Linked List: March 9, 2021

Tuesday, 9 March 2021

From the DF Archive: ‘iPhone Enterprise and SDK: First Impressions and Questions’ ★

From my 6 March 2008 first-impressions post regarding Apple’s iPhone SDK and App Store announcement:

Apple’s 30/70 split with developers is steep, but initial reaction from the developers I follow on Twitter seems to be positive. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba told me via IM, “70%? That’s… that’s… livable,” which seems to sum up the consensus sentiment. […]

In short, what developers lose per-transaction from Apple’s 30 percent take, they can more than make up for in volume. This is going to be a gold rush.

I was correct that native apps on iPhone were going to be a huge thing, but I did not foresee how “free” apps would cripple/stunt/distort the market for selling them. The market for selling iOS apps never resembled the market for selling Mac apps pre-iPhone.

Calling it a “gold rush” was, arguably, more right than I knew. At the time I wrote that, I meant it in the common sense of a new market where many would have the opportunity to make a fortune. But in a real-life gold rush, do that many people make a fortune? It certainly wasn’t the boon to indie Mac developers that I predicted.

(Rogue Amoeba, for example, has a free iOS companion app for Airfoil, and in 2008 released Radioshift Touch for iPhone for the sky-high price of $10, but as a business, they are every bit as much a Mac developer today as they were in 2008.)

Scott Forstall Encouraged Pandora to Begin Developing for iPhone Via Jailbreaking in 2007 ★

Tyler Hayes, in an interesting story for Motherboard about Pandora:

After Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 it became apparent that this new internet connected, “music player,” device in people’s pockets needed to be the future of its mobile efforts.

After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones, like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended with a question for Forstall.

“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?” asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits that were being distributed by other people to build a native Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something more formal.”

So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21 percent of iPhones.

Steve Jobs announced Apple’s plans for a third-party SDK on 17 October 2007 (“no permalink that I can find, alas”), and the SDK and App Store were unveiled by Jobs at a Town Hall event on 6 March 2008. That probably pegs this Forstall-Pandora meeting at the end of 2007, perhaps just after the SDK announcement in October. (Update 1: Here’s a link to Jobs’s “Hot News” announcement post at Internet Archive: “We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.”)

A few of the apps available on day one of the App Store began life in the jailbreak-or-bust era of 2007, including Twitterrific and Lights Out — a polished game by Lucas Newman that he was already demoing in early August 2007. Pandora and Twitterrific are still going, of course, and Steven Troughton-Smith’s Lights Off is a made-with-permission recreation of Lights Out that’s been in the App Store since 2008.

Update 2: Craig Hockenberry posted Newman’s original Lights Off source code three years ago, in this 10-year remembrance.

N.Y.U. Study: Far-Right Misinformation Is Facebook’s Most Engaging Political Content ★

Laura Edelson, Minh-Kha Nguyen, Ian Goldstein, Oana Goga, Tobias Lauinger, and Damon McCoy, in a bracing report for the Center for Cybersecurity at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering:

Facebook has become a major way people find news and information in an increasingly politically polarized nation. We analyzed how users interacted with different types of posts promoted as news in the lead-up to and aftermath of the U.S. 2020 elections. We found that politically extreme sources tend to generate more interactions from users. In particular, content from sources rated as far-right by independent news rating services consistently received the highest engagement per follower of any partisan group. Additionally, frequent purveyors of far-right misinformation had on average 65% more engagement per follower than other far-right pages. We found:

Sources of news and information rated as far-right generate the highest average number of interactions per follower with their posts, followed by sources from the far-left, and then news sources closer to the center of the political spectrum.

Looking at the far-right, misinformation sources far outperform non-misinformation sources. Far-right sources designated as spreaders of misinformation had an average of 426 interactions per thousand followers per week, while non-misinformation sources had an average of 259 weekly interactions per thousand followers. […]

Center and left partisan categories incur a misinformation penalty, while right-leaning sources do not. Center sources of misinformation, for example, performed about 70% worse than their non-misinformation counterparts. (Note: center sources of misinformation tend to be sites presenting as health news that have no obvious ideological orientation.)

That’s the basic story in a nut: It’s not the same “on both sides”. The far right has a weakness for misinformation that the rest of the political spectrum does not. From the far left to the slightly right, the NYU study shows a preference for accurate news over misinformation; it’s only the far right that prefers misinformation, and they prefer it strongly.

It’s not that Facebook’s leadership is pro-right-wing misinformation, but that they value engagement over all else. And if right-wing misinformation is catnip for a large audience, so be it. If it’s engaging, they push it.

(Via Protocol.)

F.B.I. Informant Reveals How He Got Involved With Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plotters: Facebook ★

Joe Guillen and Omar Abdel-Baqui, reporting for The Detroit Free Press:

A confidential FBI informant testified Friday in a Jackson court about being embedded for months alongside leaders of a group accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The informant’s identity was concealed for his safety. Introduced only as “Dan,” an online video feed of Friday’s hearing was cut off during his testimony so court observers only could hear him. Dan described learning of the group — known as the Wolverine Watchmen — through a Facebook algorithm that he believed made the suggestion based on his interactions with other Facebook pages that support the Second Amendment and firearms training.

“I was scrolling through Facebook one day and they popped up as a suggestion post,” Dan said. “I clicked on the page and it had a few questions to answer.”

Fucking Facebook.

T-Mobile Is Automatically Enrolling Cell Phone Customers Into Ad Tracking Based on Their Online Activity ★

Drew FitzGerald, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

T-Mobile US Inc. will automatically enroll its phone subscribers in an advertising program informed by their online activity, testing businesses’ appetite for information that other companies have restricted.

The No. 2 U.S. carrier by subscribers said in a recent privacy-policy update that unless they opt out it will share customers’ web and mobile-app data with advertisers starting April 26. For example, the program could help advertisers identify people who enjoy cooking or are sports enthusiasts, the company said. […]

A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the changes give subscribers advertising that aligns with their interests. “We’ve heard many say they prefer more relevant ads so we’re defaulting to this setting,” she said. […] The company said the changes wouldn’t apply to business accounts or children’s lines.

If it’s such a great idea that customers just love, why not turn it on for everyone, including business accounts and children’s lines?

Just more proof that no matter what Apple or Google or Microsoft do to help make our devices more private at the operating system level, we’re at the mercy of the companies providing us with internet access, whether through home landline service or cellular. AT&T and Verizon both have similar targeted ad tracking programs, and The Journal has instructions at the bottom of their report for how to opt out of them. But I continue to think the answer, for iCloud users, is a trusted VPN-like anonymizing service from Apple.

‘Right Up Our Alley’ ★

Beautiful and fascinating drone footage of a classic bowling alley — worth watching until the end. A shot like this would have been impossible, at any budget, not too long ago.