Andrew Orr

No matter how many times Mark Zuckerberg or other CEOs say sorry, corporations will continue to screw us over until someone steps in.

The result is that even if their leaders earnestly wanted to impart meaningful change to provide restitution for their wrongs, their hands are tied by entrenched business models and the short-term focus of the quarterly earnings cycle. They apologize and go right back to problematic behavior.

It’s not just Facebook though, this is every company that puts money over users (so all of them?) Whether you like regulation or not, I think both sides can agree that nothing can be done without outside influence. Like I said in a previous link, criminals don’t voluntarily turn themselves in.

Washington D.C. has made GitHub the central repository for its system of laws. It’s not a copy of the laws, it’s the actual source. And they can be edited.

Last week, I opened the file on GitHub that had the typo, edited the file, and submitted my edit using GitHub’s “pull request” feature. A pull request is a request to the file’s maintainer to review a change and then, if approved, pull it in to the main file.

This is really neat and I hope more states will follow this approach. It creates a different mindset around the law: One of collaboration and transparency, instead of separation and obfuscation.

Besides the Amazon leak, here’s some more troubling news. Researchers demonstrated a side-channel JavaScript attack that made it possible for them to spy on your other browser tabs. And even Tor is susceptible.

This information can be used to target adverts at you based on your interests, or otherwise work out the kind of stuff you’re into and collect it in safe-keeping for future reference. The technique is described in a paper recently distributed through ArXiv called “Robust Website Fingerprinting Through the Cache Occupancy Channel.”

It doesn’t sound like there’s a fix for this at the moment.

Amazon is emailing customers to tell them it leaked their names and email addresses due to a “technical error.”

It then goes on to say, “The issue has been fixed. This is not a result of anything you have done, and there is no need for you to change your password or take any other action.”

None of which is terribly reassuring. Although it doesn’t include the customer’s name it doesn’t look like a phishing attack as there is no link and no call to action.

Amazon says there is no need to change your password but you should change it anyway. If they can’t protect emails and names, why would we trust them with our passwords?

We’re entering the 2020s and it’s fitting that we’re in the Second Golden Age. Or at least that’s what Robert Reich argues.

It is time to use antitrust again. We should break up the hi-tech behemoths, or at least require they make their proprietary technology and data publicly available and share their platforms with smaller competitors.

There would be little cost to the economy, since these giant firms rely on innovation rather than economies of scale – and, as noted, they’re likely to be impeding innovation overall…Republicans rhapsodize about the “free market” but have no qualms about allowing big corporations to rig it at the expense of average people.

If we’re in the Second Golden Age now, I wonder if we’ll enter a Second Depression in the 2030s? As the saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Jen Karner has some great tips and tricks for Civilization VI. Although her article specifically mentions the Nintendo Switch, these tips work for any platform.

I’ve been playing Civilization VI since it launched on PC in 2016, and with more than 700 hours logged I’ve got strong feelings on just about every kind of start, civilization and play style. During that time I’ve beaten the game a handful of times with Culture and Science victories and have restarted the game more times than I want to count — seriously.

The best tip on there is to play to your civilization’s strengths. Each civilization gives you a unique bonus, and you should take advantage of that.

William Gallagher has a good article on how to edit HEIC photos without data loss. HEIC is now the default format for photos taken by iPhones.

When it was just that Facebook and the rest weren’t supporting HEIC, we thought time would sort that out. Now that Apple itself is still automatically converting HEIC to JPEG in emails, we’re wondering what the point is. We’d just like it to be possible to set up a Siri Shortcut so that we could tell our iPhones “no, no, we meant JPEG” and have it switch back and forth.

You can manage these settings in Settings > Camera > Formats. Choosing High Efficiency will mean your iPhone shoots in HEIC. Choosing Most Compatible means your iPhone shoots in JPG.