Linked List: December 23, 2015

Wednesday, 23 December 2015

WinterFest 2015 

Another great holiday indie app promotion, featuring Mac stalwarts such as BBEdit, Nisus Writer Pro, Tinderbox, TextExpander, and more.

IP-Boxes 

From a New York Daily News story about a judge tossing out evidence police obtained from a suspect’s iPhone:

U.S. Department of Homeland Security special agent David Bauer had testified in Djibo’s case that a “fairly new” device called an IP-Box can be used to “systematically attempt every passcode from 0000 to 9999.”

But in the other case before the magistrate, Johnson noted, different federal prosecutors argued that the IP-Box is unreliable and could result in a “non-trivial risk of data destruction.”

These devices are easily obtained, and only cost $100-200. It takes about 17 hours to run through all the codes from 0000 to 9999. (A smart one would start by trying the most commonly used four-digit passcodes first, instead of starting at 0000.) Anyway, if you haven’t switched to a six-digit passcode, you should. And if you have anything truly sensitive on your devices, you should enable the option to erase all data after 10 failed attempts.

Netflix’s New Video Compression Strategy 

Don Melton:

The tl;dr of it all is simply that Netflix plans on scaling bitrates up and down based on the complexity of their video. So, slightly higher bitrates for busy action blockbusters and possibly lower bitrates for relatively static, flat cartoons.

Basically what we’ve all been doing for years with variable bitrate (VBR) encoding. But they’re trying to control that variance a lot more than an encoder like x264 typically allows. In fact, as near as I can tell, Netflix still plans on encoding everything with a constant bitrate (CBR), but they want to be really particular about the target number.

To do that, Netflix will transcode every one of their videos a bazillion times at different resolutions and at different bitrates, finally selecting the smallest one for a particular title that doesn’t suck visually. Seriously, their algorithm for all of this is quite clever.

App Santa 2015: Award-Winning Apps, Up to 80 Percent Off for Christmas 

One of my favorite holiday traditions is this promotion from a bunch of truly great indie app developers for Mac and iOS.