Linked List: December 30, 2021

Thursday, 30 December 2021

The Conditions at a Foxconn iPhone Plant in India: Hundreds Hospitalized With Food Poisoning, Rats in Kitchens, Dorms Without Running Water 

Sudarshan Varadhan and A. Ananthalakshmi, reporting for Reuters from Sriperumbudur, India:

Reuters spoke to six women who worked at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. All of them requested they not to be named because of fear of retaliation on the job or from police. Workers slept on the floor in rooms, which housed between six to 30 women, five of these workers said. Two workers said the hostel they lived in had toilets without running water. [...]

Following the protests, food safety inspectors visited the hostel where the bout of food poisoning occurred and closed the dorm’s kitchen after finding rats and poor drainage, Jegadish Chandra Bose, a senior food safety officer in the Thiruvallur district where the hostel is located, told Reuters. [...]

The food poisoning incident sent 159 women from one dorm to hospital on Dec 15, workers told Reuters. Some 100 more women needed medical attention but were not hospitalised, the Thiruvallur district administration said last week.

The response:

The facility has been placed “on probation” and Apple will ensure its strict standards are met before the plant reopens, an Apple spokesperson said.

“We found that some of the remote dormitory accommodations and dining rooms being used for employees do not meet our requirements and we are working with the supplier to ensure a comprehensive set of corrective actions are rapidly implemented.”

“Did not meet our requirements” indeed. Jiminy.

When HDMI 2.1 Isn’t HDMI 2.1  

Simon Baker, writing for TFT Central:

We covered above what we believe the common consumer expectation is in terms of capabilities and features when they see HDMI 2.1 advertised. If you delve in to the detail of HDMI 2.1 you will probably be surprised to hear that actually none of these things are required!

We contacted HDMI.org who are the “HDMI Licensing Administrator” to ask some questions about this new standard, seek clarification on several questions we had and discuss the Xiaomi display we mentioned above. Here is what we were told:

  1. HDMI 2.0 no longer exists, and devices should not claim compliance to v2.0 as it is not referenced any more
  2. The features of HDMI 2.0 are now a sub-set of 2.1
  3. All the new capabilities and features associated with HDMI 2.1 are optional (this includes FRL, the higher bandwidths, VRR, ALLM and everything else)
  4. If a device claims compliance to 2.1 then they need to also state which features the device supports so there is “no confusion” (hmmmm)

What a mess — maybe worse than the USB-C plug situation.

Update: It gets better (by which I mean worse): HDMI 2.1a is coming at CES next week, and it’s just as confusing.

NYT: ‘Are Apple AirTags Being Used to Track People and Steal Cars?’ 

This report for The New York Times from Ryan Mac and Kashmir Hill fails the Betteridge’s Law test. Their best answer is “Well, maybe”:

Mary Ford, a 17-year-old high school student from Cary, N.C., received a notification in late October that she was being tracked by an unknown AirTag after driving to an appointment. She panicked as she searched her car.

Ms. Ford only realized it wasn’t a threat when her mother revealed she had put the tracker in the vehicle about two weeks earlier to follow her daughter’s whereabouts.

“I was nervous about Mary being out and not being able to find her,” said her mother, Wendy Ford. She said she hadn’t intended to keep the knowledge of the AirTag from her daughter, “but if I knew she would have been notified, I probably would have told her.”

This makes no sense. She hid the AirTag in her daughter’s car and didn’t tell her about it, but the Times claims “she hadn’t intended to keep the knowledge of the AirTag from her daughter”? That’s exactly what she did.

Jahna Maramba rented a vehicle from the car-sharing service Turo last month in Los Angeles, then received a notification about an unknown AirTag near her on a Saturday night with her girlfriends.

She took the vehicle to her friend’s parking garage where she searched the outside of the car for an hour before its owner notified her that he had placed the device inside the vehicle. Ms. Maramba had been driving the car for two days.

To me these examples show that Apple’s notification system for unknown AirTags is working, but the report posits the whole platform as problematic.

See also: Apple’s Tracker Detect app for Android, which launched two weeks ago.