Nice deal on a camera that I just love to shoot with. And fear not about it’s age, just today it received yet another firmware update to fix and keep, the camera current. I am thoroughly impressed with Fujifilm’s update regimen to the point where I would buy an older X100 and know I would be perfectly happy.
You can also snag the X-E2 from B&H for the same price if you prefer.
Alistair Barr and Rolfe Winkler:
The move, announced Wednesday at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, is a first step toward turning Gmail into a platform for developers who want to leverage the contents of users’ email for productivity and other applications. A travel app, for example, could scan your email inbox for booking confirmations and automatically compile them into an itinerary. An expense app can dig through your inbox for receipts and automatically file them to your cloud-based account.
This clearly sounds horrible from a privacy standpoint. Who wants developers sleuthing through their emails? I sure as hell don’t.
In an interesting note about the privacy, WSJ notes:
The new Google API may help with this. With IMAP, developers had to access all of a user’s messages to make their applications work, even if the apps only needed one specific type of data. The new API lets developers access only what they need. For example, if their app just sends mail on behalf of a user and does read mail, developers can limit their request to send-only, DeFriez said.
“There are actually less privacy concerns than IMAP,” Mawani said.
I find this statement really odd. The phrasing starts off to make it sound as though you have fine grain controls over what someone can access over the API. I picture something like: “Only emails with Confirmation in the subject line.” That actually would be pretty great.
And then you read the rest of the sentence and it sounds more like the API privacy controls will be more like: “Send only, Scan only, Send & Scan.” Which is really nothing to brag about.
All of that leads me to: how is this less of a concern than IMAP?
Also, why does Google hate IMAP so much? Granted it is not great, but it’s a standard.
ACLU:
The judge ordered the government to create a new process that remedies these shortcomings, calling the current process “wholly ineffective” and a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. The ruling also granted a key request in the lawsuit, ordering the government to tell the ACLU’s clients why they are on the No Fly List and give them the opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the list before the judge.
You guys can’t see my face, but it’s what you might call ‘a shit eating grin’.
Well, kind of (that’s not my headline). You see Nest is opening up some access to their devices so that other things can tie into the devices (HomeKit envy much?). As part of that Google is getting access to data so that a user can use voice controls to control the Nest devices.
It’s also opt-in, which is good.
So on the one hand you have Nest claiming that Google won’t get their hands on Nest data, and then you have this. Even if we give Nest & Google the benefit of the doubt, this is a case of incredibly stupid timing.
But then as Rolfe Winkler and Alistair Barr reports, Matt Rogers a Nest co-founder had this to add:
“We’re not telling Google anything that it doesn’t already know,” said Rogers.
Well that’s reassuring.
Rich Mogull:
With every iteration of OS X, iOS, and iCloud, we see Apple add increasing the privacy protections it provides its users. It has consistently enabled customers to protect their personal information from advertisers, governments, third-party developers, and even Apple itself.
Bottom line: Apple knows that it quickly will matter to consumers to have a privacy conscious company.
Dara Lind:
The Supreme Court just ruled unanimously in two decisions that police officers can’t search the cell phone of someone they’ve stopped or arrested unless they have a warrant. That’s true even if the cops suspect that the phone has data that’s relevant to the crime.
You need to know this, because cops will still try to get you to consent — not a lawyer, just saying.
Leo Kelion:
Desert Wolf’s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second.
In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls.
The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as “blinding lasers” and on-board speakers that can communicate warnings to a crowd.
That’s a real thing, they’ve already sold some, and not to governments.
Frederic Lardinois:
It also launched Drive for Work, a new version of Drive and Google apps for businesses that comes with a number of extra security features. The one feature most users will notice first, however, is that Drive for Work doesn’t have any storage limitations.
There’s a bunch of other, actually, great features too. To bad it is from Google.
Between Drive and the news of Microsoft’s storage limit increases it looks as though Dropbox may not be long for this world. Dropbox is great, but Microsoft and Google are coming close to having better offerings — and Apple may feel the pressure and drop their prices too. If Apple does that, well I would see no reason to use Dropbox.
Almost a year ago I polled readers of this site to see what they might want to see me do more of, and less of. The overwhelming response I got was: we want a podcast (again). I heard you, and I started working on a podcast, and then in August of 2013 I dropped the idea for a bit as life got busy.
Now is the time though.
So next week I am recording the first episode of what will be known as ‘The Brooks Review Podcast’ — really catchy name.
Some notes about what this show is, and is not:
That about covers it.
The show lives here. And will also be in iTunes here.
I am currently taking sponsors, even for the first episode — but I really have no clue what the listenership will be. You can see more about that here, and I’d really love to have you sponsor the show. (Paid podcasts really aren’t feasible.)
Fascinating new smart watch from Withings. It looks like a traditional analog watch, but contains all sorts of tech. For $390 it’s not cheap, but it also doesn’t look terrible — so there’s that.
The site is terrible as it hijacks your scrolling, but the highlights are:
I list that out in regurgitative fashion because their website scrolls so terribly I wouldn’t want to subject you to it.
I have a watch with a vibrating alarm, and they don’t work all that well. At least mine isn’t strong enough to wake me.
That said, this is a better train of thought than every other smart watch I have seen.
David Heinzmann:
“Almost any data that starts with an individual is going to be identifiable,” Cate said. When tracking activity from mobile phones, “you actually collect the traffic. You may not care about the fact that it’s personally identifiable. It’s still going to be personally identifiable.”
King, the Harvard sociologist and data expert, agreed that the Chicago scientists will inevitably scoop up personally identifiable data.
“If they do a good job they’ll collect identifiable data. You can (gather) identifiable data with remarkably little information,” King said. “You have to be careful. Good things can produce bad things.”
Yeah…
Henry Farrell:
If the ECJ rules that Safe Harbor is invalid, what next? Potential near-disaster for big U.S. e-commerce firms like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which are heavily exposed to European markets, and rely on European citizens’ personal data. The death of Safe Harbor would mean that they were not able to legally export personal data, potentially crippling their business model. Nor could they substitute alternative arrangements (such as contracts), since these arrangements would not provide any protection from the NSA. Firms would of course protest volubly, and get the U.S. administration to fight on their behalf.
Interesting article showing the politically hot waters that companies like Facebook may potentially find themselves in. If the ruling is not as cited as above everything is normal. If it isn’t? Well that’s going to be very interesting.
Mark Hachman:
Today, OneDrive comes with seven gigabytes of free storage, and Office 365 comes with 20 gigabytes of OneDrive storage. As of today, that’s changed: Microsoft will increase the free quota to 15 Gbytes, and OneDrive subscribers will receive a whopping 1 terabyte with their subscription. The changes will roll out over the next month.
In other words: Dropbox is a feature, not a business.
John Moltz for Macworld:
In the Windows and Android worlds, ownership of the experience is a filthy scrum of competing interests.
Very good post looking at why Apple wants to own the key, the core, things that you use their devices for.
I joined Shawn Blanc this week on his ‘Weekly Briefly’ podcast to talk Fire Phone. Not like phones that catch fire, or anything, but you know that Amazon jobber.
Shawn had JetPens as a sponsor, and there’s a link to get a free pen that Shawn loves if you spend $25 there. I can’t comment on the pen, but they seem like nice enough people that they warrant a mention.
Manfred has whipped up a LaunchBar action for browsing your Keyboard Maestro macros:
The action lists all macros available in the current context. Convenient access to the macros is possible just by browsing the Keyboard Maestro application (using the right arrow or space key). Return triggers the selected macro. Needless to say: The list of macros supports LaunchBar’s abbreviation search (to narrow down the list) and Instant Open (to open the macro of choice even quicker) as well.
Works as described and is pretty damned sweet.
New feature:
Case Conversions (UPPERCASE, lowercase, Titlecase, CamelCase, dromedaryCase, spinal-case, Train-Case, snake_case, SNAKE_CASE)
I’ve always kept Keyboard Maestro actions for doing this, but that’s a very nice addition.
John Koetsier over at VentureBeat is a little over the top in his writing about the Fire Phone, but this is a good point about the FireFly feature:
And then you’re transmitting all those pictures and sound files to the grandaddy and global leader in connected cloud technology, the company that pretty much invented what we now call big data analytics for customer insights, and the largest online retailer in the wild wild west.
Don’t miss the ‘clarifications’ from Amazon which show just how out of touch the company is with privacy implications of their services.
The bottom line is this: When you use FireFly Amazon is analyzing everything on their servers, where it stays, until you ask it to be removed. Now, you really only need to worry about Amazon using that data because Amazon doesn’t like to share, but maybe that is of little comfort either.
Stu Maschwitz on Lightroom for iPhone:
But the biggest flaw represents a fundamental misunderstanding of mobile photography. Lightroom mobile strips important metadata from your photos, including time/date and location. That’s right, Lightroom mobile kills one of your iPhone’s best camera features—the always-on GPS.
That sucks, I had no idea that happened. Seems like a bug/oversight to me so hopefully it is quickly corrected.
Spencer Ackerman:
By a substantial and bipartisan margin, 293 to 121, representatives moved to ban the NSA from searching warrantlessly through its troves of ostensibly foreign communications content for Americans’ data, the so-called “backdoor search” provision revealed in August by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.
It’s going to be tough for this to become law, but I am glad a message is finally being sent.