Linked List: September 27, 2017

Wednesday, 27 September 2017

Hugh Hefner, Who Built Playboy Empire and Embodied It, Dies at 91 ★

Laura Mansnerus, writing for The New York Times:

Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s — died Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion near the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 91.

What a life.

The News From Today’s Amazon Hardware Event ★

Nice roundup by Shannon Liao for The Verge.

Apple White Paper: ‘Face ID Security’ (PDF) ★

New from Apple, a white paper describing the security aspects of Face ID. Here’s a bit on how you’ll confirm payments:

To authorize an in-store payment with Face ID, you must first confirm intent to pay by double-clicking the side button. You then authenticate using Face ID before placing your iPhone X near the contactless payment reader. If you’d like to select a different Apple Pay payment method after Face ID authentication, you’ll need to reauthenticate, but you won’t have to double-click the side button again.

To make a payment within apps and on the web, you confirm intent to pay by double-clicking the side button, then authenticate using Face ID to authorize the payment. If your Apple Pay transaction is not completed within 30 seconds of double-clicking the side button, you’ll have to reconfirm intent to pay by double-clicking again.

Apple also published a support document with a summary of this stuff, and Rene Ritchie has a good deep dive at iMore.

Amazon: Google Won’t Tell Us Why It Pulled YouTube From the Echo Show ★

Casey Newton, reporting for The Verge:

Google won’t tell Amazon why it blocked access to YouTube on its Echo Show device, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services said. Speaking to reporters at Amazon’s headquarters today, longtime Amazon exec Dave Limp said he would “send a team to Mountain View” tonight if Google would just specify what went wrong.

Interesting to me that the Google/Amazon cold war is escalating at the same time the Apple/Amazon cold war is de-escalating (with Apple TV 4K now on sale at Amazon, and Amazon Prime coming soon to Apple TV).

Update: iCloud Text Replacements Are Moving to CloudKit Soon ★

Good news related to yesterday’s item regarding the fact that text replacement shortcuts have never synced reliably between Macs or iOS devices: an Apple spokesperson emailed me to say they checked with the team, and an update that moves text replacement syncing to CloudKit should be rolling out to iOS 11 and MacOS 10.13 High Sierra users in the “next month or so”.

That is music to my ears. I was thinking yesterday that this might take until next year (with iOS 12 and MacOS 10.14) to fix. Delighted to hear that Apple is already on the case.