If you write about industry events as a journalist, analyst, or blogger, companies may want to share with you details on their upcoming products and projects. They may present you with an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Don’t sign it. This is a situation I faced many times as an analyst at Forrester Research. And it just … Continued

The post Never sign an NDA to get a briefing appeared first on without bullshit.

We’re clearly going to be arguing about the size, power and market share of large technology companies a great deal in the next couple of years. Many of the underlying concerns we have around technology are complicated, and involve deep-seated trade-offs where we actually have to make choices, and not everything is a competition problem anyway ( I wrote about this here). But if we presume that something is a competition problem, what do we do about it? The discussion here tends to jump straight to ‘break them up’, which also means presuming that break-ups would actually work. I’m not sure about that. 

The folk memory here, of course, is Standard Oil. John Rockefeller built a network of production, processing and distribution companies that he bundled, tied and cross-leveraged in all sorts of ruthless and devious ways to squeeze out competition. Then in 1911, when Standard Oil was forcibly split up into over 30 different companies, that market power was broken and the oil industry became competitive again, or so the story goes. 

This is a great story, but I’d suggest it’s more useful to look at, and contrast, the breakup of AT&T and the proposed breakup of Microsoft, which give a rather more mixed picture. 

In 1982 AT&T settled an anti-trust case by splitting off its local access telephone network into seven regional companies (the Regional Bell Operating Companies or ‘Baby Bells’), keeping long-distance and the telecoms equipment business (which was also later split off and is now part of Nokia). This is another of the stories that anti-trust lawyers tell their young around the campfire, but its real effect was limited in important ways. Splitting local from long-distance opened up a new market for competitive long-distance carriers, and the market for telecoms equipment was liberated by breaking one customer into eight. It also led to the emergence of companies building fibre networks in city centres to connect corporate customers. However, if you were a normal consumer, and lived in the suburbs of New York or Miami, and wanted a telephone, there was still a monopoly. There was competition for long-distance, but not for your phone line; a national (near) monopoly was replaced by local monopolies. 

There’s a pretty good law-of-physics reason for this: fixed-line local access telephone networks are a natural monopoly, in much the same way as water, gas or electricity networks. Building a network of copper wires to every home in a neighbourhood is not quite as expensive as laying water pipes, but it’s expensive enough, with a long payback period, and it’s very hard to cover the cost of building two parallel networks. It’s not impossible - cable TV companies did it by selling a separate and much more expensive product, but then we don’t have multiple, parallel CATV networks either. And, of course, you can’t split the wire going into your home into two and give each half to a different company.

If local access telephone networks are mostly a natural monopoly that cannot be made competitive by break-ups, what about network effects? Two decades after AT&T was broken up, the US proposed that Microsoft should be broken up - that it be split into Office and Windows. As we know, this didn’t happen, but what it it had? What would that have changed?

Going back to 1911, splitting up Standard Oil did three things. First, it replaced a company that was often the only buyer or the only seller with many competing companies. Second, it addressed the cross-leveraging, bundling and tying whereby the oil fields, refineries, pipelines, rail cars and retailers all worked together to squeeze out competition, by breaking those into separate competing companies. And third, more abstractly, it replaced a huge company with huge financial and market power with many smaller companies with less individual mass. 

Now suppose that Windows and Office had become separate companies. So what? Well, the third point would be addressed; the overall mass of the company would be reduced. So, arguably, would the second; to the extent that you believe Microsoft was cross-leveraging Windows and Office, that would be ended. There would be no more Office/Windows bundles. 

However, it’s not clear that this would have resulted in more actual competition for Office or for Windows. There would not have been a wave of new companies making new PC operating systems, nor new PC productivity suites, any more than there was a wave of companies building new phone networks in American suburbs in the 1980s. Microsoft might have been doing all sorts of mean and sneaky things, but people used Windows and Office because of network effects, and those network effects were and are internal to each product. People used Windows because it had the software and people wrote software for Windows because it had the users, and that had very little to do with Office. If Office had been in a different company, that wouldn’t have prompted Adobe to port Photoshop to BeOS, nor id Software to write Quake for Mac before Windows. 

The strength of Windows was not that it was bundled or tied or leveraged, but that it had a network effect. The same for Office - everyone used Office because everyone used it, not because it was part of the same company as Windows. Breaking them up wouldn’t have changed this. 

Indeed, these network effects would have limited the companies emerging from a broken-up Microsoft (the ‘Baby Bills’) in just the same way that they limited everyone else. The Office company could not have made a new PC operating system to compete with Windows - no-one would have written software for it. The Windows company could not have made a new productivity suite to compete with Office - no-one would have used it, any more than anyone used Open Office. These are hypotheticals, but Microsoft really was caught by exactly this mechanic in mobile a decade later - no-one made apps for Window Phone because it had no users, and it had no users because no-one wrote apps for it, and all the power Microsoft had in Office and Windows meant nothing. 

In other words, one should think of network effects as comparable to a natural monopoly. In a network effect product as for a natural monopoly, once you have market dominance, that dominance persists not because of any anti-competitive behaviour by the company that owns it (even if there appears to be plenty) but because of the mechanics and economics of the product. 

Network effects do not dictate that there can be only one network - it depends on the market, just as you can have both cable TV and telephones on one street but only one water pipe. Hence, in early 1990s the PC market, with only 50-100m users globally, was too small to sustain more than one network - Microsoft won, Apple clung on in a niche and almost disappeared and the other contenders did disappear. The global smartphone market, with now over 4bn global users, is big enough for two networks - iOS and Android. In the early days of social networks many people thought there would be a winner in each region - Bebo was strong in the UK, Orkut in Brazil and so on - and this had happened with instant messaging in the first internet boom, but in the end Facebook turned out to have mostly global network effects. A few years later we had the same discussion about on-demand car services - many people thought thought that the network effects would be city-by-city, but in fact we had national and regional winners. However, in some countries the market did turn out to be big enough to sustain more than one network - in the USA both Lyft and Uber. 

Now, a generation after Microsoft’s antitrust case and two generations after AT&T’s breakup, we come to talking about Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon. There is little serious talk of breaking up Apple, perhaps because it’s so obviously a single unit. There is some argument for splitting AWS apart from Amazon - I find this unconvincing (and I’ll return to this in a future essay) but regardless, that would still leave the Amazon retail business itself as a single hugely powerful company that’s generating a torrent of cash. But there’s a lot of talk of breaking apart Google and Facebook, and here I think comparisons with Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft are most interesting. On one hand, there are clearly divisible component parts (Youtube, Instagram etc) in a way that’s much less true for Apple and Amazon. But on the other hand, I’d suggest that, as for Office and Windows, the competitive strength of these component parts doesn’t come from the combined ownership, but from networks effects. Hence, breaking them apart might achieve very little.

As a first observation, Google and Facebook have two-sided business models: they address advertisers and they address consumers. There’s no question that they have market dominance in online advertising (especially if you define the relevant market for Google as search advertising and for Facebook as social advertising). Equally, there isn’t much question that they bundle and cross-leverage all of their different properties when doing business with advertisers. Break them up, and advertisers would have more leverage and the successor companies to Google and Facebook would have less leverage and less market power.

Ironically, more leverage for advertisers over search or social networking companies would, all things being equal, mean less privacy for consumers. That isn’t typically what anti-trust advocates argue for, but it points to the fact that privacy isn’t necessarily a straightforward competition problem. Real policy is about trade-offs. 

However, though advertisers could now play Facebook off against Instagram and Google against Youtube, consumers would have the same choices that they had before. Just as breaking up AT&T liberalised the telecoms equipment market but not the natural monopoly local access market, changing who owns Instagram doesn’t alter the network effects that make Instagram strong, nor YouTube, nor WhatsApp, because, as for Office or Windows, the network effects are internal to the product. You don’t use WhatsApp because Facebook owns it. Google Search isn’t far ahead of Bing because it also owns Youtube. And yes, just as Microsoft was accused of doing all sorts of things to cross-leverage its businesses, so are these companies, but that’s ultimately peripheral - the market dominance comes from the products themselves.

At this point it’s sometimes suggested that if Google and YouTube became separate companies, Google would build a new video sharing product and Youtube would make an major new search engine. This is hard to take seriously - all the reasons why ‘Office Inc’ and ‘Windows Inc’ could not have competed with each other apply here in the same ways. ‘Youtube Inc’ would have none of the ongoing network effects that make Google a leader in search - it would start not just far behind Google but far behind Bing. Equally, there’s no reason for Google’s new video site to do any better than its last one - it would be on the wrong side of network effects. Indeed, the weakness of this idea becomes clearer if one asks, rhetorically, why it is that Facebook does not already compete with Google in search, or why Google has failed so many times at creating social products itself? Why would Youtube Inc’s search engine do any better than Bing - what special advantage would it have? This is all just magical thinking.

🤔

If network effects are equivalent to natural monopolies, and the market position of some of the companies that you worry about are based on network effects, what do you do? Well, when faced by a natural monopoly with problems, we don’t just shrug and give up - we regulate it. 

Going back to AT&T, the local access network is a natural monopoly, but you can unbundle competitive access to that ‘last mile’ of copper at the local exchange, with wholesale access to the data streams or direct physical access to the actual copper wire itself as it comes into the building. The trigger for this was DSL. In the USA, unbundling this access this was called ‘UNE-P’ and lasted a short while before being shut down, returning the copper monopoly to the Baby Bells. Outside the USA, regulators persevered (calling it ‘unbundling the local loop’) and created an entire new competitive layer in local access. The chart below shows the result: in pretty much every large country in Europe the former monopoly (‘the ‘incumbent’) now has less than 50% share of DSL. It still owns the copper, but it rents it out for other people to provide services on top, under a legally controlled wholesale model. The result is that in these countries most consumers have a choice of a dozen or more broadband providers. You can, in fact, combine a natural monopoly with competition.

A little later, something similar happened to roaming prices in Europe. Phone calls and data had become cheap, but roaming prices had not, and stories were widespread of hapless tourists getting huge bills for trivial amounts of use when they turned their phone on abroad. The EU responded with a set of rules that removed the consumer harm, and today roaming in Europe is effectively free.

The EU went about this by constructing an argument that this was a competition problem: the roaming price you were charged was a function of the wholesale rate agreed between the host operator and your operator, and you had no say in this. You could probably debate whether this really is a competition problem, but it doesn’t matter - the regulator found a legal mechanism to address a real consumer harm. (Ironically, a decade earlier Vodafone, which had networks in most European markets, had tried to sell a discounted roaming deal across those networks and was blocked by the EU on the grounds that since other operators could not match this it was anti-competitive. Yes, really.)

Something rather similar has happened over the last five years in European credit card interchange rates. When you swipe your card the retailer is charged a fee by Visa, MasterCard or Amex: the retailer can’t negotiate this and can’t chose not to support those card providers, so this really is a competitive question. Starting from 2015, the EU has capped these prices, pushing down interchange rates. (These rates are where loyalty points come from, so this has also reduced the value of such schemes to Europeans.)

What all of these have in common is that regulators inserted competition, cut prices, or both, by digging deep inside a monopoly or oligopoly and addressing mechanics, infrastructure and internal pricing schemes that consumers never see. They didn’t ‘break them up’ - they mandated wholesale access or price changes to things that you would never see on the P&L. Local loop unbundling came with very specific rules and pricing about every aspect of connecting to the local access network. As we look at the regulation of parts of the technology industry today, we can see some pretty similar things coming.

Hence, the UK’s competition authority, the CMA, analyses Google and Facebook’s dominant positions, and doesn’t focus on breaking them up. Instead, it proposes a long list of highly specific internal, mechanical interventions. For example:

• “The power to require Google to provide click and query data to third-party search engines to allow them to improve their search algorithms”

• “The power to restrict Google’s ability to secure default positions, to restrict the monetisation of default positions on devices [i.e. Apple selling the default search engine slot to Google] and to introduce choice screens”

• “Facebook should offer a defined find contacts service to users of a third-party platform, but rival platforms should not be required to reciprocate”

There’s lots to argue about in specific proposals like this (including how much of it will be enacted), but that’s not really the point - rather, one should ask which problems you can resolve by splitting the company apart, or by fining people, and which by getting right inside the operations and writing rules. As I pointed out here, we didn’t make cars safer by breaking up GM or Ford, but by writing rules about how you can make a car.

However, while the US does regulates cars (and many other things), most of my examples come from Europe, and this points to two distinct problems. 

First, what happens when monolithic global software systems are regulated by different authorities in different places? What if those authorities mandate things that are mutually contradictory? Worse, what if those contradictions reflect fundamental differences in philosophy? Adtech is relatively apolitical, but attitudes to free speech vary in important ways even between different liberal democracies. 

Second, different jurisdictions can have rather different operating models for regulation itself. The US tends to have a rules-based, lawyer-led system that moves forward one court case at a time, whereas Europe tends to have a principle-based, outcome-based, practitioner-led system. You can see that very clearly in the CMA report above. The US discussion tends to circle back to the Sherman Antitrust act of 1890 and what is or is not a violation, whereas the CMA argues for a new regulator that can write new rules about the operations of Google’s data centre whenever it thinks necessary.

Finally - markets change, and in technology they change very fast. Detailed, line-by-line regulation of the internal operations of a company is straight-forward when the market is set in place for 50 years, but IBM’s mainframes dominated the tech industry for only 15 years, and Windows/Intel for only another 15, and as I wrote here, neither one lost their dominance because of anti-trust intervention, but because the whole basis of their dominance became irrelevant. There are people applying to YC now that weren’t born the last time anyone started a company to write Windows software. 

This of course takes us back to the shift in regulatory models. Competition regulators are very conscious that they have moved too slowly. In tech, if you take five or ten years to resolve a complaint, then the company being harmed might have disappeared, the people who did the harm have moved to other jobs and forgotten all about it, and more fundamentally the whole market structure might have changed again - you can fine people, but it’s far too late. Hence, a big part of the shift in regulator attitudes is a shift to ex ante regulation - to thinking about what might happen instead of what did happen. (In the same vein, US regulators are also starting to think about whether moving away from their historic narrow focus on low prices for consumer might be a good idea, when looking at companies whose entire model is to be cheap or free.)

WHAT DO WE WANT?!
Ex-ante microeconomic intervention into self-reinforcing structural barriers to competition in the search market!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?!
There will be a detailed 18 month process of consultation with industry and other stakeholders, followed by statutory... (/1)

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) August 10, 2020

Of course, predictions are hard. The main reason that Americans do now have a (moderately) competitive market for telephones is that a completely different set of physics came along, in the form of cellular, where you actually can justify building three or four competing networks. Ironically, the legendary McKinsey study that said mobile would be a tiny market, and that there would only be 900,000 mobile subscribers in the USA by 2000, was commissioned by AT&T as part of this - when AT&T was broken up, no-one expected mobile to provide mass-market competition for telephone service. Equally, the anti-trust process that Microsoft went through 20 year ago was utterly ineffective - but then a few years later smartphones turned Windows PCs into accessories and Microsoft from a monopolist into just another big tech company. That’s not an argument against regulation, but it may be an argument for humility.

In the face of new viral variants, frequently changing mandates, and shifting local transmission and vaccination rates, masks are likely to remain useful, if not required, for some time. Fortunately, compared with earlier in the pandemic, these days you have many high-quality mask options to choose from, including medical-style N95s and KN95s, which many experts currently recommend as the best protection against the Omicron variant. But depending on the situation, reusable cloth masks with incorporated filters can block particles nearly as well as medical-grade masks can, as long as they fit securely.

Meine deutliche Warnung, bevor Euch irgendwelche Influenzer Lust auf die watchOS Beta machen: Es gibt KEINEN Rollback. Wer sich die Beta installiert, muss damit bis zum Release leben.

— Volker Weber (@vowe) August 10, 2020

Wichtige Regel für alle Betas: Immer nur dort installieren, wo es nicht darauf ankommt. In dieser Saison sieht das bei mir so aus:

• Beta: Ein MacBook Pro, ein iPad Pro, Surface Pro X
• Keine Beta: Andere Macs, ThinkPad Yoga, Surface Pro, zweites iPad Pro, alle iPhones, alle Apple Watch, Apple TV

iPhones und Apple Watch sind "mission critical". Die bekommen ihr Update bei der Version x.1. Ein iPad kann ich riskieren und einen Mac. Die Qualität sieht gut aus, aber ich hänge nicht alles an dieses dünne Seil. Besonders tricky: tvOS und watchOS kann man nicht downgraden. Wenn was schiefgeht, musst du einschicken.

Theoretisch könnte ich eine Apple Watch umstellen, aber dazu müsste ich erst das gepaarte iPhone auf Beta bringen. Und außerdem ist die zweite Apple Watch mein Reservefallschirm. Die muss funktionieren, wenn der ersten was dummes passiert.

Der beste Zeitpunkt, ein neues macOS zu installieren, ist übrigens immer x.5, also die letzte Version, bevor es eine neue gibt. Nur bei Catalina bin ich mir da nicht sicher.

I have a passing interest in O’Keefes Lake, a freshwater lake in Queens County, Prince Edward Island, near Avondale. If you’ve ever headed out the 48 Road from Charlottetown to Cardigan, you’ve passed it, perhaps without even knowing so, as it’s well-hidden from the road by trees: there’s just a short piece of road where you can look to the left to see the lake.

My interest in the lake was spurred some years ago when a substantial portion of its shoreline and, if memory serves, about half the lake itself, was for sale at a price that seemed remarkably low given, well, that you got to own half a lake.

Ultimately we found ourselves not in need of half a lake, perhaps put off, as well, by reports that the mercury levels in fish from the lake “can be in excess of recommended guidelines.” Who wants to own half a mercury-poisoned lake?

Of late, though, my interest in O’Keefes Lake extends to the mysterious presence of O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park on Google Maps:

It’s there on Apple Maps too, if you search:

This is mysterious because there is, and never has been, an O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park.

It doesn’t exist.

And yet it’s on the map!

My assumption is that it’s on the map because, at one point, it was approved as an official Geographic Name, and appears in the Canadian Geographic Names Database, albeit, now, with the status of “Previously Official.”

I’m presuming that, at some point in the past, Google and Apple, or their upstream geodata providers, hoovered up all of the geographic names of the world, including those from Canada, and haven’t updated since O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park stopped being a geographic name. I’m presuming this because I did exactly this myself many years ago.

A side-effect of the non-existent O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park being viewed as an official geographic name is that several websites that use geographic place names as their basis for providing information have also hoovered up the name, and so you can, among other things, get the weather for O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park:

You can read about the “park” in Wikipedia in Swedish:

And you can book a table at one of the 11 nearby restaurants:

You may have noticed that it’s O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park, but O’Keefes Lake, with an “s.” It seems that the geographic name for the lake was originally approved, in 1946, as O’Keefe Lake  and then, in 1966, changed to O’Keefes Lake.

All of which has me wondering:

1. Who was the O’Keefe (or who were the O’Keefes) after which the lake is named?
2. Why was the name changed?
3. Why was a geographic name for a Provincial Park approved, but the park never created?
4. Why is there mercury in the fish in O’Keefes Lake?

My next task is to try to make O’Keefe Lake Provincial Park disappear from the Internet: I’ve submitted edit requests to Google Maps and Apple Maps, I’ll add a note to the Swedish Wikipedia page, suggested the province update its PlaceFinder, and I’ll continue to monitor the situation until the vestiges of the park confuse us no more.

A friend, let’s call him “Bob Gray,” asked for advice on the best way to cycle from UPEI across town to Riverside Drive. I gave him my suggested route:

• Go down the trail from UPEI to the Experimental Farm road (by the beehives). 
• Turn left, uphill, through the farm building complex to Crop Lane, which will lead you to Mt. Edward Road. 
• Cross Mt. Edward Road to Confederation Street, past Parkdale Elementary School. Cross St. Peter’s Road and continue along St. Plus X to Kensington Road. 
• Take a left then a right onto Garfield Street, which will lead you straight to the Riverside Drive trail.

On Saturday, after cycling out to Gallant’s for our smoked salmon bagels, and back to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market for our weekly shop, our next stop was Riverview Country Market, and I resolved that we should subject ourselves to The Bob Gray Way to see whether it actually works.

Here’s the map of our complete 15 km Saturday cycle:

Here’s The Bob Gray Way:

We discovered some pitfalls:

1. Crop Lane is almost impossible to find: it runs in from Mount Edward Road to the Experimental Farm, but in a non-obvious way that doesn’t connect to any of the other farm roads. You can cycle to it by going in back of a large farm building and going along a rough dirt trail.
2. Garfield Street is rocky and sandy, has no shoulder, and vehicles don’t expect to find bicycles there, so it didn’t feel safe to cycle on. As you can see from our route on the map, we departed Garfield and cut through the Liquor Commission and Access PEI parking lots to avoid some of this.
3. The Riverside Drive multi-use trail, which is a great gift to cyclists, is, nonetheless, somewhat harrowing to cycle: while it is physically separated from the roadway, when there’s a large transport truck using its air brakes a couple of metres away from you that physical separation doesn’t feel very comfortable.

On the upside, we avoided the Allen Street roundabout, the tricky Allen Street-St. Peters Road intersection, and Exhibition Drive.

But we had confirmed for us that east-west cycling in Charlottetown remains no easy feat.

As the area north of Exhibition Drive shifts quickly from industrial to residential, we should start thinking more about what the active transportation routes in and out of this area should be, and especially what the best way to safely connect to the Confederation Trail spine is.

I recently watched Build an enterprise-grade service mesh with Traffic Director, featuring Stewart Reichling and Kelsey Hightower of GCP, and of course Google Cloud’s Traffic Director. Coming at this with a brain steeped in 5½ years of AWS technology and culture was surprising in ways that seem worth sharing.

Stewart presents the problem of a retail app’s shopping-cart checkout code. Obviously, first you need to call a payment service. However it’s implemented, this needs to be a synchronous call because you’re not going to start any fulfillment work until you know the payment is OK.

If you’re a big-league operation, your payment processing needs to scale and is quite likely an external service you call out to. Which raises the questions of how you deploy and scale it, and how clients find it. Since this is GCP, both Kubernetes and a service mesh are assumed. I’m not going to explain “service mesh” here; if you need to know go and web-search some combination of Envoy and Istio and Linkerd.

The first thing that surprised me was Stewart talking about the difficulty of scaling the payment service’s load balancer, and it being yet another thing in the service to configure, bearing in mind that you need health checks, and might need to load-balance multiple services. Fair enough, I guess. Their solution was a client-local load balancer, embedded in sidecar code in the service mesh. Wow… in such an environment, everything I think I know about load-balancing issues is probably wrong. There seemed to be an implicit claim that client-side load balancing is a win, but I couldn’t quite parse the argument. Counterintuitive! Need to dig into this.

And the AWS voice in the back of my head is saying “Why don’t you put your payments service behind API Gateway? Or ALB? Or maybe even make direct calls out to a Lambda function? (Or, obviously, their GCP equivalents.) They come with load-balancing and monitoring and error reporting built-in. And anyhow, you’re probably going to need application-level canaries, whichever way you go.” I worry a little bit about hiding the places where the networking happens, just like I worry about ORM hiding the SQL. Because you can’t ignore either networking or SQL.

Traffic Director

It’s an interesting beast. It turns out that there’s a set of APIs called “xDS”, originally from Envoy, nicely introduced in The universal data plane API. They manage the kinds of things a sidecar provides: Endpoint discovery and routing, health checks, secrets, listeners. What Google has done is arrange for gRPC to support xDS for configuration, and it seems Traffic Director can configure and deploy your services using a combination of K8s with a service mesh, gRPC, and even on-prem stuff; plus pretty well anything that supports xDS. Which apparently includes Google Cloud Run.

It does a lot of useful things. Things that are useful, at least, in the world where you build your distributed app by turning potentially any arbitrary API call into a proxied load-balanced monitored logged service, via the Service Mesh.

Is this a good thing? Sometimes, I guess, otherwise people wouldn’t be putting all this work into tooling and facilitation. When would you choose this approach to wiring services together, as opposed to consciously building more or less everything as a service with an endpoint, in the AWS style? I don’t know. Hypothesis: You do this when you’re already bought-in to Kubernetes, because in that context service mesh is the native integration idiom.

I was particularly impressed by how you could set up “global” routing, which means load balancing against resources that run in multiple Google regions (which don’t mean the same things as AWS regions or Azure regions). AWS would encourage you to use multiple AZ’s to achieve this effect.

Also there’s a lot of support for automated-deployment operations, and I don’t know if they extend the current GCP state of the art, but they looked decent.

Finally, I once again taken aback when Stewart pointed out that with Traffic Directors, you don’t have to screw around with iptables to get things working. I had no idea that was something people still had to do; if this makes that go away, that’s gotta be a good thing.

Kelsey makes it go

Kelsey Hightower takes 14 of the video’s 47 minutes to show how you can deploy a simple demo app on your laptop then, with the help of Traffic Director, on various combinations of virts and K8s resources and then Google Cloud Run. It’s impressive, but as with most K8s demos, assumes that you’ve everything up and running and configured because if you didn’t it’d take a galaxy-brain expert like Kelsey a couple of hours (probably?) to pull that together and someone like me who’s mostly a K8s noob, who knows, but days probably.

I dunno, I’m in a minority here but damn, is that stuff ever complicated. The number of moving parts you have to have configured just right to get “Hello world” happening is really super intimidating.

But bear in mind it’s perfectly possible that someone coming into AWS for the first time would find the configuration work there equally scary. To do something like this on on AWS you’d spend (I think) less time doing the service configuration, but then you’d have to get all the IAM roles and permissions wired up so that anything could talk to anything, which can get hairy fast. I noticed the GCP preso entirely omitted access-control issues. So, all in, I don’t have evidence to claim “Wow, this would be simpler on AWS!” — just that the number of knobs and dials was intimidating.

One thing made me gasp then laugh. Kelsey said “for the next step, you just have to put this in your Go imports, you don’t have to use it or anything:

_ "google.golang.org/xds"

I was all “WTF how can that do anything?” but then a few minutes later he started wiring endpoint URIs into config files that began with xdi: and oh, of course. Still, is there, a bit of a code smell happening or is that just me?

Anyhow

If I were already doing a bunch of service-mesh stuff, I think that Traffic Director might meet some needs of today and could become really valuable when my app started getting heterogeneous and needed to talk to various sorts of things that aren’t in the same service mesh.

What I missed

Stewart’s narrative stopped after the payment, and I’d been waiting for the fulfillment part of the puzzle, because for that, synchronous APIs quite likely aren’t what you want, event-driven and message-based asynchronous infrastructure would come into play. Which of course what I spent a lot of time working on recently. I wonder how that fits into the K8s/service-mesh landscape?

Today we are in celebration mode at Flickr as our “Shine a Light” contest has come to an end! A big thank you to everyone who participated by submitting their fabulous photos and engaging in our group discussions. You helped us make this community celebration a success. 

With close to 8,000 entries from members worldwide, the results were impressive, and the decision to choose three winners was not an easy one. A jury composed of eleven members of Flickr staff helped narrow down the selections and selected the three photos that we felt best exemplified the contest theme and criteria. Curious about the runners up and the list of staff favorites? Check out these galleries and join us in celebrating all of the contributions.

And without further ado, here are the winners of the FUJIFILM X100V Silver and FUJIFILM X-T30 Kit cameras. Congratulations!

‘Covid19: Alone in the city’ by Laurence Bouchard

How this moment was captured: “This was shot in Minatomirai, Japan. It’s a favorite place of mine to shoot because of the beautiful floor pattern. I was lucky on this particular day as a child was playing football with his father creating a beautiful scene before my eyes.”

About Laurence Bouchard: Laurence Bouchard is a Tokyo based street photographer from the U.K. He moved to Tokyo in 2009 and this sparked his interest in photography. He works as a private English instructor and also runs photography workshops via EYExplore.

‘When the newspaper doesn’t show the protest…’
by Rafshan Ekhowan

How this moment was captured: “The concept of this photo came across my mind after seeing some mismanagement for a long time. Everyone should protest against the wrong policies in a democracy. In some countries, people can’t protest against the system; even the newspapers are not protesting against those governments’ wrong policies. Through the photo, I am showing my outrage to the world news authority.”

About Rafshan Ekhowan: Rafshan Ekhowan is a student of Information and Communication Engineering at Daffodil International University of Bangladesh. He is passionate about photography and shoots things that catch his eye in and around Bangladesh.

‘Shine a light – from within’ by Laura Zalenga

How this moment was captured: “I created a mood-board around the topic of light, fell in love with the idea of having a light inside a person, and then tried to bring that vision to life, which was me sitting in the corner of my bedroom with a black fabric on the wall and floor, and having a lightbulb (LED) under my t-shirt. Testing different poses, hiding my remote control behind my body, and hoping, in the end, it would work out well. I also tried to have the person in the image be somewhat ‘undefined,’ as far as possible, with it being a self-portrait, so more people could identify with that human being and find a light within themselves. Part of the process was finding words that illustrated my feeling about the inner light, and I was excited to find Maya Angelou’s beautiful quote: “Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.””

About Laura Zalenga: Laura Zalenga is a self-portrait photographer based in Rotterdam, Netherlands passionate about the healing power of self-portraits, mental health and equality.

Thank you again to everyone that participated in “Shine a Light.” If you haven’t already, be sure to browse this gallery and the group for some spectacular photos.

An acquaintance recently accepted a community job with the target of increasing engagement by 20% within a year.

If the trendline had been increasing by 15% year on year, this is a reasonable target to hit. Sadly, this isn’t the case. The trendline has shown a decline in engagement by 10% over the past two years (2% the first year, and 8% in the past year).

This means he needs to reverse an accelerating long-term trend and then increase engagement. This isn’t a 20% increase in engagement, it’s a 30 to 40% increase in engagement. Unless he can drive 40% of people to visit the community or get existing members to participate 40% more, he’s almost certainly going to fail.

Worse yet, he accepted the target without any idea of how he was going to do it.

A few things are important here:

1) Don’t accept a target without first knowing the trendline. You can easily find yourself trying to hit impossible goals.

2) Find out why the trendline is heading in that direction. Find the ultimate cause of the problem. This is the only way to identify possible solutions that might work. This is also where you check if the reasons behind a decline are reasonably within your control.

3) Get approval to take risks before accepting the target. You can’t copy what the past community manager was doing and expect the results to be much different. To reverse a trendline you’re going to need to take risks and do something radically different. Get approval on this before accepting the targets.

I’m really enjoying discovering new blogs and reading other people’s posts tagged with the #100DaysToOffload. One I came across jist over a month ago has had a big impact on my approach to exercise.

In this post, Graham Williams (who goes by the handle ‘gray’) talks about experimenting with a month of using the MAF approach to his training.

There’s no need for a lot of waffle here. We’re looking to train in a low HR zone – I need to know my targets. This is how you get that:

Subtract your age from 180, then modify from one of the categories listed. For me this worked out to be 180 – 34 = 146 (Training consistently for ~ 2 years without injury).

Graham Williams

I’m five years older than Graham, so my target should be 141. By way of context, my heart rate has often been around 160-165bpm when finishing exercise.

The creator of this system, Phil Maffetone, suggests that you may add 5 to your target heart rate “if you are a competitive athlete training for more than a year without issues”. I’m not a competitive athlete, but I’ve been doing regular exercise ever since I can remember, so I decided that I’d aim to stay in the 141-146 range during exercise.

I have an Amazfit Bip smartwatch which allows me to see my heart rate in realtime while I run. While it’s not as accurate as a chest strap, I’ll not be buying or wearing one of those anytime soon, so it’s the best I’ve got for now.

It’s been almost a month since trying this approach and, looking at my data (11 runs) I can see that I’m running slower, sometimes much slower, as heart rate depends on multiple factors. For example, when we were on holiday in Devon, it was hotter and I was drinking more alcohol.

On average, this approach has slowed down my average pace by ~20 seconds per kilometre, which is significant. I can feel it while running, wanting to go a bit faster, as this method doesn’t really get the endorphins flowing.

What it does do, however, is ensure that I’m not exhausted after running first thing in the morning. I tend to be hard on myself, so the MAF approach looks like a simple way to have a more sustainable approach to my exercise regime.

This post is Day 28 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Revolver

Creative Director: Jimmy Hubbard
Design Director: Todd Weinberger
Sammi Chichester: Managing Editor
Photographer: Kevin Scanlon

Heidi: How did the project evolve?
Kevin: Jimmy Hubbard called me last summer and asked me to shoot High On Fire, a stoner-metal three-piece band with legendary musician Matt Pike at the helm.  The assignment was to shoot group and individual portraits in studio, and reportage imagery of the band prepping and sound-checking for a music fest in Las Vegas. This is my favorite kind of assignment.

What do you like about these types of assignments?
The controlled conditions of studio portraiture, and the run-and-gun of reportage.  The sound check was in the morning.  Tuning drums, changing bass strings, testing mics.  One of the best things about sound checks is the freedom I have to move around on stage while they’re playing songs.  I can’t do that during a concert.  It’s a more casual atmosphere, to be sure.

What makes the sound check different from a live show?
Musicians aren’t sweating, smoke and lighting isn’t as dramatic, the fans aren’t there.  But with High On Fire, the performance at that sound check was as authentic and energetic as a live performance of most other bands.  So being on stage, amongst the band, feet away from them, it was incredibly exciting.  Wrap sound check, load into the studio.

What type of cover direction did you get from the magazine?
Jimmy wanted portraits that considered the legacy of Matt Pike for the cover.  Stoic and introspective.  I went with simplicity for a lighting approach.  Trees for the background and an Elinchrom octabank key.  I had a smaller umbrella on standby for a fill, but I didn’t want it.  I shot mostly digital, but I spent a few rolls of film too.

Tell us about the shooting film.
I’d been bringing film cameras to set in recent years.  Hasselblad 500c or Fuji 680.  In most cases, the client opted for the digital images, relegating the films shots for after-the-fact darkroom adventures.  But Jimmy and the team at Revolver wanted one of the film shots…and they wanted it for the cover.  My first thought was the deadline.  As photographers know, it’s one thing to quickly turn around a digital shot.  But a darkroom print?  Maybe not so easy.  For safety, I had the shot scanned at Vista CRC in Manhattan.  That way the Revolver team could start designing the cover with a hi-res image. Then, off to Bushwick Darkroom to print.  I spent the day printing straight prints, and also variations using solarization techniques.  In the end, Revolver went for a clean look for the cover.

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Now that I am going into the office a bit more often, I had to find a mask that I don’t mind wearing all day. I tried a few different ones and have really come to like the feel of the OAD Face Mask. It fits snug and feels soft. Do you have a mask you love?

Update: A reader just reached out to me saying that these masks (poly/spandex blends) are apparently one of the least effective fabrics to protect you and others. Nooo.

For NYT Opinion, Gus Wezerek charted the gaps between white and black mortality rate:

If Black people had died at the same age-adjusted rate as white people in 2018, they would have avoided 65,000 premature, excess deaths — the equivalent of three coach buses filled with Black people crashing and killing them all every day of the year.

…oof.

The variable width bar chart above is one of several graphics in the piece. Height represents rate. Width represents the gap. Direction represents which group has the higher rate.

Tags: gaps, Gus Wezerek, mortality, New York Times, race

Online security is a significant issue these days, and as people rely more on internet services, their libraries of accounts and login credentials also grow.

Unfortunately, it’s practically guaranteed that somewhere along the line, attackers will breach a service you use and expose your passwords, login details and more. There are plenty of tools to help mitigate the threat — password managers, biometric authentication and two-factor authentication (2FA) can all help.

Another popular tool is a website called ‘Have I Been Pwned‘ (HIBP). Made by Troy Hunt, HIBP lets users punch in an email address and see a list of breached accounts attached to that email, as well as details about what data the breach exposed. HIBP launched seven years ago, and now Hunt is taking it open source.

In a blog post, Hunt lays out many of the reasons he plans to take HIBP open source. At the heart of it is that HIBP has always been a community project. But also, many companies use HIBP or something similar to warn people about breaches. Open-sourcing HIBP can help spread it to more places.

Hunt wants to put HIBP in the hands of those who can sustain it

For example, LastPass recently launched a dark web monitoring feature. The Verge reports that LastPass doesn’t use the HIBP database — it checks one hosted by Enzoic instead. However, many services rely on the same ‘k-Anonymity’ API designed by Cloudflare engineering manager Junade Ali to support HIBP.

Now @LastPass has added breached password notifications using the k-Anonymity API design by me and @troyhunt – joining @1Password, Okta PassProtect, Apple, Google, etc. https://t.co/fyOKbZWNNF

— Junade Ali (@IcyApril) August 5, 2020

Since HIBP wants to tell users their password was breached without providing an opportunity for attackers to figure out which passwords those are and make the breach worse, k-Anonymity uses math to make it difficult for attackers to do that. Those curious can read up on all the details here.

Hunt points out that Ali’s k-Anonymity API is one example of the many community contributions that made HIBP what it is. HIBP relies on contributors like Ali who freely give time, code and more.

Plus, Hunt says that open-sourcing HIBP puts the project in the hands of people who can “help sustain the service” no matter what happens to him.

Finally, Hunt notes in the blog post that his decision comes after a failed attempt to get another company to acquire HIBP without compromising on a list of ideals.

Open-sourcing HIBP isn’t happening just yet, however. Hunt doesn’t have a timeline for going open source. Part of the reason is that HIBP’s code is in a messy state, and another part is that Hunt wants to make sure he can keep the databases of breached passwords from falling into the wrong hands.

Source: Troy Hunt Via: The Verge

The post ‘Have I Been Pwned’ creator to take service open source appeared first on MobileSyrup.

iOS users who use Google Maps can rejoice now that the popular app supports the CarPlay Dashboard feature. Then, to take things further, Apple fans can also use Google Maps on Apple Watch.

The CarPlay Dashboard is the section of the in-car interface that allows users to see and control both Maps and music at the same time. For a long time, people could only use Apple Maps on the Dashboard, but after the next Google Maps update, it should be available as well.

Beyond an update to the app on iOS, Google is finally rolling out an app for the Apple Watch so users can navigate without having to pull their phone from their pocket.

Annoyingly, users can set a few saved locations as shortcuts on the Apple Watch app, but all other directions will need to be started on a phone and transitioned over to the watch.

Both of these are welcome updates and will help Google compete with Apple Maps, which has recently been updated to include more features to improve its parity with Google’s offering.

The update for Maps on iOS should be rolling out now, but the Apple Watch app will roll out over the next few weeks, according to Google.

Source: Google Keyword Blog

The post Google Maps on iOS now supports CarPlay’s ‘Split Screen’ mode appeared first on MobileSyrup.

When I first got my hands on the Lenovo Yoga C940, I was a little dismayed. I tend to prefer smaller, sleeker laptops that are light and easy to carry around. The last Lenovo laptop I reviewed, the ThinkBook 13s, was easily one of my favourite Windows laptops for that very reason. While the Yoga C940 certainly isn’t the lightest laptop out there, it still impressed me.

There’s a lot to like about the Yoga. From its unique design to its powerful specs, on paper it seems great. In practice, I found it lived up to the expectations, although some shortcomings did hamper the experience.

Despite those issues, Lenovo’s Yoga offers excellent functionality. On the one hand, it’s a high-end, powerful computer. However, thanks to a unique hinge mechanism, it also folds up into a tablet and comes with a pen for inking and drawing.

I found the Yoga actually offered a similar experience to the Microsoft Surface Book 3, albeit with a more solid build quality. There are some key differentiators, but overall, the Yoga could be a great option if you need a powerful yet portable PC capable of drawing and more.

Specs

• Display: UHD 3840 x 2160 pixel or FHD 1920 x 1080 pixel 15.6-inch IPS touchscreen, VESA-Certified Display HDR 400 with Dolby Vision, 500 nits brightness
• Processor: Up to 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9880H with vPro
• Memory: Up to 16GB DDR4 2666MHz
• Storage: Up to 2TB SSD
• Dimensions: 355.2 x 238.39 x 17.5-19.7mm
• Weight: 4.41lbs (2kg)
• Camera: 720p HD webcam
• Operating System: Windows 10 Home or Pro
• Battery: Up to 9 hours (UHD) or up to 12 hours (FHD)
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0
• Sensors: Fingerprint reader
• Ports: 2x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C/Intel Thunderbolt 3, 1x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A, headphone/mic combo
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB Max-Q

That hinge sounds great!

What immediately stands out about the Yoga C940 is the unique hinge. The laptop is split into two distinct halves; the display and the body, which contains the keyboard, trackpad and internals. In practice, it looks quite traditional, but the bar dividing the two halves pulls double duty. Beyond just a cool-looking hinge, it acts as the laptop’s speaker system.

This mini-soundbar, powered by Dolby Atmos, actually sounds pretty good and gets impressively loud. If you like using your laptop to watch videos, the hinge speaker makes for a great addition. It’d work well for gaming too, although I loathe playing anything without headphones.

However, the hinge goes beyond just being a great soundbar. It also enables users to flip the Yoga around in several different forms. There’s the traditional clamshell laptop mode — how I used it most often — as well as folding the screen all the way back so the laptop acts like a tablet. It also works well if you fold it partially back, for example, to hide the keyboard and make the display more prominent (potentially very handy for watching movies or if you want to use your own keyboard) or going into ‘tent mode.’

For my part, I found this a much more practical method of converting my laptop into a tablet than, say, Microsoft’s Surface Book 3, which allows you to fully detach the screen. While that makes for a better tablet, you lose out on what’s effectively a built-in kickstand with Microsoft’s design.

Another benefit of having a flexible hinge and not splitting the computer in two is that the Yoga C940 can pack more powerful hardware into the body. Granted, the model I reviewed sported older 2019 hardware, but presumably the 2020 variant of the Yoga can opt for more powerful hardware compared to the Book 3 since it isn’t as restricted by space or design.

Flexible and fast

Aside from being an excellent contortionist, the Yoga C940 is also a performance champ. Thanks to its powerful Intel i7-9750H processor and Nvidia GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics, the Yoga can handle just about everything you throw at it.

Throughout my review, I used the laptop primarily for work, which meant editing photos in Photoshop, using a web browser with multiple tabs open, and several other apps like Slack running in the background. The Yoga always seemed to keep up and I didn’t encounter any significant slowdowns or stuttering.

That said, when I did tax the hardware and get the fans spinning up, they were incredibly loud. Granted, the fans kept the laptop cool, but if you work near other people, they may not appreciate the extra noise.

I also found the battery life was relatively good on the Yoga. I wouldn’t want to go too far without the charging brick, but I also found I was able to consistently get five to six hours on a charge depending on my use. Obviously when running more taxing software or games, the battery life suffered, but for my average workload, the battery life held up.

As for gaming, the laptop will likely work well for lighter titles, such as popular esports, or older games. However, don’t expect to load up the latest and greatest at max settings. It’s another area where the Yoga performs well but isn’t the best.

Display almost gets it right

Lenovo equipped the Yoga with a passable 15.6-inch 1080p panel that, for the most part, worked well. While some may scoff at 1080p, I find it a more reliable option than 4K, which can tax the hardware and battery and, at least in this form factor, lead to worse performance and battery life for little benefit.

I still think resolutions around the 1440p mark work the best on laptop screens, offering the better visuals of 4K without hitting the hardware as much. That said, 1080p also works well at this size.

Aside from some oddities with the text on screen — it often looked rough, as if the screen was pixelated despite everything else on screen looking fine — I didn’t have any issues with the resolution.

Those who do want the extra resolution can opt for the 4K variant of the Yoga C940. While I wasn’t able to test it myself, it likely will impact battery life thanks to the extra pixels it needs to push.

Further, the colours looked great thanks to the Yoga’s HDR.

I am a little torn since I really liked the matte texture on the Lenovo ThinkBook 13s display. The Yoga, on the other hand, sports a glossy finish. It still looks great, but I definitely miss the matte texture, which made the screen less reflective.

Cramped typing makes for the biggest disappointment

One area I had high hopes for the Yoga C940 was the keyboard. At first glance, the keyboard looks very similar to the one on the ThinkBook 13s. I expected them to feel similar as well, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

First up, the Yoga’s keyboard felt softer, almost mushy by comparison. Considering I had the same complaint about the ThinkBook 13s, it just makes the overall feel that much worse. On the bright side, the keys are nearly silent on the Yoga unless you type really hard. For those who work in close proximity to others, this will be a blessing if they hate your loud typing.

Feel of the keys aside, the typing experience is fine. I could get by with this keyboard, although it isn’t one I would enjoy using.

My other issue with the keyboard is that it feels cramped, especially on the right side. This is mostly because Lenovo included a number pad. There was a time when I would have welcomed the number pad without question. However, I’ve recently upgraded to a ‘tenkeyless’ mechanical keyboard with my desktop and found I hardly missed the number pad once it was gone.

The problem with the Yoga is that to make the number pad fit, Lenovo made the number keys more narrow than the others, which makes it feel awkward. The other, more egregious issue, is that Lenovo also shrunk some of the right-hand keys like backspace. Because of this, I routinely miss the backspace key while typing, and it annoys me to no end. I’m sure someone who used the Yoga keyboard exclusively would eventually get used to it, but in my time with the laptop, I wasn’t able to.

As for the trackpad, the Yoga C940 sports a bigger and, in my opinion, better trackpad than what was on the ThinkBook 13s. Unfortunately, it still pales in comparison to what’s on offer from Microsoft’s Surface laptops or the trackpads on MacBooks.

The Yoga’s trackpad is large, smooth and tactile. It gets the job done, but I’ve used better.

The little details

There are a few other small things the Yoga C940 does, some good, others bad. Although it took a moment to get used to, the side-mounted power button makes it easy to turn on the laptop no matter what configuration you have it in.

Plus, the built-in stylus slot makes it easy to keep a stylus with you on the go, something I’ve always found frustrating with Microsoft’s Surface Pen. To be fair, the Surface Pro X did fix that particular gripe.

Lenovo included a webcam shutter as well, always a welcome addition for blocking the camera without sticking a piece of tape over it.

The port situation is also fairly good. On the right side is one USB-A port. The left has the headphone jack, two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a proprietary charging port. While I never like proprietary ports, Lenovo’s is better than most because it’s reversible.

The Yoga features a fingerprint scanner too, which works quite well.

The post Lenovo Yoga C940 Review: Soundbar hinge makes for great portable computing appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I just posted our current NetNewsWire plans on the NetNewsWire blog. It talks about things like Feedly and iCloud syncing, Big Sur user interface updates, and SwiftUI.

Alberta is going to switch from its provincial ‘ABTraceTogether’ app to the nationwide federal COVID Alert app, as first reported by The Globe and Mail.

ABTraceTogether was first released in the province on May 1st, and was the first of its kind to be launched in the country. The app was based on a similar app that was created in Singapore.

It uses Bluetooth to identify other smartphones with the app installed within a two-metre radius. It encrypts that data and stores it on the users’ phone.

There were some issues with the app. For instance, it only functioned on iPhones if the app was kept open and the phone was unlocked. Last month, Alberta Premier Jason Kennedy had stated that the federal government was getting in the way of the province working with Apple and Google to fix the issues.

The federal government had outlined that this was because its nationwide app was currently being developed using Apple and Google’s Exposure Notification API. The two tech giants have limited the use of their framework to one app per country.

It’s currently unknown when or how the app will be adopted in the province, but residents will likely be required to uninstall ABTraceTogether and then be encouraged to download COVID Alert once it becomes available.

Although the app is currently being tested in Ontario, the federal government is encouraging people from other provinces to download it as well so they are ready to use it once it’s functional.

ABTraceTogether has been downloaded by 234,462 people in Alberta, which is around five percent of the province’s population. At the time of writing, more than 1.5 million Canadians have downloaded COVID Alert.

Source: The Globe and Mail

The post Alberta switching over to nationwide federal COVID Alert app appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Huawei says that it’s running out of processor chips for its smartphones due to U.S. sanctions, as reported by the Associated Press.

The tech giant lost access to U.S. components and technology last year, and faced further issues when the U.S. prevented companies from using U.S. technology to manufacture components for Huawei.

Huawei says production of its Kirin chips will stop mid-September because they are created by contractors that require U.S. manufacturing technology.

The company’s president, Richard Yu, says Huawei doesn’t have the ability to create its own chips. Yu outlined this during an industry conference and said that it will be a big loss for the company.

“Unfortunately, in the second round of U.S. sanctions, our chip producers only accepted orders until May 15. Production will close on Sept. 15. This year may be the last generation of Huawei Kirin high-end chips,” he said during the conference.

Yu also stated that Huawei’s smartphone sales will likely be lower than last year, but didn’t provide any further details.

These comments come as Huawei shipped more smartphones worldwide than any other manufacturer for the first time in Q2 2020, according to a report from analytics firm Canalys. Its overseas shipments fell 27 percent in the quarter, but it’s dominating its domestic market.

The company boosted its Chinese shipments by eight percent. Huawei now sells over 70 percent of its smartphones in mainland China.

Source: Associated Press

The post Huawei says its smartphone chips are running out due to U.S. sanctions appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Datasette 0.46

I just released Datasette 0.46 with a security fix for an issue involving CSRF tokens on canned query pages, plus a new debugging tool, improved file downloads and a bunch of other smaller improvements.

Via @simonw

Drop by a HUB Cycling tent this Sunday, Aug 9 until 3 pm on Beach Avenue at Broughton Street to sign your support.

This incredibly popular and scenic route provides a safe, direct and flat connection between Hornby Street and Stanley Park for people of all ages and abilities, for recreation and commuting – all day, every day. It is a great use of limited open public space in one of Vancouver’s most popular and densely-populated neighbourhoods.

The Beach Avenue Bikeway will also relieve pressure on the very busy seawall route when bikes are allowed back on it post-COVID distancing measures.

Sign here if you agree and HUB Cycling will keep you updated on the future of this valuable cycling bikeway.

Cycling for Everyone; a report by Sustrans and Arup, which sets out recommendations for the transport industry to help tackle inequalities in cycling in urban areas has been published. After speaking at a few events Sustrans held on cycling and equality, it was an honour to write the foreword for the report. It’s rather frank, and I’m glad Sustrans gave me carte blanche to write it this way.

A lot of talk about cycling is going on in the UK media at the moment, due to the recent Government Health report, which also came out in the same week. To be honest with you, a lot of that report and suggestions made in it do not sit right in my spirit. Fat shaming, fatphobia, and stigmatising folx is NOT the one. It’s problematic. I stand in solidarity with everyone and their loved ones who have been made to feel terrible by this and a system which continually fails you. At this end, Mamma V who isn’t tip-top at the moment is currently going through elements of this bullshit with her health, weight and GP’s assumptions about ‘sedentary lifestyles’, and it’s incredibly crap.

I hope my foreword and this report are taken in, attention is paid and changes are actually made. More details about the report can be viewed on the Sustrans Blog and you can also download the full guide as a PDF.

Big love,
Jools.

The post Cycling for Everyone – A guide for inclusive cycling in cities and towns appeared first on Velo City Girl.

After receiving ACM SIGSOFT’s Influential Educator Award I wrote that I haven’t actually had much influence on software engineering education. One sign of that is that I’ve had no luck at all persuading faculty to create a class on data science for software engineers that uses software engineering data sets and results in its examples.

I now have a tentative explanation for that failure: the dearth of actionable results. It’s easy to compare the lengths of functions in JavaScript and Python (the former are much shorter on average), but what is an undergraduate supposed to do once they know that? Knowing how bugs cluster in large projects doesn’t connect with a student’s next assignment in operating systems the same way that analying data on transmission of bacterial infections connects with a nursing student’s lab practice.

So here’s my question: what results do we have from empirical software engineering that undergraduates could reasonably be expected to act on? Marian Petre’s analysis of why most practitioners don’t use UML comes to mind, though since courses outside software engineering already ignore it the practical impact would be quite small. Several decades’ worth of findings on the benefits of code review might be a better example; what others can you think of?

COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

— Wade Davis

A trio of contrarian viewpoints caught my attention over the last month:

• Oatly: The New Coke (via Hacker News)
• Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer (via Citizens Alliance of PEI newsletter)
• Small Businesses Are Overrated (via Lou Eastman on Facebook)

In each case, the authors take something that, at least in progressive circles, is taken as motherhood gospel–oat milk, small family farms, small business–and suggests that not everything is as it seems. 

Contrarian dissonance is important; it’s so easy to get trapped inside an echo chamber where certain truths are forever declared self-evident.

I thought of this when I was sent links to to petitions regarding the proposed development of a 99-unit apartment complex on the Charlottetown waterfront.

Both petitions mention the character of the neighbourhood as a reason for opposing the project.

Preserving Our Waterfront  calls out the “heritage view”:

The proposed concrete and steel structure is not compatible with lower Water Street and the surrounding area. The heritage view was not considered!

While Charlottetown City Council: Deny a Building Permit for 8 story waterfront development mentions the “aesthetic of this quiet, residential neighbourhood”:

If this development is allowed to go ahead, it will change the aesthetic of this quiet, residential neighbourhood. The scale of it will overwhelm the existing surrounding buildings, many of them Heritage properties. 

There may be other perfectly valid reasons for opposing this project, and both petitions contain bullet points of them, but if we’re going to increase urban density in Charlottetown, we need to get ourselves to realize that this will mean the scale, shape, and character of the city has to change. No, we shouldn’t have torn down Penn Station, but that doesn’t mean that nothing should ever change. And it means that “quiet residential neighbourhoods” and “heritage views” may need to be reconsidered.

Increased urban density is the clear ecological path forward for its decreased commutes, decreased need for parking, decreased urban sprawl, increased efficiency of public and commercial services. It makes sense to pack more of us together in closer proximity in more energy efficient ways.

I don’t know whether the building that’s the subject of these petitions should go forward, and my knee-jerk reaction, given my antipathy toward the developer, was to oppose it.

But, like a love of oat milk and deification of small businesses and small family farms, perhaps we need to give our assumptions a check from time to time, and realize that progressive change comes in all sorts of packages, and sometimes a knee-jerk reaction is a signal to stop and take a second look.

mkalus shared this story from jwz.

Madalena McNeil is accused of buying red paint before a protest. Under aggressive new criminal charges, it could mean she spends the rest of her life in prison.

McNeil, 28, was among four people charged Tuesday for their alleged actions at a July Salt Lake City, Utah, protest over a district attorney's decision that the fatal police shooting of a young man was justified. Protesters allegedly splashed red paint on the DA's office, broke windows, and hung signs calling for justice for the slain man.

But instead of merely charging the protesters with vandalism or even rioting, that same DA used a charging enhancement to claim they operated as a gang. Under the new charges, the demonstrators face up to life in prison. It's the latest in a pattern of harsh measures that ratchet up potential penalties by treating protesters like a criminal conspiracy. [...]

McNeil and fellow protesters were met with police in riot gear when they arrived at the DA's office, she said. Footage she filmed from the event shows the police line charging protesters with their riot shields. [...]

A criminal complaint accuses McNeil of positioning herself to shove one of the shield-toting officers, and of buying the red paint that protesters allegedly splashed outside the DA's office. She and six other protesters face criminal mischief and rioting charges, which usually cap at a second-degree felony [...] But Gill, the DA who was the focus of protesters' ire in the first place, enhanced the charges using a provision intended for gangs. Under the new enhancements, which apply to "offenses committed in concert with two or more persons or in relation to a criminal street gang," the protesters can face up to life in prison, if convicted. [...]

Groth and McNeil also questioned the potential conflict of interest of Gill issuing sentencing enhancements against protesters who were demonstrating against him.

In most states, a felony conviction means that you can never vote again, so you get criminalization of dissent and disenfranchisement in one convenient fascist package.

One tweet tried to identify a cop -- then five people were charged with felony harassment:

A New Jersey police department is pursuing cyber harassment charges against five people in connection with a protest photo uploaded to Twitter in June. Complaints were served against the original tweeter and four other people who retweeted the message, alleging that they caused the officer to fear for the safety of his family.

It's an unprecedented use of anti-harassment laws, coming amid a nationwide law enforcement backlash against anti-police brutality activism. [...]

The Nutley Police Department filed its complaints in late July over a tweet posted during a June 26th protest. The now-deleted message included a photo of a masked on-duty police officer with a request that "If anyone knows who this bitch is throw his info under this tweet." Because of the mask, the officer is not readily identifiable from the photograph, and there do not appear to be any replies revealing his identity. [...]

The department charged Sziszak and others on behalf of Detective Peter Sandomenico, who the complaint identifies as the officer in the tweet. It alleges that the photo and accompanying caption threatened the officer "acting in the performance of his duties, causing Detective Sandomenico to fear that harm will come to himself, family, and property."

Once this blew up they panicked and dropped the charges like the bullying cowards they are.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.