Linked List: July 17, 2018

Tuesday, 17 July 2018

The Washington Post: ‘Amazon Continues to Profit From the Sale of White-Supremacist Propaganda’ ★

Tracy Jan, reporting earlier this month for The Washington Post:

Shoppers can purchase Amazon.com merchandise displaying symbols of white supremacy, such as a swastika necklace, a baby onesie with a burning cross, and a child’s backpack featuring a neo-Nazi meme, all in contradiction of the retail giant’s policy against selling products that promote hatred, according to a new report from two watchdog groups.

Trump argues that The Washington Post is, under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, a propaganda mouthpiece for Amazon. It simply doesn’t register with Trump that Bezos would even consider allowing the Post to remain utterly editorially independent.

Uber Head of HR Liane Hornsey Resigns Following Discrimination Probe ★

Salvador Rodriguez, reporting last week for Reuters:

Uber Technologies Inc’s Chief People Officer Liane Hornsey resigned in an email to staff on Tuesday, following an investigation into how she handled allegations of racial discrimination at the ride-hailing firm. […]

They alleged Hornsey had used discriminatory language and made derogatory comments about Uber Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion Bernard Coleman, and had denigrated and threatened former Uber executive Bozoma Saint John, who left the company in June.

“This person ultimately was the reason behind (Saint John’s) departure from Uber,” the anonymous employees said in an email, referring to Hornsey.

Saint John joined Uber from Apple Inc in June, 2017 but left only a year later to join Endeavor, the parent company of several talent agencies. She declined to comment, telling Reuters by phone: “I don’t have anything to say about my experience there.”

I thought it was curious when Saint John left Uber after just one year. Uber’s company culture remains disgraceful.

‘The Axis Is Constructive-Destructive’ ★

Steve Jobs, in a 2010 conversation with Rupert Murdoch, in which Jobs told Murdoch he was “blowing it with Fox News”:

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”

I thought this was interesting in light of my comments yesterday regarding the power that Murdoch, by way of Fox News, holds over Donald Trump’s presidency.

This line from Jobs — “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive” — is truly the best summary of Trumpism I’ve seen. Trump supporters aren’t conservatives, they just want to see the liberal world order burn down.

(Thanks to Chloe Deguzman.)

MacOS 10.14 Mojave Removes Subpixel Anti-Aliasing ★

I was a huge fan of sub-pixel anti-aliasing back in the day (and in fact still have it enabled on 10.13), but it matters far more on non-retina displays than retina ones. I think it’s proper for Apple to focus on retina displays — and iOS has never supported sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which I can only guess factored into this decision with the introduction of UIKit apps running on MacOS — but they’re still selling the non-retina MacBook Air. I won’t issue a final judgment until Mojave actually ships, but I suspect most Air users are going to think this makes text look blurrier.

Update: Looks like you can still enable sub-pixel anti-aliasing with a Terminal command.

Supporting Michael Tsai’s Blog ★

Michael Tsai:

I’ve been told this is overdue, but I’d like to ask you to help support this site financially. This is optional. I’m not creating a paywall, and I don’t want you to feel guilty if you aren’t able to help. But if you enjoy what I’m doing here, please consider joining via Patreon.

To be clear, I see this site as a labor of love. I’m not interested in making it more commercial or in giving up software development. I would like to keep it going more or less as it’s been: a personal site with a regular posting schedule. However, the writing does consume a substantial amount of my time, and I’m hoping that patronage will help me to justify that.

Tsai has long been one of my favorite bloggers and Mac developers. I conducted a long interview with Tsai back in 2003 — still an interesting read today. His blog is simply great, period — just look at how many great links are on his homepage right now — but where he truly stands apart are the times he assembles links to commentary from dozens of people on complex stories. Here’s a great example from last week on the updated MacBook Pros. I’m happy to support his continuing work.

Third-Generation MacBook Pro Keyboards Have a Protective Silicone Barrier ★

Sam Lionhart, writing for iFixit:

Here’s an inflammatory take for you: Apple’s new quieter keyboard is actually a silent scheme to fix their keyboard reliability issues. We’re in the middle of tearing down the newest MacBook Pro, but we’re too excited to hold this particular bit of news back:

Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier.

I think it’s a stretch to call this a “cover-up” or “inflammatory”, but it certainly gives credence to the theory that improved reliability was in fact a major design goal for this keyboard.

Rob Verger, writing for Popular Science:

Pull a USB flash drive out of your Mac without first clicking to eject it, and you’ll get a stern, shameful warning: “Disk Not Ejected Properly.”

But do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way?

Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin.

That’s not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or — even more unlikely — the entire storage device.

This is terrible advice. It’s akin to saying you probably don’t need to wear a seat belt because it’s unlikely anything bad will happen. Imagine a few dozen people saying they drive without a seat belt every day and nothing’s ever gone wrong, so it must be OK. (The breakdown in this analogy is that with seat belts, you know instantly when you need to be wearing one. With USB drives, you might not discover for months or years that you’ve got a corrupt file that was only partially written to disk when you yanked the drive.)

I see a bunch of “just pull out the drive and not worry about it” Mac users on Twitter celebrating this article, and I don’t get it. On the Mac you have to do something on screen when you eject a drive. Either you properly eject it before unplugging the drive — one click in the Finder sidebar — or you need to dismiss the alert you’ll get about having removed a drive that wasn’t properly ejected. Why not take the course of action that guarantees data integrity?

NBC News: ‘Apple, Google Cashed in on Pizzagate-Offshoot Conspiracy App’ ★

NBC News:

An app promoting a conspiracy theory featuring Hillary Clinton and a child sex ring lingered at the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store for months, with both tech giants receiving a cut of the revenue in the process.

The app, called “QDrops,” sends alerts about a conspiracy theory called Qanon, an offshoot of the “pizzagate” fiction that claimed Clinton was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza shop that didn’t even have a basement. Like many conspiracy theories, Qanon got its start on 4chan, an anonymous posting site that is a seedbed for extreme thought and a large number of online subcultures.

Apple removed the QDrops app from its app store on Sunday after inquiries from NBC News.

There’s a fine line between “right-wing news” and “dangerous conspiracies”, but App Store reviewers are there to make those calls. This is not a good look for Apple.