Linked List: November 21, 2014

Friday, 21 November 2014

Terrific feature by Ian Urbina for the NYT Magazine:

Several years ago I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

Stewart Butterfield on Slack ★

Stewart Butterfield, in an interview with Rachel Metz for MIT Technology Review:

I try to instill this into the rest of the team but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like, it’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though.

I love that attitude. Rather than be satisfied with Slack’s growth and success, he’s focused on how to make it way better, not just a little better.

Craig Hockenberry on WatchKit ★

Craig Hockenberry:

Bluetooth Low Energy must be really low power: the design of WKInterfaceObject means it’s going to be on a lot. Every interaction with the watch has the potential to move actions and data between your pocket and wrist using the radio.

But more importantly, this API design gives Apple a simple way to put a cap on power consumption. We saw this approach in the early days of the iPhone and that worked out pretty well, didn’t it?

One final thought about the API design: your code never runs on the watch.

NY Post: Amazon Planning an Ad-Based Streaming-Video Service ★

Claire Atkinson, reporting for the NY Post:

The e-commerce giant will roll out a new ad-supported streaming offering early next year that will be separate from its $99-a-year Prime membership, which includes a video service, sources said.

The ad-supported option — part of an overhaul of its media offerings — poses a serious challenge to streaming rivals such as Hulu and Netflix, analysts said.

When TiVo came out 15 years ago, we began using computers to let us skip past commercials. Now, with streaming, we’re using computers to present un-skippable ads.

Financial Times: European Parliament to Call for the Break-Up of Google ★

Alex Barker and Murad Ahmed, reporting for The Financial Times:

The European parliament is poised to call for a break-up of Google, in one of the most brazen assaults so far on the technology group’s power.

The gambit increases the political pressure on the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to take a tougher line on Google, either in its antitrust investigation into the company or through the introduction of laws to curb its reach.

A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services” should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance. It has the backing of the parliament’s two main political blocs, the European People’s Party and the Socialists.

Good luck with that.

I’m Sure Apple Will Get Right on This ★

John Prisco, president of anti-virus software maker Triumfant, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple had good intentions. It kept everything close to the vest, with a closed off development community and rigorous control over applications. Apple has been brilliant at maintaining the purity of the brand and until relatively recently, that has been enough to provide additional protections against malicious attacks. But the genie is out of the iBottle.

Google, on the other hand, does allow this level of collaboration. With Android, security professionals can conduct analysis where it matters — with operating system-level interrogation and anomaly detection. With the Apple iOS, you can’t do that. You’re blocked off. What is then forced is an approach that requires only looking at the app with the AppWrapper. There is no way to develop a guardian for the operating system, so you will never be protected.

It’s not Apple who is in trouble because iOS doesn’t allow third-party anti-virus/security software to run at the operating system level. It’s the purveyors of anti-virus/security software who are in trouble.

Recode Drops Comments ★

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher:

The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.

A blog without comments?