The Interstitial

That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.

You know times are tough when you're going on national television asking for COBOL programmers.

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

Let me put it bluntly: Zoom is sloppy. Evidence of this began to accumulate last year with a screw-up discovered in mid-2019 that exposed macOS users to significant privacy exposure: your video camera could have been activated by visiting a page that loaded a malicious link. The problematic disclosures have accelerated since January 2020 with a series of errors in judgment and programming flaws. Zoom may have a top-notch technical solution and user experience, but the company deserves to take its knocks for sloppy and negligent programming.

Zoom is a damn train wreck. The only thing right they did was build a solid platform that's easy to use. Hundreds of millions of users flocked to the service because of that ease of use, exposing the privacy and security of even more users, and making Zoom a pretty penny in the process.

Google has been killing it recently with their Google Photos ads. Their first ad was a shot across the bow at Apple and its continuing sale of 16GB iPhones. Its been plastered all over the Olympics over the past week. This new ad focuses more on the lack of backup strategy that most people have with their photos which are almost always only on their phone where they take them.

These recent ads must be bringing in a number of frustrated iPhone customers over to Google Photos. While iOS 10's Photos upgrade certainly narrows the gap with Google Photos, Apple still has a lot of work to do. First, they should be axing those 16GB iPhones (which is rumored to come true this fall with the next iPhone) and also provide more iCloud storage for customers beyond the palsy 5GB.

The goal is to build a vehicle to the SAE Level 4 standard of automation. This would give the car the ability to handle all aspects of driving, although limited to certain approved areas or regions. A car could be restricted to only the island of Manhattan, or to take certain approved routes outside of Manhattan to get to the airport or Yankee Stadium.

2021 is five years away. While Ford has multiple vehicles that have smart features such as cruise control, automatic breaking, lane departure, etc. They do not yet have a production vehicle with any sort of autonomous driving. Five years isn't a long time for such an ambitious goal of removing the steering wheel and pedals. One of the biggest hurdles will certainly be a regulatory one.

The Verge:

The presentation was reportedly prepared in response to Volkswagen's realization that it couldn't meet the US's more stringent diesel emissions standards without wearing out filtering equipment too quickly. In lieu of fitting better, cleaner systems that would've increased sticker prices, the presentation showed how VW could use embedded software to detect when an emissions test was underway and change engine parameters in response, making the cars appear cleaner than they actually were.

Repulsive and disgusting.

Dave Teare, founder of AgileBits (makers of 1Password), writing over at Medium:

Slowly but surely this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things. We decided it was time to try a new approach for communication at AgileBits ... With Slack we were more connected than we ever were before. We had 81 channels where anyone could talk to anybody in the company, and if the person you needed wasn’t in that channel, no worries, you could simply @ mention them and they would be added instantly.

Wonderful essay by Dave. Slack is the industry's love child these days but it's nice to see a dissenting view demonstrating some of the bad habits people can acquire using it. I can certainly see where Dave is coming from and have experienced some of the same pain points in my teams using Slack.

But lord, 81 channels for a 60 person team? That's just bananas.

The Verge:

"I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing," he said, as the crowd chuckled with delight. The reporter then tried to move on, asking something serious about how Canada is dealing with terrorism, but Trudeau saw an opportunity to answer a way more fun question for a change. He launched into the explanation about computing, drawing applause from the crowd. "No, no, don't interrupt me," the prime minister said over the claps. "When you walk out of here, you will know more — no, some of you will know far less about quantum computing — but most of you."

Priceless. Looks like Trudeau may be smarter than his critics make him out to be.

John Templon reporting at BuzzFeed:

The files include references to at least 37 players, only eight of whom are Italian and 29 of whom have ranked in the top 50. Prosecutors are still combing through thousands of pages of evidence and say it is not yet clear how many of those named were actually approached or whether some rebuffed the fixers’ offers to throw matches.

Has yet to be corroborated, but if true, completely shocking that more than half of the top 50 ranked in the world are on this list.

Out of most professional sports, tennis lends itself better to cheating due to the individual nature of the sport (same for golf).

Canada's a pretty big place. Most people who aren't familiar with the size of our country are often quite surprised to hear how big it is.

Some of these statistics are even news to me, a home-grown Canadian boy.

One thing this does get right: for the most part, Canada is pretty empty, with most of the population being around the US/Canada border. Why? We also hate the damn cold so the border is about as far south as we can get without invading our US friends (although some of us try).

15-year old Zoe Olson, writing to Tim Cook on Medium:

I am a simple 15-year-old who has loved to doodle for as long as she can remember. I adored my first generation iPad mini, so when the iPad Pro came out I decided I could use an upgrade. What an upgrade!!

Such a great story which caught the attention of Apple's CEO. His reply is included at the end of the post.

But that’s changing. Because of the endless chain of spectacular security failures and the Snowden news that the NSA is grabbing everything it can, the tech industry is finally ramping up its security. American companies are worried that foreign customers might regard their products as direct conduits to American authorities. So they have changed their practices for moving information between their data centers. Now, confirming government’s biggest nightmare, Apple has planted a flag in the ground for privacy — endeavoring to scramble data on its iPhones so only customers can access them.

There's a wind of change happening in our society right now that will impact future generations of Internet users. Lines have been drawn and each side's resolve appears absolute. Go read Steven Levy's post and ask yourself, where do you stand?

The Verge:

The study, published in _The New England Journal of Medicine, looked at the survival rates for 1,025 patients receiving incompatible kidneys from live donors, comparing them with other kidney transplant patients. After eight years, 76.5 percent of the individuals receiving incompatible kidneys from live donors were still alive — a better outlook than for patients who stayed on the waiting list or got an incompatible kidney from a deceased donor (62.9 percent survival rate), or for patients who never received a transplant at all (43.9 percent). An accompanying editorial in the New England journal described the findings as "revolutionary."

Being the recipient of a kidney transplant in 2004 and knowing full well that it won't last my entire life, this is great news. Nobody should have to die when all of us are capable of donating organs.

If you haven't signed your donor card, make sure to do so.

Ulysses blog:

Say hello to Ulysses 2.5! This is our biggest release yet, spanning every current device and system, from iPhone 5 to iPad Pro to MacBook Air and the big guys, adding device- and system specific features such as 3D Touch and iOS 9 Multitasking.

One of the most professional writing apps available for the Mac / iPad is now available for the iPhone. What's amazing is that the Soulmen have managed to cram almost every feature from the Mac into the iPhone version. Have a look at their feature comparison table to see just what the iOS versions can do.

Ben Ubois, creator of Feedbin:

To use this feature, go to the settings page and find your secret Feedbin email address. Use this email address whenever you sign up for an email newsletter. Anything sent to it will show up as a feed in Feedbin, grouped by sender.

Such a great idea. I'll definitely use this feature and start moving my subscriptions to use this method.

Welcome to the blog on Swift.org! Today we launched the open source Swift project along with the Swift.org website. We couldn’t be more excited to work together in an open community to find and fix issues, add enhancements, and bring Swift to new platforms.

Important day for Apple.

A tweet today from Zack Shapiro seems to indicate that not only has Mailbox been abandoned by Dropbox with the whole team re-assigned to other projects, but that it's been abandoned for a few months now:

It’s sad to hear @mailbox has been abandoned inside of Dropbox. I’d love to buy it from them and keep working on it.

It's unfortunate but not surprising. Mailbox hasn't had any updates in months, the Mailbox Blog hasn't been updated since April. Mailbox was one of the first new style of email application that really tried to challenge the way we think about email. It introduced a lot of interesting concepts that have been copied in more recent apps such as Spark.

Mailbox had a very devout following and will be missed by many.

Gary Ng, writing for iPhone in Canada:

According to American Express, the service is set to launch this Tuesday, November 17, 2015. Customer service representatives we spoke with confirmed the date over the phone numerous times, and is in line with what you've told us as well.

My American Express, iPhone and Apple Watch are all locked and loaded for tomorrow.