Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

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This week in journalism fraud.

Friday, March 16th, 2012

One great story that is just now breaking, and one sad story.

The great story: remember that “This American Life” episode about Apple’s factories in China? Aired back in January, I think? “#454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”? (Amazon link provided for informational purposes only; I have removed my affiliate ID.)

This American Life and American Public Media’s Marketplace will reveal that a story first broadcast in January on This American Life contained numerous fabrications. This American Life will devote its entire program this weekend to detailing the errors in the story, which was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s critically acclaimed one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

More:

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter’s contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn’t work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

 “At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”

Excerpts are from the press release attached to the story on Jimbo’s website: the TAL website is currently inaccessible (it looks to me like they’re getting hammered).

Mike Daisey has a statement on his website, which is accessible:

My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.

ETA 3/16 1:53 PM: TAL website seems to be accessible now.

ETA 3/16 2:05 PM: Selected shorts:

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show.

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast.

Daisey’s interpreter Cathy also disputes two of the most dramatic moments in Daisey’s story: that he met underage workers at Foxconn, and that a man with a mangled hand was injured at Foxconn making iPads (and that Daisey’s iPad was the first one he ever saw in operation).

The sad story, also by way of Jimbo: You may have seen the first part of this story earlier in the week. I didn’t cover it because it was well linked everywhere. Briefly, editorial editor Bob Caldwell of the Portland Oregonian died over the weekend. After some initial confusion, it came out that he hadn’t been found dead of a heart attack  in his parked car, but had passed away while engaged in a sex act with a 23-year-old woman.

That’s sad, but not the sad part I want to talk about. The initial information (that he’d been found dead in a parked car) was provided by a friend of the family who also worked for the Oregonian. That friend has been fired.

I understand both sides here. From editor Peter Bhatia’s summary of what went wrong:

…while we are used to sources lying to us, it is difficult to swallow when the source is a fellow Oregonian journalist.

But I understand the fired editor’s position, too. In a moment of grief and weakness, she chose to try to shield the family from the pain that would be caused by the circumstances of her friend’s death becoming public. I think she was wrong. I think she shouldn’t have lied. But I also think the paper could have had some compassion and sympathy for the position their editor was placed in: a one or two week unpaid suspension seems more reasonable to me. It may be that I’m a wimp. It may be that I’m not a serious journalist. But I feel a great deal of compassion for the fired editor, even though I think she made a mistake.

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Media | 1 Comment »

Some things that have been rattling around that I’d like to point out.

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

A few days ago, the News @ Y Combinator Twitter feed linked to this article, misleadingly titled “24/192 Music Downloads…and why they make no sense”. I say “misleadingly” because the article is actually a very good introduction to the theory of digital audio, touching on such subjects as the human ear and how it works, how we know that humans can hear between 20 and 20,000 Hz, Nyquist sampling, and ABX tests.

ABX is considered a minimum bar for a listening test to be meaningful; reputable audio forums such as Hydrogen Audio often do not even allow discussion of listening results unless they meet this minimum objectivity requirement.

Holy cow! You mean, there are audiophiles out there who actually believe in science and double-blind testing? My faith in humanity is restored.

The Hon. John Gruber pointed out a post by Chris Hofstader about disability advocacy groups (in particular, the National Federation of the Blind) and how they treat corporations:

At last years NFB convention, ebay was the lead sponsor. Guess what? The ebay web site had, at that time, dozens of accessibility problems . NFB took ebay’s sponsorship dollars while ignoring their poor accessibility. Those of us who would say that any group advocating for our community should require accessibility before rewarding a company by splashing its name all over their convention like they were a friend of our population.

It isn’t just ebay: Hofstader points out that the NFB has been harshly critical of Apple (a company that has done a great deal to promote accessibility) while promoting Google’s Android (which, per Hofstader, has poor accessibility).

I’ve been seeing a lot of promotion of something called “Kony 2012”, which appears to be tied to a campaign by a charity called “Invisible Children” targeting Joseph Kony and his “Lord’s Resistance Army” in Uganda. From what I can tell, Kony is a scumbag who recruits children to fight his battle against the Ugandan army. I think he deserves to be killed; and apparently, we (that is, the United States military) have sent forces to kill him in the past. But the whole “Kony 2012” campaign seems to be, from what the supporters state, about raising money and “awareness”. As far as “awareness” goes, what good is that going to do? As far as money, money for what? Hiring mercenaries to kill Kony?

“Kony 2012” may be a worthwhile cause. But before you jump on the bandwagon, I’d like to suggest that you read the “Visible Children” Tumblr blog, which offers an alternative and skeptical take on the cause. (I will point out one problem with Grant Oyston’s entry: Invisible Children currently has three stars on Charity Navigator, not two Edited to add: I misread Oyston: IC has three stars overall, but he is correct in stating that they only have two stars in the specific subcategory of “Accountability & Transparency”.)

Posted in Android, Apple, Clippings, Geek | 1 Comment »

And yet, Apple is evil.

Friday, February 17th, 2012

…four advertising companies — Google, Vibrant Media, WPP PLC’s Media Innovation Group and Gannett’s PointRoll — have all been using code to work around privacy features in Safari’s iPhone browser. The search engine giant intended to place a temporary cookie on users’ devices to see if they were logged-in to Google services, but the research found that other cookies were also being placed on devices through the workaround.

Google is removing the cookies. Here’s a direct link to the actual work by Jonathan Mayer. And here’s the WSJ report, which does not appear to be behind a paywall.

Edited to add: LAT:

In the wake of evidence that Google Inc. circumvented privacy protections on the iPhone, federal lawmakers are asking if the company violated the terms of its broad privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Geek | 2 Comments »

Desert Bus update.

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

You can now get Desert Bus for Android and iOS. Yes, this means you can play Desert Bus on your iPad.

It is 99 cents, but the money goes to Child’s Play. So you can feel virtuous while you pretend to drive between Tucson and Las Vegas. At 45 MPH. In real time. In a pretend bus that keeps drifting to the right.

Posted in Android, Apple, Geek | Comments Closed

Anniversaries.

Monday, October 24th, 2011

A few people made note of the 10th anniversary of the iPod over the weekend.

That’s pretty nifty. But today is the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line, which is even more significant (in my humble opinion).

The article I linked above does a pretty good job of explaining the significance of the telegraph, especially by making an analogy with the Internet. It surprises me a little that the article doesn’t quote Tom Standage at all, however: his The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers is basically a book-length examination of the early history of the telegraph, and draws heavily on the telegraph-Internet analogy.

If you haven’t already read it, I enthusiastically recommend Standage’s book. He’s a good writer, and the early history of the telegraph is a fascinating subject. (For example, how much do you know about Thomas Edison, other than the standard facts? Did you ever realize Edison was basically a hacker? He was able to build Menlo Park out of the money he got for banging on early telegraph machines.)

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Geek, History | Comments Closed

Siracusa.

Friday, October 7th, 2011

This isn’t going to become the “All Steve, all the time” blog. (“Don’t mourn: build something.”)

But I really liked this piece by John Siracusa, and wanted to point it out. This will probably be the last Jobs related link, barring something extraordinary.

After seeing the Macintosh and then reading this issue of Macworld, I had an important realization in my young life: people made this.

…

We aren’t stuck with the things we have now. We can make new things, better things. And it doesn’t take many people to do it. The team that had created this mind-bending new machine were all up on my wall, their individual faces clearly recognizable.

(Also, you really should be listening to Siracusa’s “Hypercritical” podcast from 5by5 Studios.)

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 5, 2011.

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Because it is expected, even though it is all over the news: Steve Jobs.

LAT obit.

NYT obit.

Edited to add 10/6: Both John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton have nice tributes up at their sites.

ETA2: Ihnatko. Person.

ETA3: I generally don’t solicit charitable donations here. But I would like to note that the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research gets four stars (the highest possible rating) from Charity Navigator. There are worse things you could do with your money than make a donation to them; if not in memory of Steve Jobs, perhaps in memory of Randy Pausch. Or Benoit Mandelbrot. Or one of the other 419 people whose death from pancreatic cancer was notable enough for Wikipedia.

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

DEFCON 19 update #1.

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Added links to the following presentations:

Posted in Android, Apple, DEFCON 19 | Comments Closed

With apologies to Solomon Linda and The Evening Birds, The Tokens, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

In the App Store,
the Apple App Store,
the Lion ships tonight.

(I actually don’t care that much. I’m planning to wait on Lion.1 at least, maybe Lion.2. But Lawrence and I were chatting earlier today and that riff came to me; it’s the kind of thing you only get to use maybe once in a lifetime.)

(This is kind of interesting. Especially for $5.99. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I have downloaded it: this BBC documentary sounds like it could be worthwhile. Download link.)

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Music, Wordplay | 2 Comments »

Make no little plans.

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

That’s Daring Fireball on the Apple campus plans, quoting Daniel Burnham.

Bear with me, please, as it is about to get geeky in here.

Here’s an image of the proposed Apple campus, hotlinked from TechCrunch:

 

This is the best regular image I could find of the General Atomics campus in San Diego:

Slightly better overhead shot:

I think there’s at least a superficial similarity. But so what, you ask? Well, General Atomics was the company that brought us Project Orion.

Remember Project Orion? If you don’t, there’s a pretty good book on the subject: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. (Don’t pay those prices. You should be able to find this used.)  The basic idea was: let’s build a giant spaceship on top of a pusher plate, then set off atomic bombs under the plate to drive the spaceship.

“Make no little plans”, indeed. Can you imagine Apple building their campus on top of a giant metal plate, and then one day when the trans-humanist revolution comes, launching the entire site and all the employees into orbit? Of course, there’s minor details to work out in advance, but isn’t this the kind of plan that stirs the blood?

Is this what Jobs has in mind? Probably not, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

Posted in Apple, Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Tinkering.

Monday, May 30th, 2011

It has been a somewhat slow holiday weekend, and I’ve been spending a good-sized chunk of it messing with stuff.

I wanted to upgrade my existing wireless router to something that had dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) support, and would also run the dd-wrt firmware. So, thanks to the great Jeff Atwood, I went ahead and ordered a Netgear WNDR3700, got it on Friday, and started trying to get it set up on Saturday.

I like dd-wrt in principle, and I think if you’re willing to put up with it, the firmware offers a very rich feature set. But the documentation could use a lot of work. I bricked the router several times (though I was able to recover it): the instructions on this page work just fine for flashing the factory_NA.img file, but the router would lock up and require a tftp reflash as soon as I tried to flash any other version.

Once I got past that, it took a little more skull sweat (though not quite as much) to get my Maxtor EasyShare NAS working as a CIFS device, and to get a static IP assigned to it. (The dd-wrt docs on assigning a static IP even admit that the assignment process is buggy.)

A little more skull sweat after that and I was able to get the 1 TB drive I’d attached to the USB port on the router mounted using Samba and accessible from both the MacBook and Project e. So now I have about 1.3 TB of network accessible storage, which is nice. Transmit power seems reasonable: I can get a signal on my Evo well out into the parking lot of my complex. (I haven’t tried tweaking the transmit power or other settings for the radios in the router, which is one of the nice things dd-wrt lets you do.) I also like being able to put in three DNS servers; again, acting on a Jeff Atwood suggestion, I downloaded and ran namebench, and added a tertiary name server based on its recommendations.

Ah, but there’s a problem. I want to run a closed network using the 5 GHz radio only (for maximum speed) and an open network using the 2.4 GHz radio (isolated from the main network). It turns out that, while the netbook does support wireless N, the adapter only runs on the 2.4 GHz frequency. So if I want to get top speed on the netbook, I need to get a USB wireless N adapter that supports 5 GHz and is supported under Ubuntu. (I don’t want to go through the whole ndiswrapper thing.) And I haven’t been able to find that yet…

Oh, yeah: I also upgraded Microsoft Office to the 2011 version: prior to all of this, I upgraded the MacBook to 10.6.7, and Office 2011 seems to run much better under 10.6 than the Office 2004 I was using. And I can get rid of the file conversion utility.

Still on my list of things to do before school starts up again, besides updating the Saturday Dining Conspiracy pages:

  • root the Evo. But since 2.3 is rumored to be coming down the pike real soon now, I think I’ll wait for that update before rooting.
  • upgrade Project e to Ubuntu 11.04. But given the things I’m hearing about the Unity interface, I’m having second thoughts on that. Apparently, you can disable Unity on 11.04, but it’ll be the only interface in 11.10.
  • do a BIOS update on Project e. Which isn’t that big a deal, except for the part about preparing a DOS bootable USB disk under Linux or MacOS.
  • I still want to work on improving my photo setup so I can take better gun photos. Mostly, I think that’s a matter of building a light box, and perhaps purchasing some additional lights and a tripod.
  • I’d like to get part three of “Talkin’ GPS Blues” up before I go back to school.
  • I’d also like to get back into the MIT Open Courseware swing.
  • I’ve got most of the parts for a dedicated NAS box sitting under a desk, and should probably start trying to assemble that. Missing: RAM, storage space for the FreeNAS OS, and storage drives.

There’s travel in there as well. And somewhere, Mike the Musicologist is snickering at me…

Posted in Apple, asus_eee, Geek, linux | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

“What the f**k does that mean?”

–John Gruber @ Daring Fireball

John:

It’s okay. Everyone has that reaction when reading Rob Enderle. Why don’t you sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and read something soothing, like the works of H.L. Mencken?

(Speaking of taking a stress pill, I would not be upset to find one of these in my stocking on Christmas morning.)

(Speaking of the works of H.L. Mencken, I am reminded that I need to add Prejudices: The Complete Series to my Amazon wish list.)

Posted in Apple, Books, Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

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