Michael Lopp's Blog, page 25

Understanding Privacy Developments with the Latest Browsers

Solid summary of privacy-related developments in Safari and Chrome via the EFF:

Starting sometime in 2018, Google’s Chrome browser will begin blocking all ads on websites that do not follow new recommendations laid down by the industry group the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA). Chrome will implement this standard, known as the Better Ads Standard, and ban formats widely regarded as obnoxious such as pop-ups, autoplay videos with audio, and interstitial ads that obscure the whole page. Google and its partners worry that these formats are alienating users and driving the adoption of ad blockers. While we welcome the willingness to tackle annoying ads, the CBA’s criteria do not address a key reason many of us install ad blockers: to protect ourselves against the non-consensual tracking and surveillance that permeates the advertising ecosystem operated by the members of the CBA.

Google’s approach contrasts starkly with Apple’s. Apple’s browser, Safari, will use a method called intelligent tracking prevention to prevent tracking by third parties—that is, sites that are rarely visited intentionally but are incorporated on many other sites for advertising purposes—that use cookies and other techniques to track us as we move through the web. Safari will use machine learning in the browser (which means the data never leaves your computer) to learn which cookies represent a tracking threat and disarm them. This approach is similar to that used in EFF’s Privacy Badger, and we are excited to see it in Safari.

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I can’t believe…

The New York Times has is keeping track since Inauguration not only how often the President lies, but also the content of the lies and the corresponding facts.

It is baffling but mostly nauseating that this is the new normal.

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The OMFG WWDC Game

Apple’s Worldwide Developer kicks off in San Fran^h^h^h^h Jose tomorrow at 10am with the slick and practiced reveal of all the coolness you’re going to want for Christmas. The following is my arbitrary scorecard for watching the event1.

Operating Systems Yeah, all the operating systems are going to be updated. I’m giving 10 points each for iOS 11, macOS 10.13, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4 and an extra 10 points for each operating system that is released to the public. I’m not looking for a lot out of these operating systems upgrade although I remain excited about all of them except watchOS.

There are rumors of a social networking application. If Apple announces a new social networking application, there will be an automatic 25 point deduction from the final score. Social networking features inside of existing apps do not qualify for this penalty.

Bonus #1: If “collaboration,” “continuity,” or “courage” is used to describe a feature set on any platform I’ll award points each time. Maximum of 30 points.

Bonus #2: there are 30 points allocated for unpredictable OMFG operating system awesomeness.

Mac It’s all long shots in the Mac category. It’s way too soon for Apple to have a credible long term response to developers deep rooted concerned about hardware for developers. However, there are 25 points at the ready if Apple directly and confidently highlights within the event that they are addressing developer concerns regarding the Mac platform.

There are 25 points awarded if they say anything about the Mac hardware platform. Another 10 points are available if they announce plans to deliver Apple displays. Shit, make that 25 points.

Bonus: 25 points available for miscellaneous Mac hardware awesomeness.

iPhone This year is the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, and I’m pretty sure the hardware, when released, is going to blow your mind. You’ll need to brace yourself because you’re going to a see an impressive frameless piece of hardened glass that also happens to be a phone.

I deeply want to see the engineering feat to achieve absolutely zero buttons, cameras, and speakers on the front of the phone, but I am genuinely concerned that we end up with the maddening TouchBar situation where it’s not clear when you pressed a button or where a button is located.

There will be bonus points available if the camera bump is gone because that means Apple has revised, ya’know, physics.

However, as readers noted, iPhone hardware is usually announced in September, so I’m carving off 25 OMFG points just in case.

Catch-all This final category is a catch-all for all remaining product and services. Let’s start with a 15 point award for the announcement of the Siri Speaker with an extra 10 point award hiding in the wings if the product performs my first three voice commands correctly.

The iPad Pro seems like a no-brainer, but I’m super happy with my current fat iPad and Pencil, so I guess thinner and faster plus perhaps mimicking the frameless ascetic of the iPhone? Seems like a stretch. 15 points for the base upgrade plus ten bonus points for additional iPad “whoa.”

Finally, you can’t have a WWDC without the token “One More Thing” (OMT) award. The last time this was used was the long-rumored music service in 2015 which in my opinion was not worthy. The prior OMT was the Apple Watch and that is one more thing. There are 50 points on the line for a credible OMT, but just to make it interesting, there will be -50 points if the OMT is misused.

A quick review of the scorecard with potential points per category:

Operating Systems: 140 points (With a potential -25 deduction)
Mac: 100 points
iPhone: 25 points
Catch-All: 100 points (With a potential -25 point deduction)

I’ll be live tweeting the event, keeping score, and delivering loving snark. I’ll write-up the final result later this week.

Happy WWDC!

Some points can not be awarded without hands-on usage. ↩

State of Rands Leadership Slack

The Rands Leadership Slack was created on May 17th, 2015 at 12:08pm. I would call this community “vibrant.” Let’s start with stats from this weekend:

1.08 million messages since creation. (67% public, 2% private, 31% DMs)
3882 users. Talking in last seven days: 319. Reading in the same period: 1,159.
285 live channel. 207 archived.
13 services, four bots, 25 apps.

These numbers don’t tell a story other than saying “lots of people are talking about lots of things.” However, I would call the Rands Leadership Slack an unmitigated success that continues to exceed my expectations, and I see contributing factors that are supporting this success. (Good time to state I am the VP of Engineering at Slack, so here there be bias.)

First, continued member growth has mostly been word of mouth for 2017. I did marketing activities during the first year whenever it appeared that membership was flattening, but much of the growth in 2017 is word of mouth. Humans are referring other humans at a nice clip, and I’m inferring they’re doing so because they are finding value.

Second, while growing, the community is also self-regulating. The amount of administration I needed to do on a week to week basis averages less than five minutes. I attribute this to the fact I picked leadership as a domain, but also the community has deliberately defined how we expect this Slack to work.

There are two documents which define conduct are: the Welcome page as well as a Code of Conduct. In the last two years when a situation has arisen, I’ve simply pointed at the relevant clause and explained, “This is how we work together and how to treat each other” has worked every single time.

Third, and finally, Destalinator is a tool written and maintained by the denizens of this Slack. As I already wrote about, this tool prunes channels on a daily basis that haven’t been updated in two months. Because of this tool, new and current users seeking a new channel usually find a channel with recent activity. The discovery that channels are likely to be active avoids the perception problem that plagued wikis for years – the discover of a stale page (or channel) leads the reader to erroneously question, “Is everything stale here?”

It’s not stale. It’s vibrant. Over on the #jobs channel, we have a Google spreadsheet where anyone can add an open job. Curious, last week, I asked, “So, has anyone got a job as a result of being on this Slack?” The answer was a pleasing, “Many.”

I’ve run a lot of different experiments over the years to attempt to network the Rands community and each had a glimmer hope followed by immediate diminishing returns. Two years in, I am extremely thankful for the community of humans who spend part of the day caring, curating, and contributing to the Rands Leadership Slack.

The World is Full of Bullshit

The world is full of bullshit right now. Perhaps it’s always been full of bullshit, but I’m sitting here right now, and I feel that we – as a species – have taken the bullshit to an entirely new level. Strongly held beliefs are based on the flimsy opinions delivered by totally unqualified sham journalists who are more interested in the size of the audience their stories attract rather than the quality of the facts that support the story.

As an idealistic engineer, I believe that we should be able to source all facts. If you tell me that the sky is blue, there should be a convenient way for me to say, “Well, that’s an interesting theory, but can you definitively prove to me that the sky is, in fact, blue?” You would respond by providing me a URL to a site (or something), ideally several, which definitively and incontrovertibly explain how the sky is blue. I’m not talking about a Wikipedia link or a Quora article; I’m talking about a well-sourced thing, a universally agreed-upon thing that once and forever clearly defines: yes, the sky is blue.

It turns out this is hard.

In academic papers, there are no less than three types of citation styles used “to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism), to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the referenced material supports the author’s argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has used.” As you read that definition, you’ll note that nowhere does it state that a citation’s purpose is to determine whether said fact is or is not bullshit. A citation’s purpose is to help the reader gauge strength and validity of an argument, to compare other important ideas, and help the reader to form a judgment.

Does this mean we are doomed because of bullshit? Maybe.

I originally posted this piece in June of 2013. It was an introduction to another Rands charity shirt to support children literacy1, but I am re-releasing this shirt because of the bullshit… the bullshit is getting strong. While I firmly believe a well-researched opinion is a good strategy to inoculate against bullshit, the US of A is breeding virulent bullshit and not only does it feel like it’s spreading… it feels like it’s winning.

This is the third release of this shirt with popular logo designed by Victoria Wang. Unlike like prior versions, this comes in a multitude of colors thanks to the extremely competent humans at Cotton Bureau.

However, the most important fact you need to know about this shirt is that all proceeds from the sale go to the ACLU. The humans have a hard job. Each day they are working to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. In a world full of virulent bullshit where critical thinking is ignored, we need a respectable body who responsible for defending a set of principles and laws so important that we wrote them down.

Kyle is still available. He loves you. ↩

Assume They Have Something To Teach You

The daily morning calendar scrub goes like this:

Open the calendar and look at the entire day.
Note the number of meetings and the amount of unscheduled time. If unscheduled time is zero, die a little inside.
For each meeting, ask the internal question, “What do I need to do be prepared for this meeting?” and act on the answer. Re-read a spec? Glance at our Q2 goals? Make sure action items from the prior meeting are done? Or just known? This is essential pre-caching that I don’t want to do in the meeting because in any meeting, I am wasting the time of the other human’s time remembering why we’re having the meeting.

When all the resulting actions from Step 3 are done, I’m almost done. There is one final subjective assessment that I make for each meeting. How much value is each meeting going to create? How productive will this day be? This aggregate assessment remains with me the entire day.

Subjective. It’s super subjective, but I want to know before the day starts whether this day is going to full of high energy forward progress or a morass of marginally interesting minutes.1

The marginal meeting. It needs to be there, so I must figure out an angle to increase the value. I’ve got one hack that works consistently: assume they have something to teach you.

It works like this. Hypothetical scenario – a recruiting meeting. Someone who is interested in working at my company who is a referral from a human I trust. The problem is, they want to work in a different part of the organization. While I know little about the other team, I do know there are no open jobs there and won’t be for awhile.

This meeting is of perceived marginal value because I’m not interviewing this person for a gig because there is no gig. Also, I’m not qualified to interview this person because their skills are different than mine – a different team. I do trust my referral friend, and I want to do them a solid. I am also responsible for representing my company which is why this meeting is on my calendar.

More importantly, there are no marginal minutes. It is my personal and professional responsibility to bring as much enthusiasm, curiosity, and forward momentum to every single minute of my day. When I find myself in a situation where the value is not obvious, I seek it because it’s always there.

“Hi, Cathy. How do you know Ray? Interesting. How’d you two end up working together in such different parts of the company? No way. I never imagined that legal and engineering would end up working together on that? Tell me that story.”

With three questions, I’ve found a story that will teach a lesson. Cathy is telling me about the time that she and my friend Ray end up co-writing a code of conduct for their company. I’d never written one, I understand the value, and here is someone sitting here who can teach me how it’s done. Splendid.

Life isn’t short. It’s finite. As a leader with a finite set of minutes, it is your job to find the stories. They will teach you.

As an aside, for this piece, I’m working under the assumption that each of those meetings must be on my calendar. It is with distinct professional glee that I decline meetings where it is not important I am there, or it’s unclear to me what value will be created. Your mileage may vary using this strategy. ↩

Watch a rocket fall back from space…

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100 Days of WTF Just Happened Today?

At the 100 day mark of this presidency, here’s my situation:

My Twitter consumption has returned to normal levels. I no longer read every single tweet looking for the next 140 words that are going to piss me off.
My ACLU donation is now recurring.
I know a lot more about the Federal Budget because I read a lot more of the Washington Post.
I’m going to reprint this shirt with the proceeds going to the ACLU.
I’m still off Facebook.

The daily rage is gone. The disbelief is steady. The continued need to act is strong.

My constant companion in the past 100 days has been What the Fuck Just Happened Today? Don’t let the crass title fool you. The site is the best daily collection of the news out there. My favorite feature: the site is currently run by one guy. Matt Kiser is both reading the news and hand picking the stories you need to read. Each day has a title. Usually one word, sometimes more.

The bottom of this post has the complete list of titles from Matt’s site. Reading through those words will remind you of the sheer amount of WTF we’ve experienced in this last 100 days.

Matt’s running the site as his full-time job and today is the last day of his pledge drive. One guy and a website. Informing the electorate. I don’t know Matt, but I appreciate him every single day.

How it begins.
War on media.
Alternative Facts.
The Upside Down.
Command and Control.
Declining Trust.
Shut it.
Banned.
Unreal.
Embarrassment.
Dissent.
Controversy.
Supreme.
Braggadocious.
The massacre.
Suspended.
Denied.
Stumbles. Uninvited.
Challenged.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
Ethics. Blocked.
Denials.
Targeted.
Shots fired.
Turbulent.
Clusterfuck.
Inappropriate.
Intel. Dumpster fire.
Mobilized.
Accountable.
Last night in Sweden.
Skepticism.
Sweeping.
Handcuffed.
Frayed. Rejected.
Blasted. Banned in DC.
Doubt.
Crackdown.
Spike.
Split. Choice.
Tumultuous.
Misleading. Recused.
Blame game.
Accused.
Troubling.
Revised.
Unveiled.
Unraveling.
Flurry.
Blow it up.
Abrupt.
Worse off.
Contraction.
Alias. Salvage. Taxed.
Failure.
Slashed.
Tapped out.
Imminent.
Collusion.
Accusations.
Tweaks.
Contradictions.
Save face.
Ultimatum. Art of the deal.
Shit list.
Shifting blame.
Power center.
Tarnished.
Unauthorized disclosure.
“Climate change.”
Witch hunt.
Disclosures.
Incited violence.
Nuclear option.
Undermine.
Demoted.
Filibustered.
Tomahawked.
Knife fights.
Complicit.
Partially responsible.
Sean Spicer.
Trading barbs.
Misdirected.
Preemptive.
Frankenmissle.
Provocation.
Strategic patience.
Conflict of interest.
The sword stands ready.
“Super-mighty preemptive strike.”
Ridiculous standard.
Planet B.
Rest easy.
“Good press.”
Confident.
Ridiculous.
Explicit.
Weak.
Perspective.

The World is Awash in Bullshit

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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

Via the New York Times, the money quote:

The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.

Says a lot about a recent election, too.

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