Linked List: January 24, 2019

Thursday, 24 January 2019

Apple Will Pay ‘Shot on iPhone’ Contest Winners to License Photos ★

Apple updated their “Shot on iPhone” contest announcement with the following:

Apple believes strongly that artists should be compensated for their work. Photographers who shoot the final 10 winning photos will receive a licensing fee for use of such photos on billboards and other Apple marketing channels.

There we go.

Update: Om Malik:

From what I am hearing from within Apple, the plan was to pay a licensing fee and not call it a prize. That is an argument I buy!

They’ve been paying licensing fees for “Shot on iPhone” photos all along, so this passes the sniff test.

Microsoft Office 365 Now Available in Mac App Store ★

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Office 365 is available for the first time on the Mac App Store, making it easier than ever for Mac users to download Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the whole suite of Microsoft’s popular apps. Users can also purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps, so they can get up and running instantly.

I’d bet a fortune Microsoft isn’t paying Apple the standard 70/30 split for the first year of a subscription. Maybe they’ve jumped right to 85/15? Maybe even more favorable to Microsoft? I’d love to know.

35 Years Ago Today: Steve Jobs Unveils the First Macintosh ★

The world wasn’t quite ready for Macintosh yet, but the people in that audience were. They practically went nuts when it started talking. Personal computers just couldn’t do that then.

Bing Outage in China ★

Paul Mozur and Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times:

Under China’s president, Xi Jinping, the last vestiges of the global internet have slowly disappeared from an online world that had already shut out Twitter, Google and Facebook.

Now one of the last survivors, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, appears to have joined them — even though the American company already censors its results in China.

The Chinese government appeared to block the search engine on Wednesday, in what would be a startling renunciation of more than a decade of efforts by Microsoft to engage with Beijing to make its products available. If the block proves to be permanent, it would suggest that Western companies can do little to persuade China to give them access to what has become the world’s largest internet market by users, especially at a time of increased trade and economic tensions with the United States.

It says everything you need to know about how closed China is that no one even knows if Bing is actually being censored or if it’s just a glitch. Update: Turns out it really was just a glitch.

With Bing, Microsoft tried to play by China’s rules. For example, a search for the Dalai Lama, the religious leader, would turn up state media accounts within China that accused him of stirring up hatred and separatism. Outside the country, it would point to sites like Wikipedia.

Other searches, like for Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong religious group, were similarly scrubbed, though over the years users reported that using coded language could help turn up posts about some topics that were generally controlled.

My take on this is that if Western search engines are going to try to work in China, censored search terms should simply return a statement that this term is prohibited. Return no results at all rather than censored results. “This search term is prohibited” isn’t useful but at least it would be true. Turning up only state media results is false.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Doesn’t Understand Why Unpaid Federal Workers Use Food Banks Instead of Going Into Debt ★

Damian Paletta, reporting for The Washington Post:

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Thursday said he doesn’t understand why federal workers are visiting food banks during the partial government shutdown, saying they should instead seek low-interest loans from banks and credit unions to supplement their lost wages.

“I know they are, and I don’t really quite understand why,” Ross said on CNBC when asked about federal workers going to food banks. Ross is a billionaire and a longtime friend of President Trump.

His comment drew immediate criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Is this the ‘let them eat cake’ kind of attitude?” she said. “Or call your father for money?”

Is there anyone left in the Trump administration who isn’t a complete asshole?

And, let’s face it, surely a bunch of unpaid federal workers are going into debt during this shutdown — most likely on high-interest credit cards.