The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • ‘Why Airport Security Is Broken—and How to Fix It’

    [Over the weekend a lot of readers sent this in to me](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577335783535660546.html?mod=WSJ_hps_editorsPicks_1), a lot — it’s an article about the TSA and its faults. I saw it, thank you. The problem is, that while former TSA administrator Kip Hawley denounces some of the tactics used, he still has concluded that the TSA *is* a necessary evil.

    I disagree.

    The problem with the TSA is twofold:

    1. The policies that they follow, both on what is and isn’t allowed and how they screen. This is addressed very well by Hawley and it is a major problem.
    2. The people, the job.

    The second problem is what isn’t addressed, and it’s the bigger issue. Because even if we succeed in getting rid of porno scanners and allowing liquid through, we still face the issue of TSA “officers” over stepping their bounds.

    Since the inception of the TSA I have thought that airport screening should be handled not by a new agency under the directive of a dubious agency tasked with “homeland security”, but rather by the FBI.

    I say this because here is the requirement for being a TSA screener:

    Those aren’t stringent requirements, and yet they are (as the TSA would have you believe) the people on the front lines protecting this country from terrorism. Yeah.

    [By comparison here’s what it takes to be a Special Agent with the FBI](https://www.fbijobs.gov/1111.asp). [And then here’s the application process.](https://www.fbijobs.gov/112.asp)

    You may not like the FBI, but not just anyone can be *in* the FBI. And that’s the difference. The TSA was built out in a couple of months and staffed as quickly as possible with the most readily available people — and that’s why the TSA is as bad as it is.

  • TSA: Keeping Us Safe from Terrorists and Our Own iPads

    The “Fair & Balanced” Fox News:
    >A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official has been charged after being accused of stealing eight iPads from luggage at Dallas/Fort Worth International airport, KXAS-TV reported.

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  • Dark Sky is Out

    *The* weather app that I have been waiting for has finally landed. It’s a good looking app (damned blue icon though) and I can’t wait to put it through its paces to see how well it does, so far: best weather radar I have seen. It’s priced at a premium $5.99, but that makes me only like it more — I hate seeing hard work devalued by app store economics.

    UPDATE: [I am told](http://twitter.com/CraigGrannell/status/191937578549772288) this is U.S. only and continental U.S. only at that.

  • LogMyRun

    I am not a runner, both because I hate it and because I have a recurring tendonitis that prevents me from running for long periods of time. That said when I received an email about this app and looked through it, two things caught my eye:

    1. You can log the weather conditions during your run.
    2. You can log the mileage on your shoes.

    The latter I thought was really neat, I don’t know why, but I think it would be cool to know how many miles I put on a pair of shoes.

  • Canada’s Newest Coin Glows in the Dark

    Tim Hornyak:
    >The Royal Canadian Mint’s latest collectible coin features a dinosaur whose skeleton shines at night from beneath its scaly hide.

    We often joke: “looks like a kindergartener designed that.”

    It may be true in this case.

  • ‘Yet Another OSX/Java Trojan Spotted in the Wild’

    Richard Chirgwin:
    >In a second post, however, Raiu fingers infected Office documents as the vector. He also states that the Trojan is in “active stage”, after the C&C server took control of a “goat” machine operated by Kaspersky and started looking for documents.

    How long before the media starts a shitstorm claiming that Macs are now *less* secure than Windows? I give it 3 hours.

  • Instagram’s Business Model

    [Marco Arment has the best take on what Instagram did](http://www.marco.org/2012/04/15/instagram-independent), that I have read. But after reading his take I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the plan all along, to sell to a another company for big money, and if that plan is “ethical”, or whatever you want to call it.

    That is: if Instagram’s plan was to get huge and sell to another company, then the plan is essentially a greedy plan. Because the plan *must* be to grow as fast as possible at all costs, doesn’t matter if people like the service so long as they use it (the way I think most people feel about Facebook).

    However, if the plan was to create a great service and figure out the money part later, then the plan was a stupid — but noble. They were creating something out of passion, but naively assumed making money off of a free product later on would be easy — it’s not.

    Of course there could have been a great plan to make money in place all along, allowing them to create a great free service that they were passionate about, but we may never know that.

    I don’t think the first option, being acquired, could have been the business model. The service was/is just too good not to have a passionate group behind it. You can feel that in the app.

    So the only leaves the last two options.

  • ‘Why Facebook Terrifies Google’

    Dan Frommer gets to the core of why Facebook’s advertising model is so dangerous to Google:

    >And then you’ll get to the magic: Facebook’s targeting page. Here, you can narrow your ad’s target by an incredible basket of options. Location, age, gender, precise interests (as volunteered!), Facebook connections, sexual orientation, relationship status, languages, education and specific workplaces.

    And Google’s targeting:

    >Google’s search advertising product, on the other hand, only offers a fraction of this targeting. You can target by location, languages and devices. But it mostly comes down to keywords: What are people searching for or looking at?

  • Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

    Jon Calhoun:

    >Do you see the problem here?  Nothing is integrated with my email, yet it is my primary source of communication. What the hell? I shouldn’t have to forward an email to accounting and then follow up to make sure they handled it. I shouldn’t need to lookup the original email for a feature request – it should be integrated into the request itself.

    Amen. 60% of my work email gets forwarded, 30% is ignored. Yeah.

  • TSA Hiring Screening Fail

    Christine McConville:

    >TSA agent Jose E. Salgado, 59, of Chelsea was suspended from his job after his employers learned that local law enforcement agencies are pursuing criminal charges against him for the possession and sharing of pornographic images of children.

    The most surprising part of this is my general lack of surprise upon hearing this news.

  • Mozilla May Make Flash Click-to-play By Default in Future Firefox

    Should be the default for all browsers, it makes the web useable.

  • Retina.js: Retina graphics for your website

    I’ve seen a ton of these types of hacks lately and this one looks nice, but I can’t wait for there to be a more elegant solution. That solution may just be waiting until the average Internet speed is fast enough for websites to always serve the retina graphics.

  • Change Log of the Day: Camera+

    “NOT owned by Facebook”

    Classic.

  • ‘Why Is iCloud Free?’

    Stephen Hackett:
    >Where does iCloud fit in to this? iCloud isn’t backed by piles of VC money, nor is it paid for by ads. Does that mean that it will go away one day?

    His answer is spot on.

  • 500px

    A while back when I was worried about the inevitable death of Flickr I decided to look around at other online photography options. 500px came right up to the top of the list and I signed up for an account (paid account) right away. I loved the design of the site and it seemed like a really nice place to be.

    Fast forward to last week, with the arrival of my daughter, I needed a place to share photos with my family. I decided that 500px would be that place, not Flickr. With their [Lightroom plugin](http://500px.com/lightroom), it is really a snap to add pictures, well and drag and drop at least.

    Now a week into really using the site I can see that this is *the* site I will be using for my photos. What a fantastic service. They also received a bunch of due praise this week for their readable and understandable [terms of service](http://500px.com/terms).

    A great service run by some great photographers.

  • Dropbox’s Future

    Drew Houston on creating the experience that “just works” with Dropbox:
    >Achieving that experience is not simple: we have a polished exterior, but there’s this jungle of different operating systems [with which we must work] and even gnarlier stuff like operating-system bugs and incompatibilities. It’s a hostile environment: we macheted our way through that jungle of problems. It was a bunch of us spending big chunks of our 20s chasing down these obscure compatibility issues.

    Statements like this are what worry me most about the future of services like Dropbox. I for one think that Apple is committed to iCloud and thus they would prefer it baked into all Mac and iOS apps instead of Dropbox — so what reason would Apple have to *not* break all the hacks that Dropbox has in place? And there’s Dropbox’s biggest problem.

  • Apple is allowed (at long last) to intervene in Lodsys lawsuit against app developers

    Nice for those app developers that have yet to settle.

  • ‘Is This the World’s Ugliest iPad App?’

    If it’s not, then I don’t want to see what is.

  • The B&B Podcast #56: Tilt-Shifted Lemonade

    >Ben and Shawn talk about Ben’s life as a brand-new dad, Instagram and Facebook, and the Pebble smartwatch.

    This was a fun episode talking about my kid, then Shawn wanted to know my thoughts on the Pebble watch and everything got *real* (huh?).