Linked List: November 5, 2013

Tuesday, 5 November 2013

Burger King Rips Off McDonald’s Big Mac With Lookalike ‘Big King’ ★

Just shameless. For chrissake even the name is a rip-off. If they wanted to do something interesting, they should have tried ripping off the superior quality of a chain like Five Guys or In-N-Out. (Via Farhad Manjoo.)

‘The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders’ ★

Alex Buono on the making of a very funny SNL short film. Great story.

Apple: ‘Report on Government Information Requests’ (PDF) ★

Interesting information, and glad to see Apple publishing it. Looks like they reject many requests for customer information.

This bit jumped out to me on the first page:

Perhaps most important, our business does not depend on collecting personal data. We have no interest in amassing personal information about our customers. We protect personal conversations by providing end-to-end encryption over iMessage and FaceTime. We do not store location data, Maps searches, or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Also interesting: the U.S. government only permits Apple to report account-based requests in increments of 1000. Update: And here’s Apple’s amicus brief with the U.S. FISA court, arguing to allow the disclosure of the exact aggregate number of national security requests. A rare dispute these days where Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all on the same side.

Update 2: Another interesting nugget: “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.” The ACLU has a good rundown on the odious nature of Section 215. If Apple had been served with an order under Section 215, they would not be permitted even to say that they’d received it. So the clever bit here is that if such a statement (that Apple has not received any orders under Section 215) does not appear in a future version of this report from the company, we can assume that they have been served with such an order.

Actors Recast in Different Roles in James Bond Movies ★

I knew about a few of these (Anthony Dawson, Charles Gray, Maud Adams, Joe Don Baker), but most were news to me.

‘Out of the Picture: Why the World’s Best Photo Startup Is Going Out of Business’ ★

Splendid narrative journalism by Casey Newton for The Verge:

The immediate concern in the room was a forthcoming bill from Amazon Web Services, which hosts the 400 million photos stored with Everpix; the team estimated the bill would be about $35,000. “Our AWS bill is going to be due on the third. We’re not going to be able to pay,” said Pierre-Olivier Latour, who had the idea for Everpix four years ago after a vacation left him struggling to organize the hundreds of photos he took on the trip. Behind him, a poster advertised San Francisco’s minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, which he had been paying his employees for the past month. “Amazon is going to reach out to us saying, ‘Your card doesn’t work.’” He paused. “So that’s going to be fun.”

In two short years, Everpix has gone from a dream shared by two French graphics experts to one of the world’s best solutions for managing a large library of photos. It attracted 55,000 users and earned enough each month to cover the cost of the service, if not employees’ salaries.

Everpix Shutting Down ★

Damn:

It is with a heavy heart we announce that Everpix will be shutting down in the coming weeks.

We started this company two years ago with the goals of solving the photo mess and designing better ways for people to enjoy their memories. We are very proud of the work we’ve done — from the cutting-edge semantic analysis and syncing technology, right down to every pixel on our website and mobile apps.

Everpix sponsored the DF RSS feed twice this year, which is how they first came to my attention. As soon as I tried it though, I was hooked. Everpix is how photo storage should work. Really a shame to see them close.

Back in August I linked to a great piece by Bradley Chambers, “Regular People Have No Idea How to Manage Photos on Their iPhone”, and I quoted the following:

Also, photo stream needs to be reversed. Apple should store all photos/video taken with your iPhone and just store the most recent 1000 (or 30 days) locally on the device.

That’s how Everpix worked. All of your photos, stored online.

Acer CEO Resigns Amid Slump in PC Sales ★

Eric Pfanner, reporting for NYT Bits:

Acer is the fourth-largest PC maker in the world, but it has been hit hard by a decline in sales of desktop computers as more consumers and businesses turn to tablets and other devices. The company said Tuesday that its sales in the most recent quarter were 92.15 billion Taiwan dollars, down 12 percent from a year ago. It posted an after-tax loss of 13.12 billion Taiwan dollars, or $446 million, for the quarter.

The post-PC era has another victim.

Lenovo Pursued BlackBerry Bid, but Canadian Government Rejected Idea ★

Steven Chase and Boyd Erman, reporting for The Globe and Mail:

Beijing-based computer manufacturer Lenovo Group Ltd. actively considered a bid for BlackBerry Ltd., but the Canadian government told the smartphone company it would not accept a Chinese takeover because of national security concerns, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Financial Times Interview With Bill Gates ★

Wide-ranging interview with Gates by Richard Waters:

“Innovation is a good thing. The human condition — put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes — is improving because of innovation,” he says. But while “technology’s amazing, it doesn’t get down to the people most in need in anything near the timeframe we should want it to”.

It was an argument he says he made to Thomas Friedman as The New York Times columnist was writing his 2005 book, The World is Flat, a work that came to define the almost end-of-history optimism that accompanied the entry of China and India into the global labour markets, a transition aided by the internet revolution. “Fine, go to those Bangalore Infosys centres, but just for the hell of it go three miles aside and go look at the guy living with no toilet, no running water,” Gates says now. “The world is not flat and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.”

Also:

Gates fends off questions about Microsoft, though he says — contrary to persistent speculation — that he is not about to step back in to run it as Steve Jobs once returned to revive Apple. He also admits that the company is taking up a much bigger slice of his time than the one day a week to which he signed up after he left. As chairman and a member of the committee searching for a replacement to Steve Ballmer as chief executive, Gates says he still holds regular meetings with some of the company’s product groups and that he expects to spend considerable time working with the next boss after an appointment is made.