The app will monitor which apps are installed on a person’s phone, the time spent using those apps, the country you’re in, and additional app data

The Verge

… you don’t say

Following an avalanche of stories breaking right now, like this one from ARS Technica

Users have discovered a bug in Apple’s FaceTime video-calling application that allows you to hear audio from a person you’re calling before they accept the call

I only FaceTime with family, I guess we’re gonna find out how many people actually use FaceTime! My guess? Pretty few use it outside immediate family.

Now does that mean that this bug doesn’t apply to me? Not at all, anyone can FaceTime my phone, and now they can listen in, even if I don’t pickup on my end. Software is hard, it will come down to how quickly Apple acts on this one.

While the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau granted Verizon’s request for a partial waiver from the open-access rule, it denied Verizon’s request for a declaratory ruling “finding the handset unlocking rule already permits such temporary locking.”

ARS Technica

As T-Mobile put it, they knew what the rules were when they bought in during the spectrum auction. I’m a little surprised at even the 60 day wavier. I’m struggling to find any tangible benefit to the customer, and not just some made up problems for Verizon. 🤷‍♂️

This is important, because when digital projects fail, it’s often not the technology, but the underlying culture that sets the precedence for success or failure. Operating inside a culture of fear will inevitably lead to digital project failure.

Find the truth. Tell the truth.

This really echos my sentiment. That technology is the easy part, the people and the culture are the really tough challenges.

Today Github, recently acquired by the new Microsoft, announced unlimited free repos for all. This is an interesting turn, after wide spread outcry and running to places like Gitlab after the MS finalized the purchase last year. I am more and more skeptical of free services, as we all should be I’m looking at you Facebook, I’m looking right at you, and am happy to pay for the services I do use and value. So I’m a little torn over this one. On the one hand I’m happy that MS on all accounts is showing to be a ‘good steward’ of this corner stone of open source development. On the other hand, I wonder, why? MS is still a business. Maybe it’s a bit pessimistic, but I can’t help be a little weary of the good news. Like in a month the other shoe will drop. Over the past several years I have become, more and more, and new Microsoft fan. Most know to the point, I happily use a Surface Book for my day to day work, and I freakin’ love it. Still, this move seems unnecessary? At least for me, private repos wasn’t a problem I needed solved.

With FCC Chairman Ajit Pai having deregulated the broadband industry, there’s little to no chance of the commission taking action to stop fees like the one charged by Frontier.

ArsTechnica

Another example of “death by a thousand cuts”. Frontier can charge you 10 dollars for a router you don’t want or need, 5 more for a “warranty” you can’t opt out of, continue to track and sell your data because it’s in the “T & C”, and as the customer a majority of us only have one option for high speed internet, leaving little to no recourse but to complain of reddit and pay it. The alternative is to go without, which is simply not practical on any level.

☹️

All major ISPs denied selling or sharing their users’ browsing histories and other sensitive information in 2017, when they convinced Congress and President Trump to prevent implementation of broadband privacy rules. But since then, it has been reported that T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were selling their mobile customers’ location information to third-party data brokers despite promising not to do so.

FTC investigates whether ISPs sell your browsing history and location data

This one’s a give me. Yep.

The FCC’s argument, at the center of the 2017 rule, that broadband isn’t telecommunications is supported by almost no experts whatsoever, yet as an expert agency it can decide such technical matters on its own. If Congress were to establish a law clarifying that, however, it would remove the Commission’s freedom in this matter and constrict it to operating as the law dictates.

TechCrunch

It would be nice to actual have laws on the books for net neutrality and not be at the mercy of the changing emotions, and lack of ethical judgment from Ajit Pai and the constant gutting of interest in helping the public at large, instead of taking advantage of them. 🤷🏼‍♂️

With a bit of luck and a lot of trying, I’ve been able to figure out how to add Markdown support to wordpress via the REST API. This servers as a reminder to myself, and I hope it helps someone else if they come across this.

• REST API is enabled by default for wp v4 and above, so all good there
• Default Auth only has cookie support, and since I’m looking to interact and make quick publishing as easy as possible, this will not do.
  • JWT Can be enabled with this plugin , so that solved that.
• Now we can post without the admin dashboard, how do we get it to format the markdown? We can add another plugin that gives us wp-com support for markdown in Posts, Jetpack.
• With those enabled we can stringify a markdown file, and HTTP POST it to our wordpress endpoint and BOOM 🎇 we’ve been able to write in markdown, and send posts.
• Next item, post and publish in a single request? Possibly ?

I gave a talk tonight at the local React meetup. As always a ton of fun, it did however solidify that I am less and less interest in React, and more interested in Elm and Haskell as tools to use for solving and creating. Maybe you’re thinking, well duh Jesse, you have a JSToElm podcast?!? Are just realizing this now? And actually, yeah, it’s just sort of dawned on me. It’s not a question or a thought I’ve explicably had, but something that occurred to me while I was sitting there looking up at code on a giant projector, what would this look like in Elm, and I wonder what the type signature of that method would be?

It’s a small thing, but having moments like this can be very clarifying.

DuckDuckGo making fun now that Google has finally started to roll out privacy labels for their iOS labels. I’d really be curious what, if anything, is missing from this monster list.

After months of stalling, Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome and the Google app. No wonder they wanted to hide it.Spying on users has nothing to do with building a great web browser or search engine. We would know (our app is both in one). pic.twitter.com/lJBbLTjMuu

— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) March 15, 2021

“As a result of recent events, we have decided to end our arrangements with data aggregators,” a Sprint spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

Motherboard

I feel like there was a story recently, oh yeah here we go, that exposed much the same practices from cellular providers. There was outrage then, and promises of swift action and change.

prism-react-render

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  console.log(children);
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      {...defaultProps}
      theme={theme}
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I came across this article How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation today, and while I have never considered myself a “millennial”, I am on the oldest end of that time line. Based on this feelings and perspective of Anne, and others she interviewed, I would say I’m closer to ever than being a millennial.

What has been dubbed adulting, or what Anne has nicknamed “errand paralysis”, the mundane day to day tasks of dry cleaning, post office, or other repetitive analog tasks.

But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it

Anne makes some effective correlation to the burnout many of us feel in having been through school to come out to poor job prospects, or assuming massive debt to acquire more education, only to find the outcome suboptimal.

It you are a millennial, or a millennial in denial, or you know one. You need to take 10 minutes to sit down and read through Anne’s article at least once or twice.

Jesse (Millennial in denial)

I asked on twitter the other day, ‘What is the equivalent of shooting 100 free throws for communication?” Several people mentioned it was to write 750 words or so a day. Now this is of particular interest to myself, bc I have started-stopped this exact task, or what feels more like a chore, multiple times in the past. None of those efforts lasted more than 14-15 days. I have even gone so far as to build an app that will count, track, and publish those posts to a blog. And while I managed to spend almost a year working on that side project. Not once did I ever get past 10 days in a row. Now the interesting thing about streaks is that once you miss one, all the motivation is immediately sucked out of your body and into the void. The effort to start again after skipping a day, I would say, is exponentially more than starting in the first place. So? How do you avoid the disappointment black hole when you miss a day or break a streak? How do you get back to it with the same vigor and dedication?

the fact that the state of much of America’s infrastructure is appalling on its face, and even moreso when compared to nations which are on paper nowhere near as rich.

Techcrunch

I lived in London for a bit coming and going from college, and one of the things I truly miss was the public transportation. It was so quick and easy to hop a bus or train and get all over a giant city like London or Paris. That is in stark contrast to living out west in Arizona. Where the closest place to get a sandwich or a cup of coffee from where you live is often 2-3 miles away. Bus’s run every 30-40 minutes during peak times, so without a car to get around it will easily take you several hours of your day to get to and from work. Sadness is a good word for it. 😭

Ars is reporting to have a new 5GHz chip, that will not exactly be available for retail sale this year.

the chip company is asking system builders to bid for the chips in an online auction. The auctions will be held quarterly, with apparently only three system integrators bidding in the first.

[arstechnica.com/gadgets/2...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/intel-reported-to-have-a-new-5ghz-chip-thats-literally-priceless/#p3)

With some relatively positive news coming out of CES that Intel will actual ship a 10nm chip later this year, this seems like another flailing swing from a falling giant.

Ars Technica

This is a 45W processor with eight cores, 16 threads, and 16MB of cache, with a base clock speed of 2.4GHz and a turbo speed of 5GHz. The “K” on the name also indicates that the chip is overclockable: for those truly monstrous gaming laptops with high-powered cooling systems, you’ll be able to go beyond the default speeds.

Yeah, I read these specs and all I can think is, “oh boy those MacBook Pro’s just keep getting hotter and hotter.

At the top end is the i9-9900: eight cores, 16 threads, a base of 3.1GHz, and a peak of 5.0GHz. The big difference between this and the already-shipping 9900K and 9900KF is the power use: it’s a 65W chip, whereas the other two are 95W, and it’s not overclockable

Power, speed, heat. I feel like at this point Intel’s chips have passed the point of diminishing returns. I’m all for more cores and power. But that isn’t really what I need on a day to day basis. I am sure there are those that do, and for them the more cores the better, the tradeoff in heat and mobility is a welcomed compromise. For me, I don’t hit bottlenecks in my workflow with the CPU, haven’t in a very, very long time. Network, memory, possibly, and even then the times I’m waiting on my machine to preform a task is not even relative on the overall time spend in front of these things.

I’d rather have smaller chips, with longer battery lives, consuming less energy, for roughly the same amount of processing power. The idea of ARM based laptops is very exciting in this regard.

I gave a talk at my local meetup for React, the part I left out of my previous post was the meetup was hosted at my work. This had the added benefit of home court advantage (sports ball) I knew more people in the audience that usual, and was very comfortable. The side effect that I didn’t anticipate was the following day. I had a couple people, people not on my team, I might recognize them in the halls, maybe even say hi to them from time to time. These people stopped me and complimented me on my talk last night! ♥ This absolutely made my day. It really extended the excitement, the buzz, the high I get when I present something I like in front of a group that I really look up to.

This has an adverse effect that I’m never ready for, the crash. Coming down emotionally from a talk is, for me is physically painful. I am not sure you would categorize it as a chemical withdraw of good feelings, but that is the best way I can describe it. While I recover, my show is running late, I need to get it out the door, but I feel like nothing more than crawling into bed for the weekend.

To all those who attended and took the time to provide feedback, I sincerely thank you.

The cable lobby working towards their investor bottom line, not in consumers best interest.

Powell said there is “common ground around the basic tenets of net neutrality rules: There should be no blocking or throttling of lawful content. There should be no paid prioritization that creates fast lanes and slow lanes, absent public benefit. And, there should be transparency to consumers over network practices.”

Cable lobby asks for net neutrality law allowing paid prioritization

Its sounds like Powell is advocating for Net neutrality, but is a cable lobbyist at this time. In his next breath he uses words like, no need for regulation and “light touch”. I simply can’t trust any angle from cable companies that have time and time again abused their position and monopoly over a must have utility service. In a space with absolutely no competition or incentive to actually serve consumers these companies will continue to take advantage until they are forced to by government. Don’t tell me the market will regulate itself. There is no competitive market in the ISP space. It’s a joke.

I’ve had a growing number of articles in my feed that illustrate the constant behavior of telecommunication companies. As you can imagine it’s not the good kind.

AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

Charter squeezes more money out of Internet users with new cancellation policy

Ajit Pai-proposed upgrade to 25Mbps starts paying off for rural ISPs – but it’ll take a decade. 😂

Best of all, the FCC’s chairman doesn’t seem interested in keeping them honest.

Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier’s horrible telecom service

TechCrunch

He also argued that while Twitter could “do a bunch of superficial things to address the things you’re talking about,” that isn’t the real solution.

“We want the changes to last, and that means going really, really deep,” Dorsey said.

Maybe they could throw in a few of those “superficial” systems just for kicks. A real solution would be face the problem head on, and stop fairly loose terms like “changes to last” and “go really, really deep”

More specifically, Rodgers asked about the frequent criticism that Twitter hasn’t found a way to consistently ban Nazis from the service.

“We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”

That term is used to apply describe, um, Nazis and their behavior ?!?

Tech Crunch

The title of this article alone could only exist in 2019.

I know, you’re likely going to tell me “welcome to the party”, about just how blatantly gross Facebook’s actions towards users and their data have been for a long, long time. And you’re right. I’ve largely been absent from FB, still have an account, since college, but the platform has never really resonated with me. Twitter, on the other hand, I check an unhealthy amount per day. Let’s chalk up the bad actions of FB that has come out, just in the last 7 days:

• Facebook Project ‘Atlas’, paying teens to install their snooping VPN with enterprise certs.
• Facebook blocks Ad Transparency Tools
• Facebook Friendly Fraud, kids unwittingly spending money connected to their parents credit cards.

Now for most companies they would be in full PR mode. Interviews, opinion columns, talk shows, the spin machine out in force. For Facebook it seems more like just business as usual. The logic is most people using the service are unaware to the level that FB is targeting them to feed the monster advertisement and revenue machine, or they know and simply don’t care. There have been waves over the past year to #deletefacebook, and that might raise awareness, it might just be noise in the thundering hose of content and ads.

Here’s what I know. A lot of people like Instagram and What’s App, I mean a lot. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen people checking facebook or talking about it as much as the previously mentioned 2 apps. I do feel like something has to give sooner or later. Most like FB’s deceitful practices will quietly find their way into all their products like a cancer sooner or later. Maybe regulation and strict privacy rights for users will force change, or another service that offers to connect you to people will come along and spark more joy than facebook does. When that happens, you can properly thank facebook, and delete your account, like I did today.

AT&T lied to investors in order to hide the failure of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service, a proposed class action alleges.
AT&T told investors that DirecTV Now was succeeding even as its subscriber base fell due to price increases and the discontinuance of promotional discounts, said the complaint filed Monday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint accuses AT&T and executives including CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by “knowingly or recklessly” making false statements to investors and failing to disclose problems that were affecting DirecTV Now sales.

ars Technica

Big corporations can totally monitor and self police their behavior, uh huh, sure. 🙄