Linked List: March 22, 2022

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

FastScripts 3.1 Adds AppleScript Commands for Regular Expressions ★

Speaking of automation, here’s an update near and dear to my regex-loving heart. Daniel Jalkut, writing at the Red Sweater blog:

This update introduces an expansion of FastScripts’s own built-in scripting additions, with three powerful new commands for searching, replacing, and splitting text with regular expressions.

These can be used by any AppleScript on your Mac, whether you’re running the script from FastScripts or not. These new commands are also completely free of charge, so if you install and keep FastScripts running in the background, your scripts will always have access to these features.

Like anything scripting-related, there are many ways to use regular expressions for searching and replacing text in AppleScript. Having a few good commands (searching, replacing, and splitting) built into a utility like FastScripts though, with a good scripting dictionary for the syntax, is really convenient. I started beta testing this version of FastScripts a few weeks ago, and I’ve already made a few new scripts that use it, and edited a few old scripts to use FastScripts’s regex commands to replace the now-unnecessary ~~kludges~~ workarounds I was using before. Very cool, too, for sharing scripts with others, that these regex commands are available in the free version of FastScripts.

Five-Year Anniversary of Apple’s Acquisition of Workflow, Which Is Now Shortcuts ★

Matthew Panzarino, five years ago today:

Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak. [...]

The app was made by a small team that includes Ari Weinstein, a former iPhone jailbreaker. I’ve been following his efforts since the iPod Linux days and covered his very useful DeskConnect app a few years back.

Workflow has been around for a couple of years and we’ve covered it and its updates. It shares some similarity with the service IFTTT, in that it allows people to group together a bunch of actions that can allow them to perform complicated tasks with one tap. It had built up a sizeable number of users and downloads over the past few years.

I was reminded of this anniversary via John Voorhees, who linked to this prescient piece by Federico Viticci written shortly after the acquisition. Viticci was far ahead of his time in seeing the potential for Workflow/Shortcuts.

I’m of two minds about the current state of Shortcuts. First, Shortcuts seems to be improving at a faster pace than ever before. The biggest improvement, of course, was bringing it to MacOS this year, with cross-platform compatibility with iOS wherever it makes sense, but also enabling Mac-only actions like executing AppleScript and shell scripts. Until Apple showed that they were committed to Shortcuts post-acquisition, there really was no system-wide automation story for iOS. It’s very encouraging that Shortcuts isn’t just alive at Apple, it’s alive and seemingly thriving.

But there’s a part of me that thinks Shortcuts as a first-party automation technology should be even further along than it is after five years inside Apple. My recent look back at the origins of the iPhone and iOS in particular, and thinking about how much that relatively small team accomplished in just two years, has lowered my overall patience for platform advancements.

Okta Statement on Breach by Hackers ★

David Bradbury, chief security officer for Okta, in a brief post on the company’s blog:

In January 2022, Okta detected an unsuccessful attempt to compromise the account of a customer support engineer working for a third-party provider. As part of our regular procedures, we alerted the provider to the situation, while simultaneously terminating the user’s active Okta sessions and suspending the individual’s account. Following those actions, we shared pertinent information (including suspicious IP addresses) to supplement their investigation, which was supported by a third-party forensics firm.

Following the completion of the service provider’s investigation, we received a report from the forensics firm this week. The report highlighted that there was a five-day window of time between January 16-21, 2022, where an attacker had access to a support engineer’s laptop. This is consistent with the screenshots that we became aware of yesterday.

The screenshots they “became aware of yesterday” were shared on social media and, because Okta provides secure authentication to many companies, the breach has been widely-publicized. What Bradbury claims matches the evidence to date — that the attackers gained the privileges of a support engineer and no more. That’s something, but it doesn’t seem to be catastrophic. It would be a lot more reassuring, though, if the January incident had been disclosed before these screenshots were leaked to the public.

(This same hacking group, “Lapsus$”, claims to have stolen the source code for Cortana, Bing, and other projects from Microsoft.)

Update: New post from Bradbury:

After a thorough analysis of these claims, we have concluded that a small percentage of customers — approximately 2.5% — have potentially been impacted and whose data may have been viewed or acted upon. We have identified those customers and are contacting them directly. If you are an Okta customer and were impacted, we have already reached out directly by email. We are sharing this interim update, consistent with our values of customer success, integrity, and transparency.

Yowza. Seems pretty likely to me this is how “Lapsus$” stole source code from Microsoft.

Axios: ‘Vulnerable Democrats Eye G.O.P. Transit Mask Repeal’ ★

Axios:

The chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm and some of the vulnerable members he’s charged with re-electing are voicing support for a Republican-led mask mandate repeal bill.

Why it matters: This would set up a potential showdown with the White House, which recently issued a one-month extension on the federal mask mandate for public transit and airplanes.

Mask mandates are political death at this point in state-wide races. An overwhelming majority of voters are opposed to continuing them. The new normal should be “Wear a mask to protect yourself if you want to.” Democrats need to repeal these mandates now so that they’re ancient history come November.

Double-down on vaccines. Vaccines are the solution to COVID-19, and Democrats can own them as a political issue. Take mask mandates off the table and just make it all about vaccinations, which really work and really help.

45 Years at Apple for Employee 8 ★

Chris Espinosa, on Twitter, marked his 45-year anniversary at Apple last week in typical understated fashion. For the record, my favorite Espinosa story.

Nick Heer on Computational Photography’s Uncanny Valley ★

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy regarding Kyle Chayka’s aforelinked argument in the New Yorker that iPhone cameras have gotten too smart:

There are many things about the default camera app’s processing that are not to my tastes, but one attribute tops the list: its aggressive noise reduction. I wish it would back off and permit a little more grain, which gives images texture and compromises details less.

I understand why Apple’s Camera software is so aggressive about noise reduction, but I’m with Heer in preferring a little noise and texture in my low-light photos. It would be great if noise reduction were added to the list of Photo Styles we can adjust in iOS 16 this year. Keep the default aggressive but let us choose to dial it back.

Kyle Chayka: ‘Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?’ ★

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

In January, I traded my iPhone 7 for an iPhone 12 Pro, and I’ve been dismayed by the camera’s performance. On the 7, the slight roughness of the images I took seemed like a logical product of the camera’s limited capabilities. I didn’t mind imperfections like the “digital noise” that occurred when a subject was underlit or too far away, and I liked that any editing of photos was up to me. On the 12 Pro, by contrast, the digital manipulations are aggressive and unsolicited. One expects a person’s face in front of a sunlit window to appear darkened, for instance, since a traditional camera lens, like the human eye, can only let light in through a single aperture size in a given instant. But on my iPhone 12 Pro even a backlit face appears strangely illuminated. The editing might make for a theoretically improved photo — it’s nice to see faces — yet the effect is creepy. When I press the shutter button to take a picture, the image in the frame often appears for an instant as it did to my naked eye. Then it clarifies and brightens into something unrecognizable, and there’s no way of reversing the process. David Fitt, a professional photographer based in Paris, also went from an iPhone 7 to a 12 Pro, in 2020, and he still prefers the 7’s less powerful camera. On the 12 Pro, “I shoot it and it looks overprocessed,” he said. “They bring details back in the highlights and in the shadows that often are more than what you see in real life. It looks over-real.”

Chayka’s is an interesting take, for sure. He references Halide’s aforelinked deep analysis of the iPhone 13 Pro camera system (which is what reminded me to link to it) thus:

Yet, for some users, all of those optimizing features have had an unwanted effect. Halide, a developer of camera apps, recently published a careful examination of the 13 Pro that noted visual glitches caused by the device’s intelligent photography, including the erasure of bridge cables in a landscape shot. “Its complex, interwoven set of ‘smart’ software components don’t fit together quite right,” the report stated.

That shot of the bridge was not a good result, but it wasn’t emblematic of the typical iPhone 13 camera experience in any way. I don’t think Chayka is being overly disingenuous, but for 99 percent of the photos taken by 99 percent of people (ballpark numbers, obviously) the iPhone 12 or 13 is a way better camera than an iPhone 7. Yet Chayka might leave some readers thinking they’re going to get better photos from a six-year-old iPhone, which simply isn’t true.

The problem is not that iPhone cameras have gotten too smart. It’s that they haven’t gotten smart enough. There most certainly are trade-offs between old-fashioned dumb photography and today’s state-of-the-art computational photography, but those trade-offs overwhelmingly favor computational photography. Chayka’s whole argument feels somewhat like arguments that shooting on film produced superior results compared to digital sensors circa 15 years ago.

Sebastiaan de With on the iPhone 13 Pro Camera System ★

Sebastiaan de With, writing for Lux’s Halide blog:

This year’s deep dive into Apple’s latest and greatest — the iPhone 13 Pro — took extra time. I had to research a particular set of quirks.

“Quirk”? This might be a bit of a startling thing to read, coming from many reviews. Most smartphone reviews and technology websites list the new iPhone 13 Pro’s camera system as being up there with the best on the market right now.

I don’t disagree.

But I must admit I don’t take photos like most people. An average iPhone user snaps a picture in Apple’s Camera app, and … I work on my own camera app. I take photos in both Apple’s app and our own — and that lets me do something that Apple’s can’t: take native RAW photos. These shots let me poke and prod at the unprocessed photo that comes straight out of the hardware. Looking at the raw data, I’ve concluded that while Apple has taken more than one leap forward in hardware, they’re in a tricky position in software.

I missed this last month when it appeared. Well-illustrated, well-explained look at the state-of-the-art in mobile phone photography.

‘MacPaw’s Operations Amidst the Russian Aggression Against Ukraine’ ★

Oleksandr Kosovan, founder of MacPaw:

Being humans of the 21st century, we all wish that the tragic days of war were a thing of the past. However, now once more, with the Russian aggression against Ukraine, we’ve been made to witness how easy freedom, independence, and the human right to life and choice are put on the line.

MacPaw was founded and operated primarily in Kyiv, Ukraine. For us, the security of our team members is paramount. We’ve prepared various assistance programs and launched an emergency plan to ensure the safety of our peers based in Ukraine.

MacPaw is a longtime Mac development shop, with well-known utilities like CleanMyMac and the app subscription service Setapp. I’ve met Kosovan and several other MacPaw employees at WWDCs past — and I hope to see them all again.

Kosovan’s post concludes with a slew of links to services to which you can donate to support Ukraine.

Author Lauren Hough Loses Lambda Prize Nomination After Suggesting People Read a Forthcoming Book Before They Condemn It ★

Lauren Hough:

My book won’t win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry, and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn’t meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golding. They call it “call-out culture” because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don’t like, for social justice reasons, of course.

Publishing hasn’t yet figured out how to respond to YA twitter. Authors who’ve been targeted have left social media entirely. Reviewers shy away. Publishers have pulled books. Authors have changed lines, characters, and scenes in their books hoping to avoid becoming a target, or to appease YA twitter once they have. And once they have become targets, those writers often find themselves alone — their friends and colleagues silent for fear of becoming targets themselves. The entirety of the publishing world is terrified of a few hundred self-described book lovers on social media who are shockingly bad at reading books.

Very strange that Hough’s award nomination would be revoked for this, because after The New York Times editorial board’s much-discussed opinion piece last week, backed by polling, arguing that America has a problem with free speech as a social ideal, I learned on Twitter that this just isn’t so and that “cancel culture” does not exist.

(Snark aside, may I suggest that even if you disagree with the Times editorial board’s opinion, their polling results are eye-opening regarding whether Americans — on both the right and left — believe that we have a growing problem with tolerance for opinions we disagree with. Much of the knee-jerk reaction to the Times editorial board’s opinion seems like proof in and of itself that they were right.)

Speaking of The Times, here’s their story today by reporter Marc Tracy on Lambda Literary’s revocation of Hough’s award nomination:

Hough said Monday that she could not recall whether she had deleted any tweets, and denied that any of her tweets had been transphobic. Lambda did not provide examples of the posts they were most critical of. The Times has not reviewed any deleted tweets.

That’s really something. Jeet Heer:

I’m a bit baffled by this. How do we adjudicate a controversy about something said when its deleted, neither party wants to quote it, and the reporter hasn’t seen it?