Linked List: September 22, 2016

Thursday, 22 September 2016

I installed the first developer beta of iOS 10.1 on my iPhone 7 Plus review unit, and shot a bunch of portraits on the walk home from school with my son yesterday. Here they are on Flickr, each with its corresponding image without the depth effect applied. Some of them look great, most look pretty good, and at least two of them have serious problems.

MotionMark: A New Graphics Benchmark From the WebKit Team ★

Jon Lee, Said Abou-Hallawa, and Simon Fraser:

Today, we are pleased to introduce MotionMark, a new graphics benchmark for web browsers.

We’ve seen the web grow in amazing ways, making it a rich platform capable of running complex web apps, rendering beautiful web pages, and providing user experiences that are fast, responsive, and visibly smooth. With the development and wide adoption of web standards like CSS animations, SVG, and HTML5 canvas, it’s easier than ever for a web author to create an engaging and sophisticated experience. Since these technologies rely on the performance of the browser’s graphics system, we created this benchmark to put it to the test.

We’d like to talk about how the benchmark works, how it has helped us improve the performance of WebKit, and what’s in store for the future.

Some of the tests are pretty enough to be screensavers.

How Hampton Creek Sold Silicon Valley on a Fake-Mayo Miracle ★

Olivia Zaleski, Peter Waldman, and Ellen Huet, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek:

In January 2014 a Creeker on the West Coast, who asked not to be identified, received an assignment in an e-mail under the subject line “Secret Shopper Squad Stores.” She was directed to buy 20 bottles a week of Just Mayo from each Whole Foods store in a large territory. […]

After the secret purchases, the e-mail instructed, she should open one or two bottles at home to check for quality — specifically, whether the mayonnaise had separated. If the jars were all right, she could donate the rest to a food bank or give it to friends. “Do not return them to Whole Foods,” the e-mail said. It also included a link to a quality-assurance survey the Creeker was supposed to fill out for each store. But no one noticed when she didn’t do it. Within weeks she had bought so much Just Mayo that her friends and local food banks couldn’t handle any more, so she began dumping it. She spent almost $12,000 purchasing the product, she says, and she could tell the buybacks had nothing to do with quality control. “But I really didn’t think about it because I cared so much about the cause.”

With the buyback program in full swing, Tetrick celebrated the product’s success. “Wow! Some @WholeFoods are selling 100+ jars of #justmayo/day,” he tweeted on Jan. 30. Four months later, a company tweet said: “Proud to announce that #justmayo is now the #1 selling mayo at @wholefoods.”

This is just outright fraud, and Tetrick doubled down on it with his claims that the buy backs were only for the purposes of quality assurance.

Also, interesting interactive art direction on this story.

Yahoo Says Hackers Stole Data on 500 Million Users in 2014 ★

Nicole Perlroth, reporting for the NYT:

Yahoo announced on Thursday that the account information for at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers two years ago, in the biggest known intrusion of one company’s computer network.

In a statement, Yahoo said user information — including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, passwords and, in some cases security questions — was compromised in 2014 by what it believed was a “state-sponsored actor.” It did not name the country involved.

The company said that it was working with law enforcement officials and that it was invalidating existing security questions and asking users to change their passwords. Yahoo also encouraged people to review other online accounts for suspicious activity, change passwords and security questions on those accounts, and watch out for suspicious emails.

Verizon, in midst of acquiring Yahoo, only found out about this two days ago. Not a good coda to Marissa Mayer’s tenure, to say the least.

Update: Also, doesn’t “500 million accounts” effectively mean all Yahoo accounts in 2014? How many accounts could there have been that weren’t stolen? They’re saying “500 million” but they really mean “They stole every account”. Right? Update: Here’s a report that claims Yahoo has 1 billion “monthly active users”, but even if true, that doesn’t mean every active user is signed into an account. Even if it’s not all accounts that were stolen, it has to be most.