Month: April 2018

Eitan Chitayat:

There were six individuals sitting down. One on his laptop, the other five all staring at their smartphones. Not one person had their head up. What’s the point of weaning me off this thing so I can enjoy looking around me when all I see are other addicts all looking into their iPhones? It’s a bloody epidemic. All I could think about was what are kids who come in with their parents thinking about all these people? I mean, young kids who are three, four, five, 10 years old even—this is the world they’re inheriting. No one really looks at each other anymore. They think that’s normal.

Great read.

It’s hard for me to fathom why people can’t give up Facebook, since I’ve been off of it most of my post-college life. So I found this post eye opening, and sad.

Selina Wang:

Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent.

Not shocking, and I suspect this shit to keep coming out.

This update to Overcast isn’t fucking around on privacy. More of this please.

Ridiculous headline aside, Mohit Kumar:

Checkmarx reported the issue to Amazon, and the company has already addressed the problem by regularly scanning for malicious skills that “silent prompts or that listen for unusual lengths of time” and kicking them out of their official store.

I’d personally just assume that all Alexa-type devices can and will be compromised at some point to eavesdrop on you. What I don’t get is that this reporting makes it sound like Amazon is combatting the issue not by making a software patch for this loophole, but rather by policing to make sure bad actors are kicked out of the store. Which is not how this should be handled.

John Voorhees:

Although I wouldn’t suggest purchasing an app based on the promise of future features, it’s also worth noting that the 1Blocker X team says partial site whitelisting is coming soon. When implemented, the feature will allow you to do things like unblock comments and ads for a site, but leave trackers and other content blocked adding further flexibility to the app.

Great app, you should buy it. Ads are a shady business, and I strongly recommend you use a content blocker until better sets of regulations are in place to protect visitors of websites.

Nathan Toups on how to make your smart phone less addicting without going back to a feature phone has this closing thought:

This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into parts of our lives that aren’t serving us well.

I’ve largely been doing this for the past 8 months now as well. The best tip I can give with the largest immediate impact is the notifications tips he gives. I mostly only allow app badges. Be careful though, you’ll want to turn off “sounds” as well, otherwise a notification comes in, makes a sound, but you see nothing and get really confused about what the fuck is going on. Anyways, I encourage you to give this a shot.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I am going to phase out Instagram and delete that account. Sunlit is a strong contender so I took a bunch of random shots and created a “story” of sorts with them using Sunlit and my micro blog site. The results are interesting.

Using Sunlit to create the post was dead simple. The gallery view is create. But the experience of viewing the full size photos leaves a lot to be desired (I’d love to just have a Fancyzoom.js type of thing happen).

Good overview of what’s new in 1Blocker X. When I first installed the beta, I was confused by where there were so many extensions for just one app, this post explains the challenge the app faced.

I’ve not kept a close eye on the content blocker race, but it sure seems to me that the team at 1Blocker cares quite deeply about this app, and that’s a big win for everyone else.

That’s a pretty fucking tame headline compared to what is in the article. A better more accurate headline might be: ‘Facebook is actively causing people to be lynched.’

Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reporting on this hellacious situation:

We came to this house to try to understand the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world, whose markets represent the company’s financial future. For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Basically, the same shit that got Trump elected, turned up to 11, and mixed with no trusted sources of information to calm the anger. It gets worse:

Some messages included photos of dismembered bodies or fake police fliers. Almost immediately, locals in nine villages lynched outsiders they suspected of coming for their children.

Those photos were shared on WhatsApp and Facebook, and spread like wild fire. And the amazing thing is that the government is aware of the issue and is actively fighting to try and get correct information out, and has repeatedly asked Facebook for help:

Officials had pleaded with Facebook representatives, in a meeting in October, to better police hate speech and misinformation, which they warned could spiral into violence. They asked the company to establish an emergency point of contact in case it did. In a separate meeting, civic leaders urged Facebook to hire Sinhalese-speaking moderators to staff its reporting tool.

What say ye Facebook:

The Facebook employees left offering only vague promises, officials said.

There’s no Facebook office in the country. The lack of empathy in Facebook as a company is bewildering. I’ve gone ahead and deleted WhatsApp, and once I’ve figured out how to support my wife as a photographer without Instagram, I’ll delete that account and app too.

Gus Mueller:

Here’s an idea I’ve been tossing around lately- Apple should make an Instagram clone for iCloud users.

I think Micro.blog’s Sunlit gets you pretty close to a more open Instagram, with the big missing feature being the stories. Worth checking out if you’ve been earning for a better way to share experiences.

Sunlit does quite a few things better. For one it’s better to share events, or trips, as it includes checkins and groups large sets of photos together. However, as is the curse of Micro.blog it is far less discoverable. The backbone though is just a blog, and remember photoblogging? That used to be a thing, and it was glorious.

Brittany Kaiser as reported by Jake Kanter:

“I believe it is almost certain that the number of Facebook users whose data was compromised through routes similar to that used by Kogan is much greater than 87 million; and that both Cambridge Analytica and other unconnected companies and campaigns were involved in these activities.”

I think it’s very safe to assume that if you have a Facebook account, or had one at any point between 2014 and now, that your personal data was compromised and remains “out there”. If that’s not enough to get you to leave, then I don’t know that you fully understand how dangerous that data can be and is.

While I don’t agree with his keyboard (ugly) and stand (clamp stands worry me) choices, he’s got the right idea with the portrait typing perspective — it’s really a better way to write.

After all of my testing of content blockers for iOS, 1Blocker is the app that remains on all of my devices. It’s easy to use, with tons of extra power when you need it. They are coming out with a new version (I’ve been testing it, I’ll have more notes on that soon) called 1Blocker X. It’s available for pre-order now, and it’s at least as good as the last version, which makes it the industry standard — so you should get it. One really neat feature of the new app is that country specific rules, which I hope to look into more.

M.G. Siegler:

There’s something that has been in the back of my mind for some time now. And while it pre-dates the Facebook fiasco, that situation certainly brings it to the forefront. Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.

Important read.

Matt Gemmell:

Whenever I talk about the iPad as a work machine, I get some pushback that essentially says it’s not viable because it doesn’t do such-and-such. That’s fine — as long as you frame it accurately. Is it about a deficiency of modern computing, or is it just that you need something that isn’t actually tied to traditional computing, which may temporarily be unavailable for newer stuff?

Good article, pairs nicely with the member post from this week.