Linked List: May 15, 2019

Wednesday, 15 May 2019

FCC Proposes New Rules to Fight Robocalls ★

Makena Kelly, reporting for The Verge:

The new rule would make it easier for carriers, like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, to automatically register their customers for call-blocking technology. As of right now, customers have to opt-in on their own. It would also allow customers to block calls coming from phone numbers that are not on their contacts list. Commissioners are expected to vote on the measure at their June 6th meeting.

“Allowing call blocking by default could be a big benefit for consumers who are sick and tired of robocalls,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. “By making it clear that such call blocking is allowed, the FCC will give voice service providers the legal certainty they need to block unwanted calls from the outset so that consumers never have to get them.”

I’m trying to think of another issue that could garner so much bipartisan support in America today. I got nothing.

Washington Post: ‘Trump’s Prized Doral Resort Is in Steep Decline, According to Company Documents, Showing His Business Problems Are Mounting’ ★

David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell, reporting for The Washington Post:

At Doral, which Trump has listed in federal disclosures as his biggest moneymaker hotel, room rates, banquets, golf and overall revenue were all down since 2015. In two years, the resort’s net operating income — a key figure, representing the amount left over after expenses are paid — had fallen by 69 percent.

Even in a vigorous economy, the property was missing the Trump Organization’s internal business targets; for instance, the club expected to take in $85 million in revenue in 2017 but took in just $75 million.

“They are severely underperforming” other resorts in the area, tax consultant Jessica Vachiratevanurak told a Miami-Dade County official in a bid to lower the property’s tax bill. The reason, she said: “There is some negative connotation that is associated with the brand.”

“Some negative connotation” — you don’t say.

Apple Support: ‘How to Enable Full Mitigation for Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) Vulnerabilities’ ★

Apple Support:

Intel has disclosed vulnerabilities called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) that apply to desktop and notebook computers with Intel CPUs, including all modern Mac computers.

Although there are no known exploits affecting customers at the time of this writing, customers who believe their computer is at heightened risk of attack can use the Terminal app to enable an additional CPU instruction and disable hyper-threading processing technology, which provides full protection from these security issues.

This option is available for macOS Mojave, High Sierra and Sierra and may have a significant impact on the performance of your computer. […] Testing conducted by Apple in May 2019 showed as much as a 40 percent reduction in performance with tests that include multithreaded workloads and public benchmarks.

It’s good that there are no known exploits using these techniques, but even if there were, the overwhelming majority of Mac users — almost everyone — would not need to enable this mitigation. These MDS vulnerabilities enable malware on your computer to do bad things. But these vulnerabilities are not ways for malware to get onto your computer.

Once you have malware on your computer, the game is over. I’m not saying these MDS vulnerabilities aren’t a problem — they obviously are, because they make malware potentially more dangerous. But the game is keeping malware off your computers in the first place.

(Also worth noting: these particular vulnerabilities don’t affect iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, or the vast majority of Android devices because ARM chips don’t have these vulnerabilities. Only Intel chips. We’re running out of reasons for Apple not to switch the entire Mac platform to ARM.)

(Bonus parenthetical: It’s possible that there are similar vulnerabilities in ARM chips too, but if there are, none have been publicly disclosed yet.)

‘Behind Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other’ ★

Interesting feature by Nicole Nguyen for BuzzFeed with an inside look at “twttr” — a new version of Twitter currently being tested. Lots of screenshots, and I particularly enjoyed (and would have liked to see more of) senior product designer Lisa Ding’s sketchbook.

I do think most of these designs significantly help indicate reply threading. What’s a reply to the original tweet, what’s a reply to another reply, that sort of thing. Twitter is really just awful for that right now, and always has been. And the fundamental reason why is kind of obvious: Twitter started as a product that did not even have the concept of replies. Users invented them, by starting a tweet with “@username” for whomever they were replying to. Twitter eventually embraced replies as a full-fledged feature, but the way it’s worked out over 13 years (poorly) is a perfect example of a fundamental design precept: the origins of a product forever shape its future.

But again, these “twttr” designs do seem to make replies clearer. That’s good. What I don’t see is anything, anything at all, that addresses the ostensible goal of this whole effort: reducing abuse, hostility, and general bad behavior. Trolls and bullies are Twitter’s core problem, not the clarity of reply threads.