Category: Links

Michael Shear:

In record time, the 45th president has set off global outrage with a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend the ban and watched as federal courts swiftly moved to block the policy, calling it an unconstitutional use of executive power.

The president angrily provoked the cancellation of a summit meeting with the Mexican president, hung up on Australia’s prime minister, authorized a commando raid that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL member, repeatedly lied about the existence of millions of fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election and engaged in Twitter wars with senators, a sports team owner, a Hollywood actor and a major department store chain. His words and actions have generated almost daily protests around the country.

Support our curriculum and workshops for San Diego Girl Scouts to create an epic platformer game for Scratch, web, iOS & Android!

Sounds like a great cause to back. I’ve pledged and am sad to see the general lack of funding for this project.

Swati Khandelwal:

Signal has already been providing fully end-to-end encrypted chat and voice calling features, but the newly added feature will make it even easier for privacy conscious people to convey their information face-to-face through video calling without compromising security.

There are a lot of options out there, but Signal is by far the easiest and most respected in encrypted communications. But what I still find most shocking is that I can’t passcode protect the app on iOS.

Jason Kottke, writing about Ian Bogost’s post on Apple design (which is a shit show of a post):

Who makes all the apps that people want to use on their iPhones to chat/connect/flirt/collaborate with their loved ones? Facebook, Snap, Google, Slack…not Apple, who initially wasn’t even going to provide a way for 3rd parties to build apps for the iPhone. Almost every attempt by Apple to build services to connect people — remember Ping?! — has failed. Even iCloud, which promised to unite all Apple devices into one fluid ecosystem, was plagued for years with reliability problems and still isn’t as good as Dropbox.

I’d argue iMessage is a killer app for the platform, and has a better implementation than any of those listed above. Slack on iOS is a turd — Facebook’s app has been known to spy on you. If the argument that design is the the details (which is what Bogost bangs on and on about), then the detail being overlooked in those other message apps is respect for users — both in privacy and ease and reliability.

iCloud v. Dropbox is an interesting issue — for a long time iCloud Drive was not as good as Dropbox, but I’d argue that in the past 6 months it has surpassed Dropbox. The issue here is everyone has a sour taste in their mouth for iCloud. (I also argue that Dropbox no longer has a sustainable business, but to each his own.) But the truth is that I saved this post to Ulysses from my small iPad, with Ulysses open on my large iPad. Set down the small iPad and selected this post to write my comments. It was there, no sync indicator, just seamless interoperability.

Manton Reece:

Owning your content by having a microblog at your own domain is empowering. Maybe you’re writing about what you had for lunch. Maybe you’re photo-blogging an important trip. Maybe you’re posting from your iPhone at a protest outside the White House.

It’s certainly a step better than the arbitrary Twitter “verification” bullshit.

Aliya Sternstein:

Typically, a device takes anywhere from a day to a month to break into, depending on whether Secret Service computer engineers need to disassemble the device and software to figure out how it was programmed.

Interesting article.

There appeared to be eight people at the rally.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, in the second paragraph of the article:

Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack.

You read that paragraph and you think, wow that’s insane, and then you read the rest of the article and you think: I wish it was just the second paragraph — that seemed better.

Good lord, this is a perfect article.

Andrew Restuccia, Marianne Levine, Nahal Toosi:

Fearing for their jobs, the employees began communicating incognito using the app Signal shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Signal, like WhatsApp and other mobile phone software, encrypts all communications, making it more difficult for hackers to gain access to them.

Hard to blame them. I should note here that of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage — Signal is the one to trust.

Anyone who’s worked at a whiteboard knows that it’s a great place to experiment with ideas. Being able to quickly get rid of mistakes is just as important as capturing a thought. You know your fingers will be dirty at the end of a good session.

You can snag Linea here. It’s a really well done app with great UI controls. I think the whiteboard analogy is apt. It won’t replace apps like Procreate for many, but it is probably the first drawing app any iPad Pro user should buy.

Swati Khandelwal:

This is the second time in around two months when researchers have discovered flaws in Netgear routers. Just last month, the US-CERT advised users to stop using Netgear’s R7000 and R6400 routers due to a serious bug that permitted command injection.

I love the new Netgear routers, but I wouldn’t use one at this point.

Laurel Raymond reporting on the reaction to Democrats delaying nominations:

“We did not inflict this kind of obstructionism on President Obama,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the other two senators in the room. Toomey labeled the Democrats’ boycott “a completely unprecedented level of obstruction. This is not what the American people expect of the United States Senate.”

Is that true?

Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, for nearly 11 months.”

Oh, that’s right. Glad to see Democrats realizing that the rules of the game have changed. Now, can they keep up?

Jim Brunner:

State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he will file a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to invalidate key provisions of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all refugees and immigration by citizens of seven majority Muslim countries.

I’ve been particularly proud of how Washington State politicians are reacting to Trump. From the Governor, to the Seattle Mayor and now the AG.

Philip Bump:

My colleague Aaron Blake has a running tally of where Republican members of Congress stand on the most immediately controversial of those issues: the immigration travel ban. We’re going to take that a step further. Using the Sunlight Foundation’s tool to identify legislators by Zip codes, we’re detailing where the people who represent you have stood on the vote to limit Obamacare (part of a budget bill passed in mid-January) and Cabinet picks (if in the Senate). On top of that, we’ve rolled in Blake’s list of who is where on the immigration ban.

Fantastic.

Aaron Bycoffe:

The Trump score is a simple percentage showing how often a senator or representative supports Trump’s positions. To calculate it, we add the member’s “yes” votes on bills that Trump supported and his or her “no” votes on bills that Trump opposed and then divide that by the total number of bills the member has voted on for which we know Trump’s position.

One way to get politicians to act is to not reelect those who stand idly by — this Trump Score metric is a great way to hold their feet to the fire.

One thing people seem to have missed is that “make American great again” doesn’t mean the same thing to Trump as it does to literally anyone else in the world. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Michael Nutter:

We see all of these purposely hurtful, distracting and egomaniacal tactics for what they are — publicly available literature would indicate that you may apparently be displaying signs of malignant narcissism and narcissistic leadership .

Apparently?

This is terrifying. And no, it’s not talking about removing power from fuckface.

This isn’t the crazy Silicon Valley prepped post everyone has been sharing, no this is a far more realistic take on the matter. Michael McGrath for GQ on his Bug-Out-Bag:

My BOB organizes my anxiety; it gives shape and focus to my dread. It reminds me not to take things for granted, and underlines the difference between necessities and luxuries.

Humorous post all around.