Linked List: September 14, 2017

Thursday, 14 September 2017

The Eeyore Principle: Face ID Will Never Work ★

The Macalope, responding to Ron Amadeo’s “I’m worried that FaceID is going to suck—and here’s why” piece for Ars Technica:

How do we know, know, know this?

This is not the first phone we’ve tried with a facial recognition feature, and they all have the same problem.

Even the iPhone X? […]

But, for now, we know Face ID will be crappy because all the other facial recognition technologies were crappy and it ain’t like Apple ever took something that was crappy for a long time an made it better like, oh, computing or digital music or tablet computing or smartphones or fingerprint recognition or a bunch of other things. It’s not like that’s literally what they do.

Exactly the same thing happened with Touch ID. There were a few Android phones with fingerprint scanners that were out before the iPhone 5S, and they sucked. So some folks made two bad assumptions: (1) that all fingerprint scanners would always suck; and (2) that Apple would be willing to put a shitty fingerprint scanner in iPhones.

Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Target ‘Jew Haters’ ★

ProPublica:

Last week, acting on a tip, we logged into Facebook’s automated ad system to see if “Jew hater” was really an ad category. We found it, but discovered that the category — with only 2,274 people in it — was too small for Facebook to allow us to buy an ad pegged only to Jew haters.

Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

One: Facebook is a morally corrupt company. They’re just bad people.

Two: as David Simon noted, “I kind of love that ‘Jew hater’ aligns cleanly with the Second Amendment demographic. The algorithms don’t lie, do they.”

Facebook Is Heading Toward a Bruising Run-in With the Russian Election Interference Probe ★

Josh Marshall:

Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

Steve Jobs Theater, Mid-Construction ★

Great catch by Dr. Drang:

Google Earth is a little behind, but it captures the Steve Jobs Theatre at an interesting stage of construction.

The Lessons and Questions of the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 ★

Must-read piece by Ben Thompson:

To return to Lennon’s words, Jobs, particularly in his second stint at Apple, had learned how to be himself: less designer than editor-in-chief, Jobs not only drove those he worked with to create “with great deal of care”, he also set Apple on a path towards being its best self. That, famously, means the integration of hardware and software, but at least in the case of the iPhone, the pertinent integration goes down to the silicon.

To that end, the products Apple unveiled at the new Steve Jobs Theater could not have been more appropriate: a cellular watch significantly smaller than competitors with comparable battery life, a new iPhone 8 improved in virtually every dimension, and, of course, the iPhone X, with nearly every new feature dependent on that integration.

You Can’t Protect Yourself From the Equifax Breach ★

Rich Mogull, writing for TidBITS:

As much as I hate to end on a sour note, the reality is that, until the system changes, until our financial lives are governed by something stronger than some short strings of plain text that never change, we have to keep our guard up and hope for the best. And hope is never part of security best practices.

Apple Watch Series 3 Cellular vs GPS-Only: What’s the Difference? ★

Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore:

The GPS + Cellular Series 3 has double the storage capacity: 16GB to the GPS-only’s 8GB. While we don’t have an official answer from Apple as to why, I’m guessing it has to do with the watch’s impending Apple Music streaming feature: Apple Music needs a certain amount of cached storage to stream, and if the company additionally plans to allow users to locally download playlists from the streaming catalog, the extra space is necessary.

One question I’ve been asked a lot is whether you have to activate the cellular option on a cellular-capable watch. The answer is no. It’s just like with iPads — you can buy a cellular model and choose not to activate it until you want to.

‘Can Anyone Catch the Cell Phone King?’ ★

This Forbes cover from 10 years ago is a nice exception to Betteridge’s Law.

What Happened With Craig Federighi’s Face ID Demo ★

David Pogue:

Tonight, I was able to contact Apple. After examining the logs of the demo iPhone X, they now know exactly what went down. Turns out my first theory in this story was wrong — but my first UPDATE theory above was correct: “People were handling the device for stage demo ahead of time,” says a rep, “and didn’t realize Face ID was trying to authenticate their face. After failing a number of times, because they weren’t Craig, the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode.” In other words, “Face ID worked as it was designed to.”

It was probably the white glove folks who clean every demo unit to perfection after the final rehearsal. A set up mistake that resulted in a demo failure. Update: I’ve just confirmed this with an Apple engineer familiar with the situation. It’s not just spin from Apple PR.