Linked List: January 2, 2017

Monday, 2 January 2017

With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Hobble Independent Ethics Office 

Eric Lipton, reporting for The New York Times:

House Republicans, defying their top leaders, voted Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics was not public until late Monday, when Representative Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change with no advance public notice or debate.

In its place, a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review would be set up within the House Ethics Committee, which before the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics had been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

A secret vote within the Republican caucus to effectively eliminate the office that investigates their own misconduct. This is an outrage.

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement issued Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some members have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Orwellian double-speak: strengthening an ethics office by stripping its independence. The Republicans — in the House at least — are dropping all pretense that they intend to govern with any integrity.

Update: 12 hours later:

House Republicans, facing a storm of bipartisan criticism, including from President-elect Donald J. Trump, moved early Tuesday afternoon to reverse their plan to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics. It was an embarrassing turnabout on the first day of business for the new Congress, a day when party leaders were hoping for a show of force to reverse policies of the Obama administration.

Trump, it should be noted, didn’t voice opposition to the plan, only the timing of it.

‘Growing a Different Apple’ 

Vindu Goel, writing for the NYT:

At Apple, Brian Latimer was in charge of protecting some of the company’s deepest secrets.

After an engineer accidentally left a test version of the iPhone 4 at a bar in 2010, Mr. Latimer set up a system to track, recover and destroy prototypes of coming products. Later, he taught overseas suppliers how to shield production lines and compartmentalize information to avoid leaks.

Under Apple’s “need to know” philosophy, he did not even have access to much of the information he helped to secure. And like all Apple employees, he was discouraged from talking about his job with co-workers.

His current employer, Pearl Automation, could not be more different.

Founded in 2014 by three former senior managers from Apple’s iPod and iPhone groups, Pearl has tried to replicate what its leaders view as the best parts of Apple’s culture, like its fanatical dedication to quality and beautiful design. But the founders also consciously rejected some of the less appealing aspects of life at Apple, like its legendary secrecy and top-down management style.

The start-up, which makes high-tech accessories for cars, holds weekly meetings with its entire staff. Managers brief them on coming products, company finances, technical problems, even the presentations made to the board.

As the article notes, you just don’t see as many startups from Apple employees as you do from other companies.

MacOS Sierra PDF Problems Get Worse in 10.12.2 

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

It pains me to say this, speaking as the co-author of “Take Control of Preview”, but I have to recommend that Sierra users avoid using Preview to edit PDF documents until Apple fixes these bugs. If editing a PDF in Preview in unavoidable, be sure to work only on a copy of the file and retain the original in case editing introduces corruption of any sort. Smile’s PDFpen is the obvious alternative for PDF manipulation of all sorts (and for documentation, we have “Take Control of PDFpen 8” too), although Adobe’s Acrobat DC is also an option, albeit an expensive one.

What went wrong? Engst quotes developer Christian Grunenberg:

Apple wants to use a common foundation for both iOS and macOS. However, it was released way too early, and for the first time (at least in my experience) Apple deprecated several features without caring about compatibility. And to make things worse, lots of former features are now broken or not implemented at all, meaning that we had to add lots of workarounds or implement stuff on our own. And there’s still work left to be done.

In other words, parity with iOS took priority.

On the bright side, when this happened with the iWork suite, the Mac apps eventually gained back most of the functionality that was removed for parity with iOS. But it sure seems like Apple pulled the trigger on this at least a year before it was ready.

The Difference Between Google Assistant and Siri 

Matt Birchler:

The tech narrative is that Siri sucks and Google Assistant is the second coming. I have been using Siri for years, and have been going 100% in on Android over the last few weeks and have given Google Assistant a solid effort. My experience has been a little different than the popular narrative.

This matches my experience as well.