Linked List: January 17, 2020

Friday, 17 January 2020

“Wh0”:

Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.

Fun work. Turns out most emoji scissors wouldn’t actually close. I’m curious if the ones that would close somehow look worse at small sizes, or if this is something that most scissor emoji artists never bothered to consider. (Via Andy Baio.)

The FBI Used a GrayKey to Obtain Data From a Locked iPhone 11 Pro Max ★

Thomas Brewster, reporting for Forbes:

Last year, FBI investigators in Ohio used a hacking device called a GrayKey to draw data from the latest Apple model, the iPhone 11 Pro Max. The phone belonged to Baris Ali Koch, who was accused of helping his convicted brother flee the country by providing him with his own ID documents and lying to the police. He has now entered a plea agreement and is awaiting sentencing.

Forbes confirmed with Koch’s lawyer, Ameer Mabjish, that the device was locked. Mabjish also said he was unaware of any way the investigators could’ve acquired the passcode; Koch had not given it to them nor did they force the defendant to use his face to unlock the phone via Face ID, as far as the lawyer was aware. The search warrant document obtained by Forbes, dated October 16, 2019, also showed the phone in a locked state, giving the strongest indication yet that the FBI has access to a device that can acquire data from the latest iPhone.

Nothing is confirmed by anyone involved — the FBI, Apple, or Grayshift (the company that makes the GrayKey) — but this sure sounds like the FBI accessed data on an iPhone 11 Pro Max using a GrayKey. Two things if this is true. First, this really puts the lie to the FBI’s claim of needing Apple’s help accessing the Pensacola shooter’s iPhones (which were older models, and thus presumably easier to crack). Second, this is the first suggestion I’ve seen that GrayKey can unlock, or somehow otherwise access the data of, Apple’s latest generation of iPhones.

More on how GrayKey works — or at least used to work — from an April 2018 link. At one point later in 2018, it was believed that bug fixes in iOS 12 stopped GrayKey from working. It’s a canonical cat-and-mouse game. Also worth noting: Grayshift co-founder Braden Thomas previously worked as a security engineer at Apple.

WSJ: ‘Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making, but Troubles Some at FBI’ ★

Sadie Gurman, Dustin Volz, and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Some FBI officials were stunned by Mr. Barr’s rebuke of Apple, the people familiar with the matter said, and believe the Pensacola case is the wrong one to press in the encryption fight, in part because they believed Apple had already provided ample assistance to the probe.

Like I’ve been arguing, this has nothing to do with the Pensacola case in particular and everything to do with a push to make encryption illegal.

More on Tile’s Complaints About Apple in Congressional Testimony ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors, reports that Tile is complaining about Find My too:

The smaller companies are aiming to provide evidence that the tech giants have become too big and have practices in place that stifle competition and hurt sales. Tile in particular is gunning for Apple, claiming that Apple’s iOS 13 Bluetooth and location tracking devices have hurt its business, and that Find My resembles Tile’s own service.

Find My — originally Find My iPhone — has been around since 2010. And it seems like weak sauce to argue that it’s a feature Apple shouldn’t be able to provide on antitrust grounds. Putting aside Apple’s rumored dedicated location-tracking tile dinguses, if Tile’s business has been hurt by iOS 13 and Find My, their business was in bad shape to start.

It seems one of Tile’s specific complaints is related to the changes in iOS 13 that discourage third-party apps from having “Always Allow” access to location data. Apple has been pushing for apps to use “Only While Using the App”, and, when apps do use “Always Allow”, iOS will periodically remind you which apps are doing so in the background, and how often. And to turn on “Always Allow” access, the user must do so in the Privacy section of Settings — the app itself can’t prompt for it. Apple’s statement seems to suggest they’re reconsidering that.

Remember Apple’s priorities: Apple first, users second, developers third. Developers of location-tracking apps might be peeved by iOS 13’s changes, but users are much better off. A lot of apps that were asking for “Always Allow” location access were not doing so with the users’ interests at heart.

There’s just no way a third-party tile tracking product will be as integrated with iOS as an Apple product would be. It’s like rival smart watch makers complaining that Apple Watch’s integration with iPhone is unfair. Same with AirPods. At some level it is unfair, but what’s the alternative? You’re either asking for Apple (and other big platform vendors) to be severely hamstrung from innovating with integrated new products, or you’re asking for third-parties to be given low-level access to the OS on mobile platforms — a privacy and security nightmare.

There are definitely good antitrust arguments to be made against all of the tech giants, including Apple, but I don’t think Tile is a good example.

Tile to Testify Before Congress About Unreleased, Unannounced Apple Product ★

Nandita Bose, writing for Reuters:

In April 2019, Tile.com, which helps users find lost or misplaced items, suddenly found itself competing with Apple Inc, after years of enjoying a mutually beneficial relationship with the iPhone maker.

Apple carried Tile on its app store and sold its products at its stores since 2015. It even showcased Tile’s technology at its biggest annual event in 2018 and the startup sent an engineer to Apple’s headquarters to develop a feature with the company’s voice assistant Siri.

Early the following year, Tile’s executives read news reports of Apple launching a hardware product along with a service that resembled what Tile sold. By June, Apple had stopped selling Tile’s products in stores and has since hired away one of its engineers.

It sucks to get Sherlocked. But is there anything vaguely illegal here? And it seems… premature to testify before Congress about a product Apple hasn’t even announced (and for all we know, never will). What exactly is Tile’s preferred remedy here?

The Case for a Low Power Mode for Mac Laptops – and iPads ★

Marco Arment:

In light of today’s rumor that a Pro Mode may be coming that seems to offer benefits in the opposite direction, I wanted to re-make the case for a Low Power Mode on macOS — and explain why now is the time.

Modern hardware constantly pushes thermal and power limits, trying to strike a balance that minimizes noise and heat while maximizing performance and battery life. […] Apple’s customers don’t usually have control over these balances, and they’re usually fixed at design time with little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer priorities.

The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they’ll need it.

Arment has some interesting numbers showing the difference on a new 16-inch MacBook Pro while running a third-party kernel extension that disables Intel’s “Turbo Mode”. You lose about 50 percent of performance but gain maybe an additional 50 percent of battery life — and your MacBook stays very cool. A lot of people in a lot of situations would happily make that trade-off, especially if it were as easy to toggle and as noninvasive as it is on iOS. When I use Low Power Mode on my iPhone, I’m hard-pressed to notice any difference other than the yellow battery icon, even though benchmarks suggest the CPU is throttled to about half speed. Apple’s A-series CPUs are so fast that half-speed is plenty fast.

The elephant in the room is the Mac’s transition to Apple-designed ARM processors — a transition we’ve all expected to come any year now for, well, quite a few years. Apple’s plan for extending MacBook battery life might just be to switch processor architectures and nothing else. Note too that iOS’s Low Power Mode is for iPhones only — iPads don’t have it. That bodes poorly for the odds of a Low Power Mode for MacBooks — it feels like a feature Apple believes is needed only for phones.

Now that I think about it, why doesn’t the iPad have Lower Power Mode? This could be a huge game changer in a “forgot to charge my iPad before a long flight or car trip” scenario. I just spent 15 minutes searching the web to make sure the iPad really doesn’t offer this feature, because it seems so bananas that it doesn’t.

Study Claims YouTube Ads of 100 Top Brands Fund Climate Misinformation ★

Alex Hern, reporting for The Guardian:

Some of the biggest companies in the world are funding climate misinformation by advertising on YouTube, according to a study from activist group Avaaz.

The group found that more than 100 brands had adverts running on YouTube videos on the site that were actively promoting climate misinformation. The brands, including Samsung, L’Oreal and Decathlon, were unaware that their adverts were being played before and during the videos.

How do we know they were unaware? I highly doubt any of these brands specifically wanted their ads to run against climate change disinformation videos, but doesn’t the scattershot “just let the algorithm figure out where to run our ads” strategy many (most?) big YouTube advertisers take imply that some of the spots are going to run against unsavory content?

I really feel as a culture we are barely coming to grips with the power of YouTube, Facebook, and to some degree, Twitter, as means of spreading mass-market disinformation. The pre-internet era of TV, print, and radio was far from a panacea. But it just wasn’t feasible in those days for a disinformation campaign — whether from crackpots who believe the nonsense, corporate industry groups, or foreign governments — to get in front of the eyes of millions of people.

It feels like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that this is not only the state we’re in today, but that big name mass market advertisers are running commercials on this stuff.