Linked List: March 9, 2023

Thursday, 9 March 2023

Jason Kottke:

The other day on the chair lift, my kids and I were talking about our top skiing speeds (me: low 40s, them: 50+) and one of us mentioned that it would be cool if your current speed was shown on a heads-up display in your goggles. So this morning I went looking for AR ski goggles and of course they exist. Here are a pair of demo videos from Sirius (made by Oostloong) and Rekkie.

These goggles include features like real-time speed, clock, temperature, friend finding/tracking, wayfinding (directions, compass, elevation), HD recording, and phone notifications. Skiing is a natural use for AR — you’re wearing the bulky goggles for safety anyway, so you can hide all the necessary tech in there without looking ridiculous, and taking your mittens on and off to check the time or send/read texts is annoying.

The demo video for the Sirius goggles is particularly impressive. And the use case is simply incredible: skiers are already wearing bulky goggles.

WhatsApp, the Dominant Messaging Platform in the U.K., Tells the Government to Bugger Off Regarding Legislation That Would Ban End-to-End Encryption ★

Shiona McCallum and Chris Vallance, reporting for the BBC News:

WhatsApp says it would rather be blocked in the UK than undermine its encrypted-messaging system, if required to do so under the Online Safety Bill. [...]

The government said it is possible to have both privacy and child safety.

Cryptographers and privacy experts agree that end-to-end encryption is the only way to guarantee privacy. Dum-dum elected officials around the globe have a persistent “it must be possible” fantasy that it’s possible to create an encryption system with backdoor keys that would only be available to “the good guys”.

Undermining the privacy of WhatsApp messages in the UK would do so for all users, Mr Cathcart said.

“Our users all around the world want security - 98% of our users are outside the UK, they do not want us to lower the security of the product,” he said. And the app would rather accept being blocked in the UK.

“We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. We’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that,” he added.

It’s not even a matter of willingness. It’s not technically possible for WhatsApp or Signal or iMessage or any platform that’s end-to-end encrypted to use some weaker backdoor-able encryption on a country-by-country basis. The platform is either truly end-to-end encrypted or it’s not. They can’t just flip and switch and let U.K. WhatsApp users use an entirely different non-E2E protocol. The principled stand in the name of cryptographically guaranteed privacy isn’t happening now, in response to this deeply misguided legislation — it happened at the outset of these platforms, when they were designed from the ground up with E2E.

Google Is Expanding VPN Service to All Paid Google One Subscribers ★

Speaking of Google One features, here’s Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Google today announced that its Google VPN feature is expanding to all Google One subscribers, instead of being limited to those who subscribe to the Premium 2TB Google One plan.

VPN by Google One is designed to mask a user’s IP address, preventing sites and apps from collecting that information for location tracking and monitoring activity across the web. It also offers protection from hackers and network operators, similar to any other VPN.

With this change, storage space is the primary differentiating factor between Google One plans. The basic plan offers 100GB of storage, while the Premium plan offers 2TB. There’s also a free tier with 15GB of storage, but it does not include VPN access.

Using a VPN does prevent sites and apps from tracking or monitoring you. But your VPN provider can see every site you visit, and every app you use (other than apps that never do anything on the internet). VPN usage data is so lucrative to a surveillance advertising company that just a few years ago, Facebook was paying users aged 13 to 35 up to $20 per month to use their “Facebook Research” VPN app. A VPN app from Google is a hard pass for me.

Magic Eraser Comes to ‘Other Phones’ ★

Philip Michaels, writing for Tom’s Guide:

If you’re not familiar with Magic Eraser, it made its debut with the the Pixel 6 in 2021, allowing you to easily remove unwanted people and objects from images. Select Magic Eraser, and the tool’s computational smarts will identify things for removal. If you agree with those suggestions, all you have to do is tap them. If you had something else in mind, just draw a circle around it with your finger, and Magic Eraser will make the offending object disappear.

While the Magic Eraser tool is now part of the Google Photos app for iPhone, it’s still tied to Google One. To put it another way, if you want to keep any changes that Magic Eraser makes to your photos, you’ll need to sign up for a Google One membership, with subscriptions starting at $1.99/month for 100GB of storage.

A few months ago I noticed a new TV commercial campaign from Google for its Pixel phones. They start with a narrator saying “Did you know Google makes a phone?”^* The next line, in most of the spots: “Sure it’s beautiful, but it does things other phones can’t do.” And then the primary feature they show is ... Magic Eraser. Here’s a 15-second spot that only shows Magic Eraser.

Then Google ran a 90-second Super Bowl spot for the Pixel — starring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat, and some guy from the Milwaukee Bucks — and the whole thing was about Magic Eraser. It’s enough to make you think that the Pixel marketing team had no idea Google was going to make Magic Eraser available to “other phones”.

“It does things other phones can’t do” is a good slogan. “It does things other phones won’t be able to do until the end of this month”, not so much.

* This is a good hook for a Pixel ad campaign because I think it’s true that most Americans don’t know that Google makes phones. But it’s rather embarrassing that most Americans don’t know that Google makes phones given that the original Pixel debuted in 2016, and Google’s Nexus line of phones debuted in 2010. You’ve got a serious marketing problem when you’re 13 years in and see the need for a “Did you know we do this?” campaign.

‘Finally’ Indeed ★

I hope you’re well-stocked with popcorn, because you’re going to need a lot of it. Dominion Voting Systems, opening its reply brief in support of its motion for a summary judgment against Fox “News” (PDF):

Finally. Fox has conceded what it knew all along. The charges Fox broadcast against Dominion are false. Fox does not spend a word of its brief arguing the truth of any accused statement. Fox has produced no evidence — none, zero — supporting those lies. This concession should come as no surprise. Discovery into Fox has proven that from the top of the organization to the bottom, Fox always knew the absurdity of the Dominion “stolen election” story. Now, having failed to put in any evidence to the contrary (because no such evidence exists), Fox has conceded the falsity of the Dominion allegations it broadcast.

That concession is no small thing. Thirty percent or more of Americans still believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The heart of that lie remains the false conspiracy theory that Fox legitimized and mainstreamed starting on November 8 — that Dominion stole the election, using secret algorithms in its software originally designed for a Venezuelan dictator. Because of these lies, Dominion now may be “one of the most demonized brands in the United States or the world.” Dominion employees still endure threats and harassment. So it matters that Fox in private ridiculed — and never believed — the lie. And it matters that Fox has now in this litigation conceded these allegations were false.

Later:

Fox seeks a First Amendment license to knowingly spread lies. Fox would have this Court create an absolute legal immunity for knowingly spreading false allegations — lies — for profit, regardless of how absurd the lies are, regardless how many people in the chain of command know the lies are false, and regardless how many people are hurt — so long as the false claims are “newsworthy.” Fox proffers a completely made-up “rule,” contrary to decades of jurisprudence since New York Times v. Sullivan. As Judge Nichols ruled in rejecting MyPillow’s analogous argument that the First Amendment provides “blanket protection” from defamation for statements about a “‘public debate in a public forum,’” “there is no such immunity. Instead, the First Amendment safeguards our ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’ by limiting viable defamation claims to provably false statements made with actual malice.”