Linked List: March 23, 2022

Wednesday, 23 March 2022

Senator Ben Sasse (Republican of Nebraska), during today’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson:

I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities.

I’ve been using jackassery here on DF for close to 20 years, and I’m still looking at red underscores each time I do. Let’s get this splendid, indispensable word into the dictionary.

(It’s really quite a keen observation by Sasse about the effect of televising Congressional hearings, too. Watch the whole video.)

Some iPhone 7 vs. iPhone 12 Comparison Photos ★

John Nack:

If anyone reads that New Yorker article and thinks they’ll prefer shooting on an iPhone 7, please show them these iPhone 7-vs-12 shots I took.

That’s a reference to Kyle Chayka’s “Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?” article, which I commented on yesterday. It’s coincidental that Nack’s year-ago series of comparison photos pitted the same two iPhones against each other that Chayka referenced. Chayka wrote:

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.

A lot of times when new iPhones are reviewed — including my own reviews — camera comparisons are made to iPhones from just one or two years prior, and differences can seem subtle. Separate iPhones by five years, though, and the results are striking. (It’s pretty easy to tell in Nack’s gallery which photos are from which iPhone, but if you want to be certain, click the “(i)” button in Google Photos.)

How do you take a photo like this or this — to pick two of my own recent photos taken with iPhone 13 Pro — with an iPhone 7? You can’t.

Google to Pilot Third-Party Payments Alongside Play’s Own Payments, Starting With Spotify ★

Sameer Samat, writing for Google’s Android Developers Blog:

Building on our recent launch allowing an additional billing system alongside Play’s billing for users in South Korea and in line with our principles, we are announcing we will be exploring user choice billing in other select countries. This pilot will allow a small number of participating developers to offer an additional billing option next to Google Play’s billing system and is designed to help us explore ways to offer this choice to users, while maintaining our ability to invest in the ecosystem.

We’ll be partnering with developers to explore different implementations of user-choice billing, starting with Spotify.

From Spotify’s own announcement:

Spotify has been publicly advocating for platform fairness and expanded payment options, among other things, because fair and open platforms enable better consumer experiences and allow developers to grow and thrive — when this happens everyone wins.

Gee, I wonder which platforms — there are so many that Spotify really cares about — they consider unfair.

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch on the deal:

Reached for comment, Spotify declined to say what sort of commission it would be paying Google as a part of this pilot test, noting that the agreement was confidential. But a company spokesperson suggested that the commercial terms met Spotify’s “standards of fairness.”

Google also declined to detail the commission structure involved. However, it noted that user choice billing, such as is the case in South Korea, will still involve a service fee regardless of which billing system the user chooses.

Nova, Half-Priced Through the End of March ★

This is a good ad for a good deal for a great Mac-assed Mac app.

Nilay Patel Interviews Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton ★

I’ve been greatly enjoying Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast, no episode more so than this recent interview with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton. The recurring theme: general purpose computers vs. appliance computers. And my favorite line from Upton, neatly summarizing Raspberry Pi’s ethos: “We build the products we want to buy.”

My aforelinked item on John Calhoun’s “SystemSix” project is a perfect example of Raspberry Pi’s general purpose utility and affordability. If Raspberry Pi didn’t exist, there are of course ways Calhoun could have built something similar, but I doubt he would have.

SystemSix ★

John Calhoun:

SystemSix is a desk calendar that displays the weather forecast and phase of the moon on an e-ink display. This is a kind of love-letter to my first Macintosh.

It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi 3. The display is 5.83″ e-ink display from Waveshare.

If you configure it to point to a public calendar it will fetch the next six calendar events and display them (see below, the events are the folder names in the window in “list view”).

Configure your latitude and longitude in the settings and it will fetch the local weather forecast (see below, being displayed in the Scrapbook).

In the evening SystemSix displays the current phase of the moon (see below, looking like a “desk accessory” in vintage-Mac parlance).

The trash icon is displayed “full” on the day of your choice (for me it’s Monday, to remind me to take the trash to the curb for Tuesday pickup).

There are two rubs. First, it’s not an interactive classic Mac emulator. It looks like a Mac, but it’s just a static dashboard that looks like a classic Mac. Second, Calhoun built this for himself as a project. It is not, alas, a product for sale.

Future ideas:

I’m happy with this project. It satisfied both my curiosity about e-ink displays and Python as well as rekindled fond memories for the early Mac. There’s plenty more I can do with this though. I mentioned already that there are a number of “layouts” left still to implement like a Hypercard layout or two. I also got screenshots for potential layouts of an install in progress, KeyCaps, a print panel, Chooser, etc.

Perhaps Glider would work well in one of these layouts.

Nicole Nguyen Tests 5G’s Effect on Battery Life on iPhones and iPads ★

Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

So, I wanted to compare 5G and 4G battery performance for myself. I streamed a long YouTube video of relaxing ocean footage, with video quality set to “Auto,” on different Apple devices until they ran out of battery, first on 5G, then on LTE. It isn’t a perfect test, but it proved to be a consistent way to witness 5G’s added battery drain. [...]

The new SE lasted nearly an hour longer on 4G than on 5G, while the new iPad Air and iPhone 13 Mini went for about 1.5 additional hours. And while the iPhone 13 Pro ran a remarkable 12 hours and 50 minutes on 5G, it still lasted about 2.5 hours longer on LTE.

Nguyen includes a tip at the end of her column explaining how to create a simple Shortcuts automation to switch cellular networking to LTE when your device’s battery hits a certain threshold, like say 40 percent. But I look at these results and wonder why I enable 5G at all. There is nothing I do with my iPhone — nothing — where I find LTE even just a little bit “too slow”.

I wrote about 5G, including mmWave “ultra wideband”, networking speeds in my review of the iPhones 12 and 12 Pro back in October 2020. Verizon’s ultra wideband network speeds are truly extraordinary — I still typically get 1,500–2,000 Mbps down with 5G ultra wideband. With both regular 5G and LTE, I typically get between 50–100 Mbps down — and I see a regular 5G connection far far more often than I do 5G ultra wideband. I don’t see any practical advantage to regular 5G compared to LTE. Those crazy-fast ultra-wideband download speeds are like owning a car that can go 200 MPH. So I’m just going to set my iPhone to use LTE all the time and save battery life. I’ll turn 5G Auto back on if I ever run into a situation where my LTE signal seems weak or slow.

The carriers certainly aren’t going to suggest you do this because their current marketing campaigns are entirely about how great their 5G networks are — even though they’re only now starting to deliver meaningful real-world advantages over LTE. And Apple’s not going to suggest you turn off 5G either, because they are co-marketing partners with the carriers. But I’ll suggest it: try turning off 5G to save battery life and see if you miss it at all.

Arizona Is the First State to Support Driver’s Licenses in Apple Wallet ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple announced that Arizona is the first state to offer driver’s license and state ID in Wallet. Starting today, Arizonans can add their driver’s license or state ID to Wallet, and tap their iPhone or Apple Watch to seamlessly and securely present it at select TSA security checkpoints in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. [...]

Additional states will offer driver’s license and state ID in Wallet soon. Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, and the territory of Puerto Rico plan to bring this feature to their residents, along with the seven states Apple previously announced.

I’ll save you a click: the other seven states are Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Microsoft Security on the “Lapsus$” / DEV-0537 Hacking Group ★

Microsoft Security:

The activity we have observed has been attributed to a threat group that Microsoft tracks as DEV-0537, also known as LAPSUS$. DEV-0537 is known for using a pure extortion and destruction model without deploying ransomware payloads. DEV-0537 started targeting organizations in the United Kingdom and South America but expanded to global targets, including organizations in government, technology, telecom, media, retail, and healthcare sectors. DEV-0537 is also known to take over individual user accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges to drain cryptocurrency holdings.

Unlike most activity groups that stay under the radar, DEV-0537 doesn’t seem to cover its tracks. They go as far as announcing their attacks on social media or advertising their intent to buy credentials from employees of target organizations. DEV-0537 also uses several tactics that are less frequently used by other threat actors tracked by Microsoft. Their tactics include phone-based social engineering; SIM-swapping to facilitate account takeover; accessing personal email accounts of employees at target organizations; paying employees, suppliers, or business partners of target organizations for access to credentials and multifactor authentication (MFA) approval; and intruding in the ongoing crisis-communication calls of their targets.

Scroll down, and they acknowledge having been exploited themselves this week:

This week, the actor made public claims that they had gained access to Microsoft and exfiltrated portions of source code. No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities. Our investigation has found a single account had been compromised, granting limited access. Our cybersecurity response teams quickly engaged to remediate the compromised account and prevent further activity. Microsoft does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk. The tactics DEV-0537 used in this intrusion reflect the tactics and techniques discussed in this blog. Our team was already investigating the compromised account based on threat intelligence when the actor publicly disclosed their intrusion. This public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact.

Social engineering always has been, and remains, the most effective and destructive form of computer hacking.

The Verge: ‘Nothing’s First Smartphone Is Aimed at Apple, Not OnePlus’ ★

Jon Porter, writing for The Verge:

Today, Nothing is releasing a series of images of Nothing OS, the Android skin it plans to ship on the Phone 1. The images don’t reveal much about what the software might be able to do, but Pei is keen to emphasize its look, which very consciously lines up with the rest of Nothing’s branding. The interface is a sea of black, white, and red that leans heavily on the dotted font that Nothing uses for its logo.

Pei’s also very into the sound of the phone, an area he thinks is often overlooked. “Our sound design is really cool,” he says, “so definitely check that out.”

I don’t know how broad the appeal is, but I dig the retro dot matrix aesthetic. But Samsung has got to be wondering about that headline.

Ken White: ‘Our Fundamental Right to Shame and Shun The New York Times’ ★

Ken White, writing for The Popehat Report:

I’m going to offer a working definition for the purposes of this essay: “cancel culture” is when speech is met with a response that, in my opinion, is very disproportionate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, and I could certainly give you a Justice-Breyer-seven-factor balancing test, but that’s what this discussion boils down to: just as we constantly debate norms of what speech is socially acceptable, we debate norms about what responses to speech are socially acceptable. […]

Why should we care about having a serious discussion about defining cancel culture? We should because simply complaining about it in the abstract, without attempts to define it, without actionable responses, and without taking the rights of “cancellers” doesn’t ease the culture war. It inflames it.

I loved this entire piece, but the above encapsulates my thinking on the term “cancel culture” perfectly.