Author: Paul Jones

Safari 10 implements native browser extensions

Posted on by Paul Jones

Daniel Dilger, writing for Apple Insider, via Dave Mark:

On both macOS Sierra 10.12 and today’s El Capitan 10.11.5 (when Safari 10 is installed), Safari will support App Extensions built from a combination of JavaScript, CSS and native code written in Objective-C or Swift.

[…]

More importantly, the new App Extensions architecture enables developers to distribute Safari Extensions as part of their app through the App Store.

A clear trend in this year’s WWDC was the number of different extension points and distribution channels Apple is opening up: iMessage Apps, Maps extensions, Safari extensions, third-party Siri, to name just a few. The Safari Extensions, in particular, are a new approach to distributing browser plugins compared to both Chrome and Firefox, as you can write compiled code for them!

Apple discontinue the MacBook, then the Thunderbolt Display

Posted on by Paul Jones

On Monday, Apple discontinued the legacy MacBook Pro:

Apple Stores are beginning to remove the 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro from their showfloors, in what may be a sign the company is preparing to completely phase out the product with a spinning optical disc drive, AppleInsider discovered on Monday.

Now, they’ve discontinued the very underpowered Thunderbolt Display:

Apple today announced that it is discontinuing its Thunderbolt Display, the large external display many use to connect to MacBooks or other Macs for extra screen real estate. This is very likely to fuel speculation (which has been ongoing) that Apple will soon launch a 4K or 5K version of the display.

Both of these are excellent news for people that want new hardware! To be conservative, I’m calling new MacBooks and a 5K external display at least by September but potentially as early as late-July.

Obvious, low-tech, anti-spyware

Posted on by Paul Jones

A key feature of Orwell’s dystopia was the ever-present screens that can never be turned off and were also always recording. Wanting to turn the devices off was met with suspicion. I used to use a sticky note, but now I have a cute bit of swag I got from a meet up. It’s two pieces of plastic, one which slides to cover the camera, with two tiny adhesive strips to keep it comfortably in place. I cover the camera because I’ve occasionally been in front of my computer when I receive a FaceTime call, and my image pops up on the screen. Of course it’s not transmitted, but it’s unpleasant enough of an experience that it made me want to be in control of that. In recent news, Marc Zuckerberg was shown to have tape on his camera and microphone. John Gruber found a 2013 study that found you could hack the camera:

Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, said in a recent story in The Washington Post that the FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years.

You should cover your cameras, because you have your privacy to lose and nothing to gain from having it exposed.

Removing the headphone jack

Posted on by Paul Jones

There’s a lot of buzz around the next iPhone not having a headphone jack. In particular, John Gruber responded to Nilay Patel’s arguments against removing the port:

Nilay Patel, “Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Hostile and Stupid”:

But just face facts: ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse, in extremely obvious ways. Let’s count them!

And let’s compare them to arguments against removing floppy drives from the iMac in 1998.

They both miss the mark, in my opinion. Replacing the headphone jack with another jack doesn’t significantly change user experience, it’s just another way of doing the same thing. In fact Nilay’s right, if it’s just a matter of replacing the jack, it’s kind of stupid.

What I find more interesting is this portion of the discussion:

2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great

Totally agree. But the rumor is that the new iPhone will ship with wired Lightning earbuds.

Getting rid of the headphone jack and shipping with great wireless headphones would significantly improve the experience. The biggest problem, as is often the case, is charging the headphones, although perhaps the iPhone could charge the headphones?

Perhaps this is one reason I’m not in charge of the next iPhone, but as the owner of Bose wireless headphones, I can tell you that charging your headphones is a small cost to pay for wireless convenience.

Apple’s unique political independence

Posted on by Paul Jones

Hayley Tsukayama from the Wall Street Journal makes the case that Apple is uniquely disposed to take political stances because, unlike Facebook and Google, people don’t look to Apple for neutral information, they buy Apple’s hardware:

Apple, however, is still largely a company that makes phones and the personal stuff that comes with them, rather than dealing in information. Although Apple is making inroads into the publishing business with Apple News, its platform doesn’t have nearly the reach of Facebook or Google — and therefore, people don’t look to it to be an arbiter of information in the same way. And so, despite the growing activism of Apple chief executive Tim Cook, there are still plenty of people who use iPhones and don’t agree with Apple’s stances on political issues.

Before we place Apple on a moral pedestal, be warned that doing business with any of the tech giants is a moral compromise. For instance, while Apple’s political independence and stance on privacy stem from their making hardware, so does their treatment of the makers of that hardware. This independence also grants them the ability to fight against paying corporate taxes.

Being principally a hardware manufacture is part of Apple’s independence in the political sphere and the public eye, but this produces the stronger reason of Apple’s not being incentivized to compromise their users. This is what I think is exceptional about Apple.

Twitter launches Engage

Posted on by Paul Jones

Anecdotally, I think Twitter may be the highest-profile company which makes zero dollars. Its logo sits right next to Facebook on nearly every piece of marketing, and yet Twitter is nowhere near its competitors with regards to profit margin. Today, they announced a new app, which John Vorhees describes for MacStories:

[…] Twitter is different things to different people. For some it’s a public forum for chatting with friends. For others, Twitter is a broadcast medium. For still others, Twitter is all about marketing. Engage is designed to help you maximize the reach of your tweets through analytics. If that’s not your thing, you may view the app as useless, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand.

It’s an excellent service and this app shows the tremendous engineering and product brainpower they have at Twitter. Ideologically, I dislike where this is going: I wish companies would devise business models which didn’t rely on surveillance. The terms “public forum” and “broadcast medium” make me think Twitter should be owned by the people, kept completely neutral, devoid of surveillance, and run at a loss paid for by a taxes. I don’t see a way forward for this approach however, and I don’t have any hope for Twitter convincing people to pay for the service, however much it ended up being to be sustainable (per Tweet? per Kb?).

Edit: Here’s John Gruber’s take:

Even with a verified account and a fair number of followers, I find this app almost totally useless. Anything you want to actually do, like respond to a tweet, it shoots you over to the official Twitter app. I fear for Twitter — they’re just spinning their wheels.

Exactly. I worry for Twitter. I wonder if this is a play at becoming indispensable to “influencers” in hope for charging them in the future. I struggle to see how this will make them money, even if it seems “kinda cool.” If Gruber’s take is shared amongst high-profile bloggers, this app may go the way of #Music.

WWDC Diary Day 1: Keynote, Platform SotU, and Design Awards

Posted on by Paul Jones

This is my first WWDC, and I’m impressed by how efficiently the 5000 person event runs. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium comfortably hosted every executive, press person, and developer with room to spare. I got a great seat for the keynote, being right up at the front on the second level, and the sound, lighting, and presentation system made the event a pleasure to watch. Everything from the food to the WiFi to releasing the session and lab schedule to making the betas available appeared to happen effortlessly. I’m sure a lot of work went on behind the scenes to make this happen, which I’m grateful for.

Moving on to the content, this WWDC showcased Tim Cook’s Apple at its absolute best: all four of the category-defining products moved forward in titanic leaps. Before we dive into the software, there was no new hardware. This is a grand shame, but I understand why: WWDC is a software event (and Apple are going to refresh their whole Mac line with a press release very soon, right? Right? RIGHT?). In terms of the software, all of iOS, (the newly renamed) macOS, watchOS, and tvOS have many great new features, APIs, and opportunities for app developers.

Let’s go platform-by-platform.

watchOS 3

Glances are gone, long app start up time is gone, and the “Dock” takes advantage of these two changes. The idea here is that apps are now so fast to start that a multitasking tray with the live first screen of your app. Also, there is now a new input style called Scribbles which lets you “write” letters on the watch and it will translate them into letters. Additionally, there are now dedicated watchOS apps for Reminders and Find My Friends, an emergency feature called “SOS”, and Activity sharing.

The structural changes to the interaction model for watchOS is right on point: previously, if I wanted to check the weather, I could: look at the complication, open the glance, or open the app. Now, if the complication isn’t present or doesn’t have enough information, you tap what was previously the “friends” button to reveal the Dock, and you can immediately see new information, or go into the app if you need to interact with it.

The Scribble input method is a welcome change that I’ll need to use to see if it can be useful. If it’s fast and accurate enough for writing short messages without tiring my arm, I’ll be a fan and use it a lot. I don’t think I’ll use Activity sharing at all, in part because I don’t use the Watch for fitness as much as a notification management tool, so I don’t have much to add there. I’ll use Reminders, probably not Find My Friends, and hopefully not SOS.

tvOS 10

Now it’s possible to sign-in to your cable provider once, and all apps get access to that authentication now. In addition to allowing more streaming of previous shows and revealing all the apps provided by your cable deal, they’ve added more live streams. For those people that find the Apple TV interface too bright at night now have the option to turn the interface dark. There was some controversy when the Apple TV first came out that the Remote app didn’t work, which Apple quickly patched while promising a fuller experience, and have now shipped that full Siri Remote app. Finally, there are some improvements to Siri.

Perhaps Apple was hoping to supplant cable providers and so purposely didn’t ship single-sign-on on day one, but as a heavy user of Apple TV, it was by far the biggest pain point that every new app required getting my computer to get up and running. It wasn’t that big a deal, my roommates and I got pretty good at working together every time an app decided we had to authenticate again, but I certainly look forward to not doing that anymore. I also look forward to finding out what other apps are available through the cable service, it’s difficult to discover apps I can use today.

The new Remote app with accelerometer and Siri support is great. It means that any iPhone owner is now the owner of a fully featured remote for the tvOS games. The tone and style of the games on tvOS reminds me of the Wii – casual party games. I hope this catches on with users and the games become more fun, akin to Mario Party. Less casual games also have reason to be excited too, as you can now require that the player of your game have a standard game controller type too. This sacrifices some fragmentation to allow apps to be more varied and take best advantage of whatever hardware they need, and I think it’s a compromise worth making.

macOS 10.12 Sierra

The features that stood out to me about the newly renamed macOS were:

  • Unlock with an Apple Watch;
  • Apple Pay in Safari;
  • Picture-in-picture for videos;
  • Automatic syncing of desktop to iCloud;
  • Automatic syncing of clipboards across devices;
  • Storing unused files in iCloud to download on-demand;
  • Tabs everywhere;
  • and Siri!

It seems to me like macOS lives in the shadow of iOS: these features are great, but I’d argue more drastic improvements are needed. For instance, it didn’t make the keynote, but Apple are updating the filesystem from HFS+ to their new APFS, which is great news. To be fair, the Siri SDK and functionality is exactly the sort of improvement the Mac needs, but it does feel quite late, especially considering that it’s been on iOS so long, and that Cortana and Google Now have long since shipped. I dislike the automatic syncing and optimizing to iCloud features because I like having more direct control and access to my files, but I’m sure people will love those features (I do recommend keeping a separate hard drive and a backup instead, however). This release is a great start, but there is much more that needs to be done: updating OpenGL, modernizing AppKit (have you ever tried using NSTableView?). and making the hardware and software usable by professionals in virtual reality, video, and other fields.

iOS 10

This is a mammoth release for iOS. The biggest focus was in the Messages app, where you can now:

  • Send handwritten notes;
  • Add animations to your messages;
  • Add “likes” to messages;
  • Annotate images before sending them;
  • Attach stickers to messages or images;
  • Automatically replace words with emoji;
  • Download and create apps that run within iMessage.

Messages, more specifically iMessage, has become a platform that strives to compete directly with Facebook’s Messenger. I look forward to using this version of iMessage, and I’m curious about what is possible in iMessage apps. The one fatal downside today of iMessage as a platform is the single-platform-edness of it (Apple platforms). There were rumors that Apple was going to announce iMessage for Android, and there is precedent for something like that now with Apple Music for Android. However, I don’t think iMessage for Android will ever happen, because it’s not a service Apple makes money on and I think it keeps many people on iOS. However, long-term, I’d argue having a truly competitive messaging platform would be good for Apple. Consider that selling apps and services on a cross-platform iMessage would probably make more money long-term than keeping users captive and not having developer interest. This feature will be great for people who only know people with iPhones, but I can’t blame Apple for not expanding one of their most valuable apps to competitors’ products.

Other improvements include:

  • Creating extensions for selling stuff within the Maps app;
  • Improved traffic handling in Maps;
  • Search for stuff on the way during navigation in Maps;
  • A new Home app for controlling your connected home products;
  • Revamped Apple Music;
  • Raise your phone to wake up the OS;
  • Increased use of 3D Touch throughout the system;
  • Interactive notifications withs views;
  • Better predictions above the keyboard;
  • A redesigned news;
  • AI powered Photos improvements;
  • Apple Pay in Safari;

These are all magnificent improvements that users will love, I think Apple did a great job in all-around improving iOS. The iMessage improvements are topical, fun additions that will convince people to upgrade, and the OS-level improvements and new APIs are a welcome change for power users and developers.

Independent podcasting

Posted on by Paul Jones

Podcasting is the new radio, where the convenience of “listen to it on your own time” and “find exactly what you want to hear” beat out “listen to it live”. From my experience, the demand for podcasts far outweighs the supply, and it’s an ample time to get into podcast publishing. The beautiful thing about podcasting today is that if you do want to do it, it’s easy. Create a WordPress or Squarespace, get the template you want, and record with whatever microphone you probably have, like on your phone or laptop. The reason it’s this easy is that while the largest aggregator of podcasts, Apple, does approve being listed in their Podcast app, Podcasts are just RSS feeds, an open standard. But as the big producers of podcasters want to make more money, they have demands of the platform. Here’s the New York Times:

Interviews with over two dozen podcasters and people inside Apple reveal a variety of complaints. The podcasters say that they are relegated to wooing a single Apple employee for the best promotion. That sharing on social media is cumbersome. And that for podcasters to make money, they need more information about their listeners, and Apple is in a unique position to provide it. The problems, they say, could even open up an opportunity for a competitor.

I’m not convinced these were the reasons given to Apple in that meeting, because frankly I think they’re weak, but let’s take this point-by-point:

  1. That podcasts “are relegated to wooing a single Apple employee for the best promotion” is wrong because that’s what you need to do to get publicity in Apple’s podcast store, but I’d argue that you’d be better off publicizing your podcast using other channels, namely the web. Rather, I think improving the positioning options available to publishers will probably benefit big players to the detriment of indie publishers, and so I think it’s a net loss for the platform.
  2. “That sharing on social media is cumbersome.” Yes, it is, arguably because sharing on social media is just another platform to lock yourself into. But even if you deem sharing on social media is a good thing to do, which I very much doubt, podcasts are still an open enough standard that you can create a link which has timestamp information on it and takes a user straight to the content you want them to see, no middle man, and go get your podcast if they like what they hear.
  3. That “they need more information about their listeners”. Users are smart. They know they’re being spied on. They see that they search for a spork on Amazon 3 years ago, have been flagged as being a user that’s interested in alternative-dining options, and that you’ve continued to programmatically serve them ads across websites. They don’t like it. To bring programatic, unskippable ads to podcasts would be more damaging than lucrative, and so I would implore publishers to find alternative business models, namely sponsorship.

Marco Arment made a similar case:

Big podcasters also apparently want Apple to insert itself as a financial intermediary to allow payment for podcasts within Apple’s app. We’ve seen how that goes. Trust me, podcasters, you don’t want that.

It would not only add rules, restrictions, delays, and big commissions, but it would increase Apple’s dominant role in podcasts, push out diversity, give Apple far more control than before, and potentially destroy one of the web’s last open media ecosystems.

Remember I was talking about how you can just fire up an WordPress instance and get to podcast publishing? If it was more of a “platform”, we’d see the same problem’s that the App Store is struggling with: that the top 1% of the podcasts earn 99% of the profit. The reason for this is that big publishers would be better equipped to negotiate with Apple or whoever the platform owner is. It may be harder to earn a buck in today’s podcast ecosystem, but I am convinced that it’s better than centralizing control.

Federico Viticci gives his two cents for MacStories:

The great thing about the free and decentralized web is that the aforementioned web platforms are optional and they’re alternatives to an existing open field where independent makers can do whatever they want. I can own my content, offer my RSS feed to anyone, and resist the temptation of slowing down my website with 10 different JavaScript plugins to monitor what my users do. No one is forcing me to agree to the terms of a platform.

I understand why the web tends towards centralization today: owning and running a server is a naturally centralized relationship, especially considering that the knowledge has yet to disseminate to everyone. That won’t last forever, I am convinced that one day the barrier for entry for running your own server will be so low and the dissemination of technical knowledge will be so great that these arguments will become obsolete.

In the mean time I plan on complaining as loud as I can in order to defend indie producers.

Apple Music in iOS 9.3

Posted on by Paul Jones

Apple are publicizing their new APIs for Apple Music in iOS 9.3:

Provide controls for Apple Music within your app. iOS 9.3 now supports playback of any song for Apple Music members.

This is a good move, because controlling and managing music is so personal to people. For instance, listeners of classical music (I’m told) don’t necessarily prefer “artist” to be the top level entity, instead preferring the performer. This is an opportunity for 3rd party app developers to get in on the success of Apple’s music streaming service by filling niches that Apple are struggling to cater to with the one-size-fits-all Music app.

“Could children one day sue parents for posting baby pics on Facebook?”

Posted on by Paul Jones

I find myself both envious of the technology that children grow up with these days and contradictorily thankful that my childhood wasn’t as public as it might’ve been today. Furthermore, I find it oddly uncomfortable and saddening to see how infants react to being filmed with a smartphone, because their eyes immediately fix on the camera, like they know it’s important but they’re not sure why. On that note, France has created a precedent which would allow babies to sue their parents for violations of privacy:

That photo of your toddler running around in a nappy or having a temper tantrum? Think before you post it on Facebook. That’s the advice from French authorities, which have warned parents in France they could face fines of up to €45,000 (£35,000) and a year in prison for publishing intimate photos of their children on social media without permission, as part of the country’s strict privacy laws.

Can children or infants consent to being recorded? Are parents responsible for managing their child’s privacy? What’s the harm in posting your baby pictures for your baby? I’d argue that most infants don’t understand privacy, that in fact the consent does fall upon the parents to manage (for better or worse), and that the harm is that before your child comes to the age of consent, they have already irrevocably lost a part of their privacy. In a way, it’s akin to smoking around your child, became through no fault of the child, little parts of their well-being are gone forever. Of course, people will disagree, especially considering that those pictures likely bring great pleasure to social-media-savvy grandparents.

“Paul Ryan” and the Trump fail

Posted on by Paul Jones

Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan:

Actually existing Ryan has always been a con man — someone playing the part of Serious, Honest Conservative, but never doing a very good job of it. His budgets were always fraudulent in obvious ways, full of trillion-dollar magic asterisks and spectacular evasions. But he has consistently been portrayed in news reports and analysis as an earnest policy wonk. Why?

Krugman thinks that the reason he’s portrayed as honest comes from within the Republican strategy, but I’d argue that more blame lies with the news agencies themselves. Corporate news are corporations too, and they want to policies that are equitable to them and their affiliates and subsidiaries. So they portray politicians that are sympathetic to them in similarly sympathetic light.

As much as I loathe Trump’s public lies, racism, sexism, and casual fascism, his sentiment towards the Republican establishment is well placed, and because of their years of deceiving the people with wedge issues, they deserve every bit of the mess he made of their primary and legitimacy.

John Doe’s Manifesto

Posted on by Paul Jones

The whistleblower behind the Panama Papers has released a manifesto under “John Doe.” It’s powerful. Read the whole thing, here’s the conclusion:

The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake. But when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern. It signals that democracy’s checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic, and that severe instability could be just around the corner. So now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions.

Historians can easily recount how issues involving taxation and imbalances of power have led to revolutions in ages past. Then, military might was necessary to subjugate peoples, whereas now, curtailing information access is just as effective or more so, since the act is often invisible. Yet we live in a time of inexpensive, limitless digital storage and fast internet connections that transcend national boundaries. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots: from start to finish, inception to global media distribution, the next revolution will be digitized.

Or perhaps it has already begun.

Atlanta Mayor’s column ripping Sanders drafted by lobbyist

Posted on by Paul Jones

From stretching campaign finance rules, to stretching campaigning near voting booth rules, to clinching super delegates in states lost by well over double digits, the Clinton campaign has really been disappointing me. And now there’s this:

A few days before the Georgia primary, influential Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed published a column on CNN.com praising Hillary Clinton and ripping her opponent, Bernie Sanders. Reed attacked Sanders as being out of step with Democrats on gun policy, and accused him of elevating a “one-issue platform” that ignores the plight of the “single mother riding two buses to her second job.”

But emails released from Reed’s office indicate that the column, which pilloried Sanders as out of touch with the poor, was primarily written by a corporate lobbyist, and was edited by Correct the Record, one of several pro-Clinton Super PACs.

Clinton’s politics is more of the same, and right now is not bad for some people, especially the wealthy, moreso the politically wealthy. But her moral barometer is clearly broken, and her campaign is one the most unimaginative in modern Democratic history (which I don’t understand because she’s been planing this for decades!). The reason, in my opinion, for this level of desperation is that the Democratic establishment know that Sanders’ message is resonating with people, and that scares them, because $27 a person is a lot less than $2,700 (for people) or unlimited amounts (to SuperPACs).

“Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously.”

Posted on by Paul Jones

As I’ve said, I use Apple Music because it’s convenient, it’s baked into my iPhone, and it’s a good value considering how much I use it (the conjunction of these points amounts to, essentially, laziness). The reason I bring it up is this via Marco Arment:

This Apple Music horror story is making the rounds today. It sounds like either a severe user error or a severe bug, and there’s no way to know which it is, but regardless, this aside is good advice:

For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “Hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

Own your data.

I keep my personal media, like rare MP3s I found of my favorite bands, demos my friends have given me, and songs I’ve made, completely separate from iTunes, and you should too. This is closely related the point that Apple is your biggest dependency (and that’s usually fine). It didn’t used to be this way, when I could trust iTunes and it’s simple filesystem storage, but when I signed up for iTunes Match, that got really complicated and so I moved those files.

For related reading, here’s Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read”, which will make you either paranoid or scoff.

App Store search is currently broken

Posted on by Paul Jones

The App Store search results are behaving strangely, specifically, a search for “Spotify” yields “SoundCloud” (and others that aren’t Spotify) and a search for many smaller apps yields nothing. I take this as an accidental early roll-out of pay-to-play search, perhaps. Here’s Craig Grannel‘s take:

All this makes me think is that, once again, the App Store needs a serious kicking. But also Apple needs to do a bit more stealing. I might grumble about Android and that Google Play is mostly full of garbage, but at least when I find something I want to install on my Android devices, I can do so from the web.

I agree that the the App Store needs a serious kicking, but I’m not sure that being able to install remotely would be enough. This search bug is unfortunately timed, because discovery is by far the most lacking component of the App Store. I don’t have a proposal for how to improve discoverability when there are so many apps, but given Phil Schiller is now heading things up at the App Store, I’m hopeful they’ll be an announcement at WWDC.

This reminds me of a fact I learned at an iOS meet up that deserve repeating: as app developers, Apple is our biggest dependency. Mostly this deal works out great: Apple take 30% and the hardware profit to promote and sustain the marketplace for 3rd party apps. But Apple is still a dependency, and this isn’t the App Store’s first year, it’s not Apple’s job to promote 3rd party apps, it’s your job as a publisher. If you don’t like that, there are other platforms.

Update: iMore have a hilarious addendum to this story:

It also seems as though the problem is impacting the Mac App Store as well, with Apple’s Xcode missing from search results.

Windows 10 updates are now ruining pro-gaming streams

Posted on by Paul Jones

One day a few weeks ago, my roommate and I were hanging out, watching a video on his computer or something or another. All of a sudden, he starts complaining that his OS had chosen to automatically update his computer. Having read on the blogosphere that Windows was getting more aggressive about its update flows, I told him other people were experience it as well. It’s been getting worse, apparently:

After deciding to try and ruin advertise during the weather by attempting to automatically install midway through a forecast, Windows 10 is starting to wreak havoc with gamers. Ex-professional Counter Strike player turned full-time streamer Erik Flom was rudely interrupted mid-game and live on Twitch by Windows 10 automatically installing on his PC.

This is a huge PR problem that Microsoft absolutely deserve for this behavior. Pro-gamers make their living by streaming, making these upgrade policies costly embarrassments. The core problem that not even Mac users are immune to is that we use software that we don’t, and very often can’t, fully understand, even as a community. I mean this in the sense that these operating systems are closed source, and sometimes they have malicious behaviors like this one. If the code was at least available for auditing or was fully open-source, experts in the community could decry malicious behavior.

I’m not an open-source stalwart, in part because of what I interpret as necessity, but I’m definitely an open-source evangelist. When you can, use GNU/Linux.

What happens next will test the character for all of us

Posted on by Paul Jones

Elizabeth Warren via Facebook:

Donald Trump is now the leader of the Republican Party. It’s real – he is one step away from the White House. Here’s what else is real:

Trump has built his campaign on racism, sexism, and xenophobia. There’s more enthusiasm for him among leaders of the KKK than leaders of the political party he now controls.

He incites supporters to violence, praises Putin, and, according to a columnist who recently interviewed him, is “cool with being called an authoritarian” and doesn’t mind associations with history’s worst dictators.

He attacks veterans like John McCain who were captured and puts our servicemembers at risk by cheerleading illegal torture. In a world with ISIS militants and leaders like North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Un conducting nuclear tests, he surrounds himself with a foreign policy team that has been called a “collection of charlatans,” and puts out contradictory and nonsensical national security ideas one expert recently called “incoherent” and “truly bizarre.”

What happens next will test the character for all of us – Republican, Democrat, and Independent. It will determine whether we move forward as one nation or splinter at the hands of one man’s narcissism and divisiveness. I know which side I’m on, and I’m going to fight my heart out to make sure Donald Trump’s toxic stew of hatred and insecurity never reaches the White House.

Well said.

Obama’s offshore drilling proposal rests on research funded by fossil fuel industry

Posted on by Paul Jones

In order to justify expanding fossil fuel production, the Obama administration is citing the economic benefits of this activity. Unfortunately, according the International Business Times, these studies were funded by the same groups which stand to benefit from this expansion:

Buried in the BOEM report’s fine print, though, were footnotes shedding light on how the bureau came to its conclusions: it used studies from the same fossil fuel industry that could benefit from the expansion. Eight of the nine economic analyses cited by government regulators in their report were produced by authors or organizations with links to the fossil fuel industry — whichhasbeen lobbying the federal government on drilling issues in the lead-up to a decision.

This reminds me a great deal of the initial study that set off the anti-vaccination movement: the study was funded by a group to smear a competitor’s MMR vaccine in favor of the group’s M/M/R approach (giving each vaccine separately). The moral of both stories is: biased, namely corporate-funded, research is dangerous. If the studies are found to have any fault in favor of the oil lobby, the publishers and authors should be shamed and expelled with the same intensity as the author of the anti-vaccination “corrupt science”.