Linked List: June 30, 2020

Tuesday, 30 June 2020

The Talk Show: ‘It Shouldn’t Be Hard to Get a Smoothie’ 

Dan Frommer returns to the show for more analysis of WWDC 2020, including App Clips and the Mac’s transition to Apple silicon.

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Safari 14 Does Not Block Google Analytics 

Simo Ahava:

When Safari says it blocks or prevents a tracker, what it means is that the ITP algorithm has flagged some domain as having cross-site tracking capabilities, and Safari has, among other things, stripped it of its capabilities to carry cookies in cross-site requests, also known as third-party cookies.

This is what Safari means when it’s prevented a known tracker in google-analytics.com. That domain has been flagged as a cross-site tracking domain, and Safari assigns certain protective measures to any communications to and from that domain (you can read more about them here).

Apple’s current UI description for this feature sure makes it sound like Google Analytics is being blocked.

Always Clarifying Advice: Take Pride in Your Work 

Nilay Patel, on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s decision to boot racist jerk subreddits:

It’s so easy to get lost in the technical lawyer nonsense of 230 and free speech and on and on, but sometimes the answer is as simple as people looking at the thing they’ve made and deciding they would like to be more proud of it than they are.

That’s a clarifying way to look at these decisions. Simple question: is Jack Dorsey proud that Trump used Twitter to promote a video of an old white guy shouting “White power!” at Black Lives Matter protestors? Is anyone at Twitter proud of this? If you’re ashamed of it, why allow it?

2020 Apple Design Awards Include Zero Mac Apps, But at Least the Award Graphic Looks Awful 

Such a great year for the Mac at WWDC, but not one ADA winner. But yet the ADAs are currently the top feature story in the Mac App Store app. And just look at the virtual ADA award in that promo graphic — who made that? It just seems bizarre that the ADAs — awards for those who pay obsessive attention to the smallest of details — are being promoted using a graphic seemingly made by someone who doesn’t understand 3D perspective.

Perhaps the ADA graphic was made by the same team that did this slide from keynote and completely phoned in the work for the icons in MacOS Big Sur?

Woodrow Wilson Was a Racist Shitbag 

Colin Woodard, writing at TPM Cafe:

“Division and Reunion” was met with mixed reviews, but was a commercial success, as it embraced an account that let white Americans put the Civil War and civil rights behind them. And it inspired Wilson to write “A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902. (“A disappointment after the pleasure of examining the pictures is past,” a leading journal wrote of it.) It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Josh Marshall:

Wilson was a thoroughgoing racist even by the standards of his own day. His attitude toward African-Americans and their political rights don’t just look bad from the perspective of the day. They were widely considered retrograde even in his own day.

It’s absolutely flabbergasting to compare these basic facts to what I learned about Woodrow Wilson in high school, which was more or less just the facts of World War I and that Wilson’s spearheading of the League of Nations was noble.