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The Thirty-Days Edition Saturday, May 20, 2017

Apple Allegedly Retaining Deleted iCloud Notes Past The 30-day Grace Period, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

In a blog post, the company explains that using a version of its Phone Breaker tool, it extracted notes that were outside of the thirty-day grace period. ElcomSoft writes that its tool extracted nearly 50 notes that had been deleted by the user over a month ago. In fact, the oldest note it was able to retrieve was from 2012. What this means is that Apple is holding on to deleted notes for much longer than it should be and it’s unclear why.

What The World’s Most Avid Pizza Box Collector Thinks Of Apple’s Patented Pizza Box, by Herman Wong, Washington Post

The vents: “You’ve got those ports on the top, which are sort of toward the center and in a circle, and they seem to be located around the point where you have the most moisture build up. Standard pizza boxes have their vents toward their corners. And if you look at a pizza, and you look through those corner slots, you see nothing or you are looking at crust. The moisture’s not coming from there; the moisture is really coming from the tomatoes. If you have it toward the center that’s a really smart idea, that’s cool.”

Information Superhighway

Instagram Worst Social Media App For Young People’s Mental Health, by Kara Fox, CNN

Instagram -- the image-saturated app with over 700 million users worldwide -- topped the list in terms of negative impact, most notably among young women, stated the report, published Friday.

Instagram draws young women to "compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and Photoshopped versions of reality," said Matt Keracher, author of the report.

‘The Internet Is Broken’: @Ev Is Trying To Salvage It, by David Streitfeld, New York Times

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

His goal is to break this pattern. “If I learn that every time I drive down this road I’m going to see more and more car crashes,” he says, “I’m going to take a different road.”

But a new road may have other problems. It may, for instance, be a dead end.

Stuff

How Does Google Assistant Stack Up Against Siri On An iPhone?, by Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge

As things stand right now, between Siri’s advantages when it comes to native integration to things like messaging and music, along with the system-wide availability that makes it accessible at any time means that in most cases, it’s easier to use Apple’s assistant. While Assistant does clearly best Siri when it comes to overall knowledge and support for Google services, (including Maps) the current implementation just isn’t so dramatically better at these tasks that it’s worth the extra inconvenience of working around Apple’s sandboxing.

The Only Thing Worse Than The Fidget Spinner Craze Is Fidget Spinner Apps, by Kelly Beck, Mashable

In a matter of weeks, fidget spinners went from something almost nobody had ever heard of to the must-have toy of the season. The anxiety-reducing handheld spinners are so ubiquitous that dozens of developers are trying to cash in on the phenomenon with fidget-spinner themed mobile apps.

People are into it, apparently. So into it that the top game in the iOS app store is a virtual fidget spinner that doesn't do anything but spin.

Notes

This Is The Story Behind That Double Push Alert The New York Times Sent About Comey’s Trump Memo, by Joseph Lichterman, Nieman Lab

“We know a lot of people get their news from pushes predominantly, said Eric Bishop, a Times assistant editor for mobile. “I think being able to tell two sides of this story — one that explained the main news and then the other that had that color with the quote — gave people a second element of the story, and if they didn’t swipe into read it, they knew more about the full story,” he said. “It also was another entry point, another compelling aspect of it that might make you want to swipe in and read it.”

Combined, the alerts were among the most swiped-through alerts the Times has sent this year, Bishop said. The two alerts drove 41 percent of the story’s total traffic in the Times’ iPhone app; about 56 percent of the total swipes came from the first alert with the remainder coming from the second.

The White House Will Meet With Tech Execs For Advice On Giving The Government A Digital Upgrade, by Tony Romm, Recode

The White House plans to huddle with top executives from Apple, Facebook, Google and other tech giants next month to brainstorm ways that the U.S. government can put more of its “citizen services” online and tackle thorny policy issues like high-skilled immigration.

Both items are part of a lengthy agenda — obtained by Recode on Friday — that awaits the inaugural gathering of the American Technology Council, an effort by President Donald Trump to modernize the inner-workings of Washington that’s being spearheaded by his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Bottom of the Page

When inserting a micro-USB plug, probability teaches me that, at random, there's a 50-50 chance that I'll get it right the first time.

Turns out, I get it wrong about 80% of the time. Which includes times when I plugged in the correct direction, but the plug didn't quite fit, and I thought it was the wrong way around, twisted the cable 180 degrees, and found out that I was correct initially.

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Turns out, the world is broken.

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Thanks for reading.