Linked List: November 28, 2017

Tuesday, 28 November 2017

New Official ‘Apple Support’ YouTube Channel ★

Slew of good tips and tricks here already.

It also occurs to me that this is a sign of just how dominant YouTube is. Everyone publishes video on YouTube, even Google’s biggest rivals — Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. YouTube effectively is the internet for video content.

New ‘Sets’ Feature in Windows 10 Adds System-Wide Tabs ★

Interesting idea, particularly the way that the tabs in a window can be from any application. I don’t think this idea would translate at all to the Mac, but it seems like it could work on Windows.

‘A Night at the Garden’ ★

Shocking short film by Marshall Curry:

In 1939, New York’s Madison Square Garden was host to an enormous — and shocking — gathering of 22,000 Americans that has largely been forgotten from our history.

Chilling footage. About 4 minutes in, a protestor tries to storm the stage and he takes a serious beating from the Nazis and then some rough handling by the police. There are children on stage — American Nazi Youth? — and they seem gleeful watching this guy take a beating.

From the Q&A with Curry:

Q: Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?

A: The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden you can be sure that many times that were passively supportive.

MacOS High Sierra Bug Allows Root Access Without Password ★

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

There appears to be a serious bug in macOS High Sierra that enables the root superuser on a Mac with with a blank password and no security check.

The bug, discovered by developer Lemi Ergin, lets anyone log into an admin account using the username “root” with no password. This works when attempting to access an administrator’s account on an unlocked Mac, and it also provides access at the login screen of a locked Mac.

There’s no “appears to be” about this — this is a serious bug. Allowing root access without a password is just inexplicably bad. I rarely describe any bug as inexcusable, but this is inexcusable.

Until Apple issues a fix, there is a workaround: manually enable the root user account and give it a strong unique password.

Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II ★

Ben Thompson:

That, though, is the magic of the term “net neutrality”, the name — coined by the same Tim Wu whose tweet I embedded above — for those FCC rules that justified the original 2015 reclassification of ISPs to utility-like common carriers. Of course ISPs should be neutral — again, who could be against such a thing? What is missing in the ongoing debate, though, is the recognition that, ever since the demise of AOL, they have been. The FCC’s 2015 approach to net neutrality is solving problems as fake as the image in Wu’s tweet; unfortunately the costs are just as real as those in Congressman Khanna’s tweet, but massively more expensive.

Thought-provoking piece — I find myself persuaded.

See Also: Tyler Cowen: “What It Would Take to Change My Mind on Net Neutrality”. The key idea to keep in mind is that the basic principles of “net neutrality” and the specific regulations put in place by the Obama administration in 2015 are different things. You can be in favor of net neutrality in principle but be opposed to the current regulatory structure as the best way to achieve and protect it.

CNBC: ‘Uber Reportedly Trained Workers to Use Disappearing Messages to Evade Authorities, Former Employee Alleges’ ★

Anita Balakrishnan, reporting for CNBC:

A U.S. judge on Tuesday said Uber “withheld evidence from me” and granted a request from Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving car unit to delay a trade secrets trial that had been scheduled to begin next week.

The delay centers around a letter from a former Uber security analyst’s attorney to an Uber lawyer. The former employee reportedly made bombshell allegations, including that employees at Uber were trained to “impede” ongoing investigations, multiple media outlets reported.

It never stops with these guys.