By John Gruber

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Friday, 7 July 2023

Le Monde: ‘France Set to Allow Police to Spy Through Phones’ ★

Le Monde:

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only “dozens of cases a year.”

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

It’s unclear from this article whether the law would simply allow police to try to do this, using security exploits to plant malware on targets’ devices, or if France is going to mandate that all devices include back doors to enable it. Either way, good luck with that. The way the article is written, it’s made to seem that the police have the technical ability to just do this. They don’t.

GQ Shits the Bed ★

Will Sommer, reporting for The Washington Post:

In an unusual step, GQ magazine removed an article critical of powerful media executive David Zaslav from its website just hours after it was published Monday, following a complaint from Zaslav’s camp. [...] At one point, Bailey compared Zaslav to tyrannical “Succession” patriarch Logan Roy. “In a relatively short period of time, David Zaslav has become perhaps the most hated man in Hollywood,” Bailey wrote.

A Zaslav spokesman complained to GQ about the story soon after it was published, according to people close to the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve confidences. By early afternoon on Monday, the magazine had made extensive edits to the story. [...]

Bailey told The Washington Post that, after GQ made the changes, he asked editors to remove his byline. He said an editor told him that GQ would not keep an article on its website without the author’s name. By Monday afternoon, the article was removed entirely from the site.

Humiliating cowardice on the part of GQ’s editors. The original article was harsh but accurate. It had some zingers, yes, but it was mostly just a factual list of the actual shitty and stupid things Zaslov has done since he took the helm of the newly combined Warner Bros Discovery conglomerate. Why would GQ do this? There’s a wee bit of a bad smell with this:

GQ has a corporate connection to Warner Bros. Discovery. The magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, is owned by Advance Publications, a major shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery. Advance Publications did not respond to a request for comment.

But over at Variety, Tatiana Siegel uncovers the stench:

GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch is producing a movie at Warner Bros. titled “The Great Chinese Art Heist,” which is based on a 2018 GQ article by Alex W. Palmer. [...] Sources say Welch was involved in the discussions surrounding the removal of Bailey’s initial story and made the call to pull the revamped story, which ran some 500 words shorter than the published version. Those same sources say Warner Bros. Discovery complained about the initial story to two GQ editors, one of whom was Welch.

MrBeast Trolls Elon Musk on Threads ★

Truly a singular genius. It’s hard to imagine a funnier giveaway stunt than this.

Thursday, 6 July 2023

Twitter Is Threatening to Sue Meta Over Threads, Meta Executives Threaten to Piss Their Pants Laughing ★

Max Tani, reporting for Semafor:

On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

Good luck with that.

Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

It’s comical to think that Meta needed engineers from Twitter to build Threads. Like Twitter is a model of reliability and stability, and Meta’s platforms don’t serve an entire order of magnitude more users. Even more comical:

Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.

Even if ex-Twitter employees were working on Threads, Elon Musk fired them. It’s not illegal to hire people fired by a competitor. Would be kind of wacky if it were. This letter is so transparent: Musk is threatened by Threads and jealous of the mountain of media attention it’s getting, so he’s lashing out. Commanding his lawyer to send a silly letter like this feels like a Trump move, no exaggeration.

Mastodon’s FAQ on Threads ★

Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon:

Today, Meta is launching its new microblogging platform called Threads. What is noteworthy about this launch is that Threads intends to become part of the decentralized social web by using the same standard protocol as Mastodon, ActivityPub. There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.

What strikes me about this FAQ is that nearly every question has no basis in reality. It’s calming the irrational fears of people who view Facebook as a corporate bogeyman. Having written quite a bit recently about Threads joining the open fediverse, I can vouch that these fears are real, insofar as people really do think Threads is somehow going to steal their data, or that Facebook is somehow going to show ads to people on Mastodon servers, but those fears have no more basis in reality than worrying about monsters who live under your bed.

Here’s the one that really matters:

Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?

There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Custom Domain Names as Bluesky Handles — Fun Feature, and Now a Business Model ★

From the official Bluesky (pro tip: rhymes with brewski and Russki) blog:

We believe that there must be better strategies to sustain social networks that don’t require selling user data for ads. Our first step in another direction is paid services, and we’re starting with custom domains. While setting up a custom domain to use with Bluesky and the AT Protocol is fairly straightforward, it does require some familiarity with domain registrars and DNS settings. Yet, over 13,000 users have already either repurposed domains they already owned to use as handles, or purchased a domain solely because of Bluesky. Domains have so much potential as a personalized way to customize identities and as a decentralized way to verify reputation that builds off the existing web. For example, U.S. Senators have used the senate.gov domain to verify their identity on Bluesky without our involvement, and a third-party developer built a web extension that checks if websites are linked to an AT Protocol identity. The possibilities are wide in the domain-as-a-handle space.

We’re partnering with Namecheap, a popular domain registrar, to offer a service for easy domain purchasing and management. With this, people can set a custom domain as their handle on Bluesky and the AT Protocol in under a few minutes.

Making it a built-in feature and a source of recurring revenue for the Bluesky company — legally, a public benefit corporation — is a great idea. Using a custom domain name as your handle is one of the best features of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and it really is rather simple. But by building it in as a feature, Bluesky can make it super simple, and remove the possibility of error.

In Bluesky’s settings (which are relatively concise), go to “Change Handle” under “Advanced”. Then tap (or click) “I have my own domain.” On the next screen enter the domain name you own and wish to use in the top field, and Bluesky will show you the domain and value to enter at your registrar. I’m using “gruber.foo”, but you can just as easily use a subdomain like “john.gruber.foo”. The Daring Fireball account on Bluesky will be “daringfireball.net” — I could have used “gruber.daringfireball.net” for my personal account. A publication like, say, The New York Times could allow reporters to each have official Bluesky accounts like “reportername.nytimes.com”. Verification, in a sense, is built in.

Then just go to your domain registrar and create an entry of type “TXT” using the domain and value you copied from the Bluesky app. Wait a few minutes for the change to propagate and your custom domain is now your Bluesky handle. Here’s a screenshot from my settings at Google Domains.

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Monday, 3 July 2023

Instagram’s Threads App Was Briefly Listed on Google Play Over the Weekend ★

Threads, the ActivityPub-compatible Twitter clone from Instagram, briefly (and presumably inadvertently) was listed in the Google Play Store over the weekend. The app itself wasn’t available, but Alessandro Paluzzi captured screenshots. The icon is plain but clever: a thread in the shape of an “@”. It’s showing up in the Play Store in Europe, too.

That Threads is seemingly very close to launching makes Twitter’s rate-limiting all the more baffling. Twitter users want an alternative, and Elon Musk is now actively pushing them away. (Dave Lee, in a column for Bloomberg, dismisses Mastodon in a single painful sentence: “One of them, Mastodon, saw a big spike in users this weekend, but can’t shake its reputation as being overly complex for non-techy users.”)

Update: Threads is now pre-listed in the App Store, marked as being available on this Thursday, July 6. Here’s the icon. Shit’s getting real.

Mashable: ‘Twitter’s API Keeps Breaking, Even for Developers Paying $42,000’ ★

Matt Binder, reporting for Mashable:

According to developers paying Twitter, since the switch over to Elon Musk’s paid API subscription plans, Twitter’s API has experienced frequent issues that make it extremely difficult to run their apps.

Twitter’s API issues have frustrated developers in each of Twitter’s new API access tiers. Those with Basic or Pro plans — paying $100 and $5000 a month for API access, respectively — have experienced unannounced changes to their plans, numerous bugs, and often receive zero customer support. And developers shelling out for Twitter’s Enterprise API Plan, which starts at $42,000 per month, are experiencing sudden outages and disappointing service considering the money they’re paying.

“Everything used to work fine before we started paying half a million per year,” shared one developer in a private Twitter developer group chat shared with Mashable.

This is how Twitter is dealing with paid services. At this point, choosing to pay for Twitter Blue as a user looks about as smart as buying a ticket for OceanGate’s next submarine.

The CEO Who Isn’t in Charge of the Company ★

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

Well, look, if I were the newly hired chief executive officer of a social media company, and if the directors and shareholders who brought me in as CEO had told me that my main mission was to turn around the company’s precarious financial situation by improving our position with advertisers, and if I spent my first few weeks reassuring advertisers and rebuilding relationships and talking up our site’s unique audience and powerful engagement, and then one day my head of software engineering came to me and said “hey boss, too many people were too engaged with too many posts, so I had to limit everyone’s ability to view posts on our site, just FYI,” I would ... probably ... fire ... him?

I mean I suppose I might ask questions like “Is this because of some technological limitation on our system? Is it because you were monkeying with the code without understanding it? Is it because you tried to stop people from reading the site without logging in, and messed up and stopped them from reading the site even when they logged in? Is it because you fired and demoralized too many engineers so no one was left to keep the systems running normally? Is it because you forgot to pay the cloud bills? Is it because deep down you don’t like it when people read posts on our site and you want to stop them, or you don’t like relying on ad revenue and want to sabotage my ability to sell ads?” Those are all interesting questions, and I suppose having the answers would help my new head of software engineering fix whatever this guy broke. But no matter what the answers are, this guy’s gotta go. If you are in charge of the software engineers at a social media site, and you make it so that people can’t read the site, that’s bad.

The only way you wouldn’t fire the head of software at Twitter would be, say, if he owned the company.

Axiom ★

My thanks to Axiom for sponsoring last week at DF. Axiom is logging, re-invented. They give developers — and everyone else in your organization — the power to gain instant, actionable insights on all your data as efficiently as possible. Visit their Playground to see how it works, and peruse their succinct, cogent FAQ to learn everything you’d want to know about them.

Axiom pricing starts at just $25/month for 1 TB/month of logs. Get all your logs, all the time.

CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Vision for Twitter 2.0: Sound-On Video Ads ★

Hannah Murphy, reporting for The Financial Times:

Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is preparing a series of measures to bring back advertisers who had abandoned the platform under Elon Musk’s ownership, including introducing a video ads service, wooing more celebrities, and raising headcount.

The former NBCUniversal advertising head, who started as chief executive on June 5, is seeking to launch full-screen, sound-on video ads that would be shown to users scrolling through Twitter’s new short-video feed, according to three people familiar with the situation.

That sounds just lovely. Now I’m definitely going to pay for a Twitter Blue account. I just love sound-on video ads. Hopefully they’ll intersperse them between every 2 or 3 regular tweets.

Everything Continues to Be Going Just Great at Twitter ★

Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch:

Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping. While this measure has affected all Twitter users, TweetDeck users in particular are today reporting major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load.

Musk initially enforced read-limits of 6,000 daily posts for verified users and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets, respectively. Given that TweetDeck loads up multiple tweets through various columns simultaneously, it’s likely that the effects of the read restrictions are amplified within TweetDeck.

Needless to say it’s rather nutty that a business whose primary revenue stream is advertising would institute rate limits at all, let alone severe limits that typical users bump up against in about 20 minutes of browsing. Musk’s thinking, one presumes, is that this is the masterstroke that will prompt people to sign up for Twitter Blue at $8-11/month.

The bigger, more fundamental change Musk instituted over the weekend is making it such that tweets aren’t visible unless you’re logged in to a Twitter account. This broke all sorts of things. Messaging apps (like Apple’s Messages) can no longer render preview cards for tweets, for one thing. Closer to home, it broke the @daringfireball auto-posting account. More amusingly, as documented by Sheldon Chang, this change completely broke Twitter itself — some part of the Rube Goldberg-ian machine that assembles users’ timeline feeds was itself subjected to these rate limits, so Twitter wound up DDOSing itself. It’s like a gasoline company instituting rations that stranded its own fleet of tanker trucks.

From its inception through this weekend, Twitter has been like blogging, insofar as tweets being public. You visit the URL for a tweet, you see the tweet. Now it’s a walled garden, like most of Facebook, available only to logged-in users. I suspect this change will prevent the Internet Archive from caching tweets, too. That just sucks.

WSJ: ‘Goldman Is Looking for a Way Out of Its Partnership With Apple’ ★

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

The Wall Street firm is in talks with American Express to take over its Apple credit card and other ventures with the tech giant, according to people familiar with the matter. Goldman went public with plans to scale back its consumer business late last year, but it appeared committed to the Apple relationship. The bank recently extended the partnership through the end of the decade, agreed to support Apple’s “buy now, pay later” offering and launched a bank account with the tech company.

Now it is in talks to offload those businesses and its credit-card partnership to Amex, according to people familiar with the discussions. A deal with Amex isn’t imminent or assured, people familiar with the conversations said, and it could take a while to transfer the partnership in any case. Apple would have to agree to a transfer. The tech company is aware of the talks, which have been ongoing for months, the people said. [...]

In January, Goldman disclosed that it had lost about $3 billion on the consumer-lending push since 2020.

It’s unclear how much of Goldman’s losses in their consumer banking foray are attributable to the Apple Card specifically, but Sridhar Natarajan reported for Bloomberg^* back in January that it’s the source of most of their losses:

The division’s $1 billion pretax loss reported for 2021 was mostly tied to the Apple Card, people with knowledge of the numbers said. And about $2 billion in 2022 mainly stems from the Apple card and installment-lending platform GreenSky, the people said.

How you lose money issuing credit cards that charge usurious interest rates is beyond me. Not quite in the territory of Donald Trump somehow losing money while running casinos, but it’s up there. Are they issuing Apple Cards to deadbeats? (Apparently, yes: they’ve been issuing a lot of cards to people with bad credit.)

If Goldman does bail, AmEx would be as good a partner as any for Apple: they know how to deliver a premium experience and turn a good profit doing so.

* You know.

Astra Carta Seal ★

LoveFrom Serif in action, again:

The Astra Carta seal was designed by Sir Jony Ive and his team at the creative collective LoveFrom.

The design complements the Terra Carta seal, using the same typography and St Edward’s Crown. The structure is similarly defined by sacred geometry, overlaid with astronomical motion and heavenly bodies.

The animation is rather hypnotic. Somehow both busy and peaceful. (And the actual document — the Summarium — is entirely set in LoveFrom Serif as well.)

Sunday, 2 July 2023

Humane Reveals Product Name: ‘Ai Pin’ ★

Humane:

Humane, Inc. today announced its first device will be called the Humane Ai Pin, the latest detail to be revealed ahead of its launch later this year. The Humane Ai Pin is a new type of standalone device with a software platform that harnesses the power of AI to enable innovative personal computing experiences. [...] Humane’s first device will be powered by an advanced Snapdragon platform from Qualcomm Technologies. [...]

Dev Singh, Vice President, Business Development of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. commented: “We are proud to be collaborating with Humane and that this first-of-a-kind clothing-based wearable device will be powered by Snapdragon. Humane’s Ai Pin will deliver a superior AI experience and feature an assortment of on-device AI capabilities. Its revolutionary and sleek form factor is packed with powerful performance so that it can make sense of real-time contextual information and provide the wearer with a new and exciting experience. We cannot wait to see where they take this device.”

We’ll have to take Singh’s word for it that the form factor is “revolutionary and sleek”, as they still aren’t showing it.

David Pierce at The Verge:

Humane continues to be mysterious about how the Ai Pin works, what exactly it will do, and even what it looks like. (Most mysterious of all: why in the world is “AI” not capitalized? What is “Ai?” Am I supposed to pronounce it like “eye?” I am confident this will infuriate The Verge’s copy desk and me in equal measure for years to come.)

The Daring Fireball Style Desk is on break for the extended U.S. holiday weekend, and hasn’t yet issued a ruling.

Saturday, 1 July 2023

The Password Game ★

Another dose of old-school internet fun from Neal Agarwal.

Friday, 30 June 2023

The Talk Show: ‘The M Is for Magnificent’ ★

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show for a post-WWDC discussion about Vision Pro and VisionOS.

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XKCD’s Annotated Alphabet ★

Tangential to typography, but it seems fitting with this week’s theme nonetheless. This comic, to me, is Randall Munroe at his best: distilling a vague universally held thought into crystallized form.

Hoefler’s Proof for Testing Fonts ★

While I’m on a font kick, I greatly enjoyed this essay from Jonathan Hoefler:

Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Sometime in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.

I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.

Thursday, 29 June 2023

Womprat: ‘The Font You’re Looking For’ ★

On another end of the new font spectrum, Womprat — designed by Louie Mantia, engineered by Ender Smith — is every bit as Star Wars-y, if not more so, than any typography from Lucasfilm itself. If I worked at Disney I’d write a check to buy the exclusive rights to Womprat. It’s so good, so right, so fun, and so amazingly technically detailed. It’s as much coded programmatically as it is designed visually. And it includes an assortment of dingbat icons. Hell, even the slogan is perfect.

Domingo Germán Throws the 24th Perfect Game in MLB History ★

Lindsey Adler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Before the season began, New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán changed his jersey number from 55 to 0. It turned out to be a prescient move. On Wednesday night, Germán became just the 24th pitcher in MLB history to throw a perfect game, using just 99 pitches to mow through 27 Oakland A’s batters without allowing a single baserunner.

Entering the game with a 5.10 ERA in his first 14 starts of the season, Germán completed the first perfect game since Félix Hernández threw one for the Mariners in August 2012. There were three perfectos thrown that year — by Hernández, Matt Cain, and Phillip Humber — but nearly 11 seasons had passed without one occurring.

“Growing up, [Hernández] was my idol,” Germán said through a translator after the game. “I really looked up to the way he pitched.”

LoveFrom Serif ★

Mark Wilson, in a profile back in April for Fast Company about the creation of LoveFrom Serif, a new font family designed by many of the designers behind Apple’s remarkable San Francisco family:

Serifs (think Times New Roman) became the focus instead, and after an exhaustive search, LoveFrom designer Antonio Cavedoni landed on Baskerville as a source of inspiration. The typeface is one everyone has seen, so it would be quietly familiar, even timeless. But it has enough expressive components that it could live in many contexts. Just as great of an appeal was the historical context of John Baskerville himself.

“John Baskerville as a person, as a craftsperson, was uncannily similar in his obsessiveness and his character to those of us at LoveFrom,” Ive says. “And that really, in a very natural way, became the starting point for developing our own typeface.”

Baskerville was indeed obsessive, Cavedoni explains. As we wrote in our story on the Terra Carta, Baskerville first made his money in “japanned” lacquerwork items. As he reached his 40s, he had the resources to go heads-down on his passion for word-making. As a trained calligrapher, he wanted to elevate the quality of book printing. He obsessed over not just the design of his typeface Baskerville but of the crafted execution of the individual metal “punches” that pressed each letter to ensure the printing was sharp. He even formulated an improved ink, and learned he could place woven paper into hot brass cylinders to give it a glossy finish.

A type designer who veered into innovations in ink formulation and paper finishing — yes, that sounds like a kindred spirit to Ive and his colleagues.

The entirety of Steve Jobs’s Make Something Wonderful — both on the web and in the limited print editions — is, unsurprisingly, typeset in LoveFrom. Before that, I’d only encountered LoveFrom Serif in small doses, and typically at display sizes (like the LoveFrom website’s home page). Turns out it’s quite good — traditional but distinctive — as a long-form text face. Broadly speaking, most people perceive serif fonts as more formal, sans serifs more casual. LoveFrom Serif feels like a friendly, emotionally warm serif, but which cedes no ground on formality and structure. British, for sure, but somehow with a welcome whiff of California. It’s clearly derived from Baskerville, but evokes a different feel, particularly at text sizes, than the eponymous Baskerville that ships on Apple platforms.

Cavedoni presented a lecture just this week entitled “Unexpected Baskerville: The Story of LoveFrom Serif”, at San Francisco’s Main Public Library. It pains me to have missed what appears to have been a remarkable presentation, with noteworthy guests and historic books, but a video recording is forthcoming “later this year”.

Postscript: I’ve been sitting on this link for a few weeks, partly because, well, I do that, but also because I wanted to let the experience of having read Make Something Wonderful settle in. That book, to me, is LoveFrom Serif’s true debut. If you want to exercise a typeface, set a book in it. It has occurred to me several times during this stretch how much I miss Dean Allen, and specifically, herewith, I crave his thoughts on both the typeface and the book. Re-reading for the umpteenth time Twenty Faces, Dean’s remarkably concise and compelling “survey of available text typefaces”, I was reminded that his entry on ITC Baskerville points also to Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko’s inspired 1996 revival (has it been that long? I will forever think of Mrs Eaves as a “new” typeface), which Dean described thus: “an interesting if mannered experiment in reviving Baskerville by aping the unpredictability of form found in letterpress text.”

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Monday, 26 June 2023

Ron Amadeo’s Pixel Fold Lasted Four Days ★

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

I didn’t do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100 percent brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen. The entire left half of the foldable display stopped responding to touch, too, and an hour later, a white gradient started growing upward across the display. [...]

Manufacturers keep wanting to brush off the significant durability issues of flexible OLED displays, thinking that if they just shove the devices onto the market, everything will work out. That hasn’t been the case, though, and any time you see a foldable phone for sale, you don’t have to look far to see reports of dead displays. I’m sure we’ll see several reports of broken Pixel Folds once the unit hits the general public.

Earlier today I described the market for foldables as a niche (people willing to spend nearly $2,000) within a niche (people willing to buy any phone that doesn’t support using a protective case) within a niche (people who want a foldable phone in the first place). But that’s within another level of niche: people who don’t care that foldables are relatively fragile.

Sorry, but XMPP Was Doomed, Not Extinguished by Google ★

Ploum, in a piece titled “How to Kill a Decentralised Network (Such as the Fediverse)”:

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that). [...]

While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).

Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger and more important than it is today. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.

This is in the context of the situation with Mastodon and Facebook’s upcoming “Threads” project, and the subset of Mastodon instance admins who are pledging preemptively to block it. Basically it’s an argument that Google applied Microsoft’s old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy to kill XMPP, and that thus XMPP is a better example than email when debating whether large scale federated protocols should allow large corporate instances to join.

I don’t buy it. XMPP is an instant messaging protocol. Instant messaging is effectively dead. AIM is gone and I learned only while writing this post that ICQ is apparently still around. All modern messaging protocols have some form of message persistence; instant messaging did not. With instant messaging you could only send a message to someone while they were logged in with the client app open and running. You can’t prove a negative, but I see no scenario where XMPP would have any relevance today, regardless of Google’s decisions a decade ago.

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Monday, 26 June 2023

Allison Johnson Reviews the $1,800 Google Pixel Fold ★

Allison Johnson, writing for The Verge:

Google has optimized a bunch of its own apps to work in the Fold’s unfolded tablet mode, and they’re great. Gmail, YouTube, Photos — they all make use of the full screen by putting information in sidebars and vertical columns. Chrome has a desktop-like interface, complete with tabs at the top of the window and the ability to load the full versions of websites. Google Meet readily moved a tiled view of attendees to the top part of the screen when I set the phone up in an L-shape, sliding the controls to the bottom half of the display. I didn’t have to fiddle with anything — it just worked.

A lot of third-party apps don’t take advantage of the whole inner screen, though, which stinks. Instagram is just a phone-sized app with black bars on either side. Same with Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and even Google-owned Fitbit. You can double-tap the blank space on either side to quickly slide the app to the left, right, or middle, which is nice. TikTok plays its vertical videos in the middle of the screen but at least uses the extra space on either side to move all the text that’s usually right on top of the video out of the way. Even so, it feels like a lot of wasted space when you’re not watching a video or multitasking.

This form factor seems more appealing to me than flip phones, but still, I have not an iota of envy from my perch on the iPhone side of the fence. It’s good that Google has tweaked so many of its own Android apps to fully embrace the tablet-sized folded-out screen, but if most of the third-party apps you most use don’t, that seems like the end of the discussion right there.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: third-party developers aren’t going to spend time embracing these foldable screens unless there are a lot of phones in use sporting them, but users aren’t likely to buy them until there’s widespread support for them in the apps they use most. If this is a great form factor then Google should stand behind it with a push that declares that foldable screens are the future of Android, or at least the future of Pixel phones. Otherwise it all seems like a waste of time.

The other problem, I’ll reiterate, is cases. The overwhelming majority of people put their phones in protective cases. The more expensive a phone is, the more likely people will see the need to “protect” it with a case. This phone starts at $1,800 for 256 GB of storage, and costs $1,919 for 512 GB. (The iPhone 14 Pro costs $1,200/$1,400 for the same amounts of storage.) But foldable phones can’t be put in cases. They’re targeting a niche within a niche within a niche — people willing to spend $1,800 on a phone, without using a case, with a foldable display.

Update: Turns out, there are cases for the Pixel Fold: a $60 silicone case from Google itself, and a “coming soon” leather one from Bellroy. Another Update: Some cases from Spigen, starting at $60, and a collection from Android Police of others.

‘Inside the AI Factory: The Humans That Make Tech Seem Human’ ★

Josh Dzieza, in a splendid investigative report co-published by The Verge and New York Magazine:

For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.

The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is. [...]

This tangled supply chain is deliberately hard to map. According to people in the industry, the companies buying the data demand strict confidentiality. (This is the reason Scale cited to explain why Remotasks has a different name.) Annotation reveals too much about the systems being developed, and the huge number of workers required makes leaks difficult to prevent. Annotators are warned repeatedly not to tell anyone about their jobs, not even their friends and co-workers, but corporate aliases, project code names, and, crucially, the extreme division of labor ensure they don’t have enough information about them to talk even if they wanted to. (Most workers requested pseudonyms for fear of being booted from the platforms.) Consequently, there are no granular estimates of the number of people who work in annotation, but it is a lot, and it is growing. A recent Google Research paper gave an order-of-magnitude figure of “millions” with the potential to become “billions.”

Evocative artwork by Richard Parry accompanying the piece at The Verge, too.

Sunday, 25 June 2023

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for their continuing sponsorship support here at DF — they sponsored Daring Fireball last week, and they were the presenting sponsor at this year’s The Talk Show Live From WWDC. They’re a great company with a great product.

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong. Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, addresses this issue head-on.

Kolide offers a more nuanced approach than MDM solutions to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. Their premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.

Visit Kolide’s website to learn more and see it in action.

Friday, 23 June 2023

Former App Store Review Lead Phillip Shoemaker Seems to Have an Oddly Personal Grudge Against Phil Schiller ★

Neil Long, writing at Mobilegamer.biz, has an interesting interview with Phillip Shoemaker, who ran App Store review at Apple from 2009 to 2016:

Apple’s app review process remains a huge problem for mobile game-makers as they navigate vague guidelines and inconsistent rulings. So we asked Shoemaker for his thoughts on how Apple can fix it:

“The way to solve that inconsistency — and I hate to say it — is: let’s take a page from Google,” he told us. “Especially now with the AI tools that are out there. You can do probably 80% of the work the review team does.”

In the era of app stores, it’s seemed pretty clear that Apple’s has had fewer problems with malware slipping through than Google’s. I’m not aware of a single iOS developer who doesn’t think the App Store, especially review, can and should be improved in numerous ways. But neither “make it more like the Play Store” nor “use AI for review” sounds right to me.

Also, App Store review times have decreased from an average of about 5 days to 1 day since Shoemaker left Apple in 2016. (And my understanding is that new automation tools are a big part of that process improvement. Shoemaker’s gripes about App Store review seem stuck in 2016.)

Schiller appears to be the last holdout when it comes to automating app review compared to Apple SVPs Eddy Cue, Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak and App Store VP Matt Fischer. “I think the way to radically improve the App Store is have Phil be an Apple fellow and get his hands off the App Store,” says Shoemaker. “That’s what they really need to do. Eddy’s more progressive, Joz is more progressive, and we know Matt is as well. Phil just needs to get his meaty paws off the App Store.”

“If Phil doesn’t step back, it’ll absolutely be the courts making changes,” Shoemaker continues.

If I worked at Apple I’d print up a “Meaty Paws” sign and tape it to Schiller’s door.

“Phil needs to step back, I think that’s the main thing — new blood needs to come in there and make some changes because cutting the price and opening up the guidelines to allow new interesting things is going to be critical.”

Phil Schiller, of course, is the executive who suggested decreasing Apple’s rake in a memo back in 2011.

“It was tough working for Phil…he was one of those guys that would love to throw insults at people, right? I mean he had no boundaries — he’d insult your children and you’re like: ‘Why am I working at this company again?’”

Shoemaker would regularly get feedback from his kids on apps and games and use that feedback in the ERB meetings. “Phil would say things like, oh, that’s a stupid thing to say, are your kids that dumb? And you’re like, are you freaking kidding me?”

Seems like the two Phils did not get along. No word from Shoemaker on whether iWiz is coming back to the App Store, either.

Why Has Mastodon Adoption Stalled? ★

Bloonface, in a thoughtful post regarding the stagnation in growth in the Fediverse:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

After Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter there was an initial burst of new users and increased usage on Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse, but mostly this is about Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter). And then it flattened, and perhaps has even declined.

I would like to see Mastodon thrive. But the platform’s ideological zealotry is obviously holding it back and seemingly isn’t going to change. That’s why I’m much more optimistic about Bluesky’s long-term prospects. Six weeks later and I feel stronger than ever about this quip I posted in early May:

Bluesky: “If you liked Twitter, you’ll love Bluesky.”

Mastodon: “If you hated Twitter, you’ll like Mastodon.”

Hundreds of millions of people liked what Twitter once was, and what it aspired to be. Bluesky might be that.

WebKit on VisionOS Will Support Open WebXR Content ★

Ben Lang, writing for Road to VR:

In a somewhat surprising move, Apple confirmed that Safari on Vision Pro will support WebXR. Prior to the reveal of the headset, it was an open question whether the company would entertain the idea of XR experiences through the browser, and even more so if the company would adopt the relatively new WebXR standard. But now Apple has confirmed that Safari on Vision Pro will indeed support WebXR.

The company confirmed as much in its WWDC 2023 developer talk titled Meet Safari for Spatial Computing, in which Apple explained the version of Safari running on Vision Pro “truly is Safari with the same WebKit engine underneath, plus some thoughtful additions for [Vision Pro].”

Thanks to Safari on visionOS being a fully-featured version of the browser, existing websites should work exactly as expected, the company says. But to go beyond flat web pages, Safari on visionOS includes support for WebXR for immersive experiences and the new <model> tag for 3D models.

I don’t find this surprising at all. Apple has always embraced open content and the web, to the extent that it makes sense in the overall platform experience. Web browsing on mobile phones was practically non-existent before the iPhone. (Steve Jobs aptly described the circa 2007 mobile web as “the baby Internet” during the iPhone introduction.)

Perhaps most tellingly regarding VisionOS, Apple hired Ada Rose Cannon a year ago — she’s co-chair of the W3C Immersive Web Working Group and a preeminent figure in the WebXR community.

Thursday, 22 June 2023

Ian Betteridge on Meta and Mastodon ★

Ian Betteridge:

What defines Mastodon is not the use of a protocol. The protocol is just an enabler. Instead, Mastodon is defined by allowing communities (instances) freedom of association. It is the ability of communities to choose not to federate with anyone else which gives Mastodon its strength.

His whole post is thoughtful and considered, and worth your attention. Betteridge largely disagrees with me on this issue, and while he hasn’t changed my mind, I’m happy to direct your attention to his arguments.

But I do disagree with this:

If you want to understand why some communities are wary of Meta, it’s worth remembering how ActivityPub works. Let’s say I run an instance called EvilMole.social. If I don’t defederate (block) Meta’s server, any user on their server and any user on EvilMole can follow each other. So suppose that @[email protected] follows @[email protected] What happens?

First, every single one of Molesworth’s posts are now available to Meta, including all the replies they make to everyone including people who don’t follow anyone on Meta’s server. In other words, Meta gets access to posts from people who may very well have an issue with that.

If you don’t want Meta (or Google, or whoever) to see your posts, then no matter which instance you’re on, and which other servers your instance chooses to federate with, you need to make your account private. If you’re posting publicly on any Mastodon server, everything you post is visible to the world, including Meta. If your account isn’t private, you’re posting to the open web. Google doesn’t run an ActivityPub instance (yet?) but clearly they’re indexing Mastodon posts.

Wednesday, 21 June 2023

First Look at Early VisionOS Apps ★

Simon B. Støvring:

It’s amazing how much the appearance of a Vision Pro app changes depending on whether it’s built “Designed for iPad” against the iPadOS SDK or it is built as a proper Vision Pro app against the visionOS SDK.

I think “Designed for iPad” apps stand very little chance of becoming successful at launch. Users will expect apps that make heavy use of frosted glass and all the transitions that come with the visionOS SDK.

James Thomson:

This is PCalc running as a native Apple Vision Pro app (rather than running the existing iPadOS app as before).

Paul Hudson:

Once you have the visionOS SDK installed you can really see how the idea of light and dark mode just doesn’t make sense with Vision Pro — click the mountain icon in the bottom-right corner to try different environments, and also different times of day.

Exciting times ahead.

Typography 2024: Matthew Butterick on the Campaign Websites Thus Far ★

Matthew Butterick:

Even more confusing is the quadrennial hand-wringing about so-called “spoiler candidates”, a pejoration that keeps slouching toward normalized use, sort of like “frivolous lawsuit”. Let’s keep the blame for “spoiling” any election where it be longs — with the people who voted.

Largely, however, I think these theories are promoted by political journalists as a means of protecting their own hoary narratives of presidential politics. Here’s mine: It’s chaotic. It’s weird. Nobody knows anything. Thus, evaluating the candidates through the design & typography of their campaign websites is as valid a method as any. If you think otherwise, you’re a typographic spoiler.

Nothing inspiring in the whole bunch.

The best campaign branding I’ve seen in a long time was PA Senator John Fetterman’s last year. A distinctive color scheme, and typography that matched his personal image.

Chargers and Ports Designed by Committees Generally Suck, EV Edition ★

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

CharIn, the association behind the CCS EV charging standard, has issued a response to the Tesla and Ford partnership on the NACS charging standard. [...] Last month, Ford announced that it will integrate NACS, Tesla’s charge connector that it open-sourced last year in an attempt to make it the North American charging standard, into its future electric vehicles.

Obviously, CharIn is trying to defend itself and survive here, but I don’t think it is necessarily fighting fair.

When it comes to the charge connector itself, there’s no doubt that they lost the battle. It is almost comical how bad the design of the CCS connector is compared to Tesla’s.

The CCS charger is big fat and ugly, and has reliability problems. Tesla’s NACS charger is smaller, more reliable, and more elegant. The CCS charger is the EV equivalent of pre-USB-C USB ports. NACS is like Lightning. Rivian and GM are now on board with NACS too.

The best way to get a good standard port is to let proprietary designs fight it out in the market, and let the winner become the de facto standard.

David Pogue Had Suspicions Regarding Missing OceanGate Titanic Submarine ★

Jake Kanter, writing for Deadline:

A six-month-old CBS report on OceanGate’s Titanic tourism submarine is going viral on social media after reporter David Pogue raised safety concerns about the now-missing vessel.

Pogue visited OceanGate’s operations last year and was submerged in the $1M submarine, named Titan, which vanished off the coast of Canada on Sunday. It was carrying a pilot and four passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. [...]

“It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness. You are putting construction pipes as ballast,” Pogue said to Rush in an interview.

“I don’t know if I would use that description,” Rush replied. He added that the OceanGate worked with Boeing and Nasa on the pressure vessel. “Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you’re still going to be safe.”

Pogue said he was nervous before boarding and revealed some of the contents of the waiver form he was required to sign. This described the submarine as an “experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

Hindsight is 20-20, blah blah blah, but there’s no way you could have gotten me to go on this thing. So many red flags, not the least of which is that the vessel’s lone portal was only certified for a depth of 1,300 meters, but the Titanic wreck is 3,800 meters deep.

VisionOS SDK Is Now Available ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the availability of new software tools and technologies that enable developers to create groundbreaking app experiences for Apple Vision Pro — Apple’s first spatial computer. Featuring visionOS, the world’s first spatial operating system, Vision Pro lets users interact with digital content in their physical space using the most natural and intuitive inputs possible — their eyes, hands, and voice. [...] With the visionOS SDK, developers can utilize the powerful and unique capabilities of Vision Pro and visionOS to design brand-new app experiences across a variety of categories including productivity, design, gaming, and more.

Next month, Apple will open developer labs in Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo to provide developers with hands-on experience to test their apps on Apple Vision Pro hardware and get support from Apple engineers. Development teams will also be able to apply for developer kits to help them quickly build, iterate, and test right on Apple Vision Pro.

Three thoughts:

• This is the same SDK Apple itself is using to develop VisionOS apps. I mean, sure, Apple has access to private APIs, but that’s true on MacOS and iOS too. But this is not like the original WatchKit in 2015, where third-party developers were stuck with a severely limited SDK that was nothing like the APIs being used by Apple itself for the built-in WatchOS apps. This is real dogfooding, and I bet we see some very strong apps and games for VisionOS on day one.

• These in-person labs will prove essential for many developers during this prelude period, where developers won’t have access to Vision Pro itself while working on apps.

• I think Reality Composer Pro could be the sleeper hit of this SDK — a tool not (just) for programmers, but for creative artists. Like what Adobe Illustrator was to graphic design vs. writing Postscript code at the outset of the desktop publishing revolution a generation ago.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: I-95 Will Re-Open This Weekend ★

Josh Shapiro on Twitter:

Based on the tremendous progress these crews made over the weekend, I can now say:

We will have I-95 back open this weekend.

We have worked around the clock to get this done, and we’ve completed each phase safely and ahead of schedule.

I would’ve bet a lot money on this taking more than two months. It’s not just inspiring to see a big government project succeed, it’s downright fun. A lesson in how to accomplish big things: figure out a plan, get to work, work hard, and keep working until it’s done.

Fosstodon’s Measured Take on Facebook and the Fediverse ★

Kev Quirk, co-founder of Fosstodon (a 60,000-user Mastodon instance):

Truth is, there isn’t that much info out there on how this thing will actually work, or what it will be capable of. Lots of people seem to be concerned about Facebook “getting their info”. Fact is, they can do that now if they really want to — it would be trivial for Facebook to stand something up that hoovers up all the public data that’s on the Fediverse, via API.

And that’s the clincher here — it’s all public data. So the best advice I can give if you’re concerned about your data, is lock down your account and don’t post publicly.

All that being said, here’s what we plan to do if this thing ever sees the light of day:

• As a team, we will review what the service is capable of and what advantages/disadvantages such a service will bring to the Fediverse
• We will then make a determination on whether we will defederate that service
• We will NOT jump on the bandwagon, or partake in the rumour mill that seems to be plaguing the Fediverse at the moment

It’s important to say that neither myself or Mike like anything that Facebook stands for. Neither of us use it, and both of us go to great lengths to avoid it when browsing the web. So if this service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.

Bingo.

Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation at Scale Is Impossible to Do Well ★

Mike Masnick, back in 2019:

I’ve argued for years that while many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that’s misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I’d like to propose Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone. While I’m not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow’s, I’ll just note a few points on why the argument I’m making is inevitably true.

Tuesday, 20 June 2023

DPReview Found a Buyer: Gear Patrol ★

Scott Everett, writing at DPReview:

We’ve heard from many of you over the past several weeks, and we realize there are many questions about what comes next for DPReview. We’re thrilled to share the news that Gear Patrol has acquired DPReview. Gear Patrol is a natural home for the next phase of DPReview’s journey, and I’m excited to see what we can accomplish together. [...]

Will all DPReview staff join Gear Patrol?

Our current core editorial, tech, and business team is moving forward with DPReview. Gear Patrol is committed to continuing DPReview’s industry leading journalism, and we look forward to collaboratively investing in the site’s future moving forward.

Will DPReview change its editorial coverage or site features as a result of this?

The site will continue to operate as it was before, with all editorial coverage and site features remaining the same, and all historical content accessible. That being said, we are excited to begin a new chapter working within and alongside an editorial company like Gear Patrol and expect to continue evolving DPReview based on customer feedback and the rapidly changing state of the publishing industry.

This sounds like nothing but good news.

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