Month: May 2022

Deconstructing a Simple Mechanical Watch Movement ⇥ ciechanow.ski

Bartosz Ciechanowski:

In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components.

Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below.

This is a lovely and well-illustrated exploration of how springs and gears become a self-recharging timekeeping mechanism. Fantastic.

E.U. Objects to Apple’s Self-Benefitting Restrictions on iPhone NFC Capabilities ⇥ protocol.com

The European Commission:

The Commission takes issue with the decision by Apple to prevent mobile wallets app developers, from accessing the necessary hardware and software (‘NFC input’) on its devices, to the benefit of its own solution, Apple Pay.

The E.U. is also working on a digital wallet of its own, which it says will create a standard way for residents to prove their identity and potentially make payments. I have not seen that noted in any of the articles about the Commission’s allegations.

Ben Brody, Protocol:

Apple told the Wall Street Journal it is “setting industry-leading standards for privacy and security” while providing would-be competitors access to the technology on the same terms as it operates. The pushback echoes Apple’s defense in other antitrust cases, including those targeting its App Store: The company often insists that features that appear to create a closed ecosystem funneling consumers through its products are merely security protections.

Are the security features it has built for Apple Pay unique to the implementation of that service, unable to be reproduced by or for third parties? I am asking honestly. Apple’s statement manages to be both misleading — “Apple Pay […] has ensured equal access to NFC” makes no sense — and vague about its security standards. Apple’s security guide suggests deep hardware and software integration lends Apple Pay a superlative level of security, but it does not say anything about why this could not be made available to third parties.

I am not just asking questions; I really do want to know what is up with this.

The CDC Paid for Location Data From Millions of Phones Collected by Safegraph ⇥ vice.com

Joseph Cox, Vice:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated — meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people — but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

Remember, during the early days of the pandemic, when the Washington Post published an article chastising Apple and Google for not providing health organizations full access to users’ physical locations? In the time since it was published, the two companies released their jointly-developed exposure notification framework which, depending on where you live, has either been somewhat beneficial or mostly inconsequential. Perhaps unsurprisingly, regions with more consistent messaging and better privacy regulations seemed to find it more useful than places where there were multiple competing crappy apps.

The reason I bring that up is because it turns out a new app that invades your privacy in the way the Post seemed to want was unnecessary when a bunch of other apps on your phone do that job just fine. And, for the record, that is terrible.

In a context vacuum, it would be better if health agencies were able to collect physical locations in a regulated and safe way for all kinds of diseases. But there have been at least stories about wild overreach during this pandemic alone: this one, in which the CDC wanted location data for all sorts of uses beyond contact tracing, and Singapore’s acknowledgement that data from its TraceTogether app — not based on the Apple–Google framework — was made available to police. These episodes do not engender confidence.

Also — and I could write these words for any of the number of posts I have published about the data broker economy — it is super weird how this data can be purchased by just about anyone. Any number of apps on our phones report our location to hundreds of these companies we have never heard of, and then a government agency or a media organization or some dude can just buy it in ostensibly anonymized form. This is the totally legal but horrific present.

Reports like these underscore how frustrating it was to see the misplaced privacy panic over stuff like the Apple–Google framework or digital vaccine passports. Those systems were generally designed to require minimal information, report as little externally as possible, and use good encryption for communications. Meanwhile, the CDC can just click “add to cart” on the location of millions of phones.

If/When/How Repro Legal Helpline ⇥ reprolegalhelpline.org

Extremely bleak news from my neighbours to the south. This is not the law yet, and it is possible for a justice on the Supreme Court bench to change their mind, or for a future decision to craft a more concrete legal standing.

Until then, I think the If/When/How helpline may be a useful resource for many people.

Update: A reminder to exercise an abundance of caution since pretty much everything you do, even regarding your health, is tracked and can be traced back to you. In many states, there will be an appetite for using this information to prosecute health procedures.

Today in Organizations That Treat Your Personal Information Badly: the U.S. Department of Education, Grindr, and the Ad Tech Machine ⇥ gizmodo.com

Surya Mattu and Colin Lecher, the Markup:

For millions of prospective college students, applying online for federal financial aid has also meant sharing personal data with Facebook, unbeknownst to them or their parents, The Markup has learned. This information has included first and last names, email addresses, and zip codes.

After The Markup questioned the U.S. Department of Education about the tracking practice, the feature that enables sharing those details with Facebook was turned off. But personal data from an unknown number of students remains in Facebook’s hands, to be used for its own purposes. According to the company’s privacy policy, it may retain this type of data for years. And the tracker remains on the website and continues to share some information about visitors with Facebook.

Byron Tau and Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal:

Clients of a mobile-advertising company have for years been able to purchase bulk phone – movement data that included many Grindr users, said people familiar with the matter.

The data didn’t contain personal information such as names or phone numbers. But the Grindr data were in some cases detailed enough to infer things like romantic encounters between specific users based on their device’s proximity to one another, as well as identify clues to people’s identities such as their workplaces and home addresses based on their patterns, habits and routines, people familiar with the data said.

Via Shoshana Wodinsky, Gizmodo:

Does the blame in this case lie with Grindr? Absolutely. But it also lies with a system that handles your anonymity without care. Right now, if you have enough cash, you can buy location data from cell towers, satellites, retailers and countless apps that might, inadvertently, surface someone’s sexuality. And until the LGBT+ community stops being seen as a juicy market for ad targeting, people will keep buying that data, and they’ll keep doing whatever they want with it, legally. And that means nobody, queer or otherwise, is safe.

So long as personal data harvested largely without explicit consent continues to be treated as a product, it is unsurprising how invasive this industry will continue to operate. The only way this changes is if individuals have a legally guaranteed right to privacy and if businesses are prevented from sharing and collating the information they collect except under specific and rare circumstances.

The Disentanglement of Jony Ive From Apple ⇥ nytimes.com

Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, in an adapted excerpt from his book “After Steve” which will be released on Tuesday:1

It was 2014, and Apple’s future, more than ever, seemed to hinge on Mr. Ive. His love of pure, simple lines had already redrawn the world through such popular products as the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Now, he was seated at a conference table with Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, the two men embodying nearly 40 years of collaboration, with one designing and the other assembling the devices that turned a failing business into the world’s largest company. They both wanted another hit, but Mr. Ive was pushing for a product reveal more audacious than any in the theatrical company’s history.

The Apple Watch was slated to be introduced at a local community college auditorium near the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. To bring cosmopolitan gloss to a suburban landscape of strip malls, Mr. Ive recommended removing two dozen trees and erecting a lavish white tent.

His extravagant vision wasn’t going over well.

“They want $25 million,” a colleague said of the event’s price tag.

Apple marketers at the table were aghast. Few could comprehend the logistics of moving trees, much less the staggering cost.

You know me — I just had to see this for myself. And it does appear that Apple temporarily relocated several trees for the construction of the hands-on area at the Apple Watch introduction. Based on the aerial imagery in Google Earth, they were planted some time between September 2011 and May 2012 and were not large. It sounds more laborious in Mickle’s telling than I think is warranted.

This is yet another in the ongoing series of articles establishing Ive as a relic of an Apple that was, in several retellings, preoccupied with form over function, and regularly invented new product categories out of thin air. In the decade since Steve Jobs’ death, so the story goes, Apple has been reduced to a successful financial instrument.

I have been admittedly simplistic, but this narrative often approaches this simpler form, and I do not buy it. Jobs, Ive, and Tim Cook are all clearly pivotal figures in Apple’s resurgent history, but it is possible to overstate their individual contributions in a desire for a simple narrative.

Clay Shirky reviewed Mickle’s book for the Times:

In the epilogue, Mickle drops his reporter’s detachment to apportion responsibility for the firm’s failure to launch another transformative product. Cook is blamed for being aloof and unknowable, a bad partner for Ive, “an artist who wanted to bring empathy to every product.” Ive is also dinged for taking on “responsibility for software design and the management burdens that he soon came to disdain.” By the end, the sense that the two missed a chance to create a worthy successor to the iPhone is palpable.

It’s also hooey, and the best evidence for that is the previous 400 pages. It’s true that after Jobs died, Apple didn’t produce another device as important as the iPhone, but Apple didn’t produce another device that important before he died either. It’s also true that Cook did not play the role of C.E.O. as Jobs had, but no one ever thought he could, including Jobs, who on his deathbed advised Cook never to ask what Steve would do: “Just do what’s right.”

I am sure Mickle has some good sources; he wrote extensively about Apple while a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, a position he held until earlier this year. (He is now at the Times.) I am interested to read this new book, despite its apparent slant. I obviously cannot say anything about this book yet, so I do not want to get ahead of myself.

But it does seem telling how the Times excerpt at the top of this article centres around the September 2014 Apple event. It may be best remembered as the unveiling of the Apple Watch, but much of the post-Jobs era of the company can trace its roots back to that day, with the introduction of two other critical things: Apple Pay, Apple’s first big internet services push since iCloud; and the iPhone 6 series, which remains the best-selling line of iPhones the company has ever released.

The iPhone does not need to be replaced by the next successful product. In its earliest incarnations, it was a Mac accessory. In hindsight, Apple’s push into services and accessories — AirPods being another hit — seems well-timed. Not only has it not invented another product of the impact of the Mac or iPhone, none of its competitors have either. Can you think of a product category that is waiting for an Apple-like magical touch? I am not sure I can. I think Mickle underplays how redefining the Apple Watch was in its market, and the same for the company’s own silicon. But if we are seeking a better designed, more well-considered version of a nascent tech category, not one stands out to me.

  1. One little aside: I find Mickle’s use of the phrase “the two men embodying nearly 40 years of collaboration” rather misleading. Combined experience is one of those crappy false inflations that makes no sense, and it is even less sensible here. Why not write about how the two have been collaborating for about twenty years? That is still impressive and is more honest. ↥︎

Apps Not Busy Being Born Are Busy Getting Killed Off

After Apple announced to developers another round of culling old unpopular apps, I was one of a few people lamenting this seemingly arbitrary spring cleaning.

I thought Matt Deatherage wrote a particularly good counterpoint, explaining that supporting older apps also leaves Apple maintaining some support legacy and deprecated APIs in newer versions of iOS:

Technical debt describes the cost of not making software changes that you know you should make because they’re too difficult or expensive. Today, iOS carries the technical debt for thousands of applications that did not keep up with changes in the OS. At some point, that debt has to devolve back onto the developers that didn’t make changes, rather than accumulating on Apple because it updated and modernized the operating system.

Apple has been better on backward compatibility than most of its competitors, but everything has limits. The new Mac Studio does not run the original MacPaint binary — nor will it run any PowerPC binaries (a feature lost 11 years ago in Mac OS X 10.7), and only runs Intel binaries through Rosetta 2 translation. iOS in turn dropped support for 32-bit binaries nearly five years ago. It’s unreasonable to require a major hardware change to allow iOS to shed years of patches to benefit developers who haven’t kept up.

This ruthless commitment to pushing its platforms forward has surely reduced Apple’s technical debt. There are not many parts of MacOS or iOS that feel like an archaeological dig in the way Microsoft Windows often does. But Apple’s decision to drop support for legacy apps is not merely a technical decision; Apple has decided to drop availability of these apps for all devices, even very old ones.

One of the main differences between iOS and just about any other consumer platform is the control wielded over app distribution. Many of the side effects of that strategy have been written about to death, but I had not previously considered is how this reduces device lifespan. On other platforms, it is not possible to make older software unavailable to future buyers. I have a Nintendo GameCube for which I can still purchase new-to-me games from the secondhand market. I am writing these words on a decade-old MacBook Air that is stuck on MacOS Catalina and sometimes requires older builds of third-party software. To Deatherage’s point, you could today buy a copy of MacPaint and a system to run it on, even if neither has been updated in decades. But even if I kept an iPhone 4 in good working condition, I would have a hard time finding software from other developers that would still function.

Increasingly, that is because some pieces of software require web-based components that may be incompatible with older versions. Sometimes, the developer will want to make API changes; other times, it is for security reasons. In either case, it is usually the developer choosing when to drop support, not a big platform company.

But there are plenty of applications that have few to no web-based components and which could work perfectly on old devices. Developers will sometimes pull these apps from market if they no longer wish to support builds for older devices. But that still leaves an unknown number of apps that Apple is choosing to make disappear. That means users of older devices may find themselves in a situation where they are no longer able to download an otherwise fine app because it is no longer popular enough to keep stocked on the virtual shelves.

Surely there are technical solutions to this. What if software like this had support for minimum and maximum operating system versions? What if these apps were only made available for users of older devices?

Making choices like these do not come for free. Apple would have to continue storing products on its servers for which there is little demand. There would need to be a way for developers to mark this software as unsupported to acknowledge its legacy status. Software that relies on web-based SDKs would need to be handled separately. One of the advantages of Apple’s current App Store process is how, for the most part, apps available for download generally just work; there is often no need to check for system compatibility.

But perhaps an elegant solution is the price Apple ought to be paying for being the sole source of native applications for iOS and iPadOS, its two most successful platforms by device sales. The App Store knows what device a user is browsing from, so it should only be offering compatible software anyway. That is possible regardless of whether the software was last updated yesterday or ten years ago.

To Apple’s credit, its long-term device support is generally pretty good; iOS 15 works with devices as old as the first-generation iPhone 6S, released in 2015. And, after this round of app culling started generating press coverage, Apple helpfully clarified its rationale. There is still some fuzziness: apps that have “not been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period” are subject to removal, but there is no indication of what “extremely few times” means.

I am not generally opposed to the App Store distribution method. It has plenty of advantages for users over other models, though it does present different compromises for developers. This elimination of older apps has underscored for me how tethered an iOS device is to Apple’s decisions and processes, even in old age. Is it proper for Apple to make the decision about when to excise otherwise functional apps from its store, simply because of age or popularity? Given how the App Store is the only venue for native apps on iOS, I am not sure that answer ought to be an easy yes.