As such, since moving up to St. Paul and being somewhat unmoored from in-office interactions (aside from near-monthly visits, which due to the COVID-19 era, have all but disappeared), I’ve moved back to using a split between my personal MacBook Pro (a late 2013 model that still runs very well), my iPhone, and my iPad Pro (first model, sans FaceID).

This system has been working well. Luckily, I am able to connect to all my enterprise accounts via the Microsoft suite of apps (Outlook, Office, et al). This did, however, require me to purchase a personal Microsoft subscription (Microsoft 365 or whatever they’re calling it now). A minor inconvenience, but it has since permitted me unrestricted usage of all their core apps across the entire Mac ecosystem. And they’re quite good.

Aside from a few finicky adjustments with the Mac version of Outlook (no docked calendar view, funky search filters), it’s a much more pleasant experience to use than the Windows 10 counterpart. Skype works just fine, Teams even better. And synchronicity between all platforms works for the most part. Skype for Business is the worst offender (inconsistent conversation threads if I’m hopping between one platform and another is annoying — Teams is way more consistent). But Microsoft’s adherence to the MacOS doctrine of user interface design is just so much more intuitive for me, and it’s native adherence to the Mac services and my preferred productivity apps is indispensable. The biggest issue I’ve run into are the restrictive policies on using my company’s instance of Box. And that’s about it.

Since my Mac is heading into 7-8 year territory, I’ve been thinking about an upgrade, and where I want to continue to invest in the future of the Apple ecosystem. Work connectivity is important, but not a dealbreaker. And up until recently, I’ve been very interested in dumping the Mac and going all-in on iOS with a fully loaded iPad Pro 2020/2021 with the new Magic Keyboard + trackpad integration. I do think iPadOS has started moving in the right direction to, down the road, ostensibly replace the Mac. But not yet.

To freshen things up a few months ago, I bought a Magic Trackpad as a mouse replacement. And for some curious reason, this minor change in Mac interaction, along with a renewed interest in RSS via the rebooted NetNewsWire + Feedbin, something clicked, and I have become ever more invested in the Mac again.

• Re-installed Launchbar (oh, I’ve missed it), hooking up several handy actions and re-memorizing those I’d forgotten.
• Finally started using Spaces correctly (e.g., directing apps to open in either a designated Work space or Personal space).
• Doubled-down on using Things as both my personal and work todo app (dropping Todoist — which I had only been using due to its inter-operability between Mac/iOS/Windows).
• Seeking a new scratchpad, I instantly bought into IconFactory’s brilliant Tot for the Mac + iOS, and have been using it exhaustively since its launch for everything from non-analogue notetaking to dropping phrases, quotes, or minor meetings note as into to later deposit into my work cache (Microsoft OneNote).
• Began writing a text adventure in Twinery, an endeavor that seems inconvenient or much more difficult on anything but a proper computer.
• Saw a great tweet by Paulo that prompted me to superpower my shortcuts in the keywords pane to initiate a ton of symbols I’ve come to rely on for use in my note-taking (yes, admittedly, something that pairs with iOS).
• Just something about multiple windows for apps instead of the full-screen malarkey. I like the idea of full screen, and sometimes shift into it, but it’s still not as productive as the original interface formula.
• And, of course, bridged a number of RSS feeds I used to follow into my Apple folder to get back into the modus operandi of Apple news and culture.

This may not seem like a dramatic change, but it has reinvigorated my interest in Mac as a comprehensive, fully-loaded platform currently to its likely long-term successor, iPadOS. My confidence in navigating its interface by keyboard or the variety of customizable gestures with the Magic Trackpad, plus the better (as of now) asset manipulation/folder/sharing infrastructure/scriptable automation, has me convinced the Mac isn’t going anywhere soon, even if Apple released Xcode and Final Cut Pro to it this year (few of the last remaining stalwarts of “Mac-only”). As it stands, the Mac is still king. And I’m glad I’ve returned to it fully.

• Wunderbar: An earnest bar/restaurant whose campus is home to a glamp-ground with rentable tents/RVs as well. Great lighting and vibes.

• Grandma Rays: Roomy dive bar. Only realized the clever play on the town’s name itself on our drive home.

• Angry Trout: A worthy lunch spot; the prepared fish over salads were great, and the soups (chowder and chili) warmed us up. Everything about the place is curated or designed with sustainably in mind.

• Tre Søstre: A beautiful set of vacation rentals that directly channel Scandinavian architecture. Warm, inclusive interiors, ample views of Grand Marais via windows and balconies, and a great gas fireplace won us over.

Wrought of 1680D Cordura ballistic nylon and lined with a microfiber interior, the smartphone-sized wallet is a handsome execution to both hold and look at, and functions well for day-to-day use. Several features set this apart from my default Trove:

• The wallet is larger dimensionally than the Trove (it measures 5.1” x 3” x 0.2”) vs the Trove’s lean card-sized profile
• Materials are completely different. Cordura ballistic nylon in this grade is tough and stiffer than the less-heavy duty elastic and leather combo from Trove (and many other slim/minimal wallets)
• There are three stacked card holders for easy access/common usage on on side of the wallet, which is a 'whatever' for me since I’m typically grabbing only my credit card in nearly every circumstance
• There is a YKK-zippered pocket that fits damn near everything else, including additional cards, bi-folded US cash, and keys
  • This pocket is also RFID-lined, protecting against skimmers while also permitting cards in the exterior 3-slot pockets to be tappable (e.g., transit cards)

The zippered pocket, while not new to wallets (Bellroy has plenty of options with it), is phenomenally well executed here. It's small and rests almost unnoticeably against the zipline, minimizing its footprint. I’ve been so used to triple/quadruple folding US cash that it’s a great convenience not to have to anymore. And the reduction of a keychain in the summer months (sans winter coat pockets) has been terrific. My only extra daily carry aside from this wallet and my phone is the occasional car dongle when I need to drive. That’s it.

Overall, the card’s quality build looks like it’ll hold up. The card slots are fine, though it’s much easier to pull out the top card than the others due to the thick-stitched rims (and I do miss the Trove Swift’s pull tab, which at first seemed unnecessary but has grown into a pleasant, tactile luxury). And the zippered pocket is a welcome change — while not elegant, it stores cash, keys, and a few extra cards while keeping the entire wallet profile fairly slim. For the reduction in additional EDC needs alone (especially with limited pockets in the summer), the Aer Cardholder is recommended, and could very well replace any ultra-slim wallet you have if you’re looking for the specific benefits it brings.

Thinking back, Harmony Korine’s absurdist, anti-summer vacation flick Spring Breakers was probably my first A24 film. I recall going into that one thinking one thing, and a quarter of the way through thinking the exact opposite — undermining your expectations so astutely way was a wonderful thing.

Every year now, A24 has a few films that hit a fervor of mainstream discussion. This year it’s French director Claire Denis’s High Life, which I have unfortunately not seen yet, but have read the NYT interview and listened to A24’s podcast between her and Rian Johnson — it sounds fabulous. Three years ago it was the Academy Award-winning Moonlight, a freshman effort by the young Barry Jenkins. I was disappointed that in 2017 The Florida Project didn’t receive the award accolades it deserved, but what a phenomenally-acted film that was. A24 cranks out consistently good fare, ruminating and thoroughly exploring scripts and completed films to distribute. And since Moonlight, they have begun funding and distributing some their own films (albeit most disappointingly with the recent David Robert Mitchel film, Under the Silver Lake, which was just recently distributed straight to streaming instead of a more formal theatrical release).

In addition to the consistency in quality, A24 successfully accomplishes unique contributions to its work to bolstering marketing efforts, notably standing out to a new generation of audiences, and addressing the changing technological formats of distribution.

1. A24 does a stellar job with film posters. They are oftentimes off kilter, using colors and typefaces in direct opposition to adjective thumbnail images of films when scrolling through lists in whatever app you’re using to pick a film. They usually don’t follow traditional patterns, compositions, or styles, oftentimes reminding me of enthusiastic graphic designers’ riffs on classic film poster designs as fanfare.
2. The trailers are wholly untraditional, operating more as teaser previews for the films whilst avoiding detailing out the entire narrative like so many other distributors. A24 is getting (or have already gotten?) to the point of relying entirely on brand. What a millennial convenience.

Founded by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges back in August of 2012, A24 has had and continues to pave an independent legacy of great film production and distribution. As the technology/streaming services become more complicated, and production of film and prestige television become more competitive, it’s good to see a company carve out a sort of niche in storytelling and film aesthetic, which they dial directly into their desired audiences. Like so many of the “millennial” direct-to-consumer brands such as Quip, Flamingo, Harry’s, Burrow, YES PLZ Coffee, Casper, Parachute, and Away, A24 is synonymous with consistent expectations (or the thrill of undermining expectations in traditional film structure). I wouldn’t be surprised if they charged a subscription fee to help fund their more experimental films in the future, uplifting the film production paradigm further. They’ve become such a prized product that recently they’ve partnered with HBO (for the show Euphoria), Hulu (for the show Ramy), and a partnership with Apple for their upcoming Apple TV+ service.

It’s great to see a scrappy, well-directed company succeed on so many fronts while staying true to its nature in the modern era of convoluted entertainment production and distribution. Fingers crossed they keep it up.

I’m talking about Michael Schur’s NBC show, The Good Place, a drama-comedy that came seemingly out of the blue, and since its first episode has been one of the easiest and most delightful shows on television. The writing is quick-witted enough, the material substantial enough, and the concept entirely metaphysical. How does a show capture so many things at once without being burdened by its own complexity?

Looking at Shur’s backlog of work is telling, I suppose. He wrote, produced, and directed a number of previously successful shows, contributing to many cultural milestones such as The Office (US version), Park & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-nine, Master of None, and Saturday Night Live. He also dabbled in the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” as its writer, one of the more ludicrous but pitch-dark comedy episodes of the future-shock Netflix series. But for The Good Place, a certain kind of nonchalance permeates its very soul. No one character dominates (though I would argue Kristen Bell’s Eleanor and Ted Danson’s Michael steal the spotlight), and the story is smoothly unwound over a sprint of 25 minutes per episode, each one ending in a credits sequence cliffhanger. The entire format begs you to binge watch without feeling bogged down in a mountain of episodes (each season squares off at just ten episodes a piece).

The Good Place is at its core a show about relationships among four key characters, and whose narrative tackles karma in a constructive and deconstructive way — all in an afterlife setting. The premise is keen on exploring absurdist situational humor, and is at its strongest with character interactions that take full advantage of the quickly-developed dispositions of each of the show’s stars. Michael operates as a kind of foil for everyone’s delights (and toils), sound-boarding off everyone's reality check of the afterlife's meandering eternity.

What perhaps helps set this show apart from many others competing for your attention is the colorful sets and nearly cartoonish narrative brokered through bubbly music, jovial cinematography, and dialogue bantering that exudes a PG-style appropriateness while nodding gracefully to a cleverer audience’s intellectualism. The Good Place sits in stark contrast to HBO’s dreary, somber The Leftovers, but intriguingly both share similar stretches of exploratory existentialism. Of the two, I certainly feel better after finishing an episode of the former.

In a cluttered world of show choices — many of which are exceedingly excellent — The Good Place stands out for its unusual territory and easy format, and has something almost everyone can find delight in.

...the demos above are impressive because Duplex specifically withholds the fact that it’s not human. The net effect is, for better and for worse, a form of deception. Duplex was elegantly, intentionally designed to deceive.

My wife recently jetted over to Iceland for a quick few days with her sister and a friend. When she arrived back, she left a few goodies for me, one of which was a curious, “handmade” concoction called Smoked Lava Cheese. Though I won’t claim I’m a connoisseur of cheese by any stretch, I would consider myself an enthusiast for the age-old custom of melting a pile of cheese into a merged form and eating with a fork. This may sound strange, or maybe you’ve done it (either way, I recommend doing it, now?), these little circular cheese bites remind me exactly of this practice. Except in portable, snack form. And that’s a good thing.

An Icelandic snack made from “pure” cheese, Lava Cheese is a brand that began in Iceland back in December of 2016, engineered by the founders Guðmundur Páll Líndal and Jósep Birgir Þórhallsson. As they state in their origin story:

The idea of a snack made from pure cheese came to us when we realized the best part of a grilled cheese sandwich is the melted cheese which hits the grill.

So right you are. I’ve always loves the crunchiness of the slightly hardened cheese bits from microwaving or oven-heating nachos (the shredded pieces that missed the tortilla chips and get a heat-flash during the warm-up), which gave me the idea of doing this when I was a kid. Skip the chips and just toss a pile of shredded cheese on a plate, microwave for 1:30, and there you go. Pure cheese. I’ve since migrated to using a small egg-sized pan to do the heating work, and at this age, it’s only once and a while. But… Lava Cheese. These Icelandic guys came up with a few variations, and I’m very thankful Ashley brought me home a box.

Since the cheese has been “smoked”, there is a slightly different flavor than when I’d do it. You can feel the hardened cheese texture with your tongue, which nails the first part of the idea of crispier cheese. I suppose, according to the company’s naming convention, this texture reflects the Icelandic lava fields. I’m terrible at describing tastes, so from here, you’ll likely experience a harsher aroma of cheddar, and a sharper association with the cheese you’re likely most familiar with, just restructured in harder, less dairy-like form. It delivers, though, and I have to imagine it’s a better snack than some faux bullshit cheese flavorings from Cheetohs or whatever other hell-spawn snack food from PepsiCo/Nabisco/Mars.

While I was able to enjoy the Smoked Cheddar version, I found that after researching the company’s other products, they also have a Crunchy Cheese series that includes Licorice Root and With Chili. The largest hurdle here is that line of snacks is only available at retail in Iceland, though they hint that new locations are coming soon. I certainly hope so, as I can attest to the magic of this stuff, and think it would do well in any other country on the planet. In the meantime, fry some cheese on your own, toss bacon in there, whatever it takes — it’s an easy, decadent, go-to late-night snack.

Google has been the go-to, default search engine for all general inquires on the Internet for years. As the Internet has fragmented and compartmentalized itself, other search engines have emerged, but for more “single-serving”, contextual inquires. Like retail (Amazon). Video (YouTube — also owned by Google). Travel (TripAdvisor, Kayak, Hipmunk). Local (Yelp). Voice convenience (Siri, Amazon, Cortana, Google). News (Apple News, Google News). But general search still dominates. It is the reigning entry point to the Internet for many, even though closed ecosystems like Facebook have and continue to threaten the larger, endless Internet, and reform it into a smaller shell of its former self.

But why do so many continue to use Google for general search? As a company with such breadth and ambition, these recent years it has seen unprecedented fallout, mostly around the integrity of its business model: the European Union sued Google (twice, actually), copied Snapchat, permitted invalid ad trafficking, contributed to “inhumane” technological implications, have always and increasingly positioned you as their product, has served fake news and misleading auto-suggestions, aggressively pushed a publisher-hijacked news system that keeps users within the Google ecosystem, and on and on. It still does a sufficient job of surfacing mostly relevant results, but as a company that makes 90% of its revenues from peddling ads, why should you feel it as a trustworthy source of information and handling your data exhaust? Particularly when other search engines exist that can provide the same quality of results?

Aside from a number of advances in paid search, organic search hasn’t been modified in significant ways for years. Updates have been mostly tied to incremental universal search result formats, mobile-specific carousels for easier navigation, arguably convenient “quick answers” that sometimes don’t always state facts or truthfully answer an inquiry. And the reliance on your personal data and search history to attempt machine-learning’s personalization of results doesn’t always equate to a better experience.

If you’re onboard so far, then try DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is a search engine that uses privacy as the gravity for its differentiation from Google and Bing, stemming a number of useful and user-respectful features and services off it. Along the lines of Tristan Harris’s new venture (an ex-Google employee himself), DuckDuckGo is the embodiment of humane technology. While it has many advantages to Google, three are prominent:

• Always-on secure search. DDG requires HTTPS, and even if you use a bang operator (I’ll go over this later), it still sends your inquiries encrypted.
• Anonymity. DDG hides the keywords you use in queries.
• Most importantly, DDG does not track you or peddle personalized results via personal behavior aggregation like Google and Bing do.

Beyond Just Private “Search”

In addition to maintaining your privacy while providing more than sufficient results, DuckDuckGo also has built-in niceties that Google or Bing do not:

• They enable you to use search shortcuts (called bangs) to jump into a search across other places like Google (!g), Google Maps (!gm), Wikipedia (!w), Amazon (!a), and others. All you do is type the bang shortcut, space, and then whatever your query is, and DDG will send you to the results page inside the target engine (so it’ll jump you into Google Maps or Amazon) via — most importantly, when applicable — an encrypted session.
• DDG provides fantastic browser plug-ins and apps for accurately blocking ads and other intrusions in your web browsing, most notably trackers. These trackers monitor your activity across the internet, attempting to sync behaviors back to advertisers and other companies to stitch together your activity profile for selling you ads and selling each other data about you, for which, of course, you are paid nothing.
• Sick of the blue links in results? There are themes you can choose from to apply refinements to your experience. Nice.
• They make their money off ads and affiliate marketing. But they are not gathering profiles about their users, or mining data elsewhere.

Try It As Your Default Search Engine

Unless you blindly trust Google, there is no harm in trying a new search engine for a week. Here are the easiest ways to try DDG, even if not indefinitely. By the fifth day, you probably will forget you’re using a different search engine, and be better off for it.

• Visit their website, bookmark it or set it as your homepage in your browser of choice, and you’re good to go.
• Set as default in iOS:
  • Go to Settings
  • Select Safari > Search Engine
  • Select DuckDuckGo
• Set as default in Android:
  • Unfortunately Android doesn’t allow you to add DDG as a default, so you have to download the DuckDuckGo app and use it instead. Should tell you something right there.
• Set as default in Chrome
  • Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines.
  • Go to Other Search Engines
  • Type "DuckDuckGo" in the box for Add a new search engine
  • Type "duckduckgo.com" in the box for Keyword
  • Copy and paste https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s into the URL
  • Click "Make Default" when you mouse over the custom search engine.

Just try it. I switched at the beginning of 2017 on every web browser I use, and it has yet to disappoint.

While the unveiling of Apple’s AirPods at last year’s September iPhone 7 event was met with both awe and meh, it’s one of those products that you have to use to appreciate. Ignore the aesthetics and your assumptions regarding their audio output quality, and instead fixate on:

• Wires into your ears, around your body, and connecting to your phone cause friction and annoyance in movement, can get snagged on things (especially when commuting on public transportation
• Storing wired headphones is scattershot, and wires typically tangle more often that not, requiring extra time to detangle
• Wireless headphones have historically not always retained a stable Bluetooth connection to your source device
• Switching wireless headphones between devices for audio connectivity is not always intuitive or easily accessible
• Dancing (or other energetic activity with full-body motions) with any kind of headphone is fairly unworkable

While all these points of contention are not deal breakers for any traditional (or even wireless) headphones or earphones, they do illuminate the possibilities of completely wire-free ear buds and new kinds of audio platforms.

Since it’s been over a year since Apple and other companies like Bragi have released this new kind of earphone (“truly wireless” seems to be the current moniker for them), a lot has been said, written, and discussed about their usefulness and application. I’ve only had the AirPods for the latter half of 2017, but I’m ready to provide a perspective on them.

AirPods’ Functionality is Fluid

Some perceptive technology writers have indicated Apple’s master strategy with personal devices is shrinking and handing-off capabilities from one device to another in its ecosystem. Whether that will come to its full realization, the AirPods function exceptionally well today as truly wireless earbuds, and their bridge to Siri expands their convenient usefulness exponentially. Here’s what I like about them:

• Settings. Customization of both earbuds’ physical tap actions (e.g., you can customize a double-tap on the physical exterior of either bud to pause music, initiate Siri,skip a song, etc.) is great.
  • Gestures like this could expand in the future, as Apple did update the ability to tap both earbuds separately for separate actions
• Comfort. The AirPods fit is fairly similar to the original EarPods, though they are ever so slightly larger in the ear. I don’t have a problem with the fit, and contrary to what you may assume, they do not fall out of your ears.
• Lightweight. Hardly any heft to them. You forget they’re in your ear.
• Ear detection. Truly an Apple move — you pluck one out of your ear while listening to audio and the audio pauses automatically. Place the bud back in your ear and it picks up right where it left off.
• Pairing with multiple devices. Sure, the W1 chip Apple incorporated into AirPods makes it very easy to pair with with your iPhone or other Apple device right away (you simply open the AirPods case next to the device and it pairs within seconds), but the behind-the-scenes cleverness of using iCloud to then also pair them with all your other devices from which you’re signed into the same iCloud account is brilliant.
• Speed. These are fast to use. Open the case, pop them in your ears, hear the “bing” noise, and you’re good to go. Pluck them out, slide them into the case (magnetic attraction pulls them right into their slots), and slip the case in your pocket. No wires. No tangle.
• Lightning charge. While a proprietary cable, they use the ubiquitous Apple Lightning connection to charge. If you have an iOS device, you have this cable (or several) laying around. It also charges exceptionally fast.
• 24 hours charge in case. The AirPods case acts as both a battery charger for the AirPods and their housing unit. Once charged, the case has 24 hours of life to give, plus the 5 hours of life the AirPods hold themselves.
• One-bud Use. That’s right. You can use one bud at a time, with mono audio, to make calls or listen to music while you give your other ear some breathing room.

The Current Limitations to AirPods

The AirPods aren’t without issue, though I must say for a first generation Apple product, it’s about as good as it gets. The last time they nailed an accessory so well the first time was probably the original AirPort WiFi router. Here’s a list of things I’ve noticed after using them for several months that derail them from perfection, but could be iterated via improvements in future versions.

• Sound isolation. EarPods weren’t great at this, and neither are AirPods. You can easily hear noise outside these earbuds quite easily, and commuting on a train nearly defeats the audio output in your ear lest you crank the volume up to unreasonable levels.
• Lack of physical volume controls. This is by the far the most annoying part of the AirPods. I loved having a remote for volume, pause/playing, and Siri on previous EarPods models and some other earphones/headphones I used in the past. This is a first world problem, though. Volume controls on your device control them just fine. You can use Siri to control the volume, but this is impractical and slow more often than not. But if you have an Apple Watch, the auto-face change on it usually provides volume controls if you’re listening to something, and this is the easiest way to remote control them.
• 5-hour battery life. I’ve never run them dead before, as I usually am not listening to them for longer than a few hours, but five hours is a limitation for longer flights or extended activities using them. Of all the truly wireless earbuds, though, the AirPods have the longest battery life (as of Dec 2017).
• Sharing audio. While you can share an AirPod “bud” with someone else to listen or watch the same device’s media, you can’t pair two AirPods to the same device and output the audio simultaneously (which is, granted, an annoying technological limitation for any wireless headphones — dual audio output to two headphones listening to the same iPad on an airplane, for instance, is a drag).

Overall

AirPods are my favorite Apple product of the last few years, and have already become my second-most used device next to my iPhone. They are great for music while quietly getting ready in the morning, the perfect companion for my morning commutes listening to The Daily and The Intercept, and a pleasure to pop in for the evening jaunt home listening to whatever’s left in my podcast queue. I’ll even slip them in a few times during the day at the office to catch a quick track or two while cranking through emails. While I prefer using my Bose QuietComfort 35s when flying (since they cancel out the miscellaneous noises in-flight), I have used the AirPods a few times with the wife while traveling and watching a movie together, and they work just fine as long as the volume is cranked.

Highly recommended.

You can pick them up at Amazon for $160.

The Atlantic

While drenched in superlatives, Yoni Appelbaum's piece titled Is the American Idea Over?, one of the headliners in the latest Atlantic issue, covers a range of survey points and perspective on the U.S.'s role in the world today, and how its population is reckoning with it.

It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise—and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning. Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value—10 out of 10—to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same. A quarter of the latter group say it’s unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people’s liberties. Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.

But most notable (and agreeable) is the reality that true democracy is fragile, an ever-escalating balancing act of security, freedom, opportunity, and tolerance of differences:

The greatest danger facing American democracy is complacence. The democratic experiment is fragile, and its continued survival improbable. Salvaging it will require enlarging opportunity, restoring rights, and pursuing equality, and thereby renewing faith in the system that delivers them. This, really, is the American idea: that prosperity and justice do not exist in tension, but flow from each other. Achieving that ideal will require fighting as if the fate of democracy itself rests upon the struggle—because it does.

The Economist

America’s global influence has dwindled under Donald Trump

On trade, [Donald Trump] remains wedded to a zero-sum view of the world, in which exporters “win” and importers “lose”. (Are the buyers of Ivanka Trump-branded clothes and handbags, which are made in Asia, losers?) Mr Trump has made clear that he favours bilateral deals over multilateral ones, because that way a big country like America can bully small ones into making concessions. The trouble with this approach is twofold. First, it is deeply unappealing to small countries, which by the way also have protectionist lobbies to overcome. Second, it would reproduce the insanely complicated mishmash of rules that the multilateral trade system was created to simplify and trim. The Trump team probably will not make a big push to disrupt global trade until tax reform has passed through Congress. But when and if that happens, all bets are off—NAFTA is still in grave peril.

The New York Times

If you haven't first read anything about the Paradise Papers, it's essential reading for the weekend. In a follow-up op-ed, Gabriel Zucman noodles on how we can enact policy to stop corporations and the wealthy from avoiding taxes in havens around the world:

The United States loses, according to my estimates, close to $70 billion a year in tax revenue due to the shifting of corporate profits to tax havens. That’s close to 20 percent of the corporate tax revenue that is collected each year. This is legal.

Meanwhile, an estimated $8.7 trillion, 11.5 percent of the entire world’s G.D.P., is held offshore by ultrawealthy households in a handful of tax shelters, and most of it isn’t being reported to the relevant tax authorities. This is… not so legal.

These figures represent a huge loss of resources that, if collected, could be used to cut taxes on the rest of us, or spent on social programs to help people in our societies.

The team behind what I've called (and remain firm on) the best slim wallet available have taken to Kickstarter to rev up funds for the next phase of its wallet, which they call Trove Swift.

The fundamentals of the original wallet remain intact:

• It's virtually the same physical size as its predecessor
• It retains the same two layers of bonded, full grain Italian vegetable-tanned leather
• The same (from what I can tell) tight, high-quality elastic
• Same composition of three separated slots for cards, cash, Instax photos, business cards, and so forth
• A reversible design that permits versatile options for storing different kinds of slim materials

What’s New

What's different, however, is one of the available slots access to stored cards. As the creators state on their Kickstarter page:

Our backers and customers over the last three years have given a lot of feedback on the TROVE Wallet, they love the versatility of having 3 separate compartments, the quality of materials and workmanship and the compact and minimalist aesthetics. The TROVE Swift retains all of the qualities our customers love about the original wallet and adds a quick access pull-tab. We know everyone has that one card that they use everyday more than others, and we wanted to improve the speed and accessibility by adding the Swift pull-tab.

To confirm, the single, obvious differentiation between this version of the Trove wallet is the pull-tab. I was actually surprised by this when they graciously sent me a review unit. So let's get this out of the way: this is an impressive pull-tab. They summarize having tested several different materials for the ribbon and the pull-tab itself, finally landing on a union of polyester ribbon and coated metal tab. The ribbon feels like a micro-sized version of a belt buckle of the smoothest variety, and the feeling it provides when you glide it out of its resting place is a tactile pleasure. At 0.3mm thick, it's indecipherable as part of the wallet's in-pocket feel, and the tab itself only juts out slightly once a card or set of cards are placed in the one slot it functions in.

As a functional pull-tab, it far out-performs and out-feels the pull-tabs in Bellroy wallets, and a week in, feels entirely up to the task of long-term viability.

But is a pull-tab what the Trove needed?

Honestly, it brings nominal value to the wallet's design and functionality. It's not unwanted or unwarranted -- the feature is squarely about improving accessibility of a favorite set of cards. But of the two core slots with easiest accessibility of cards, neither caused any problems pulling the cards out in the original version of Trove (those front-facing cards in a stack prodded out just enough to easily grab with a finger). The more difficult-to-access single-slot (I'll call it the slot on the "bottom"), is actually where I think a pull-tab would have been more useful. This slot is typically where I dump my RFID office access card and another one or two rarely used items. But because of the tightness of the wallet, that tends to be where it's a little more difficult to stick a finger in and extract a card.

Where the pull tab does benefit the user is when you need to extract cash. While I usually don't carry any currency, if I do, I always fold it three or four ways to fit into one of the two easier "top" slots, and jam it into the crevice. With the cash resting against a card in the pull-tab slot, the feature works great -- the cash pulls out swimmingly.

Other Miscellany to Note:

• This version of the Trove seems to be, at least initially, limited to a set of monochromatic colors (all of good taste). Perhaps a "build your own" option will be coming later on.
• It's only available on Kickstarter, but as of this writing, they've exceeded their goal and aim to ship by the end of the year.
  • Based on this review unit, though, it's in perfect working condition, and I have to imagine it's just a matter of scaling up production and materials to ship to customer demand, but I wouldn't worry about there being any quality assurance issues whatsoever.

In Summary

Overall, the Trove Swift is an excellent iteration on what I continue to deem the best slim/minimal wallet you can buy. Whether you care for the pull-tab or not, Trove still is the right choice.

First up is Robert McMillan’s piece on Apple’s expansion of “cutting edge” privacy methodologies. We first heard about this shift at last year’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the annual development get-together Apple hosts on the west coast. Essentially, Apple is investing serious resources into, and anchoring product integrity around what the industry calls differential privacy.

Two years ago, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered shoppers could be identified by linking social-media accounts to anonymous credit-card records and bits of secondary information, such as the location or timing of purchases.

”I don’t think people are aware of how easy it is getting to de-anonymize data,” said Ishaan Nerurkar, whose startup LeapYear Technologies Inc. sells software for leveraging machine learning while using differential privacy to keep user data anonymous.

Differentially private algorithms blur the data being analyzed by adding a measurable amount of statistical noise. This could be done, for example, by swapping out one question (have you ever committed a violent crime?) with a question that has a statistically known response rate (were you born in February?). Someone trying to find links in the data would never be sure which question a particular person was asked. That lets researchers analyze sensitive data such as medical records without being able to tie the data back to specific people.

Whether the expansion of this methodology will be successful, or prove a hindrance for Apple, is yet to be seen. The establishment media is casting it as a do-or-die juncture in Apple’s commitment to artificial intelligence and machine-learning initiatives. And while other companies are starting to pursue differential privacy, it is a hindrance to core products many of them have, so it’s really only being applied to photo applications and not advertising platforms, for instance.

But no matter how much Apple invests in ways to further its hardware and software services while ringing the privacy bell, it still is beholden to governments. And so: enter China.

Apple has been pressing hard into China over the last several years. As of 2017, it is Apple’s third largest market behind the US and Europe, but has started to slide due (likely) to the increasing competition in the country. According to The Wall Street Journal (again!), Apple has recently buckled under governmental pressure, and will be complying with China to store all cloud data for Chinese customers with a government-owned company.

Apple said it made the latest change to comply with China’s new rules on data storage and cloud-services operation that went into effect June 1 as part of sweeping new regulations aimed at improving cybersecurity. It also said the new data center would improve speed and reliability for customers in China.

The Silicon Valley company has been one of the technology industry’s strongest advocates for fending off government incursions into user data. In a statement, Apple said it has “strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems.”

The latest move comes as Apple has been facing increasing regulatory headwinds in China. Last year, for example, its online book and movie services was shut down by authorities, who didn’t give specific reasons for the closing.

These kinds of things are bound to happen. Apple has also had to recently navigate opening retail stores in India, as the government there had restricted companies with “cutting edge technology” to perform sales without first sourcing some percentage of components locally. This Indian law has apparently pushed sales in that country further back still.

As we see Apple continue to press forward on its hardware, software, and integration fronts, the challenge of maintaining privacy will be tested. They are one of the few, if only, major technology companies left with such goals — time will tell if they can pull it off, or if customer interest cares at all.

Update: Aug 13, 2017.

Thoughtful piece by economist Tyler Cowen on this ordeal over at Bloomberg: Don't Be Too Hard on Apple for Bending to China.

Apple is still doing plenty to help Chinese citizens counter their censors. It sells chat and messenging apps in China that allow for encryption. Apple iPhones and iPads, bought in the U.S., bypass Chinese censorship altogether when they use the 4G network (not Wi-Fi); presumably some Chinese citizens have bought these products and use them. Perhaps most important, VPN apps are still available in China through other means, or overseas, and Chinese citizens can download them and combine them with Apple products to help bypass censorship. Apple has hardly backed away from its mission of tying the world together.

By now you’ve heard the beckoning of tech companies to buy a device for your home, whereby you can calmly (or loudly) speak “hey Alexa-hey Google-hey Siri” into the air and a machine, listening for the right queue, will help you do something or provide something in return. It’s the far-fetched sci-fi dream of yore — controlling your appliances throughout the home, and asking an esoteric artificial intelligence machine to do your bidding. It’s the invisible interface. But is it the final frontier for computing? And what must we sacrifice and compromise to get there?

What Exactly is Going on in the Home?

A few years ago, both Google and Apple introduced home automation frameworks in an attempt to bind several disparate Internet of Things products from third-party manufacturers. Google’s Android@Home—nowait-Brillo-holdon-Android Things and Apple’s HomeKit play important roles in centralizing control for the myriad of hardware and products that are now, for reasons of convenience (?), Internet-connected (lights, switches, locks, cameras, fans, windows, etc.). These centralized controls are found in things like the Apple Home app on your iOS device or Apple TV, since you’d probably rather use just one app that dozens of individuals apps to control your dozens of Internet-connected products.

But what makes all this even easier? An invisible interface you simply talk to, that is always on, and always at the ready. And so here is where the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and upcoming Apple HomePod enter stage left. With the innocent looks of a speaker, these are beamforming, microphone-arrayed devices that can parse out human voice through the noise of running music in the background and can respond to a variety of inputs from the user. Sure, they’re limited to what they can do, but all of them will allow for pretty consistent behavior, namely:

• Manipulation of music, playlists, etc.
  • Mostly done natively through each company’s maintained music platform (like Amazon Music), though other music platforms can be streamed as well
• Answering basic questions, setting timers, and so forth
• Controlling Internet-connected devices and accessories

Conveniency and ubiquity continue to be the name of the game here. Why place an always-on listening device in your home? Because it’s more convenient to say “hey Alexa, play xx album” out loud without thinking about anything but the words than opening your phone, opening the music app, conducting a search with the software keyboard, and then hitting play. If these voice assistants can become as intricately sophisticated as we need them to be, they certainly could be the future operating systems.

Is There a Danger of Overreach?

So should we be cautious about all this new tech? Probably.

First off, having nearly everything in your home connected to the Internet could be considered dangerous in its own right. Mr. Robot has a damning episode on home automation going haywire due to malevolent hackers. It could happen. Smart home accessories have already broken down, leaving owners confused as to how to turn on a light switch.

Security is paramount. And its importance is not just integral to keeping all connected devices safe from being manipulated from the outside, but also keeping privacy intact for owners of listening devices. These devices have been raising concerns about in-home privacy more than the cameras on your laptop and phones have of late. As Alex Swoyer writes in the Washington Times:

Consumers generally are believed to have consented to a company being able to collect information based on the product’s use guidelines. But whether consumers are truly aware of what that means, and whether companies are able to share the information they collect with the government raise more questions.

These devices must listen for a key phrase in order to initiate on the user’s command, so it’s no secret that the microphone is “on” at all times. Unless you’re using a setting that requires a button press to initiate, like Siri on your iPhone. The concern of privacy and potential overreach by these devices came to the forefront of an investigation in Arkansas, late in 2015. According to NPR, we know from court documents that police confiscated an Amazon Echo at the scene of an apparent murder post-football party to potentially seek out additional information that the device may have recorded at the time of the crime. Additionally, it was stated that "investigators are also using information from a smart water meter, alleging that an increase in water use in the middle of the night suggests a possible cleanup around the crime scene”.

I’m not telling you to refrain from purchasing these kinds of products. They are, after all, extremely convenient and powerful (even in their infancy right now), and offer a pretty concrete vision of where tech companies are going in the near-future. But I am suggesting to you to think carefully about which ones you buy, and the potential unintended consequences of having one in your home.

Apple Takes the High Road

So what is the most valuable company on the planet doing? Late to the game, some may say. But at their recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple did announce a product launching in December called HomePod. It’s their version of the voice assistant-powered intelligent speaker, and being an Apple product, the company has a very clear idea of what its marketing message is for it.

Unlike Amazon Echo and Google Home, both of which emphasize the artificial intelligence behind the tech to drive a number of services, Apple is heavily leaning into tackling the home audio market for its HomePod (think Bose and Sonos as competitors, not Amazon or Google). They’ve called it “the new sound of home”, and it’s no mistake that they’ve put music and superior sound quality as the banner features. Ben Lovejoy has an astute write-up on the differences between Apple’s strategy here, claiming that Siri does still lag behind competitive voice assistant systems, but has a very focused direction compared to data-gathering giants like Google.

Given the comprehensive nature of the Apple ecosystem, Apple could choose to go down the same route as Google. It could use all of the data it has about me, tie Siri queries to my Apple ID and deliver the same level of intelligence and proactive suggestions as Google Home. If it did so, nobody would be saying that Siri lags significantly behind Google’s artificial intelligence.

But Apple makes a deliberate choice not to do so. When I ask Siri a question, my iPhone doesn’t attach my Apple ID to my query so that Siri’s servers can make contextual sense of it. All that is sent is a random identifier that cannot be linked to my identity in any way. The random identifier is used to help Siri learn my voice: it doesn’t know who I am, but it knows that my query came from (say) person 7582066701, and it can check back over six months to match my query against my voice file to better understand what I actually said.

Will the concessions in favor of privacy compromise Apple’s growth with Siri and its connected devices, or will the trade-off be a good middleground? I obviously am in the camp favoring data privacy, and am willing to lag behind the use-cases of competitor devices to instead wait for Apple’s cautious take on this new medium. But keep in mind that all these devices are in very early stages of their feature roadmaps, and most people don’t even know what these voice assistant-powered speakers can and cannot do. Mostly that’s because the enabled service features are still be rolled out for third-parties to use, and while Apple limits the usages to just a handful of actions, most features from Google and Amazon are used by developers but not used by the products’ users.

Recode reports”when developers for Alexa and its competitor, Google Assistant, do get someone to enable a voice app, there’s only a 3 percent chance, on average, that the person will be an active user by week 2”. It’s no surprise, then to read this:

The statistics underscore the difficulty Amazon and Google are having in getting Echo and Home owners to discover and use new voice apps on their platforms. Instead, many consumers are sticking to off-the-shelf actions like streaming music, reading audiobooks and controlling lights in their homes.

Too many choices are oftentimes too much to handle. Until these devices are ubiquitous and their broad services are well known enough to all consumers, most voice applications will probably go unused, just like applications on your phone or computer go unused either from being undiscoverable by the user, or the lack in need of its employment.

Where We Go From Here

Whether you want to call this tech transition full of overreach or not, the tale of listening “smart” speakers reinforces a few things that come with the territory of most topics I discuss on this site.

One is that we need to think through the kind of future we want. Current and future generations will probably become more accustomed to the invasiveness of these kinds of systems in our homes, and won’t think much about the privacy consequences. To them (and to many in general), it’s about convenience.

Secondly, we need to ensure that we continue to build next generation Internet-connected devices and accessories with a strong security foundation. Many security specialists, including Bruce Schneier, have advocated for a rebuilding of certain Internet protocols and security features to bake into the future of the Internet. How do we get there? Through policy and innovation. At least we hope.

Thirdly, we need to be mindful of the kinds of products we use, what the manufacturer is providing as a service, and at what cost to you. You should know by now that Google makes money off your data (they’re an advertising company); Amazon makes money off your purchases (they’re primarily a retailer); Apple makes money off your hardware purchases (they’re primarily a hardware design company). None of this may matter to you, but in the case of compromised data, hardware, and privacy risks, it’s clear that one company is probably a safer bet than the others.

Finally, someone needs to redesign the way Terms of Services are written. No consumer reads this shit thoroughly, and most of us don’t even know what we’re signing up for or handing over to various companies and third-parties. It’s an epidemic, and we need some sound policies enacted to clear up the mess for everyday people. You know, for us. We aren’t all lawyers, and we don’t have hours to read through and verify we’re good with these conditions. Leave that to Norwegian slow TV.

A few recent reports on Facebook’s activities should have its users, policy makers, and technologists thinking constructively about how the company’s services should be perceived: is it high time to think about reasonable regulation, or should we let the titans roam free?

Why pick on Facebook? For one, they have nearly two billion active monthly users (according to Facebook, that is, a company whose numbers shouldn’t be accepted without some level of suspicion). That’s an immensely large swath of the planet’s Internet-connected population. And secondly, they — much like Google — earn an extraordinary stream of revenue from paid advertising, oftentimes inscrutable in its nature. To put things into perspective, Facebook netted $8.809 billion in the last quarter of 2016, 98% of which was derived from its advertising product. And I say this revenue is oftentimes inscrutable because while most users understand Facebook earns revenue off ads, little do they know how this product works. Users freely provide Facebook with data about themselves, and Facebook in turn provides that data to advertisers, publishers, and agencies so that these third-parties can target various formats of ads back at you (video, display/banner, post-click ad experiences) via your impressions, interactions, etc. It’s amazing how much money brands will pour into ads just to net an impression (really, an eye-glance) at an image. Money just pours into Facebook’s coffers off this “attention economy” methodology. (How many times a day do you check your news feed?)

Now that there is some context: Technology innovation and its subsequent ramifications for not only our data security and privacy, but also our very own thoughts and brain activity, are ripe for further progress and exploitation by large corporations. It is up to us to decide how far the reach of these technologies go, and what level of acceptability there is in their application and monetization.

Where Facebook Plans to Take Us

Facebook has made significant investments in what it calls Internet.org, a gigantic initiative to connect everyone in the world who doesn’t yet have an Internet connection. According to a profile on this initiative by Wired, the estimates are that 4.9 billion people as of 2016 are not connected. How exactly can Facebook pull this off? As Wired reports:

To reach everyone, Internet.org takes a multipronged approach. Facebook has hammered out business deals with phone carriers in various countries to make more than 300 stripped-down web services (including Facebook) available for free. Meanwhile, through a Google X–like R&D group called the Connectivity Lab, Facebook is developing new methods to deliver the net, including lasers, drones, and new artificial intelligence–enhanced software. Once the tech is built, a lot of it will be open-sourced so that others can commercialize it.

On the surface, this isn’t a conniving project. There are good intentions behind connecting humankind. And Facebook is investing money and resources into this project because they believe the world will be a better ecosystem when everyone is connected to the Internet. They also probably believe that those extra 4.9 billion people will join Facebook and contribute back to the investment by seeing millions of ads and pouring that investment back into Facebook’s pockets. This, too, is fine. It's business. But do the masses who will piggyback off this enterprise know that? And what hardware and software is Facebook aiming to develop for the next generation that will impact us, whether we’re using Facebook explicitly or not?

Let’s start with a simple one: Facebook’s advertising away from Facebook.com. This isn’t new. For about three years, Facebook has provided brands a product called Facebook Audience Network, a mobile platform that delivers ads to mobile apps and mobile sites across digital ecosystems. Google has had something like this for even longer (Google Display Network), but Facebook’s network has already reached second-largest, and has arguably better data to provide to publishers and agencies. Why and how does this correlate to Internet.org? Aside from being an ad service targeting its own users across their Facebook and non-Facebook activities, it’s also inherently built into future users’ Internet activities. This quote from a Business Insider piece says it all — Facebook ad executive Brian Boland describes Facebook Audience Network:

"For years, people externally would ask, 'Why aren't you doing an ad network?' We knew deep down that it was a good, important thing, but we really needed to figure out how to do it in a way that would bring what we did well to the rest of the internet."

Without reading too heavily into this, essentially Facebook, as we would have guessed, simply wants to provide the most personalized ads in the history of humankind to all of humankind wherever they might be. A grand concept with cosmic ambition.

And they aren’t stopping here. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Facebook is testing a new means of helping media companies sell video advertising natively (on their own sites) in a smarter and more automatic way. This tool is called Audience Direct, and is Facebook’s push into media publishing houses to help re-affirm their relationships (since Instant Articles hasn’t been panning out all that well). It's also engaging media publishing’s Internet currency: earned attention from readers. We all know that video is an attention blackhole, so it was inevitable that Facebook would bring their personalized ad targeting to the masses through this medium.

As if Facebook following you to the far reaches of your online activities wasn’t enough, they announced at their F8 developers conference just this past week that they are “working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts”. While Facebook has been throwing a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks, this doesn’t smell bad to me. But it is one more thing we need to be apprehensive about before fully committing to whatever manifestation it ends up taking.

The brain-computer interface, as described by Facebook’s development team, “could be an ideal way to receive direct input from neural activity that would remove the need for augmented reality devices to track hand motions or other body movements”. It feels silly talking aloud to Siri or Google Assistant — especially in public — and that feeling probably won’t normalize. Facebook’s development in a neural interface is probably partially aimed at removing the public stigma of talking to computer assistants out loud, instead employing a conduit in your brain to do that same thing. As the Verge reports:

Dugan (Regina Dugan is one of the lead Facebook developers for the project) stresses that it’s not about invading your thoughts — an important disclaimer, given the public’s anxiety over privacy violations from social network’s as large as Facebook. Rather, “this is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain,” reads the company’s official announcement. “Think of it like this: You take many photos and choose to share only some of them. Similarly, you have many thoughts and choose to share only some of them.”

Being able to pull off this interface seems to require some level of mind-reading, just like Amazon’s Echo devices and Google’s Google Home devices require some level of constant listening in your home to be able to recognize keywords to initiate their services. It is actually a good thing that Facebook is declaring its long-term intentions ahead of this interface becoming reality. We as a people need to understand the ramifications of this kind of progress, and how invasive the future of technology could be.

But let’s remind ourselves that Facebook doesn’t make money off hardware (okay, maybe a tiny amount from Oculus Rift) or services (okay, that 2% of revenue from Facebook games) — they make money from selling ads. And it’s very indicative, at least right now, how Facebook would monetize something like this. Per an investigative piece from Sam Biddle at The Intercept:

Facebook was clearly prepared to face at least some questions about the privacy impact of using the brain as an input source. So, then, a fair question even for this nascent technology is whether it too will be part of the company’s mammoth advertising machine, and I asked Facebook precisely that on the day the tech was announced: Is Facebook able to, as of right now, make a commitment that user brain activity will not be used in any way for advertising purposes of any kind?

Facebook spokesperson Ha Thai replied so esoterically that Sam had to rephrase the question, to which Ha Thai simply reiterated that “privacy will be built into this system, as every Facebook effort” and “that’s the best answer I can provide as of right now”. Sam goes on to ruminate on this technology and Facebook’s somewhat careless response to his inquiry, mockingly pointing out that “Facebook’s announcement made it seem as if your brain has simple privacy settings like Facebook’s website does”. This likely isn’t true, unless they’re trying to build in neural obfuscations to parts of your brain and only permitting activity through the speech center. I’m not a neurologist, so any speculation here is out of my realm. But the idea of sending brain activity to Facebook’s servers for processing is a heavy concession to make when and if we all adopt this invisible interface. It does sound amazing and seamless, but coming from Facebook, the data we provide also sounds ripe for re-application and distribution to third-parties for monetization and security exposure.

Where & How Do We Begin Regulating?

We can’t progress technologically without violating (or re-wiring our perception of) a few privacy concerns here and there. And Facebook, along with many other technology companies, have the right to invest, research, and build solutions that further us culturally and technologically. But there are very important considerations we need to keep in check, primarily with regards to our inherent right to privacy.

In a recent piece on smart homes (starring tech like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Google Home) by Paul Sarconi for Wired¹, there is a “note” about privacy:

If your paramount concern in life is privacy, turn back now. Google Home and Amazon Echo are constantly listening, and they send some of what you say back to the mothership. But you know what? This is just another scootch down the slippery slope you stepped on when you signed up for Facebook, bought your first book on Amazon, and typed “symptoms of shingles” into a search box. Tech companies have always asked us to give up a little privacy, a little data, in exchange for their wondrous services. Maybe homebots are the breaking point. But the things Alexa can do — so convenient! One bit of advice: Before the gang shows up to plan the casino heist, hit the device’s mute button.

Sure, it’s a note that reads like: yeah, this is all great but you are no longer in control of your data exhaust, your digital communications, your shared and stored photos, your behavior and spoken words in your own home, but the superpower convenience of kindly asking Alexa to order new deodorant is too tempting to dismiss.

So where and how, indeed, do we begin talking about regulation? This isn’t about stifling innovation. I still dream about hovercrafts². But I am talking about process transparency and clarity of intent. It is inevitable that all companies will continue to mine, test, and use data for all kinds of innovations that make their way into products and services we’ll all use to make our lives better and more convenient. But if we don’t have an understanding of what we’re signing up for in terms and conditions of services we use, the implications of digital storage for notes and photos and communications with friends, or how using a device’s conveniences will require forfeiting our privately spoken words and thoughts, then we put more vulnerabilities into not only the hands of corporations, but also of governments and more malicious groups that could aim to hack and compromise that data. Without transparency into how this data is provided, accessed, secured, and shared, we shouldn’t feel confident in continuing to invest our dollars and attention into these companies’ products and services.

In his last article before retirement, the personal technology writer Walt Mossberg declares a call to action to which we all should attentively listen:

My best answer is that, if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health, and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the US, it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.

Footnotes

1. Oddly enough, I can’t seem to locate the article on the Wired site for linking, but it’s in the June 2017 print edition ↩︎
2. Even though their real-life deployment is nearly impossible at this point due to infrastructure. ↩︎

In the transitional years from the early smartphone era to now, sites tried finding a middle ground in design between too mobile-friendly (stripped down and hardly functioning) and too desktop-reliant (don’t just design sites for a large screen and tons of Internet bandwidth). This middle ground ended up becoming “responsive design”, an approach to web development that attempted to streamline page weight (for mobile) but have the flexibility of displaying the same amount of content, and typically loading the same number of scripts, across device screen sizes. For most circumstances, this was the right path to take. It wasn’t a mobile vs desktop world we were heading towards; it was a mobility world we had already entered, where the only thing that really differentiated access to websites and apps was the size of the screen and the interface accessibly (finger touch vs mouse click).

Unfortunately for everybody, this was (perhaps unintentionally) interpreted by developers that they no longer had to worry about page loading, script-rendering, and other complexities in web design contributing to page speed because an iPhone was just as powerful as your everyday, off-the-shelf laptop. Oh, and don’t mind the increasing complexity of ad networks and the growing inundation of ad placements and tracking scripts to load — any smartphone can handle those, too.

Except that this shift has left the web wounded. Everything seems to take longer to load, websites break easily, taps on mobile don’t register sometimes, and register other times, and so on and so on. I’ve written about site speed and performance before. It’s a growing problem. So much of a problem that the tech titans have taken note. Facebook attempted to remedy this and save the publishing industry by pushing hard on its Instant Articles initiative, a closed-garden approach to offering publishers a speedy alternative to their own laggard websites’ article templates and Facebook-sized reach. Apple built-in an iOS app called ‘News’, offering its take on the age-old RSS feed readers, but layering on pretty templates that were fast. And Google, the all-mighty search behemoth and purveyor of results that include the news, has aggressively pushed publishers, retailers, and websites of all kinds towards its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative, which is essentially an open source project encouraging the creation of streamlined HTML pages to reduce clutter and external JavaScript but while also running Google-only JavaScript and reassuring full reader analytics.

So How are Things Going?

Two years later, Instant Articles don’t seem to be working out as planned, as The Verge contemptuously bemoans:

But it's unclear if any huge advantage ever materialized. Facebook decided from the start that publishing a story using the Instant Articles format would not automatically improve its ranking in the News Feed. In practice, Instant Articles typically do reach more people, because people are more likely to read and share them. But as the format spread, competition increased, and any advantage to using Instant Articles was blunted within months. Given that Instant Articles were designed to carry less advertising than mobile web articles, broad reach was essential to ensure publishers would profit from the format. The reach just never arrived.

Apple’s ‘News’ app was initially off to a rocky start) in usage, but not much has been reported since. While arguments have risen about Apple’s role of gatekeeper in the news ecosystem, it seems that most publishers have welcomed it as an easy secondary publishing platform that permits a “bring your own advertising” model and subscription service options that are hard to ignore.

But what about Google. Google’s AMP project is more controversial than both Facebook and Apple’s forays, as it threatens web development integrity on the open web. A rant from The Register describes the plight as thus:

Announced in 2015, duly open sourced and integrated into Google’s mobile search, Google has pitched AMP as a way to speed the mobile web. It employs something the ads slinger calls AMP HTML that the firm describes as a “new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies.”

What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web.

If that appeals to you, here's what you need to do. First, get rid of all your HTML and render your content in a subset of HTML that Google has approved along with a few tags it invented. Because what do those pesky standards boards know? Trust Google, it knows what it's doing. And if you don't, consider yourself not part of the future of search results.

Sure, you might say: making the web faster is a noble vision. And yes, we unanimously agree, a faster web is better. But as the Register points out, “as with anything that eschews standards for its own modified version thereof, it's about lock-in. Tons of pages in Google AMP markup mean tons of pages that are optimized specifically for Google and indexed primarily by Google and shown primarily to Google users.” AMP is primarily a way for Google to combat lock-in systems from Facebook and Apple. The tech giants want everybody’s attention. But if you have an app feeding off standards (like Apple News), there isn’t a threat to disrupting the entire Internet’s web standards and rallying them around a controlled framework. We all want the Internet to be decentralized, right? Then you have to look at adopting AMP as an opposite way to do that. AMP is a choice for [Google search] inclusion, and there are monetary and attention-capturing benefits to doing so for brands and publishers. But forking your web development to accommodate a tech company’s recommended framework, a framework that is favored by that tech company’s mysterious organic algorithm for surfacing news results, is something else entirely. We’ve already seen what reckless strains of SEO has done to the web. Let’s not repeat those mistakes with reckless adoption of Google’s AMP HTML framework.

AMP also is a branding nightmare. Tapping a link from Google search results (again, the only way to access these versions of canonical pages) loads the page from Google's cached AMP index nearly instantaneously. Sharing that page simply shares the Google cached URL of the article, and trying to read more from that author/publisher is a frustration in interaction design -- the permalink button to go to the brand's actual domain is an unintuitive icon, and branding itself is obfuscated by the AMP framework's content-first philosophy. So what's in it for brands aside from handing over the keys to Google, and continuing to strain their own websites' development with the same shitty inundation of scripts, ad networks, unfriendly mobile paradigms, and page speed performance?

This debate has only just begun. But several of the Internet’s finest warriors are working on alternative solutions. The first of this anti-AMP movement is brought to you by a thoughtful fuck you project by Pinboard’s founder, Maciej Ceglowski. He basically re-created Google’s original AMP demonstration page without any of the forced Google scripts, and it represents the same performance. Maybe if we encouraged web developers to focus on leaner, cleaner designs (melding the pre-iPhone days with a more careful post-iPhone responsive design mantra) we could get to a better place for everyone. I’ll leave you with Ceglowski’s snarky comment at the bottom of his faux-AMP demo site:

Dozens of publishers and technology companies have come together to create this unfortunate initiative. However, it is 2015, and websites should be small and fast enough to render on mobile devices rapidly using minimal resources. The only reason they are not is because we are addicted to tracking, surveillance, gratuitous animation, and bloated, inefficient frameworks. Requiring a readable version of these sites is a great idea. Let's take it one step further and make it the only version.

Update: May 25, 2017

A mildly-related update here from TechCrunch on Facebook's plans for support for Google AMP and Apple News. Essentially they're trying to make it easier (and their own solution interoperable between competing formats) for publishers to more easily manage these specially-formatted content distribution channels. This comes in the form of an Instant Articles SDK (software development kit), enabling developers to "take the markup that’s used to build Facebook’s Instant Articles and use it to create the code that’s needed to build for AMP and Apple News." Note that Facebook would prefer you start with content distribution and formatting within its ecosystem, and use the Instant Articles SDK to output to competitor ones.

TechCrunch points out:

[T]he extension’s launch also comes at a time when a number of high-profile publishers have begun to abandon Facebook’s format, due to its lack of monetization options.

In April, for example, it was reported that Forbes, Hearst, The New York Times and others have backed out of Instant Articles. Other major media organizations including Bloomberg, The WSJ, ESPN, CBS News, NPR, Financial Times, and VICE News have also been holdouts, running little to no content in Facebook’s format. Others who have used the format have been winding down their support; and last month, The Guardian pulled out of both Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News.

If you use several services and apps, you’ve probably been inundated with requests from the company to refer friends or acquaintances to try the product. This may come off as annoying or invasive. But this growing trend isn’t something to shrug off — it can be a legitimate, respectful means of proliferating their product to qualified prospects (your friends) while taking a firm stance against feeding the online advertising monster. Sure, not every company has this larger notion in mind, but a recent post from the co-founder of Basecamp (previously 37signals, RIP) had me contemplating this tactic in an entirely different context.

At first, it seems like most companies are trying to game you to hand over your friends’ emails to solicit their product. For urban dwellers, Uber and Lyft do this incessantly with ubiquitous banners and reminders to earn credits or money off future rides if you refer a friend. You can make money by doing so, but you compromise very little by abstaining. When these were actually new services, I’m sure quite a few of us handed out our referral codes to friends to incentivize them to sign up for free credits themselves, and backpay our selves with referral credits. No harm done. Everyone wins. And keep in mind this is far from a ponzi scheme or a multi-level marketing ploy. It’s a simple referral or “influencer” marketing program.

From this process, we are all voting with our trust — the company in question is voting on you, the customer and trusted user of the product already, and you are voting on your esteemed referral. We aren’t passing anything along aside from an email to a company we trust with our own email, and put our weight in a recommendation that we find valuable or useful to another vetted individual. The companies investing in you are putting their media dollars in something that is more humane than into the massive online advertising machine that exists today, the latter of which is oftentimes fraught with all kinds of digital rights considerations.

So when Jason Fried stated the following, it resonated and, frankly, made sense:

Every dollar you spend is a vote, and we were casting hundreds of thousands of votes for big companies that are tracking people’s every step, every move, every curiosity, and every detail of their lives. Fuck that.

Indeed. As a company, you can do as you please, spend your money where you deem it most necessary and effective, but to take a stance like this is commendable. Sure, it’s a referral program and Basecamp is using their current, loyal customer base for new leads into its productivity platform. But it isn’t for credit on next month’s payment; rather, it’s straight cash. They’re paying you to recommend a product to which you’re already loyal.

If this sounds familiar, the notion is certainly nothing new. Amazon might be running the most extensive referral system on the planet with their Amazon Associates Program, essentially an opt-in affiliate network. You add a tracking parameter to every URL of a product you reference or recommend on your site, and if there’s a purchase made, you get a kick-back. The difference here is that Amazon is also one of the largest data collection conglomorates, and this program comes at a cost — Amazon is tracking you and your referrals, along with everyone else who engages with either the Amazon.com domain or an Amazon ad placement anywhere on the web. (In addition, they track you if you click on someone else’s affiliate link, whether you knew it was an Amazon affiliate link or not.)

So what’s so grandiose about Basecamp’s philosophy? They previously had “experimented” with running ads on the Internet's large ad networks (Google, Facebook, and Twitter), but after spending some six-figures, they stopped:

Why give money to Facebook, Google, and Twitter when we can give it right back to our customers? They’re better advocates for Basecamp than any ad we can write. They’re not a platform, they’re people who know other people who can surely benefit from Basecamp just like they are.

That’s fluff, you might say. But they made a conscious decision to cease voting with their money to feed ad ecosystem, and instead put that money in the hands of current customers. And they aren’t the only ones pursuing this kind of referral mentality. Another example is Simple, a financial solution for “saving easily” and “banking beautifully.” They have a fairly unique proposition for referrals — instead of paying you cash, their referral program yields you a “handcrafted home for your Simple card.” In collaboration with Tanner Goods, Simple sends you and your referred friend a custom leather wallet. It’s a wry play on the debit card you receive when you become a Simple customer, as well as the provision of a handsome gift to anyone exerting the effort to refer someone to the company’s CRM.

The defiance against investing more money into advertising models that rely on tracking, data collection, and data sharing is a welcome tactic by companies to earn respect for their customers as well as future prospects. These non-traditional referral programs are clever ways to circumvent the expected normality of affiliate systems engineered by Amazon and others in the modern era. If only we voted more of our attention away from constant interaction with the platforms deploying such ad networks, we’d have the leverage to demand more transparency, accountability, and performance from the services we use.

Converting Facebook data into money is harder than it sounds, mostly because the vast bulk of your user data is worthless. Turns out your blotto-drunk party pics and flirty co-worker messages have no commercial value whatsoever.

But occasionally, if used very cleverly, with lots of machine-learning iteration and systematic trial-and-error, the canny marketer can find just the right admixture of age, geography, time of day, and music or film tastes that demarcate a demographic winner of an audience. The “clickthrough rate”, to use the advertiser’s parlance, doesn’t lie.

Yadda yadda, we've heard this all before. It's how most ad platforms operate these days -- harnessing machine-learning and all sorts of other [likely] hobbled together algorithms that provide conduits for proprietary data to advertisers and agencies to use in various campaigns to micro-target audiences and potential customers.

This is probably where privacy advocates should come shouting that this is a misuse of personal data. But is it? Facebook has provided its users a free service monetized by users' own tenacity to share and provide Facebook (and, subsequently, its advertisers) everything about themselves. While you could argue that some of the data provided is "personally identifiable information" (PII), Facebook hasn't forced you to share that information. And since users provide that information, Facebook can more or less do what it wants with it. Garcia-Martinez tends to agree, arguing that processing profile traits and post contents to inform demographic and audience triggers can easily be done with programming, so should its application matter to the masses?

The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable. Which is what happened with Trump and the “fake news” accusation: even the implacable Zuck had to give in and introduce some anti-fake news technology. But they’ll slip that trap as soon as they can. And why shouldn’t they? At least in the case of ads, the data and the clickthrough rates are on their side.

There's also a link to another Guardian post that discusses how Facebook shares teens' emotional states with advertisers (likely derived by some kind of algorithm-based sentiment model). If we've learned anything at all about algorithms, it's that they can misinform as often as they can inform. A user uproar could certainly change the fate of data sharing with advertisers, but I don't see this happening until something truly offensive occurs, probably akin to Target's mishap a few years ago. And even that won't stop the use of data to inform advertising campaigns and the marketing of products/services on these platforms. The temptation (and intrinsic need) to use data is too fierce. And the rate of engagement on these platforms, with the amount of information being provided on a daily basis, is unprecidented by anything similar in human history.

While platforms like Facebook continue to require our attention to survive, they increasingly also need us to provide data to feed its monetary engine. The two are almost inexplicably tied together. Time and tolerance will tell how this shakes out.

Can most of this be blamed on the CEO? According to that profile, probably:

But the previously unreported encounter with Mr. Cook showed how Mr. Kalanick was also responsible for risk-taking that pushed Uber beyond the pale, sometimes to the very brink of implosion.

Crossing that line was not a one-off for Mr. Kalanick. According to interviews with more than 50 current and former Uber employees, investors and others with whom the executive had personal relationships, Mr. Kalanick, 40, is driven to the point that he must win at whatever he puts his mind to and at whatever cost — a trait that has now plunged Uber into its most sustained set of crises since its founding in 2009.

As long as deleting apps and still having the potentiality of being tracked by the deleted company is a threat to privacy and security, I hope technology gate companies like Apple continue to fight the good fight.

Update (APRIL 24, 2017)

Additional speculation (and clarification) from the fallout of the New York Times profile article from John Gruber (Apple pundit extraordinaire):

That sounds like Uber was doing the identifying and “tagging” (whatever that is) after the app had been deleted and/or the device wiped, but I think what it might — might — actually mean is merely that the identification persisted after the app had been deleted and/or the device wiped. That’s not supposed to be technically possible — iOS APIs for things like the UDID and even the MAC address stopped reporting unique identifiers years ago, because they were being abused by privacy invasive ad trackers, analytics packages, and entitled shitbags like Uber. That’s wrong, and Apple was right to put an end to it, but it’s far less sensational than the prospect of Uber having been able to identify and “tag” an iPhone after the Uber app had been deleted. The latter scenario only seems technically possible if other third-party apps were executing surreptitious code that did this stuff through Uber’s SDK, or if the Uber app left behind malware outside the app’s sandbox. I don’t think that’s the case, if only because I don’t think Apple would have hesitated to remove Uber from the App Store if it was infecting iPhones with hidden phone-home malware.

John's whole piece is worth reading if you want much clarity on what Uber was presumably doing. Curious what their tactics were/are for other phone manufacturers.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html?_r=1

He went on to say that if you regulated the Internet like a utility, "we wouldn't have the Internet". His nonsensical retort to his constituents proves an incredulous disconnect between our elected officials and the reality of our country's people. This is typical Republican rhetoric applied to what should be a nonpartisan issue. The Internet is woven into the fabric of our society, and throwing blanket statements like it's optional for anyone in this country to use it is unfathomably stupid. Perhaps for an old man, using the Internet is not nearly as intrinsic to living day-to-day as it is for the rest of us, but it is concerning that such a man is contributing to the rules that govern our privacy and the public utility that is the Internet.

The ruling is disappointing, and comes at a crucial time in our democracy where the intersection of connected devices, surveillance, and our right to privacy and dignity has become an increasing important fork in political decision-making. It will continue to be an area requiring, justifiably, government regulation. No one is saying choice is a bad thing here, but applying such rationale to ISPs' clamoring for advertising "innovation" is ridiculous. ISPs are feeling pressure from advertising giants like Facebook and Google, and are begging (sorry, lobbying) to gain a foothold to justify their existence as something more meaningful than being an expensive pipe to the Internet. We also can see how well this strategy is working for Verizon and AT&T, both telecommunications behemoths that are investing heavily in content and lobbying hard against net neutrality to justify business expansion to their shareholders since they've sunken into a similar dilemma.

The bullshit doesn't end here.