Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld, pulled together this extensive list of things you can ask Siri. This is worth a scan, just to make sure you have a sense of Siri’s current range.
How many of these commands will work on HomePod? I tried a number of these, and I was actually surprised by how many did work. Cool.
First things first, this set of rankings is based on data from GitHub and StackOverflow. Read the post for the details on how this data was collected.
There are plenty of other ways to assess the popularity of programming languages, but this seems a reasonable approach.
It’s notable that Swift has tied Objective-C. As the post says:
Finally, the apprentice is now the master. Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, as Swift merely tied the language it effectively replaced – Objective C – rather than passing it. Still, it’s difficult to view this run as anything but a changing of the guard.
Pass this along to your dev friends.
Before we dig into the linked post, it might help to know a bit about Ken Segall. From his bio:
Working with Steve Jobs as his ad agency’s creative director for twelve years spanning NeXT and Apple, he led the team behind Apple’s legendary Think different campaign, and set Apple down the i-way by naming the iMac.
That said, here’s Ken Segall, from the linked post:
The Apple story of the week is the new HomePod ad. Four minutes in length, I’m not sure you can call it an ad, but it’s out there and getting mostly positive reactions. Directed by Spike Jonze, psychedelic expanding sets, cool music, emotional dance … what’s not to like?
And:
It’s not that I don’t like it. I think it’s beautifully produced, like all Apple ads. But it does make me feel like I’ve been here before. Or, more accurately, that I’ve been here many times before. Like I’m stuck in an infinite loop of Apple dancing ads.
Over the years, Apple has given us a virtual stream of ads in which music inspires someone to dance. The scenery changes, laws of physics are increasingly challenged, but the basic concept remains the same.
At least that’s been my overall impression. So the new HomePod ad moved me to action. After I finished dancing, I nosed around to see if my memory matched the reality.
At the very least, this is a fascinating walk through the history of Apple’s music advertising. Of course Apple’s ads will have a lot of dance in them. Advertising is a visual medium and if you are pitching music (and lots of Apple’s products involve music in some fashion), dance is a terrific visual storyteller.
So what’s the problem here?
In my opinion, a company like Apple can take two approaches to advertising. It can start thinking about what works for the mainstream audience—like dancing and celebrities (who are also frequently summoned by Apple these days)—or it can use its mass-popularity to take the same risks today as it did when it was the underdog.
The latter is the Apple that captured so many hearts.
And:
The iPod Silhouette campaign changed Apple advertising in a huge way. It was virtually the first Apple campaign that didn’t feature a lot of white space, a gorgeous product shot and clever words. Yes, it was a lot of dance, but it was a totally fresh take on dance.
Fair enough. This is more of a quest for a fresh take, something as groundbreaking and different as the Silhouette campaign.
No matter how you feel about this, scroll through Ken’s post, take a look back at some of Apple’s past ads. Some great stuff there.
Dave Winer:
I’ve been writing about Google’s efforts to deprecate HTTP, the protocol of the web. This is a summary of why I am opposed to this.
DaveW’s take on Google’s pitch:
- Something bad could happen to my pages in transit from a HTTP server to the user’s web browser.
- It’s not hard to convert to HTTPS and it doesn’t cost a lot.
- Google is going to warn people about my site being “not secure.” So if I don’t want people to be scared away, I should bend to their will (as if the web were their platform).
The rest of the article is Dave’s rebuttal, a thoughtful read from a very smart someone who knows this stuff inside and out. A few bits:
Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don’t make the rules.
And:
A lot of the web consists of archives. Files put in places that no one maintains. They just work. There’s no one there to do the work that Google wants all sites to do.
And:
Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.
If you care about HTTP vs HTTPS, take a few minutes to read Dave Winer’s post. Then dig into Nick Heer’s excellent In Defence of Surfing the Insecure Web for a bit wider perspective.
Neither take is about bashing HTTPS, or about ditching security in any way. It’s about thinking carefully before ditching openness and about how decisions about the internet are and should be made.
Good stuff.
Peter Kafka, Recode:
Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs.
And:
Netflix isn’t an outlier, either. Last fall, for instance, YouTube said that its live TV service, which it had pitched as a mobile-first offering, was generating more than half of its streams on TVs.
The Netflix part is not a surprise to me. Netflix grew its brand with DVDs, inexorably tied to the TV. Add to that, the TV is (usually) the biggest screen in the house and set up as a social center, typically with comfortable chairs and couches facing the screen, with a table or two nearby for food/snacks.
But the YouTube live TV bit was a surprise. To me, that really shows the long-lasting pull of the TV, strong enough to pull a service born on your computer, over into the living room.
Kurt Wagner, Recode:
In a very casual Periscope livestream on Thursday, Dorsey said that he wants to verify everyone on Twitter, a continuation of the plan Twitter laid out a few years ago when it asked users to apply for verification online.
That program as been suspended since the fall, when Twitter got major backlash for verifying a few white supremacists. But it appears that Dorsey is open to relaunching some version of it once Twitter figures out how it should work.
“The intention is to open verification to everyone,” Dorsey said from a conference room at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. “And to do it in a way that is scalable [so] we’re not in the way and people can verify more facts about themselves and we don’t have to be the judge and imply any bias on our part.”
I do hope Twitter finds a way to solve the “identity” problem. I don’t have a problem allowing anonymity in public forums. But:
To me, anonymity is important. Think whistleblowers, not trolls. But if there’s a setting available to me that lets me limit my feed to only verified accounts, or shows verified tweets in a blue bubble and anonymous tweets in a grey bubble, I can’t help but see that as helpful in slowing the spread of malnews/hatespeech.
All that said, the road to a verified identity is fraught with difficulty. A nigh-impossible problem to solve. Here’s hoping.
I’ve been list-building again. Last week, I posted a tweet asking about Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide.
Yesterday, I tweeted about requests for improvements in the next rev of HomePod and HomePod Siri.
I’ve already gotten a huge wave of feedback. Clearly, people see the potential with HomePod and have some great ideas on making HomePod and Siri interaction better.
All that said, one topic that came up in the Twitter discussion was the ability to control your HomePod experience from your Mac or your iPhone. The idea would be to access the HomePod’s history and current queue, adding and deleting songs to control what’s coming.
Turns out, there is a way to do some of that.
Jason Snell, from this MacWorld article:
The HomePod doesn’t behave like most other Apple devices. Unlike the Apple Watch, there’s no dedicated app. It supports AirPlay, so it shows up in the list of audio sources—but it’s also remote-controllable like an Apple TV. And to configure it, you don’t visit the Settings app, but the Home app. Here’s a quick guide to where and how you can control the HomePod from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
In a nutshell, Jason walks you through the process of using the Home and Music apps, and Control Center (on iOS) or iTunes (on the Mac), to connect your iPhone/Mac to your HomePod, remote controlling content on HomePod without using AirPlay.
This feels like a hack to me. I do appreciate the ability to pick a song and add it to the HomePod queue, but I find the process confusing and insufficient.
Give me a HomePod app, please. One that shows the current queue and history, with a simple up next/add to queue feature. The keyword is simple. I shouldn’t need to juggle three different mechanisms, each with a unique and unrelated interface, just to visually manage my HomePod song experience.
Interesting side note: Playing around, I clearly was able to add songs to my HomePod while it was playing and, at the same time, have music playing on my iPhone. Then I powered down my iPhone and my HomePod stopped playing. I was not AirPlaying from my iPhone to my HomePod, yet the iPhone was clearly controlling my HomePod.
With my iPhone off, I asked HomePod Siri to play a song, and she did. When I powered down my iPhone, HomePod took back control. Interesting. And confusing.
UPDATE: With a bit of help from Kyle Gray, I got to the view of my HomePod up-next queue on my iPhone’s Music app. It’s there and it does work. Discoverability aside, I still would like to see a separate queue for my HomePod, one that lives beyond the moment. When I said, “Hey Siri, play Walk the Moon”, HomePod Siri complied, and that wiped the queue I’d constructed.
That said, if I say “Hey Siri, play Perfect Darkness by Fink next”, HomePod Siri will add that song to the queue and I can see that addition on my iPhone.
But if I say “Hey Siri, add some Steely Dan next”, I’ll get a river of Steely Dan songs added to the queue. Would love a “Siri, undo” command.
I’ve been tracking this one wit great interest. From the description:
Up for sale is one of the rarest Apple computers you’ll find. This is a prototype/clear Macintosh Portable (M5126) backlit. I’ve been collecting for many years now and only know of four of these left in the world. All of which, based on my knowledge, exist in private collections i.e. Lonnie Mimm’s, an individual in Europe, this one, my personal collection. This is one of my favorite Apple computers and the fact this is a clear prototype make is unbelievably rare. The chances of one of these coming up for sale again are very low.
And:
The engineer I bought this from worked on the Macintosh Portable project. Another buddy of his, who also worked on the project and was leaving the Apple, said he planned on throwing this prototype out. The person I bought this from literally found it in his buddies trash before he left Apple. The engineer I bought this from kept it in his office until he left Apple and kept it safe for 28 years.
Follow the link, check out the pictures. Beautiful. From what I can tell, this is the prototype of this device, which Apple sold from 1989 to 1991 at the incredibly expensive price of $7,300 (about $14,000 in today’s dollars). Crazy.
As I write this, the prototype has a current bid of $8,100. Don’t tempt me, internet.
Federico Viticci, MacStories:
In the first update since November 2017, Apple today released version 1.7.8 of Workflow, the powerful iOS automation app they acquired last year. The latest version, which is now available on the App Store, introduces a brand new Mask Image action, adds support for Things’ automation features, and improves the ability to extract text from PDFs using the company’s PDFKit framework, launched in iOS 11. While the unassuming version number may suggest a relatively minor update, Workflow 1.7.8 actually comes with a variety of noteworthy changes for heavy users of the app.
If you’ve never played with Workflow, take a few minutes and download it (it’s free).
And if you use Workflow, read Federico’s excellent walkthrough of what’s new.
CNET:
Need an incentive to exercise? Maybe the chance to land an Apple Watch could help.
That’s what UnitedHealthcare is hoping, anyway. The health insurance company is integrating the Apple Watch into its UnitedHealthcare Motion digital wellness program, which gives people access to activity trackers that then allow them to earn up to $1,000 a year if they meet daily walking goals.
And:
After paying tax and shipping, anyone enrolled in UnitedHealthcare Motion can get an Apple Watch Series 3 and have the option to apply earnings from the program toward buying the device. After that, their earnings are deposited into their health savings account or health reimbursement account to help cover out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Great move.
From the release:
The company conducted 756 audits spanning 30 countries and covering suppliers representing 95 percent of total spend. Apple’s efforts to raise standards are having a dramatic impact and the number of low-performing facilities decreased to just 1 percent.
Apple goes deeper into the supply chain to find issues and fix them more than any other company in its industry and each year it will do more to raise the bar and protect the people who make Apple products as well as the planet.
Indeed.
Buzzfeed:
Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.
Step through the article, read the tweets. This has all the elements of a next-gen horror movie. I can’t help but wonder if there’s IoT hacking going on here, if there’s not someone having a good laugh over this.
Or ghosts. Yeah, probably ghosts.
Craig Hockenberry:
Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.
First things first, this is a great look back at a moment in time. The iPhone shipped, but there was no SDK, the secret (VERY secret) sauce that let developers build apps that sat on the shoulders of Apple’s iPhone software designers.
Craig tells the story of that first wave of folks who found ways to pry the mysteries of iPhone OS mechanics from the clues of the native apps built by Apple, dumping the classes of those apps and working out how they did what they did.
This is the work of the giants on whose shoulders future iOS developers now stand.
Craig’s writeup resonated with me very strongly. Back then, my partner, Dave Wooldridge, and I were running a publishing company called SpiderWorks, shipping eBooks for developers before eBooks had quite hit the mainstream. SpiderWorks was bought by Apress and, as part of the deal, I convinced Apress to publish a book on iPhone programming I had been contemplating.
They agreed, and Jeff LaMarche and I signed an NDA with Apple to get a pre-release version of the iPhone OS (what it was called back then) SDK.
The core of the book, Beginning iPhone Development, was a series of 20 or so apps, each of which showed off a piece of the SDK. Jeff and I brainstormed the concepts, and he did all the heavy dev lifting, with my focus on writing and re-writing to crystallize the concepts, make sure the story was clear enough for beginners to follow without too much head-scratching.
The biggest problem we ran into was the combination of an NDA (which prevented us from discussing the SDK details with ANYONE) and a rapidly changing code base. Each new SDK Apple shared with us caused all our apps to break, which meant rewriting the code and the explanatory text that showed how it all works.
Madness.
Ultimately, the book was ready to go, and it shipped within days of Apple publicly releasing the SDK and officially lifting the NDA.
That experience was one of the most grueling, and thrilling, experiences of my life. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
[VIDEO] Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser, on the Panic blog:
A few months ago, a complaint started popping up from users downloading or updating our apps: “Geez, your downloads are really slow!”
If you work in support, you probably have a reflexive reaction to a complaint like this. It’s vague. There’s a million possible factors. It’ll probably resolve itself by tomorrow. You hope. Boy do you hope.
Except… we also started noticing it ourselves when we were working from home. When we’d come in to the office, transfers were lightning fast. But at home, it was really, seriously getting hard to get any work done remotely at all.
So, maybe there was something screwy here?
This is a fascinating story, well told. In a nutshell, Panic got reports of slow downloads from a non-trivial subset of their customers, wrote a script to try to find a common link, and actually found that link. And it was Comcast.
Cabel tells the story in the video embedded in the main Loop post. Excellent detective work.
Reuters:
BlackBerry Ltd on Tuesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook Inc and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps, arguing that they copied technology and features from BlackBerry Messenger.
And:
“Defendants created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry’s innovations, using a number of the innovative security, user interface, and functionality enhancing features,” Canada-based BlackBerry said in a filing with a Los Angeles federal court.
One of the patents in question covers the concept of a badge, that is, a changing number tied to an icon that reflect, for example, the current number of unread email messages.
Check out this thread from The Verge’s Nilay Patel:
https://twitter.com/reckless/status/971095505429319682
This has massive potential. Potential revenue for BlackBerry, and potential disruption for a raft of companies that will find themselves in court fighting this and other patents.
Yikes.
This is a fascinating story, which starts with:
My wife’s iPhone X was snatched out of her hand in Clerkenwell just over a week ago. It obviously immediately went offline and wasn’t trackable, so we put it in Lost Mode with my mobile number.
Here’s a link to the Twitter thread.
[VIDEO] Ad Week:
The 48-year-old Oscar winner has directed a new four-minute short film for Apple’s HomePod speaker featuring yet another marquee collaborator—the English musician and dancer FKA twigs. The result is a stunning piece that’s charming, surreal, emotional, playful, theatrical and utterly compelling—one of the most remarkable ads of the year so far.
This is no overstatement. Gorgeous ad. Watch it yourself. It’s embedded in the main Loop post. Worth every second.
Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:
I unplugged the Echo and put it away, leading to many questions about where Alexa went, voiced by our three year old son.
That was about three weeks ago, and in those three weeks, the entire family has gotten acquainted with HomePod and this iteration of Siri.
And:
Obviously the HomePod blows away the Echo in terms of audio quality. I really like how the HomePod sounds, and as we already pay for Apple Music, we were good to go there.
That’s where things start to go south. In Stephen’s take, Alexa is either the same or superior to Siri in most every way. For someone used to Alexa, the switch to Siri comes across as an annoyance, especially if music quality is not a priority.
Stephen ends with:
In short, the increase in sound quality doesn’t make up for the frustration of using Siri. The HomePod is going to live in my studio; the Echo is back in its rightful place in the kitchen.
I’ve been living with HomePod for about a month and I have to agree with this take. I love my HomePod, but HomePod Siri is relatively primitive. Even when it comes to music.
I often find myself planning strategically how I will get Siri to recognize an unusual name, especially one with a lot of syllables. There have been times when I just could not get Siri to play a song even though I know the song is in the Apple Music catalog.
The lack of multiple or named timers is not a big deal to me, but I do see it as a symptom, a sign that these are early days still.
I assume that the next HomePod patch will bring new capabilities to HomePod Siri. I assume that the HomePod Siri team is paying strict attention to feedback, feverishly taking notes and planning strategy, working hard on an update that will show glimmers of a glorious new HomePod Siri future.
I sure hope that is the case.
[VIDEO] Bennett Sorbo had an iPhone 6s with a dying battery. He ran his iPhone through some benchmarks, timing and filming the whole thing.
He then went to Apple, got a replacement battery, and ran the same tests again. The video embedded in the main Loop post shows the results.
Bottom line, replacing the battery clearly speeds things up. If you jump to about 2:34 in, you’ll see that the tasks took 5:45 on the bad battery (a presumably throttled processor) and only 4:33 on the new battery.
That’s a savings of 1:12, or about 21%. Not necessarily accurate to say that your phone will be 21% faster with a new battery, but it certainly seems like a new battery would make your phone at least somewhat more nimble.
Good experiment.
Digital Trends:
Think that Google’s search algorithms are good at reading your mind? That’s nothing compared to a new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan, which can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.
To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.
This is just a seed of a concept, the barest proof of concept. But it’s not nothing. This deep neural network can track the changes to a brain scan and draw conclusions about what that brain was viewing.
This is a small, terrifying step toward dystopia. Sci-Fi writers, start your engines.
Amazon Help:
Amazon Logistics (AMZL) may take a photo on delivery when a package is left unattended. Capturing delivery photos is intended to help customers see that their package was safely delivered and where. The photo will focus on the placement of the package. If a photo on delivery is captured, it may show up when you track a package from Your Orders.
And here’s a tweet showing the customer experience:
https://twitter.com/Heather_PLS/status/905932416774168576
This has all sorts of implications. First off, is this a sign that Amazon will shift its stance on refunds when packages are stolen off the porch? Currently, Amazon sends a replacement, no questions asked. Is the value here purely for notifications, or will Amazon use this as proof and, combined with their drop the package inside your house Key program, shift responsibility of package theft to the homeowner?
But there’s also a massive data collection effort underway. Amazon is creating an army of workers who are being trained to take pictures of people’s houses. As is, this is valuable mapping data. But to me, this also hints at a huge potential next step. Amazon might use this camera-laden workforce to take other pictures. Not suggesting something nefarious, more saying they might create a powerful database that can be used for queries like:
Huge potential.
First off, interesting timing. On Friday, we posted a piece entitled Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide, which focused purely on Apple innovation that was first mocked, then drove change in the industry.
This is a bit different, but certainly related.
Fast Company, on this year’s Mobile World Conference:
In most years, MWC is a showcase for Android at its best, with a slew of affordable smartphones, cutting-edge tech specs, and new ideas like curved screens and optical-zoom cameras. The show ultimately demonstrates how Android phones are different—and in some ways, better—than the iPhone.
This year seemed different. Instead of playing up the things that make Android handsets unique, phone makers tripped over themselves to show that they were on equal footing with Apple. In doing so, they came off as cheap imitators, unable to keep up with ideas that may not even be worth pursuing to begin with.
And:
The worst example was the use of a cutout, or notch, for the front-facing camera on phones with edge-to-edge displays. While the iPhone X’s notch is arguably an eyesore, at least it serves a clear purpose, housing the flood illuminator, dot projector, and infrared camera that allow Apple’s Face ID authentication system to work. The notch therefore serves as a statement about the technology underneath, which might explain why Apple paid such close attention to the design of its curves.
None of this was internalized by the notch purveyors at Mobile World Congress. Asus boasted that its Zenfone 5 and 5Z have smaller notches than the “Fruit Phone X,” which is easy enough to pull off when the phones have nothing like Face ID inside. And while Asus says its phones have a higher screen-to-body ratio than the iPhone X, they also have thicker bezels at the bottom of the screen that throw off the edge-to-edge design. The same was true with several other iPhone X knockoffs that appeared at the show.
And:
It doesn’t help that Samsung hints at having Face ID-like powers with its new AR Emoji feature, which creates an on-screen avatar from a scan of the user’s face. As my colleague Harry McCracken wrote, AR Emoji has “none of the uncanny polish and precision” of Apple’s Animoji, perhaps because the S9 doesn’t have any of iPhone X’s face-mapping sensor tech.
This is not an argument that all innovation comes from Apple. It’s more, Apple’s influence has grown to the point that the copying has accelerated and become much more widespread.
[H/T, Scott Knaster]
UPDATE: Add to all this the most prescient observation by Jean-Louis Gassée, from back in December, commenting on Samsung mocking the notch while, at the same time, calling attention to this branding attribute:
The iPhone X’s display has been mocked, notably in this Samsung commercial, for the “notch” at the top, the tiny area where all the Face ID organs (and other sensors) cut into the screen. An astute marketing person pointed to Samsung’s error in fingering the black notch: It’s a distinctive branding attribute, it tells everyone you’ve got a new iPhone X. (And let’s see what Samsung does when they deploy their own face recognition on a future device.)
[VIDEO] Developer Peder Norrby is using an iPhone X with ARKit and face tracking to create some pretty cool special effects. Watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post) for details. See also the trompe l’oeil Wikipedia page, which shows off the original artistic effect, which fools the eye into thinking it is seeing 3D.
Here’s a painting (Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874) that really pulls this off:
Norrby is planning on releasing his work as a free app and making his source code public. Nice.
Bleeping Computer:
The percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018.
These statistics on Flash’s declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) held in San Diego last week.
That’s a precipitous dropoff, all in less than 4 years.
Last summer, Adobe announced the official end-of-life for Flash:
In collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
So this dropoff is not a big surprise, more a sign that people are moving their content in the right direction.
Motherboard:
In 2010, Google stunned the telecom sector by announcing the company would be jumping into the broadband business. Under the brand banner of Google Fiber, the search giant proclaimed it would be lighting a much-needed fire under the traditionally uncompetitive broadband industry, delivering ultra-fast gigabit connections across the United States.
When I first heard about Google Fiber, I was thrilled. Thrilled, mostly, with the idea of competition and what it could mean for consumers: cheaper pricing and way faster speeds.
But:
While Google Fiber did make some impressive early headway in cities like Austin, the company ran into numerous deployment headaches. Fearing competition, incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast began a concerted effort to block the company’s access to essential utility poles, even going so far as to file lawsuits against cities like Nashville that tried to expedite the process.
That sort of reaction should not have been a surprise to Google. Of course incumbent ISPs will claw and scratch to protect their territories and revenue streams.
I think the real threat to big cable, at least in the short term, will be 5G deployment, wireless technologies that do not depend on the telephone poles and buried wires/fiber. With an unlimited data plan and video streaming speeds, the real cord cutting can truly take hold.
Google Fiber might have missed their moment.
A few days ago, I got into a Twitter discussion about things Apple changed and were mocked for changing, yet those changes were copied and, eventually became the new normal. The original discussion was prompted by a wave of phones embracing the notch.
I was surprised by how many different things emerged from this exercise. Key to making this list was Apple making a change that is first mocked. So innovation isn’t sufficient. Here’s the original tweet. Feel free to retweet or reply to it, send me anything I’ve missed. […]
Good list. Definitely worth a look. A few I did not know.
Wired:
On Wednesday, at about 12:15 pm ET, 1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once. It was the most powerful distributed denial of service attack recorded to date—and it used an increasingly popular DDoS method, no botnet required.
GitHub briefly struggled with intermittent outages as a digital system assessed the situation. Within 10 minutes it had automatically called for help from its DDoS mitigation service, Akamai Prolexic. Prolexic took over as an intermediary, routing all the traffic coming into and out of GitHub, and sent the data through its scrubbing centers to weed out and block malicious packets. After eight minutes, attackers relented and the assault dropped off.
How the attack was pulled off:
Database caching systems [memcached servers] work to speed networks and websites, but they aren’t meant to be exposed on the public internet; anyone can query them, and they’ll likewise respond to anyone. About 100,000 memcached servers, mostly owned by businesses and other institutions, currently sit exposed online with no authentication protection, meaning an attacker can access them, and send them a special command packet that the server will respond to with a much larger reply.
Interesting story. Leaves me wondering why the attackers relented. Did a human plan it to be this long? Was there some mechanism that measured the impact of the attack, it stopped when Prolexic stepped in? Was the time limit to avoid being traced?
ElevationLab blog:
When someone goes to the lengths of making counterfeits of your products, it’s at least a sign you’re doing something right. And it deserves a minute of flattery.
But when Chinese counterfeiters tool up and make copies of your product, send that inventory to Amazon, then overtake the real product’s buy box by auto-lowering the price – it’s a real problem. Customers are unknowingly buying crap versions of the product, while both Amazon and the scammers are profiting, and the reputation you’ve built goes down the toilet.
And if you’ve paid Amazon a boat load of money to advertise the product you’ve designed, built, invested in, and shipped – it’s further insult to injury. And when new counterfeit sellers keep popping up every week so you have to play whack-a-mole with Amazon, who take days to remove the sellers, it’s the beginning of the end for your small business.
Follow the headline link, take a look at the picture, a screen capture of an Amazon listing. Can you tell that this is a counterfeit? It says ElevationLab, in the form of a link, right above the product name. In this image, the product is sold by “suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd”. According to ElevationLab, they do not sell to wholesalers, so (the way I read it) if it’s not sold by ElevationLab, it’s counterfeit.
I went onto Amazon and looked up the product myself. Here’s a link. When I looked it up, I got a product sold by Crystal Sylvain, but with the same ElevationLab link at the top. Presumably, this is a counterfeit as well, perhaps an alt version of “suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd”.
How are we supposed to tell? I want to support the original designer/maker, not help rip them off and put them out of business.
Infuriating.
[VIDEO] This is an amazing video (embedded in the main Loop post). Hit play, then click and drag to look around as the Waymo self driving car takes you for a ride. Note that this only seems to work in a desktop browser, not in iOS. If anyone figures out how to get this to work on an iOS device, please ping me and I’ll update the post.
I’d love to have this experience in person.
UPDATE: To run on iOS device, check this tweet.