Linked List: April 29, 2017

Saturday, 29 April 2017

My thanks to Outlier for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Outlier makes radical quality clothing, with obsessively sourced raw materials. Their clothes are designed for performance, durability, and movement. I’m wearing their Ultrafine Merino T-shirt and Megafine Merino socks as I type this, and they are, simply, excellent.

I just got a pair of their shorts, too, and the first thing I checked out were the pockets. The pockets on most shorts I’ve owned are shitty. There’s no other way to say it. The pockets on Outlier shorts are exquisite. This is a company that pays attention to the details — all of the details.

What other company sells a bomber jacket with a description that begins “They say ‘don’t fuck with a classic’”? No one. Check them out. I’m buying a slew of their stuff this week.

HAL, Not Threepio ★

Me, a few days ago:

Once you start thinking about the implications of an AI-driven device that can both see and hear you, it becomes obvious just how primitive these devices still are. I want a C–3PO, not a talking camera fixed on my dresser that tells me if my socks and shirt match.

Now that I think about it, what I really want is HAL. Think about it: HAL 9000 is the platonic ideal of these voice-driven assistants. He understands you perfectly, every time; he answers immediately; he can see not just hear; and he’s available throughout your home/spaceship. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark were amazingly prescient about where AI and human-computer interfaces were heading. They were just too optimistic about how soon we’d get there.

Man Who Owns Car Company Thinks We Should Build Public Transit System for Cars ★

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch on Elon Musk’s (admittedly cleverly named) Boring Company:

Just what does Elon Musk’s Boring Company want to accomplish? This might be our clearest picture yet — a video shown during Musk’s TEDTalk from Friday morning, which includes a rendering of a future underground transit network where cars travel on crisscrossing layers of tunnels that include sleds shuttling vehicles around on rails at around 130 mph.

This is a stupid idea, and I can’t believe anyone is taking it seriously. Why in the world would any city in the world invest in a public transit system for cars? I’m all for major investments in public transit infrastructure, but public transit is and should be for people, not for fucking cars.

EPA Website Removes Climate Science Site From Public View After Two Decades ★

Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information. [...]

The staffer described the process of reviewing the site as “a work in progress, but we can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months,” adding that Pruitt’s aides had “found a number of instances of that so far” while surveying the site.

Yet the website overhaul appears to include not only policy-related changes but also scrutiny of a scientific Web page that has existed for nearly two decades, and that explained what climate change is and how it worked.

Translation: “We can’t let scientific facts get in the way of our policies.”

The Bush administration wasn’t exactly known as a friend to environmental concerns, but even they didn’t take down these pages of scientific facts and data. The Trump kakistocracy is something else entirely.

Thieves Leak First 10 ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 5 Episodes After Netflix Refuses to Pay Ransom ★

Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

An anonymous hacker has carried through on a threat to release “Orange Is the New Black” season five episodes online — after Netflix allegedly failed to respond to the cybercriminal’s shakedown demands. [...]

The first 10 episodes of season 5 were apparently shared shortly before 6 a.m. ET Saturday, with the 10 files comprising a total of 11.46 gigabytes. [...]

According to “thedarkoverlord,” the hacker or hackers also have obtained unreleased shows from ABC, Fox, National Geographic and IFC. The content appears to have been stolen in an attack on post-production studio Larson Studios in late 2016, according to piracy-news site TorrentFreak. “Thedarkoverlord” explained in an online post that they obtained only the first 10 of the 13 episodes of “OITNB” season 5 because the cyberattack was carried out before the final three installments were available.

Here’s “Thedarkoverlord”’s post announcing the release of the episodes.

I got a tour of MLB Advanced Media’s facilities in New York last year. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the area where HBO shows were handled. That area was like the count room in a casino — the securest of secure areas. You know how you don’t crack jokes about bombs while you’re in the security line at an airport? It’s like that with leaked episodes of Game of Thrones at MLB Advanced Media — no joking matter.

I would not want to be Larson Studios.

George Takei: ‘Internment, America’s Great Mistake’ ★

George Takei, in an op-ed for The New York Times:

I was 5 years old at the beginning of our internment in Arkansas. I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us.

I was 7 years old when we were transferred to another camp for “disloyals.” My mother and father’s only crime was refusing, out of principle, to sign a loyalty pledge promulgated by the government. The authorities had already taken my parents’ home on Garnet Street in Los Angeles, their once thriving dry cleaning business, and finally their liberty. Now they wanted them to grovel; this was an indignity too far.

When I was a kid, I thought World War II was “a long time ago”. Now that I’m in my 40s, when I think about the fact that the Japanese internment happened just 30 years before I was born, it gives me pause. It wasn’t that long ago.

Apple Halts License Payments to Qualcomm in ‘All-Out War’ ★

Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. cut off billions of dollars in payments to Qualcomm Inc., turning a contract dispute into what one analyst called an “all-out war” that forced the chip supplier to slash forecasts given only days ago.

The world’s largest publicly-traded technology company and one of the main suppliers of components to the iPhone, its most important product, have traded accusations of lying, making threats and trying to create an illegal monopoly. The fight involves billions of dollars of technology licensing revenue that, if permanently cut off or reduced, would damage Qualcomm’s main source of profit and help bolster Apple’s margins.

Apple told Qualcomm it will stop paying licensing revenue to contract manufacturers of the iPhone, the mechanism by which it’s paid the chipmaker since the best-selling smartphone debuted in 2007, the San Diego, California-based company said in a statement. Qualcomm removed any assumption it will get those fees from its forecast for the current period. Apple doesn’t have a direct license with Qualcomm, unlike other phone makers.

Reminds me of that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper said to Duck Phillips, “I don’t have a contract.” This is some serious hardball — Qualcomm had to cut its revenue forecast for the next quarter by $500 million.