Linked List: January 9, 2019

Wednesday, 9 January 2019

‘Rather Than Dipping a Drinking Glass Into the Ocean, They Say, Astronomers Have Dunked a Bathtub’ ★

The Economist on a new paper addressing Fermi’s Paradox:

Dr Wright’s argument echoes that made by another astronomer, Jill Tarter, in 2010. Dr Tarter reckoned that decades of searching had amounted to the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass into Earth’s oceans at random to see if it contained a fish. Dr Wright and his colleagues built on Dr Tarter’s work to come up with a model that tries to estimate the amount of searching that alien-hunters have managed so far. They considered nine variables, including how distant any putative aliens are likely to be, the sensitivity of telescopes, how big a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they are able to scan and the time spent doing so. Once the numbers had been crunched, the researchers reckoned humanity has done slightly better than Dr Tarter suggested. Rather than dipping a drinking glass into the ocean, they say, astronomers have dunked a bathtub. The upshot is that it is too early to assume no aliens exist. Fermi’s question is, for now at least, not a true paradox.

Update: The original paper: “How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-Dimensional Cosmic Haystack”.

U.S. Carriers Are Selling Customers’ Real-Time Location Data ★

Joseph Cox, writing for Motherboard:

Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones in the United States.

The bounty hunter sent the number to his own contact, who would track the phone. The contact responded with a screenshot of Google Maps, containing a blue circle indicating the phone’s current location, approximate to a few hundred metres.

Queens, New York. More specifically, the screenshot showed a location in a particular neighborhood — just a couple of blocks from where the target was. The hunter had found the phone (the target gave their consent to Motherboard to be tracked via their T-Mobile phone.)

The bounty hunter did this all without deploying a hacking tool or having any previous knowledge of the phone’s whereabouts. Instead, the tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint, a Motherboard investigation has found. These surveillance capabilities are sometimes sold through word-of-mouth networks.

It doesn’t seem like Verizon is off the hook on this scandal either:

Microbilt’s product documentation suggests the phone location service works on all mobile networks, however the middleman was unable or unwilling to conduct a search for a Verizon device. Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.

To say this is an outrageous privacy violation is an understatement. It’s downright dangerous. The carriers’ defense is basically that they only intended to sell this data to the “right” people, and the fact that these middlemen are reselling it to the “wrong” people is against their “terms”. Fuck that. This data should not be sold to anyone, period. This is no better than if the carriers let people pay to listen to your phone calls. Honestly, for me and my family, our location data is more private than the content of our calls.

Brief Thoughts on the State of Windows ★

Speaking of a fresh pair of eyes looking at a long-standing desktop OS, my son got a PC for gaming over the holidays. I haven’t really used Windows since the XP era. Windows 10 is — really something.

This tweet from Meowski Catovitch shows what I’m talking about. Windows 10 does have a new, simpler UI for (in this case) power settings. But the Windows 7 UI is still there (click “Additional power settings”) and the ancient XP settings are still there as well (click “Change advanced power settings”). It’s not a better UI — it’s the facade of a better UI built on top of the same old crap, which was in turn a facade on top of older crap. In the same way pre-NT Windows was just a brittle coating on top of creaky old DOS, Windows 10 is just a veneer on top of Windows XP. I’d much rather just have the old XP interface.

I’d rather retire from using computers than use Windows 10. What a mess.

The Mac Through the Eyes of a New User ★

Zoë Smith:

I haven’t used Windows for ten years, since I was contractually obliged to at work. Perhaps all these features are there too. But they were not discoverable by Fabio, an intelligent person who uses a computer to do a job which is not a fancier version of “using a computer”.

I’ve been a Mac user since the IIsi. I know those features above inside-out, know which have been there since Classic days, which have just arrived, and yes, which can be flaky on occasion. But to see it through a new Mac user’s eyes is to see a vast enormity of mistakes not made. It is to perceive a clarity of intention through design, maintained over decades of updates.

I loved this piece. I see a lot of complaints about the state of the Mac from long-time Mac users. I think of a lot of complaints about the state of the Mac myself. But it’s a good reminder that compared to everything else, the Mac remains an oasis of cohesive and consistent elegant design. Just getting the basics right goes a long way.

Using BBEdit and Excel to Revive a Dead Podcast Feed ★

Jason Snell:

When people ask me what features of BBEdit I use, I can mention Markdown tools and syntax support, which I use for writing stories like this one. But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe — something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word.

Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML. And while I realize that’s not a task most people will do, perhaps this article can serve as a little bit of inspiration for some future moment when you find yourself in desperate need of a fast way out of an intractable text situation.

Jason and I are very similarly inclined this way. Text in format A that I want in format B — I always turn to BBEdit. I was curious what the hell he used Excel for, but it turned out to be the sort of thing Excel (or Numbers — I stopped understanding how Excel works years ago) is perfect for.