Search Results for: coffee

Spotify Continues to Remove Episodes of Joe Rogan’s Podcast ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Paul Resnikoff, Digital Media News:

Just last week, Digital Music News first reported that 40 different Joe Rogan Experience podcast episodes were found missing from Spotify, now the exclusive platform for the show. Now, that number has quickly grown to 42, with potentially more shows quietly getting removed from the catalog.

Among the newly-missing is an episode (#411) with Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey, a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Strangely, Spotify has deleted three total episodes with Asprey for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

You may remember Asprey from his many years of bullshit.

It is worth reading this article alongside something like Ben Thompson’s piece about sovereign writers, and considering the balance of editorial control and independence against guaranteed income.

I am not a fan of Rogan’s podcast; I think it sounds like if you grafted a mouth onto a lifted Dodge Ram covered in Punisher decals. I also think that it is probably a good thing for the world that Spotify can exercise some control over a popular but obsequious host. But I have to wonder how comfortable Rogan is with sharing his fame with Spotify while letting it meddle with his show. Spotify surely benefits from the exclusivity of his show and being associated with one of the world’s most popular podcasts; Rogan benefits because he is a hundred million dollars richer, which is a galling amount of money for Joe Rogan’s HGH and PCP power hour. Spotify apparently has little editorial control, but it now has control and responsibility over distributing an exclusive show that it paid, again, a hundred million dollars for. Rogan’s name may be on the show, but it is Spotify’s reputation that is on the line.

Bloomberg: Apple Is Working on a New TV Product With HomePod and Videoconferencing Capabilities ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

The company is working on a product that would combine an Apple TV set-top box with a HomePod speaker and include a camera for video conferencing through a connected TV and other smart-home functions, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Gurman says that this product is “still in the early stages” which, if you want to be a bit cynical, gives this report enough wiggle room to never pan out.

But it is intriguing, isn’t it? I know that it is something I would have loved to own this past year. Over Christmastime, I used AirPlay to place a FaceTime window onto the television and set my MacBook Air on the coffee table so that we could spend time with family in a more immersive way. It was a pretty nice, albeit janky, setup.

The obvious question about something like this is where a camera would be mounted, given that some people probably do not put their Apple TV out in the open or adjacent to their television screen. The other question is whether we can expect a new remote, something that for years I have been hearing is in the works, yet somehow never arrives. The Apple TV appears to be on the development cycle usually reserved for new kinds of water.

After Union Push, Medium Follows the Trend ⇥ vice.com

Medium CEO Ev Williams, in a companywide email:

Though Medium has been an open platform since day one, we’ve had an editorial team almost as long. The original thesis was that we wanted to establish that Medium was both open and high quality. We wanted to set the bar high. We were successful in doing that, and, since then, the editorial part of our company has gone through many iterations as we’ve strived to find the right way to integrate it. In 2014–16, we published great original content but we didn’t have the right business model to support it.

[…]

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I strongly believe that the editorial talent we have assembled here is a strategic asset that is in line with our business and strategy. For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers — both already on Medium and not — and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience.

So instead of house publications like OneZero, GEN, and the just-launched Momentum, Medium is following Substack’s strategy of hiring individual writers. This is because, as Williams writes, “the role of publications — in the world, not just on Medium — has decreased in the modern era”, which is a sentiment I worry deeply about. I love following the work of individual writers, but there are also plenty of publications that I read because I trust them and their editorial standards.

As I was writing this, I was reminded of something Steve Jobs said eleven years ago:

I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers … I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever.

With a somewhat liberal definition of “bloggers”, this remains true. There is plenty of great reporting done every day by people who are not star journalists.

Medium’s latest pivot is yet another example of the company’s inability to focus on anything, at all, ever. About seven years ago, Medium had a handful of in-house publications like Steven Levy’s Backchannel and the Nib. Those brought in regular readers, so the next step was monetization.

Davey Alba, writing for Buzzfeed News in 2017:

Then Medium shifted to branded content partnerships. And then decided it wanted to host boutique online publications. In late 2015 and early 2016, it brought more than a dozen small, separate publishing operations onto the platform, while Medium’s in-house publications either quietly wound down or moved away from the platform. A year later, the platform pivoted again, firing a third of its employees — 50 workers in nonengineering roles — and shutting down its New York and DC offices. The publishing partners — beloved sites like The Awl, The Ringer, Pacific Standard, and ThinkProgress — left Medium in a mass exodus.

Now, a few months later, Williams has a new model, one that he maintains is the right one for today’s state of affairs in online publishing. The current membership model includes a small team of editors — jobs that had existed at the company until January 2017 when it unceremoniously eliminated them. The only difference now seems to be that the company’s new-again editorial staff will be much smaller — and this time, editors won’t be attached to particular editorial brand names, but rather work for Medium as a whole. It appears, in other words, that Williams has pivoted so many times he’s ended up right back where he started.

That was then; this is now, with Medium pivoting to Substack because it cannot commit to sticking with anything or maintaining job security. And that latter thing seems to be related to this latest corporate shift.

Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice:

The move comes less than one month after all Medium employees — including the editorial unit — attempted to unionize and lost by one vote. Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium’s nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it. The news media industry (including VICE) is highly unionized; the tech industry is not.

Four current Medium employees told Motherboard that in the leadup to the vote, Medium and Williams himself discouraged the company from unionizing. Medium hired the unionbusting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis in the leadup to the February union vote. Williams also held “coffee chats” with small groups of workers, where four current employees told Motherboard that Williams said that it would be difficult to raise money from venture capitalists if the union won the vote.

Medium keeps trying to eat its tail, and venture capital firms keep sinking tens of millions of dollars into its flailing efforts. Five years from now, Medium could have pivoted two or three more times, or it could be entirely wiped from the web. It’s anybody’s guess.

Unproven Biometrics Are Increasingly Being Used at Border Crossings and by Law Enforcement ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Hilary Beaumont, the Walrus:

In recent years, and whether we realize it or not, biometric technologies such as face and iris recognition have crept into every facet of our lives. These technologies link people who would otherwise have public anonymity to detailed profiles of information about them, kept by everything from security companies to financial institutions. They are used to screen CCTV camera footage, for keyless entry in apartment buildings, and even in contactless banking. And now, increasingly, algorithms designed to recognize us are being used in border control. Canada has been researching and piloting facial recognition at our borders for a few years, but — at least based on publicly available information — we haven’t yet implemented it on as large a scale as the US has. Examining how these technologies are being used and how quickly they are proliferating at the southern US border is perhaps our best way of getting a glimpse of what may be in our own future—especially given that any American adoption of technology shapes not only Canada–US travel but, as the world learned after 9/11, international travel protocols.

[…]

Canada has tested a “deception-detection system,” similar to iBorderCtrl, called the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real Time, or AVATAR. Canada Border Services Agency employees tested AVATAR in March 2016. Eighty-two volunteers from government agencies and academic partners took part in the experiment, with half of them playing “imposters” and “smugglers,” which the study labelled “liars,” and the other half playing innocent travellers, referred to as “non-liars.” The system’s sensors recorded more than a million biometric and nonbiometric measurements for each person and spat out an assessment of guilt or innocence. The test showed that AVATAR was “better than a random guess” and better than humans at detecting “liars.” However, the study concluded, “results of this experiment may not represent real world results.” The report recommended “further testing in a variety of border control applications.” (A CBSA spokesperson told me the agency has not tested AVATAR beyond the 2018 report and is not currently considering using it on actual travellers.)

These technologies are deeply concerning from a privacy perspective. The risks of their misuse are so great that their implementation should be prohibited — at least until a legal framework is in place, but I think forever. There is no reason we should test them on a “trial” basis; no new problems exist that biometrics systems are solving by being used sooner.

But I am curious about our relationship with their biases and accuracy. The fundamental concerns about depending on machine learning boil down to whether suspicions about its reliability are grounded in reality, and whether we are less prone to examining its results in depth. I have always been skeptical of machines replacing humans in jobs that require high levels of judgement. But I began questioning that very general assumption last summer after reading a convincing argument from Aaron Gordon at Vice that speed cameras are actually fine:

Speed and red light cameras are a proven, functional technology that make roads safer by slowing drivers down. They’re widely used in other countries and can also enforce parking restrictions like not blocking bus or bike lanes. They’re incredibly effective enforcers of the law. They never need coffee breaks, don’t let their friends or coworkers off easy, and certainly don’t discriminate based on the color of the driver’s skin. Because these automated systems are looking at vehicles, not people’s faces, they avoid the implicit bias quandaries that, say, facial recognition systems have, although, as Dave Cooke from the Union of Concerned Scientists tweeted, “the equitability of traffic cameras is dependent upon who is determining where to place them.”

Loath as I am to admit it, Gordon and the researchers in his article have got a point. There are few instances where something is as unambiguous as a vehicle speeding or running a red light. If the equipment is accurately calibrated and there is ample amber light time, the biggest frustration for drivers is that they can no longer speed with abandon or race through changing lights — which are things they should not have been doing in any circumstance. I am not arguing that we should put speed cameras every hundred metres on every road, nor that punitive measures are the only or even best behavioural correction, merely that these cameras can actually reduce bias. Please do not send hate mail.

Facial recognition, iris recognition, gait recognition — these biometrics methods are clearly more complex than identifying whether a car was speeding. But I have to wonder if there is an assumption by some that there is a linear and logical progression from one to the other, and there simply is not. Biometrics are more like forensics, and courtrooms still accept junk science. It appears that all that is being done with machine learning is to disguise the assumptions involved in matching one part of a person’s body or behaviour to their entire self.

It comes back to Maciej Cegłowski’s aphorism that “machine learning is money laundering for bias”:

When we talk about the moral economy of tech, we must confront the fact that we have created a powerful tool of social control. Those who run the surveillance apparatus understand its capabilities in a way the average citizen does not. My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country.

What we’ve done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.

Well we’re using it now, and we have done little to assure there are no bystanders in the path of the bullet.

Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple ⇥ theguardian.com

Kurt Wagner and Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. lashed out at Apple Inc. in a series of full-page newspaper ads, claiming the iPhone maker’s coming mobile software changes around data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses.

The ads, which ran Wednesday in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, carried the headline “We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” They home in on upcoming changes to Apple’s iOS 14 operating system that will curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data about users and ply them with targeted advertising.

Alex Hern, the Guardian:

The point of contention is a feature coming to iPhones in the new year that will require developers to ask for permission before they can track what users do across apps. Apple says the feature, which was originally slated for launch in October before being delayed in order to allow advertisers time to cope, is necessary to protect user privacy; it comes alongside a number of similar changes in new versions of iOS, such as a requirement that app developers provide a “nutritional label” for their software to explain what they do with user data.

Facebook objects – but seems keen to stress it is not doing so because it is defending its bottom line. According to its pitch, the real victims are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”.

Dan Levy — but not that Dan Levy — of Facebook:

This affects not just app developers, but also small businesses that rely on personalized ads to grow. Here’s why. Small businesses have small budgets. For these small budgets to work, they have to be targeted at the customers that matter to small businesses. It doesn’t do a local wedding planner any good to reach people who aren’t planning a wedding. Likewise, it doesn’t do a small ecommerce outfit selling customized dog leashes any good to reach cat owners. Put simply, by dramatically limiting the effectiveness of personalized advertising, Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.

Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.

The way to describe this feature coming to iOS devices next year is that all apps that wish to track users must ask permission. But Reed Albergotti of the Washington Post filed a credulous report:

Facebook took aim at Apple on Wednesday, criticizing the iPhone maker’s new policies limiting personalized ads on Apple products.

Facebook said changes Apple has made to how easily advertisers can track iPhone users will disproportionately harm small businesses that rely on personalized advertisements to reach customers and find new ones. Facebook said its internal research has found that small businesses earned 60 percent less in sales when they were not able to use the kind of targeted advertising that Apple aims to limit.

Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for ads and business products, blasted Apple, questioning the company’s motives for a move he said benefits Apple’s bottom line. “We believe Apple is behaving anti-competitively by using their control of the App Store to benefit their bottom line at the expense of app developers and small businesses,” he said during a call Wednesday. Facebook launched a new website and took out full-page ads in newspapers to try to drum up support.

At best, Albergotti’s report treats everything about this issue as an open debate where both parties’ claims are equally accurate. While I understand the inclination to avoid taking sides, it is possible to check their claims against the available evidence. I have quoted above the first three paragraphs of the story, only after which there is a comment from Apple clarifying that, no, this new policy does not inherently limit tracking or advertising:

“We believe that this is a simple matter of standing up for our users,” said Apple spokesman Fred Sainz in a statement. He said the new changes in iOS 14 don’t actually prohibit Facebook from continuing to offer the same tracking. Rather, “It simply requires they give users a choice,” he said. Apple has denied that it is making the changes for business reasons. Instead, Apple says, the changes, which require customers to specifically opt into personalized ad tracking, are meant to enhance its customers’ privacy, which the company has called a fundamental human right.

It would be more honest for Albergotti to describe this change for what it is: instead of requiring users to opt out of targeting later, it now requires users give explicit consent for each app to track them using the system identifier. There are parts of this that may be worth treating as an open discussion — the trade-offs for small businesses described by Facebook may be real to some extent, and this change may improve user privacy as Apple claims — but the mechanism itself is not a debate. These new policies are not, as Facebook and Albergotti say, explicitly about “limiting personalized ads”, only requiring that users meaningfully consent to them instead of burying that affirmation in a lengthy privacy policy.

Every Morning, John Foley Wakes Up and Drinks Water From His Own Hands ⇥ defector.com

Let me give you a glimpse of my weekend: I like to get up just a little late, make myself a great cup of coffee, and sit down with the New York Times’ “Sunday Routine” column because it is hysterical. It is full of semi-famous wealthy New Yorkers sharing what they describe as a typical Sunday for them, and usually involves some fantasy combination of waking up at the crack of dawn, exercising for hours, eating a handful of nuts for breakfast, browsing boutiques, picking up some stuff at a farmer’s market, and cooking a big dinner with the family — and so scarcely resembles my own understanding of what a weekend ought to be that I find it hard to believe a single word.

Anyway, Paige Darrah interviewed John Foley, CEO of Peleton, for the series and this caught everyone’s eye for obvious reasons:

Twenty years ago a colleague told me the key to your day is to hydrate at much as you can, so the first thing I do is drink 40 sips of water from my hand at the upstairs bathroom sink. It’s efficient. I drink until I feel like I’m going to throw up water. Every day.

Dan McQuade, Defector:

The Times article opens with an anecdote that Foley doesn’t like to wear branded Peloton gear for fear of looking, in his words, “like a tool.” I fear Foley has been pranked by his colleague and writer Paige Darrah, who have now made him explain in a fancy New York newspaper that he drinks water with his paw, like a cat, until he hurls. My cat doesn’t even drink water from the faucet, preferring instead to meow at me until I give her a pint glass.

The Times piece also mentions that Foley is touchy when it comes to being mocked. I don’t imagine this is going to help with that at all.

Understanding ProRAW ⇥ blog.halide.cam

Ben Sandofsky of Lux:

As we dug deeper into ProRAW, we realized it wasn’t just about making RAW more powerful. It’s about making RAW approachable. ProRAW could very well change how everyone shoots and edits photos, beginners and experts alike.

To understand what makes it so special, the first half of this post explains how a digital camera develops a photo. Then we go on to explain the strengths and weaknesses of traditional RAWs. Finally, we dive into what’s unique about ProRAW, how it changes the game, and its few remaining drawbacks.

Grab a coffee, because this is a long read.

As expected, this is much better than my attempt. You can read both, though. Are you really doing something better right now?

New Apple Maps, Including Look Around and Guides, Are Now Available in Canada ⇥ justinobeirne.com

Earlier today, Apple announced that the full new Maps experience was rolling out to Canadian users. That’s right — not just users in Toronto and Vancouver, but across the entire country.

I have been keeping my eye on Justin O’Beirne’s catalogue of changes all evening. The cartography is undeniably better: it is more precise, just as clear, and has subtler distinctions in cities and parks. The 3D models of buildings look very good, and Look Around is terrific; I am glad that Google no longer has a monopoly on street-level imagery. It is nowhere near as comprehensive as Google’s efforts, but there is imagery for a wider range of places than I imagined.

There are also Guides: collections of locations and landmarks from resources like AllTrails, Complex, the Los Angeles Times, and Time Out. Sadly, there are currently none for Calgary, but there are already two for Banff. I hope Sprudge puts together a coffee guide for our little city; we have some terrific shops and roasters here that deserve more attention.

My first impressions of its data are more mixed and, because I cannot load old Maps at the same time, it is tough to make comparisons. I will say that I panned around a few blocks near me and found a few businesses that had pins far away from where they should have been, one business that changed its name last year and had not been updated, and a listing for a bar that closed its doors thirteen years ago, all within a couple of minutes. This is all in a city of over a million people. That’s not to say that I have never found errors with Google Maps, but I find them more rarely and, in a similarly quick glance of the same area, did not notice anything wrong.

Upon unveiling its new Maps effort in a story with TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, Apple said that two of its goals were to improve “ground truth” and to be able to make changes faster. I hope that is the case. I don’t know how to assess the accuracy of place data beyond the most obvious flaws, and I don’t know how to evaluate that over time. I just need to be able to trust my maps provider. I have found Apple’s existing Maps client to provide good driving directions and generally accurate addresses for businesses; however, I have found business hours in particular to be inaccurate, even before this year’s restrictions.

There are so many reasons to use Apple’s Maps app. It is nicer to look at with better cartography. It is integrated throughout the system and doesn’t have ads. Its implementation of street-level imagery blows Google’s out of the water, and you don’t have to fight with user-submitted panoramas. Apple’s challenges remain with places and businesses which, unfortunately for them, form the backbone of many users’ digital mapping needs. I hope this initiative is what helps get them closer to Google’s high benchmark.

Following Tradition, Ajit Pai Will Leave the FCC on January 20 ⇥ vox.com

Sara Morrison, Recode:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai has announced that he will leave the agency on January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in as president. This gives Biden at least one commissioner slot to fill on his first day in office and, should that choice be confirmed, a Democrat majority to fulfill his vision of what the FCC should be and do for the next four years.

You know what pairs well with novelty-sized coffee mugs? Tiny violins.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Pai’s tenure wasn’t entirely devoid of value. The agency boss did oversee massive and noncontroversial wireless spectrum auction efforts that will deliver troves of valuable spectrum to market, and spearheaded the creation of the nation’s first suicide prevention hotline (988).

But by and large Pai’s tenure was comprised of a parade of industry-cozy policies, bad data, hubris, and in many instances, outright lies.

I have no doubt Pai will be able to find a cushy job beginning January 21 in the industry he was supposed to regulate. After all, that’s the very job he had before he joined the FCC.

Understanding 5G ⇥ tidbits.com

Glenn Fleishman, TidBits:

However, 5G won’t be transformative for most people or purposes. Its advantages primarily accrue to cellular carriers, even more so than 3G or 4G, which offered significant boosts in throughput and allowed higher rates over broader areas. 5G will let carriers charge more for service in some cases, handle more customers simultaneously, break into new markets that require higher throughput or low latency, and equip more kinds of devices with ubiquitous high-speed cellular data connections.

For users, it will gradually feel like we have broadband no matter where we might be, which is not terribly exciting except when you want to stream a 4K movie in the backseat of a car on a highway or download a 5 GB file in a minute in a coffee shop. The level of excitement should be more akin to finding out your city has (silently) dug up the streets while you were sleeping, replaced 10-inch water mains with 20-inch ones, and then cleaned it all up without you knowing. 5G is better network plumbing that your “Internet utility” had to install to deal with the amount of data and new data connections it wants to move around a city.

This is the best primer I’ve read about 5G. Fleishman manages to bring all of its different narrative strands into a coherent and easy-to-read article.

New iPhone Day 2020

This year’s iPhone announcements were special for me because it is the first time since 2017 that I know I will be buying a new phone. My partner’s 6S has some sort of circuit fault that discharges batteries extremely quickly, so she will be getting my iPhone X — and I will be getting, well, something announced today. But it is not easy because, more than ever, it feels like there is some compromise at every level. That is not a criticism, only an observation based on my priorities.

But we will get to that.

The Event Itself

I do not wish to make light of this harrowing pandemic, but the more I see Apple’s new presentation format, the more I like it. The nostalgic soul in me pines for the Stevenote era because he was one of the best public speakers in modern corporate history. Yet, one of the drawbacks of a golden era Steve Jobs keynote — from, say, 2005 through 2008 or so — is that it maximized Jobs’ presence at the expense of the thousands of people involved in creating a product or service. Sure, you would occasionally hear from Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Scott Forstall, and others, but there was a gravity around Jobs that made it hard for others to get as much attention.

The Tim Cook era Apple has distributed presentations amongst greater numbers of executives, managers, and marketing types, but I do not think it has ever been as effective as it is in the videos they have been forced to create as a result of this pandemic. We get to hear from even more people who were involved in creating these products — and likely more than a live theatrical production could handle. There are logistical reasons for not handing off the presenter role every few minutes in a live setting, and there are also many people who simply are not comfortable in a live broadcast setting with an audience.

As many observers have pointed out, it is also a far more diverse group of presenters. Apple really does pick presenters who are intimately familiar with a technology because they worked on it. I am enjoying hearing more from these voices in addition to the usual suspects on the executive team.

Today’s presentation did have its lulls. The iPhone 12 lineup supports 5G — more on that in a minute — so not only did Apple explain at multiple points how revolutionary 5G is supposed to be, an executive from Verizon appeared to help explain how revolutionary 5G is supposed to be with the help of Verizon. There was also a demo of a new iPhone version of “League of Legends”, so we really hit the Apple keynote jackpot today.

I wonder what Verizon did to deserve such prominent placement during today’s keynote. It has been a very long time since Apple has donated several minutes of valuable iPhone-adjacent air space to a carrier, or a technical partner of any kind. But, like the September keynote, this stream clocked in at a few minutes over one hour long, so it isn’t like those moments pushed live audiences to some kind of bladder breaking point.

5G

As I have written for years now, the way 5G is being sold to the public is wildly disproportionate to the actual day-to-day impact it will have on most of us most of the time. At the moment, 5G is largely a useful buzzword for when you want billions of dollars in tax breaks, a shortcut for newspapers to seem more technologically advanced, and a way to eat up phone batteries at speeds slower than LTE.

But that surely does not have to be the case. One reason speeds are so slow right now is because faster 5G waves require users to be in closer proximity to cell towers and, so far, the infrastructure coverage is weaker than for LTE in the United States. But what if a company starts shipping a whole bunch of the most popular smartphone model in that country? That may spur a wave of adoption that effectively requires cell carriers to build out infrastructure more quickly. Outside of the U.S. and with many different 5G frequencies used worldwide, the situation surely differs. I am interested to know what it is like in Calgary, for example. When Apple gets behind a technology, though, it tends to push the industry as a whole.

5G radios also require more power, but Apple is being clever there as well. The iPhone 12 models are usually using LTE but will ramp up to 5G when it is necessary. That seems like an adept way to balance speed and battery life.

But, oh boy, did Apple sell 5G hard during today’s presentation, to points where I think they overstepped.

For example, before either iPhone was unveiled, Tim Cook spoke generally about 5G. One of the things that caught my ear was his claim that it “helps protect your privacy and security” because it is so fast that you are less likely to connect to insecure public Wi-Fi hotspots. There is some truth to that statement, but it sounds an awful lot like spin. Public Wi-Fi, at least where I am, is often slower than LTE, so it isn’t a compromise of privacy for speed. A Wi-Fi hotspot is appealing because carriers in many countries have monthly data allowances on their plans, so connecting to Wi-Fi avoids expensive overage charges.1

Then, during the introduction of the iPhone 12 Pro, Greg Joswiak said that doctors will be able to download scans faster, and implied that 5G could make the difference between life and death. This is probably true in some circumstances, but it is a wild claim to drop during an iPhone keynote. There are many cases where having faster network speeds is simply a nicer and better experience for most customers, and I found the dive into a possible life-saving realm of 5G to be more distracting than convincing.

The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro Lineups

The thing that is hard about this year’s iPhone lineup is that they are hard to choose between for both the ways that they overlap and the ways that they differ.

The best news this year, from a basic hardware standpoint, is that Apple has resurrected the iPhone 5-like flat sided form factor and mixed it with the glass sandwich of the iPhone 4 and recent iPhone models. That hardware design language has always been my favourite for its in-hand stability and precision, and I am glad to see it brought back and modernized. It is basically the same design across the lineup, with the iPhone 12 getting an aluminum chassis and the Pro models sporting stainless steel.

The processor is also the pitched as being the same on all models — though benchmarking experts will tell us the extent to which they are equivalent. They all have the same Ceramic Shield cover glass, which, Apple says improves the likelihood it will survive a drop by four times, they all have OLED displays, they all have MagSafe — another blast from the past — and they all support 5G. These phones are, in many ways, the same.

As I wrote above, I am upgrading from an iPhone X, so there is a lot that will be new to me and I am not a great resource for year-over-year comparisons. But I do know what I like and use on this phone. I prefer a smaller form factor, so the iPhone 12 Mini caught my attention in a big way. But, though I am excited by the prospects of a wide angle lens, I use the telephoto lens on my current iPhone to know that I do not want to be without it. The telephoto is only available on the Pro models, so I will naturally be guided to them.

But there’s a big catch here, which is that the cameras in the iPhone 12 Pro Max are no longer consistent with those in the smaller Pro model. Across the lineup, most of the camera changes this year seem to be in software rather than lenses or sensors. The situation is not so simple with the Pro Max, as Sebastiaan de With explains:

In addition to a better lens, the 12 Pro Max has the room to pack a new, 47% larger sensor. That means bigger pixels, and bigger pixels that capture more light simply means better photos. More detail in the day, more light at night. That combines with the lens to result in almost twice as much light captured: Apple claims an 87% improvement in light capture from the 11 Pro. That’s huge.

But that’s not its only trick: the 12 Pro Max’s Wide system also gets a new sensor-shift OIS system. OIS, or Optical Image Stabilization, lets your iPhone move the camera around a bit to compensate for your decidedly unsteady human trembly hands. That results in smoother video captures and sharp shots at night, when the iPhone has to take in light over a longer amount of time.

These appear to be big improvements to the camera and they are, frustratingly, only on the biggest iPhone model. That makes complete sense from an engineering perspective and I do not think Apple should restrict the camera of the bigger model because it no longer has parity with its smaller sibling.

But, damn, that makes this a pretty difficult choice. If I want the best camera on an iPhone this year, I have to live with a size I find harder to use day-to-day; if I want to get the size that works best for me, I have to sacrifice a camera mode I use most. But, as choices go, I could just stick with the middle-ground option.2 That seems like a sensible compromise all around, but I do hope that sensor-based stabilization system comes to smaller iPhones by the time I am ready to buy another.

  1. American carriers are not immune to this. Verizon, a company that received a generous amount of prime keynote time, has several “unlimited” plans for you to choose from. One immediately wonders why a range of choices is needed for plans that are “unlimited”, and it is because there are several limitations on those plans. I, too, wish for words to have agreed-upon definitions. ↥︎

  2. When I was in college, I used to work at a coffee shop that offered only small and large sizes. Most of the time, when someone ordered coffee and I had to ask which size they wanted, they would answer “medium”. I guess, in a good, better, best situation, people generally choose “better”. ↥︎

Hey, Nah

Yesterday, Basecamp began sending invitation codes to people who had previously registered interest in Hey, its much-anticipated new email-like product. Hey has a bunch of quirky new features that, unsurprisingly, cannot entirely be shoehorned into existing email protocols so, while it uses SMTP, it does not support IMAP or POP. Users must use the proprietary Hey suite of apps to access their @hey.com inbox, and cannot use other email addresses within Hey’s apps.

The company says that its apps are all “full-featured native apps” but its desktop apps are Electron-based. That’s not entirely relevant to this post, but it is my policy to shame websites masquerading as native apps.

Anyway, while Apple was busy touting the results of a study it funded that estimated the total economic footprint of the App Store at over half a trillion dollars in 2019, the company was also rejecting a bug fix update to the already-approved Hey app for iOS.

David Pierce, Protocol:

Hey does cost $99 a year, but users can’t sign up or pay within the iOS app. It’s an app for using an existing outside service, just like Basecamp’s eponymous platform — and Netflix and Slack and countless other apps. “So we were like, OK, maybe we just got the Monday morning reviewer,” Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said. Lots of developers over the years have found that their app-review luck sometimes depended on who happened to be looking, and whether they’d had coffee yet. So Basecamp fixed more bugs, submitted a new version — 1.0.2 — and hoped for the best.

The app sat in the queue for review, then in the “under review” status for far longer than usual. Then Waugh got a phone call. The Apple reviewer said he was calling because the new app hadn’t resolved the issue with rule 3.1.1. The issue had been escalated internally, and Apple had determined it was a valid rejection — the only way to move forward would be to implement Apple’s payments system. And not only that: Waugh was told that Apple would like a commitment and a timeline for implementing the payment system, or Apple might be forced to remove Hey from the App Store entirely.

When Waugh and Basecamp pointed out that there were many other apps — even email apps like Spark or Edison — that allowed users to log in to their existing accounts without signing up through Apple, the reviewer told them they wouldn’t discuss other apps. And that was that.

It’s hard not to quote Pierce’s piece at length because it is so comprehensive. Pierce says that Apple admitted that it shouldn’t have approved the app in the first place; Apple also said that Hey doesn’t qualify as a “reader” client app nor is it a business-focused software-as-a-service app, so it apparently must implement Apple’s own in-app purchases API. This is news.

David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp:

We did everything we were supposed to with the iOS app. Try downloading it (while you can?). You can’t sign up, because Apple says no. We don’t mention subscriptions. You can’t upgrade. You can’t access billing. We did all of it! Wasn’t enough.

This extraordinary rejection comes on the very same day that the European Commission announced that it was opening two antitrust investigations into Apple’s business practices. One concerns Apple Pay, and the other is about the App Store; obviously, the latter will be my focus. The Commission:

The Commission will investigate in particular two restrictions imposed by Apple in its agreements with companies that wish to distribute apps to users of Apple devices:

(i) The mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system “IAP” for the distribution of paid digital content. Apple charges app developers a 30% commission on all subscription fees through IAP.

(ii) Restrictions on the ability of developers to inform users of alternative purchasing possibilities outside of apps. While Apple allows users to consume content such as music, e-books and audiobooks purchased elsewhere (e.g. on the website of the app developer) also in the app, its rules prevent developers from informing users about such purchasing possibilities, which are usually cheaper.

Apple’s response, via Manton Reece:

It’s disappointing the European Commission is advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don’t want to play by the same rules as everyone else… We don’t think that’s right — we want to maintain a level playing field where anyone with determination and a great idea can succeed.

This is the worst, most insulting statement from Apple that I’ve ever seen. Everything in it is backwards.

There remains a fair argument that Apple can take some cut of sales made through the App Store and its own in-app purchase APIs, though I think 30% is too high. Apple maintains the store, offers marketing benefits, and pays for hosting, distribution, and credit card fees. But, as subscriptions have become the preferred way to charge for apps — a shift encouraged by Apple — the App Store commission increasingly seems like a form of rent-seeking.

Add to that Apple’s prohibition on references of any kind to digital purchases being available outside of iOS apps — a prohibition that extends to website materials linked from within an app — and things begin to look ridiculous. Amazon finds itself in a situation where it can sell paperbacks through its app and offer samples of Kindle books, but cannot sell Kindle versions without giving 30% of the sale to Apple, nor can it explain why or where the book can be bought. Spotify faces a similar quandary with its subscriptions, and its complaint to the E.U. is cited as a triggering factor in the Commission’s investigation. I’ve written about that complaint, which I think has problems.

Regardless of what you think about Apple’s rules and restrictions, none of the above prohibitions apply to Hey’s rejection. The Basecamp team explicitly designed around Apple’s rules and ensured that there were no references to subscriptions or billing from within the app. It’s possible that this is a mistake but, as it has already gone through the dispute process, it appears to be entirely deliberate. A reversal would only be responding to the negative press coverage this has generated.

Apple’s response to the E.U. antitrust investigation says that all apps in its store are subject to the same rules, but that is plainly not true, either. The way Apple is splitting hairs in Hey’s service offering and refusing to compare it to other apps is grossly unfair. The reason I included a detailed description of how Hey works at the outset of this post is because this appears to be the main difference between it and any other email app. But that is an undocumented, unclear, and almost wilfully pedantic interpretation.

Meanwhile, bigger tech companies like Netflix, before it stopped offering in-app purchases, negotiated sweetheart deals with Apple to take a 15% cut on every subscription instead of 30% for the first year and 15% for subsequent years. Then there are the “premium subscription video entertainment” providers who, in exchange for implementing many tvOS features, have been allowed to use their own in-app purchasing mechanism instead of Apple’s APIs, allowing them to keep the entire subscription cost.

WWDC begins in six days. Apple is using the lead-up to strongarm a well-known developer following its policies and issue dishonest statements and press releases about competition in the App Store on the same day that the E.U. announced an antitrust investigation into these practices. Audacious.

Employee Surveillance Applications Are an Intrusive Waste of Time ⇥ nytimes.com

Adam Satariano, New York Times:

With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.

The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.

Via Christina Warren:

[…] Moreover, all it does is underscore that you don’t trust your employees and encourages employees to use workarounds to avoid surveillance.

But what really gets me is that in the modern work era, employees are frequently encouraged to bring their own devices to work. Meaning, I’m paying for my own equipment. And that comes with a tacit expectation we work more off hours. Imagine paying to be spied on!

Finding loopholes is ultimately what Satariano did:

By the end, I found myself trying to cheat the Hubstaff system altogether. As I write this at 11:38 a.m. on April 24, I am about to get some coffee and spend time with my cooped-up kids. But I plan to leave a Google Doc open on my computer that Hubstaff can screenshot to make it look like I was doing work.

Aside from how creepy, intrusive, and ineffective surveillance technologies like these are, I cannot imagine that anyone will actually sift through employees’ work sessions to verify that the report is accurate. All the data collection in the world cannot replace trust, but it can destroy it.

James Lipton Dies Aged 93 ⇥ hollywoodreporter.com

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

The Era of Widely-Peddled Fake Products ⇥ thewirecutter.com

Ganda Suthivarakom, the Wirecutter:

The rise of counterfeit goods and other phony products sold on the Internet has been swift — and it has largely gone unnoticed by many shoppers. But make no mistake: The problem is extensive. Most people don’t realize this, but the majority of listings on Amazon aren’t actually for items sold by Amazon — they’re run by third-party sellers. And even though many, many third-party sellers are upstanding merchants, an awful lot of them are peddling fakes.

A major Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed that Amazon has listed “thousands of banned, unsafe, or mislabeled products,” from dangerous children’s products to electronics with fake certifications. The Verge reported that even Amazon’s listings for its own line of goods are “getting hijacked by impostor sellers.” CNBC found that Amazon has shipped expired foods — including baby formula — to customers, pointing to an inability to monitor something as basic as an expiration date. Because of the proliferation of counterfeits and what Birkenstock describes as Amazon’s unwillingness to help it fight them, Birkenstock won’t sell on Amazon anymore. Nike announced that it is also pulling out of Amazon. “Many consumers are … unaware of the significant probabilities they face of being defrauded by counterfeiters when they shop on e-commerce platforms,” reads a January 2020 Department of Homeland Security report (PDF) recommending measures that would force e-retailers to take counterfeits even more seriously. “These probabilities are unacceptably high and appear to be rising.”

Counterfeits, overwhelming choice, Prime Day, poor-quality recommendations, deceptive advertising, and its myriad private labels combine to make Amazon feel increasingly like a low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store.

Here’s a true and dumb story about your silly writer: last Wednesday, as I was trying to put my MacBook Air on the coffee table, I missed and instead allowed gravity to place it directly onto my foot. My laptop is fine. One of my toes, however, is broken. I got it checked out on Thursday just to be safe — universal health care is a very good thing — and was told that I could keep buddy taping it; it’s not a serious break. They recommended I pick up a cohesive bandage, which they said could best be found on Amazon. So I tried finding it, and spent a solid hour poking around the Amazon storefront. It’s not that there’s a shortage of choice; it’s quite the opposite problem. I just wanted to find a small quantity of the narrowest bandage available. I ended up frustrated and buying a six-pack with multiple sizes made by a company I’ve never heard of. It was, oddly enough, the best choice, but not even close to the correct one.

Rage Against the Machine Learning

A recent cold snap seems to have increased my propensity to experience bugs. I’m usually a walking commuter to my day job, but I’ve happily accepted a lift from my partner all week long as temperatures dropped below the ‑30° C mark every morning. As I got into the car this morning, I noticed a strange notification on my lock screen:

Siri Suggestion on lock screen to take day-long commute to work

This appears to be a Siri suggestion — a nudge by the system to show a hopefully-useful shortcut to a common task. As Apple puts it:

As Siri learns your routines, you get suggestions for just what you need, at just the right time. For example, if you frequently order coffee mid morning, Siri may suggest your order near the time you normally place it.

Since I go to work at a similar time every day, it tells me how long my commute will take and gives me the option to get directions. Nice, right?

Except something is plainly not right: it’s going to take me over a day to get to work? Here’s the route it thinks I should take:

Apple Maps directions across the continent

I found this hilarious — obviously — but also fascinating. How did it get this so wrong?

My assumption was that my phone knew that I commuted to work daily, so it figured out the address of my office. And then, somehow, it got confused between the location it knows and the transcribed address it has stored, and then associated that with an address in or near Rochester, New York. But that doesn’t seem right.

Then, I thought that perhaps the details in my contact card were wrong. My work address is stored in there, and Siri mines that card for information. But there’s a full address in that card including country and postal code, so I’m not sure it could get it so wrong.

I think the third option is most likely: I have my work hours as a calendar appointment every day, and the address only includes the unit and street name, not my city, country, or postal code. I guess Apple Maps’ search engine must have searched globally for that address and ended up in upstate New York.

But why? Why would it think that an appointment in my calendar is likely to be anywhere other than near where I live, particularly when it’s recurring? Why doesn’t Apple Maps’ search engine or Siri — I don’t know which is responsible in this circumstance — prioritize nearby locations? Why doesn’t it prioritize frequent locations?

If you look closely, you’ll also notice another discrepancy: the notification says that it’s going to give me directions to “12th St”, but the directions in Maps are to “12 Ave SE”. Why would this discrepancy exist?

It’s not just the bug — or, more likely, the cascading series of bugs — that fascinates me, nor the fact that it’s so wrong. It’s this era of mystery box machine learning, where sometimes its results look like magic and, at other times, the results are incomprehensible. Every time some lengthy IF-ELSE chain helpfully suggests me driving directions for going across the continent or thinks I only ever message myself, my confidence is immediately erased in my phone’s ability to do basic tasks. How can I trust it when it makes such blatant mistakes, especially when there’s no way to tell it that it’s wrong?

End the Razor-and-Blades Business Model ⇥ theverge.com

Kim Lyons, the Verge:

Obviously, we won’t see an end to such gadgets because too many products rely on what economists refer to as the “two-part tariff,” where you buy the product (razor, floss dispenser, coffee maker) and then pay a per-unit fee for the items (blades, floss, coffee pods) that make the product usable. Every subscription razor blade company has this figured out: it’s why the razor itself is usually relatively inexpensive, but the specialized blades are pricey.

However, the gadgets that are flooding the marketplace (and Kickstarter) now are a generation removed from razor blades, which actually do take some precision to manufacture. The gadgets I’m ranting about are ones that try to convince you to spend more for a relatively inexpensive, readily available product: floss dispensers with proprietary floss (it’s just string, people); garbage cans with specialty garbage bags; even a manicure machine that paints each fingernail individually using — wait for it — pods of its proprietary nail polish.

The razor-and-blades model simply refuses to die. The Juicero thing happened in 2017, the same year Albert Burneko wrote my favourite thing that has ever been written about Keurigs. HP began offering a subscription model for their printers, which allowed them to claim ownership over the cartridges used and add DRM to prevent third-party refills. This business model is wasteful, expensive, and should be abolished — not expanded.

Shopping Is Complicated by Overwhelming Choice, Bad Search Options, and Well-Meaning Professional Reviews ⇥ vice.com

Casey Johnston, Vice:

For a long time, our problem was there were not enough things to choose from. Then with big box stores, followed by the internet, there were too many things to choose from. Now there are still too many things to choose from, but also a seemingly infinite number of ways to choose, or seemingly infinite steps to figuring out how to choose. The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

The degree to which you feel this problem definitely depends on your income, or at least, being in the privileged position of not having to make do with the only thing you can afford. But for people with even a limited ability to make an investment purchase, if it’s worth it, there’s even more pressure to get it right. Knowing you wasted a big chunk of money on a cheaper, worse thing that falls apart when you could have spent a little more money on a thing that is good and lasts feels like failure. You’ve then wasted your money, wasted your time, you’ve contributed to global warming, and now you have to start the entire thing over again and hope you don’t somehow end up making the exact same mistake.

We’ve known since at least the 1970s that too much choice feels far from freeing; it is anxiety-inducing and causes us to feel paralyzed.1 In a bid to narrow down our options, we’ll probably turn to professional reviews — particularly from sites like the Wirecutter, where Johnston was a senior editor.

Matt Hartman, the Outline:

This obsessive tendency is as obviously silly as it is widespread. Culture journalist Eliza Brooke pointed out that “Google searches for ‘best” have been steadily rising for years.’” Product recommendation sites have been springing up across the internet, including scientific reviews and influencer reviews and trend reviews and aggregated reviews and bad SEO-driven reviews and even worse copies of all of the above. “Googling ‘best air fryer’ is not a path to enlightenment, but into a spiral of comparison between publications,” Alyssa Bereznak said of the impact at the Ringer.

The worst part, though, is that I don’t actually care about pants or pillows or travel mugs. I just want to be a man with warm coffee, a covered crotch, and no neck pain. Mediocre products would suffice. But I can’t help but enter the product review trap for every little item because I live in the United States in 2019 and so I am constantly taught that I must make the best purchases because buying good things is also a moral good.

I get why people want the “best” of something, but I think that’s the wrong term for review sites to be using. I assume it’s for Google ranking reasons that they do.

Review websites are fantastic starting points for product categories that you know virtually nothing about, and for larger purchases that are supposed to last a long time. As an example, I’ve been trying to find a decent portable vacuum for cleaning detritus out of the car, and a few review roundups saved me from buying a model that wasn’t going to be powerful enough, even though it was from a well-known brand.

But the “best” product for you may vary from what reviewers recommend. You’ll know this if you know a particular product category well, or if you have fairly specific requirements. For example, when the Wirecutter tested food storage containers, they suggested Pyrex’s tempered glass containers. What Pyrex markets as an “eighteen piece set” — which is actually nine containers of various sizes and nine matching lids — costs about $30 in the United States. Their plastic pick was similar, except made by Snapware and about $10 less expensive for the same-sized set. I get the allure of both of these. But neither option fulfills three criteria that I consider essential: they must be perfectly stackable with and without a fitted lid, so they sit securely in my fridge or pantry when in use, but are compact when not in use; they must be cheap enough to leave behind, so they don’t feel precious; and they must all fit the same lid, so I don’t have to go hunting for a specific one in an oft-disorganized cupboard. And, for those reasons, I own fifty-count sleeves of half- and whole-litre heavy-weight plastic deli containers, and fifty lids that fit both sizes. I bought them from a restaurant supply store where I get a lot of my kitchen gear; this “hundred and fifty piece set”, as the marketing department might put it, cost me $15. Oh, and they’re microwaveable and machine-washable.

I think review websites could do a better job of making their criteria more apparent. I also think Amazon should make their website easier to use, especially for categories with thousands of options. Nobody needs that much choice. But we can do a better job of understanding the role of professional reviewers. They provide recommendations, but if you know better or have specific requirements, you shouldn’t take their “best” choice too literally.

  1. I think I’ve mentioned before how much I loathe shopping for toothpaste. Of all the goods in the world, why can I select from so many variations of that? ↥︎

Ticketmaster Is Fighting a Losing Battle Against Scalpers by Making Purchases More Difficult for Fans ⇥ vice.com

Jason Koebler, Vice:

For four years during college, I bought and scalped tickets on the side. I didn’t use bots and I wasn’t good at it. I ultimately lost a lot of money. But I did learn quite a lot about the ticket scalping industry. And I learned enough to know that the “anti-scalper” strategies Ticketmaster has deployed in recent years benefits scalpers, not fans.

It is the full-time job of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world to buy tickets during hectic Ticketmaster onsales and sell them at jacked-up prices. When Ticketmaster tweaks how sales work, scalpers have lots of time and incentive to learn how to optimize for its new systems and to circumvent its anti-scalper tech. By making onsales more complicated, Ticketmaster is hurting average fans who buy tickets using the site only a couple times a year and helping the people who buy tickets every single day, in dozens of different onsales.

I was reminded of this article today as I attempted to buy a couple of tickets to a low-demand show that definitely isn’t seeing mass orders by scalpers. Point of clarity: scumbags they may be, ticket scalpers do not actually collect human scalps.

I started on my phone, because I was in the kitchen making coffee. I have the Ticketmaster app, but it had logged me out at some point. So I had to go through all of its prompts to pick bands and artists to get emailed about — no, thank you — to switch on push notifications, and all the rest of it. I signed in using my complicated saved password, which had apparently expired, so I had to go through their whole password reset process. Expiring passwords are bullshit.

Anyway, I tapped the button to get tickets and I got an all-white screen with a flashing loading bar for maybe ten seconds, and then an error: “unable to identify your browser”. I do not know what this means. The error page says I need to have JavaScript and cookies enabled — which I do — and that I can’t use a proxy or VPN — which I am not.

I switched over to my Mac and tried in Safari, Chrome — the browser for people who don’t give a shit about their privacy — and I even brushed the dust off my copy of Firefox. I got the same error in all of them. I tried again on my phone using LTE, and had the same problem. Their website is apparently so secure that I simply cannot use it to buy tickets; last year, however, a Canadian investigation found that Ticketmaster was complicit in scalping. Live Nation Entertainment — the parent company of both Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which were somehow permitted to merge in 2010 — has exclusive contracts with some of the biggest venues in North America, too, so they’re impossible to avoid.

So I guess I’ll try buying tickets in person, at a booth, the way my ancestors once did.

An Airbnb Scam Demonstrates the Site’s Toothless Policies ⇥ vice.com

Allie Conti, Vice:

I was thankful I’d gotten the last-minute agreement in writing, but I also started to wonder what had actually happened in Chicago. Unable to shake the sense that this was more than a run-of-the-mill bad host, I started to look for red flags I must have missed. It didn’t take long to find a few. For one, the phone number that the Airbnb host had called me with was a Google number that couldn’t be traced. Through a reverse image search, I also realized that the profile picture Becky and Andrew had used on Airbnb was a stock photo from a website that hosts surfing-themed desktop wallpapers. And when I started going through other people’s reviews of Becky and Andrew’s properties, I noticed some other renters had reported experiences that strangely mirrored my own. A woman said she was forced to switch up her itinerary three minutes before check-in due to alleged plumbing issues. A man said that he was promised a refund because his rental was “falling apart,” though it never materialized.

Even some of the positive reviews of Becky and Andrew’s Chicago rentals seemed odd, especially those left by other pairs of hosts. Kelsey and Jean, for example, said Becky and Andrew were “awesome and communicative guests.” But they themselves were based in Chicago, where it seemed they had at least two properties of their own. Why would they need to rent from someone else there? Even stranger, Kelsey and Jean’s photo also had been cribbed from a travel site, and the language they used to describe their home (“Westloop 6 Bed Getaway – Walk the City”) seemed similar to that of Becky and Andrew’s (“6 Bed Downtown / Wicker Park / Walk the City”). It wasn’t long before I found what looked an awful lot like the apartment I’d originally booked with Becky and Andrew—the one on North Wood Street—listed by Kelsey and Jean as well. There was no mistaking it: The couch, coffee table, dining room set, and wall art were all the same.

I started to wonder whether “Becky and Andrew” and “Kelsey and Jean” existed at all.

This is a brilliant investigation, well told.

It’s almost as though operating businesses free of regulation under the guise of “disruption” leads to predictable consequences that scale-obsessed platform owners struggle to solve.