Linked List: February 5, 2021

Friday, 5 February 2021

Parler Offered Trump 40 Percent Ownership Stake if He Joined and Posted There Exclusively ★

Ryan Mac and Rosie Gray, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

The Trump Organization negotiated on behalf of then-president Donald Trump to make Parler his primary social network, but it had a condition: an ownership stake in return for joining, according to documents and four people familiar with the conversations. The deal was never finalized, but legal experts said the discussions alone, which occurred while Trump was still in office, raise legal concerns with regards to anti-bribery laws.

Talks between members of Trump’s campaign and Parler about Trump’s potential involvement began last summer, and were revisited in November by the Trump Organization after Trump lost the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee and current president, Joe Biden. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40% stake in the company.

It’s really been a busy couple of months.

Fox News Cancels Lou Dobbs’s Show One Day After Dobbs Is Named in Election Lies Lawsuit ★

You hate to see it.

Bloomberg Reports That Google Is Exploring Fig-Leaf Privacy Controls for Android ★

Mark Gurman and Nico Grant, reporting for Bloomberg^*:

Google is exploring an alternative to Apple Inc.’s new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the internet industry is slowly embracing user privacy, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans.

“Alternative” is the wrong word. It’s not like you can choose between Apple’s system and Google’s. Apple’s system only exists on iOS, and Google’s would only exist on Android.

And Apple’s new tracking-related features are not “anti-tracking”. They’re simply about raising user awareness of tracking and giving users control over it. I’m not being facetious here. Nothing Apple is doing is “anti-tracking”. It’s only “anti-surreptitious-tracking”, and that’s a huge difference. It’s very easy and clear how to opt in to being tracked.

Let’s say a cottage industry arose where commercial companies were, unbeknownst to most people, plugging their fleets of electric vehicles into the outdoor power outlets on people’s homes overnight. “No one told us not to plug our electric delivery vans into these homes’ freely available power outlets.” And then, after this practice comes to light, the electric company adds a feature where every time a new vehicle is plugged into your outdoor power outlet, you, the homeowner, need to authorize that vehicle as being allowed to charge using the electricity you pay for. If you don’t authorize it, they don’t get the juice.

By Gurman and Grant’s logic, Bloomberg would describe this as an “anti-electric-vehicle” feature. That’s nonsense. It’s just putting the owner in charge of access to a resource that, heretofore, they didn’t realize companies were taking from them without asking.

A Google solution is likely to be less strict and won’t require a prompt to opt in to data tracking like Apple’s, the people said. The exploration into an Android alternative to Apple’s feature is still in the early stages, and Google hasn’t decided when, or if, it will go ahead with the changes.

If it doesn’t require opting in, it might as well not exist.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.

Beeper: Multi-Service Multi-Platform Messaging App That Supports iMessage ★

Beeper is a new $10/month app/service that aims to provide a unified chat app for 15 messaging platforms (and counting) — including iMessage. From their FAQ:

How in the world did you get iMessage to work on Android and Windows?

This was a tough one to figure out! Beeper has two ways of enabling Android, Windows and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user a Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed which bridges to iMessage, or if they have a Mac that is always connected to the internet, they can install the Beeper Mac app which acts as a bridge. This is not a joke, it really works!

The idea of a single app with support for multiple messaging services harks back to Adium — and even Apple’s own iChat, which supported several services back in the day (AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, ICQ, and more). One of Beeper’s founders is Eric Migicovsky, who created the Pebble smartwatch back in 2013. When Beeper was announced two weeks ago, he tweeted to confirm that the jailbroken old iPhone trick was no joke, with photos.

Running the Beeper app on an always-on Mac as a bridge for iMessage is reasonable — and is how AirMessage, an unofficial (needless to say) iMessage client for Android works. Sending users old iPhones running old jailbroken versions of iOS is delightfully clever, but — scaling issues aside (what happens if Beeper gets hundreds of thousands of users, let alone millions?) — is a security nightmare. It strikes me as utterly irresponsible.