Linked List: December 23, 2016

Friday, 23 December 2016

My thanks to StoryWorth for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. The holidays are here — Christmas is just two days away — and StoryWorth is a terrific and meaningful gift idea. It’s a way to get to know family members better. Here’s how it works: Each week, StoryWorth will send them a new question. They answer it with a story, which gets shared with you. After a year, all of their stories are bound in a beautiful keepsake book. It’s a great way to get to know your loved ones better.

StoryWorth is the rare gift that can be purchased at the very last minute, but is still truly personal and meaningful. Even better: StoryWorth is offering Daring Fireball readers $20 off, just by following this link to buy.

On North Carolina and Democracy ★

Andrew Reynolds, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina:

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table — a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

This is not left versus right. This is not politics as usual. This is not something both sides do. This is about a party — the Republican Party — that no longer believes in democracy.

Update: I do believe that what is going on in North Carolina is utterly anti-democratic, but the study cited here looks like complete garbage.

Uber Explains Why It Looks Like Its App Is Still Tracking Your Location, Long After Rides End ★

Great story from Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, following up on my report that some DF readers reported Uber being listed as having checked their location long after they last used the app, even though Uber claims they’re only using the “Always” location privilege for “five minutes after the trip ends”:

However, Uber says the location tracking is not intentional behavior on the part of its app.

Uber investigated the issue today, at our request, and found the issue is related to the iOS Maps extension. This also explains why not everyone was seeing the problem.

Uber’s map extension feature was made available in September, and is based on Apple’s protocol for Map extensions. Other map extensions from Uber competitors would work the same way, then.

According to an Uber spokesperson: “For people who choose to integrate ride sharing apps with iOS Maps, location data must be shared in order for you to request a ride inside the Maps app. Map extensions are disabled by default and you can choose to turn them on in your iOS settings,” they said.

In other words, it’s not a bug, it’s feature. And it’s a feature of iOS.

I think this might explain it. I’m thinking Apple should change this so that these extensions only load when you tap the “Ride” tab in Maps. As it stands now, they load (and check your location) every time you enter the Maps app, period.

Rene Ritchie on Consumer Reports’s MacBook Pro Testing ★

Rene Ritchie, responding to Consumer Reports’s scathing but incredibly inconsistent battery life tests on the new MacBook Pros:

If I were running the tests, that right there would be a red flag. A huge, glowing, neon red flag.

Those results make very little sense and I’d take apart my chain, link by link, until I found out what was going on. I’d check and re-check my tests, I’d watch the systems like a hawk, and I’d do everything possible to find what was causing the variance. I’d even — gasp — try testing different machines and something other than web pages to see if that revealed more information.

Inconsistent results from battery life tests, for responsible publications, aren’t a reason to rush out a headline in time for the holidays. They’re a reason to start questioning everything, and to diligently retrace every step along the way, until you can get repeatable, reputable results.

I do think Consumer Reports rushed this out. There’s a lot of “We have no idea what’s going on” here. But something is going on.

Anecdotally, reports from DF readers are all over the map. Many are complaining that battery life is poor — not based on the “time remaining” estimate that Apple removed from the battery menu item in 10.12.2, but on real-world usage. Some though, are getting excellent battery life (as I did in my review, mostly using a Core i5 13-inch model with Touch Bar). Others are claiming they were getting poor battery life but it has greatly improved after upgrading to MacOS 10.12.2.

A friend pointed out the other day that this is where we really miss the old magazine testing labs, like Macworld’s. They’d buy all the various hardware models, test them thoroughly (and document the exact nature of the tests), and copiously report the results. It was a very useful service, and they were trustworthy.

Update: Phil Schiller, tweeting a link to Ritchie’s story:

Working with CR to understand their battery tests. Results do not match our extensive lab tests or field data.

Matthew Panzarino, in a series of tweets about Consumer Reports’s results:

Apple hasn’t given me anything on this, but I’ve had folks in know tell me that big data scoop (all MBP users) is NOT showing these results.

Consumer Reports Slams New MacBook Pros ★

Jerry Bellison, Consumer Reports:

Apple launched a new series of MacBook Pro laptops this fall, and Consumer Reports’ labs have just finished evaluating them. The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another.

As a result, these laptops are the first MacBooks not to receive recommended ratings from Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports embarrassed itself during the iPhone 4 “antennagate” story, but they’ve long rated Apple’s notebooks highly.

For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.

That’s absolutely bonkers. You expect minor variance from one run to another, but not like this. Either something is seriously wrong with these new MacBook Pros, or something is seriously wrong with Consumer Reports’s testing (or both).

Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs. That’s not enough data for us to draw a conclusion, and in any case a test using Chrome wouldn’t affect our ratings, since we only use the default browser to calculate our scores for all laptops. But it’s something that a MacBook Pro owner might choose to try.

This is crazy too. Whatever the benefits of Chrome are, everyone knows it’s an energy hog. There is no way that using Chrome should result in better (and more consistent) battery life than Safari.