding” app drivers had developed was introduced into the official Gojek app through a new feature called “autobid.” Gojek also briefly introduced the ability for drivers to filter orders, but according to drivers removed the feature when too many drivers started filtering for specific types of orders. While Gojek adopting driver-developed app features shows its responsiveness to driver needs, it also comes with the fear of drivers losing agency over how and how long they can use the features.

If there is one constant in the gig economy, it is that businesses must concede that they are actually employers rather than mere platforms for contractors. Every time they try treating workers like independent labour, they find it is an impediment to their business model.

Marketers Are Worried That iCloud Private Relay Could Be a Technical Hurdle Instead of a Policy One ⇥ digiday.com

Seb Joseph, Digiday:

And herein lies the rub for ad execs. Apple has told them fingerprinting is off-limits but doesn’t seem to be aggressively enforcing this policy. Few execs, however, believe this perceived inaction will last. Eventually, goes the thinking, Apple won’t need to enforce a policy like ATT to rid its mobile operating system of fingerprinting — it will have the technology to block it from ever happening in the first place. The reason: Private Relay.

Private Relay renders a person’s IP address useless for fingerprinting because it redirects web traffic through two separate servers. Granted, an IP address is just one of many aspects that make a fingerprint of someone’s behavior on a device — but it’s an important one.

For all of marketers’ thrashing and gnashing about App Tracking Transparency, it really is only a policy change. Apple certainly tries to enforce it; it knows about SDKs that function as trackers, and at least one attempt to circumvent these rules has faltered. iCloud Private Relay creates a much more robust barrier, especially if it is extended to all network traffic from all apps — and, notably, compliance does not depend on the attentiveness of an App Store reviewer.

Ten Years After ‘People Staring at Computers’ ⇥ kylemcdonald.net

Kyle McDonald:

In 2011 I published a series of photos taken with the laptops in two New York City Apple Stores, as part of my ongoing exploration of surveillance, face analysis, and computer-mediated interaction. In response, Apple contacted the Secret Service and they raided my apartment. After censoring the work online, Apple did not pursue a civil case against me. And after a few months long investigation by the Secret Service, Assistant United States Attorney Judith Philips declined to prosecute me.

Ten years later, this work is still an important reference point for my art practice. I continue to work with faces and to reflect on privacy and surveillance in a new era dominated by machine learning.

McDonald’s work has long been a reference point for my own practices related to surveillance and privacy. I still find this piece fascinating, even if it is admittedly creepy:

I’m not sure I would make this piece today, anyway. I’m increasingly critical of artwork that attempts to engage with the theme of surveillance by replicating systems of surveillance. How fruitful can a conversation be about consent and privacy, when an artist does not seek their subject’s consent?

It feels like the era of a shock-and-awe approach in laying bare the privacy abuses of our time has run its course. That era seemed to be driven by a misplaced interrogation of power: even though the general public participates in widespread privacy abuses, we did not create them and do not maintain them. A more effective exploration of widespread surveillance has to acknowledge this power difference to be both ethical and effective.

Apple Music Lobotomizes Siri ⇥ talk.tidbits.com

Dave Scocca on the TidBits forum (via Michael Tsai):

What’s killing me is Apple Music. I have an iTunes library of almost 15,000 songs, mostly ripped from my CDs but with a number of iTunes store purchases. I have a 256 GB iPhone to allow me to have my music with me, and my new-ish Civic has CarPlay. It used to be great–I could use either the car’s voice control button or (later) “Hey Siri” and request music and have it played.

Since activating Apple Music, that process has gone completely to hell. Siri seems to have no idea of what music might actually be stored on the phone. At first, I could play an album using the phone controls or the CarPlay interface, but if I asked Siri to play the exact same album I would be told that it couldn’t be played because I didn’t have cellular data enabled for music streaming. I have tried adding the words “from my library” to various places in my requests to Siri, and it generally does nothing.

I complained about this two years ago when this behaviour was introduced in iOS 13; my bug report — FB6825077 — is dated July 26, 2019. That bug report has gone unacknowledged and unfixed. It is another example of how Siri and CarPlay can be more distracting than helpful, which is worrisome behind the wheel.

The best solution I have found for requesting music is to ask to play an album or playlist “from my local library”. It is imperfect, but it is the command that most often gets me what I want. But it is entirely unnecessary — why would I prefer that my iPhone waste bandwidth streaming a record from Apple Music when I have a local copy right there? It makes no sense at all.

Facebook-Funded Comscore Study Indicates Heavy Use of First-Party Apps on Android and iOS ⇥ theverge.com

Alex Heath, the Verge:

If you use an iPhone or Android phone, chances are the majority of your most-used apps were made by Apple and Google.

That’s the takeaway from a new Comscore study that ranks the popularity of preinstalled iOS and Android apps, such as Apple’s Messages, alongside apps made by other developers. The results show that the majority of apps people use on their phones in the US come preinstalled by either Apple or Google. The first-of-its-kind report was commissioned by Facebook, one of Apple’s loudest critics, and shared exclusively with The Verge.

I am guessing it will not surprise most of you to see the effect of defaults, but it is quite something to see Instagram, for example, used by fewer people every month than Apple’s own Stocks app on iOS and the Samsung Calculator on Android.

Interesting as it may be, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this study. Apparently the most-used app on iOS is the phone app — according to this study, it has more active monthly users in the U.S. than the camera, Messages, YouTube, or Instagram. Why do I not believe that? Meanwhile, not a single phone app appears on the list of the twenty most popular apps on Android — but Walmart’s shopping app sneaks in at the bottom of the list. Also, Gmail is the fourth most popular app on Android, but the highest email application on iOS — Apple’s own Mail app — ranks thirteenth, which is yet another data point indicating that email analytics cannot be trusted.

I’m not arguing that Facebook skewed this study in a specific direction. I just think that these results indicate a flawed methodology.

Microsoft’s Falling Surface Duo ⇥ arstechnica.com

Jesus Diaz, writing at Tom’s Guide shortly after Microsoft unveiled the Surface Duo phone in October 2019, nearly a year before it was released:

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.

Not only that, but I also got the impression that, while Apple has been aimlessly wandering for years now — led by a man who is an administrator not interested in products but marketing and profits — Microsoft has surprisingly come out with a clear vision of what they want the future to be. And they are executing it.

Diaz calls Microsoft “the David to Apple’s Goliath”, which is an incredible analogy to use for what are currently the two most valuable businesses in the world, both of which are the only companies to have a market cap of over $2 trillion. Even at the time Diaz wrote this, Apple and Microsoft were worth around a trillion dollars apiece, which is less David-and-Goliath and more Hobbs-and-Shaw.1

Rob Enderle, eWeek, in August 2020, a few weeks before the Surface Duo was finally released:

Microsoft’s last major attempt to pivot a market belonging to someone else was with the Zune, which attempted to redefine the iPod segment into something with video and where music sharing was legal. It failed, and it was embarrassingly followed by the iPhone, which showcased what Microsoft should have built instead.

[…]

In short, the Surface Duo won’t be a Zune (the execution is far above where the Zune was); the question is whether it will eventually step up to reaching its potential as an iPhone-like product that can pivot the market. That question will depend on several things I’ve mentioned, and it will take two to five years.

Enderle acknowledges that the first version of the Surface Duo would likely be rocky. Like the iPhone, he says, it would take several iterations for it to sell well. But the iPhone was immediately apparent as the future of mobile devices. The Surface Duo, on the other hand — well?

Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica yesterday:

Poor Microsoft. The company’s Surface Duo phone was supposed to be the company’s triumphant entry into the Android phone market, but instead, it will probably be remembered as one of the bigger flops in the industry. The latest chapter of Microsoft’s dual-screen disaster involves a new low price for the ongoing fire sale: Amazon’s Woot is selling the phone for $409, an incredible $990.99 off the $1399.99 MSRP. The one catch is that it’s locked to AT&T.

Woot’s inventory is now sold out, which will disappoint those of you hoping to buy a prototype device that was inexplicably announced a year before going on sale at a higher price than any iPhone model or, for what’s worth, this Suzuki. Not a great showing for the new “king of innovation” and one of the “best inventions of 2020” according to Time magazine.

  1. As Diaz writes, the other major new product announced at Microsoft’s 2019 press conference was the Surface Neo. Despite a promised holiday 2020 launch date, it still has not shipped, possibly in part because development on the operating system it was supposed to run has been cancelled. ↥︎

Reactions to Amazon’s Purchase of MGM ⇥ nytimes.com

Nicole Sperling, New York Times:

At MGM, the two [Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy] have compiled a heady mix of A-list directors and compelling material they hope hearkens back to the days when Fred Astaire and Judy Garland roamed the once-hallowed studio’s hallways. The next six months will show if their strategy pays off. [Paul Thomas] Anderson’s movie will debut on Nov. 26. It will follow Ridley Scott’s pulpy drama “House of Gucci,” starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver. In December, Joe Wright’s musical adaptation of “Cyrano,” with Peter Dinklage and featuring music from The National, will be released.

[…]

In a shareholder meeting last month, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, called the reason behind the acquisition “very simple.” He said MGM had a “vast, deep catalog of much beloved” movies and shows. “We can reimagine and redevelop that I.P. for the 21st century.”

That runs counter to the approach Mr. De Luca and Ms. Abdy have primarily taken.

Paris Marx, Jacobin:

Commenting on the merger, Nicholas Russell explained that the streaming wars and the consolidation it’s incentivized turns film and television into “commodities to be traded and hoarded in order to capture subscriptions,” which leads to a “dilution of both quality and vitality for the cinematic form.” While companies like Disney are producing fewer movies for cinema as they focus exclusively on blockbusters, they’re all developing a flood of content for their streaming platforms to keep people’s attention — but the quality of those programs has notably declined.

This is not new, per se, as many works of art have long been treated as valuable assets. Wealthy patrons ordered musical compositions to which they held exclusive rights for a period of time; paintings were commissioned by religious institutions and royalty; sculptures were collected by the aristocracy for hundreds of years before the modern art market.

But what is seemingly new is how much entertainment is driven by so few franchises and, owing to consolidation, so few studios. It is not enough to have a successful movie and some sequels. Now, it is that and spin-off movies and broadcast television shows and streaming media and theme park attractions and novelizations that occupy the same narrative universe. Shared worlds are not a recent invention, but it is hard to come to terms with the sheer volume of storytelling that is driven by milking single collections of intellectual property.

That oft-referenced Walt Disney quote comes to mind:

I don’t make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures.

I wish I saw more cinema driven by the love of movies and less seemingly built around an assembly-line business model and easy revenue.

Brent Kendall, Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Trade Commission will be the agency to review Amazon.com Inc.’s proposed acquisition of Hollywood studio MGM, according to people familiar with the matter, just as the commission gets a new chairwoman who has been critical of the online giant’s expansion.

[…]

The MGM review could present an early test for new FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan, who made her name in antitrust circles in large part by criticizing Amazon. She wrote a widely read law-review article while at Yale Law School that argued U.S. antitrust law has failed to restrain the online retailer.

If you haven’t read Khan’s instant classic 2017 Yale Law Journal article about Amazon, I urge you to make time for it. I found it very readable, even for a layperson like me, though it is more like a book than then “note” it is categorized as.

Annie Palmer and Lauren Feiner, CNBC:

Amazon is pressing for the recusal of FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan from ongoing antitrust probes of the e-commerce giant, citing her past criticisms of the company’s power.

In a 25-page motion filed Wednesday with the FTC, Amazon argued that Khan has made public comments about Amazon and its conduct, including that the company is “guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up,” suggesting she lacks impartiality in antitrust investigations into Amazon.

Calling bias is, according to this report, not an uncommon move for companies that are facing scrutiny. That does not make it any less a cheap shot. If Khan’s pre-FTC analysis is correct — if a fair and honest assessment of the marketplace arrives at a conclusion that is negative for Amazon’s practices — that is not evidence of prejudice. I am sure there are many scholars that disagree with the conclusions Khan arrived at in that Yale piece, but I do not think anyone would seriously accuse her of not doing her homework on the issues.

Audacity’s New Privacy Policy Does Not Make It ‘Spyware’ Any More Than Any Other Application ⇥ gizmodo.com

An un-bylined FOSS Post, uh, post headlined “Audacity is now a Possible Spyware, Remove it ASAP”:

The famous open source audio manipulation program was acquired by a company named Muse Group two months ago. The same company owns other projects in its portfolio such as Ultimate Guitar (Famous website for Guitar enthuisasts) and MuseScore (Open source music notation software).

Ever since, Audacity has been a heated topic.

The parent company is a multi-national company and it has been trying to start a data-collection mechanism in the software. While Audacity is nothing more than a desktop program, its developers want to make it phone home with various data taken from users’ machines.

Shoshana Wodinsky, Gizmodo:

Ever since Audacity was acquired by tech conglomerate Muse Group in late April, fans of the free-to-use audio tool have been raising hell about some of the changes made to the software. First came plans to add telemetry capture. Then came a new contributor license agreement. Then last week came a privacy policy update that some Audacity die-hards say turns the software into “spyware.” But Audacity isn’t “spyware” — if only because virtually every app we use is some form of spyware these days.

[…]

Also worth mentioning here is that some of the other products under the Muse Group umbrella — like the music notation software MuseScore — feature nearly identical privacy policies, which suggests the parent company just updated Audacity’s policies for some consistency across its catalog. But that doesn’t excuse the piss-poor wording on its original draft, which Ray swears will be “revised” soon enough.

A website for free software enthusiasts is casually throwing around loaded terms like “spyware” for commonplace software features? Blow me over.

All the Right Words on Climate Have Already Been Said ⇥ niemanlab.org

Sarah Miller, Nieman Lab:

What then? What would happen then? Would people be “more aware” about climate change? It’s 109 degrees in Portland right now. It’s been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times. What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?

Several minutes into Marc Maron’s “End Times Fun” special, he jokes that “we did everything we could” to combat climate change because “we brought our own bags to the supermarket… yeah, that’s about it”. I think about that joke a lot — partly because it is very well constructed in a typically Marc Maron sort of way, and partly because, yeah, that feels about right.

I went to art school; I do not know what we can individually do about how much we ruin our planet. We can consume less, finish all the food in our fridge, use as little plastic as possible, and steer away from our most excessive instincts. But after all that — what then? Everything I have read points to a bleak future for anyone living near a coastline, in particular, or in an already-warm region unless there is significant intervention from governments and private industry.

My feeds in NetNewsWire often juxtapose distressing stories like those against, say, a recent issue of Today in Tabs where it is pointed out that fast fashion company Shein launches ten thousand products every month — over three hundred a day, every day — and this is completely okay in the eyes of some because it is merely satisfying demand. The machine churns, it spits out a $17 patterned shirt that you can own for just four monthly payments of $4.25, Shein invests some of its earnings into developing a different patterned shirt that it will sell you for $19, and apparently everyone is happy with the significance of this arrangement. Nobody has to think about how it is possible to fit the entire production costs of a shirt into under twenty Canadian dollars, nobody has to concern themselves with the lifespan and integrity of that garment, and Shein can repeat it all tomorrow when it launches another three hundred new items.

The article linked in that Tabs newsletter says that Shein shotguns products into the marketplace, then uses that sales data to create its next batch of products. But that basically means that it has produced plenty of goods that have been discarded by design. Shein knows it is going to waste many things it makes; that is core to its strategy.

This sort of structure repeats itself on my laptop with alarming frequency: I read a story about the climate we have created through decades of disregard for our waste, and then I read a story about something that is wasteful by design because that is how it has become successful. I will drink a glass of water — incidentally, sourced from a river fed by melting snowpack on a glacier that has been receding at alarming speed — and try to reconcile everything I have ever read about our deteriorating climate with our continued exploitation of this planet. It feels hopeless.

Defector Approaches Forty Thousand Paying Subscribers Just Nine Months After Launch ⇥ voices.media

Esther Kezia Thorpe, Media Voices Podcast:

The new company is owned by its employees, and at the moment, is almost completely funded by subscriptions. Defector’s VP of Revenue and Operations Jasper Wang spoke to us on the Media Voices Podcast to tell the story of how the publication formed, how subscriptions are going, and whether other outlets could replicate its success.

[…]

Looking at other publications, Defector initially played around with a lower entry price point of around $5 a month. “We did the back of the envelope math and said, ‘$5 a month, if we can convert 30,000 people, that’s actually not enough money,’” Wang said. “We have to make sure that we’re not shooting ourselves in the foot, and make sure that that floor is high enough.”

I have been a huge fan of Defector since its launch last year, and I am excited to renew my subscription when the time comes. Its writers produce something reliably good to read every day, and I have been impressed to see a new publication succeed with the shocking strategy of asking people to pay enough money. And I don’t even like sports.

The Collective and Rotting Hallucination That Is the Internet ⇥ theatlantic.com

Jonathan Zittrain, the Atlantic:

This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge.

This article is not solely about link rot — though that is a significant component; instead, it is about the unique qualities of electronic resources that lend themselves to poor suitability for long-term reference and archiving. I wanted to highlight one example Zittrain cites.

Philip Howard bought a copy of “War and Peace” on his Nook in 2012:

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern…”

Imagine if, in a hundred years’ time, the version of “War and Peace” that was being read in schools was the former, and then someone discovered that “Nookd” was a mistranslation because someone had lazily done a find-and-replace to substitute trademarked product names.

John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain, writing in May for Columbia Journalism Review:

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study — meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com — there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.

This was a sample data set from 1996 through mid-2019, but maybe the most shocking number is the 2018 one: after just a year, one in every sixteen links from the Times’ website to an external source had stopped working. The Times already has an attribution problem; this just makes it worse. The researchers point out that URLs within U.S. Supreme Court opinions fare even worse, with about half of links not working as originally intended.

Zittrain and colleagues created Perma.cc to try to solve this problem, particularly for legal and scholarly users. It is a good, necessary effort that uses the Internet Archive’s engine to build permanent links to pages that Perma.cc promises are, indeed, permanent.

But while you would think all permalinks on the web would be permanent, just like you might think permafrost would never thaw — the “perma” is a pretty big clue — but it turns out that language is funny like that.

In my testing, Perma.cc worked fine for text-based pages, but failed to capture video files on YouTube. That is broadly the case with other archival methods; there simply is not a large-scale effective YouTube mirror. If something is removed from the world’s most popular general-purpose video hosting site, it may be lost forever.