Linked List: December 10, 2016

Saturday, 10 December 2016

My thanks to Eero for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Give your family (and your family’s devices) the gift of hyper-fast, whole-home Wi-Fi with the Eero Wi-Fi System. The world’s first — and best-selling — Wi-Fi system has just been updated with the next generation of mesh technology, Alexa Skills, and an app overhaul to help better optimize your network.

It’s so easy to set up. Each Eero device is the same. You hook one of them up to your cable modem. You spread the other ones around your house (they recommend one for every 1,000 square feet). Then they mesh together and form a single network with strong signal everywhere in your home. Eero is one of my favorite new products of 2016 — I’d say that even if they weren’t sponsoring DF.

Tim Cook Will Attend Trump’s Tech Summit Wednesday ★

Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode:

Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are among the small group of top tech leaders who will attend a summit with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday at Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the situation. […]

Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

As Gabe Rivera notes, the invitation list seems to correspond to those companies with $100 billion market caps.

“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

“We are with him and will help in any way we can” sounds like “I’m ready to spit-shine his shoes” to my ears. I expect all of them to be polite — or perhaps better put, politic — in their public statements on the meeting, but there’s no need for these CEOs to fall in line.

I expect Tim Cook to handle himself just fine. I think he’ll leave Trump Tower with his dignity, integrity, and Apple Inc.’s interests under a Trump administration intact. (Getting a bill passed to repatriate foreign-held dollars at a reasonable tax rate could happen in the post-Trump political climate.) But, man, to be a fly on the wall in that room if Steve Jobs were still alive….

Derangement ★

The entirety of the Trump transition team’s response to the extraordinary news that the CIA believes Russia interfered with the election with the intention of helping Trump win:

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and “Make America Great Again.”

Put aside that every single word of that statement is false. (It was George W. Bush’s White House that claimed to be convinced that Iraq had WMDs, not CIA intelligence officers. The election was only a month ago — we’re still closer to election day than we are to Trump’s first day in office. Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and his Electoral College win ranks 46th out of 58 in history.) Put aside that the statement doesn’t even claim the report is false — the implication is that it doesn’t matter whether or not Russia interfered in a U.S. election to help one side, when, clearly, anyone with an interest in ours being an honest democracy would call for a thorough and immediate investigation of these claims.

That’s a lot to put aside. But here’s the best part. One of the people who did claim in 2002 that Iraq had stockpiled hidden weapons of mass destruction was John R. Bolton, then Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Today comes news that Trump’s team is considering nominating Bolton to be Deputy Secretary of State.

So within the span of a breath, Trump’s team is claiming that the people who claimed Iraq had WMDs in 2002 have no credibility on matters of foreign intelligence, and are thinking about nominating one of them as second-in-command at the State Department.