The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Smug Nest CEO makes more promises about keeping Nest away from Google databases

    Casey Johnston:

    > Laurie Segall, the CNNMoney technology correspondent who interviewed Fadell, tried to clarify that Nest would not start feeding her ads about sweaters because it knows she is cold all the time. “Not that I know of, no,” said Fadell, smiling.

    > “Can you promise?” Segall asked.

    > Fadell laughed. “If we ever change it, I’ll let you know.”

    What a smug response to the biggest concern his users have about the chosen company direction. Not only that, but it is telling that Fadell is the only one “reassuring” people, when it really needs to be Google making the assurances.

    Google should really be taking this more seriously, because *I* of all people seem to not be the most vocal worrier.

  • ‘Sunday’s sound bite doesn’t tell Richard Sherman’s story’

    Will Leitch, on THE BEST CORNER IN THE NFL:
    > The point is, Richard Sherman, that unlikely hero, that Stanford honors student, that beautiful lunatic, is going to be the center of the biggest event in sports for the next two weeks. The more you research him, the more you learn about him, the more you understand where he his coming from … the more you get it. So many athletes claim they aren’t respected, that they’re misunderstood, that No One Believed In Them. Sherman has the benefit of being right about that. It drives him. All told, I can think of few better representatives of what football is about.

    See also: [Tommy Tomlinson](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tommytomlinson/2014/01/19/22-brief-thoughts-about-that-richard-sherman-interview/). Can’t wait to see the best corner in the NFL play again. ((And I don’t even like football.))

  • RAW Image Tests

    This is a really interesting comparison of the same RAW image being converted by different RAW image processors. I've shot in RAW for a really long time, but never given much consideration to how the image is processed differently with different tools. This is a really interesting comparison of the same photo processed with different tools.

    I've not tried Photoninja as it is not retina ready (yuck), but I did try Iridient and Capture One the other day. I have to say, I was impressed with the detail I got with Iridient, though the camera I was using was not officially supported by Lightroom yet.

  • Sunlit

    In Sunlit you create stories that combine photos, location check-ins, and text. For trips, events, or any memories. You can share them with friends and everything syncs automatically.

    Really great app and it's built off of the App.net backbone. I've been playing with it for a bit and I think this is going to be a great way to share moments in your life with family and friends. Previously I was using a shared Photo Stream, but this has a web component which makes things much easier.

  • ‘Apple’s Nest’

    Daniel Jalkut:

    On that point, one reason I wouldn’t expect Apple to acquire a company like Nest is that the products are far too specific, far too niche. Apple doesn’t make very many specific things anymore. They make general tools and leave it to customers how they should best be used. In fact, over the past 10 to 15 years, Apple’s products are increasingly generalized, and more suitable to a wide range of uses (and customers) as the products become more refined.

  • ‘WTF, FTC’

    John Moltz:

    > And, if that’s not enough, the new chairwoman of the FTC who swooped in and demanded the consent decree was a partner at Quinn Emanuel, whose clients included Google and Samsung. In fact, it’s the same firm that leaked information to Samsung on contract agreements between Nokia and Apple.

  • ‘Everything you need to know about Obama’s NSA reforms, in plain English’

    Good synopsis from Brian Fung on the NSA reforms Obama is enacting. The [EFF has given Obama’s reform a score](https://www.eff.org/node/78469) of 3.5 out of a possible 12… so that’s actually probably every thing you need to know.

    [Obama’s full text remarks are here](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/heres-the-full-text-of-president-obamas-nsa-speech) and the policy directive is [here](http://www.scribd.com/doc/200382836/Presidential-Policy-Directive-regarding-Signals-Intelligence-Activities).

  • ‘The Net Neutrality Endgame’

    Matt Drance:

    > Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.

  • The NSA Director’s Lies

    [Daniel Stuckey a month back ](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-nsa-director-asked-hackers-for-advice-but-left-a-lot-unanswered) reported on what NSA Director Keith Alexander showed on a slide at Black Hat 2013. Alexander showed what the NSA doesn’t collect:

    > And listed what the NSA is not involved in obtaining:
    > • Content of calls
    > • NO voice communications
    > • NO SMS/text messages
    > • Subscriber information
    > • NO names
    > • NO addresses
    > • NO credit card numbers
    > • Locational information

    *lol?*

  • ‘Amazon is a hornet’s nest of malware’

    Brian Fung (stupidly misleading title):

    > Together, the four Amazon-hosted sites accounted for 6 percent of all malware Solutionary found in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the report. Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) is the leading malware host among global hosting providers, followed closely by GoDaddy.

    And:

    > A typical eight-character alphanumeric password might cost as little as $45 to crack.

    Pretty wild to think about the fact that for $45 worth of Amazon servers you can crack some passwords. Also pretty wild to think about the fact that GoDaddy itself isn’t considered spam.

  • ‘Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA’

    Bruce Schneier:

    > Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn’t forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me — as someone with access to the Snowden documents — to explain to them what the NSA was doing.

    This is amazing.

  • ‘NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep’

    James Ball:

    > The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

    So what, right?

    > On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

    > • More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

    > • Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

    > • More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

    > • Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

    > The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

    No big deal though…

  • Unretrofied’s Artifacts Series on Yours Truly

    Neat little interview series that Chris Gonzales is putting together. I’m honored to have gone first — it can only get better now.

  • ‘N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers’

    This is the kind of NSA story that really doesn’t bother me. Nonetheless it is epically neat. David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker:

    > The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.

  • ‘What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You’

    Elizabeth Dwoskin:

    > The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.

    This is the shit that keeps me up at night.

  • The Three Billion Dollar Question

    Some recent comments on the Google acquisition of Nest:

    [Fred Vogelstein](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/why-google-paid-three-billion-dollars-for-a-thermostat-company.html):

    > Buying Nest may be Page’s most important deal as C.E.O. of Google, a job he took on in 2011; it takes the company a long way toward realizing a vision of a Google that goes well beyond its roots as a simple search engine. Buying Motorola Mobility, in 2012, for more than twelve billion dollars, was a first step. Buying Nest not only thrusts Google into the business of selling general consumer electronics but it finally supplies the search company with the expertise to keep doing it.

    This ignores the fact that Motorola has seemingly yet to do anything different under Google’s ownership — not even making the Nexus devices for Google.

    [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/14/betteridge-google-hardware):

    > This Nest acquisition makes me think Google didn’t want these things to be jokes. That they want to make devices that tens of millions of people will buy and use in the way that they buy and use Apple devices.

    Keyword there: “buy”.

    [Ben Thompson](http://stratechery.com/2014/googles-new-business-model/):

    > In my estimation, this deal is not about getting more data to support Google’s advertising model; rather, this is Google’s first true attempt to diversify its business, in this case into consumer devices.

    The idea behind these three thoughts is similar: Google wants to take making *and* selling consumer devices seriously. I have to question whether that is possible.

    Google web services are the best of breed because it plays to the Google strength of data driven decisions. Handheld electronics requires more emotionally driven decisions. More “this *feels* wrong” and less “the data says this *is* wrong”. Motorola doesn’t bring that to the table, but Nest certainly does.

    In Nest Google has a different challenge: making money from selling goods, rather than from selling ads/users. I’ll go back to something I say over and over: you don’t buy Google products because *you are* Google’s products.

    With Nest and consumer electronics that’s not the case at all, and Google has yet to show that they even have a vague understanding of the notion of making money directly from sales of physical goods. Everything Google does is about driving their ad business by selling things at close to cost — just like Amazon.

    John Gruber, in [the same post as above](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/14/betteridge-google-hardware), restates a common notion:

    > Perhaps a better way to put that is that Google is getting better at what Apple is best at faster than Apple is getting better at what Google is best at.

    He’s specifically talking about design and web services. I think that’s not what each company is truly good at. Google is phenomenal at using data to drive ad sales — Apple sucks at that (look at iAds). Apple is truly good at selling products with industry leading margins — they do that by making you *need* their products, and Google is really bad at that so they give their stuff away free ((Or close to free.)) (because then “why not use it”).

    The nagging question I have in my head has nothing to do with Google’s ability to make compelling and good looking hardware. No, instead I wonder: can Google bring itself to making money off of hardware?

    They don’t have to make money from selling products, but if they aren’t directly making money then I have to wonder about two things:

    1. How long before someone at the company decides the R&D spending is too high and cuts it?
    2. How long before Page decides that since the products don’t make money, they really should “get” the data those products generate to help make money from ads?

    It seems to me that good intentions are only allowed to happen when you are making money from your “profit centers”, and that those good intentions (especially at Google) quickly die when you aren’t making that money.

  • Quote of the Day: Marco Arment

    “Google won’t break into your home. You’ll invite them in.”

  • NSA and One Attack

    Spencer Ackerman:

    While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism.

    “I'm not going to give that insurance policy up, because it's a necessary component to cover a seam that I can't otherwise cover,” Inglis said.

    This post has been going around because it seems very damning on the surface.

    The NSA is best thought of as a tool, and while their one tool may not build you the entire structure, it may be a vital tool. If you really believe that all the NSA data collection programs has only foiled one terrorist attack then what you are saying is that big data is pretty useless.

    I think that's far from the truth. More likely The NSA can only tie one specific foiled attack directly to NSA help, everywhere else the help was just help and not the end solution. I'd still like the program gone, but that doesn't mean I don't think it helps at all. I just think the cost of that help is far too high.

  • Camera Filters

    With the bettering of smart phone cameras and a growing general interest in digital photography one thing that gets left out of geeky talk is the use of on-lens filters. Not the filters that you apply after you take an image (ala Instagram), but filters you stick on the front of your lens prior to taking the photo.

    I’m not a trained photographer, but I have had experience with many of these filters and I wanted to share a few thoughts for those of you moving towards more pricey digital cameras. (I wish they made some filters for the iPhone — then again that’d be silly.)

    A Note About Filters and Prices

    There’s two really important things to remember when purchasing any filter:

    1. You are putting another piece of glass between your scene and the image sensor. With every piece of glass your image quality can degrade. Don’t put a $20 filter on the front of a $1,000 lens. Buy high-quality filters or your really sharp lens may not be so sharp anymore.
    2. Adding more glass can increase lens flare and other “undesirable” things. (Though this could be good if you aspire to be JJ Abrams, but bad if you want clean and crisp photos.)

    There are things that help reduce these factors, but keep those two important points in mind before you click ‘buy’ on anything or read any further.

    UV Filter

    This may be the most common of camera filters. The UV filter is essentially a clear filter that goes on your camera lens (some people call them “protective” filters too). These filters serve two purposes:

    1. To help block UV rays from the actual film inside the camera.
    2. To protect the front lens element from damage.

    With digital cameras, for the most part, my understanding is that these filters are only useful for protecting the front lens.

    In other words, I personally skip these filters, but if you are prone to bashing your camera around then maybe you need one — but buy a high-quality filter in that case. Remember $150 for a filter is far less than your lens cost.

    For the most part you can skip these filters and just smirk when people tell you that you need one.

    CP Filter

    The Circular Polarizing filter is the one filter I would encourage you to get. Like polarized sunglasses it can cut down on glare. The circular part means that the filter (once attached) can rotate independently of the lens so that you can shift the polarization.

    Update: I was mistaken here as the circular part refers to the type of polarization. My apologies.

    This comes in handy for photographing reflective surfaces as you can truly cut down the reflections, or capture better (subjective) color when shooting landscapes.

    Wikipedia actually has a good article on the usage of CP filters with some great example shots. I highly, highly, recommend you have one of these and the Wikipedia article is a good place to start understanding why (just look at the photo comparisons if nothing else).

    It is important to note that depending on the filter you select, you will lose some light coming into the lens, so they aren’t made for shooting in low-light. If you shoot products ((Bloggers, that’s you.)), landscapes, or real estate this is a must have.

    Specialty

    There’s also three specialty filters that I want to mention, as you may bump into them as you look around.

    Close Up Filter

    To take a really close up picture of an item you need to buy a true macro lens. Short of that are specialty filters called “close up” that allow you to get the lens closer to the item while maintaing focus — creating a poor-mans macro lens.

    I really do not recommend these. They are just magnifying glasses (more or less). I’ve only ever owned one and I was really underwhelmed by it. Better to save up for a macro lens and fake it until then. ((By faking it I mean you just take the photo from farther away at f/8+ and then crop in tighter on the item.))

    Neutral Density Filter

    Have you ever seen those shots of ocean waves, or waterfalls, and the water looks like a fine smooth blurry mist? Those are long exposure shots — slower shutter speed — and a neutral density filter was most likely (but not always) used to get the them.

    Essentially an ND filter is sunglasses for your lens, making a bright afternoon much darker. The neutral part denotes the fact that they do not change the coloring of the photo, but you really need to spend good money if you want a truly neutral filter.

    They are sold in “stops” meaning how much light they block out. Again, if you shoot water this is a great tool and dead simple to use. (Though you will need a tripod when using one.)

    Graduated Neutral Density Filter

    Like the ND filter, the GND filter seeks to stop down the light in the image. Unlike the ND filter it doesn’t do it over the entire front of the lens. This is what landscape photographers love to use, as typically half of the filter is an ND and the other half is clear. The graduation comes into play because there is no hard line between the two halves, instead they gradually blend into each other.

    This allows you to stop down the sky, but not the terrain, creating a (hopefully) better exposed image. ((That’s a highly subjective statement, as I mean technically well exposed. Lest we forget that photography is art and there is no right or wrong.))

    I would not recommend buying a GND filter that screws on to the front of your lens. Buy a square filter, where you can just hold it in front of your lens, allowing you to adjust the angle and position of the graduation depending on the scene.

    Do note that you can fake this a bit digitally (Lightroom has a tool for this), but the results just aren’t quite the same as you would get with a filter.

    Coatings, Brands & Prices (etc)

    Coatings

    You will notice some filters saying things like MRC — this is a type of coating applied to the glass on the filter. The better the coating, the better the glare/lens flare control is, I am told. Overall it’s best to look for filters with the MRC moniker and buy those.

    I’ve used a ton of MRC and Kaesemann MRC filters and have been very happy with them.

    Brands

    I’ve bought all sorts of brands, but the ones I trust are:

    • B+W (pro-sumer type grade, and mostly what I own/buy)
    • Heliopan (more expensive)
    • Lee (pro-level gear)
    • Rodenstock (very expensive)

    Prices

    As far as prices go you can spend a lot or very little. I personally don’t think it’s worth wasting money on cheap filters, but I don’t make money from my photography either, so I try not to waste all my money on expensive filters.

    Here are the filters I recommend:

    Etc.

    Some things to note as you look through filters:

    1. They come in different sizes. I linked to 46mm versions as that is common in micro-4/3, but your lens should be marked with its size. Be sure to check that before you buy anything. (Larger sized filters cost more, sorry.)
    2. You may run across “slim” filters but be warned that they often prevent you from attaching a lens cap. They are slimmer, so they have nothing to attach a standard lens cap to. Non-slim filters should work with your lens cap.
    3. The Lee filters that I linked to above are square/rectangles. They make holders for them but don’t bother. You can just hold them in front of your camera and shoot — you are going to want a tripod anyways.

    Wrap

    Right now, for my micro-4/3 setup I only have a CP filter, and I will likely get a GND next and an ND last. You don’t need a filter to get good photos but it can help you get the photos you envision and they are a lot of fun to play with.

  • ‘Of Cameras’

    John Carey on photography and the mobile shift:

    It is simply evolving, as it always has, and the ebb and flow of those who want creative control in camera vs those who get enough creative inspiration from adding software filters will continue to fluctuate in time.