Category: Links

This is great.

Good overview of the problems from CJ Chilvers. I am taking a new approach (which I am just starting) using BitTorrent Sync and my hosted Mac mini. More on that later.

Ben Bajarin:

Without question, iCloud still has a long way to go. However, I still believe it is one of the more encompassing multi-device synchronization engines I have used in some time.

If the app supports iCloud, it’s all I use.

1910 Design & Communication on their blog:

We believe that email is about two things. Reading and writing. And that focusing on these two is what would truly move email to where it deserves to be. What we propose here is not a redesign of any particular email application. Neither is it a suggestion as to how we think an email application should be visually styled. It’s an experiment of how email could be functionally improved through the use of better typography, based on the premise that structure is more important than surface.

Really great philosophy — and I suspect, especially with iOS 7, that we are going to see more and more apps go down this road. It’s always stumped me how shitty the reading and writing experience is in email clients.

Leah McGrath Goodman reporting a conversation with Satoshi Nakamoto’s brother:

“My brother is an asshole. What you don’t know about him is that he’s worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You’re not going to be able to get to him. He’ll deny everything. He’ll never admit to starting Bitcoin.”

Donald G. Mcneil Jr.:

When scientists made the stunning announcement last year that a baby born with H.I.V. had apparently been cured through aggressive drug treatment just 30 hours after birth, there was immediate skepticism that the child had been infected in the first place.
But on Wednesday, the existence of a second such baby was revealed at an AIDS conference here, leaving little doubt that the treatment works. A leading researcher said there might be five more such cases in Canada and three in South Africa.

Awesome.

Fascinating report about Facebook buying a drone company. It’d be easy to make a joke that this takes Facebook privacy violations to the next level, but from the sound of it this a slightly more charitable deed.

Either way, you have to think that there is a larger risk here of world governments deciding that the drone airspace needs regulation. After all 11,000 drones flying for five years straight from just one company — well it seems like we could have an aerial traffic jam.

I don’t give a shit about this law, but Mike Pearl’s opening salvo is why I will keep reading his articles:

Last month, in a piece about third-hand smoke being potentially deadly, I said banning e-cigarettes “would be a fucking stupid thing to do.” Well the Los Angeles City Council is officially fucking stupid.

Looks fantastic, but that manufacturers can implement it differently may be it's undoing.

Bardi Golriz:

Let me be clear. If you’re looking for one device that is both a great tablet and great laptop, the Surface Pro 2 is not that device. But I’ve used the Surface Pro 2 plenty as both a tablet and laptop to know that an utopian hybrid is inevitable. It won’t necessarily be built by Microsoft, but this device is coming.

His post is short, but I love how it ends. I’m less convinced we can have one device that is great all around — or even a great tablet/laptop combo, but his conclusion is hard to argue with so go read it.

Shawn Blanc:

Because, and maybe I’m being grandiose, but I think those who are doing “real work” from their iPhone and iPad, are, in a small way, helping steer the direction of the personal computer.

Interesting thoughts from Shawn on this debate. I linked to just one quote from Mathis’ post (which is what Shawn is responding to), but there’s a lot in that post that I disagree with.

(This is cherry picking, I know.) Mathis’ example of taking notes while on a Skype call is comical. You can do that on the iPad, just switch away from Skype to a note app — you even get the benefit of not seeing the shitty, ad-laden, Skype interface too. Of course, other things I simply cannot do — or only can do within the confines of one app — on the iPad.

My stance on this has remained pretty steady: it doesn’t so much matter which tablet OS you use, as much as it matters what apps are on each of those tablets.

And that’s why I’ll always put my money on iOS. Yes, Windows 8 on Surface Pro 2 can run legacy Windows apps, albeit in a shitty non-touch-UI way. But guess what? So can my iPad, I do it weekly. I just boot up iTap RDP, log into my Windows machine and work in a really annoying fashion — which is pretty close sounding to how it is on the Surface. ((And if you don’t have a Windows machine, Amazon has you covered with their virtual machine program.))

I’m not saying that my solution is better, just that there is a solution on the iPad. Ultimately, somethings could be much better on iOS, but I’d argue that iOS has less to improve on than Windows 8, or Android has to improve on.

If I were forgoing a laptop, that’s when I might consider something like the Surface, but if I just want something that can stand in for my laptop here and there — iPad all the way.

Greg Kumparak:

Basically: Unless Apple is omitting something or there’s some backdoor tucked into their many-layers-deep encryption (which, while unlikely, isn’t inconceivable) they really can’t read your iMessages without a fairly insane amount of effort. Sure, they could theoretically brute force their way past your private key. Or they could scrap the entire system and replace it with something with glaring security holes, and hope no one notices.

Spencer Ackerman and James Ball:

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users’ feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ’s servers. The documents describe these users as “unselected” – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.
One document even likened the program’s “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events” to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

In other words: I think it is safe to assume that if you ever “showed” yourself on a webcam, there is a high likely hood that an image of you may be saved on a government server somewhere.

Sean Gallagher:

The Black (FCC ID H8V-BLK) is an Android phone with a feature for a very specific demographic: it will self-destruct if tampered with.

What’s the over/under on this phone from Boeing have a larger market share than Microsoft’s when it is released?

Bruce Schneier:

Was this done on purpose? I have no idea. But if I wanted to do something like this on purpose, this is exactly how I would do it.

I hope Apple is doing and internal audit on this, and I hope they come out and tell us what really happened. Yes, this is very much wishful thinking on my part.