Amazon has officially unveiled its latest Echo product: a touchscreen device with built-in Alexa called the Echo Show. The device was extensively leaked this week, but is now available to preorder from Amazon for $229.99.
I’m interested in where this is going.
I came across a neat little command line tool via Rob Griffiths’
Robservatory
this morning, a Ruby gem named
iStats1. Install is easy
enough in Rob’s example, sudo gem install iStats, except that when you
use sudo to install gems you are using the default macOS Ruby, and
installing to system paths.
➜ ~ /usr/bin/gem environment RubyGems Environment:RUBYGEMS VERSION: 2.0.14.1RUBY VERSION: 2.0.0 (2015-12-16 patchlevel 648) [universal.x86_64-darwin16]INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0RUBY EXECUTABLE: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/bin/rubyEXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /usr/local/binRUBYGEMS PLATFORMS: ruby universal-darwin-16GEM PATHS: /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0 /Users/jonathanbuys/.gem/ruby/2.0.0 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0GEM CONFIGURATION: :update_sources => true :verbose => true :backtrace => false :bulk_threshold => 1000REMOTE SOURCES: https://rubygems.org/While that might be fine, my personal preference is to keep the core
system as close to default as possible. I once ran into an issue keeping
Jekyll up to date, so now I use the excellent
Homebrew to install an updated version of Ruby and
keep the gems in /usr/local, which is entirely mine and safe to write
to.
brew install ruby
Also, I make sure that /usr/local/bin is called before /usr/bin in
my shells PATH variable.
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:~/Unix/bin/:$PATH
Now I can call gem install iStats and the gems will be installed
safely, keeping my core system clean and my gems easily updatable.
As Rob points out, this is apparently not associated with iStat Menus. ↩︎
Indeed in this case, where unroll.me is owned by an analytics service, it appears that the entire purpose for the service is to get access to user email data for monetization. So apparently Unroll.me, with access to its user email accounts, collected their Lyft receipts, anonymized them, and sold them to Uber. I’m pretty sure people signing up for unroll.me don’t expect that to happen.
David reinforces a point that we have heard so often it’s become cliché, “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product”. Shortly after reading this post I saw a recommendation for Readdle’s free Spark mail client. I’ve given it a try in the past, but it didn’t suit me. After reading the privacy policy, I think I should probably go back in and properly delete my accounts. From what I can tell, Spark:
We use third party services, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and Amplitude, to collect and analyze how you use Spark. These services may collect information about you and your usage of Spark in accordance with their respective privacy policies.
We might use that email address to reach out to you periodically with information about features, updates, announcements or to request your feedback.
Where OAuth is not supported we keep your account username and password on our secure servers.
We then use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device.
Readdle goes on to explain that they primarily use the email headers to send push notifications for new mail, that they do not sell your information to third parties, and that you can unsubscribe to emails at any time. Readdle makes some great apps, ones that I use quite a bit, but I wish they’d reconsider using server-side processing for Spark. If they worked out a way to do what they needed to do on-device, Spark would be a much more attractive option for my email.
The advantage to using Linode is that since it’s a virtual server, rather than a VPN service, I’m completely in charge of the setup and configuration of the VPN server. Again, this isn’t foolproof, because my traffic is only encrypted between my Mac and the Linode server, meaning that if Linode decided it wanted to track my outbound traffic, then I’d be in much the same boat as before. (Essentially, Linode becomes my de facto ISP.) Given, however, that Linode’s main business is hosting, and that they have their own pretty strong privacy policy, I’m not particularly concerned on that point. But, again, that’s subject to the vagaries of business.
In reference to my previous post on the subject, this is the only method of using a VPN for privacy that I can recommend.
I’ve seen quite a few smart people recommend using a VPN service in the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to repeal privacy rules for ISPs. Unfortunately, I find this advice to be a bit misguided, or at least ill-informed. You can move your risk around, but in the end this comes down to an issue of trust, and avenues of recourse.
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. It creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a remote server, and then optionally routes all of your Internet traffic through that tunnel. The case for using one for security against your ISP is that if your traffic is encrypted, they can’t see what you are browsing to and your data becomes useless to them to sell. Once your traffic reaches the other side of the VPN, it’s aggregated with all of the service’s other customers. That’s fine, and mostly makes sense, but if you are going to use a VPN service it’s important to come to an honest conclusion about how much you trust the company.
If your VPN server is outside of the United States, you are effectively giving up any legal recourse against the provider, meaning they can do whatever they want with your data, regardless of what they advertise or what they tell their customers. A single gateway for all of your traffic has a tremendous amount of power. They can inject code into any (non-SSL encrypted) web page. They can read all of your email. They can see all of the URLs you visit. All of the power of your ISP, you are transferring to your VPN provider, but if you choose a company outside of the United States, you lose whatever protection or recourse you have now.
What the ISPs are doing is not right, but at least we know what they are doing. If you pick a fly-by-night VPN service and send them all your traffic, there’s no telling what they’ll do with that data. It doesn’t matter if they post good things on their website if you can’t verify their claims.
Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.
For those of us who make their living on their Mac, this is fantastic news. I might never buy a Mac Pro1, but I’ll still reap the benefits of Apple’s development and focus on Mac hardware and software. This is a message to the community that Apple hasn’t lost it’s mind; the Mac is still going strong.
What I will plan on buying is a new Apple display. My current Dell 4K display is ok, but after being spoiled by the Thunderbolt Display I had on my desk at the previous gig, this Dell feels like a big step back. No built in iSight camera, no built in speakers, too many wires, and that ugly Dell logo on the front. It’s a beautiful screen, and I need that for the number of hours I spend looking at text every day, but it’s all the rest of it, that overall Apple experience, that I’m missing.
I’ll be interested to hear what Marco has to say this evening on ATP. He has, at least to my mind, been the biggest skeptic and nay-sayer within the community when it comes to future prospects for the Mac. Of course, that’s nothing new. Mac enthusiasts have been hearing that their favorite computer is just about to die for literally decades. Yet here we are.
But, then again, I might yet. ↩︎
Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 manning a fire tower on Washington’s Desolation Peak, in the northern Cascades. He didn’t do much writing there, apparently, despite being alone with pencil and paper. But he stayed for 63 days. The views were good.
Maybe this is what I need to finish my NaNoWriMo project.
Spoiler: yes.
Back to the headline. Could this be the future of the Mac? As iPhone processing power increases, could Apple create a hybrid desktop product driven by some future version of the A10 Fusion (the 64-bit system on a chip that drives the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), a product that looks and acts like an iPhone, but that doubles as a desktop experience when you plug it into a dock, complete with large display, mouse, and keyboard?
I’ve been saying this is the future for years. This is the only direction that makes sense. Given enough computing power a phone will eventually be the only device we need.
Holding the S8, I’m struck by the fact that nothing about it feels especially surprising, and not just because damn near everything about it has been leaking for the past few months. The boldest feature is every phone’s more important feature: the screen. On the S8, it extends up and down to cover nearly the entire front of the phone. It also curves around the left and right, something Samsung is calling the “infinity display,” which gives it the look of not having any bezels at all. And speaking of curves, the four corners of the screen are also slightly curved instead of squared-off, which adds some elegance and perhaps some screen durability.
But will it explode?
Machine learning is different. Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. It is still Artificial Narrow Intelligence — the computer is bound by the data and goal given to it by humans — but machine learning is, in my mind, meaningly different from what has come before. Just as Shannon fused the physical with the logical to make the computer, machine learning fuses the development of tools with computers themselves to make (narrow) artificial intelligence.
Like I was talking about in On Computing Tomorrow, the ability of computers to generate algorithms, or entire programs, is potentially fatal to a certain set of developers. I’m certain my role in DevOps is not immune. If you can ask a computer to look at a git repository and build the exact right environment to support that application, what need will there be for sysadmins or devops? Far less than what there is now. This train isn’t going to stop, and like all technology, we either need to get on board or get run over.