adrian_mrd

And Apple can also add non-purchased music albums into your library without telling you too - refer to that debacle involving the U2 album 'Songs of Innocence' from 2014.

It would be interesting to ascertain how many times users' on social media flag a security problem to a company's social media team that isn't actually a security problem? In other words, how many false negatives get caught too?

Troy Hunt's post is really told from the victor's perspective (likely a bias rather than intentional or arrogance), but to form a well-rounded view, understanding how many false negatives would likely help...

I wonder if the bureaucrat(s) or technocrat(s) who originally wrote or co-wrote this bill, has a technology background or is a white label lawyer from one of the big legal firms who often write legislation for the Australian Parliament on an expensive consulting basis? Or just an in-house lawyer from the A-G's office - whose expertise is purely legal rather than technological?

Many of these clauses are so vague ("Providing technical information like the design specifications...") that they show either a fundamental lack of practical technology knowledge, or, are deliberately vague so that the arms of the Orwellian Australian federal government octopus can create the intended backdoor without explicitly calling it a backdoor. Maybe both are true?

Was it William Shakespeare who once proffered: is a backdoor by another, obfuscated name, still a backdoor?

"Reasonable and Appropriate" indeed. Funny how satirical pieces like these oft act as the best ways for the general public to understand the scope of proposed changes by a government (or lobbying efforts by companies or NGOs) - see also John Oliver, Colbert, et al.

So true.

Does anyone know if any commercial VPN providers implement WireGuard yet on iOS? > "An iOS app is available in the WireGuard repository, but as it isn't in the App Store yet. It's probably not going to do you any good unless you're an iOS developer yourself."

The article references code for iOS apps but also states that "it needs to be baked right into the kernel for that to happen.". Would iOS apps also need the iOS Kernel (say iOS 12.x or iOS 13.x) to include WireGuard to take advantage of some of the speed advantages over OpenVPN?

Good points. Part of the problem with the debate at this point is that there is little to no transparency about any of those costs.

Android is obviously a larger ‘strategic’ play so I would argue that should be excluded and Google Play Services are also likely to either be ‘strategic’ plays (ie Apple offers music, so do we; Customers want movies, let’s offer them too, etc) or potentially revenue positive.

If Google’s and Apple’s accountants can setup magical tax systems across the world - they could also provide some useful data points about the true costs of running their App stores.

As a specific example, I’d be interested to know, what the hosting and bandwidth costs are for the App Stores (likely heavily subsidised given both Apple and Google run cloud platforms including hosting).

At the moment, there is next to no transparency except the “30%” cut and some high-level info in their quarterly financial reports.

Epic's is a useful reference point. The retrospective angle was particularly surprising, but also shows how successful Fortnite has been in terms of revenue.

Three thoughts.

There is a certain irony at play here, given both Apple and Google's own fights with tax authorities in many jurisdictions (eg the double Irish and the EU, Australian complaints about tax avoidance, agreements about their use of shell companies in the Cayman Islands or other tax havens, etc.).

I have always wondered what the real cost is to both Google and Apple in running their App Stores? The 30% figure has been a constant - with a few exceptions like the in-app subscriptions after 1 year on iOS down to 15% - for 10 years now but what are the actual revenue vs cost figures involved in running these [billing] stores? What would be a fairer cut... 10%? 15%? 17.8% in large economies and 22.6% in smaller countries (as semi-random numbers), etc.

Currency fluctuations are also important. Apple more so than Google, also seem to make quite some revenue from pegging their prices against the USD and only updating these once or twice a year - and generally only at very favourable forex conversions in Apple's favour. An unintended side effect here is that many non-USA consumers are subsidising USA consumers purchases of both Apple and Google products (because the USD is the benchmark price). Given the reliance on China as the hardware manufacturer, maybe the Yuan would be 'fairer' in many instances? (It won't happen of course due to how Cupertino and Mountain View centric both companies, and by extension, how pro-USA many of their pricing decisions are).

Great explanation, thanks.

Sounds like a horrible future for Borneons. But, it's obvious why many farmers turn to palm oil.

It is a very effective cash crop (hence the big screen TV - possibly a Curved 100" OLED screen for "that guy" running the Palm Oil plantation ;) and the demand is there worldwide.

Farming is often a very tough existence, so palm oil is very alluring for many who would otherwise face relative or absolute poverty.

This isn't literature, but from Melbourne Zoo's Don't Palm Us Off campaign, a campaign in favour of mandatory labelling of palm oil in Australia and New Zealand, their argument goes:

"Mandatory labelling of palm oil will help put pressure on food companies to start using sustainably-produced palm oil." [0]

There seems to be disagreement about what sustainable palm oil entails or how sustainable it actually is [1], so would be good to see this claim backed up with research.

[0] https://www.zoo.org.au/get-involved/act-for-wildlife/dont-pa... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/10/nestle-p...

Worth noting that in many countries - including Australia and New Zealand - that it is not compulsory (legally mandated) for food manufacturers to label the oil that they use as Palm Oil. They can just state Vegetable Oil, thus hindering many consumers in these countries from determining which products in their local supermarket use palm oil - just by looking at the label directly on the product.

A poor outcome for consumers in these markets.

I largely agree; although I ‘fear’ that the regulation will take the form of the competition authorities rather than say, a communications authority (FCC in the USA [1], ACMA in Australia, relevant bodies in European nations). Why such a ‘fear’? Because it is the wrong way to regulate in my opinion and proves that the ‘horse’ has bolted.

I can’t remember the source but I recently read that Facechook has a PR team of 1,100 (WTF?!) and that even The Zuck (™ pending!) has a personal media team of 15-20 making him look like a Saint. Spoilers: outside of HN and many tech sites, it’s working - even in the light of Cambridge Analytica, et al.

The real issue stems from the fact that very few elected Politicians or Technocrats understand technology and its implications, OR, are too fearful to attack the FANGs as they are very powerful, OR are susceptible to soft propaganda efforts; otherwise known as lobbyists.

It’s clear to me at least that an unregulated Facebook is a potential danger in many parts of the world: USA elections, Myanmar, etc. It obviously has great utility too - hence its absolute success - but the days when Google, Apple, Facechook, et al, say they are not media companies are hopefully in the past.

[1] although not under the current FCC regime!

Yeah, all good points, although sometimes one just needs to export a file or two (as opposed to setting up a publishing workflow or a system).

And Compressor for Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Media Encoder CC for Premiere Pro CC are effectively integrated (or some of the export code) for such a function - or are launched via the apps when you ‘Export’ or ‘Share’, although this can depend upon your CC plan or whether you have purchased/installed Compressor, or not.

The ‘crushing the HDR’ is a good point, I’ll have to look up how this codec handles DR and colour gamet :)

Does anyone know if Final Cut Pro X or Premiere Pro (or other popular video editing tools) yet support encoding to the "HDR VP9 Profile 2" ?

(HDR VP9 Profile 2 is isted as a new feature, as per "Android 9 adds built-in support for HDR VP9 Profile 2, so you can now deliver HDR-enabled movies to your users on HDR-capable devices." yet I wonder if this is effectively a telco-friendly video codec not widely used by media publishers or creators?)

Given the number of times the post mentions Machine Learning (ML), I'm surprised they didn't skip the P for Pie and go straight to naming it Android ML ;)

That is a very upsetting story. Thank you for taking the time to share it. It serves as a pertinent example of how cold and calculating advertising can be - especially with regards to intimate, personal life events.

Facebook still seems to misunderstand its role as a communications platform funded through adtech and data harvesting. And as a company with 2 billion+ customers ('users' in reality, as their customers are actually advertisers), they need to understand that they have an ethical role to play in using technology (yes, even communications technologies) and need to address their Orwellian bones.

> “Innovation”: a ubiquitous word with a slippery meaning.

“An innovation is a novelty that sticks,” writes Michael North in Novelty: A History of the New, pointing out the basic ontological problem of the word: if it sticks, it ceases to be a novelty.

*

I find that the current usage of the word innovation is largely meaningless. As a word, it has a great ‘brand’ (reputation? cachet? connotation?) but in 90-95% of the uses and contexts I hear it in, its usage is so vague as to be almost meaningless.

See also: agile, privacy, feedback.

"The Collectible MacCoin is First Fully Food-Backed Global Currency" - The PR hype train is in full effect with that sentence.

Like most PR spin, I understand what they are trying to state with "Food-backed" but it's such a meaningless parameter*

* except to PR teams, of course!

Brilliant reply to the parapsychologists 'incident':

"Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” John Archibald Wheeler

It’s interesting that he kept a (very) low profile in his two years at the firm.

Was he persona non-grata in ‘the Valley’ after his Microsoft exit?

I interpreted your statement of "just to have plenty of backup" as having plenty of storage space rather than multiple copies / redundant backup.

The problem I have had is that when one is trying to duplicate/copy > 1 Tb of data across tens, if not thousands of files, that the bitrot is not always easy to find. Windows and OS X / MacOS treat bitrot differently and, it seems, across different file types.

And yeah, lots of issues with scratching, discolouration, lost, etc., of any printed or optical media. That's why a hybrid physical-digital solution is a good half-way house. Same goes for encryption keys or one's crypto wallets, best to hedge one's bets over physical and digital media.

Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups).

There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs.

Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)

Hi, I’m using Purify ‘content blocker’ on iOS (11.4, Safari) and I can view the article without any issues.

“Microfilm machines trained people’s eyes to read differently: A blur of rapidly advancing images replaced flipping through pages, a precursor to the transition from reading books to surfing the web. Once we adjusted to the nonlinear reading devices, we wanted to jump around instead of advance through page after page.“

I oft find it interesting how a medium (and/or technology) can fundamentally alter the basic experience of reading.

Maybe try a not-for-profit or a social enterprise as many of them are trying earnestly to solve difficult problems (climate change, obesity crisis, opoid addiction, access to clean water, homelessness, better treatment of animals, decreasing electronic waste, etc.), and they are not bound to any particular locale.

As Martin Luther King once said: "it's always the right time, to do the right thing", and as some other commentators have stated, many 'good' people are trying to improve our world - it's just that the tech bros often have better PR teams and that all important 'network scale'.

Hang in there, the dream is definitely still alive :)

My favourite quote from the piece: “If you have a bunch of self-motivated and smart people and you put them together they’ll produce something incredible. But you can’t minimize the importance of management.

It’s a dirty word. It’s prosaic. It’s not vision. It’s not dream. It’s not technological excellence. But unfortunately, it makes all the difference.” - Joanna Hoffman, Head of marketing at General Magic

Good management in technology environments is akin to tracks for a train/monorail.

Boring: yes, but they provide the 'connective tissue', the velocity and the direction for everyone in the organisation to leverage, the support infrastructure for everyone else to produce great 'stuff' (products, services, outcomes, whatever). They should also build upon years of experience and/or brilliant thinking - which is what tracks do!

Great tech management teams also help (all) staff understand why the tracks are there to begin with: to solve problems for users (relevant to the Andy Hertzfeld 'put the user first' and the Tony Fadell 'understand your audience' quotes).

And yeah, reframing rejections and criticisms (the Marc Porat quote) is great advise for any entrepreneur.

Well, I find the Bill Hicks skit funny :) If you don’t, then all power to you.

Some people think the Smurfs is a nice, cute cartoon and others see a Marxist village led by a misogynistic Karl Marx figure. They’re both just perspectives, a la, the Rashomon effect.

And the KLM to KLF thing was a typo. People make mistakes - myself included!

Likely have to agree to disagree on this one. It's a comedy piece for one, and it's an opinion at that, but what is the critique Bill Hicks is making in the Youtube link I shared? I think it's best summed up with "you are filling the world with bile and garbage".

And honest about what they do? That seems wildly inaccurate. Like any profession, there are honest advertisers & marketers and there are dishonest ones, but the incentive of advertising is to influence purchasing decisions, and marketing to promote awareness, encourage consumption, and/or generate new revenue.

What would you have (had) Rage Against the Machine do? Stop making music that people enjoy and relate to? Or, should they do what the KLF did and (allegedly) burn a million dollars in cash one night and renounce all future songwriting and performance royalties? What would that achieve apart from an artistic statement?

Lastly, by your definition, aren't Rage Against the Machines just good at marketing? Or is licencing one's music to a large music label perhaps the most effective method of advertising their beliefs and opinions? Playing to larger audiences or making coin from their trade, doesn't necessarily mean they are hypocrites.

--- edit: minor typo fixes, refined some sentences