Linked List: August 21, 2018

Tuesday, 21 August 2018

Aston Martin Reproducing Goldfinger DB5s With Gadgets 

Speaking of James Bond, Joel Stocksdale, reporting for Autoblog

It won’t simply be a DB5 in the correct color, either. The company is teaming up with the special effects supervisor from the most recent James Bond films, a man who, according to IMDb, has been working on Bond movies at some level since The Spy Who Loved Me and was the special-effects supervisor on the the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy and the two latest numbered installments of the Star Wars series, to build the cars with “functioning gadgets such as revolving number plates and more.” The “and more” part has us particularly intrigued. We imagine the tracking computer and bulletproof shield are simple enough. But the hideaway machine guns and ejector seat might be tricky. Regardless, you won’t be able to deploy any of the gadgets on public roads, as Aston Martin explicitly states the cars won’t be street legal.

We’re sure that won’t keep Aston from finding buyers for these dream DB5s. The price tag probably won’t deter serious buyers, either. The company says each car will sell for 2,750,000 pounds, which comes to $3,510,000 at current exchange rates. Of the 28 cars, 25 will be sold directly to customers. The remaining three will include one for Aston Martin, one for EON Productions, the company that produces Bond movies, and one that will auctioned for charity. Aston estimates the first cars will be delivered in 2020.

Pretty cool, but that’s a lot of money for a car that isn’t even street legal.

Google Data Collection Research 

Digital Content Next:

In “Google Data Collection,” Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together.

The key findings include:

  • A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.

  • For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.

That’s quite a difference.

Harper’s Weekly Review 

A lot of weird news this week, even by today’s standards:

US secretary of the interior Ryan Zinke, who has been investigated for violating the Hatch Act after tweeting a photo of himself wearing “Make America Great Again” socks, wore Ronald Reagan socks while touring the Carr fire sites in Northern California, and said that the wildfires were started by “environmental terrorist groups.”

Research Suggests Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany 

Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, reporting for The New York Times:

Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

And the effect apparently works the other way, too:

Could Facebook really distort social relations to the point of violence? The University of Warwick researchers tested their findings by examining every sustained internet outage in their study window. German internet infrastructure tends to be localized, making outages isolated but common. Sure enough, whenever internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly.

Huawei Caught Passing Off DSLR Pictures as Phone Camera Samples 

Rachel England, writing for Engadget:

Now, Huawei never explicitly said that the advert was shot on the Nova 3, and of course it’s well-accepted that advertising is a land of smoke and mirrors and probably not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things — companies tweak the truth all the time in order to peddle their wares. But this is just deliberately misleading. And pretty embarrassing for the company, too.

This is more than just “tweaking the truth”. It’s downright dishonest. Compare and contrast with Apple’s years-long “Shot on iPhone” campaign — all of them actual photos shot using actual iPhones.

Back to My Mac Is Going Away in Mojave 

Apple support document:

Back to My Mac will not be available on macOS Mojave. You can get ready now by learning about alternatives for file access, screen sharing, and remote desktop access.

I never really used Back to My Mac, but I hadn’t realized it was removed in Mojave. I’m not sure screen sharing and remote desktop access are adequate replacements.

Danny Boyle Out as Director of ‘Bond 25’ 

From the official James Bond Twitter account:

Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig today announced that due to creative differences Danny Boyle has decided to no longer direct Bond 25.

Seems like that November 2019 release date might be in jeopardy, unless they find someone to direct who’s willing to shoot the script as-is (which is what Ron Howard did when he took over Solo).

My vote would be to bring back Martin Campbell and give him time to get the script right. Campbell’s Casino Royale is the best modern Bond film, by far, and Goldeneye was at least the best of the Brosnan films.