Linked List: March 29, 2017

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

Android Auto vs. Apple CarPlay Head-to-Head 

Everyone who works on CarPlay and Siri at Apple should be forced to watch this. Pretty much a shutout victory for Android Auto.

The 265 Members of Congress Who Sold You Out to ISPs, and How Much It Cost to Buy Them 

T.C. Sottek, reporting for The Verge:

Republicans in Congress just voted to reverse a landmark FCC privacy rule that opens the door for ISPs to sell customer data. Lawmakers provided no credible reason for this being in the interest of Americans, except for vague platitudes about “consumer choice” and “free markets,” as if consumers at the mercy of their local internet monopoly are craving to have their web history quietly sold to marketers and any other third party willing to pay.

The only people who seem to want this are the people who are going to make lots of money from it. (Hint: they work for companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.) Incidentally, these people and their companies routinely give lots of money to members of Congress.

So here is a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you, and how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle.

Completely and utterly along party lines. Not one Democrat voted for this. “Congress” didn’t do this. Republicans in Congress did this.

There’s no argument that can be made in defense of this bill other than that the Republican party believes that increasing the profits of telecom companies is more important than protecting the privacy of people.

‘Things Change’ 

Jim Coudal breaks the news: The Deck network is shutting down.

I’ll have more to say later, but now, just one word: Thanks.

Nathan Peretic Called It, Too 

Nathan Peretic, one day after Zeldman’s post in February 2010:

The coup de grâce, history will note, was Apple’s release of the iPhone sans Flash. The mobile Internet became a force to reckon with overnight, single-handedly trashing Flash’s former claim of ubiquity. The iPhone has gashed a gigantic hole in the number of people browsing the Internet who don’t have Flash. The iPad is poised to increase that number.

This is an excellent summation of the logic that doomed Flash.

Before the iPhone and iPad, Flash was the easiest way to publish multimedia viewable by the largest audience. The percentage of web-viewing devices with Flash Player installed, right from the factory, was surely in the high 90s. In an ideal world, web publishers would have aggressively moved to HTML5 simply because it was a better — and open — technology. But that wasn’t enough of a motivation.

Almost every device could play Flash content. Many devices could not render HTML5 content, because they were junky PCs running Internet Explorer. Publishers went for the larger group, technology be damned.

Starting with the iPhone, there was no longer any way to publish multimedia in one format for “almost all” devices. You could stick with Flash and ignore mobile, or you could switch to HTML5 and leave legacy PCs running old browsers behind. The choice was easy.

Zeldman Called It 

Jeffrey Zeldman, back in February 2010 (two months before Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”):

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

Plug-in technology made sense when web browsing was the province of geeks. It was a brilliant solution to the question of how to extend the user experience beyond what HTML allowed. People who were used to extending their PC via third-party hardware, and jacking the capabilities of their operating system via third-party spell checkers, font managers, and more, intuitively grasped how to boost their browser’s prowess by downloading and updating plug-ins.

But tomorrow’s computing systems, heralded by the iPhone, are not for DIYers. You don’t add Default Folder or FontExplorer X Pro to your iPhone, you don’t choose your iPhone’s browser, and you don’t install plug-ins in your iPhone’s browser. This lack of extensibility may not please the Slashdot crowd but it’s the future of computing and browsing. The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works.

If you had your eyes open, you could see that Flash was doomed as soon as it became clear that the iPhone had changed the world.