Linked List: July 7, 2018

Saturday, 7 July 2018

My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Kolide is a new startup working to solve the security challenges of tech companies that run large Mac fleets.

Last year, Netflix blogged about a great internal tool called Stethoscope which helped their security team communicate the key settings they expect their employees to manage instead of relying on intrusive enforcement. They termed this concept “User Focused Security”.

Kolide recently released Kolide Cloud, which enables you to roll out this User Focused Security strategy and effectively communicate your organization’s Mac security best-practices to your users.

Additionally, Kolide Cloud can detect and alert you about situational security concerns in your Mac fleet that often lead to serious compromises. Kolide looks for improperly stored 2FA backup codes, evidence of unencrypted backups, browser extensions that subvert the privacy of your users, and a litany of other issues that you will want to shut down immediately.

Kolide Cloud is free for your first 10 devices and you can sign up today.

‘In Search of Steve Ditko’ ★

Steve Ditko, the reclusive co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, died yesterday at 90. This documentary from around 10 years ago for the BBC by Jonathan Ross is a terrific look at his life and work.

WSJ: ‘Samsung Estimates Operating-Profit Growth at 5 Percent, Short of Expectations’ ★

Timothy Martin, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Sales of the company’s latest flagship device, the Galaxy S9, have been weak, as consumers keep their phones longer and remain unimpressed with the newest options.

Lee Seung-woo, a Seoul-based analyst at Eugene Investment and Securities, expects Samsung will ship about 31 million Galaxy S9 devices in 2018. That would mark a dramatic decline from just two years ago, when the Galaxy S7 became Samsung’s best-selling phone ever, with roughly 50 million shipments.

Imagine the hysteria if flagship iPhone sales dropped 40 percent in two years.

I’m not so sure that the S9 is particularly “unimpressive” compared to previous Samsung phones so much as that other high-end Android handsets have caught up. I think what’s happening to Samsung is what many thought would happen to the iPhone circa 2013 — they’re losing sales to “good enough” phones from a dozen other Android makers from around the world. Even the high-end Android market is turning into a commodity market.

iOS is the moat that separates Apple from the pack, just like MacOS is in the PC market. Samsung doesn’t really have a moat. If anything, their proprietary software is worse than the off-the-shelf Android from Google. What’s the argument for buying an S9 instead of, say, a Pixel or OnePlus or whatever else has a great display and camera?

Twitter Is Shutting Down a Million Fake Accounts Per Day ★

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporting for The Washington Post:

Twitter has sharply escalated its battle against fake and suspicious accounts, suspending more than 1 million a day in recent months, a major shift to lessen the flow of disinformation on the platform, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter confirmed to The Post, has more than doubled since October, when the company revealed under congressional pressure how Russia used fake accounts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, according to the data.

I understand that “monthly active users” count has been a major metric that investors have used to value Twitter. But it’s a failure of Twitter’s executive team that they allowed the company to be painted into a corner where the company benefitted by looking the other way at large scale fraud because of an inflated “user” count.

Twitter’s executives should’ve started hammering home the point years ago that monthly active users is a legitimate metric, but monthly active accounts is not, and that in fact fake accounts are detrimental to the health of Twitter’s social network. Better late than never, but this should’ve started years ago.