Linkdump for May 3rd through May 7th

Sometime between May 3rd and May 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Connecticut OKs Bill Pledging Electoral Votes To National Popular-Vote Winner: “The bill adopts an interstate compact that's officially called ‘The Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote.’ The agreement won't kick in unless it's backed by enough states and other voting areas to claim a majority of Electoral College votes. In addition to Connecticut, the other jurisdictions in the pact are California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state, along with Washington, D.C.”
  • The original iMac: 20 years since Apple changed its fate: “Sitting in the Flint Center in 1998, it would have been impossible to imagine the Apple of 2018. But without that day, and the product that Steve Jobs unveiled on that stage, it’s hard to imagine that Apple would have ever had the chance to become what it is today.”
  • One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.: Bah! Science did no such thing! It’s one study with a small sample size, screwball parameters (Courier? Seriously?), and a barely measurable result that only really affected those participants already predisposed to two-spacing. Sentences get one space, and one space only. (My favorite part: “Note: An earlier version of this story published incorrectly because, seriously, putting two spaces in the headline broke the web code.”)
  • ‘Who Gets to Be Sexy?’: Interesting look at how the porn industry is changing. “Amateurs are flooding the internet; piracy has addled the once-dominant studios; production has atomized and scattered. But along the way, something interesting has started to happen: Women are rising up.”
  • Swedish Meatballs Are Turkish? ‘My Whole Life Has Been a Lie’: “The country’s national Twitter account made the announcement in a tweet this week. ‘Swedish meatballs are actually based on a recipe King Charles XII brought home from Turkey in the early 18th century,’ the tweet said. ‘Let’s stick to the facts!’”

Linkdump for April 12th through April 15th

Sometime between April 12th and April 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for November 12th through December 19th

Sometime between November 12th and December 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Toxic Masculinity Is the True Villain of Star Wars: The Last Jedi: SPOILERS: “Poe's character, while not one of the main protagonists, has even more to do in The Last Jedi. However, while he may be filling the role of the dashing pilot that Han did in the Original Trilogy, director Rian Johnson is using the archetype to say something completely different about heroism, leadership, and—perhaps most importantly—masculinity.”
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi Offers the Harsh Condemnation of Mansplaining We Need in 2017: SPOILERS: “Any female boss in 2017 or American still nursing the hangover of the 2016 presidential election can tell you that even nice guys often have trouble taking orders from women.”
  • Star Wars, the Generations: SPOILERS: “Great movies reflect an era through the eyes of artists who embody that era. George Lucas embodied the era of Baby Boom ‘destiny’ and self-conceit. Rian Johnson embodies our era of diminished heroism, cynicism and near despair– tempered by the hope, if we can but learn from our heroes’ mistakes, that somehow, some way, some day, we may yet restore balance to the Force.”
  • Rian Johnson Confirms The Dorkiest Reference In ‘The Last Jedi’: SPOILERS: “There is a dorky reference in Star Wars: The Last Jedi that even director Rian Johnson admits that you may have to be of a certain age to get – thanks to a narrow window where you might have been watching premium cable in the very early ‘80s when this bizarre little short film would air in-between feature-length films.”
  • Rian Johnson Says There Are No Twists, Only Honest Choices: SPOILERS: “It seemed completely honest to me. It seems like the most dramatic version of that. And that’s what you’re supposed to do. Find what the honest moment would be, and then find the most dramatic version of it. So, in terms of the big ‘twists’ in the movie, they sprung from a process of trying to follow where these characters would go as honestly as possible.”
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi humanizes the Force: SPOILERS: This was one of my favorite things about The Last Jedi. To my mind, a very smart direction to take things.
  • Did You Catch the Brazil Reference in Star Wars: The Last Jedi?:
  • ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Redeems the Prequels: SPOILERS: “One of the many reasons I love Star Wars: The Last Jedi is that it redeems the prequels. … It recontextualizes the prequels and reinforces what I loved about them.”
  • Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II: Interesting argument that the likely change to ISP regulations — the 'net neutrality' debate — may not be quite the horrid thing it appears to be. Worth thinking over. "The question at hand, though, is what is the best way to achieve net neutrality? To believe that Chairman Pai is right is not to be against net neutrality; rather, it is to believe that the FCC’s 2015 approach was mistaken."
  • Keyboard Maestro 8.0.4: Work Faster with Macros for macOS: Saving for me to remember and look into when I have more time.
  • The Amazons’ New Clothes: “The Wonder Woman designs received acclaim from fans and costume fanatics alike. They were clearly inspired by the Amazon’s origins in the Mediterranean and were feminine but very functional. Why mess with perfection? Oh, right. The all-male team of directors and executive directors wanted women to fight in bikinis.”

Linkdump for July 25th through September 21st

Sometime between July 25th and September 21st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for June 25th through July 16th

Sometime between June 25th and July 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for April 27th through May 17th

Sometime between April 27th and May 17th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Case of the Stolen Source Code: Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer. // In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned. // Long story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of source code to several of our apps.
  • JSON Feed: Announcing JSON Feed: We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.
  • Let’s discuss the Linguistic & Pragmatic use of the [“N-word”]: No matter what your intentions, the word WILL mean something different depending on your relative status. Language is circumstancial.
  • The neural network writes the episode list for next season’s Dr. Who: I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, pick up lines, and D&D spells. Now I give you: training a neural network on the complete list of Dr. Who episodes.
  • What we really need is an adaptation of the original 1740 The Beauty and the Beast: So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve?  And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before?  And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling?  And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air?

Trust

There has been a tendency to mock people that want to buy products simply because a certain company makes them. Some will say this type of buyer is being guided by marketing, or is just a follower, but in reality it comes down to trust. Many people trust Apple. It is this very important connection with users that will likely get people to at least try the Apple Watch, and for Apple that is the best outcome they can wish for.

There is a better than 50% chance that I’ll be ordering an Watch on the day they’re added to the Apple Store.

My 2015 Resolutions

  • 640×1136 (iPhone 5s)
  • 2,048×1,536 (iPad Air 2)
  • 5120×2880 (iMac with Retina Display)

Yes, I make this joke somewhat annually. But…it amuses me, so I’ll probably continue to do so. One of these days I should dig back through prior years to figure out where I’ve posted this (blog, Facebook, Twitter) and see how my resolutions have changed over time.

No such thing as “just metadata”

With all the recent news concerning the NSA’s surveillance programs (Prism et al.), one of the common defenses has been that for at least some of these programs (though not all), the government is “just” collecting metadata. For example, should the government access your email records, they might not have access to the content of the email, merely the associated data — like who you communicate with, when, how often, who else is included in the messages, and so on.

Techdirt has a good overview of why the “it’s just metadata” argument is a foolish argument to make — basically, there is a lot of information that can be derived from “just metadata” — but there’s also an MIT project called “Immersion” (noted in the TechDirt article, though I found it elsewhere) that gives a good visualization of what can be learned from a relatively limited dataset.

Immersion scans your Gmail account (with your explicit permission, of course), and then runs an analysis on the metadata — not the content — of your email history to create a diagram showing you you communicate with and the connections among them.

As an example, here’s my result (with names removed). This is an analysis of almost 52 thousand messages over nearly nine years among 201 separate contacts. Each dot is a single contact, the size of the dot is a measure of how often I’ve communicated with them, and the lines between them show existing relationships between those people (based on messages with multiple recipients).

Immersion Contact Map

In that image, there are two obvious constellations: the blue grouping at the top right are my family and long-time friends; the orange/green/red/brown grouping to the left are my Norwescon contacts. The scattering of purples and yellows are contacts that fall outside of those two primary groups. While there’s not much here of great surprise or import for me, I did already learn one thing of interest — apparently one of my old high school friends has had some amount of contact with one of my Norwescon friends (that’s the single line connecting the two constellations). Now, I have no idea what sort of relationship exists between them — it could be nothing more than my sending a group email that included one and accidentally including the other as part of the group — but some sort of relationship does, and that’s information I didn’t have before.

Now, my metadata is fairly innocuous. But for argument’s sake, suppose I was involved not with Norwescon, but with some other group of people that, for whatever reason, I wanted to keep quiet about. Maybe I’m involved in the local kink scene, and could face repercussions at my job or in my personal life if this became known. Maybe I’m having a gender identity crisis that I’m not comfortable publicly discussing, but have a strong internet-based support group. Maybe I’m part of Anonymous or some similar group, discussing ways to cause mischief. Maybe I’m a whistleblower, and these are my contacts. Maybe I’m a news reporter who has guaranteed anonymity for my sources — but suddenly, this metadata exposes not only who I communicate with, but when and how often, and if there’s a sudden ramp in communication between me and certain contacts in the weeks or months before I break a big story with a lot of anonymous sources, suddenly they’re not so anonymous any more. And, yes, of course, because no list like this would be complete without the modern boogeyman that is the government’s excuse for why this surveillance is necessary — maybe I’m a terrorist. (For the record, I’m none of the above-mentioned things.)

However, of that list of possibilities, terrorism (or, less broadly, investigation of known or suspected crimes) is the only one that the government should really have any interest in, and that’s exactly the kind of investigation that they should be getting warrants for. If they suspect someone, get a warrant, analyze their data, and build a case from there. But analyzing everyone’s data, all the time, without specific need, without specific justification, and without warrants? And then holding on to the data indefinitely, allowing them to troll through it at any time for any reason, whether or not a crime is suspected?

There’s a very good reason why terms like “Orwellian”, “Big Brother”, and “1984” keep coming up in these conversations.

Now PGP-enabled

With all the recent concerns about security and privacy in the world of PRISM, I finally decided to carry through on something I’d considered from time to time in the past, and have set myself up to be able to handle PGP encryption for my mail. I’m using GPGTools for the OS X Mail client and Mailvelope for Chrome when I need web access to my Gmail account.

To be honest, I don’t know how often I’ll actually use PGP for anything other than signing my messages — I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever been truly concerned about what someone might find if they snooped through my email (they’d probably be pretty bored) — but as long as the option is there, might as well make sure I’m set up to use it in case I ever feel the need.

My PGP public key follows:

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