in the news

“…no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys”

01/13/2020

Apple responds to AG Barr on phone unlocking: read the full statement here:

Earlier today Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to unlock the alleged phone of the Pensacola shooter — a man who murdered three people and injured eight others on a Naval base in Florida in December. Apple has responded by essentially saying: “no.”

“We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation,” the company said. “It was not until January 8th that we received a subpoena for information related to the second iPhone, which we responded to within hours,” Apple added countering Barr’s characterization of Apple being slow on its approach to the FBI’s needs. However, it ends the statement in no uncertain terms: “We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys.”

Apple’s position is the correct one. If you create a software backdoor or a weakness in encryption, it will inevitably be exploited by bad actors. How do we know this? Because even the NSA can’t keep its top secret tools and methods out of enemy hands.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also got in on the debate:

“I do think backdoors are a terrible idea, that is not the way to go about this,” Nadella said. “We’ve always said we care about these two things: privacy and public safety. We need some legal and technical solution in our democracy to have both of those be priorities.”

End of Watch

02/14/2019

NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission – The New York Times:

Opportunity, the longest-lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.

“It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said at a news conference.

I wasn’t around for the moon landings, but space exploration has captivated me my entire life. I follow every mission, every discovery, every grainy photo from distant probes. The Mars rover missions have easily been my favorites. Not just flybys of distant objects, these were actual up-close exploration. Crisp, beautiful shots of an alien landscape. The rovers represent some of the best of what NASA can do.

RIP Paul Allen

10/16/2018

We lost Paul Allen yesterday. Growing up in the northwest, his influence loomed over the region, but in a good way, not in the possibly bad way of some contemporaries.

Paul Allen existed at the intersection of all of my interests. This probably isn’t much of a feat, because his interests were so many — overlap is unavoidable. It’s impossible for me to visit any of my bookmarked sites today without seeing a tribute to Allen.

As an example of his influence, I just think back to our last family trip to Seattle:

We attended a Seahawks game. Recall that in 1996, moving vans were quite literally packing up the team to move them to Los Angeles before Allen swooped in to keep them in Seattle.
We walked through the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington
We visited MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture, that Allen founded in 2000. Most of the exhibits are out of his own personal collection of pop culture artifacts. It’s a spectacular museum.

He was a presence in music and art, exploration, sports, technology, aerospace, science and science fiction. The list is endless.

What a tremendous life.

Subscription hell

05/07/2018

via TechCrunch:

I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. I’m frustrated that subscription usually means just putting formerly free content behind a paywall. I’m frustrated that the price for subscriptions seems wildly high compared to the ad dollars that the fees substitute for. And I’m frustrated that subscription pricing rarely seems to account for other subscriptions I have, even when content libraries are similar.

This piece is a mess, though I agree with a few of Danny’s points. While he does mention it, I think he loses sight of the fact that these services cost money to operate. This cannot be emphasized enough. There are only two ways to make money in content: ads and/or subscriptions. If you feel that ads are too gross, then you are left with the subscription model. Content costs money. In some cases, very serious money. Netflix could never (at least not in a timeframe that would satisfy investors) recoup their content costs using ads alone.

How do you run world-class newsrooms which are doing real investigative journalism, paid for by advertising alone? Prior to the rise of the web, publishers were able to use revenue from classified ads to fund those operations — subscriptions and commercial advertising were secondary revenue streams in many cases. Classified ads were small and highly profitable. Craigslist took that revenue away from the publishers, leaving them high and dry.

The rise of dedicated streaming services for video are forcing traditional broadcasters to launch their own streaming services compete for viewer eyeballs. Having solid back catalogs of content gives each of them a compelling reason to exist.

The biggest mistake made by publishers on the early web was giving their content away for free, setting the expectation that this would always be the case. Now that they desperately need that subscription revenue, consumers are starting to feel pinched.

This is all a matter of perception though. Subscriptions aren’t new, and people had plenty of them prior to the web. My parents had two daily newspaper subscriptions, 5-6 monthly magazines, and satellite TV service. In our home today, I pay for three news subscriptions, one music, and seven video services. I value the content and I am willing to pay for it, just like my parents did in the 1980s and 90s. If a service is not providing me enough value out of the $5-12 per month, then I will cancel it (and it’s a lot easier to cancel a streaming service than it is to cancel Comcast…)

This is the future, and it’s really not that different from our past.

Thanks for the memories, Chico’s

01/25/2018

Columbia Basin Herald::

The news that Chico’s Pizza Parlor was destroyed in a weekend fire hit many hard. The Moses Lake community and former residents showed their concern online with a flood of comments on the Herald’s website and Facebook page. People even kept talking on Facebook late into Saturday night, sharing memories and photos of the longtime business. I was right there with them because I loved Chico’s too. Starting the conversation was easy.

An entire region mourns the death (hopefully only temporary, but you know how these things usually turn out…) of an iconic pizza parlor.

I grew up there, and Chico’s was an institution. It’s unthinkable to my own children, but my hometown didn’t have a pizza restaurant. Our choices were: 1. Heat up a Tombstone or, 2. Make the 40 minute drive to Chico’s. Option 2 was always preferred.

It was one of the few places in the area where you could take a group of people for a meal and just relax. So many memories there. The arcade where we kids could play while the pizza baked. The ancient bench seats. The mountains of toppings.

Sausage and black olive was my thing.

Thanks, Chico’s.