Linked List: March 16, 2016

Wednesday, 16 March 2016

True story (you can ask my mom): my first spoken word was “cookie”, such a fan of Cookie Monster was I. I’ve never been one for moderation.

(Don’t miss the small-print gag at the very end.)

Susan Crawford: ‘The Law Is Clear: The FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS’ 

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford, who served as Obama’s special assistant in 2009:

The president — our Law Professor in Chief — has to know the DOJ is on shaky ground. He’s probably got this rule of statutory construction rolling around in his mind as he watches college basketball this week: Specific statutes trump general ones. Generalia specialibus non derogant.

Nonetheless, the president has chosen his I Get Terrifying Briefings Every Day hat. It’s understandable. Who will blame him for protecting us? He’s worried about something awful happening. It’s just that increasingly hard-to-hear rule of law alarm bell going off again.

The DOJ is arguing that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) should not apply, when clearly it should. And they’re arguing that the All Writs Act should apply, when clearly it shouldn’t. The more I read about it, the stronger Apple’s legal argument looks.

‘Dr. Strangelove’ Coming to Criterion Collection 

Sign me up.

Michael Mann Launches Book Imprint; ‘Heat’ Prequel Novel in Works 

Mike Fleming Jr., reporting for Deadline Hollywood:

Writer-director Michael Mann, long one of the most literate translators of words to the screen, has made a deal to launch Michael Mann Books. The imprint will generate a series of novels with a stable of writers and the properties will simultaneously be developed for film and television. Mann will look through his own long list of credits for ideas, and a big piece of news here is that high on the priority list is a prequel novel dealing with the principal characters of Heat, Mann’s seminal crime thriller. The prequel novel will cover the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shihirles (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters so brilliantly layered in the 1995 film. Mann based that film on stories of a lot of real criminals and cops, and references to past experiences are peppered throughout the picture.

Sign me up.

Google Lands Apple as Cloud Services Customer 

Kevin McLaughlin and Joseph Tsidulko, reporting for CRN:

Alphabet’s Google has quietly scored a major coup in its campaign to become an enterprise cloud computing powerhouse, landing Apple as a customer for the Google Cloud Platform, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told CRN this week.

Since inking the Google deal late last year, Apple has also significantly reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services, whose infrastructure it uses to run parts of iCloud and other services, said the sources, who all requested anonymity to protect their relationships with the vendors.

Apple has not abandoned AWS entirely and remains a customer, the sources said.

Well, that’s interesting. (Via Ben Bajarin.)