By John Gruber

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Peer Review of Marc Andreessen’s Theranos Tweets ★

Don’t know why he deleted this gem from 2015.

How Much Fraud Can a Fraudster Fraud? ★

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column for Bloomberg:

And so when Holmes was charged with wire fraud, it was for a mix of investor fraud and patient fraud. “Jurors heard Theranos patients testify their blood-test results falsely led them to believe they had unhealthy conditions,” but found Holmes not guilty on those counts. I don’t know why — I was not at the trial, and I certainly wasn’t in the jury room — but it seems plausible that Holmes was less personally culpable for those tests than she was for her own pitches to investors. But never mind that.

Instead, my point here is that if you do a fake blood test on a patient, you have arguably defrauded him (though Holmes was acquitted of that), but how much have you defrauded him really? Arguably the answer is quite a lot; arguably he is quite badly harmed by thinking he had a deadly disease and taking drastic steps to fight it, or thinking he did not have a deadly disease and missing the chance to fight it. But arguably the answer is $14.95, or whatever he paid for the blood test (I made that number up): You were doing fraud for money, and the money you got from any one patient is fairly small. Whereas the money you got from Betsy DeVos was $100 million.

Dithering ★

Dithering is back after the holiday break. If you’re not listening, you’re missing out. Best $5/month you’ll ever spend, trust me.

What Hi-Fi: ‘Is Bluetooth Holding Back Apple’s AirPods?’ ★

Tom Parsons has a good interview with Gary Geaves, VP of acoustics at Apple, providing some insight into the design of AirPods 3:

Everything points to Apple taking sound quality very seriously with the AirPods 3, and all of its modern-day audio products for that matter, and the recent launches of Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless and (in a slightly different way) Spatial Audio point to a real push towards higher audio quality. But there’s a catch, as far as I can see it — a bottle-neck that’s been preventing real qualitative leaps in the sound of wireless headphones essentially since wireless headphones came into being. I’m talking about Bluetooth, of course, which almost all wireless headphones, including AirPods, rely upon and which doesn’t have the data rate for hi-res or even lossless audio. I ask Geaves whether the use of Bluetooth is holding back his hardware and stifling sound quality.

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and ... I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

A rare exception to Betteridge’s Law. I sincerely hope Apple has something proprietary in the works, perhaps for AirPods Pro 2.

Monday, 3 January 2022

Kelly Evans: ‘The iPhone Is Going Away’ ★

Kelly Evans, writing last month for CNBC:

This may seem like a comical thing to say when Apple is about to potentially sell 40 million iPhones this holiday season, according to Wedbush. But the iPhone is in its sunset years. It has maybe the rest of this decade left before it’s put out to pasture. And all the buzz now is over Apple’s upcoming goggles.

VR headsets will never replace phones. I highly doubt AR glasses ever will either. The iPhone is like the Mac — a 38-year-old platform that is selling better than ever — here to stay.

‘Modest’ ★

Mark Gurman’s lede sentence for his Bloomberg column this week:

After a modest set of device launches in 2021, Apple Inc. is set for a stronger 2022 — with new iPhones, AirPods and potentially a VR headset.

New M1 iMacs in May: almost universally hailed; nothing like them available for PCs. Apple has simply pantsed Intel and AMD, not just on performance-per-watt but performance, period.

iPad Pros with M1 in May: almost universally hailed, nothing like them for Android. (New iPad Mini in September, too.)

iPhones 13 in September: still the best phones in the world; camera better than ever.

Apple Watch Series 7 in October: Series 6 was undeniably the best smart watch on the market, and Apple made something altogether better: bigger screen, significantly better battery life.

14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max: I can’t even.

New third-generation AirPods in October, and hell, they even released a new Apple TV with a good remote control this year. Calling 2021 a “modest” year for Apple device launches is just obstinately cranky. If 2021 wasn’t a great year for new Apple hardware, what year was?

Bob Lefsetz on ‘Don’t Look Up’ ★

Bob Lefsetz:

We haven’t had a movie that’s captured the zeitgeist like this since Network. And that may be a better movie, but it’s not as good of a snapshot of life in these United States and the media business.

Do you feel alone? Is life confusing? Does it make no sense? Do you not even recognize our country? Then Don’t Look Up is for you. The truth is we’re shown the fiction every damn day that the center is holding. The media business functions like it’s still the twentieth century while it might as well be the twenty-third. The internet came along and blew the old world apart. It democratized the country. I’m not talking about DEMOCRACY, but democratization. Now everybody has a voice, like the feed of comments scrolling down the images in this picture. Everybody’s got a hater, EVERYBODY! Hell, they want to take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. We’ve become unmoored and the distance has become too far for the rope to be thrown to reconnect us.

See also Frank Oz:

I just do not get it. Someone does something so daring & funny & needed as Don’t Look Up from Netflix and it’s being given mixed & negative reviews! What???!!! It’s our Dr. Strangelove for today! “We really did have it all, didn’t we?” Those words need to be imbedded in our souls!

John Madden, Teacher ★

Bryan Curtis, writing for The Ringer:

One of the coolest things about John Madden is that he was an academic. It was a brief run, but still. In 1979, after Madden quit as head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, to teach an extension course called “Man to Man Football.” Madden’s students had watched football on TV. Now, they wanted to understand how it worked.

Professor Madden stood in front of a board that was like the Telestrator he later used on TV. Madden drew X’s and O’s and carefully studied his students’ faces. “I wanted to see at what point I lost ’em,” he told me years later. Madden was trying to find the most simple way to explain a complex game. He was converting passive football fans into smart fans. For the next 30 years, Madden performed the same trick on TV every week.

See also:

• David Roth at Defector: “Every Sport Could Use a John Madden”.
• Where to watch Fox’s documentary All Madden.

Tomorrow Is Doomsday for BlackBerry Devices ★

From BlackBerry’s OS services FAQ:

As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022. As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality.

I wonder how many people are still hanging on to old BlackBerry phones. At one point, they truly had a cult following.

It’s also worth noting that there are seemingly no significant Android phones with hardware keyboards. Like none. The iPhone all-screen form factor with an on-screen software keyboard has completely won out.

Count COVID Hospitalizations, Not Cases ★

Gina Kolata and Anna P. Kambhampaty, reporting for The New York Times:

Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, noted on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that many new infections, especially in people who are vaccinated and boosted, result in no symptoms or mild symptoms, making the absolute number of cases less important than it was for previous versions of the virus.

“As you get further on and the infections become less severe, it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases,” Dr. Fauci said.

That advice is in keeping with what many epidemiologists have said all along. Despite the daily drumbeat of case counts, the number of positive tests has never been a perfect indicator of the course of the epidemic.

The New York Times itself needs to take this advice to heart. Over the weekend they published a scaremongering story about rising cases in Puerto Rico, but as Nate Silver pointedly observed, only 13 paragraphs into the story did they mention that only 317 people — on an island with 3 million people — were hospitalized for COVID. What’s going on right now in Puerto Rico is a vaccine triumph.

Samsung Promises ‘Groundbreaking’ New TV Feature: NFT Support ★

Chris Welch, The Verge:

“With demand for NFTs on the rise, the need for a solution to today’s fragmented viewing and purchasing landscape has never been greater,” the company said in a press release. “In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator, a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place.”

No. Just no.

Saturday, 1 January 2022

MacUpdater ★

My thanks to CoreCode for sponsoring this week at DF to promote MacUpdater. MacUpdater automatically tracks the latest updates of all applications installed on your Mac. See at a glance which of your apps are outdated and update any app with a single click. Don’t waste time manually searching for updates, downloading, installing, and cleaning up. MacUpdater takes care of everything for you.

Great new features in MacUpdater 2 include: an optional menubar-only interface, “Update All” button, Touch Bar support, auto-quitting running apps, Apple Silicon native binary, advanced security and scan timing options, higher performance, and improved release notes viewing.

MacUpdater is a great tool for any Mac user with a bunch of apps installed.

Friday, 31 December 2021

The Talk Show: ‘Schrödinger’s Feature’ ★

Apple’s 2021 year in review, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
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Thursday, 30 December 2021

The Conditions at a Foxconn iPhone Plant in India: Hundreds Hospitalized With Food Poisoning, Rats in Kitchens, Dorms Without Running Water ★

Sudarshan Varadhan and A. Ananthalakshmi, reporting for Reuters from Sriperumbudur, India:

Reuters spoke to six women who worked at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. All of them requested they not to be named because of fear of retaliation on the job or from police. Workers slept on the floor in rooms, which housed between six to 30 women, five of these workers said. Two workers said the hostel they lived in had toilets without running water. [...]

Following the protests, food safety inspectors visited the hostel where the bout of food poisoning occurred and closed the dorm’s kitchen after finding rats and poor drainage, Jegadish Chandra Bose, a senior food safety officer in the Thiruvallur district where the hostel is located, told Reuters. [...]

The food poisoning incident sent 159 women from one dorm to hospital on Dec 15, workers told Reuters. Some 100 more women needed medical attention but were not hospitalised, the Thiruvallur district administration said last week.

The response:

The facility has been placed “on probation” and Apple will ensure its strict standards are met before the plant reopens, an Apple spokesperson said.

“We found that some of the remote dormitory accommodations and dining rooms being used for employees do not meet our requirements and we are working with the supplier to ensure a comprehensive set of corrective actions are rapidly implemented.”

“Did not meet our requirements” indeed. Jiminy.

When HDMI 2.1 Isn’t HDMI 2.1  ★

Simon Baker, writing for TFT Central:

We covered above what we believe the common consumer expectation is in terms of capabilities and features when they see HDMI 2.1 advertised. If you delve in to the detail of HDMI 2.1 you will probably be surprised to hear that actually none of these things are required!

We contacted HDMI.org who are the “HDMI Licensing Administrator” to ask some questions about this new standard, seek clarification on several questions we had and discuss the Xiaomi display we mentioned above. Here is what we were told:

1. HDMI 2.0 no longer exists, and devices should not claim compliance to v2.0 as it is not referenced any more
2. The features of HDMI 2.0 are now a sub-set of 2.1
3. All the new capabilities and features associated with HDMI 2.1 are optional (this includes FRL, the higher bandwidths, VRR, ALLM and everything else)
4. If a device claims compliance to 2.1 then they need to also state which features the device supports so there is “no confusion” (hmmmm)

What a mess — maybe worse than the USB-C plug situation.

Update: It gets better (by which I mean worse): HDMI 2.1a is coming at CES next week, and it’s just as confusing.

NYT: ‘Are Apple AirTags Being Used to Track People and Steal Cars?’ ★

This report for The New York Times from Ryan Mac and Kashmir Hill fails the Betteridge’s Law test. Their best answer is “Well, maybe”:

Mary Ford, a 17-year-old high school student from Cary, N.C., received a notification in late October that she was being tracked by an unknown AirTag after driving to an appointment. She panicked as she searched her car.

Ms. Ford only realized it wasn’t a threat when her mother revealed she had put the tracker in the vehicle about two weeks earlier to follow her daughter’s whereabouts.

“I was nervous about Mary being out and not being able to find her,” said her mother, Wendy Ford. She said she hadn’t intended to keep the knowledge of the AirTag from her daughter, “but if I knew she would have been notified, I probably would have told her.”

This makes no sense. She hid the AirTag in her daughter’s car and didn’t tell her about it, but the Times claims “she hadn’t intended to keep the knowledge of the AirTag from her daughter”? That’s exactly what she did.

Jahna Maramba rented a vehicle from the car-sharing service Turo last month in Los Angeles, then received a notification about an unknown AirTag near her on a Saturday night with her girlfriends.

She took the vehicle to her friend’s parking garage where she searched the outside of the car for an hour before its owner notified her that he had placed the device inside the vehicle. Ms. Maramba had been driving the car for two days.

To me these examples show that Apple’s notification system for unknown AirTags is working, but the report posits the whole platform as problematic.

See also: Apple’s Tracker Detect app for Android, which launched two weeks ago.

Wednesday, 29 December 2021

‘Law of Large Numbers’ Claim Chowder ★

James B. Stewart, writing for The New York Times just under a decade ago:

Here is the rub: Apple is so big, it’s running up against the law of large numbers.

Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger.

If Apple’s share price grew even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 trillion by 2022. That is bigger than the 2011 gross domestic product of France or Brazil.

To be clear, Stewart never predicted that Apple couldn’t continue growing at that rate — he just posited it as somewhat improbable. But here we are.

(Let’s ignore that this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with either the actual Law of Large Numbers or the Law of Truly Large Numbers.)

Apple’s market cap as I type this today: $2.94 trillion.

Tuesday, 28 December 2021

Boom — John Madden Dies at 85 ★

For my generation, he and Pat Summerall will forever be the voices of football. Madden made a complex game simple in his commentary, but his everyman demeanor belied the fact that he really understood the game. As a commentator he never lost sight of the fact that football is a game, and games are supposed to be fun.

Update: Nice 5-minute tribute video from the NFL. From that video, here were Madden’s only rules while coaching the Raiders in the 1970s:

1. Be on time.
2. Listen.
3. Play like hell when I tell you to.

Pretty good set of rules — not just for a football team, but life.

Hands-On With Snap’s First AR Spectacles for Early Adopters ★

The bad news: they overheat and they’re ugly.

The good news: they only get 30 minutes of battery life, so they probably won’t get a chance to burn you.

Reuters: Amazon Kowtowed to P.R.C. and Removed All Reviews of Xi Jinping’s Book in China ★

Steve Stecklow and Jeffrey Dastin, reporting for Reuters:

Amazon.com Inc was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China.

A negative review of Xi’s book prompted the demand, one of the people said. “I think the issue was anything under five stars,” the highest rating in Amazon’s five-point system, said the other person.

Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon’s e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.

I don’t know why the Chinese government is so sensitive about this. Even here in the U.S., where we’re free to leave whatever reviews we want on Amazon for Xi’s book, it’s rated 4.7/5 after nearly 2,000 reviews. Seriously, go look.

(That’s an affiliate link that will make me rich.)

Tumblr, the App Store, and Porn ★

“Sreegs”, a former iOS engineer at Tumblr, on Tumblr’s recent problems trying to comply with the App Store’s ban on pornographic content:

Let me be clear about this from the get-go: I think Apple’s censorship policies are wrong and they have no grounds to be policing adult content within apps on the app store. Apple’s power to set content policy over apps is absolutely fueled first and foremost by internal policy that goes back to Steve Jobs. After that, they’re beholden to payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn. Finally, there’s lawmakers and policy that influence them as well. I think these are the 3 things that shape their policy decisions, in order.

I get the “no grounds” thing from a free speech and consenting adults perspective. But right there in the same paragraph, he lists several grounds: payment processors are distancing themselves from porn, and lawmakers are threatening to regulate app stores.

But the obvious grounds for these policies is brand. Apple’s brand is firmly distant from porn. You might think that’s prudish or outdated, but it’s not your brand. Among major cruise lines, all but one have casinos on each ship. The exception: Disney. It’s perfectly legal; Disney just doesn’t want their brand associated with gambling. For similar reasons, Apple is going to err on the side of overzealousness with porn in the App Store. You can get all the porno you want on the web on iOS devices.

(Sreegs’s post is mostly about frustrations with the App Store review process in general, not Tumblr specifically, and is worth reading.)

Update: Workaround for iOS 15 Autocorrect Turning ‘20’ Into ‘2.0’ ★

Update to yesterday’s piece on iOS 15’s autocorrect:

With the help of several readers, I think I know what’s causing this. If you have an app installed with the string “2.0” in its name, that will cause “20” to autocorrect to “2.0”. I in fact have such an app installed on my iPhone. At least one reader has seen the same thing with “1.0” for the same reason.

The best workaround is to create a do-nothing text replacement in Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, with the phrase “20” and shortcut “20”. I.e., set both fields to the digits of twenty. You don’t have to set “2.0” as the shortcut — if you do, you won’t be able to type “2.0”. Just set both fields to “20” and iOS autocorrect will prioritize this above the fact that you have an app installed with “2.0” in its name.

Alexa Tells 10-Year-Old Girl to Touch Live Plug With Penny ★

BBC News:

Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug. The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”.

“Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said.

Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

Tell me again how far ahead of Siri Alexa is. These assistants are all deeply flawed.

Monday, 27 December 2021

‘Detectives’ ★

This spot was in frequent rotation during yesterday’s NFL games. It’s perfect.

iOS 15 Autocorrect Continues to Irritate ★

Short roundup of tweets collected by Michael Tsai, starting with this one from Steven Troughton-Smith:

Apple really needs to throw out its crowdsourced machine-learned autocorrect system entirely. Autocorrect used learn from everything I typed, now it interjects with typos & weirdisms from random internet users. It’s been a complete train wreck since they introduced this stuff.

I’m not 100 percent sure it started with iOS 15, but for a few months now, whenever I try to type “20” (twenty) on my iPhone, iOS replaces it with “2.0”. Every time.

Update: With the help of several readers, I think I know what’s causing this. If you have an app installed with the string “2.0” in its name, that will cause “20” to autocorrect to “2.0”. I in fact have such an app installed on my iPhone. At least one reader has seen the same thing with “1.0” for the same reason.

The best workaround is to create a do-nothing text replacement in Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, with the phrase “20” and shortcut “20”. I.e., set both fields to the digits of twenty. You don’t have to set “2.0” as the shortcut — if you do, you won’t be able to type “2.0”. Just set both fields to “20” and iOS autocorrect will prioritize this above the fact that you have an app installed with “2.0” in its name.

Inside the Failure of COVID Exposure Notifications in the U.S. ★

Myoung Cha, former head of health strategic initiatives for Apple and currently chief strategy officer for Carbon Health, on Twitter:

With the omicron surge, I have had more friends send me screenshots of exposure notifications (EN) in the last week than I have in the last year. Here are some reflections based on the work I led at Apple working with Google and some thoughts on the road ahead. [...]

The biggest pushback we got was why we wouldn’t allow governments around the world to use the API to collect a ton of data about users who had opted in since traditional contact tracing provided more precise insights on who had been exposed to the index case.

Our reply of course was to protect user privacy since the identity and whereabouts of all of your friends could be sucked up by a bad government actor with a more centralized design — to build a social graph of all users with the pandemic as the justification.

“Trust us, we are the government” was often the pushback. But of course, this wasn’t a theoretical concern but something that actually happened in both Singapore and Australia with systems that did not adopt our privacy-preserving approach.

The U.S. needed — and still needs — a single federal exposure notification system. Doing it state-by-state seemed all along like something that wouldn’t work, and it hasn’t. Our state borders are, by design, completely porous. That said, I’ve got iOS exposure notifications enabled, and I encourage you to, too.

The State of External Retina Displays ★

Casey Liss:

The above is the entire lineup. That’s it. Four options. Three of which existed 1,665 days ago.

This is why Apple needs to make its own prosumer-priced external display (or even better, displays) — it’s clear no one else is making them other than LG, and the LG displays aren’t great.

Update: Yoni Mazuz points out that LG’s UltraFine 4K — the smaller one — was replaced at some point after 2017 with a slightly larger panel with lower resolution, but with faster USB ports.

‘USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables’ ★

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The hardware side works terrifically: a USB-C plug fits into any USB-C jack. But perhaps the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the group that manages the development of the USB standard, didn’t fully think through the complexity of what has to go over the USB wiring and how to communicate that effectively: power and video coupled with several different standards for data.

You know what doesn’t have any of these problems? Lightning.

Saturday, 25 December 2021

From the DF Archive: ‘Merry’ ★

Ten years ago today. Holds up.

Friday, 24 December 2021

Shaker & Spoon ★

My thanks to Shaker & Spoon for sponsoring this week at DF. Still looking for a last minute Christmas gift? Give the gift of craft cocktails at home. Shaker & Spoon conveniently delivers unique, high-quality ingredients and bespoke, bar-worthy recipes.

Each box calls for a different spirit and showcases various styles of cocktail-making, arriving with 3 original recipes created by world-class bartenders and enough ingredients (syrups, bitters, aromatics, garnishes) for 12 cocktails — 4 from each recipe. Just add the alcohol, and your box will use up the whole bottle. It’s perfect for last-minute gifts for the friend or family member who has everything: all you need is their email, and they’ll redeem their cocktail experience at the time of their choosing.

I can vouch that their recipes and ingredients are terrific and highly recommendable.

Thursday, 23 December 2021

The Talk Show: ‘The Post-Doom Era’ ★

Emmy Award-winning Joanna Stern returns to the show. Topics include: Apple’s new iCloud “legacy contact” feature, the current state and future of VR headsets, Elon Musk, and more.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• RevenueCat: In-app subscriptions made easy.
• Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.

‘A Normal Person Explains Cryptocurrency’ ★

Chef’s kiss video by Avalon Penrose. Makes sense to me.

Philadelphia Gets the New 3D Apple Maps With Detailed Landmarks ★

Jacob Krol, writing for CNN Underscored:

In order to unpack the latest Apple Maps improvements that you should know about, CNN Underscored got to chat exclusively with David Dorn, product lead, and Meg Frost, design lead, at Apple Maps. From 3D buildings in cities to clearer navigation instructions, here’s everything you need to know.

Good interview, and well-illustrated with examples.

I’ve explored the new 3D views in Apple Maps in other cities already, but it’s really something else to explore your own city. These new 3D maps for Philly are really good — beautiful, accurate, and useful. I love the illustration style for the landmarks — a friend commented that he’d buy a model of Apple’s rendition of our City Hall. It’s a very neat style.

After a few days, it occurred to me what this style reminds me of: the maps Disney provides for their theme parks. They don’t put everything in the park on their maps — just the important stuff. And they render the major attractions — the landmark attractions — with far more detail and at a larger scale. Not just so they pop visually, but because they help you navigate and orient yourself.

Wednesday, 22 December 2021

A Few About Boxes From Vintage Mac Applications ★

Speaking of classic Mac OS, Riccardo Mori assembled a collection of screenshots of about boxes, many from really old apps. The MacPascal one has a build date from the day before the Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. No surprise, the ugliest one of the bunch is from Microsoft Word 3.0 in 1987. The early ResEdit about box asked for bug reports to be mailed — on paper — to an engineer at Apple’s headquarters.

Mori’s post is from 2015, but it was new to me. A lot of the later ones are quite elaborate and very distinctive. I miss cool about boxes — that’s where developers signed and got credit for their work.

(Via Dave Winer.)

‘Mac OS 9: OStalgia Edition’ ★

Michael Feeney:

(mac)OStalgia is exploring my 2021 work-from-home routine from a nostalgic perspective. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.

This project is delightful: reimagining modern apps like Slack, Zoom, and Figma on Mac OS 9. There are numerous details I’d quibble with (multiple windows active at the same time, for example), but it brought me joy to explore these designs and watch his video of them in action. I miss this style of UI design very much — not the exact look, per se, but the spirit of emphasizing clarity above all else, where content fields are clearly content fields, input focus is clear, and buttons look like buttons.

The Incomparable Does ‘Get Back’ ★

Here’s another good podcast about Peter Jackson’s 8-hour Beatles documentary Get Back — The Incomparable’s panel discussion, with Jason Snell, Steven Schapansky, Monty Ashley, Guy English, and Amy Gruber:

Toast, vests, London Bobbies sucking on their chin straps, Debbie the receptionist, Paul as “second boss”, Yoko’s knitting, George Harrison’s pinstripes, and most importantly, the amazing view of a bunch of musical geniuses having a very difficult time creating anything at all.

Tuesday, 21 December 2021

Project Zero: A Deep Dive Into an N.S.O. Zero-Click iMessage Exploit ★

Ian Beer and Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero:

Based on our research and findings, we assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever seen, further demonstrating that the capabilities NSO provides rival those previously thought to be accessible to only a handful of nation states.

I won’t claim to understand all of this — pointer programming was never my forte — but the overall explanation here is very cogent, and easy to follow. Basically, NSO Group’s exploit involved sending an iMessage-using target a PDF file with a .gif file name extension. The PDF file contained an image in the semi-obscure JBIG2 format, a black-and-white format created for fax machines in the late 1990s. Apple’s image-processing code for JBIG2 streams had a buffer overflow bug. Then it gets a little eye-popping:

JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent.

The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying.

‘The Secret Uganda Deal That Has Brought N.S.O. to the Brink of Collapse’ ★

Mehul Srivastava, reporting for The Financial Times:

In February 2019, an Israeli woman sat across from the son of Uganda’s president and made an audacious pitch — would he want to secretly hack any phone in the world? [...]

A few months after the initial approach, NSO’s chief executive, Shalev Hulio, landed in Uganda to seal the deal, according to two people familiar with NSO’s East Africa business. Hulio, who flew the world with the permission of the Israeli government to sell Pegasus, liked to demonstrate in real time how it could hack a brand-new, boxed iPhone. [...]

After spending a decade in the favor of the Israeli government, NSO now finds itself as an irritant in relations between Israel and the US, using up vital foreign “policy bandwidth we need to talk about Iran,” said a foreign ministry official who asked for anonymity.

That is a reversal for NSO, which former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used as a diplomatic calling card with several countries, including the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, which did not have official relations with Israel.

Using this system as a “diplomatic calling card” — with that list of countries — is outrageous. Downright dystopian.

Terrific reporting from the Financial Times here, including more circumstantial evidence that it was Apple who tipped off the State Department about these hacked phones in Uganda. Remarkably detailed for an operation that, quite obviously, was intended to be clandestine.

Monday, 20 December 2021

Notchmeister 1.0 ★

The Iconfactory:

This holiday season we have a special gift for Mac users everywhere, especially ones with a new MacBook Pro and notch. We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of Notchmeister.

So what does Notchmeister do?

Think of it as a fun way to spruce up your notch. Or as a screen saver for something you can’t see. Or, maybe, just a useless waste of time.

The Mac has a grand tradition of silly utilities — exquisitely well-crafted, but serving no purpose other than to be fun — and Notchmeister is a perfect example.

Mux ★

My thanks to Mux for once again sponsoring DF last week. Mux is the developer video platform. Use their Video API to build video streaming into your application and make it play beautifully at scale on any device. A Mux stream is just one GET request away from magical-feeling features like automatic thumbnails, animated GIFs, and data-driven encoding decisions. Looking to understand if your videos are gaining traction? They’ve got that covered with Mux Data: get info about views, viewers, and playing time. You can also see whether viewers are getting errors or rebuffering, and whether you should be using Mux (trick question — yes).

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