Day: 24 February 2022

Making a Good Example of a Bad Example ⇥ bynkiidotcom.wordpress.com

John C. Welch (via Michael Tsai):

As most of y’all know, I’ve been kind of up in the OneDrive debacle for a while, going back to when the “new” OneDrive was only available on the Insider builds and breaking everything. But like everything that goes this epically wrong, there’s a lot others (and the OneDrive team) can learn from this epic situation

This is a terrific list. Item number one?

One Major Change At A Time

One of the biggest things that’s hitting OneDrive Mac users is that there’s two fundamental changes hitting them at once. This isn’t new chrome or a slight reordering of things, OneDrive on the Mac has made two fundamental changes that affect everyone using the app. One of those, the moving of the OneDrive root was imposed on them via API changes from Apple. The other is the Files-On-Demand being no longer optional. My guess is the latter was in the works when the former hit, and rather than delay the FoD changes, they went ahead with them anyways, “may as well have all the pain at once.”

Developers, if anyone ever suggests this to you, fight back as hard as possible, because this will cause you pain for years. Years. […]

This is such a good attempt of making the best of a terrible situation. These two big changes have many implications, and it has robbed me of any trust I had in OneDrive. I already disliked its behaviour, but at least I understood it. Now, that rug has been pulled out in a way that is profoundly upsetting. I am still working through problems caused by this update. For example, placeholder files are not automatically created for the entire OneDrive directory, only for files and folders I have opened. This means Spotlight cannot index those files and folders, which means I cannot fully search OneDrive on my Mac. It does not matter to me whether this is Microsoft’s fault or Apple’s. It matters that I am surprised — daily — by new roadblocks in my existing workflow caused by software updates and under-hood changes no user should have to think about.

I know there are smart people building these products, but it oftentimes feels like nobody in charge of shipping them cares about how damaging this kind of stuff is for users. It is insulting.

The Associated Press Wanted to Sell an NFT of Video of Migrants Adrift at Sea ⇥ web3isgoinggreat.com

Molly White, in her excellent Web3 is Going Just Great project:

However, on February 24 they announced that their newest NFT would show a short, top-down video of around fifty migrants crammed into a small inflatable boat, adrift at sea in the Mediterranean. Any goodwill the AP might have had for their NFT project was likely shattered by their choice to monetize a video of human suffering. The already horrific NFT announcement was particularly ill-timed, given its juxtaposition on many Twitter feeds amongst news of Russian military action against Ukraine. The Associated Press deleted the announcement tweet four hours later.

When I first saw a screenshot of this tweeted by Rob Sheridan, I could barely believe it was real, but it was. The AP really decided it would be a fantastic idea to sell the ownership — in whatever bizarre way an NFT constitutes “ownership” — of a video of migrants escaping their homeland.

The Associated Press:

We deleted an earlier tweet promoting an upcoming NFT auction. This was a poor choice of imagery for an NFT. It has not and will not be put up for auction.

No shit. Consider that at least a few people were surely involved in this process: someone to operate the NFT auction, a social media person to write the tweet, and some managers along the way. This is a clearly terrible idea that somehow sailed through the approvals process because, I guess, the lure of NFTs is simply too good to second-guess the humanity of the situation.

Margrethe Vestager Says Tech Giants May Prefer Fines to Compliance ⇥ reuters.com

Foo Yun Chee, Reuters:

European Commission Vice President and digital chief Margrethe Vestager said Apple’s behaviour could indicate other big companies behave similarly.

“Some gatekeepers may be tempted to play for time or try to circumvent the rules,” she said in an online speech at a U.S. awards ceremony on Tuesday.

“Apple’s conduct in the Netherlands these days may be an example. As we understand it, Apple essentially prefers paying periodic fines, rather than comply with a decision of the Dutch Competition Authority on the terms and conditions for third parties to access its App Store.”

The maximum fine Apple will pay in the Netherlands is €50 million. Apple made over $330 million every day in Europe during its most recent quarter — admittedly, the winter holiday quarter. This penalty seems to be insufficient to compel urgent change for a company with bottomless wealth.

Major Publishers Are Working on an AMP Exit Strategy ⇥ wsj.com

Alexandra Bruell, Wall Street Journal:

Companies including Vox Media LLC, BuzzFeed Inc.’s Complex Networks and Bustle parent BDG said they have started testing or are considering using their own versions of mobile-optimized article pages, instead of building them using the Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, which Google introduced in 2015 and is supported by an open-source working group. The Washington Post has gone a step further, abandoning AMP last summer.

A potential exit from AMP would make media companies slightly less reliant on Google, whose dominance in digital advertising has strained its relationship with publishers and been referenced in a December 2020 lawsuit by state attorneys general alleging anticompetitive behavior.

About a year ago, Google stopped artificially boosting AMP pages in its search engine. Publishers may have found the format a worthwhile trade-off when Google restricted results in the news carousel for mobile users, but not any more. Good riddance.

I am amused that publishers are working on specific mobile versions of their websites again. The whole point of smartphone web browsers was that WAP — not that — versions were no longer needed; smartphones could render webpages just the same as a desktop computer. Responsive design helped optimize layouts so webpages could fit better on a smaller screen. But publishers jammed pages so full of video ads and tracking scripts and giant images that a mobile version seems to make sense again. A few CSS media queries cannot get rid of all of that junk.

An alternative is to make webpages without so much needless tinsel so they load quickly and work great regardless of what device someone may be using, but that is just too much to ask.

Who Is Policing the Location Data Industry? ⇥ themarkup.org

Alfred Ng and Jon Keegan, the Markup:

There is an estimated $12 billion market of companies that buy and sell location data collected from your cellphone. And the trade is entirely legal in the U.S.

Without legislation limiting the location data trade, Apple and Google have become the de facto regulators for keeping your whereabouts private — through shifts in transparency requirements and crackdowns on certain data brokers.

[…]

Workers in the location data industry told The Markup that data brokers are increasingly collecting data directly from app developers instead of relying on SDKs, which often leave a digital footprint. And it’s unclear how Apple and Google could even monitor how apps are sharing and selling data once they obtain it.

The short version is that nobody is policing it, and location data collected from anyone with a smartphone and commonplace third-party apps has become a massive unregulated market.

I understand the argument for Apple and Google to operate their platforms by their rules, but privacy should not be a policy decision made by a parent company. Nobody should have to decide what unknown privacy tradeoffs they are making by choosing software from one company over another. There must be clear rules restricting the collection and use of this information, and the U.S. desperately needs those laws since most of the world’s major technology companies are based in that country.

Twitter Needs a Retraction Mechanism ⇥ twitter.com

Will Truman:

I think the concerns about an edit button are overblown, but there would be very little downside to Twitter having a “retraction” option, wherein the tweet is left up but with a strikethrough indicating it is not or is no longer valid.

This is a fantastic idea. How many times have you seen a tweet with tens of thousands of likes and retweets, only to be followed by a less popular self-reply correction? The current mechanism for modifying a tweet is clearly inadequate, and deleting an offending tweet means a record of the origin of some piece of incorrect information may be lost. Brilliant.