Linked List: March 26, 2023

Sunday, 26 March 2023

My thanks to Kolide for again sponsoring DF last week. Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong. Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, addresses this issue head-on.

Kolide offers a more nuanced approach than MDM solutions to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. Their premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.

To learn more and see Kolide in action, visit kolide.com.

Gurman: Apple Presented Headset at Top 100 Meeting ★

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column at Bloomberg:

There was a momentous gathering at Apple Inc. last week, with the company’s roughly 100 highest-ranking executives descending on the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. The group, known as the Top 100, was there to see Apple’s most important new product in years: its mixed-reality headset. [...]

But this time was different. Earlier demonstrations were lower-key affairs, meant to show progress and secure the headcount needed to keep going. The latest preview took place in the Steve Jobs Theater, Apple’s biggest showcase, suggesting that a public unveiling is getting close. The executives attended the event ahead of heading to their annual offsite, held at a resort in Carmel Valley, California.

The demonstrations were polished, glitzy and exciting, but many executives are clear-eyed about Apple’s challenges pushing into this new market.

The New York Times: ‘At Apple, Rare Dissent Over a New Product: Interactive Goggles’ ★

Tripp Mickle and Brian X. Chen, reporting for The New York Times:

The headset looks like ski goggles. It features a carbon fiber frame, a hip pack with battery support, outward cameras to capture the real world and two 4K displays that can render everything from applications to movies, two of the people said. Users can turn a “reality dial” on the device to increase or decrease real-time video from the world around them. [...]

Because the headset won’t fit over glasses, the company has plans to sell prescription lenses for the displays to people who don’t wear contacts, a person familiar with the plan said.

This seems like an impediment to an impulse purchase, especially in the U.S., where corrective lenses require an up-to-date prescription from an optometrist or ophthalmologist. And won’t this make it tricky to share a headset between multiple people? If it really costs $3,000, I suppose that’s the biggest impediment to an “impulse” purchase.

During the device’s development, Apple has focused on making it excel for videoconferencing and spending time with others as avatars in a virtual world. The company has called the device’s signature application “copresence,” a word designed to capture the experience of sharing a real or virtual space with someone in another place. It is akin to what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, calls the “metaverse.”

The chicken-and-egg problem here is that everyone you’re “copresencing” with needs an Apple headset too.

The device will double as a tool for artists, designers and engineers, tracking them as they draw freely in space in image-editing applications and tracking hand gestures for the editing of virtual reality films. Lastly, it will function as a high-resolution TV with custom-made video content from Hollywood filmmakers such as Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man.

The key sentence in the story is this:

Some internal skeptics have questioned if the new device is a solution in search of a problem.

The RIAA v. Steve Jobs ★

Paul Kafasis, writing at the Rogue Amoeba blog:

Earlier this month, however, we heard a chilling story. It comes from the Podfather himself, Adam Curry, who was instrumental in helping podcasts take off in the mid-2000s. He’s also a long-time Audio Hijack user and supporter, one who provided us with many helpful suggestions in the early years. Recently, Adam gave an interview detailing his efforts to modernize the podcasting format. Therein, he told a story about the origins of podcasts in iTunes, and a conversation he had with Steve Jobs circa 2005.

Amazing story. Curry himself added this note, on Twitter:

His actual words were “fuck them”.