Linked List: March 14, 2024

Thursday, 14 March 2024

’Objectified’ Turns 15, Streaming Free Through March 17 

Objectified (2009, 75 minutes) is a documentary film about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

A lovely film, and you can’t beat the price this week.

Masimo Proves New Apple Watch Series 9 Units Still Have the Blood Oxygen Sensor 

Florian Mueller, writing at IP Fray:

The January 12, 2024 CBP order has recently been published (CBP webpage). The parties’ filings with the appeals court were heavily redacted where they discussed the enforcement dispute over Apple’s workaround. Now it’s a bit clearer what technical changes Apple made and why they managed to get their workaround Watches cleared. There is some hardware “designation” in the newer Watches that tells the software in those Watches not to perform pulse oximetry although all of the necessary components are present. Masimo managed to reenable pulse oximetry, but only after jailbreaking older iPhones and using them to manipulate the Watch, which constitutes a “significant alteration” of the product.

The fact that Masimo could reenable the feature by running some custom software on jailbroken older iPhones absolutely positively means that Apple itself can reactivate that feature for its customers in the event it prevails on appeal or, in the alternative, in late August 2028 at the latest (because the patents-in-suit expire then).

It’s been pretty clear since January that the sensors in dispute are still present in newly-sold Apple Watches, and they’re simply disabled in software, but this seemingly confirms it.

Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark 

Ryosuke Niwa, writing on the WebKit blog:

As announced on browserbench.org today, in collaboration with other browser engine developers, Apple’s WebKit team is excited to introduce Speedometer 3.0, a major update that better reflects the Web of today. It’s built together by the developers of all major browser engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit with hundreds of contributions from companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Mozilla. This post is a deep dive into how the collaborative Speedometer project improved the benchmark’s measurements methods and test content.

I care about Speedometer not for comparing different browser engines against each other on the same machine (even though that’s Speedometer’s primary purpose), but as a benchmark for measuring CPUs. It measures something very real and utterly practical: how fast web rendering is in an actual browser.