In short, Qin says that he called AppleCare to close his account the day before the government-owned Guizhou-Cloud Big Data company took over Chinese iCloud account data, only to get into an argument with an Apple representative who was “really curious” why Qin didn’t “want to use Guizhou-Cloud Big Data’s service.”
The advisor then allegedly used his iCloud login information to hack his account, which contained both sensitive information and logins for other accounts. If that wasn’t bad enough, the advisor then called to blackmail Qin, saying that he would release the information if Qin didn’t comply with his demands.
While early forms of typography date to the mid-15th century, word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word have made various fonts familiar to pretty much anyone who has come into contact with a computer in the last, oh, 20 years or so.
But, there’s a growing online community that’s expanding the reaches of lettering; creating swirling, curling fonts that are as much works of art as they are tools to create literal words.
And they’re turning these creations into careers.
To a large extent, I believe the design industry was better off for this shake-up. The green felt and the linen–oh, the linen–had probably become too much. Besides, as in all areas, we sometimes need a good paradigm shift to make us think differently.
But I’d argue that the great simplification of the visual interface had an air of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hold your pitchforks and let me explain.
Unless it's some strange point of pride that you've got 20 items in your Mac's menubar, you need Bartender 3. It's a simple app that hides away menubar icons until you need them and so both saves space and stops distractions. Plus Bartender 3 does this so well that you'll never want to go back.
These apps aren't a substitute for the sophisticated face-tracking tech that lets iPhone X users animate the pile of poop, but they're guaranteed to annoy your friends less than those Animoji videos.
In 1972, Carl Sagan was preparing to send humans into space. The Pioneer missions were unmanned, sure—but NASA had asked Sagan to design a depiction of Earth's inhabitants for the trip, just in case the spacecraft ran across some aliens. He designed two nude figures with the help of his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, and his friend Frank Drake. Linda drew the woman to have Asian features, and the man African, according to Carl’s memoirs—though both ended up looking suspiciously European, with haircuts characteristic of the 1970s. Not unlike Sagan himself.
The Sagans were encountering an old problem. Any time the brains behind an encyclopedia (or a SETI mission) need to represent humanity, they have to somehow encompass the whole of the species in a single form—a type specimen, as biologists would call it.
Which is why the editors of the “human” entry on Wikipedia were having such a hard time in 2003. The crowdsourced encyclopedia, in theory, offers a solution to the problem of representation; no single writer has control over the way in which a subject is presented. But still: They had to choose a single image to lead the entry. And whatever photo they went with would inevitably leave out most of the diversity and cultural nuance that makes humanity beautiful and interesting.
Some humans are terrible.
~
Luckily, some humans are not terrible. In fact, some are even great. And I am eternally grateful they exist. Especially the great humans that we cross path with.
~
But, some other humans are terrible.
~
Thanks for reading.