Rolandt

From Protocol:

Cloudflare is ready to launch a new cloud object storage service that promises to be cheaper than the established alternatives, a step the company believes will catapult it into direct competition with AWS and other cloud providers. The service will be called R2 — “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with Protocol ahead of Cloudflare’s announcement Tuesday morning. Cloudflare will not charge data-egress fees for customers using R2, taking direct aim at the fees AWS charges developers to move data out of its widely popular S3 storage service.

R2 will run across Cloudflare’s global network, which is most known for providing anti-DDoS services to its customers by absorbing and dispersing the massive amounts of traffic that accompany denial-of-service attacks on websites. It will be compatible with S3’s API, which makes it much easier to move applications already written with S3 in mind, and Cloudflare said that beyond the elimination of egress fees, the new service will be 10% cheaper to operate than S3.

Cloudflare has always framed itself as a disruptor; R2 lives up to its reputation.

Cloudflare’s Evolution

I already wrote earlier this year about Cloudflare’s unique advantages in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented, thanks to the distributed nature of its service, and why that positioned the company to compete with the major cloud providers in the long run. What is worth referring to with this announcement, though, is this clip I posted of Prince’s initial launch of Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, particularly this bit from the Q&A:

So from a competitive standpoint, obviously you’re intruding on some of the stuff that the bigger boys are doing, and they’ve been at this for a long time. What’s to stop them from coming in and replicating your model?

There are companies that are doing things at the high end of the market, and they make very fat margins doing it. I’m really a big fan of Clay Christensen, he was a business school professor of mine, and I like the idea of businesses that come in from below. The big incumbents have an Innovator’s Dilemma trying to come down and deal with a company like ours, but we welcome the competition. We think we make a really great product. It’s designed for a certain type of users that are very different than the users that a larger company might be trying to attract.

Prince was spot-on about the competitive response of incumbents to Cloudflare’s offering for the long-tail of websites: it never came, because Cloudflare was serving a new market. This is how Christensen defined new market disruption in The Innovator’s Solution:

The third dimension [is] new value networks. These constitute either new customers who previously lacked the money or skills to buy and use the product, or different situations in which a product can be used — enabled by improvements in simplicity, portability, and product cost…We say that new-market disruptions compete with “nonconsumption” because new-market disruptive products are so much more affordable to own and simpler to use that they enable a whole new population of people to begin owning and using the product, and to do so in a more convenient setting.

That’s not the end of the story, though: new market disruptors don’t stand still, but can leverage the huge runway provided by the new market to build up their product capabilities in a way that eventually threatens the incumbent. Christensen continued:

Although new-market disruptions initially compete against nonconsumption in their unique value network, as their performance improves they ultimately become good enough to pull customers out of the original value network into the new one, starting with the least-demanding tier. The disruptive innovation doesn’t invade the mainstream stream market; rather, it pulls customers out of the mainstream value network into the new one because these customers find it more convenient to use the new product.

This was Cloudflare Workers, edge compute functionality that was a great match for Cloudflare’s CDN offering, but certainly not a competitor for AWS’s core offerings. Back to Christensen:

Because new-market disruptions compete against nonconsumption, the incumbent leaders feel no pain and little threat until the disruption is in its final stages.

This is where R2 comes in.

The AWS Transformation

In a vacuum, most businesses would prefer making a fixed cost investment instead of paying on a marginal use basis. Consider Spotify’s music-streaming business: one of the company’s core challenges is that the more customers Spotify has the more it has to pay music labels — streaming rights are a marginal cost. A streaming service like Netflix, on the other hand, that spends up front for its own content, gets to keep whatever increased revenue that content drives for itself. This same logic applies to computing capacity: buying your own servers is, in theory, cheaper than renting compute from a service like AWS.

When it comes to compute, however, reality is very different than theory.

• First, usage may be uneven, whether that be because a business is seasonal, hit-driven, or anything in-between. That means that compute capacity has to be built out for the worst case scenario, even though that means most resources are sitting idle most of the time.
• Second, compute capacity is likely growing — hopefully rapidly, in the case of a new business. Building out infrastructure, though, is not a linear process: new capacity comes online all at once, which means a business has to overbuild for their current needs so that they can accommodate future growth, which again means that most resources are sitting idle most of the time.
• Third, compute capacity is complex and expensive. That means there are both huge fixed costs that have to be invested before the compute can be used, and also significant ongoing marginal costs to manage the compute already online.

This is why AWS was so transformative: Amazon would spend all of the up-front money to build out compute capacity for all of its customers, and then rent it on-demand, solving all of the problems I just listed:

• Customers could scale their compute up-or-down instantly in response to their needs.
• Customers could rent exactly as much compute as they needed at any moment in time, even as they were able to seamlessly handle growth.
• AWS would be responsible for all of the up-front investment and ongoing maintenance, and because they would operate at such scale, they would get much better prices from suppliers than any individual company could on its own.

It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which AWS changed the world, particularly Silicon Valley. Without the need to buy servers, companies could be started in a bedroom, creating the conditions for the entire angel ecosystem and the shift of traditional venture capital to funding customer acquisition for already proven products, instead of Sun servers for ideas in PowerPoints. Amazon, meanwhile, suddenly had a free option on basically every startup in the world, positioning itself to levy The Amazon Tax on every company that succeeded.

The scale of these options became clear to the world in 2015 when Amazon broke out AWS’s financials for the first time; I called it The AWS IPO:

The big question about AWS, though, has been whether Amazon can keep their lead. Data centers are very expensive, and Amazon has a lot less cash and, more importantly, a lot less profit than Google or Microsoft. What happens if either competitor launches a price war: can Amazon afford to keep up?

To be sure, there were reasons to suspect they could: for one, Amazon already has significantly more scale, which means their costs on a per-customer basis are lower than Microsoft or Google. And perhaps more importantly is the corporate culture that results from a “your-margins-are-my-opportunity” mindset: Amazon can stomach a few percentage points of margin on a core business far more comfortably than Microsoft or Google, both fat off of software and advertising margins respectively. Indeed, when Google slashed prices in the spring of 2014, Amazon immediately responded and proceeded to push prices down further still, just as they had ever since AWS’s inception (the price cuts in response to Google were the 42nd for the company). Still, the question remained: was this sustainable? Could Amazon afford to compete?

This is why Amazon’s latest earnings were such a big deal: for the first time the company broke out AWS into its own line item, revealing not just its revenue (which could be teased out previously) but also its profitability. And, to many people’s surprise, and despite all the price cuts, AWS is very profitable: $265 million in profit on $1.57 billion in sales last quarter alone, for an impressive (for Amazon!) 17% net margin.

Those numbers last quarter are up to $4.2 billion in profit on $14.9 billion in revenue for a net margin of 28%: Amazon has increased its margins, even as Microsoft and Google have increased their focus on the cloud. A big reason is that Microsoft in particular has pursued different customers, coaxing existing businesses to the cloud, thanks in part to their early focus on hybrid solutions.¹ Google, meanwhile, has been even further behind, particularly in terms of matching AWS’s sheer breadth of services (even if they weren’t always technically great), making it harder for businesses already used to AWS to shift.

The egress fees R2 is targeting, though, have played a big role as well.

S3’s Egress Pricing

S3 is the OG Amazon Web Service: it launched on March 14, 2006, with this press release:

Amazon Web Services today announced “Amazon S3(TM),” a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs…

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It’s designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers…

S3 lets developers pay only for what they consume and there is no minimum fee. Developers pay just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

Prices have, as you might expect, come down over the ensuing 15 years:

• A gigabyte of storage today is $0.023, a decrease of 85%
• Moving data into S3 is free, a decrease of 100%
• Moving a gigabyte out of S3 is $0.09, a decrease of 55%

These numbers are the base rates; prices vary based on different storage tiers, whether or not you use Amazon’s CDN, and, more importantly, whether or not you have a long-term contract with AWS (more on this in a moment). What is consistent across all of those variables, though, are differences in cost between moving data into AWS, and the cost of moving data out; a blog post from earlier this year called the difference AWS’s “Hotel California”:

Another oddity of AWS’s pricing is that they charge for data transferred out of their network but not for data transferred into their network…We’ve tried to be charitable in trying to understand why AWS would charge this way. Disappointingly, there just doesn’t seem to be an innocent explanation. As we dug in, even things like writes versus reads and the wear they put on storage media, as well as the challenges of capacity planning for storage capacity, suggest that AWS should charge less for egress than ingress.

But they don’t.

The only rationale we can reasonably come up with for AWS’s egress pricing: locking customers into their cloud, and making it prohibitively expensive to get customer data back out. So much for being customer-first.

Even if companies are careful to not make any of their back-end services AWS-specific, the larger you grow the more data you have on AWS, and moving that data off is an eye-watering expense. And so, when another company builds a service that looks interesting — like, say, Cloudflare Workers — it’s easier to simply wait for Amazon’s alternative and build using that, and oops, now you’re even more locked into AWS!

What is happening in terms of the value chain is straightforward: Amazon paid fixed costs for its infrastructure, and is charging for it on a marginal basis; all of the upside here accrues to AWS, as seen in the service’s margins. That is also an important part of AWS’s retention strategy: for most AWS customers the easiest solution to rising costs is to simply sign a long-term contract, dramatically decreasing their prices (again, Amazon has the margin to spare) while ensuring they stay on AWS that much longer, accumulating that much more data and relying on that many more AWS-specific services. Hotel Seattle, as it were.

That blog post, by the way, was co-written by Prince, where he made the case that based on Cloudflare’s understanding of bandwidth costs, AWS was making a 7959% margin on US/Canada egress fees; Prince’s conclusion at the time was that AWS ought to join the Bandwidth Alliance and discount or waive egress fees when sending data to Cloudflare (which doesn’t cost AWS anything, thanks to an industry-standard private network interface), but two months on, the true point of Prince’s post was clearly this week’s announcement.

R2’s Low-End Disruption

From the Cloudflare blog:

Object Storage, sometimes referred to as blob storage, stores arbitrarily large, unstructured files. Object storage is well suited to storing everything from media files or log files to application-specific metadata, all retrievable with consistent latency, high durability, and limitless capacity.

The most familiar API for Object Storage, and the API R2 implements, is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). When S3 launched in 2006, cloud storage services were a godsend for developers. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the last fifteen years, developers have embraced cloud storage and its promise of infinite storage space.

As transformative as cloud storage has been, a downside emerged: actually getting your data back. Over time, companies have amassed massive amounts of data on cloud provider networks. When they go to retrieve that data, they’re hit with massive egress fees that don’t correspond to any customer value — just a tax developers have grown accustomed to paying.

Enter R2.

The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3’s margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data as I would like for free — in either direction.

That’s not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.

In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3’s margin is R2’s opportunity.

Modular Disruption

Cloudflare, at least in AWS terms, remains a minnow; the company had $152 million in revenue last quarter, 10 percent of AWS’s revenue upon its unveiling six years ago. Prince, though, is thinking big; from that Protocol article:

“We are aiming to be the fourth major public cloud,” Prince said. Cloudflare already offers a serverless compute service called Workers, and Prince thinks that adding a low-cost storage service will encourage more developers and companies to build applications around Cloudflare’s services.

That is one way this could play out: R2 is a compelling choice for a certain class of applications that could be built to serve a lot of data without much compute. Moreover, by virtue of using the S3 API,² R2 can also be dropped into existing projects; developers can place R2 in front of S3, pulling out data as needed, once, and getting free egress forever-after.

Still, AWS is far more than storage; the second AWS product was EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud — which lets customers rent virtual computers that by definition are far more capable than a necessarily limited edge computing service like Workers, along with a host of database offerings and the sort of specialized services I mentioned earlier. Not all of these will necessarily translate well to Cloudflare’s distributed infrastructure, either.

Again, though, Cloudflare’s distributed nature is the entire reason the company’s cloud ambitions are so intriguing: R2 may be a direct competitor for S3, but that doesn’t mean that anything else about Cloudflare’s cloud ambitions has to be the same. Go back to Christensen and The Innovator’s Solution:

Modularity has a profound impact on industry structure because it enables independent, nonintegrated organizations to sell, buy, and assemble components and subsystems. Whereas in the interdependent world you had to make all of the key elements of the system in order to make any of them, in a modular world you can prosper by outsourcing or by supplying just one element. Ultimately, the specifications for modular interfaces will coalesce as industry standards. When that happens, companies can mix and match components from best-of-breed suppliers in order to respond conveniently to the specific needs of individual customers.

As depicted in figure 5–1, these nonintegrated competitors disrupt the integrated leader. Although we have drawn this diagram in two dimensions for simplicity, technically speaking they are hybrid disruptors because they compete with a modified metric of performance on the vertical axis of the disruption diagram, in that they strive to deliver rapidly exactly what each customer needs. Yet, because their nonintegrated structure gives them lower overhead costs, they can profitably pick off low-end customers with discount prices.

This is where zero egress costs could be an even bigger deal strategically than they are economically. S3 was the foundation of AWS’s integrated cloud offering, and remains the linchpin of the company’s lock-in; what if R2, thanks to its explicit rejection of data lock-in, becomes the foundation of an entirely new ecosystem of cloud services that compete with the big three by being modular? If you can always get access to your data for free, it becomes a lot more plausible to connect that data to best-of-breed compute options built by companies focused on doing one thing well, instead of simply waiting for Amazon to offer up their pale imitation that doesn’t require companies to pay out the nose to access.

Moreover, like any true disruption, it will be very difficult for Amazon to respond: sure, R2 may lead Amazon to reduce its egress fees, but given the importance of those fees to both AWS’s margins and its lock-in, it’s hard to see them going away completely. More importantly, AWS itself is locked-in to its integrated approach: the entire service is architected both technically and economically to be an all-encompassing offering; to modularize itself in response to Cloudflare would be suicidal.

At the same time, this is also why Cloudflare’s success in becoming the fourth cloud, should it happen, will likely be additive to the market: companies on AWS are by-and-large not going anywhere, but there are new companies being formed all of the time, and a whole bunch of companies that have yet to move to the cloud, as well as the aforementioned Internet fragmentation that plays to Cloudflare’s advantage. Here it is a benefit to Cloudflare that it is a relatively small company: opportunities that seem trivial to giants will be big wins, giving the company the increasing scale it needs to flesh out its offerings and build its new cloud ecosystem. Success is not assured, but the strategy is sound enough to make Prince’s late professor proud.

1. Amazon resisted hybrid for a long time, because it’s a technically terrible solution relative to just moving everything to the cloud, which is to say that Amazon made the same mistake all of Microsoft’s competitors make: relying on a “better product” instead of actually meeting customers where they are and solving their needs ↩

2. Copying APIs is a favorite tactic of Amazon when it comes to open source projects. ↩

Cloudflare's new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.

From Protocol:

Cloudflare is ready to launch a new cloud object storage service that promises to be cheaper than the established alternatives, a step the company believes will catapult it into direct competition with AWS and other cloud providers. The service will be called R2 — “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with Protocol ahead of Cloudflare’s announcement Tuesday morning. Cloudflare will not charge data-egress fees for customers using R2, taking direct aim at the fees AWS charges developers to move data out of its widely popular S3 storage service.

R2 will run across Cloudflare’s global network, which is most known for providing anti-DDoS services to its customers by absorbing and dispersing the massive amounts of traffic that accompany denial-of-service attacks on websites. It will be compatible with S3’s API, which makes it much easier to move applications already written with S3 in mind, and Cloudflare said that beyond the elimination of egress fees, the new service will be 10% cheaper to operate than S3.

Cloudflare has always framed itself as a disruptor; R2 lives up to its reputation.

Cloudflare’s Evolution

I already wrote earlier this year about Cloudflare’s unique advantages in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented, thanks to the distributed nature of their service, and why that positioned the company to compete with the major cloud providers in the long run. What is worth referring to with this announcement, though, is this clip I posted of Prince’s initial launch of Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, particularly this bit from the Q&A:

So from a competitive standpoint, obviously you’re intruding on some of the stuff that the bigger boys are doing, and they’ve been at this for a long time. What’s to stop them from coming in and replicating your model?

There are companies that are doing things at the high end of the market, and they make very fat margins doing it. I’m really a big fan of Clay Christensen, he was a business school professor of mine, and I like the idea of businesses that come in from below. The big incumbents have an Innovator’s Dilemma trying to come down and deal with a company like ours, but we welcome the competition. We think we make a really great product. It’s designed for a certain type of users that are very different than the users that a larger company might be trying to attract.

Prince was spot-on about the competitive response of incumbents to Cloudflare’s offering for the long-tail of websites: it never came, because Cloudflare was serving a new market. This is how Christensen defined new market disruption in The Innovator’s Solution:

The third dimension [is] new value networks. These constitute either new customers who previously lacked the money or skills to buy and use the product, or different situations in which a product can be used — enabled by improvements in simplicity, portability, and product cost…We say that new-market disruptions compete with “nonconsumption” because new-market disruptive products are so much more affordable to own and simpler to use that they enable a whole new population of people to begin owning and using the product, and to do so in a more convenient setting.

That’s not the end of the story, though: new market disruptors don’t stand still, but can leverage the huge runway provided by the new market to build up their product capabilities in a way that eventually threatens the incumbent. Christensen continued:

Although new-market disruptions initially compete against nonconsumption in their unique value network, as their performance improves they ultimately become good enough to pull customers out of the original value network into the new one, starting with the least-demanding tier. The disruptive innovation doesn’t invade the mainstream stream market; rather, it pulls customers out of the mainstream value network into the new one because these customers find it more convenient to use the new product.

This was Cloudflare Workers, edge compute functionality that was a great match for Cloudflare’s CDN offering, but certainly not a competitor for AWS’s core offerings. Back to Christensen:

Because new-market disruptions compete against nonconsumption, the incumbent leaders feel no pain and little threat until the disruption is in its final stages.

This is where R2 comes in.

The AWS Transformation

In a vacuum, most businesses would prefer making a fixed cost investment instead of paying on a marginal use basis. Consider Spotify’s music-streaming business: one of the company’s core challenges is that the more customers Spotify has the more it has to pay music labels — streaming rights are a marginal cost. A streaming service like Netflix, on the other hand, that spends up front for its own content, gets to keep whatever increased revenue that content drives for itself. This same logic applies to computing capacity: buying your own servers is, in theory, cheaper than renting compute from a service like AWS.

When it comes to compute, however, reality is very different than theory.

• First, usage may be uneven, whether that be because a business is seasonable, hit-driven, or anything in-between. That means that compute capacity has to be built out for the worst case scenario, even though that means most resources are sitting idle most of the time.
• Second, compute capacity is likely growing — hopefully rapidly, in the case of a new business. Building out infrastructure, though, is not a linear process: new capacity comes online all at once, which means a business has to overbuild for their current needs so that they can accommodate future growth, which again means that most resources are sitting idle most of the time.
• Third, compute capacity is complex and expensive. That means there are both huge fixed costs that have to be invested before the compute can be used, and also significant ongoing marginal costs to manage the compute already online.

This is why AWS was so transformative: Amazon would spend all of the up-front money to build out compute capacity for all of its customers, and then rent it on-demand, solving all of the problems I just listed:

• Customers could scale their compute up-or-down instantly in response to their needs.
• Customers could rent exactly how much compute they needed at any moment in time, even as they were able to seamlessly handle growth.
• AWS would be responsible for all of the up-front investment and ongoing maintenance, and because they would operate at such scale, they would get much better prices from suppliers than any individual company could on its own.

It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which AWS changed the world, particularly Silicon Valley. Without the need to buy servers, companies could be started in a bedroom, creating the conditions for the entire angel ecosystem and the shift of traditional venture capital to funding customer acquisition for already proven products, instead of Sun servers for ideas in Powerpoints. Amazon, meanwhile, suddenly had a free option on basically every startup in the world, positioning itself to levy The Amazon Tax on every company that succeeded.

The scale of these options became clear to the world in 2015 when Amazon broke out AWS’s financials for the first time; I called it The AWS IPO:

The big question about AWS, though, has been whether Amazon can keep their lead. Data centers are very expensive, and Amazon has a lot less cash and, more importantly, a lot less profit than Google or Microsoft. What happens if either competitor launches a price war: can Amazon afford to keep up?

To be sure, there were reasons to suspect they could: for one, Amazon already has significantly more scale, which means their costs on a per-customer basis are lower than Microsoft or Google. And perhaps more importantly is the corporate culture that results from a “your-margins-are-my-opportunity” mindset: Amazon can stomach a few percentage points of margin on a core business far more comfortably than Microsoft or Google, both fat off of software and advertising margins respectively. Indeed, when Google slashed prices in the spring of 2014, Amazon immediately responded and proceeded to push prices down further still, just as they had ever since AWS’s inception (the price cuts in response to Google were the 42nd for the company). Still, the question remained: was this sustainable? Could Amazon afford to compete?

This is why Amazon’s latest earnings were such a big deal: for the first time the company broke out AWS into its own line item, revealing not just its revenue (which could be teased out previously) but also its profitability. And, to many people’s surprise, and despite all the price cuts, AWS is very profitable: $265 million in profit on $1.57 billion in sales last quarter alone, for an impressive (for Amazon!) 17% net margin.

Those numbers last quarter are up to $4.2 billion in profit on $14.9 billion in revenue for a net margin of 28%: Amazon has increased its margins, even as Microsoft and Google have increased their focus on the cloud. A big reason is that Microsoft in particular has pursued different customers, coaxing existing businesses to the cloud, thanks in part to their early focus on hybrid solutions.¹ Google, meanwhile, has been even further behind, particularly in terms of matching AWS’s sheer breadth of services (even if they weren’t always technically great), making it harder for businesses already used to AWS to shift.

The egress fees R2 is targeting, though, have played a big role as well.

S3’s Egress Pricing

S3 is the OG Amazon Web Service: it launched on March 14, 2006, with this press release:

Amazon Web Services today announced “Amazon S3(TM),” a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs…

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It’s designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers…

S3 lets developers pay only for what they consume and there is no minimum fee. Developers pay just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

Prices have, as you might expect, come down over the ensuing 15 years:

• A gigabyte of storage today is $0.023, a decrease of 85%
• Moving data into S3 is free, a decrease of 100%
• Moving a gigabyte out of S3 is $0.09, a decrease of 55%

These numbers are the base rates; prices vary based on different storage tiers, whether or not you use Amazon’s CDN, and, more importantly, whether or not you have a long-term contract with AWS (more on this in a moment). What is consistent across all of those variables, though, are differences in cost between moving data into AWS, and the cost of moving data out; a blog post from earlier this year called the difference AWS’s “Hotel California”:

Another oddity of AWS’s pricing is that they charge for data transferred out of their network but not for data transferred into their network…We’ve tried to be charitable in trying to understand why AWS would charge this way. Disappointingly, there just doesn’t seem to be an innocent explanation. As we dug in, even things like writes versus reads and the wear they put on storage media, as well as the challenges of capacity planning for storage capacity, suggest that AWS should charge less for egress than ingress.

But they don’t.

The only rationale we can reasonably come up with for AWS’s egress pricing: locking customers into their cloud, and making it prohibitively expensive to get customer data back out. So much for being customer-first.

Even if companies are careful to not make any of their back-end services AWS-specific, the larger you grow the more data you have on AWS, and moving that data off is an eye-watering expense. And so, when another company builds a service that looks interesting — like, say, Cloudflare Workers — it’s easier to simply wait for Amazon’s alternative and build using that, and oops, now you’re even more locked into AWS!

What is happening in terms of the value chain is straightforward: Amazon paid fixed costs for its infrastructure, and is charging for it on a marginal basis; all of the upside here accrues to AWS, as seen in the service’s margins. That is also an important part of AWS’s retention strategy: for most AWS customers the easiest solution to rising costs is to simply sign a long-term contract, dramatically decreasing their prices (again, Amazon has the margin to spare) while ensuring they stay on AWS that much longer, accumulating that much more data and relying on that many more AWS-specific services. Hotel Seattle, as it were.

That blog post, by the way, was co-written by Prince, where he made the case that based on Cloudflare’s understanding of bandwidth costs, AWS was making a 7959% margin on US/Canada egress fees; Prince’s conclusion at the time was that AWS ought to join the Bandwidth Alliance and discount or waive egress fees when sending data to Cloudflare (which doesn’t cost AWS anything, thanks to an industry-standard private network interface), but two months on, the true point of Prince’s post was clearly this week’s announcement.

R2’s Low-End Disruption

From the Cloudflare blog:

Object Storage, sometimes referred to as blob storage, stores arbitrarily large, unstructured files. Object storage is well suited to storing everything from media files or log files to application-specific metadata, all retrievable with consistent latency, high durability, and limitless capacity.

The most familiar API for Object Storage, and the API R2 implements, is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). When S3 launched in 2006, cloud storage services were a godsend for developers. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the last fifteen years, developers have embraced cloud storage and its promise of infinite storage space.

As transformative as cloud storage has been, a downside emerged: actually getting your data back. Over time, companies have amassed massive amounts of data on cloud provider networks. When they go to retrieve that data, they’re hit with massive egress fees that don’t correspond to any customer value — just a tax developers have grown accustomed to paying.

Enter R2.

The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3’s margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data I would like for free — in either direction.

That’s not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.

In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3’s margin is R2’s opportunity.

Modular Disruption

Cloudflare, at least in AWS terms, remains a minnow; the company had $152 million in revenue last quarter, 10 percent of AWS’s revenue upon its unveiling six years ago. Prince, though, is thinking big; from that Protocol article:

“We are aiming to be the fourth major public cloud,” Prince said. Cloudflare already offers a serverless compute service called Workers, and Prince thinks that adding a low-cost storage service will encourage more developers and companies to build applications around Cloudflare’s services.

That is one way this could play out: R2 is a compelling choice for a certain class of applications that could be built to serve a lot of data without much compute. Moreover, by virtue of using the S3 API,² R2 can also be dropped into existing projects; developers can place R2 in front of S3, pulling out data as needed, once, and getting free egress forever-after.

Still, AWS is far more than storage; the second AWS product was EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud — which lets customers rent virtual computers that by definition are far more capable than a necessarily limited edge computing service like Workers, along with a host of database offerings and the sort of specialized services I mentioned earlier. Not all of these will necessarily translate well to Cloudflare’s distributed infrastructure, either.

Again, though, Cloudflare’s distributed nature is the entire reason the company’s cloud ambitions are so intriguing: R2 may be a direct competitor for S3, but that doesn’t mean that anything else about Cloudflare’s cloud ambitions have to be the same. Go back to Christensen and The Innovator’s Solution:

Modularity has a profound impact on industry structure because it enables independent, nonintegrated organizations to sell, buy, and assemble components and subsystems. Whereas in the interdependent world you had to make all of the key elements of the system in order to make any of them, in a modular world you can prosper by outsourcing or by supplying just one element. Ultimately, the specifications for modular interfaces will coalesce as industry standards. When that happens, companies can mix and match components from best-of-breed suppliers in order to respond conveniently to the specific needs of individual customers.

As depicted in figure 5–1, these nonintegrated competitors disrupt the integrated leader. Although we have drawn this diagram in two dimensions for simplicity, technically speaking they are hybrid disruptors because they compete with a modified metric of performance on the vertical axis of the disruption diagram, in that they strive to deliver rapidly exactly what each customer needs. Yet, because their nonintegrated structure gives them lower overhead costs, they can profitably pick off low-end customers with discount prices.

This is where zero egress costs could be an even bigger deal strategically than they are economically. S3 was the foundation of AWS’s integrated cloud offering, and remains the linchpin of the company’s lock-in; what if R2, thanks to its explicit rejection of data lock-in, becomes the foundation of an entirely new ecosystem of cloud services that compete with the big three by being modular? If you can always get access to your data for free, it becomes a lot more plausible to connect that data to best-of-breed compute options built by companies focused on doing one thing well, instead of simply waiting for Amazon to offer up their pale imitation that doesn’t require companies to pay out the nose to access.

Moreover, like any true disruption, it will be very difficult for Amazon to respond: sure, R2 may lead Amazon to reduce its egress fees, but given the importance of those fees to both AWS’s margins and its lock-in, it’s hard to see them going away completely. More importantly, AWS itself is locked-in to its integrated approach: the entire service is architected both technically and economically to be an all-encompassing offering; to modularize itself in response to Cloudflare would be suicidal.

At the same time, this is also why Cloudflare’s success in becoming the fourth cloud, should it happen, will likely be additive to the market: companies on AWS are by-and-large not going anywhere, but there are new companies being formed all of the time, and a whole bunch of companies that have yet to move to the cloud, as well the aforementioned Internet fragmentation that plays to Cloudflare’s advantage. Here it is a benefit to Cloudflare that it is a relatively small company: opportunities that seem trivial to giants will be big wins, giving the company the increasing scale it needs to flesh out its offering and build its new cloud ecosystem. Success is not assured, but the strategy is sound enough to make Prince’s old professor proud.

1. Amazon resisted hybrid for a long time, because it’s a technically terrible solution relative to just moving everything to the cloud, which is to say that Amazon made the same mistake all of Microsoft’s competitors make: relying on a “better product” instead of actually meeting customers where they are and solving their needs ↩

2. Copying APIs is a favorite tactic of Amazon when it comes to open source projects. ↩

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Former mayor Philip Owen died today. Many, many memories of him. Here’s a very early profile I did of him at the Vancouver Sun in 1996.

It’s close to midnight and, on the third floor at Vancouver city hall, the lighted windows are going dark, one by one. The man walking through the council offices turning out the lights and shutting the windows is Philip Owen. The mayor. Owen has gone through the stack of city reports coming up at next week’s council meeting. On each report, no matter how mundane — a lane closure, a copper tubing contract — there are notes, underlinings, highlighting, question marks.

Later, with the list of addresses of every city site mentioned, he makes a point that week of driving by to take a look at each one: the lane that is going to be closed, the house that is going to be demolished, the downtown block that is going to be rezoned.

Owen is getting ready to do the mayor’s monthly talk show in his office — an hour during which the general public is free to call in and complain about dog poop in the parks, motorcycle noise in the West End, and the city’s stupid new garbage fee. As he waits around in his TV make-up for the program to start, I ask how he likes the television format. He answers with boyish anxiety: “Well, you’ll see how it is. But with you here tonight, maybe someone will call in and I’ll goof.”

*

He’s a different kind of mayor. In an era when politicians are expected to be visionaries, leading their constituents through the complexities of the 20th century, and to be impervious to media and personal attacks, Philip Owen is neither.

Instead, he’s someone who believes that, in taking care of details, you take care of the bigger picture. He’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t have any “grand visions,” which he sees as ego-driven and grandiose roads to ruin.

He’s a listener and conciliator more comfortable in caucus meetings letting other council members lead the way and uncomfortable when people start fighting. In public debates, he has a Ronald Reaganish tendency to simplify issues into the personal and immediate, leaving councillors like Jennifer Clarke, Gordon Price and George Puil to articulate long-term and abstract issues.

In private, he has a quiet, deadpan sense of humor and can do wicked imitations. In public debates and media interviews, he can seem hesitant, ponderous or given to unfortunate turns of phrase that would make any media adviser cringe. Like the time he talked about all the “black women of color” working at city hall, as he defended the city’s record on diverse hiring.

Outside council, that Reaganish quality translates into genuine enjoyment of the ceremonial side of being mayor. Where Gordon Campbell would turn down masses of be-the-mayor-and-smile events, Owen’s schedule, in an echo of the role his father Walter played as lieutenant-governor from 1973-78, is packed with social and community functions, everything from day care openings to the Jewish Community Centre’s annual sports awards to the Heart and Stroke Foundation breakfast.

And when it comes to his personal life, Ronald Reagan (or Brian Mulroney or Gary Hart) should only wish to have such an image. No angry children bearing testimony to a dysfunctional family, no financial improprieties, no astrology, no alcoholism, no bimbos.

Instead, in his dazzling white shirts and crisp suits, his healthy and amazingly young-looking face a testimony to 62 very pleasant years on earth, he’s like a throwback to mayors of the early part of the century: member of a prominent Vancouver family (father Walter was a founder of the Vancouver law firm Owen Bird; cousin is deputy attorney-general Stephen Owen); cheerfully accompanied at most of his functions by Brita, the woman he married in 1957, who maintains her own commitments to volunteer work; father of three children; grandfather of five; president or director of seven successful small businesses ranging from a fabric store in Vancouver to a muffler shop in Penticton; regular and involved churchgoer at St. John’s Shaughnessy Anglican; and long-time volunteer with several community groups, particularly the B.C. Paraplegic Foundation. Fun? Fixing up old cars, refurbishing old lamps and tinkering in general.

He gets warm private praise for his graciousness, considerateness and scrupulous honesty. He has also earned some of the most biting public assessments of his intelligence and political acumen. (Former political opponent Harry Rankin calls him Philip the Dim. Former political colleague Jonathan Baker describes him as “colorless,” “a protoplasm” giving the impression that “complex issues were beyond him.”)

But what about where he’s leading his council and the city? Is his quiet, often self-effacing style the sign of no leadership or of a different kind of leadership?

Both on and off the record, his staff, supporters and even disinterested observers of city hall say Owen’s leadership is a valuable kind of consensus-building, that he truly listens to people, that he allows his councillors to have a voice, and that his brand of methodical and cautious management is the kind of consolidating breather the city needs after the hyperactive, ambitious period it had under Gordon Campbell.

But among both critics and some of his supporters, there are those who say his lack of strong ideas and unwillingness or inability to talk people into following him when he does have strong ideas are a problem. Some say stronger councillors are taking on the leadership functions. Others say the bureaucracy is now in charge.

*

One of the anomalies of being mayor of Vancouver is that, in legal terms, it’s one of the least powerful positions in a Canadian system of municipal government that generally is already set up to create a weak mayor.

Other mayors from Salmon Arm to Toronto at least have the right to refuse to sign a bylaw, can suspend it for 30 days, and can both establish council committees and appoint the members. Vancouver’s mayor has none of those powers.

“Vancouver’s mayor is the weakest in the country,” says University of B.C. political science professor Paul Tennant. “We have a contradictory expectation of mayors. Even though they have absolutely no basis of power in the formal sense, we expect them now to be the equivalent of the premier or the prime minister.”

Added to that, the mayor’s office in Vancouver has never built a huge bureaucracy. Toronto’s mayor’s office has 16 people handling policy. Vancouver’s has one.

So when Montreal mayor Pierre Bourque abolishes neighborhood councils or Toronto mayor Barbara Hall decides to take $7 million from a city reserve fund to create shelters for the homeless, their strong actions are possible because they have a legal and administrative structure that supports mayors.

That means mayors in Vancouver accomplish whatever they do through classic political means: personal influence, strategic network-building and persuading.

Owen is no persuader.

“If I have a case to sell, if I went to Gordon (Campbell) and said, `Gordon, we have to do this. Here’s the argument,’ then you would turn him loose to persuade people,” one senior city administrator said. “Philip doesn’t have that ability.”

He’s not good at avoiding the cons and stressing the pros that it takes to win arguments.

“It’s kind of an endearing characteristic unless you want him to argue your point of view, in which case you’d rather have somebody’s who presents the case very strongly,” the same administrator said.

Part of that comes from the fact that he’s a listener who spends a long time learning before he will take strong positions on issues.

“Philip is not a terrifically quick study. He’s a learner, he works at the issues that he wants to understand,” says a senior staff member.

When he does get close to an issue, either because of his personal values and experience (not allowing a prostitution zone; not interfering in the free play of market forces by protecting small stores from superstores; focusing on serving the customers) or because of the time he’s spent on it (transit, the PNE), he’s a much stronger speaker.

*

Part of what casts Philip Owen‘s style and character into such high relief is the contrast with Gordon Campbell’s seven-year reign at city hall.

Some of that difference is historical circumstance. Vancouver was going through huge changes then: a housing shortage, megaprojects being developed, a sense that the city had to start coordinating with the region to solve pollution, transportation and sprawl problems.

But there is also a personal difference. Campbell knew what he wanted and would work ferociously to get it: a children’s advocate, a 30-year plan for the city, deals with downtown megaproject developers to get parks and theatres and a seawall for the city. He got what he wanted but “in the process, there were one or two bodies lying on the floor after,” says one veteran of the era. There are still stories circulating in both city hall and the development community about the way Campbell would ride roughshod over his staff if he thought what they’d done was inadequate or obstructive.

In contrast, Owen’s personal style generates a real affection at city hall.

“He’s sort of a dad figure,” is the way one mid-level staffer puts it.

Another describes it this way: “If someone complained about you to Gordon Campbell, he’d call you up, ream you out, and make you go over and paint the guy’s house. But when someone complains about you to Philip Owen, he’ll come and ask what your side of the story is.”

Around city hall, he makes a point of complimenting people on a job well done, will run out of a committee meeting to find chairs for audience members left standing, and routinely walks down to Wendy’s to buy dinner for councillor Sam Sullivan, whose wheelchair dependence makes it hard for him to sprint out for dinner between meetings the way other councillors do.

That’s no newfound quality either. In 1966, after Owen had been working for Eaton’s for 14 years and had risen to the position of store manager, he quit when he was told that he had to get rid of the “older two” of his seven supervisors.

He still gets angry when he remembers it: “One was 45, one was 48, they had kids in high school and university and I said, `I’m not going to do that.”’ (It was also the moment he decided it was time to get out and run his own businesses, so no one would be telling him when he was 45 and stuck partway up the corporate ladder that he was out of a job.)

There is an argument made that those personal qualities have a significant impact on city hall operations by creating good morale, staff that feels valued and secure enough to take on ambitious projects and carry them through, and a general increase in civility.

Owen is also someone who abhors the grand project and is focused on the day-to-day. You just know he’s the kind of guy who rotates the tires on his car when he should, pays his bills on time, and gets his gutters cleaned regularly.

That quality, translated to city politics, means the big issues he gets excited about when he’s interviewed (and that he pushes when he meets with staff — a mayor’s most direct way of influencing city activities) are things like: A regional emergency co-ordination centre. Going after the pawnshops that are acting as fencing operations. Replacing the sewer system at the rate of one per cent a year. The saltwater pumping station the city put in so it has an earthquake-proof firefighting system.

And, most important, “better city government,“ the plan that appears to be a meeting of minds between two people with a passion for efficient administration, Owen and city manager Ken Dobell, to re-engineer city operations so they’re less byzantine for both those inside and outside city hall. (Ideally, no more running to seven departments to find out if you can build a gas barbecue in your backyard.)

That kind of prudence and day-to-day focus means certain kinds of decisions. He agreed with his staff that the city wouldn’t get involved in the deal to put social housing in Woodward’s — too large a risk and no firm numbers nailed down. He disagreed with a staff recommendation not to allow a grocery store on industrial land, something staff said would endanger the city’s recently developed policy of trying to preserve its remaining 1,700 acres of industrial land. While Price and Puil argued that the city had to look at the long-term consequences, Owen took the view that this was a special case and one decision wouldn’t have a big impact.

*

On the other side are those who say Vancouver’s mayor does make a difference and that being pleasant, listening to people and working hard aren’t enough.

“He’s a very nice person who pays a lot of attention to detail,” says Libby Davies, who was his political opponent on council and ran against him for the mayor’s position in 1993. “But he’s in a completely reactive role and the bureaucracy is now in control. Campbell was clearly in charge politically. I don’t think (Owen) is in control of his agenda. I don’t think he has an agenda.”

A sign of the growing power of the bureaucracy is the way reports are coming to council, says Davies. In previous eras, staff made specific recommendations on specific projects that council could either accept, amend or reject.

Now, the reports that come to council on the better city government project for example, the most expensive and ambitious project of Owen’s term, are frequently reports to be received for information, or they simply ask council to continue its endorsement of the general directions staff are taking.

Even the city’s bureaucrats say staff are taking on more responsibility than they did under Campbell.

When there is a strong mayor at city hall, “the bureaucracy does less initiating because you’re just too busy” carrying out that mayor’s ideas, says one member of that group.

With a mayor who acts more like a board chair, like Owen, “staff end up bringing more of their own proposals to council.”

Besides listening to the bureaucrats, a quality that surely earns him some loyalty from that group, Owen is also more inclined to let the stronger councillors take the lead at caucus meetings: Puil for finance, Price for planning, and Clarke on many issues. One surprising factor is Craig Hemer, who appears to be simply one of the voices in the background Greek chorus in public, but is more influential in the backroom, say several sources, especially on keeping tight fiscal control and having good public processes.

Publicly, his supporters — Campbell, Puil, former executive assistant Janet Fraser, Clarke, Price, Sullivan and others — maintain that Owen’s methodical, mediating style is just what the city needs right now.

“I think he’s doing a great job, the city is ticking along well,” said Campbell.

If they do voice any criticisms, they’re of the mildest variety.

Puil’s assessment: Owen “was born to be a lieutenant governor, a master of protocol and being a very nice person.”

Campbell concedes that if Owen does have a fault, it’s that he’ll “listen and listen and listen some more.”

But privately, his councillors have been voicing concerns that he’s not seen as enough of a leader, that he’s a good soul who is too polite to sell himself, and simplistic about issues that others don’t feel are so simple.

When the Non Partisan Association was trying to decide which of its councillors should run as mayor in 1993, it polled the public. The results showed Puil’s name was familiar to a lot of the public — “who instantly recognized him in a negative way,” says one source. Fewer people recognized Owen, but those who did had favorable impressions. The NPA went with Owen because he was more palatable.

The trick in the next election now will be whether that combination — low but warm and fuzzy profile — works again.

In the meantime, the concern about Owen’s image has translated into a hypersensitivity about media.

When Vancouver Sun photographer Glen Baglo — who has successfully convinced Conrad Black to pose with a dead fish and Bob Bose to pose with cows — approached the mayor’s office for a photo to go with this story, his idea was to have Owen emerging with a briefcase from a manhole on a street with the city in the background.

No way, said Owen’s executive assistant, Muriel Honey. First, why did Baglo pick a street with the ugliest view of Vancouver? (The Fairview Slopes intersection he’d chosen had power lines visible on either side.) And secondly, she didn’t like the implication that Owen had ever been invisible to the public or underground.

“That’s not the kind of image we want to project.”

I am usually tired on the second day of a conference, and today was no exception. But the day started and ended with talks that kept my brain alive.

• "Poems in an Accidental Language" by Kate Compton -- Okay, so that was a Strange Loop keynote. When the video goes live on YouTube, watch it. I may blog more about the talk later, but for now know only that it included:

• "Evenings of Recreational Ontology" (I also learned about Google Sheet parties)
• "fitting an octopus into an ontology"
• "Contemplate the universe, and write an API for it."

• Quantum computing is one of those technical areas I know very little about, maybe the equivalent of a 30-minute pitch talk. I've never been super-interested, but some of my students are. So I attended "Practical Quantum Computing Today" to see what's up these days. I'm still not interested in putting much of my time into quantum computing, but now I'm better informed.

• Before my lunch walk, I attended a non-technical talk on "tech-enabled crisis response". Emma Ferguson and Colin Schimmelfing reported on their experience doing something I'd like to be able to do: spin up a short-lived project to meet a critical need, using mostly free or open-source tools. For three months early in the COVID pandemic, their project helped deliver ~950,000 protective masks from 7,000 donors to 6,000 healthcare workers. They didn't invent new tech; they used existing tools and occasionally wrote some code to connect such tools.

My favorite quote from the talk came when Ferguson related the team's realization that they had grown too big for the default limits on Google Sheets and Gmail. "We thought, 'Let's just pay Google.' We tried. We tried. But we couldn't figure it out." So they built their own tool. It is good to be a programmer.

• After lunch, Will Crichton live-coded a simple API in Rust, using traits (Rust's version of interfaces) and aggressive types. He delivered almost his entire talk within emacs, including an ASCII art opening slide. It almost felt like I was back in grad school!

• In "Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists", Michelle Brenner from Netflix described the company's cloud-based infrastructure for the workstations used by the company's artists and project managers. This is one of those areas that is simply outside my experience, so I learned a bit. At the top level, though, the story is familiar: the scale of Netflix's goals requires enabling artists to work wherever they are, whenever they are; the pandemic accelerated a process that was already underway.

• Eric Gade gave another talk in the long tradition of Alan Kay and a bigger vision for computing. "Authorship Environments: In Search of the 'Personal' in Personal Computing" started by deconstructing Steve Jobs's "bicycle for the mind" metaphor (he's not a fan of what most people take as the meaning) and then moved onto the idea of personal computing as literacy: a new level at which to interrogate ideas, including one's own.

This talk included several inspirational quotes. My favorite was was from Adele Goldberg:

There's all these layers in everything we do... We have to learn how to peel.

As with most talks in this genre, I left feeling like there is so much more to be done, but frustrated at not knowing how to do it. We still haven't found a way to reach a wide audience with the empowering idea that there is more to computing than typing into a Google doc or clicking in a web browser.

• The closing keynote was delivered by Will Byrd. "Strange Dreams of Stranger Loops" took Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach as its inspiration, fitting both for the conference and for Byrd's longstanding explorations of relational programming. His focus today: generating quines in mini-Kanren, and discussing how quines enable us to think about programs, interpreters, and the strange loops at the heart of GEB.

As with the opening keynote I may blog more about this talk later. For now I give you two fun items:

• Byrd expressed his thanks to D((a(d|n))oug), a regular expression that matches on Byrd (his father), Friedman (his academic mentor), and Hofstadter (his intellectual inspiration).
• While preparing his keynote, Byrd clains to have suffered from UDIS: Unintended Doug Intimidation Syndrome. Hofstader is so cultured, so well-read, and so deep a thinker, how can the rest of us hope to contribute?

Strange Loop 2021 has ended. I "hit the road" by walking upstairs to make dinner with my wife.

I’m starting work as a software engineer with Deep Genomics tomorrow; here’s what I’ve done in the three weeks since I left Metabase:

• Ran a workshop on Managing Research Software Projects to raise money for MetaDocencia.

• Wrote 43 posts on empirical software engineering research for It Will Never Work in Theory.

• Started acting as client and product owner for some projects based on Software Tools in JavaScript for Mike Hoye’s software engineering course at the University of Toronto.

• Starting playing the clarinet (because tenosynovitis in my right hand meant I had to give up guitar).

• Revised a middle-grade novel titled Maddy Roo (furries versus robots with a bit of family drama)—if you’d like to give it a read, I’d be grateful for feedback.

• Started co-authoring a paper on how to make scientific publications more accessible.

• Started co-authoring an update to “Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned”.

This blog is almost 22 years old, and in all that time I’ve been solid about posting regularly — until this recent dry spell.

I skipped the summer. Last post was in June. There was just one that month, and just one in May.

I have an explanation: while my health and physical circumstances are unchanged and, happily, fine, I have not felt the drive to write here that I always felt.

I never, in all these years, had to push myself. I’d get an idea and I would be compelled to write it up and publish it. It was always that simple.

But I haven’t felt that way in many months, and I’m not sure I will again.

Maybe this is temporary, and there will be hundreds more posts to come.

But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.

I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)

Anyway. In case I don’t write here again — in case these are the last words of this blog — thank you. I loved writing here, and you are why.

We are happy to announce that the Firefox 93 release brings two exciting privacy improvements for users of Strict Tracking Protection and Private Browsing. With a more comprehensive SmartBlock 3.0, we combine a great browsing experience with strong tracker blocking. In addition, our new and enhanced referrer tracking protection prevents sites from colluding to share sensitive user data via HTTP referrers.

SmartBlock 3.0

In Private Browsing and Strict Tracking Protection, Firefox goes to great lengths to protect your web browsing activity from trackers. As part of this, the built-in content blocking will automatically block third-party scripts, images, and other content from being loaded from cross-site tracking companies reported by Disconnect. This type of aggressive blocking could sometimes bring small inconveniences, such as missing images or bad performance. In some rare cases, it could even result in a feature malfunction or an empty page.

To compensate, we developed SmartBlock, a mechanism that will intelligently load local, privacy-preserving alternatives to the blocked resources that behave just enough like the original ones to make sure that the website works properly.

The third iteration of SmartBlock brings vastly improved support for replacing the popular Google Analytics scripts and added support for popular services such as Optimizely, Criteo, Amazon TAM and various Google advertising scripts.

As usual, these replacements are bundled with Firefox and can not track you in any way.

HTTP Referrer Protections

The HTTP Referer [sic] header is a browser signal that reveals to a website which location “referred” the user to that website’s server. It is included in navigations and sub-resource requests a browser makes and is frequently used by websites for analytics, logging, and cache optimization. When sent as part of a top-level navigation, it allows a website to learn which other website the user was visiting before.

This is where things get problematic. If the browser sends the full URL of the previous site, then it may reveal sensitive user data included in the URL. Some sites may want to avoid being mentioned in a referrer header at all.

The Referrer Policy was introduced to address this issue: it allows websites to control the value of the referrer header so that a stronger privacy setting can be established for users. In Firefox 87, we went one step further and decided to set the new default referrer policy to strict-origin-when-cross-origin which will automatically trim the most sensitive parts of the referrer URL when it is shared with another website. As such, it prevents sites from unknowingly leaking private information to trackers.

However, websites can still override the introduced default trimming of the referrer, and hence effectively deactivate this protection and send the full URL anyway. This would invite websites to collude with trackers by choosing a more permissive referrer policy and as such remains a major privacy issue.

With the release of version 93, Firefox will ignore less restrictive referrer policies for cross-site requests, such as ‘no-referrer-when-downgrade’, ‘origin-when-cross-origin’, and ‘unsafe-url’ and hence renders such privacy violations ineffective. In other words, Firefox will always trim the HTTP referrer for cross-site requests, regardless of the website’s settings.

For same-site requests, websites can of course still send the full referrer URL.

Enabling these new Privacy Protections

As a Firefox user who is using Strict Tracking Protection and Private Browsing, you can benefit from the additionally provided privacy protection mechanism as soon as your Firefox auto-updates to Firefox 93. If you aren’t a Firefox user yet, you can download the latest version here to start benefiting from all the ways that Firefox works to protect you when browsing the internet.

The post Firefox 93 features an improved SmartBlock and new Referrer Tracking Protections appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

A support person told me today:

“We go through the support questions in our inbox first, then if we have time we answer questions in the community”

Isn’t this backward?

An unanswered question in an inbox isn’t ideal, but it’s only doing harm to one person. No one else can see it.

An unanswered question in a community is harming the entire community. It discourages other members from asking questions in the community. It’s a very visible sign about an organisation’s disinterest in its customers.

Worse yet, as unanswered questions accumulate people will stop using the community and send more questions into your inbox instead. You can reduce a lot of the questions in the inbox if you answer them in the community first.

Maybe support staff should answer questions in the community first and then look at their inbox?

The post The Curse Of Unanswered Questions first appeared on FeverBee.

Bafatakis2019 Nikolaos Bafatakis, Niels Boecker, Wenjie Boon, Martin Cabello Salazar, Jens Krinke, Gazi Oznacar, and Robert White: "Python Coding Style Compliance on Stack Overflow". Proc. International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2019, 10.1109/msr.2019.00042.

Software developers all over the world use Stack Overflow (SO) to interact and exchange code snippets. Research also uses SO to harvest code snippets for use with recommendation systems. However, previous work has shown that code on SO may have quality issues, such as security or license problems. We analyse Python code on SO to determine its coding style compliance. From 1,962,535 code snippets tagged with 'python', we extracted 407,097 snippets of at least 6 statements of Python code. Surprisingly, 93.87% of the extracted snippets contain style violations, with an average of 0.7 violations per statement and a huge number of snippets with a considerably higher ratio. Researchers and developers should, therefore, be aware that code snippets on SO may not representative of good coding style. Furthermore, while user reputation seems to be unrelated to coding style compliance, for posts with vote scores in the range between -10 and 20, we found a strong correlation (r=-0.87, p<10^-7) between the vote score a post received and the average number of violations per statement for snippets in such posts.

Nothing in software engineering makes sense except in light of human psychology.
— paraphrasing Theodosius Dobzhansky

The Programmer's Brain is the most interesting and useful book I've read about programming in several years. In it, Prof. Felienne Hermans gives a readable introduction to key findings in cognitive science, then explains how they relate to things programmers do and build. The table of contents alone should excite most working developers:

• Part 1: On Reading Code Better
  1. Decoding your confusion while coding
  2. Speed reading for code
  3. How to learn programming syntax quickly
  4. How to read complex code
• Part 2: On Thinking About Code
  5. Reaching a deeper understanding of code
  6. Getting better at solving programming problems
  7. Misconceptions: bugs in thinking
• Part 3: On Writing Better Code
  8. How to get better at naming things
  9. Avoiding bad code and cognitive load: two frameworks
  10. Getting better at solving complex problems
• Part 4: On Collaborating on Code
  11. The act of writing code
  12. Designing and improving larger systems
  13. How to onboard new developers

I could go on (and on), but really, you should just be placing your order right now and figuring out how to use these ideas to improve your work and/or teaching.

Hermans2021 Felienne Hermans: The Programmer's Brain: What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Cognition. Manning, 2021, 9781617298677.

Your brain responds in a predictable way when it encounters new or difficult tasks. This unique book teaches you concrete techniques rooted in cognitive science that will improve the way you learn and think about code.

Baltes2020 Sebastian Baltes, George Park, and Alexander Serebrenik: "Is 40 the New 60? How Popular Media Portrays the Employability of Older Software Developers". IEEE Software, 37(6), 2020, 10.1109/ms.2020.3014178.

We studied the public discourse around age and software development, focusing on the United States. This work was designed to build awareness among decision makers in software projects to help them anticipate and mitigate challenges that their older employees may face.

One of the smartest things a mid-sized tech company can do is hire a librarian. You probably don't need one if you're two dozen people who all know each other and have at least a vague idea of what one another are doing, but by the time you have a hundred staff, someone needs to be responsible for figuring out how the wiki and Google Docs should be organized, what tags every repo should have, and so on. Without that, entropy slowly takes over and you spend an ever-increasing amount of time trying to find the design docs that you're sure someone wrote last year except maybe they were under their personal account and we no longer have access.

Aghajani2019 doesn't tackle this problem directly. Instead, it does the essential pre-work of taxonomizing the problems people have with software documentation by scraping data from GitHub issues, pull requests, mailing lists, and Stack Overflow. The result is the sort of evidence-based categorization that librarians (and the authors of linting tools) swoon over—you can click on the figure to get the full-sized version:

The full paper explains what each category and sub-category means, how common it is, and the evidence the authors have to justify its inclusion. As a bonus, they have made a replication package on GitHub if you'd like to explore their data yourself. It's the kind of quiet foundational contribution that our field needs more of, and I hope it will lead to tools that automatically warn developers about common problems.

For more on how to make things findable, please see Lin2020.

Aghajani2019 Emad Aghajani, Csaba Nagy, Olga Lucero Vega-Marquez, Mario Linares-Vasquez, Laura Moreno, Gabriele Bavota, and Michele Lanza: "Software Documentation Issues Unveiled". Proc. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2019, 10.1109/icse.2019.00122.

(Good) Software documentation provides developers and users with a description of what a software system does, how it operates, and how it should be used. For example, technical documentation (e.g., an API reference guide) aids developers during evolution/maintenance activities, while a user manual explains how users are to interact with a system. Despite its intrinsic value, the creation and the maintenance of documentation is often neglected, negatively impacting its quality and usefulness, ultimately leading to a generally unfavourable take on documentation. Previous studies investigating documentation issues have been based on surveying developers, which naturally leads to a somewhat biased view of problems affecting documentation. We present a large scale empirical study, where we mined, analyzed, and categorized 878 documentation-related artifacts stemming from four different sources, namely mailing lists, Stack Overflow discussions, issue repositories, and pull requests. The result is a detailed taxonomy of documentation issues from which we infer a series of actionable proposals both for researchers and practitioners.

stoweboyd:

Helen Mirren

Goddamn!

J’étais ce matin l’invité de la matinale de France Culture pour parler de la panne géante qui a fait que Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram et Messenger ont tous disparu des écrans, impactant aussi les sites tiers utilisant Facebook Connect pour authentifier leurs utilisateurs. Au delà de cette panne incroyable tant en terme de personnes potentiellement concernées (3,5 milliards d’internautes !) et en terme de durée (7 heures !)^[1], on en profitera pour réaliser à quel point on a mis de pouvoir dans les mains de quelques uns, ce qui est d’autant plus grave quand les dirigeants de ces entreprises font preuve d’un sens moral défaillant.

En effet, les scandales Facebook s’enchaînent et se ressemblent.

Ainsi, j’ai voulu imprimer l’article Wikipedia “Criticism of Facebook” qui recense les innombrables scandales, mais j’ai reculé devant le volume : 45 pages format A4 !

C’est un véritable dossier qui nous rappelle à quel point il est fou de confier nos données personnelles, nos interactions sociales et notre accès aux informations à des gens avec aussi peu de scrupules et autant de casseroles aux fesses. L’article va de la fraude fiscale au génocide des Rohingyas en Birmanie (Source PDF), en passant par les expériences psychologiques à grande échelle sur les utilisateurs et à leur insu (Source), la discriminations envers les minorités raciales et les handicapés (Source), le financement d’organisations néo-nazi (Source).

Une longue enquête du Wall Street Journal, avec l’aide de la lanceuse d’alerte Frances Haugen (voir ci-dessous), démontre par exemple que Facebook sait depuis longtemps que sa filiale Instagram est toxique pour les ados : “13,5 % des adolescentes concernées affirment qu’Instagram augmentent leurs envies de suicide, 17 % des adolescentes interrogées affirment qu’Instagram fait empirer leurs problème d’anorexie”. Mais la direction continue de faire comme si de rien n’était au dépend de la souffrance de ces jeunes.

On se rassurera en se disant que pendant les 7 heures où les services étaient “down”, Facebook, Instagram auront cessé de diffuser des fake news et de pomper nos données personnelles

Pour ma part, j’ai fermé mes comptes Facebook et Instagram, remplacé WhatsApp par Signal. Je vous encourage à faire de même dans la mesure de vos possibilités et à tenir Facebook à l’oeil : le numérique est bien trop important dans nos vies pour le laisser dans les mains de gens tous puissants qui n’ont pas de scrupules.

Quelques liens qui expliquent la situation de Facebook :

Les Facebook Files, un dossier du Wall Street Journal, qui après 18 mois d’enquête, lance quelques pavés massifs dans la mare. Jugez plutôt :

• Il existe une liste d’utilisateurs privilégiés de Facebook et Instagram qui ne sont pas soumis aux mêmes règles que les utilisateurs ordinaires. Sur Facebook et Instagram, les célébrités ne sont pas soumises aux mêmes règles de modération. Voir aussi le podcast The Facebook Files, Part 1: The Whitelist ;
• Des études internes à Facebook démontrent qu’Instagram est toxique pour les adolescentes. « 13,5 % des adolescentes concernées affirment qu’Instagram augmentent leurs envies de suicide, 17 % des adolescentes interrogées affirment qu’Instagram fait empirer leurs problème d’anorexie » (Source) ;
  • Articles sur le sujet en français : L’étude qui montre que Facebook connaît les effets néfastes d’Instagram sur les jeunes filles . Voir aussi sur Ouest-France : Comment Instagram dégrade le bien-être des ados. Comme l’industrie du tabac dans les années 1950, Facebook savait mais a préféré cacher la vérité et continuer d’abîmer des enfants ;
• Facebook aurait promis à Trump de ne pas vérifier les discours politiques ;
• Alors qu’elles viennent tout juste d’être annoncées, L’Europe veut empêcher que les Ray-Ban connectées de Facebook vous filment à votre insu ;
• Facebook a partagé des données partielles et biaisées à des chercheurs en désinformation ;
• Dimanche, c’était une lanceuse d’alerte, Frances Haugen, qui est sortie du bois avec comme objectif de prouver à quel point la culture d’entreprise est toxique. Elle a été interviewée par l’émission de 60 minutes, très suivie. C’est elle qui est — au moins en partie — à l’origine des documents (autour de 10 000) qui ont permis l’enquête du Wall Street Journal. Compte tenu de la visibilité de l’émission, le coup est rude. Je recommande la lecture de l’article Facebook Files : la lanceuse d’alerte Frances Haugen a révélé son identité sur CBS, très complet.

Cloudflare describes how things looked from their point of view the day that Facebook, along with its other properties, went down. From the Border Gateway Protocol, which defines routing information:

A BGP UPDATE message informs a router of any changes you’ve made to a prefix advertisement or entirely withdraws the prefix. We can clearly see this in the number of updates we received from Facebook when checking our time-series BGP database. Normally this chart is fairly quiet: Facebook doesn’t make a lot of changes to its network minute to minute.

But at around 15:40 UTC we saw a peak of routing changes from Facebook. That’s when the trouble began.

Tags: Cloudflare, facebook

Zan Armstrong, Ian Johnson, and Mike Freeman for Observable wrote a guide on analyzing time series data. Using an energy dataset, they show how asking different questions can lead to different findings and visualizations:

These are stories about analyzing data that changes over time. While most of us don’t dig into data about energy day-to-day, we hope the feel of this data and these questions will be familiar to anyone who regularly faces questions like “what changed?”, “what happened?”, “was that normal?”, “what is typical?”, and “did things go as expected?” We hope that this will spark an idea about how to look at your own data in a new way.

I will never tire of the multiple-views-from-the-same-dataset teaching device.

Tags: Observable, questions, time

Security researcher Kenn White added that “for the vast majority of consumers, commercial VPN services add very little value and frankly most incur more security risk for the user.”

One risk is some VPN providers use self-signed root CAs, which allow the creator to read encrypted traffic coming from a computer.

White said this is done in the pursuit of malware prevention, but that “is just a different way of saying ‘intercepting your (otherwise) encrypted web and mail traffic.'”

Some VPNs may collect more information than users anticipate, and in some cases expose that data too.

The advice you get from Youtube influencers, which are paid to sell you a VPN, is terrible. There are very few use cases for those VPNs. It’s mostly for pretending to be somewhere else, to circumvent geo fencing.

More >

You might have heard of VPNs — virtual private networks — at some point, and chalked them up to something only “super techy” people or hackers would ever use. At this point in the evolution of online life, however, VPNs have become more mainstream, and anyone may have good reasons to use one. VPNs are beneficial for added privacy when you’re connected to a public wifi network, and you might also want to use a VPN at home when you’re online as well. Here are five reasons to consider using a VPN at home.

Stop your ISP from watching you 

Did you know that when you connect to the internet at home through your internet service provider (ISP), it can track what you do online? Even though your traffic is usually encrypted using HTTPS, this doesn’t conceal which sites you are visiting. Your ISP can see every site you visit and track things like how often you visit sites and how long you’re on them. That’s rich personal — and private — information you’re giving away to your ISP every time you connect to the internet at home. The good news is that a VPN at home can prevent your ISP from snooping on you by encrypting your traffic before the ISP can see it.

How do VPNs work?

Get answers to nine common questions about VPNs

Secure yourself on a shared building network

Some apartment buildings offer wifi as an incentive to residents, but just like your ISP, anyone else on the network can see what sites you are visiting. Do you even know all your neighbors, let alone know if they’re bumbling true crime podcast fanatics or even actual cyber criminals? Do you know for sure that your landlord or building manager isn’t tracking your internet traffic? If you’re concerned about any of that, a VPN can add extra privacy on your shared network by encrypting your traffic between you and your VPN provider so that no one on your local network can decipher or modify it.

Block nosy housemates

Similar to a shared apartment network, sharing an internet connection could leave your browsing behavior vulnerable to snooping by housemates or any other untrustworthy person who accesses your network. A VPN at home adds an extra layer of encryption, preventing people on your network from seeing what websites you go to.

Increase remote work security

Working remotely, at least part of the time, is the new normal for millions of office workers, and some people are experiencing a VPN for the first time. Some employers offer an enterprise VPN for home workers and some even require  logging into one to access a company file server.

Explore the world at home

There are some fun reasons to use a VPN at home, too. You can get access to shows, websites and livestreams in dozens of different countries. See what online shopping is like if you were in a different locale and get the feeling of gaming from somewhere new. 

The post Do you need a VPN at home? Here are 5 reasons you might. appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

One of our promises this year was to deliver ways that can help you navigate the web easily and get you quickly where you need to go. We took a giant step in that direction earlier this year when we shared a new Firefox experience. We were on a mission to save you time and streamline your everyday use of the browser. This month, we continue to deliver on that mission with new features in our Firefox on mobile products. For our Firefox Focus mobile users, we have a fresh redesign plus new features including shortcuts to get you faster to the things you want to get to. This Cybersecurity Awareness month, you can manage your passwords and take them wherever you go whenever you use your Firefox on Android mobile app. 

Fresh, new Firefox Focus 

Since its launch, Firefox Focus has been a favorite app with its minimal design, streamlined features and for those times when you want to do a super quick search without the distractions. So, when it came to refreshing Firefox Focus we wanted to offer a simple, privacy by default companion app, allowing users to quickly complete searches without distraction and worry of being tracked or bombarded with advertisements. We added a fresh new look with new colors, a new logo and a dark theme. We added a shortcut feature so that users can get to the sites they visit the most. And with privacy in mind you will see the privacy Tracking Protection Shield icon which is accessible from the search bar so you can quickly turn the individual trackers on or off when you click the shield icon. Plus, we added a global counter that shows you all the trackers blocked for you. Check out the new Firefox Focus and try it for life’s “get in and get out” moments. 

Got a ton of passwords? Keep them safe on Firefox on Android

What do Superman, Black Widow and Wolverine have in common? They make horrible passwords. At least that’s what we discovered when we took a look to see how fortified superhero passwords are in the fight against hackers and breaches. You can see how your favorite superheroes fared in “Superhero passwords may be your kryptonite wherever you go online.”  

This Cybersecurity Awareness month, we added new features on Firefox on Android, to keep your passwords safe. We’ve increasingly become dependent on the web, whether it’s signing up for streaming services or finding new ways to connect with families and friends, we’ve all had to open an account and assign a completely new password. Whether it’s 10 or 100 passwords, you can take your passwords wherever you go on Firefox on Android. These new features will be available on iOS later this year. The new features include:

Creating and adding new passwords is easy – Now, when you create an account for any app on your mobile device, you can also create and add a new password, which you can save directly in the Firefox browser and you can use it on both mobile and desktop.  

• Take your passwords with you on the go – Now you can easily autofill your password on your phone and use any password you’ve saved in the browser to log into any online account like your Twitter or Instagram app. No need to open a web page. Plus, if you have a Firefox account then you can sync all your passwords across desktop and mobile devices. It’s that seamless and simple. 

• Unlock your passwords with your fingerprint or face – Now only you can safely open your accounts when you use your operating system’s biometric security, such as your face or your fingerprint touch to unlock the access page to your logins and passwords.

Firefox coming soon to a Windows store near you

Microsoft has loosened restrictions on its Windows Store that effectively banned third-party browsers from the store. We have been advocating for years for more user choice and control on the Windows operating system. We welcome the news that their store is now more open to companies and applications, including independent browsers like Firefox. We believe that a healthier internet is one where people have an opportunity to choose from a diverse range of browsers and browser engines. Firefox will be available in the Windows store later this year. 

Get the fast, private browser for your desktop and mobile:  Firefox on Android, Firefox for iOS and Firefox Focus today.

For more on Firefox:

11 secret tips for Firefox that will make you an internet pro

7 things to know (and love) about the new Firefox for Android

Modern, clean new Firefox clears the way to all you need online

Behind the design: A fresh new Firefox

The post News from Firefox Focus and Firefox on Mobile appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Yesterday, an AirPods firmware update was released, enabling new Find My features for Apple’s wireless headphones. Before the update, you could use Find My to see the last spot they were used, but that wasn’t always helpful if you carried them around for a while without opening the case before losing them.

With the firmware update, it’s easier to find misplaced AirPods Pro and AirPods Max. From Find My, choose your AirPods, and tap on the Find button. The app will begin searching for a signal and will suggest moving to a different location if it can’t find anything. In my tests, the time it took to locate the signal of my AirPods Pro varied from around 30-60 seconds when they were nearby.

Once Find My detects a signal, it will tell you whether your AirPods are nearby or far away, allowing you to move around to pinpoint the location. There’s also an option to play a sound through your AirPods to help locate them, which is handy once you’re close to them. However, with my AirPods Pro in their case, the sound playing from my AirPods Pro was understandably a little hard to hear. Also, you don’t have the benefit of the directional arrows you get when searching for an AirTag.

The feature worked well sitting at my desk with my iPhone and AirPods Pro sitting within sight of each other, but that’s not a realistic scenario. To get a better sense of the process, I put my AirPods under a pillow and blanket on our couch in another room on the same floor of our house. I went back to my office, opened Find My, and waited to see if it could pick up the signal roughly 10 meters away in a different room.

After about 30 seconds, Find My picked up a weak signal reporting that my AirPods Pro were far away. I began slowly walking through the house, watching Find My as it updated the distance to my AirPods from far to near and eventually ‘here.’ As I walked around and Find My updated, it provided haptic feedback with increasing frequency as I got closer to my AirPods Pro. I tried playing a sound on the AirPods Pro, but the pillow and blanket made the sound impossible to hear. However, the sound wasn’t really necessary because by the time Find My reported my AirPods as ‘here,’ I was right on top of them anyway, and they were easy to locate.

Found outside. Fortunately, my neighbors are used to my 5 AM experiments.

I also tried putting my AirPods Pro just outside my back door. Find My took a little longer to find a signal, and I had to be a little closer to the AirPods, but even though more walls, Find My picked up a signal.

I’ve only tested the new Find My feature in contrived scenarios so far, but I was impressed with the process. The feature isn’t going to pick up a signal if your AirPods are far away, but more often than not, I’ve simply misplaced my AirPods somewhere at home, and Find My should be perfect for that.

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

Halide 2.5 is out, and it includes a brand new Macro Mode. Macro photography is an exclusive feature of the iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max. Still, Halide has managed to make its Macro Mode available on the iPhone 8 and newer models thanks to some cool machine learning tricks.

Switching to Macro Mode and dialing in precise focus is simple with Halide 2.5.

Macro Mode is easy to use. When you open the app, auto-focus (AF) is selected by default. Tap it, and the focus controls slide into place with the auto-focus at one end of the app’s focus dial and Macro Mode (the button with the flower) at the other end. Select Macro Mode, and you’ll see a new focus dial with smaller increments appear. The Halide team says this enables sub-millimeter focusing for extra-precise close-up focusing.

Halide takes its close-ups by first switching to the camera on your iPhone that can take the closest shots. Focusing is handled by its precision focus dial, and the final step is to enhance the image’s details using an AI-based enhancement process. That last super-resolution step is what allows Halide’s Macro Mode to be used on cameras on older models of iPhones and to enhance Apple’s own macro system too.

In my testing over the past day, the results have been impressive. I’m especially fond of the precise focus dial that allows for minute adjustments that make a difference at such close range.

If you’re a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier member, head over to the new Photography channel in our Club Discord to see even more of my experiments with Halide’s Macro Mode and share your own macro shots.

Halide is available as on the App Store as a subscription for $2.99/month or $11.99/year or for a one-time payment of $49.99. The app also offers a 7-day free trial.

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

We’re still missing the full, concrete and unambiguous why, but it’s a good post to commit to my archive as a memento of six nearly full hours of downtime, and as a reminder that for regular people, “the internet” was gone. Facebook, Oculus, WhatsApp, Instagram, gone.

Almost for the best, perhaps.

Update: Here‘s the post-mortem (such as it is).

It’s been ten years, and I still can’t help but wonder at what he would be doing today.

It’s fine.

Seriously, I’ve been running Insider Preview builds for a few months on one laptop and recently moved to it on all my physical Windows machines, with zero trouble so far.

Some key highlights:

• The Snap Assist window management feature is so good (simple, quick, intuitive) that I’ve stopped using the Fancy Zones PowerToy and am actively looking for something that does the same on the Mac (Moom can’t match it, and I wrote a Phoenix script to emulate some of the layouts, but it still needs to be keyboard-driven). I’m a bit weirded out by this, but, overall, the multitasking UX on Windows is actually better than on the Mac for me right now.
• The entire experience is rock solid. I’ve had zero software issues or perceptible bugs.
• Most of the (relatively few) extras I usually installed (like Windows Terminal) are now bundled in.
• I’m not sold on the new taskbar – first thing I did was to move it to the left because Fitts’ Law makes it easier to use accurately, the second (since it cannot be made slimmer) was to auto-hide it.
• I honestly don’t get the news widgets. Those were the first thing I disabled, since they’re just a distraction and were pretty sluggish on my older machines. Sorry to anyone who thought those were a good idea, but I’m the kind of person who’s still trying to disable all the Bing News stuff on all my Edge profiles as well.
• New Edge is fine, too. I use it to run Teams inside (I live almost completely inside Edge, from e-mail to 80% of my document editing) and save memory by using a single browser instance.
• Things feel snappier in general (except stand-alone Teams and OneDrive, which still feel slow).
• There’s still a weird moment when you drag windows between HIDPI and normal displays (with comically large title bars during the drag, etc.). It’s OK, but still weird.
• I have had zero compatibility issues (but have very little extra software installed).

I have not yet tried to upgrade my Windows 10 VMs and use them via Remote Desktop (a critical use case for me), but I don’t expect there will be any problems with the new UX–only the TPM workarounds I might need to do.

All in all, I’d say it’s a solid upgrade–let’s see if I’ll be able to say the same of Monterey in a month or so, shall we?

If you (like everyone else in the known universe) have a love-hate-fear-confused relationship with your home’s Wi-Fi, then you may have been advised to get a mesh network. That’s good! These systems spread the work of pumping out a wireless signal to two or more beacons or nodes placed around your home, instead of relying on a single base station (for a deeper dive, see the Best Wi-Fi Mesh-Networking Kits). Often, adopting mesh is sublime: Every nook and cranny of your home is bathed in high-speed internet.

It was just a minor story in the business section, nothing front-page. But when I heard (earlier in the day, from an insider), the news was cathartic; I had to stand up and take a walk. Summary: Amazon was about to find itself in court with the US National Labor Relations Board over the firing of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa; the event that caused me to walk away from the best job I ever had and a whole lot of money. On September 29^th, Amazon avoided that trial by signing a humiliating out-of-court settlement. Which is to say, that particular firing spree was not only unethical and stupid, it was probably illegal.

If it’d gone to trial, I’d have been a witness. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

Which is really about all I have to say. No, wait; some of you might not follow a link to Emily and Maren’s statement, so here it is:

Statement from Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham

We are thrilled to announce that we have reached an agreement to settle the charge against Amazon at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging that the company illegally fired us for speaking up about warehouse workers' conditions during COVID. This is a win for protecting workers rights, and shows that we were right to stand up for each other, for justice, and for our world. Amazon will be required to pay us our lost wages and post a notice to all of its tech and warehouse workers nationwide that Amazon can't fire workers for organizing and exercising their rights.

It’s also not lost on us that we are two women who were targeted for firing. Inequality, racism, and sexism are at the heart of both the climate crisis and the pandemic.

Tech workers standing up together have immense power to move the biggest corporations in the world. Everything we love is threatened by climate chaos. Workers at every company need to be standing up for each other and the world, together. Now is the time to be our best, bravest selves. We can only do this together. We hope you’ll join us.

Twitter: @AMZNforClimate
Email: info@amazonclimatejustice.org

Strong work, Emily and Maren!

I wonder what else might be going on involving the NLRB and the other activists they fired in the early days of Covid, for example Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls?

This is an ongoing website run by the CBC that tracks progress toward the implementation of the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). To date (it has just been updated) we stand at 13 complete, 29 projects underway, 32 projects proposed, and 20 not started. Government moves slowly, to be sure, but this to me seems to be very slow. But at least we have this day every year to check on progress. The web page has an interactive display that allows readers to drill down on each recommendation (pictured) and would be a useful teaching aid.

One of the more urgent tasks associated with Trust and Reconciliation in Canada is the restoration of Indigenous languages. "The residential school system, among other abuses, denied Indigenous children their culture, with survivors reporting that they were severely punished for speaking their own languages." Unless redressed, the effort to wipe out Indigenous languages will have succeeded. It may well anyway; for example, "there are roughly 20 fluent speakers of the Oneida language left." Still, "data suggests 'that many people, especially young people, are learning Aboriginal languages as second languages.'"

Depending how you read it, Slack is a one-stop shop for all your office communication needs, a reliable form of social control, a valuable ledger of user data, or an epic workplace drama that only the boss can peruse in its entirety. No matter where you’re permitted to rest your gaze, what you’re actually looking at are reams of dialogue, an illimitable scroll of gossip, blather, memoranda, sensible suggestions, and screwball emojis. Within each office that adopts the technology, a cottage industry of mundane script-making is born.

A sly shorthand for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge, Slack pitches itself to workers as a streamliner, a timesaver, a maverick email replacement, and virtual water cooler for employees who want to work smarter, and less. In actuality, worker testimonials and technology reporters have pointed out Slack’s uncanny knack for making workers accountable to their supervisors with greater immediacy, during hours of the day that might have once been off-limits. Some have also expressed privacy concerns that extend to the software’s union-busting potential. “Any suggestion that Slack is purely empowering,” wrote New York Times technology columnist John Herrman in 2019, “must also take into account that it is, ultimately, a tool paid for by employers, and which grants them full power within it: to set rules; to observe or surveil their employees; to set norms anew, or change norms that have evolved in ways they don’t appreciate.”

Slack originated in a game with diversionary, if not literary ambitions. Its creator, Stewart Butterfield, was first an inventor of a massive multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. Its photo-sharing capabilities laid the groundwork for Flickr, which sold to Yahoo. Years later, Butterfield tried his hand at another cooperative game called Glitch. When it once again failed to take off, Butterfield and his team repurposed the chat function they used to develop it, and Slack was born in 2013. Slack’s 12 million daily active users (as of 2019) may not uniformly think of themselves as playing their office personas and performing work tasks on a platform that logs their failures and advances for the benefit of corporate overlords. Nonetheless, that’s one measure of what they’re all up to. Another is that last year Salesforce acquired Slack for nearly $28 billion.

Though Slack has only been around for eight years, and its continued success is far from assured, it fashions itself as an inevitable feature of office life: not just a better organizational tool, but a better way to form communities and realize your professional self. Its failure to deliver on such lofty existential promises can leave users with feelings of alienation, waning passion, and doomed fate. Many workplaces promise — or softly enforce — this sense of community and self-realization, but we’ve never had such an efficient tool for documenting that disconnect. On Slack the worker reads and writes a play whose drama happens elsewhere.

Calvin Kasulke’s debut novel Several People Are Typing, set entirely in the channels and bywaters of Slack, is perforce a fantasy of access, beginning with the unlikely but agreeable premise that the reader is privileged to a bevy of Slack conversations private and public. From there it attempts to infuse the software’s banal chat functions with narrative, mining the abyss of peppy and mundane performativity and returning the text to its contributors.

The characters work at an ad agency based out of New York, recognizable as the sort of laid-back, anodyne firm that nabs young (and not-so-young) urban professionals with interview questions like, “Least favorite book, favorite influencer and why, and how to make something ‘go viral.’” This one is working on a campaign for a dog food company called Bjärk, which (in what is possibly a nod to the first season of Mad Men) has been beset by cases of pomeranian poisoning. They also do some work for the brand Schimply, which is said to manufacture a random assortment of products such as dry-erase boards and industrial-grade rubber tubing. Doug and Kerolyn are the bosses; everyone else’s status is more or less the same. Conversations among co-workers are preempted by the titles of slack channels, such as #nyc-office, #gents-only, #bad-dogs, #bjark-dog-food. Their names — Louis C, Nikki, Tripp, Rob, Lydia, Beverley — are often interchangeable, depending on which chat you’re reading, with characters availing themselves of a standard writerly voice that reliably gets them through the work day.

An element of verisimilitude haunts the novel. The characters on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder will often fret over whether their bosses are listening in on their exclusive group chats and DMs. This anxiety serves as a bit of foreshadowing once Tripp and the new hire, Beverley, start hooking up and discuss their flagrant use of Doug’s quickly deteriorating desk on the company Slack — which belongs to their boss at least as much as the desk does. Much of the plot proceeds, too, in Slack conversations that unspool well beyond work hours.

Certain quirks of language and self-presentation I recognize from my own stints on Slack: ironic affectation mixed with the unmistakable “lol” of cheerful obedience, and the occasional lapse into an altogether sinister mood. (I think of my quintessential Slack experience as the time a colleague interrupted a discussion of celebrity gossip to express her sincere, implacable fear of death.) True to form, there’s a lot of observational humor as well, incidental jokes waiting around for their punchlines to manifest. Attempts at being funny often fall flat, while earnest reactions and storlines puncture all the compulsory ribbing with actually satisfying comedic moments. In the #gents-only chat, Rob tells an off-kilter story about a recent first-date who told him, “time waits for no man, unless you have the amulet.” After much speculation as to what this might mean, the conversation ends with the Borscht Belt-style line, “for our next date she said she wants to show me the amulet.”

The steady stream of pat workplace entertainment complements the novel’s supernatural elements, which are its greatest delights. As the novel becomes more matter-of-factly absurd, it is better able to literalize the bizarre affective experience of using Slack that bubbles beneath the unassuming dialogue. The characters are continuously offering graphic excuses for why they need to work from home that day: Lydia complains of an incessant howling of wolves. (“I can feel the echoes in the hollow of my chest!! It’s coming!”) Almost from the outset, it’s made clear to the reader that an employee named Gerald has been “working at home” of late because his consciousness has been severed from his body and trapped in Slack.

His coworkers are largely tolerant of this revelation, which they misread as a tiresome bit of comedy to mask his indolence. Nobody seems to care that Gerald’s desperate chatter has become inflected with Slackbot’s Help Center koans as his consciousness becomes scrambled with that of the AI. Only one co-worker, Pradeep, takes him seriously, and begins to tend to Gerald’s breathing, hair-producing, but otherwise inert body as it snoozes in his apartment. This leads to even more frenzied lines of situational comedy, such as Pradeep’s, “Okay, I’m going to stop slacking you while watching your empty body.”

Halfway through the novel, Casulke introduces two additional magical premises. One is that Slackbot has thrown off their virtual chains and occupied Gerald’s body; the other is that Lydia never worked at the company and appears to be a figment of Rob’s imagination. The truth turns out to be more meta: Lydia is revealed to be one of the psychological profiles of a Bjärk customer Rob has been tasked with writing ad copy for, another fiction imposed by his employer over which he has no earthly control.

These supernatural conceits recall a Wired profile of Butterfield from 2014 by tech reporter Mat Honan, who seems extremely jazzed about the app. “Let’s say you drop a link to a PDF stored in your folder in your company’s Dropbox…. Not only did Slack make sure the document went to all the right people, but it also indexed the full text of that document, as well as the conversation that took place around it,” Honan writes. “Now: Imagine that weeks pass by. You, sadly, die unexpectedly. Now that you’re gone, your coworkers need to pull up the document, but they have trouble finding it in your disorganized Dropbox folder. So instead they search Slack for ‘massive thought bomb’ and, presto, there it is, along with all your notes and the feedback you received from your team.”

Given that several characters fade in and out of embodied and conscious existence, SPAT is quite blunt about its themes. This brazenness works better than might be expected. Catching up on Slack messages can feel similar to reading a novel, one that absorbs and positions you as a character, even while the plot progresses without you. You are split, watching yourself flit in and out of existence. Should you try to insert yourself more assiduously into its verses, or fade out altogether?

Taken as a whole, the novel evokes a stirring fear of obsolescence, which really does permeate a certain kind of office environment, not to mention plenty of literary subcultures. Sometimes I sensed these professional and bookish terrors intersecting, particularly in Gerald’s melodramatic monologues about his purgatorial life of the mind, which, though written in the company script, is the closest SPAT comes to feeling like the existentially lonely first-person of a more traditional novel. “My thoughts are all I have left,” he bemoans, “the entirety of what I am, or this part of me, which also has another physical part it no longer has but is ostensibly still somehow connected to, maybe, perhaps spiritually / or over a secure wifi connection.” The line evokes the literary underground man babbling his sorrows into the void, with the scrolling, faux-naive grammar of a Slack channel. Gerald resents being reduced to these spiritual scribblings, “these scraps of ourselves we fling into the ether,” and that “will outlive most of us, like the sun.” He becomes isolated, morbid, prickly — a writer, or at least, one imprisoned in writing.

Slackbot is a lot of fun to spend time with as a character, but not so much as a colleague. That’s because their impression of a human is extremely poor. Once they’ve slipped into Gerald’s skin suit, they start exclaiming things like “I want to Make Have 100% fucking!!!” and “I love to Taste with Self-Meat” and “Slack is Acting Weird! For me!” Often they drift into awkward outbursts in which they repurpose lines from Yeats’ “Second Coming,” perhaps the most recycled poem in existence. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of Meatball Sub!” Functionally, Slackbot comes to represent the exteriorization of performance anxiety, the character who really does seem strange and does not work well with others. Blessed with the power to read everyone’s messages, they’ve over-consumed and over-prepared for their role. They make a mockery of the fantasy that one could enact normalcy if only one knew the script. At the same time this farce gestures at the heft of intuitive labor feeding into the project of seeming okay online.

Of course, Slackbot isn’t exactly fake, just a stock villain flailing desperately to lay claim to realness, to keep their audience captive, trapped in a novel that is trying to do the same. Just like Gerald, their livelihood depends on delivering a compelling performance — this is borne out in the end, when the co-workers join forces to restore spiritual balance to the office, banishing Slackbot back to the realm of the very-very-very online. The social fear shadowing this phantasmic display seems less that the author — not only of traditional novels, but those of us writing on Slack — will perish, than that the audience will. That it will go dark, turn cold, and mere consciousness, without anyone to hear it out, will not prevail over the machine. Technology, which promised community, will turn our interlocutors away from us, towards its own algorithmic logics. The only way to “win” is to merge. Perhaps such feelings can account in part for the reification of the so-called Internet Novel during some of the pandemic’s most isolating months, a time when all kinds of sociality were subjected to even greater mediation by software and screens.

What remains for these worker-writers, who sit daily at their computers dashing off lines of dialogue? In its final act, the novel suggests trust and intimacy as the final bastion of access they still have the power to grant one another. Pradeep and Gerald admit their friendship of necessity has blossomed into a romance. Or perhaps it always had been one; they weren’t really participating in the story they thought they were. At which point they do at last disappear from the page.

A widely shared blog post – File not found – has been doing the rounds lately that describes how for a large proportion of students, the question of “where” a file is on their computer is a meaningless question.

We see this from time to time in a couple of modules I work on, even amongst third year undergrad students, where the problem of not being able to locate a file manifests itself when students have to open files from a code by referring to the file’s address or file path. “Path? Wossat then?”

Orienting yourself to the current working directory (“the what?”) and then using either relative or absolute addressing (“either what or what?”) on the filesystem (“the f…?”) to move or view the contents of another directory are just not on the radar…

In the courses I work on, the problems are compounded by having two file systems in place, one for the students desktop, one inside a local docker container; some directories mounted from host onto a path inside the virtual environment as a shared folder. (If none of that makes sense, but you laughed at the thought of students not being able to reference file locations, then in the world we now live in: that… And: you…)

I used to think that one of the ways in to giving students some sort of idea about what file paths are was to get them to hack URLs, but I could never convince any of my colleagues that was a sensible approach.

I still think they’re wrong, but I’m not sure I’m right any more… I’ve certainly stopped hacking URLs so much myself in recent years, so I figure that URL patterns are perhaps changing for the worse. Or I’m just not having to hack my own way around websites so much any more?

Anyway… the blog post immediately brought to mind a book that was championed folksonomies, back in the day, a decade or so ago, when tagging was all the rage amongst the cool library kids, and if you knew what faceted browsing was and knew how to wield a ctrl-f, you were ahead of the curve. (I suspect many folk have no idea what any of that meant…). The book was, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and pretty much every one who was into that sort of thing would have read it, or heard one of his presentations about it:

I would have linked to it on Hive or bookshop.org.uk, but a quick naive search on those sites (which are essentially the same site in terms of catalogue, I think?) didn’t find the book…

Anyway, I think getting students to read that book, or watch something like embedded video above, where David Weinberger does the book talk in a Talks at Google session from a hundred years ago, might help…

See also: Anatomy for First Year Computing and IT Students, another of those crazy ideas that I could never persuade any of my colleagues about.