Linked List: March 23, 2024

Saturday, 23 March 2024

The overriding gist of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple brought to mind, for DF reader E.G., Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Despite being an enormous Vonnegut fan, I couldn’t recall reading it before. It’s so apt. As E.G. quipped in his email to me, “Only in making all products, services, and experiences equally bad, will we have equality and fairness.”

There are a couple of plain text versions of the story on the web, but none that do justice to the story typographically. So, channeling my inner Dean Allen, I typeset one. Curl up with it on your iPad — or, dare I suggest, go old-school and print it out.

Update: “Harrison Bergeron” is included in Vonnegut’s short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Apple Books (which includes it in its free preview).

Digital Wallets and Per-Merchant Card Numbers ★

Matt Birchler, writing at Birchtree:

It’s notable that it’s called a DPAN and not “the Apple Pay number” — it’s a generic term, and that’s because this is a standard feature of digital wallets everywhere, not just Apple Pay. Google Pay and Samsung Pay are the biggest other digital wallets in the U.S. and they both do exactly the same thing. While it’s not technically using a DPAN since the payment runs through different companies, Amazon Pay and Shop Pay buttons also obscure the actual FPAN (full card number) from merchants.

I feel like this comes up a lot, but I can not stress enough to you how little merchants want to ever ever ever handle your actual credit card number. It adds so much risk on their end and modern payment acceptance tools make it easy to collect payment details in a way that makes sure as few people as possible have access to the real card info.

Gruber mentions banks absolutely not wanting to use DPANs themselves, but we actually don’t need to speculate about this, we have this info already. Numerous banks from Walls Fargo to Chase to Bank of America have (or had) digital wallets, all of which used DPANs to protect your plain text account number. Paze is what a few big U.S. banks use today and it of course uses DPANs as well. In fact the top reason they give for why you should use Paze is, “Paze does not share your actual card number with the merchant.”

The Exception That Proves the Rule: HP Sold PCs With iTunes Pre-Installed in 2004 ★

Apple press release from January 2004:

Working to provide consumers with the most compelling digital content whenever and wherever they desire, HP and Apple today announced a strategic alliance to deliver an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod, the number one digital music player in the world, and Apple’s award-winning iTunes digital music jukebox and pioneering online music store to HP’s customers.

As part of the alliance, HP consumer PCs and notebooks will come preinstalled with Apple’s iTunes jukebox software and an easy-reference desktop icon to point consumers directly to the iTunes Music Store, ensuring a simple, seamless music experience. This offering is yet another way that HP is helping consumers enjoy more from their personal digital entertainment content.

My point stands that iTunes on Windows was successful largely from users who installed it themselves, but it’s worth a correction to point out that it was pre-installed on HP PCs for a while, and at the time HP was the second-biggest PC maker. Hard to believe I forgot this, because the most remarkable part of the deal wasn’t that HP pre-installed iTunes, but that Apple granted HP a license to sell HP-branded iPods.

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. WorkOS is a modern identity and user management platform that enables B2B SaaS companies to accelerate enterprise adoption. Free up to 1 million MAUs, WorkOS brings a modular approach to B2B Auth with enterprise-ready features like SSO, SCIM, and User Management.

The APIs are flexible and easy to use, designed to provide an effortless experience from your first user all the way through your largest enterprise customer.

Today, hundreds of high-growth scale-ups are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom.