Month: June 2016

Gah… Apple

I use a Mac at work. It’s a fine machine and I like the screen and battery life, but I’m not a generally fan of Apple the company or its products. Sometimes I forget why, and I need to be reminded.

Like today, when I decided, even though Safari is basically a sucky product, there are probably people that use it, so I might just port my little political statement Chrome extension to Safari. I’d already done so to Firefox, so how hard could it be?

Well, it turns out, not too hard. Actually, for the minimalist version that most people are using, it required no code changes at all. It did take me awhile to figure out how everything works in the Apple extension tool, but overall, not too bad.

I knew I would have to submit to reviewers at Apple to get it published. I had to do the same at Mozilla for Firefox. But what I did not know is that in order to do that, I had to sign up to be an Apple Developer. Moreover, I could only do so under my real name (ie, not dave@toolsofourtools.org) and most annoying, they wanted $99. A year. or as long as the extension is up.

I’m not going to play $99/yr to provide a free plugin for the few people who are dumb enough to use Safari on a regular basis.

In an odd way, this gets right to the heart of one of the many reasons I do not like Apple. They are constitutionally opposed to my favorite aspects of the computing and the Internet: the highly empowering ability for people to scrappily do, say, make anything they want for next to nothing, and at the level of sophistication that they want to deal with. Apple doesn’t like scrappy things in its world, and actively weeds them out.

Apple, you suck. Thanks for the reminder never to spend my own money on your polished crap.

Clever, disturbing

Apple was recently granted a new patent for technology that will disable your phone’s camera at concerts where photography is forbidden.

The patent uses an infrared signal, which could be picked up by the imaging sensor itself. This is rather ingenious and cunning, because you could not disable the shut-down sensor without disabling the camera yourself, since they are one and the same.

IPhone_5S_main_cameraDepending one how pervasive such tech became, and how closely integrated the detection, decoding, and disabling is to the actual silicon image sensor, it could become nearly impossible to defeat this tech, or to obtain a phone that doesn’t include it.

I find blocking cameras at concert venues mildly annoying, but the potential for abuse of this technology seems large. Will folks on the street use it to block being photographed? Will it be deployed in government buildinds? Outside cop-cars? Will the secret for how to disable everyone else’s phone get out?

Over the last few years we’ve seen some exciting benefits from ubiquitous deployment of cameras. People are getting caught doing things that are illegal or at least shameful. I’d be bummed to see some technology from Silicon Valley reverse this progress.

 

 

The code we unwittingly run

This will come as no news to tech-savvy people, but when you open a webpage, you are running a metric shit-ton of code from all over the Internet.
A bunch of garbage nobody needs.
A bunch of garbage nobody needs.
Since I’ve been doing some Chrome Extension development over the past couple of days, I’ve been opening up the dev tools that let you see the “console” output of all the javascript that runs on a page. It’s a lot. I have an ad-blocker running, so most of those GETs and POSTs generate error messages and go nowhere. But there are a lot of them. And the code keeps trying over and over.
And it’s from a lot companies, too. On the NYT alone, I get messages from various systems from google, amazon, facebook, doubleclick, moatads.com, brealtime.com.
Aside from the privacy and tracking aspects, it feels like a theft of resources, too. They’re using my CPU to do work that has nothing to do with rendering their page.