Linked List: November 16, 2020

Monday, 16 November 2020

Instant Claim Chowder: Gordon Mah Ung on Apple’s M1 Performance Claims ★

Gordon Mah Ung, executive editor of PCWorld:

Let me just say it out loud, OK? Apple is full of it. I’m referring to Apple’s claim that its fanless, Arm-based MacBook Air is “faster than 98 percent of PC laptops.” Yes, you read that correctly: Apple officials literally claimed that the new MacBook Air using Apple’s custom M1 chip is faster than 98 percent of all PC laptops sold this year. […]

Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus’ stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware’s updated Area 51M? The answer, I’m going to guess is “no.” Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either.

This is one of the dumbest hot takes I’ve ever read. First, the PC laptops Ung cites are almost certainly squarely in the top percent or two by unit sales. So they’d seemingly fit exactly in the difference between 98 percent and 100 percent.

Second, I wouldn’t bet against these M1 Macs.

Ung’s “Apple is full of it” take reminds me of the BlackBerry executives who thought Apple’s 2007 iPhone announcement was a fraud, that it couldn’t do what Apple said it could do.

Google Photos Is Ending ‘Free Unlimited Storage’ in June ★

Dieter Bohn, writing last week for The Verge:

After five years of offering unlimited free photo backups at “high quality,” Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. The change will happen on June 1st, 2021, and it comes with other Google Drive policy changes like counting Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets against the same cap. Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.

That “five years” link makes clear that “free and unlimited” was a big part of the appeal of Google Photos all along. And it’s not really a 5-year-old product — Google bought Picasa back in 2004, 16 years ago, and they’ve been giving away some version of free hosted photo storage ever since. And they’ve surely lost billions of dollars doing so. Even if their “free” storage costs, say, $1/user/year (which I think even at Google’s scale is way low), with one billion users, that’s $1 billion per year. It’s easy to see how this could be costing them many billions per year.

Casey Newton:

Google earned $11.2 billion in profits last quarter and uses all your uploaded photos to train its ML algorithms, which offers it other enormous competitive benefits.

Also seems notable that free Google photo storage helped to drive tons of startups out of this market — Everpix, Loom, Ever, Picturelife. Now that they’re gone, and Google is tired of losing money on Photos, the revenue switch flips.

It really is that simple.

(Everpix was a favorite of mine — so damn good.)

Apple Addresses Last Week’s OCSP Server Failure and Related Privacy Concerns ★

Apple updated its “Safely Open Apps on Your Mac” support document, in response to last week’s server failure and the ensuing privacy concerns:

We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices. These security checks have never included the user’s Apple ID or the identity of their device. To further protect privacy, we have stopped logging IP addresses associated with Developer ID certificate checks, and we will ensure that any collected IP addresses are removed from logs.

In addition, over the the next year we will introduce several changes to our security checks:

A new encrypted protocol for Developer ID certificate revocation checks

Strong protections against server failure

A new preference for users to opt out of these security protections

They posted this update over the weekend.

Apple TV App Is on PlayStation 5, Too ★

I mentioned two weeks ago that Apple TV was available on the new Xbox consoles — should have mentioned too that it was launching on PS5 (and going on PS4) as well. Trying to think of boxes where Apple TV could be but isn’t. Nintendo Switch?

Update: We own (and love) a Switch — so I know that Nintendo doesn’t have streaming apps from anyone, not even Netflix. Switch just doesn’t do video — Nintendo keeps it focused on games. But I’m just saying what’s out there that could have the Apple TV app that’s hooked up to TVs in households where folks might want to watch Apple TV?

Update 2: Wait, there is a streaming service available on Switch: Hulu. I did not know this! Why in the world is Hulu there and none of the others? This makes me think Apple TV and Disney+ and Netflix really could be there.

ViDL: Free Mac Utility Based on ‘youtube-dl’ ★

Speaking of youtube-dl, ViDL is a proper Mac app based on it:

ViDL is a free Mac app that allows you to easily download videos from YouTube and hundreds of other websites for offline viewing.

It is based on the popular youtube-dl command line tool, but much easier to use, especially with videos/playlists that require a login (like your personal “Watch Later” list).

GitHub Reinstates ‘youtube-dl’ Project After Concluding DMCA Takedown Request From RIAA Was Bullshit ★

Abby Vollmer, writing for The GitHub Blog:

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.

The “additional information” link is a response to the RIAA’s takedown request by the EFF, acting on behalf of the youtube-dl project. It’d be a shame if there was a Streisand Effect to this abusive attempt by the RIAA to hurt a great project like youtube-dl, which is a terrific utility that lets you download offline copies of videos from YouTube (of course) and a slew of other services.

There are, of course, a bunch of options (youtube-dl is a nerdy command-line tool), but basically you can just type youtube-dl 'URL-TO-VIDEO-HERE' and it just works. You pass youtube-dl a URL to a web page with an embedded video, and it downloads a copy of the video. And you can install youtube-dl on your Mac easily using Homebrew.

Really would be a shame if this just raises awareness of youtube-dl.

Moderna’s Vaccine Efficacy Readout ★

Good overview of Moderna’s vaccine news, from Derek Lowe at Science Magazine’s In the Pipeline blog:

The second press release from the company today is also significant: Moderna says that new stability testing shows that their vaccine remains stable for up to six months under standard freezer conditions, up to 30 days under standard refrigeration conditions, and up to 12 hours at room temperature. There’s no dilution or further handling at the point of administration. This is much more like what you want to see, as compared to the more demanding storage conditions that seem to be needed for the Pfizer candidate. This is how a lot of medicine (and food, for that matter) is already distributed and stored — our infrastructure is a lot more prepared for this.

High effectiveness and it’s easier to distribute. Nothing but good news here.

Parler’s Lead Investor Is Rebekah Mercer ★

Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

After The Wall Street Journal reported on the Mercers’ ties with Parler, Chief Executive John Matze confirmed that Ms. Mercer was the lead investor in the company at its outset and said that her backing was dependent on the platform allowing users to control what they see.

Some of the people familiar with the matter said Parler was a Mercer family investment. Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company. Mr. Mercer couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Ms. Mercer said in a separate post that she and Mr. Matze “started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended.” She said the effort is an answer to what she called the “ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords.”

The Journal doesn’t link to Mercer’s posts (perhaps because Parler makes them very hard to find permalinks to if you’re not signed in), but they are here and here. The Mercers, if you’re not familiar with them, are the money behind Breitbart and other wingnut propaganda efforts.

The whole thing boils down to a “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” mentality. You’re either on board with spreading any and every bit of wingnut propaganda (pre-election: Hunter Biden’s laptop was a major scandal being overlooked by legit new media who were in the bag for Biden; post-election: the election was rigged against Trump, but, somehow, not rigged against House, Senate, and state legislature Republicans) or you’re the enemy. Thus Twitter and Facebook are the enemy. This, despite the fact that Facebook is such a conservative echo chamber that its list of top-performing link posts, day in and day out, is dominated by pro-Trump voices.

It’s not enough. Fox News isn’t enough for these lunatics, because however conservative Fox News’s opinion slant is, their news is still actual news, like, for example, that Biden soundly beat Trump in the election. So, now they have Parler — a Twitter-like social network funded by the family that funded Cambridge Analytica. To say these people operate in bad faith is to give “bad faith” a bad name.

Do be sure to read Parler’s privacy policy (PDF), which makes Facebook look like it’s fully committed to protecting privacy.

Moderna’s Coronavirus Vaccine Appears to Be 95 Percent Effective ★

Elizabeth Cohen, reporting for CNN:

“These are obviously very exciting results,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor. “It’s just as good as it gets — 94.5% is truly outstanding.”

Moderna heard its results on a call Sunday afternoon with members of the Data Safety and Monitoring Board, an independent panel analyzing Moderna’s clinical trial data. Vaccinations could begin in the second half of December, Fauci said. Vaccinations are expected to begin with high-risk groups and to be available for the rest of the population next spring.

In Moderna’s trial, 15,000 study participants were given a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effect. Over several months, 90 of them developed Covid-19, with 11 developing severe forms of the disease. Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and only five of them developed Covid-19. None of the five became severely ill. The company says its vaccine did not have any serious side effects. A small percentage of those who received it experienced symptoms such as body aches and headaches.

I can get used to hearing good news continue rolling in.