Linked List: December 10, 2014

Wednesday, 10 December 2014

If You Enable iCloud’s Two-Factor Authentication, Do Not Lose Your Recovery Key ★

Harrowing tale from Owen Williams at The Next Web: his iCloud account was locked because someone seemingly had attempted to hack into it. But he couldn’t unlock it without his recovery key (which he couldn’t find), even though he still knew his account password and had access to his second “trusted device”, his iPhone.

I think he’s way too harsh on Apple’s policies here, though. Even the headline of the piece seems off to me: “The Dark Side of Apple’s Two-Factor Authentication”. The lesson here is that if you enable two-factor authentication, you might need to access your recovery key even if you haven’t forgotten your password or lost your trusted device. Apple should make that clear.

The lesson is decidedly not that Apple should allow you to talk your way back into accessing your account over the phone, which seems to be what Williams wanted. That’s exactly how Mat Honan’s account got hijacked two years ago.

The Talk Show Bond Anthology ★

Back in 2011, Dan Benjamin and I reviewed the then 23 James Bond movies made to date (including the non-EON production Never Say Never Again). David Smith has collected those segments into a standalone feed so you don’t have to hunt for individual movies, and don’t have to scan each episode trying to find where the Bond discussion starts. This is so great.

‘They’re starving for material. Starving.’ ★

From a fascinating 1997 interview with Paul Thomas Anderson by Roger Ebert:

Q. Los Angeles is filled with people who want to direct films. They’re always asking, “How do I get started? What do I do?” You have somehow managed to negotiate a path to that point. What do you tell people who want to be directors?

A. That there is nothing else I can do, and nothing else I will do. “No” is not an option. I have to do this or I will die. I only get to direct because I can write - that’s the key. The scary thing is, if you can write, you hold a lot of cards. They’re starving for material. Starving.

Instagram Hits 300 Million Monthly Users, Surpassing Twitter ★

Perhaps it’s as simple as photos being more appealing to a broader audience than tweets. But I say part of Instagram’s success is that their interface is simpler, and the rules for what you see in your feed are like what Twitter’s used to be: a simple chronological list of posts from the people you choose to follow. Insert your own “Correlation is not causation” disclaimer here, but it seems to me that Twitter’s slowing growth corresponds pretty closely to its complexity increasing over the past few years.

Put another way: Instagram is clearly run by people who get what it is that makes Instagram a cool thing. Twitter seems run by people who just don’t get Twitter.

Apple and IBM Deliver First Wave of IBM MobileFirst for iOS Apps ★

This press release from Apple is rather dry — full of blustery enterprise-ese that has a sedative effect on me. But I’m glad I stuck with it to the end, where they have links to both IBM’s and Apple’s galleries of these apps. These don’t look like “enterprise” apps. They look like regular apps — really good ones, the sort of apps Apple would choose to feature in the App Store. This was a huge question I had about this deal. Great design is fundamental to what sets iOS apart, and what has enabled iOS to lead the post-PC disruption of the entire consumer computing industry. Would great UI design play a part in this IBM/Apple enterprise endeavor? Looks to me like the answer is yes.

(Interesting color palette on that insurance retention app — looks like something I’ve seen before, can’t quite put my finger on it.)

President Obama Writes His First Line of Javascript for Hour of Code ★

Obama writing JavaScript is a gimmick, yes, but I like the idea of making basic programming skills a fundamental aspect of education, right up there with reading, writing, math, and history. It’s fundamentally just logic, and better logic skills are useful universally.

(Apple’s iTunes team has put together a good list of apps, books, and podcasts to promote Hour of Code, including The Talk Show.)

Grantland’s Oral History of ‘Boogie Nights’ ★

Fantastic look back at the making of one of my favorite movies ever. Here’s just one tidbit from postproduction supervisor Mark Graziano, regarding the spectacular opening shot/scene:

I remember that shot because I’m a Scorsese fan and I love that shot in Goodfellas where he goes into the Copa. And here’s Paul basically … he never said so, but the way I read it was he’s trying to one-up that Goodfellas tracking shot. And he did.

The whole movie owed a creative debt to Goodfellas to my eyes. Goodfellas created a mold for this sort of sprawling, years-long period-piece ensemble saga. The flow, the pace — the genius use of pop music to establish the era.