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The Two-Factor-Is-Not-Enough Edition Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Two-factor Authentication Is A Mess, by Russell Brandom, The Verge

Nearly all major web services now provide some form of two-factor authentication, but they vary greatly in how well they protect accounts. Dedicated hackers have little problem bypassing through the weaker implementations, either by intercepting codes or exploiting account-recovery systems. We talk about two-factor like aspirin — a uniform, all-purpose fix that’s straightforward to apply — but the reality is far more complex. The general framework still offers meaningful protection, but it’s time to be honest about its limits. In 2017, just having two-factor is no longer enough.

Why I Had To Switch To iPhoneSE, by Om Malik

Over past few months, I have been experiencing increasing pain in my left wrist and thumb. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night in extreme pain. I thought it was a broken bone or something like that. I mean it was painful and it forced me to visit my doctor According to my doctor is because of overusing my left thumb on the phone. She pointed out it is only a matter of time before this turns into a full-blown case of carpal tunnel syndrome and I will need surgery to fix it. So I have a brace on my left hand and a smaller phone will allow me to do a lot less than the big phone and hopefully I will heal sooner.

Over Many Objections, W3C Approves DRM For HTML5, by Peter Bright, Ars Technica

EME is not itself a DRM system. Rather, it is a specification that allows JavaScript applications to interact with DRM modules to handle things like encryption keys and decrypting the protected data. Microsoft, Google, and Adobe all have DRM modules that comply with the spec.

The decision to bless the EME specification as a W3C standard was made last week in spite of substantial opposition from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Many opponents of this regard any attempt to impose such technical restrictions as an affront to the open Web. But HTML's inventor and W3C's director, Tim Berners-Lee, decided that the objections to EME were not sufficient to justify blocking the spec, giving it his, and hence the organization's, approval.

Pretty Pictures

Desktop, Screensaver, And Browser Tab Eye Candy For Your Mac, by Adam C. Engst, TidBITS

With the right software, you don’t even have to build your own collection of images, and you can decorate not just your Desktop, but your screensaver and new browser tabs.

Look Back At Mac OS X’s History With 5K Versions Of All The Default Wallpapers, by Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge

Apple aficionado Stephen Hackett of 512Pixels, in partnership with Twitter user @forgottentowel, has created a centralized place to find upscaled 5K resolution versions of every main OS X wallpaper ever made. They’re ideal on a Retina display with your current-gen iMac or MacBook Pro.

Stuff

Mindscope Review, by John Voorhees, MacStories

John Goering, the developer of Mindscope, describes the app as a magnet board for your brain. That’s a good description as far as it goes, but it doesn’t entirely capture what is possible with his app. With wiki-like cross-links and the hierarchical depth of an outliner, Mindscope offers a dimensionality to organizing text that isn’t possible with tools like Scapple.

Waze For iOS Adds Voice Recorder Feature For Custom Turn-by-turn Directions, by Jordan Kahn, 9to5Mac

The feature allows users to record their own voice prompts that can be used, for example, as turn-by-turn directions while navigating:

Notes

Capitalism The Apple Way Vs. Capitalism The Google Way, by Mihir A. Desai, The Atlantic

The paths taken by Apple and Google manifest alternative answers to one of the main questions facing capitalism today: What should public companies do with all of the money that they’re making? Even as corporations have brought in enormous profits, there has been a shortage of lucrative opportunities for investment and growth, creating surpluses of cash. This imbalance has resulted in the pile-up of $2 trillion on corporate balance sheets. As companies continue to generate more profits than they need to fund their own growth, the question becomes: Who will decide what to do with all those profits—managers or investors? At Google, where the founders and executives reign supreme, insulated by their governance structure, the answer is the former. At Apple, where the investors are in charge because of the absence of one large manager-shareholder, it’s the latter. (To be clear, even though Apple’s previous efforts to stifle investors’ concerns were no longer tenable, the company can still afford to spend mightily on research and development.)

Why has each company taken the approach that it has? These two strategies reflect different reactions to an issue central to modern capitalism, the separation of ownership and control. In short, owners aren’t managers, as they once were when businesses existed on a smaller scale. And when owners have to outsource running the company to executives, this leads to what economists call “the principal-agent problem,” which refers to the issues that come up when one person, group, or company—an “agent”—can make decisions that significantly affect another—a “principal.”