Linked List: April 26, 2019

Friday, 26 April 2019

Facebook Users Morbidly Curious What Site Going to Do With Their Personal Data to Recoup $5 Billion Fine ★

The Onion:

Wondering how the social media giant will unethically exploit their personal data next, Facebook users conceded Friday they are morbidly curious to see what the company does to them in order to recoup its losses following a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine. “I know I’m probably not gonna like it, but I have this deep, dark desire to know what kind of fucked-up shit they’ll do to violate our privacy this time,” said Cleveland-area Facebook user Lisa Wincheck, explaining that while it’s hard to imagine the social network doing anything worse than it already has, its history suggests it will once again produce a nefarious, probably illegal new way to monetize the intimate details of people’s lives.

Why Everyone Is Watching TV With Closed Captioning on These Days ★

Jason Kottke:

As Sebastian Greger notes in his summary of the resulting thread, closed captioning is a great example of how accessibility features can benefit everyone, especially those who may have disabilities or limitations that aren’t typically acknowledged as such.

Such a great point about accessibility. It really is for everyone.

On the closed captions front — I use Apple TV’s “what’d they just say?” feature several times every episode watching Game of Thrones. I don’t know what they do with their audio but damned if the characters don’t all sound like a bunch of mumble-mouths a lot of the time. And last night I finally watched Netflix’s The Highwaymen (it was exactly as good as I expected going in, which is to say about a B-) and I had to leave closed captions on for entire scenes. I didn’t have the volume set particularly low, I just couldn’t understand what they were saying. If it weren’t for closed captions — and the ease with which Apple TV lets one toggle them — I’d have abandoned the movie and gone to bed.

YouTube Gamed Into Recommending Russian Propaganda on Mueller Report ★

Guillaume Chaslot:

One week after the release of the Mueller report, which analysis of it did YouTube recommend from the most channels among the 1000+ channels that I monitor daily?

Russia Today’s!

This video funded by the Russian government was recommended more than half a million times from more than 236 different channels. […]

Technology can enable two worlds:

One where accountability keeps cheaters in check

One where social media is manipulated by armies of fake accounts

I’m on Facebook’s case more frequently, but YouTube might be just as complicit in distributing massive-scale propaganda pushed by fake accounts they could surely detect but don’t in the name of the almighty god both companies worship: engagement. They both use devilishly clever algorithms to target this propaganda, not to flag it.

Apple Tops Laptop Magazine’s Rankings for Tech Support ★

Apple tops the list, with Razer close behind, then there’s a big drop. So if you’re ever frustrated by Apple’s tech support, just think about how bad the other side has it.

Three Long-Time Designers Leave Apple’s Industrial Design Team ★

Tripp Mickle, reporting yesterday for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc.’s close-knit industrial design team is undergoing its most pronounced turnover in decades, marking a changing of the guard for the famed group that has defined the tech giant’s aesthetic and spearheaded the development of products including the iPhone.

Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis, who together have more than 35 years of experience at Apple, decided to leave the company recently, people familiar with the departures said. Another member of the team with a decade of experience, Julian Hönig, plans to leave in the coming months, people familiar with his plans said.

I’m not sure I’d call it a “changing of the guard” but Apple’s ID team has been remarkably stable, and truly is close-knit.

More on iFixit Pulling Its Galaxy Fold Teardown ★

Dieter Bohn, writing at The Verge:

Why is Samsung doing this? We’ve asked for comment, obviously, but we suspect an answer may not be forthcoming. That leaves us with a whole pile of possible reasons we can only speculate on.

On the charitable end of the interpretation scale is that Samsung is definitely reworking the Fold, the design will change, and Samsung doesn’t want to have a teardown out there for a device it isn’t ever going to ship. Possibilities get successively less charitable from there.

I don’t think that’s it. Who pulls a review? No one. It doesn’t matter — from iFixit’s perspective — if Samsung wants it pulled.

Perhaps the partner who provided the Fold to iFixit wasn’t supposed to, and Samsung is just enforcing a contract.

I think that last bit is close, but not quite right. The exact wording of iFixit’s explanation for pulling the teardown is worth parsing:

We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail.

My bet is that their “partner” is in hot water with Samsung over their having handed the Fold unit over to iFixit. iFixit knows pulling the teardown makes them look bad, like they’re caving in to a demand from Samsung, but they’re doing it anyway to protect or perhaps even as a favor to this “ally in making devices more repairable”, a description I suspect might mean “someone who has in the past and might again in the future get us early access to hardware through unofficial channels”.

I.e., iFixit is doing a favor for their source, not a favor for Samsung, even though they know some will see it as a favor for Samsung.

Alternatively, the really bad look for iFixit is that their “partner” is a marketing firm that is also a partner for Samsung, and getting pre-retail-availability to iFixit was originally part of the marketing rollout for the Fold and iFixit is really just going along with this so that they keep getting pre-retail-availability access to Samsung devices.

It’s a bit inside baseball but the whole thing is just weird, because, as I said at the top, reviews just don’t get pulled unless the review itself — not the product — is flawed.

Casey Johnston Bought a 2018 MacBook Air and You Know Exactly Where This Is Going ★

Casey Johnston, writing at The Outline:

Fueled by equal parts irrational hope I knew I shouldn’t trust and deep skepticism to which I should have listened, I bought the 2018 MacBook Air.

Sure enough, a couple months into owning this computer, the keys started to act up. As before, problems would come and go; the E or B key would be unresponsive for a day or so before whatever was jamming them up mysteriously went away. The spacebar was the worst offender. For a long while it doubled spaces from a single keypress, but only sometimes. Finally, it seemed to get something lodged under it big or annoying enough that it couldn’t shake itself loose, and I had to pound it to get a space out of it; for two days, my sentencescame outlikethis. I made a Genius Bar appointment.

These keyboards are the biggest mistake in Apple’s history.^*

Even if they ship a truly new, reliable keyboard this summer (which I think they will, because if they don’t, it means they’re in deep denial of a huge problem), how long will it take for that new keyboard to roll out across the entire MacBook line? Even if Apple is on the case, hard at work on a new keyboard, there are likely to be brand-new MacBooks in the lineup with the unreliable butterfly keyboards for at least another year.

The real harm is to the long-term reputation of the entire MacBook brand.

* Or at least modern Apple history — post-NeXT-reunification. There’s no point comparing it to the Apple III or Lisa.

Kara Swisher: ‘Put Another Zero on Facebook’s Fine’ ★

Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times:

How can I describe the fine of between $3 billion and $5 billion that Facebook is likely to pay to the Federal Trade Commission — which will doubtlessly be touted as its largest ever — to settle the government’s inquiry into what the social networking giant called “our platform and user data practices”?

How about: It’s a parking ticket. Not a speeding ticket. Not a DUI — or a DUI(P), data under the influence of Putin. A parking ticket.

Exactamundo.

iFixit Removes Galaxy Fold Teardown ★

iFixit:

After two days of intense public interest, iFixit has removed our teardown of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. That analysis supported our suspicions that the device provided insufficient protection from debris damaging the screen.

We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail.

I was — and remain — genuinely curious who supplied them with a unit. It couldn’t have been a review unit — those have to be returned and review terms always forbid taking devices apart. Maybe from a carrier?