Linked List: June 16, 2020

Tuesday, 16 June 2020

Basecamp’s New App, Hey, Flagged in App Store Limbo for Not Using In-App Purchase ★

David Pierce, writing at Protocol:

Right around the time the team at Basecamp was launching their Hey email service to the public on Monday, Zach Waugh, Basecamp’s lead iOS developer, got a distressing email. The second version of their iOS app, 1.0.1 — with a few bug fixes from the original — had been rejected by the App Store reviewers. It cited rule 3.1.1 of Apple’s guidelines for app developers, which says in essence that if you want people to be able to buy stuff in your app, you need to do it using Apple’s payments system.

Waugh and Basecamp didn’t think that rule applied. Hey does cost $99 a year, but users can’t sign up or pay within the iOS app. It’s an app for using an existing outside service, just like Basecamp’s eponymous platform — and Netflix and Slack and countless other apps. “So we were like, OK, maybe we just got the Monday morning reviewer,” Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said. Lots of developers over the years have found that their app-review luck sometimes depended on who happened to be looking, and whether they’d had coffee yet. So Basecamp fixed more bugs, submitted a new version — 1.0.2 — and hoped for the best. […]

The issue had been escalated internally, and Apple had determined it was a valid rejection — the only way to move forward would be to implement Apple’s payments system. And not only that: Waugh was told that Apple would like a commitment and a timeline for implementing the payment system, or Apple might be forced to remove Hey from the App Store entirely.

I really don’t get it. Even if we concede that the App Store rules around in-app payments (lowercase) being required to use Apple’s In-App Payments (uppercase) APIs (which give Apple their 15-30% cut) are OK (which is a big concession), I don’t see how Basecamp’s Hey app is violating them.

You cannot sign up for Hey within the iOS app. And if you have a Hey account in free trial mode, the iOS app doesn’t have links or buttons prompting you to become a paying customer. They don’t tell you to upgrade to a paid account outside the app. When you don’t already have an account, these are the only three screens you can see in the app: a sign in screen, a help screen, and a password reset screen. The help screen says, in its entirety:

Trying to join HEY?
You can’t sign up for HEY in the app. We know that’s a pain. After you’ve created an account, you’ll be able to use the app.

Need help from a person?
Send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll get right back to you.

That’s it. They don’t even tell you where you need to go to create an account. I don’t see what more Basecamp could do here. The Hey app isn’t dancing around the App Store’s rule 3.1.1 in some cute way — they’re complying with it completely. Am I missing something?

If this is not a mistake on Apple’s part — and it might be a mistake, given that version 1.0 of the app was approved, and there are many apps in the App Store for which you need to sign up and pay outside the store, including Basecamp itself! — it’s outrageous. The rules as they’re written are controversial (and the subject of antitrust inquiries in both the U.S. and E.U.), but the Hey app seemingly complies with all of them.

Facebook, Google CEOs Are Open to Testifying to Congress on Antitrust ★

Tony Romm, reporting for The Washington Post:

In letters to committee leaders, Facebook and Google signaled they would dispatch their top executives as long as other tech giants’ leaders participate, the sources said. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos also has signaled he will participate in the hearing, after the e-commerce giant initially resisted lawmakers’ demands, The Post reported this week. Bezos owns The Washington Post.

Apple, meanwhile, told the committee that it would send a senior executive yet did not clearly commit its leader, Tim Cook, to appearing before lawmakers, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. That approach could ratchet up tensions between the iPhone giant and lawmakers in Washington, who previously had threatened to issue a subpoena forcing Bezos to appear before Amazon ultimately expressed an openness to it.

“I’ll go if you go” sounds a lot like the social dance of teenagers, but, well, some social interactions scale all the way up to the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. If Bezos, Pichai, and Zuckerberg all testify, trust me, Cook will be there. No surprise that Apple hasn’t said no — they’ve said nothing.

Also, filed under “How Times Change”, it’s striking that Microsoft, of all companies, is not involved in this.

Sony Unveils the PlayStation 5 ★

Raymond Wong and Ryan Houlihan, writing for Input:

The PS5’s bold design is already dividing gamers. We can’t decide if we love it or hate it. It’s no sleek PS2, which — fun fact — was inspired by a skyscraper. The PS5 is weird, organic-looking, and resembles something Zaha Hadid would come up with. There’s no disputing the fact that it’s not boring, though. In 26 years of PlayStation, the PS5 is the most daring design yet and breaks with past console aesthetics. It’s very clear Sony made the PS5 to be shown off, not hidden inside of a cabinet. But would you proudly display it? It’s unlikely to match anything in your home.

I like it, but I think it’s clear that the “Digital Edition” without a Blu-ray drive is much better looking. Also, it’s very big compared to previous generation PlayStations.

Facebook Pitched New Tool Allowing Employers to Suppress Words Like ‘Unionize’ in Workplace Chat Product ★

Lee Fang, reporting for The Intercept:

During an internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack.

On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees.

The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”

Union-bashing aside (which, admittedly, is a big thing to set aside), it seems crazy to me that any organization would even consider using a Facebook tool for internal communications. Who would trust this?

Facebook Workplace is currently used by major employers such as Walmart, which is notorious for its active efforts to suppress labor organizing. The application is also used by the Singapore government, Discovery Communications, Starbucks, and Campbell Soup Corporation.

Facebook’s product page for Workplace lists the World Health Organization, Spotify, and Heineken as paying customers too.

Elite CIA Hacking Unit Failed to Protect Its Systems, Allowing Disclosure to WikiLeaks ★

Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, reporting for The Washington Post:

The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.

The breach — allegedly by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release “Vault 7,” and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA’s history, causing the agency to shut down some intelligence operations and alerting foreign adversaries to the spy agency’s techniques. […]

Absent WikiLeaks’s disclosure, the CIA might never have known the tools had been stolen, according to the report. “Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss,” the task force concluded.

Keep this story in mind the next time the FBI and DOJ start barking about their being trustworthy with the secret keys to encryption backdoors they want built. I know the CIA is not the FBI, but, if anything, you’d think the CIA would be better at protecting truly sensitive secrets.

I’m not even arguing that the FBI and CIA are inherently incapable of keeping digital secrets. I’m sure both have many secrets that haven’t leaked. It’s just obviously possible that they could and have leaked secrets.

Supreme Court Rules, 6-3, That the Civil Rights Act Applies to LGBTQ Rights ★

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the 6-3 majority:

Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

My headline here links to Slate’s coverage of the opinion, which includes analysis and opinion from both sides of the issue. But I highly recommend reading Gorsuch’s opinion: it’s cogent, clear, and compelling — and, very much conservative.

See also: Sean Trende’s analysis at RealClearPolitics, including a compelling theory that Roberts voted with the majority strategically, not because he necessarily agreed.