MyAppleMenu

The Djinn's-Shattered-Bottle Edition Sunday, March 27, 2016

This War On Math Is Still Bullshit, by Jon Evans, TechCrunch

Let us focus on that unfortunate but inarguable truth. Let us not talk about government overreach, or technology trumping law, or libertarianism, or the crypto wars of the 90s. Let’s focus on how encryption is merely math, which anyone can do, and let’s explain how world-class “military-grade” implementations of that math are already available, for free, to anyone and everyone. Whether you like it or not, that djinn is well and truly out of its shattered bottle, and no “elegant solution” might squeeze it back in. No one can win a war on math, so please let’s not start one. Everyone will lose.

Beyond Surveillance: What Could Happen If Apple Loses To The FBI, by Danny Yadron, The Guardian

It’s about who can manipulate the 1s and 0s that control our ever-increasing number of devices that track how we drive, when we’re home and if the door is locked.

“We already have a hard enough time trusting our technology and understanding what it’s doing,” says Soltani, who worked on regulation for the Federal Trade Commission with a brief stint at the White House. “What the government is asking Apple to do in some way is to further undermine that.”

Your Favorite Neighborhood Fruit Company

Apple Expansion 'Game Changer' For Cupertino, San Jose, Sunnyvale, by George Avalos, San Jose Mercury News

Apple's plans for a new "spaceship" campus in Cupertino are certain to create an attention-getting headquarters icon and another Silicon Valley landmark, but the company's push into neighboring cities such as San Jose and Sunnyvale is likely to also transform those communities with dramatic new office complexes and high-paying jobs.

Fake Jobs In Real Startup

My Year In Startup Hell, by Dan Lyons, Fortune

If you made a movie about a laid-off, sad-sack, fiftysomething guy who is given one big chance to start his career over, the opening scene might begin like this: a Monday morning in April, sunny and cool, with a brisk wind blowing off the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.  The man—gray hair, unstylishly cut; horn-rimmed glasses; button-down shirt—pulls his Subaru Outback into a parking garage and, palms a little sweaty, grabs his sensible laptop backpack and heads to the front door of a gleaming, renovated historic redbrick building. It is April 15, 2013, and that man is me. I’m heading for my first day of work at HubSpot, the first job I’ve ever had that wasn’t in a newsroom.

Stuff

OS X 10.11 (El Capitan): Finder Fails To Record First Few Keystrokes Typed Immediately After Creating New Folder, by Pierre Igot, Betalogue

How on earth is this acceptable in a modern operating system? It’s one thing to have speed/responsiveness issues. It’s quite another to fail to include standard features such as a keyboard buffer in order to minimize the impact of such issues on the actual usability of the software.

Flip Into The Digital Era Of Fashion, by Faye Harris, Huffington Post

The news and magazine application that’s operable on a smartphone, tablet, and desktop will provide a visual voice for the students using cutting-edge digital and social media skills, quintessential to an increasingly image-driven culture. Digital magazines have an important place in the world of fashion and social media, says Mia Quagliarello, Head of Curation and Community at Flipboard. “They are an effortless and beautiful way to package and share classwork and social media activity, publicly or in private groups.”

Moments App Beneficial For Sharing Photos, by Melissa Parker, Flor-Ala

Develop

The Dream Of Usable Email Encryption Is Still A Work In Progress, by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard

Now, it’s been almost two years, and encryption is making headlines thanks to the public fight between the FBI and Apple over the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The controversial case has prompted several tech companies not only to support Apple in court, but also promise even more encryption in their services.

Yet, Google and Yahoo’s projects on secure end-to-end encrypted email have yet to see the light of day. That’s why some are starting to question how much Google and Yahoo really care about making this happen.

Layoffs, by Keith Gregory

Layoffs are a coldly rational response to the prospect of running out of money. Sometimes they happen well in advance of a crisis, sometimes they happen when the company is on the brink of bankruptcy. But in either case, being laid off simply means that the skills you bring to the table are perceived as being less valuable than the associated cost of your salary and benefits. I realize that's not much comfort when you're the person being laid off.

Notes

The Race Is On To Control Artificial Intelligence, And Tech’s Future, by John Markoff and Steve Lohr, New York Times

If true believers in A.I. are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls A.I. could steer the tech industry for years to come.

The Tesla Dividend: Better Internet Access, by Susan Crawford, BackChannel

For all those cars to do their jobs, we’re going to need fiber high-speed Internet access connections deep into every neighborhood in the country.

Bottom of the Page

Software is hard.

~

Thanks for reading.