Linked List: January 25, 2017

Wednesday, 25 January 2017

The National Park Service Refuses to Be Silenced 

Dana Hunter, writing for Scientific American on the National Park Service’s resistance against the Trump administration’s gag order:

Not long after Badlands was brought into line, anonymous employees of the NPS went rogue. They created the AltUSNatlParkService account and, after retweeting a particularly provocative image from the Badlands account along with some climate change data, announced their intent in no uncertain terms:

Mr Trump, you may have taken us down officially. But with scientific evidence & the Internet our message will get out.

These federal employees speaking out now understand that science is not subordinate to politics, that truth is essential, and transparency vital to a functioning democracy. They are risking their careers to ensure the public is kept informed. They’re exercising their free speech rights to ensure we know the truth.

I have never been prouder of our National Park Service than I am now.

How to Retract a Mistake 

A Reddit thread claimed that Apple was removing negative reviews of the new LG 5K display from the online Apple store. A slew of news sites jumped on the story. Turns out, Apple had not enabled reviews on these displays until today.

TidBITS publisher Adam Engst shows how to do a retraction right:

Hence, the claim on Reddit that Apple removed negative user reviews cannot be entirely true. For confirmation, and this is what we should have done before publishing, we looked in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which showed that from the time the LG UltraFine 5K Display page was first crawled on 5 November 2016 until now, there have never been any user reviews. In addition, we confirmed that other products in the Apple Store with user reviews do show those reviews in the Wayback Machine, so it’s not just an anomaly with the Apple Store site.

In other words, we should never have published that ExtraBITS link. We regret both the error and calling into question behavior on Apple’s part that never took place. It’s important that readers be able to trust that we can back up any criticisms that we make, and while we were certainly not alone among news outlets in publicizing that Reddit thread, we should have checked more carefully before believing it.

Mashable shows us how not to do it.

Dropcam Founder and Former Nest Executive Greg Duffy Joins Apple 

Duffy, you may recall, got a lot of attention last year when he excoriated Tony Fadell for what Duffy claimed was Fadell’s mismanagement of Dropcam post-acquisition.

Reed Albergotti got the scoop on Duffy’s hiring for The Information. From their paywalled story:

At first glance, Mr. Duffy seems like an unlikely candidate to become part of Apple’s vast corporate machinery. Even by Silicon Valley standards, where eccentricity is a virtue, Mr. Duffy is an individual. After leaving Nest, he embraced aeronautics with a passion, becoming an expert helicopter pilot, flying old fighter jets and taking a plane trip around the world, all the while considering his next startup idea.

People who know Mr. Duffy, but weren’t aware that he had joined Apple, expressed surprise. They had been sure Mr. Duffy would found a new company, aiming for his second blockbuster.

Must be an interesting gig.

Android Central on Trump’s ‘Old, Unsecured Android Phone’ 

Alex Dobie, writing for Android Central:

So there you go. Trump’s personal Android phone is more than likely a Samsung Galaxy S3, released in 2012, and which last received a software update in mid-2015, with firmware based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean.

As noted in the intro, we don’t know for sure that Trump is still using this specific Galaxy S3. The two NYT reports conflict on whether he turned it in, or is still using it to fire out tweets from the White House. But if he is, and it’s the same consumer GS3 model he was apparently using as of February 2016, it’s safe to say it’s a good three years out of step with the latest Android security updates. Many Android security scares have come and gone since the GS3 got its last update in August of 2015.

It’s ridiculous if he’s actually still using that old phone. It’s a national security risk.