Linked List: May 7, 2021

Friday, 7 May 2021

Flurry Analytics: 96 Percent of iOS 14.5 Users in U.S. Have Opted Out of App Tracking 

I don’t know, seems low to me.

Google Circumvents Roku Ban by Adding YouTube TV to the Main YouTube App 

Google’s official YouTube blog:

Today, we’re introducing a new feature that gives you access to YouTube TV from within the YouTube app, making it easier to enjoy all the content you love. Existing members can easily access YouTube TV by clicking on “Go to YouTube TV” in the main YouTube app. This update will be available to all YouTube TV members on Roku over the next few days, and we will expand to as many devices as we can over time.

Translation: Fuck you, Roku. We dare you to ban the YouTube app.

Separately, we are also in ongoing, long-term conversations with Roku to certify that new devices meet our technical requirements. This certification process exists to ensure a consistent and high-quality YouTube experience across different devices, including Google’s own — so you know how to navigate the app and what to expect. We’ll continue our conversations with Roku on certification, in good faith, with the goal of advocating for our mutual customers.

Translation: You’ll add hardware support for the AV1 codec whether you want to or not, because we say so.

Roku’s response, via The Verge:

Google’s actions are the clear conduct of an unchecked monopolist bent on crushing fair competition and harming consumer choice. The bundling announcement by YouTube highlights the kind of predatory business practices used by Google that Congress, Attorney Generals and regulatory bodies around the world are investigating. Roku has not asked for one additional dollar in financial value from YouTubeTV. We have simply asked Google to stop their anticompetitive behavior of manipulating user search results to their unique financial benefit and to stop demanding access to sensitive data that no other partner on our platform receives today. In response, Google has continued its practice of blatantly leveraging its YouTube monopoly to force an independent company into an agreement that is both bad for consumers and bad for fair competition.

Translation: Fuck us? No, fuck you, Google.

(Anyway, I was on Roku’s side in this dispute until they pluralized “attorney general” that way. Come on, Roku.)

Apple Hires Stella Low, Formerly of Cisco, as New Communications Boss 

John Paczkowski, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

Apple has hired a new vice president of worldwide corporate communications. Stella Low, former communications chief at networking giant Cisco, will take on the role, which has been unfilled since late 2019.

A tech industry veteran, Low has done stints at Unisys and Dell, where she served as senior vice president of communications. She’ll report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. […]

Low will succeed Steve Dowling, who served as Apple’s head of corporate public relations for 10 years before departing in September 2019. And her tenure will give a welcome break to Apple Fellow Phil Schiller, who has been overseeing the company’s public relations operation since Dowling left.

I’m sort of surprised they went outside, because it’s Apple. But also sort of not surprised because there didn’t seem to be any internal candidates contending for this gig. If they were going to fill this spot from within it wouldn’t have taken so long.

Jim Dalrymple:

The big question for someone at this level at Apple is not qualifications, but whether or not they fit the Apple culture. That will be her biggest hurdle — it starts and stops there.

Culture is always the issue at Apple for outsiders. Remember John Browett, who lasted only six months as chief of Apple Retail? His explanation: “I just didn’t fit within the way they ran the business. For me, it was one of those shopping things where you’re ejected for fit rather than competency.” Angela Ahrendts lasted five years in that role, but I never got the feeling that she ever quite jibed with Apple’s culture. Deirdre O’Brien — who’s been at Apple for decades and replaced Ahrendts as head of retail — feels like a natural.

Steve Dowling came to Apple after running CNBC’s Silicon Valley news bureau, but he was at Apple for 11 years (including 10 running corporate comms) before his five-year stint as PR chief. Dowling got Apple.

‘Tesla Privately Admits Elon Musk Has Been Exaggerating About “Full Self-Driving”’ 

Exaggerating or straight-up lying, you make the call.

Script Debugger 8 

New version of Late Night Software’s amazing Script Debugger:

You want your computer systems to be simple, reliable and automatic. Script Debugger is the integrated development environment that makes that happen by making your AppleScript coding easier, faster, and more transparent. And now Script Debugger runs natively on M1 Macs, with full support for universal applets, Dark Mode, and themes.

For anyone who uses AppleScript seriously, Script Debugger is a veritable bargain at $99 (with generous upgrade pricing for registered users of versions 7 and 6). And even if you’re just an AppleScript tinkerer, Script Debugger 8 now has a free-to-use Lite mode that is so much better than Apple’s own Script Editor.

A good rule of thumb: it’s fair to gripe about the various idiosyncrasies and anachronisms in AppleScript, but try using Script Debugger before you complain.

Facebook Remains a Right-Wing Amplification Tool 

Worth remembering, amidst all the Republican claims that Facebook’s continuing exile of Donald Trump from its platforms is proof that the company is biased against Republicans, that its algorithms are clearly biased in favor of them because Facebook optimizes for engagement above all else, and angry right-wing partisan misinformation is addictive content for wingnuts.

New York Times columnist Kevin Roose tracks the top-performing link posts on Facebook every day, and every day, they are dominated by one thing. Not sports. Not celebrity gossip. Not straight news. What dominates is right-wing punditry. Today’s list:

  1. Franklin Graham
  2. Ben Shapiro
  3. Ben Shapiro
  4. Dan Bongino
  5. Ben Shapiro
  6. Ben Shapiro
  7. Dan Bongino
  8. The Pioneer Woman - Ree Drummond
  9. Thin Blue Line
  10. Ben Shapiro

Yesterday’s:

  1. Franklin Graham
  2. Ben Shapiro
  3. Ben Shapiro
  4. Dan Bongino
  5. Dan Bongino
  6. NPR
  7. Ben Shapiro
  8. Ben Shapiro
  9. Ben Shapiro
  10. Ted Cruz

Facebook’s continuing ban of Trump isn’t because they’re biased against Trump supporters — it’s despite the fact that they cater their algorithms to attract Trump supporters.

Kara Swisher on Trump’s Continuing Exile From Facebook 

Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times:

In general, I have considered the case of Mr. Trump to be much less complex than people seem to think. And it has been made to appear highly complicated by big tech companies like Facebook because they want to exhaust us all in a noisy and intractable debate.

Mr. Trump should be seen as an outlier — a lone, longtime rule breaker who was coddled and protected on social media platforms until he wandered into seditious territory. He’s an unrepentant gamer of Facebook’s badly enforced rules who will never change. He got away with it for years and spread myriad self-serving lies far and wide. […]

In moving the key decision over Mr. Trump out of its own hands (where it belonged), the company has passed along the hottest of potatoes and said good riddance to responsibility. Facebook is pretending that its hands are tied, even though Facebook executives were the ones who tied them.

I, for one, would never have bet that Jack Dorsey would be the one who finally dealt with Trump’s abuse decisively, and that Mark Zuckerberg would be the one who looks utterly feckless. I think Zuckerberg was hoping that Trump would just fade from relevancy once he was out of office. That clearly hasn’t happened, and it’s not going to happen over the next six months, either. Zuckerberg needs to make a decision now.