Linked List: February 8, 2019

Friday, 8 February 2019

Sprint Sues AT&T Over Its Bullshit 5G Branding ★

Richard Lawler, reporting for Engadget:

In its claim, Sprint said it commissioned a survey that found 54 percent of consumers believed the “5GE” networks were the same as or better than 5G, and that 43 percent think if they buy an AT&T phone today it will be 5G capable, even though neither of those things are true. Sprint’s argument is that what AT&T is doing is damaging the reputation of 5G, while it works to build out what it calls a “legitimate early entry into the 5G network space.”

I don’t understand why Apple is participating in this charade. It’d be more honest for iOS to indicate this with a poop emoji in the status bar than with “5GE”.

Facebook’s Whack-a-Mole Markup Battle Against Ad Blockers ★

Wolfie Christl:

Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block ‘Sponsored’ posts, oh my.

One look at the markup in the tweet he links to is enough to drive an HTML purist to drink.

On Margins: Lisa Brennan-Jobs and the Design, Production, and Writing of Memoir ★

Speaking of excellent podcast episodes, do not miss Craig Mod’s interview with Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Any podcast that spends 15-20 minutes talking about the design of a book cover is catnip for me. But after listening, I went from not being interested in Brennan-Jobs’s memoir to wanting to read it immediately. It’s just a fabulous interview.

Reply All: ‘Negative Mount Pleasant’ ★

Absolutely riveting podcast episode on the very local story behind Foxconn’s Wisconsin factory scam, as reported by Sruthi Pinnamaneni. A story of farcically bad government turns heartbreaking by the end.

Jeff Bezos’s War With National Enquirer Involves a Huge Spy Scandal ★

John Schindler, writing for Observer:

A hint where this scandal is headed appeared last night when a Post reporter revealed on MSNBC that Gavin de Becker, the security guru to the stars whom Bezos hired to look into AMI, “told us that he does not believe that Jeff Bezos’s phone was hacked, he thinks it’s possible that a government entity might have gotten hold of his text messages.” […]

Another suspect is Saudi Arabia, which incurred the wrath of The Washington Post by murdering and dismembering their columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last October. Bezos referenced that awful crime in his blog post, including the line, “Pecker and his company have also been investigated for various actions they’ve taken on behalf of the Saudi Government,” explaining that AMI is seeking Saudi funding. Bezos added, “Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.”

Here’s a detail I would like to see everyone reporting on this story identify: what type of text messages was Bezos exchanging with Lauren Sanchez? “Text message” technically implies SMS, but in common usage most people call iMessage messages “texts”, and the act of sending them “texting”. Or were they using some other platform? People call all sorts of messages “texts”.

This matters because SMS is not encrypted. iMessage is not just encrypted but end-to-end encrypted. If, as Bezos’s investigator apparently believes, Bezos’s phone was not compromised, that means either Sanchez’s phone was compromised, or the messages were intercepted in transit. But if they were iMessages, they couldn’t be intercepted in transit.