Linked List: January 16, 2014

Thursday, 16 January 2014

Tobias Frere-Jones Is Suing Jonathan Hoefler 

This came as a total shock. I’m a longtime customer and fan of H&FJ’s remarkable library of typefaces, and I’ve known Jonathan Hoefler as an online friend for just about as long as I’ve been writing Daring Fireball.

No matter how this turns out, it’s a terribly sad turn of events. I feel obligated, however, to point out that there is no little irony in the fact that Frere-Jones’s complaint is set in Arial.

Update: Via Other Means, here is Frere-Jones’s complaint set in Gotham, his masterpiece.

Brian Krebs: ‘A First Look at the Target Intrusion, Malware’ 

Brian Krebs:

Target has yet to honor a single request for comment from this publication, and the company has said nothing publicly about how this breach occurred. But according to sources, the attackers broke in to Target after compromising a company Web server. Somehow, the attackers were able to upload the malicious POS software to store point-of-sale machines, and then set up a control server within Target’s internal network that served as a central repository for data hoovered by all of the infected point-of-sale devices.

“The bad guys were logging in remotely to that [control server], and apparently had persistent access to it,” a source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity. “They basically had to keep going in and manually collecting the dumps.”

In what I suspect is not a coincidence, my wife’s credit card, which she used at Target once during the compromised window, was used for fraudulent purchases two days ago.

Exposure 

Very similar to Storehouse in some ways, Exposure is a web publishing/hosting service for “creating beautiful photo narratives”. Two big differences: (1) Exposure is web-based, not app-based (but they do use responsive design, so everything looks good on any sized device); and (2) they are charging for subscriptions:

Far too many services start free in an effort to sign up as many users as possible, only to eventually surround your content with ads to try to keep the lights on.

Collecting Underpants 

When something cool like Storehouse launches, free of charge and free of ads, I always get a bad feeling in my gut. There must be some kind of catch in the future. At some point, something will have to change. They’ll either have to start charging money for something, or start selling ads against the content, or get acquired by one of the giants (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo).

Charging money up front is no panacea. Everpix is a perfect example of that — they charged money for subscriptions and they saw growth, but they didn’t grow fast enough for the revenue to put them in the black. But at least when you signed up and committed to the service, you could see how they wanted to make it work financially. With Storehouse, we have no idea.

Storehouse: Visual Storytelling 

New iPad app and publishing service, with a bunch of ex-Apple talent on the team (including CEO and co-founder Mark Kawano.)

Storehouse is two things: (1) a creative tool for collecting photos and videos into elegant stories, where a “story” is a single scrolling page; and (2) a hosting service for all published stories. So you use Storehouse both to create your own stories, and also to view/read the stories published by everyone else. Drafts are stored locally on your iPad; once published, all stories are public. You can follow individual users, a la social apps like Twitter and Instagram.

The app is really well done. It feels ahead of the curve in terms of direct manipulation, and it’s marvelously clear in terms of navigation. Published stories are available on the web for anyone and everyone to see, but everything else — creation, editing, discovery — is only available on the iPad app. And the whole thing is (for now at least) free of charge, and free of ads.

Jim Beam and the Myth of Bourbon 

Ian Crouch, writing for The New Yorker:

Bourbon seems like a sturdy marker of a freedom-loving American identity, but that narrative is mostly a pleasant fiction. The truth of the tale lies in mergers and holding companies and transnational distribution rights. George Jones never sang about any of that. The real story of the modern whiskey industry is less romantic but no less American. The country’s “native spirit,” as bourbon is often called, is one of capitalization and consolidation.

I somehow missed the news that Japanese whiskey-maker and beverage conglomerate Suntory is going to buy Jim Beam — for $16 billion.