Category: Links

Om Malik:

While many of the technologies will indeed make it easier for us to live in the future, but what about the side effects and the impacts of these technologies on our society, it’s fabric and the economy at large. It is rather irresponsible that we are not pushing back by asking tougher questions from companies that are likely to dominate our future, because if we don’t, we will fail to have a proper public discourse, and will deserve the bleak future we fear the most.

This post has been making the rounds, and why not? It’s a very detailed and beautiful look at the creation of what looks to be a lovely bag. It’s nerd heaven.

What struck me was the fact that no one actually talked about the bag itself, which doesn’t look all that great to me. I haven’t used it, so I can only comment on what I see.

I did manage to hear from one person who owns the bag, and loves it.

Thomas Verschoren says of the bag:

I ordered this bag the day it became available and after using it for few months now, I have to say, it’s one of the best bags I ever bought.

I still see major flaws, and for the money I think there are better messenger bag options, but it does look nice on the outside.

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain:

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”

See, this is why the US is hated. This bullshit right here.

Here’s a link to get VMware working under Yosemite.

Seth Rosenblatt:

Avast didn’t have to resort to much digital jiu-jitsu to recover the data from the phones it acquired, McColgan said. His team used “fairly generic, publicly available,” off-the-shelf digital forensics software such as FTK Imager, a drive-imaging program.

“Although at first glance the phones appeared thoroughly erased, we quickly retrieved a lot of private data. In most cases, we got to the low-level analysis, which helped us recover SMS and chat messages,” Avast researchers Jaromir Horejsi and David Fiser wrote in the report.

Yikes. Makes me wonder how well iOS fairs.

We basically all assumed this right? I did. What’s most damning about this report is two fold:

1. It shows the NSA either lied (by omission, or directly) about knowing that Snowden did have access to this data, and did take it.
2. This also shows that the NSA weasels its way around the law whenever and wherever it can.

This is a tough spot to comment on this. The NSA’s job is foreign intelligence, and it seems fair game to gobble up transmissions from US citizens that correspond with foreign targets. Or, put another way, we would all be rooting for Chloe and Jack to hack into servers and analyze this data to stop a terrorist plot on 24.

What strikes me as the most troubling aspect is that for most of these, there is no real urgency to the intelligence. It’s one thing (in my mind) to aggressively bend, or break, laws if there is an assumed imminent terrorist attack. It’s a completely different thing if it is just routine preventative measures.

So to me, I’m fine with going all wild west if we know something big is about to go down and we are aggressively trying to stop that, but I am not fine with aggressive tactics as a matter of course.

Where that line is drawn, and by whom, is the impossible part of all this.

Clive Thompson on using multiple devices to work:

In a sense, screens are beginning to absorb some of the cognitive ergonomics of paper, one of the oldest reading devices of all. With paper, after all, we’ve always put down one document and picked up another, shifting our attention organically. And as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper note in The Myth of the Paperless Office, spreading out papers on a desk lets our eyes easily roam—a property hard to replicate on a single screen. Now the plunging price of hi-res mobile devices means it’s possible to own a few of them.

“A few of them”? Hmm, I don’t know about that. It makes sense to make use of the device you have already, or to add in a tablet. But if the idea is to add in multiple tablets to better replicate a paper desk workflow, then — umm — why not just use paper?

Stefan Constantinescu on the (excellent) Tab Dump site, breaks down the Samsung report for everyone:

Samsung: They had a shit quarter (profits and revenues down year over year), so they published a long list of reasons as to why. Spoiler: Korea’s currency is too strong. Chinese people like Chinese phones. No one buys a phone in Q2. Our marketing budget is ridiculous. People aren’t updating tablets as often as phones. And it just keeps going. Excuse after excuse.

Tab Dump is currently the best site on the web.

Eddie Smith offers a clever way to use Little Snitch for both protecting your data on public wifi, and for keeping data usage in check when on LTE tethering. It’s very smart.

I’ll have to implement this for sure.

Nate Barham on wearables from Apple:

If it isn’t notifications and it isn’t health, then what is it that this new device will do or allow us to do that isn’t blatantly obvious? Payments could certainly be easier on a device that is already out and accessible. Though few of us need to shave a couple seconds off a notification check, many have felt the pressure of fiddling with our phones in line at a coffee shop.

This is the same thing I have been wondering: what the hell does a wearable do for me which is substantially (or even marginally) better than the phone in my pocket?

Jessica Ferris:

I’m reminded here of viruses, which, as Wikipedia points out, can only replicate inside the living cells of other organisms. Facebook benefits when this relationship remains invisible. When we make the mistake that I made—when we forget that Facebook is using our friendships as hosts, and not the other way around—our forgetting is very convenient for Facebook.

Some ass at the TSA:

As the traveling public knows, all electronic devices are screened by security officers. During the security examination, officers may also ask that owners power up some devices, including cell phones. Powerless devices will not be permitted onboard the aircraft. The traveler may also undergo additional screening.

Emphasis mine.

Perfect

James Gowans:

On an occasional camping trip or outdoor expedition, the knife catches a glimpse of what it's life could be like. Cutting through rope and wood. Bathing in sweat and dirt. But these moments are seldom and fleeting as the excursions become more suburban.

I loved this short little post.

Two things really stood out to me about this article:

1. If you are working with 60fps, you have to design 58 frames moving you from A to B. That's staggering (and yeah not actually design those screens, but more “think about” how you move between them).
2. The ripple effect that Stamatiou has animated to show a sense of transition is really good.

Yes this is an article about Android design, but more than that it is an article about modern design. UI is in motion, and it's not simply a matter of saying this screen looks like this, and that screen looks like that. You have to be able to design the transition from screen to screen as well.

To me, that's what takes an OK app to an outstanding app. The best example I have of this is Vesper. The design is good, not revolutionary. The app is OK, functionality wise, as it doesn't do much of anything new.

But what makes Vesper so great is that animations. The way the arrow stretches as you swipe to archive. Those little touches move it from just another app, to something special — even with its limited functionality.

Stamatiou:

Things like page transitions will still exist but involve more of the elements on each page. You'll begin choreographing. In the next few years consideration for motion will be required to be a good citizen of your desktop/mobile/wearable/auto/couch platform. It will be an expected part of the design process just like people will begin to expect this level of activity and character in software.

Here we have Amazon taking the FTC to court over the fact that the FTC wants Amazon to prompt for passwords more often so as to prevent children from buying apps/IAP. That's actually pretty reasonable from the FTC (fines, etc. notwithstanding).

I know Apple has had to deal with this too, but take iOS 8 for example. Where Apple has gone over and above to create a system whereby parents get an approval notification on their device if their children want to buy something.

Why? Just think about where these companies are making their money. Apple from the devices themselves, Amazon from selling stuff. No wonder Amazon is fighting this, and Apple is just trying to make families want to be all Apple devices.

Robert Peston:

So there have been some interesting developments in my encounter with the EU's “Right to be Forgotten” rules.

It is now almost certain that the request for oblivion has come from someone who left a comment about the story.

On the surface, the European Union's 'Right to be Forgotten' law seems like a win for privacy advocates, but it is a complicated law. It can be both good and very bad. Take the linked article for example. In this case someone asked that the article be purged because they person made a comment on the article — the article isn't about them, they just commented on it. That's surely not the intent of the law, but it is the law.

What's even more odd, is that it appears that only searching for that person's specific name will show the article missing, other searches still turn up the “removed” article.

So essentially what the EU has created is a law that:

1. Is being abused already.
2. Doesn't actually work.

Well done.

Just wanted to point you guys over to this website. It's a really great site and one I read daily. It's also handy when you are busy and just want to know what is going on without going down the rabbit hole that is your RSS reader.