If you have not yet read it, Tyler Vigen’s story about researching the reason for building one specific pedestrian bridge over one stretch of a highway in Minnesota is — hand on heart — as good as everyone says it is, and I recommend spending the time with it and its many notations. A full mystery, told fully.
Kim Zetter, Wired:
As summer turned to fall, behind closed doors, suspicions began to grow among people across government and the security industry that something major was afoot. But the government, which had spent years trying to improve its communication with outside security experts, suddenly wasn’t talking. Over the next few months, “people who normally were very chatty were hush-hush,” a former government worker says. There was a rising fear among select individuals that a devastating cyber operation was unfolding, he says, and no one had a handle on it.
In fact, the Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.
Zetter’s thorough investigation into the circumstances of the 2020 SolarWinds breach — including her previously reported story about the FBI’s foreknowledge — is worth your time. It is also a reminder to me that the circumstances of Bloomberg’s Supermicro story, another supposed supply chain compromise, remain mysteriously uncorroborated and without similar on-the-record journalism.
For your weekend reading delight, a gripping story by Kit Chellel in Bloomberg about how a few clever souls in 2004 won £1.3 million on the ostensibly random game of roulette.
Ben Taub, the New Yorker:
It was against this backdrop [of the “golden age of fraud”] that German institutions supported Wirecard. The country’s traditional industry is in cars and energy systems — BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens. Wirecard represented the nation’s challenge to Silicon Valley, its leap into financial technology and the digital era. “German politicians were proud to be able to say, Hey, we have a fintech company!” Florian Toncar, a German parliamentarian, observed. Wirecard’s rising stock price was regarded as a sign that the business was dependable, that its critics were clueless or corrupt. The German business newspaper Handelsblatt called Wirecard’s C.E.O. a “mastermind” who had “come across the German financial scene like the Holy Spirit.” But it was not regulators or auditors who ultimately took the company down; it was a reporter and his editors, in London.
[…]
“You cannot understand Wirecard if you understand Wirecard only as fraud,” Felix Holtermann, a financial reporter at Handelsblatt, told me. “It’s not a Potemkin village, it’s not a Bernie Madoff case.” According to Holtermann, who has also written a book about the company, Marsalek routinely “used his power to override Wirecard’s very, very small compliance department” to issue bank accounts, credit cards, and debit cards to Russian oligarchs who were on European financial blacklists. “Germany was, and still is, the money-laundering saloon of Europe,” he said. “Only the biggest washing machine broke.”
The story of Wirecard is outside my usual reading catalogue; I do not spend a lot of time on the Financial Times’ Alphaville pages. So it is unsurprising that I missed the initial cracks of this story as they were reported in 2015. In a way, I am glad I only experienced this for the first time through Taub’s article. It is staggering.
Megan Garber, the Atlantic:
In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called “a vast wasteland” in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a “vast descent into triviality.” Postman saw a public that confused authority with celebrity, assessing politicians, religious leaders, and educators according not to their wisdom, but to their ability to entertain. He feared that the confusion would continue. He worried that the distinction that informed all others — fact or fiction — would be obliterated in the haze.
[…]
These are Postman’s fears in action. They are also Hannah Arendt’s. Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators — the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century — Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
This is an unquestionably thoughtful piece that explores the seemingly agreed-upon phenomenon of citizens of the United States — in Garber’s terms, but I do not think it is limited to the one country — viewing society from an increasingly detached perspective. Instead of people and ongoing events, we see only characters in a storyline. I think it is very well worth your time and consideration.
But I think it is telling that Garber repeatedly references decades-old books and essays which say, more or less, the same thing. These are issues which society has grappled with for decades. Granted, public trust in government and institutional figureheads has been declining and, so, perhaps some people are filling in the mistrust with their imagination. It also feels forced, to me, to drag these well-trodden arguments into a more contemporary framing by using the word “metaverse”, which I am not sure entirely makes sense here despite Garber’s justifications.
That aside, I appreciate Garber’s updated exploration of the confused zone between what we consider the real world and what we treat as entertainment. The rapid pace at which studios option current events seems, to me, to be both a cause of this phenomenon as well as a product of it — all of those streaming services demand exclusive shows, and it is more exciting to watch a simplified and enhanced version of real life. I am surprised Garber did not cite the Social Network as an accelerant; I have noticed fictional events from the film being casually used when describing Facebook’s origins. People describe others as “real-life NPCs” and it can be hard to know when they are doing so earnestly or ironically.
One other thing; Garber:
The efforts to hold the instigators of the insurrection to account have likewise unfolded as entertainment. “Opinion: January 6 Hearings Could Be a Real-Life Summer Blockbuster,” read a CNN headline in May — the unstated corollary being that if the hearings failed at the box office, they would fail at their purpose. (“Lol no one is watching this,” the account of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted as the hearings were airing, attempting to suggest such a failure.)
As Garber writes, the reasons the hearings actually drew large audiences. She does not mention one reason for that: the Committee hired former ABC News producers to make it more compelling for television viewers, and they leveraged connections to put it in prime time slots. It is fair to portray this as a way to turn dry scraps of testimony and a confusing series of events into an understandable storyline. A more cynical read is that these producers treated real life as entertainment fodder. As this essay suggests, the line has fully blurred.
Andy Greenberg, author of “Sandworm”, has a new book out called “Tracers in the Dark” about the new investigative techniques to find criminals who use Tor and cryptocurrencies. Over the past month and a half, Wired has dripped out a lengthy excerpt from the book. The final part was published this week and I spent today reading the whole thing in full.
It leaves much to think about. There are huge ethical questions with unsatisfying answers. For example, Hansa was secretly operated by Dutch police for about a month before it was shut down. But when Greenberg asked investigators whether they had any qualms about facilitating thousands of drug sales, they seemed to give it little thought.
Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary look into a large and expertly coordinated investigation of a modern-day drug market kingpin, well narrated by Greenberg. I was a big fan of “Sandworm”, and I am looking forward to this book becoming available for me at my library.
Perhaps you, like I, have previously attempted to untangle the dense vocabulary inherent to the “crypto” or cryptocurrency or “Web3” space. Maybe you have read Kevin Roose’s guide in the New York Times, or a version of Roose’s essay edited to add context and remove puffery on Molly White’s website, or Rusty Foster’s explanation of Terra; maybe you watched Dan Olson’s video. Maybe you, like I, have done all of those things and only wish there was something much longer to ingest.
Well, good news: the current print issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has been dedicated to a single essay by Matt Levine about how all of this came to be. Yes, it is very long. But it is a Matt Levine piece, so it is also very readable, entertaining, and clearheaded. This is not a critique of the crypto space, nor does it promote those efforts. I am not sure it is truly neutral; nothing is. What it is is a self-contained encyclopedia of that entire world. Good luck.
Ed Caesar, the New Yorker:
North Korea’s cybercrime program is hydra-headed, with tactics ranging from bank heists to the deployment of ransomware and the theft of cryptocurrency from online exchanges. It is difficult to quantify how successful Pyongyang’s hackers have been. Unlike terrorist groups, North Korea’s cybercriminals do not claim responsibility when they strike, and the government issues reflexive denials. As a result, even seasoned observers sometimes disagree when attributing individual attacks to North Korea. Nevertheless, in 2019, a United Nations panel of experts on sanctions against North Korea issued a report estimating that the country had raised two billion dollars through cybercrime. Since the report was written, there has been bountiful evidence to indicate that the pace and the ingenuity of North Korea’s online threat have accelerated.
According to the U.N., many of the funds stolen by North Korean hackers are spent on the Korean People’s Army’s weapons program, including its development of nuclear missiles. The cybercrime spree has also been a cheap and effective way of circumventing the harsh sanctions that have long been imposed on the country. In February, John C. Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division of the Justice Department, declared that North Korea, “using keyboards rather than guns,” had become a “criminal syndicate with a flag.”
There are elements of this report that I do not love,1 but it is an extraordinary look at the effects of an advanced persistent threat actor whose motivation is almost solely financial gain. American and Israeli governments collaborated on malware for espionage and hardware destruction in Iran; the Russian government unleashed Petya and NotPetya to attack Ukraine in an act of war; “Five Eyes” governments share the Warriorpride espionage framework (PDF) for smartphones. But none of these countries’ governments seem interested in siphoning cash just because they can. North Korea, sanctioned internationally and with limited resources, needs money and has invested in a world-class digital subterfuge team to get it.
For example, Priscilla Moriuchi, who is now at Harvard and was previously at the NSA, said in an interview quoted here that “North Koreans understand criminality”. It sounds like Moriuchi means the North Korean government and its agencies, not North Korean people generally, but this imprecision frustrates me because it implies that an entire country’s population is criminally-minded. ↥︎
In Wired, Lauren Goode wrote about how the apps and services she uses will not let her forget about the wedding she cancelled:
[…] The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.
[…]
I want a chisel, not a sledgehammer, with which to delete what I no longer need. I don’t want to have to empty my photo albums just because tech companies decided to make them “smart” and create an infinite loop of grief. That feels like a fast path to emotional bankruptcy, a way to “rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should,” as the writer André Aciman put it. “To feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste.” There it is: What a waste. Not wasted time, even if that is also true; that would be too cynical. A waste of potential joy.
This essay is a phenomenal exploration of coping with our decreased agency over our memory.
One of the Google engineers that Goode interviewed for this story explained that they implemented their Memories feature because, in part, many pictures were not viewed after they were taken. It seems that few people considered that, sometimes, we do not want to see those photos again — or, if we do, that we would like to do so on our own terms.
It’s a Friday before a long weekend and I kind of unloaded in the two earlier posts today. Sorry about that. Here’s something a bit lighter, from Katy Vine in Texas Monthly:
Agent Reed didn’t know what to make of Fosdick and T. R.: First these two guys crash into the Gulf of Mexico together, then each flies into this tiny airport within days of each other, and two weeks later, T. R.’s jet bursts into flames. The more Reed dug, the more certain he became that the Citation fire was just one piece of a grand scheme.
The T.R. character in this article seemed to model his life on James Bond, but I think he comes across more like Sterling Archer. Just, you know, not nearly as funny. A remarkable story for your weekend read.
Arundhati Roy, writing in the Financial Times:
But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.
[…]
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
There are two clear lessons I hope we draw from this situation that, months ago, I would find unfathomable. The first is that we desperately need competent, transparent, and humble leadership at all levels. I feel somewhat lucky in that respect, but not entirely so; I understand that not everyone is so fortunate.
The second lesson that we should learn is that we need to care for the wellbeing of one another long before we are forced to do so. It should be abundantly clear that even small vulnerabilities are exacerbated when they are tested.
The “normal” that I hope we return to is one in which we are once again free to travel, gather as friends, go to shows, eat and drink at new restaurants and bars, and spend more time together. But that should not mean going back to underpaying people in positions that have always been vital; we should not underestimate the strengthening qualities of good governance, public research, and civil service.
Nitasha Tiku, Wired:
All of those precepts sent Google’s workforce into full tilt after the travel ban was announced. Memegen went flush with images bearing captions like “We stand with you” and “We are you.” Jewglers and HOLA, affinity groups for Jewish and Latinx employees, quickly pledged their support for Google’s Muslim group. According to The Wall Street Journal, members of one mailing list brainstormed whether there might be ways to “leverage” Google’s search results to surface ways of helping immigrants; some proposed that the company should intervene in searches for terms like “Islam,” “Muslim,” or “Iran” that were showing “Islamophobic, algorithmically biased results.” (Google says none of those ideas were taken up.) At around 2 pm that Saturday, an employee on a mailing list for Iranian Googlers floated the possibility of staging a walkout in Mountain View. “I wanted to check first whether anyone thinks this is a bad idea,” the employee wrote. Within 48 hours, a time had been locked down and an internal website set up.
[…]
In his short, off-the-cuff remarks to the packed courtyard, Pichai called immigration “core to the founding of this company.” He tried to inject a dose of moderation, stressing how important it was “to reach out and communicate to people from across the country.” But when he mentioned Brin’s appearance at the airport, his employees erupted in chants of “Ser-gey! Ser-gey! Ser-gey!” Brin finally extricated himself from the crowd and shuffled up to the mic, windbreaker in hand. He, too, echoed the protesters’ concerns but tried to bring the heat down. “We need to be smart,” he said, “and that means bringing in folks who have some different viewpoints.” As he spoke, a news chopper flew overhead.
And that was pretty much the last time Google’s executives and workers presented such a united front about anything.
Tiku presents a deep, well-investigated look at an increasingly toxic internal culture as executives pursued morally-challenged money making opportunities.
Craig Mod:
It feels — intuitively — that software (beyond core functionality) should aim for speed. Speed as a proxy for efficiency. If a piece of software is becoming taurine-esque, unwieldy, then perhaps it shouldn’t be a single piece of software. Ultimately, to be fast is to be light. And to be light is to lessen the burden on someone or some task. This is the ultimate goal: For our pocket supercomputers to lesson burdens, not increase them. For our mega-powered laptops to enable a kind of fluency — not battle, or struggle — of creation.
This essay speaks to me on a gut level; I’m sure many of you will have a similar appreciation for it.
Mod’s essay is positive and delightful. I will say — in a more negative and grouchy tone — that slow software invariably irritates me, in a very thousand cuts kind of way. I use Windows at work and I wince every time I click on the Start menu and have to wait for the second-long superfluous render-blocking animation to play. Some of the very slow animations in tvOS make me feel the same way — for example, when exiting the screen saver. Don’t get me wrong — animation adds expected polish — but it should not be an impediment.
Slow software feels imprecise and untrustworthy. Fast software feels implicitly more reliable and cared-for. I have a top-of-the-line iMac; not only should I not feel sluggishness in any day-to-day task, everything ought to feel instantaneous. I wish this were a higher priority for all software firms at an organizational level. For me, at least, it determines what I use.
Hubert Horan, American Affairs Journal:
Above all, Uber argued that its business model and technology were so innovative that it had created an entirely new industry (“ridesharing”) based on entirely new business concepts (the “sharing economy”). It insisted that it was a “tech company” selling sophisticated software, and could not possibly be compared to taxi companies. In fact, however, Uber carries people from point A to point B, just like taxis have for a hundred years. The “tech company” claim was really an attempt to get people to ignore its huge losses, since tech companies like Facebook had quickly grown into profitability. The “software” claim was designed to justify preventing its drivers from getting the labor law protections employees are entitled to, based on the argument that they were totally independent entrepreneurs who had freely chosen to purchase Uber’s superi or software products. Furthermore, nothing in Uber’s business model is actually being shared. The only meaningful economic distinction between “taxis” and “ridesharing” is that the latter avoids regulations that traditional taxis must still obey and depends on billions in predatory investor subsidies.
Uber’s claim that its growth resulted from customers freely choosing its superior service in competitive markets is fundamentally false. Competitive markets use price and profit signals to help allocate resources to more efficient uses. Uber grew because its years of billion-dollar subsidies totally distorted those signals, and allowed it to drive more efficient producers out of business.
About a year and a half ago, I linked to a couple of pieces arguing that Uber’s most impressive revolutionary gesture would be if the company functioned as a long-term business. They have lost — and I’m going to write this out in full and italicize it — fourteen billion dollars in the last four years. Horan’s analysis of Uber’s performance to date is second-to-none, and he’s reasonably skeptical of attempts to distract from the company’s mismanagement and losses through the invocation of autonomous vehicles.
Drew Magary, Deadspin:
I remember hosting the Deadspin Awards in New York the night of December 5th and then heading over to a karaoke bar for a staff after-party, where I ate some pizza, drank a beer, sang one song (Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky,” which would soon prove either fitting or ironic, depending upon your perspective), and that’s it. After that comes a great void. I don’t remember inexplicably collapsing in a hallway, fracturing my skull because I had no way to brace myself for the impact. I don’t remember sitting up after that, my co-workers alarmed at the sight of blood trickling out of the back of my head. I don’t remember puking all over Barry Petchesky’s pants, vomit being one of many fun side effects of your brain exploding, as he held my head upright to keep me from choking on my own barf. I don’t remember Kiran Chitanvis quickly calling 911 to get me help. I don’t remember getting into an ambulance with Victor Jeffreys and riding to an uptown hospital, with Victor begging me for the passcode to my phone so that he could call my wife. He says I made an honest effort to help, but my circuits had already shorted out and I ended up giving him sequences of four digits that had NOTHING to do with the code. Flustered, he asked me for my wife’s phone number outright. Instead, I unwittingly gave him a series of 10 digits unrelated to the number he sought.
I don’t remember that. I don’t remember bosswoman Megan Greenwell trailing behind the ambulance in a cab with her husband and staying at the hospital ALL NIGHT to plead with them to give me a closer look (at first, the staff thought I was simply inebriated; my injury had left me incoherent enough to pass as loaded) because she suspected, rightly, that something was very wrong with me. I don’t remember doctors finally determining that I had suffered a subdural hematoma, or a severe brain bleed: A pool of blood had collected in my brain and was pressing against my brain stem. I was then rushed to another hospital for surgery, where doctors removed a piece of my skull, drained the rogue blood, implanted a small galaxy in my brain to make sure my opinions remain suitably vast, put the hunk of skull back in, and also drilled a hole in the TOP of my head to relieve the pressure. They also pried my eyes open and peeled the contact lenses off my eyeballs. They then put me into a medically-induced coma (SO METAL) so that my brain could rest and heal without Awake Drew barging in and fucking everything up.
I don’t remember any of that. I told you I wouldn’t be a very reliable narrator.
This is many things. It is gutting, inspiring, saddening, frustrating, at times very funny because Drew Magary wrote it so of course it is, illuminating, and moving. But, as a piece of writing, it’s perfect. Put this on your reading list for the weekend, or read it now. I don’t care which; it’s worth your time.
This essay by Paul Ford, published in Wired, is magnificent. I’ve been letting it stew all day, re-reading it a couple of times here and there. It’s beautiful, haunting, gutting, and romantic. Two excerpts from a dozen or more I could have picked to share here. First:
I keep meeting people out in the world who want to get into this industry. Some have even gone to coding boot camp. They did all the exercises. They tell me about their React apps and their Rails APIs and their page design skills. They’ve spent their money and time to gain access to the global economy in short order, and often it hasn’t worked.
I offer my card, promise to answer their emails. It is my responsibility. We need to get more people into this industry.
But I also see them asking, with their eyes, “Why not me?”
And here I squirm and twist. Because— because we have judged you and found you wanting. Because you do not speak with a confident cadence, because you cannot show us how to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard, because you overlabored the difference between UI and UX, because you do not light up in the way that we light up when hearing about some obscure bug, some bad button, the latest bit of outrageousness on Hacker News. Because the things you learned are already, six months later, not exactly what we need. Because the industry is still overlorded by people like me, who were lucky enough to have learned the etiquette early, to even know there was an etiquette.
Tech is, of course, not the sole industry with an insular and specific culture; but, it is something that can be changed by readers of websites like this one, or Wired. Technology has been commoditized so that you see people of every age, race, gender, and personality walking around with a smartphone or a DSLR or a smartwatch or wireless headphones, but the creation of these things haven’t followed suit at the same rate.
The second excerpt:
I have no desire to retreat to the woods and hear the bark of the fox. I like selling, hustling, and making new digital things. I like ordering hard drives in the mail. But I also increasingly enjoy the regular old networks: school, PTA, the neighbors who gave us their kids’ old bikes. The bikes represent a global supply chain; when I touch them, I can feel the hum of enterprise resource planning software, millions of lines of logistics code executed on a global scale, bringing the handlebars together with the brakes and the saddle onto its post. Then two kids ride in circles in the supermarket parking lot, yawping in delight. I have no desire to disrupt these platforms. I owe my neighbors a nice bottle of wine for the bikes. My children don’t seem to love computers as I do, and I doubt they will in the same way, because computers are everywhere, and nearly free. They will ride on different waves. Software has eaten the world, and yet the world remains.
This sounds dour and miserable but it isn’t all that — I promise. As much as Ford examines the failings of the industry in this essay, there’s an undercurrent of optimism.
In some ways, Ford’s piece reminds me of Frank Chimero’s 2018 essay about how web development is increasingly like building software instead of just writing a document. I remember when I learned that I could view the source of a webpage, and that’s how I began to learn how to build stuff for the web. That foundation drove my career and a passion for learning how things are made. Things are different now, of course. Common toolchains now generate gnarly HTML and indecipherable CSS; the web is less elegant and human-driven. But I’m not sure that different and harder are necessarily worse.
Thinking more comprehensively about Ford’s essay, perhaps there’s a new perspective that can be brought only by those new to tech. After growing up with the stratospheric rise of the industry and seeing how it has strained, maybe that context will inform how they read this piece.
Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing, Reuters:
A team of former U.S. government intelligence operatives working for the United Arab Emirates hacked into the iPhones of activists, diplomats and rival foreign leaders with the help of a sophisticated spying tool called Karma, in a campaign that shows how potent cyber-weapons are proliferating beyond the world’s superpowers and into the hands of smaller nations.
[…]
The ex-Raven operatives described Karma as a tool that could remotely grant access to iPhones simply by uploading phone numbers or email accounts into an automated targeting system. The tool has limits — it doesn’t work on Android devices and doesn’t intercept phone calls. But it was unusually potent because, unlike many exploits, Karma did not require a target to click on a link sent to an iPhone, they said.
In 2016 and 2017, Karma was used to obtain photos, emails, text messages and location information from targets’ iPhones. The technique also helped the hackers harvest saved passwords, which could be used for other intrusions.
It isn’t clear whether the Karma hack remains in use. The former operatives said that by the end of 2017, security updates to Apple Inc’s iPhone software had made Karma far less effective.
This story is just one part of a deeper investigation from Schectman and Bing into surveillance activities by the United Arab Emirates on dissidents and activists, which is worth reading. Remarkably, it even cites a named source.
The timing of the capabilities of this exploit coincide with the introduction of iMessage media previews. If I were looking to create a security hole in an iPhone without any user interaction, that’s the first place I’d look. Also, note that this report states that this exploit is now “far less effective”; it does not say that the vulnerabilities have been patched.
A new post by Justin O’Beirne is an immediate must-read for me, and this latest one is no exception. In fact, it’s maybe the one I would most recommend because it’s an analysis of the first leg of a four-year project Apple unveiled earlier this year. Here’s what Matthew Panzarino wrote at the time for TechCrunch:
The coupling of high-resolution image data from car and satellite, plus a 3D point cloud, results in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal reconstructions of city streets with textures in place. This is massively higher-resolution and easier to see, visually. And it’s synchronized with the “panoramic” images from the car, the satellite view and the raw data. These techniques are used in self-driving applications because they provide a really holistic view of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho view can do even more for human viewers of the data by allowing them to “see” through brush or tree cover that would normally obscure roads, buildings and addresses.
Regardless of how Apple is creating all of its buildings and other shapes, Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks empty in comparison. […]
And all of these details create the impression that Apple hasn’t just closed the gap with Google — but has, in many ways, exceeded it…
[…]
But for all of the detail Apple has added, it still doesn’t have some of the businesses and places that Google has.
[…]
This suggests that Apple isn’t algorithmically extracting businesses and other places out of the imagery its vans are collecting.
Instead, all of the businesses shown on Apple’s Markleeville map seem to be coming from Yelp, Apple’s primary place data provider.
Rebuilding Maps in such a comprehensive way is going to take some time, so I read O’Beirne’s analysis as a progress report. But, even keeping that in mind, it’s a little disappointing that what has seemingly been prioritized so far in this Maps update is to add more detailed shapes for terrain and foliage, rather than fixing what places are mapped and where they’re located. It isn’t as though progress isn’t being made, or that it’s entirely misdirected — roads are now far more accurate, buildings are recognizable, and city parks increasingly look like city parks — but the thing that frustrates me most about Apple Maps in my use is that the places I want to go are either incorrectly-placed, not there, or have inaccurate information like hours of operation.
As has become a bit of a tradition around here, I have a review of iOS 12 coming; however, it won’t be out today. Turns out trying to find an apartment in Calgary right now is difficult and time consuming.
In the interim, please read Federico Viticci’s excellent deep dive into iOS 12. It’s far more detailed than mine will ever be and, as the iOS automation expert, he’s uniquely gifted in explaining this update’s improvements to Siri and the new Shortcuts app.
I’ve been using my iPhone X for nearly a week now and, while I have some thoughts about it, by no means am I interested in writing a full review. There seem to be more reviews of the iPhone X on the web than actual iPhone X models sold. Instead, here are some general observations about the features and functionality that I think are noteworthy.
The iPhone X is a product that feels like it shouldn’t really exist — at least, not in consumers’ hands. I know that there are millions of them in existence now, but mine feels like an incredibly well-made, one-off prototype, as I’m sure all of them do individually. It’s not just that the display feels futuristic — I’ll get to that in a bit — nor is it the speed of using it, or Face ID, or anything else that you might expect. It is all of those things, combined with how nice this product is.
I’ve written before that the magic of Apple’s products and their suppliers’ efforts is that they are mass-producing niceness at an unprecedented scale. This is something they’ve become better at with every single product they ship, and nothing demonstrates that progress better than the iPhone X.
It’s such a shame, then, that the out-of-warranty repair costs are appropriately high, to the point where not buying AppleCare+ and a case seems downright irresponsible. Using the iPhone X without a case is a supreme experience, but I don’t trust myself enough to do so. And that’s a real pity, because it’s one of those rare mass-produced items that feels truly special.
This is the first iPhone to include an OLED display. It’s made by Samsung and uses a diamond subpixel arrangement, but Apple says that it’s entirely custom-designed. Samsung’s display division is being treated here like their chip foundry was for making Apple’s Ax SoCs.
And it’s one hell of a display. It’s running at a true @3x resolution of 458 pixels per inch. During normal use, I can’t tell much of a difference between it and the 326 pixel-per-inch iPhone 6S that I upgraded from. But when I’m looking at smaller or denser text — in the status bar, for example, or in a long document — this iPhone’s display looks nothing less than perfect.
One of the reasons this display looks so good is because of Apple’s “True Tone” feature, which matches the white balance of the display to the environment. In a lot of indoor lighting conditions, that’s likely to mean that the display is yellower than you’re probably used to. Unlike Night Shift, though, which I dislike for being too heavy-handed, True Tone is much subtler. Combine all of this — the brightness of the display, its pixel density, its nearly edge-to-edge size, and True Tone — with many of iOS’ near-white interface components and it really is like a live sheet of paper in your hand.
Because it’s an OLED display that has the capability of switching on and off individual pixels, it’s only normal to consider using battery-saving techniques like choosing a black wallpaper or using Smart Invert Colours. I think this is nonsense. You probably will get better battery life by doing both of those things, but I’ve been using my iPhone X exactly the same as I have every previous phone I’ve owned and it gets terrific battery life. Unless you’re absolutely paranoid about your battery, I see no reason in day-to-day use to treat the iPhone X differently than you would any other phone.
I’m a total sucker for smaller devices. I’d love to see what an iPhone SE-sized device with an X-style display would be like.
Face ID is, for my money, one of the best things Apple has done in years. It has worked nearly flawlessly for me, and I say that with no exaggeration or hyperbole. Compared to Touch ID, it almost always requires less effort and is of similar perceptual speed. This is particularly true for login forms on the web: where previously I’d see the Touch ID prompt and have to shuffle my thumb down to the home button, I now just continue staring at the screen and my username and password are just there.
I’m going to great pains to avoid the most obvious and clichéd expression for a feature like this, but it’s apt here: it feels like magic.
The only time Face ID seems to have trouble recognizing me is when I wake up, before I’ve put on my glasses. It could be because my eyes are still squinty at the time and it can’t detect that I’m looking at the screen, or maybe it’s just because I look like a deranged animal first thing in the morning. Note, though, that it has no trouble recognizing me without my glasses at any other time; however, I first set up Face ID while wearing my glasses and that’s almost always how I use it to unlock my phone. That’s how it recognizes me most accurately.
Last week, I wrote that I found that there was virtually no learning curve for me to feel comfortable using the home indicator, and I completely stand by that. If you’ve used an iPad running iOS 11, you’re probably going to feel right at home on an iPhone X. My favourite trick with the home indicator is that you can swipe left and right across it to slide between recently-used apps.
Arguably, the additional space offered by the taller display is not being radically reconsidered, since nearly everything is simply taller than it used to be. But this happens to work well for me because nearly everything I do on my iPhone is made better with a taller screen: reading, scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, or writing something.
The typing experience is, surprisingly, greatly improved through a simple change. The keyboard on an iPhone X is in a very similar place to where it is on a 4.7-inch iPhone, which means that there’s about half an inch of space below it. Apple has chosen to move the keyboard switching button and dictation control into that empty space from beside the spacebar, and this simple change has noticeably improved my typing accuracy.
In a welcome surprise, nearly all of the third-party apps I use on a regular basis were quickly updated to support the iPhone X’s display. The sole holdouts are Weather Line, NY Times, and Spotify.
I have two complaints with how the user interfaces in iOS work on the iPhone X. The first is that the system still seems like it is adapting its conventions to fit bigger displays. Yes, you can usually swipe right from the lefthand edge of the display to go back to a previous screen, but toolbars are still typically placed at the top and bottom of the screen. With a taller display, that means that there can be a little more shuffling of the device in your hand to hit buttons on opposite sides of the screen.
My other complaint is just how out of place Control Centre feels. Notification Centre retains its sheet-like appearance if it’s invoked from the left “ear” of the display, but Control Centre opens as a sort of panelled overlay with the status bar in the middle of the screen when it is invoked from the right “ear”. The lack of consistency between the two Centres doesn’t make sense to me, nor does the awkward splitting of functionality between the two upper corners of the phone. It’s almost as though it was an adjustment made late in the development cycle.
Update: One more weird Control Centre behaviour is that it displays the status bar but in a different layout than the system usually does. The status bar systemwide shows the time and location indicator on the left, and the cellular signal, WiFi indicator, and battery level on the right. The status bar within Control Centre is, left to right: cellular signal, carrier, WiFi indicator, various status icons for alarm and rotation lock, location services indicator, Bluetooth status, battery percentage, and battery icon. The location indicator, cellular strength, and WiFi signal all switch sides; I think they should stay consistent.
I don’t know what the ideal solution is for the iPhone X. Control Centre on the iPad is a part of the multitasking app switcher, and that seems like a reasonable way to display it on the iPhone, too. I’m curious as to why that wasn’t shipped.
This is the first dual-camera iPhone I’ve owned so, not only do I get to take advantage of technological progress in hardware, I also get to use features like Portrait Mode on a regular basis. Portrait Mode is very fun, and does a pretty alright job in many environments of separating a subject from its background. Portrait Lighting, new in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, takes this one step further and tries to replicate different lighting conditions on the subject. I found this to be much less reliable, with the two spotlight-style “stage lighting” modes to be inconsistent in their subject detection abilities.
The two cameras in this phone are both excellent, and the sensor captures remarkable amounts of data, especially if you’re shooting RAW. Noise is well-controlled for such a small sensor and, in some lighting conditions, even has a somewhat filmic quality.
I really like having the secondary lens. Calling it a “telephoto” lens is, I think, a stretch, but its focal length creates some nice framing options. I used it to take a photo of my new shoes without having to get too close to the mirror in a department store.
Animoji are absurdly fun. The face tracking feels perfect — it’s better than motion capture work in some feature films I’ve seen. I’ve used Animoji more often as stickers than as video messages, and it’s almost like being able to create your own emoji that, more or less, reflects your actual face. I only have two reservations about Animoji: they’re only available as an iMessage app, and I worry that it won’t be updated regularly. The latter is something I think Apple needs to get way better at; imagine how cool it would be if new iMessage bubble effects were pushed to devices remotely every week or two, for example. It’s the same thing for Animoji: the available options are cute and wonderful, but when Snapchat and Instagram are pushing new effects constantly, it isn’t viable to have no updates by, say, this time next year.
I mentioned above that I bought AppleCare+ for this iPhone. It’s the first time I’ve ever purchased AppleCare on a phone, and only the second time I’ve purchased it for any Apple product — the first was my MacBook Air because AppleCare also covered the Thunderbolt Display purchased around the same time. This time, it was not a good buying experience.
I started by opening up the Apple Store app, which quoted $249 for AppleCare+ for the iPhone X. I tapped on the “Buy Now” button in the app but received an error:
Some products in your bag require another product to be purchased. The required product was not found so the other products were removed.
As far as I can figure out, this means that I need to buy an iPhone X at the same time, which doesn’t make any sense as the Store page explicitly says that AppleCare+ can be bought within sixty days.
I somehow wound up on the check coverage page where I would actually be able to buy extended coverage. After entering my serial number and fumbling with the CAPTCHA, I clicked the link to buy AppleCare. At that point, I was quoted $299 — $50 more than the store listing. I couldn’t find any explanation for this discrepancy, so I phoned Apple’s customer service line. The representative told me that the $249 price was just an estimate, and the $299 price was the actual quote for my device, which seems absurd — there’s simply no mention that the advertised price is anything other than the absolute price for AppleCare coverage. I went ahead with my purchase, filling in all my information before arriving at a final confirmation page where the price had returned to $249, and that was what I was ultimately charged.
It’s not the $50 that troubles me in this circumstance, but the fact that there was a difference in pricing at all between pages on Apple’s website. I don’t know why I was ever shown a $299 price, nor do I understand why I’m unable to use the Apple Store app to purchase AppleCare+ for my iPhone X using my iPhone X.