Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Writing

Comment on Lion’s Internet Recovery

I’ve recently added a new non-spinning disk to my system and decided to give Lion’s disk recovery system a try: how did it actually perform, where were there problems, and how were they resolved?

I was incredibly impressed with the general functionality of the Internet-based recovery mechanism. After adding the new disk I was asked to connect to a local wireless network and then basic recovery data was streamed into RAM. From there I successfully downloaded and installed the OS, and restored files and settings from encrypted network storage. Total time to restore the OS and about 200GB of data: 3.5 hours.

Were there any problems? Yes, though only one is truly significant to my mind. While the password for logging into the OS remained the drive encryption that I’d set up through the OS (i.e. Filevault 2) had to be re-intitialized. When I attempted to do so I received warnings that the disk could not be encrypted.

This constituted a major problem for me.

The solution was relatively simple, though annoying. Apparently the Internet-based recovery process fails to install a recovery partition on the disk. Without this partition Filevault 2 cannot be enabled. The solution was to reinstall Lion from within the OS. This doesn’t change any settings and, effectively, is just used to create the disk-based recovery partition. After the partition is set up Filevault 2 can be enabled without a problem.

I don’t have a particular issue with having to jump through some hoops to re-enable the disk encryption. I do, however, have issues with the fact that there are no warnings that this security setting isn’t enabled/carried through when re-installing Lion and importing data and settings from a Time Capsule. In effect, if I wasn’t poking around settings to ascertain whether they had been carried over I likely would have never known that the disk hadn’t been encrypted. This is a particularly serious information flow error as far as I’m concerned. Hopefully Apple will integrate some kind of a notice system in the future to alert users about which settings were and were not carried over, as well as more verbosity concerning why Filevault 2 cannot be enabled after an Internet-based OS restoration.

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Writing

Windows 8 has a new design paradigm; to find programs’  settings you must hover your cursor to the right of the screen. There is no indication that these settings panels exist.

The new paradigm can be contrasted against the ‘early’ Metro paradigm in Windows Phone. Under the ‘old’ paradigm ellipses are used to indicate additional options. The translation of Metro to the desktop – insofar as ellipses are being removed – strikes me as a poor decision for two reasons:

  1. It breaks Metro UI tenants that Windows Phone users have learned;
  2. The Mail settings aren’t linked with any OS-wide settings (so far as I can tell), which means that if you don’t figure out the ‘hover to the right’ paradigm you can spend considerable time getting frustrated trying to just add a new mail account.

There has to be some indication to users that additional information (i.e. the settings panel) exists or the settings should be accessible in multiple locations. Failure to accommodate these needs should be understood as design failures insofar as UI parsimony is damaging the overall UX.

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Writing

Why I Can’t Recommend gfxCardStatus

A recent Ars Technica article got me interested in a neat piece of donation-ware called gfxCardStatus. See, contemporary 15″ Macbook Pros have two GPUs. One is discrete and the other is integrated. The theory is that when you’re on battery power you’re more likely to hop over to the integrated GPU to save battery, though whenever you need the power of the discrete GPU you have a seamless transition over to it.

This is really cool in principle. Unfortunately it never seems to work out very well.

Ars notes that there are a whole series of frameworks that cause OS X to transition to the discrete GPU. Many of these frameworks are routinely used by such graphic-intense programs as Twitter, Reeder, and Skype. Consequently, if you have these open you don’t enjoy the battery savings associated with the integrated GPU.

The proposed solution is gfxCardStatus, which lets you force the OS to use either the discrete or integrated GPU. You can also let OS X run things and maintain dynamic switching. This is handy: it increased my battery life some by letting me choose the GPU I wanted to run.

The program is less handy insofar as it breaks the ability to use a second monitor. While annoying to troubleshoot in an office setting, it’s incredibly problematic when I can’t connect to a projector when giving a presentation.

I don’t know if this is a regular or abnormal problem. I do know that it’s a deal breaker for me: a little more battery life doesn’t – can’t – justify breaking core OS functionality.

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Aside Links

SandForce Controllers and Encryption

Rob Graham has a good look at the challenges facing SandForce controllers – which are used by a large number of the solid state hard drives on the consumer market – as related to disk encryption. I highly recommend reading it but, if you just don’t have the time, here’s the key takeaway: “The problem with a SandForce controller is that all its features are lost when using full disk encryption, but all its downsides remain. Thus, if you plan on using an SSD for your notebook computer, you should plan on getting something other than a SandForce controller.”

Categories
Writing

A Glimpse Into How ‘Normals’ Read the Internet

I use the term ‘normals’ in an utterly positive sense: Vanity Fair’s recent piece, titled “World War 3.0,” scatters enough truth through the article that it possesses a veneer of credibility while obfuscating falsehoods and myths. The result is that unsavvy readers will be left with conceptions the everything is peachy with ICANN (false), that the ITU is coming to take over the ‘net (false), that the Internet is boundary-less (false), that there are honest-to-God “good guys” (the disorderly folks) and villains (orderly organizations like states), and that loosening arms exports related to encryption is significantly linked to the theft of IP (arguably very false).

Unfortunately, there is enough truth scattered throughout the article that someone who isn’t familiar with the terrains of Internet security, governance, and IP policies could be easily drawn into an appealing and accessible narrative. It is precisely narratives like this that those of us familiar with Internet policies have to fervently oppose and correct, with a recognition that not correcting the record can promote serious misinformation leading to disastrous (or, at best, misguided) policy responses by the “bad guys” of the Internet (i.e. state actors).

The article is worth a read, though it may bring your blood to a boil. Regardless of its factual accuracy, however, I suspect that the piece can be read as how non-experts perceive the past decade or so of Internet policies and practices. As such it’s incredibly valuable for those of us in the trenches to get a better perspective on how our conflicts are seen publicly, if only to make out actions and processes that much clearer for the general citizenry.

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Links Writing

Can Nulpunt “Abolish Government Secrecy?”

In a word: No.

Nulpunt is an online database that lets individuals subscribe to topics and, when a freedom of information request on the topic becomes available, ‘pushes’ the content to the user. This mediates the present format for such requests, where individuals tend to be hunting for specific information and the population generally has no effective means to see or understand the information divulged to fellow citizens.

The aspiration of the service is that government secrecy can be undermined by making information more prominently available. I’m not confident that this can possibly be the case because the service fails to address the primary means by which states keep citizens in the dark: it does not prevent state agents from refusing requests nor from redacting significant elements from released documents.

While it may be effective in nations such as the Netherlands, which have recently adopted new transparency laws, I can’t imagine Canada or the US moving to entirely new document release processes without a significant stick. Nulpunt is not, and cannot, function as that stick so long as governments refuse to recognize their situatedness as servants, rather than masters, of the population at large.

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Quotations

2012.6.14

Design is not a zero-sum economic game but an ambivalent cultural process that serves a multiplicity of values and social groups without necessarily sacrificing efficiency.

Andrew Feenburg. (2010). “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom” in Between Reason and Experience.
Categories
Writing

Did Apple Design in the Wrong Direction?

It’s a big deal whenever Apple refreshes the design of their products. It isn’t just that the media goes nuts, but that other parties (read: the media) tend to swoon about Apple’s decision and the company’s competitors get ready to ape Apple’s new paradigms.

Unfortunately, the switch to the newly designed Airport Express seems like a terrific step in the wrong direction from a design perspective, while simultaneously being in the right direction from a product alignment perspective. Let me explain.

While some sites have stated that the older Express routers were ‘wall warts’, anyone who’s travelled with one of these routers can speak to their functionality. They were easy to pack, easier to set up, and incredibly reliable. The ‘warts’ were also useful when setting up wifi printing or Airplay functionality at home. In both of these latter cases, it was easy to move the router to where you wanted either the printer or speakers and didn’t necessitate cluttering up the space with unneeded cables.

The new form factor is better visually linked to Apple’s existing routers and Apple TV products. On these grounds, Apple is (arguably) bringing a superior branded identity to the Airport Express line, ensuring that anyone who sees the router will immediately think ‘Apple’. This has significant marketing and branding resonance but, unfortunately, it comes at the expense of device efficiency.

Good design is tightly linked with beauty, usability, and efficiency. In the case of the newest iteration of the Airport Express, Apple has prioritized the corporate image over product efficiency; the Express is a less efficient product on grounds that it assumes more physical space that has previously been needed. The incapacity to link these priorities is suggestive that the newest Apple router is a failed product from a design position, regardless of the popularity or sales of the new iteration.

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Videos

On Pay Equity

I’m certain that, in some countries, efforts to achieve pay equity in this manner would result in Parliament legislating the ‘striker’ to work. Such legislation would be ‘necessary’ on grounds that efforts to achieve pay equity threatened the national economy and, thus, had to be moved to binding mediation without the employer being forced to deal with the existing market situation.

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Aside

Free Speech Zone

The contemporary “free speech” zone