Category: Aside

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Aside Quotations

2013.8.2

What are Google’s Nexus devices for if not to be purchased by large numbers of consumers? Google’s take on that issue has been consistent: they’re “halo” devices meant to educate the rest of the ecosystem. Burke put it to us this way: “Basically what Nexus allows us to do is set the standard … [we can] demonstrate how Android runs and hopefully influence other device manufacturers to take what we’ve done and do even better.”

That explanation has often been difficult to take at face value. Though the phones have usually been elegant devices, they typically launched with specs that were behind the curve. The Galaxy Nexus had a pretty terrible camera, for example, and the Nexus 4 lacks support for LTE. Now that Google sells top-end “Google Play edition” phones that run stock Android, the Nexus line seems more irrelevant than ever.

That brings us to the other — and more important — reason the Nexus line exists: Google simply needs hardware on which it can develop Android. Burke says “as an engineering team creating a mobile platform — we can’t do that in the abstract. We need to do it on a real device that we’re carrying with us.” When people ask me about the Nexus line, I like to joke that if you need to create a few hundred polished and usable devices for Google engineers, why not make a few hundred thousand more and sell them to hardcore users?

I think that acknowledging Google wants to control some of its own hardware for internal development purposes – as well as to better enable external developers to produce software for Android – continues to strike to the heart of why the ‘Nexus’ line exists. Arguably the recent ‘Play Edition’ of manufacturers’ flagships phones could address consumers’ desire for stock Android experiences, but I don’t think that the Play Editions will fully satisfy developers’ interests in working from a stock, no-nonsense, quickly updated platform.
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Aside

WiFi “Security”

This really isn’t the warning you want to get when signing into a wifi-portal.

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Aside Links

AT&T’s Anti-Infringement Patent

AT&T’s recent patent to detect and act on network-based copyright infringement raises significant red flags for network neutrality advocates. However, we need to look beyond the most obvious (and nefarious!) red flags: when examining corporate surveillance prospects we need to reflect on the full range of reasons behind the practice. Only in taking this broader, and often more nuanced, view are we likely to come closer to the truth of what is actually going on, and why. And, if we don’t get closer to the specific truth of the situation, at least we can better understand the battleground and likely terms of the conflict.

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Aside Links

Backdooring an ‘Encrypted’ Application

Persuant to my last post on cryptography and pixie dust, it’s helpful to read through Matt Green’s highly accessible article “How to ‘backdoor’ an encryption app.” You’ll find that companies have a host of ways of enabling third-party surveillance, ranging from overt deception to having access to communications metadata to compromising their product’s security if required by authorities. In effect, there are lots of ways that data custodians can undermine their promises to consumers, and it’s pretty rare that the public ever learns that the method(s) used to secure their communications have either been broken or are generally ineffective.

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Aside Links Quotations

How to Publish A  Story That Explains How to Use Social Media to Juice Your Story’s Popularity

emptyage:

I paid to have my latest Wired story promoted on social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, to try to show that a lot of the metrics* we use to measure a story’s success are bullshit. It worked. When the story went live today, the page appeared with more than 15,500 links on Twitter, and 6,500 likes on Facebook. The story is a part of Wired’s Cheats package for the latest issue of the magazine. It needed to go live online at the same time readers encountered it in print, and it needed to have all those social shares set up in advance. 

…

The entire package was going live at once. I could publish my story a little bit early, but the timing needed to be very close. I wanted all the public-facing stats (like the 15 thousand links and Twitter and 6,000 Facebook shares) to be live by the time the text appeared. Certainly, if someone found it in print or on the tablet, it needed those metrics to already be there. To make that happen, we cheated. 

…

This morning (or last night) at a little after 1 am, I added the story text, set it to the current time, and hit update. Now it showed up in RSS readers and I could openly tweet it form my main account. (I had originally used a secondary Twitter account I have for testing 3rd party stuff to link to it and score retweets.)

So now, the story goes “live” and as if by magic it has tens of thousands of social shares listed on it the instant real people start to encounter it. It worked. 

*As is site traffic, to a very large extent. My original idea was to use a botnet to throw traffic at it, but Wired’s lawyers said “no, no. Don’t do that.“ 

And, of course, people tend to associate lots of shares with an article’s significance or influence. Consequently, by ‘cheating’ ahead of time a content owner can add a false gravitas to the content in question. I’m curious to know how search companies that, in part, use social signals to surface content deal with this kind of ‘hacking the social.’

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Aside

Housekeeping Note

This website began as a space to do ‘little blogging’, giving me some leeway to think and write about issues without breaking up the tenor or character of the more lengthy analyses of contemporary privacy, security, and technology issues that I undertake at Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets. Since I began writing at Quirks and Tech, a little over a year ago, I’ve posted 600 items. In effect, what began as a distraction space has become a little more serious and, as a result, a visual update has been in order.

I purchased a domain for the site several months back when I decided that I liked writing here. Today, I’m happy to unveil the new theme for the site.[1] It emphasizes readability and a general lack of visual clutter. The fonts are far easier to parse than those associated with the previous theme that I was using, and the shading of various areas is subtle enough distinguish between different blocks of content without becoming overbearing.

As part of the update I’ve formalized links to my other presences online, and begun thinking about systemic ‘top categories’ to help people wade through the morass of posts that I’ve generated. I’m going to continue making some minor tweaks over the next while, but the general structure and aethetic are going to remain for some time going forward.

  1. I’ve modified the Tewday theme in the course of these updates. I cannot express how disappointed I was with much of the theme upon delivery: sloppy CSS coding was pervasive, and many styling elements (like lists! like blockquotes) weren’t done properly. I’ll be reviewing the theme – and how to fix parts of it – at a later date.  ↩
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International Plugs

carry-on-my-wayward-butt:

durinfamilyfeels:

eliastheswede:

queen-amy-of-leadworth:

japam:

yugoslavic:

why cant we all have the same the world would be a better place

what the fuck italy

BUT LOOK HOW HAPPY DENMARK IS.

I just realized now 101% done our outlets look in North America and I fucking lost it

our outlets are reacting to the other outlets

Of course, when you travel it’s often the case that housing builders have multi-national outlets (looking at you, in particular, Brasil). The problem is that you often don’t know about those commonalities until you arrive with all your kit. The worst is when you mistakenly assume that outlets will generally be multi-national outlets and that turns out to not be the case (I’m looking at you, UK).

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I’m really not clear why the hell a fitness application needs to be able to read who is calling me and to be able to track my outbound phone calls.

Thus far I’ve spoken via Twitter with their mobile developer, who says that the permissions request is an error on his part. I’ve also gone back and forth – repeatedly – with Fitbit’s technical support team. The first response wasn’t in parseable English, and the subsequent messages haven’t clarified why this particular permission is needed.

So, after several days of trying to learn why Fitbit is requesting these Android permissions – and what data they’re collecting – I’m not really any closer to understanding the situation than I was when I started this whole process. I’m thinking that it’s about time to exercise my rights as a Canadian and start requesting copies of all data that the company has captured about me….and then see if they’re willing to comply with Canadian privacy laws.

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Firearms vs Tampons

chartier:

Jessie Jessup

context

They were off the deep end a while back: I think that the Republicans are now drilling for oil at the bottom of the pool…

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Aside

Nature: it can happen to you, too