The Occasional Blargh

“Uber’s Data Privacy Policy” [emphasis mine]

We wanted to take a moment to make very clear our policy on data privacy, which is fundamental to our commitment to both riders and drivers. Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes. Our policy has been communicated to all employees and contractors.

It’s generally not a good idea in trying to clean up a public relations disaster to continue to make obvious misstatements of fact. The very second sentence is a lie. Not just simply because we know of prior instances of people accessing and disseminating rider and driver information for entertainment, but because it would be impossible for Uber to operate if “all employees at every level” were prohibited from accessing the data. How would Uber know what to charge riders, what to pay drivers, how to dispatch drivers, and so on? Making such an overstatement again does nothing but leads folks to think Uber takes the public for fools.

This leads the release to devolve into a list of non-exhaustive examples of business reasons why it’s more likely than not that the majority of people working at Uber would have access to some piece of driver or passenger data. “The only exception to this policy is pretty much to do anything to run the business.”

Of course, the problem was not that Uber has access to people’s use of the service, but that people with that access are not trustworthy. That is the question that remains unanswered by the blog post.

Juxtaposition

I’m going to steal a bit from Raging Thunderbolt’s probably abandoned blog (Ed.: You’re one to talk. Before today, your last post was from over a year ago.) where she or he places two statements together to contrast each other. And I’ll steal a topic which was done on the website last year. Unlike her or him, I will probably F it up. Both statements appeared on Daring Fireball (the longtime obsession of these pages).

Marco Arment [on the release of various Microsoft apps for free on mobile devices]:

It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting the reality of Office’s market position on smartphones and tablets. To some degree, Office needs to compete with the free Google Docs and iWork, but for many customers, it’s also competing with the idea of simply not using office apps (or using them far less often).

John Gruber [on reaction to a developer’s release of an expansion pack for $2]:

Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5-star review; such a beautiful and original work of art, and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.

The thing here is it hasn’t been a new complaint that the Apple App Store has not really fostered a healthy marketplace where developers can make the money needed to invest in applications more substantial that social media front-ends or simple fad-games. There’s folks who feel this has managed to stunt the iPad’s ascent as the PC replacement it was so destined to be. So, doesn’t it seem weird to celebrate as the natural order of things for one company to be pulled toward free by consumers, while lambasting consumers for pulling another app for free?

Uber Shrugged

This is not what leadership at normal companies do.

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

Go read the whole thing at Buzzfeed. It’s hard to pull out choice quotes from the story, but paragraphs eight and nine are particularly damning a it describes the plan:

Over dinner [at Manhattan's Waverly Inn, attended by such big-wigs as Arianna Huffington], he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.”…

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column…

He returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.…

So, of course, right after the story hit the Internet, Michael apologized and went on to say that those comments “do not reflect [his] actual views and have no relations to [Uber’s] views or approach.” Which makes sense because who among us haven’t created such elaborate retaliatory plans right there on the spot. Play-acting a Bond villain is a fun way to liven up any dinner party.  Afterwards, I bet they did “Songs in the Style Of…” which is another fun improv game.

Even as absurdly unbelievable as that bit of damage control was, the previous actions of Uber should make you believe it even less. In the very same Buzzfeed article, during Uber’s attempt to show how they can be trusted, they broke their own policies. They demonstrated how no one is allowed to view customer data except for business purposes by accessing the data of Buzzfeed reporter and Uber customer Johana Bhuyian. And I will prove to you this is not a bomb by detonating it.

This, however, is not a one-off problem with Uber. This is a company that lives up to its name by believing it is better than you, or your petty concerns about fairness or safety or privacy. Straight from the beginning, when it was fighting taxicab regulations, through to paying drivers poverty wages while telling the press otherwise, to its infamous innovation of legalized price gouging (thus why it needed to fight those regulations) and sabotaging its competitors, to its indifference to the safety of their customers or financial well-being of its drivers, Uber only cares about its bottom line. Oh, and its reputation. It will go to any self-defeating length to protect its reputation. No surprise when you have a company that is founded by someone whose life's philosophy comes from Atlas Shrugged.

This discussion fascinates me because... wow. Not pictured is this response by Rob Pegoraro: From here, that makes Apple users look like a sad and bitter lot. You were thinking "non-Apple gadget," right? Though even then...

See also: Satisficers > Maximizers

 

Android First? Two years later, still waiting for this to happen.

I don’t think he’s looking very hard.

Adobe is…

…obviously never going to get that correction from John Gruber.  Though they probably never asked for one. In fact, it’s doubtful Adobe ever noticed that post where Gruber misreads their press release, and criticizes the company from that misreading.

But I do find it weird how Gruber is praising Apple for mission statements whose only difference from Adobe’s investment statements are the replacement of conditional words with triumphalist hyperbole.

The biggest change, no surprise, is from biz-dev bullshit to plain English, four days before Steve Jobs became CEO in September 1997.

So, once again, Gruber confuses hyperbole with “plain English.” The only reason the statements collected by Alexandre Gollner aren’t bullshit is that none of them are outright dishonest. That includes the pre-September 1997 statements Gruber didn’t like. Those old statements told you far more about what Apple does than today’s puffery. Now everybody knows what Apple does, so they don’t need to say so on its PR. But neither the pre-Jobs statements nor the modern statements are what I would call bullshit.

The last time we left John Gruber with a press release, he confused a forward looking financial statement for a mission statement. But that was back when Gruber was just a lowly blogger. Today, he is not just a simple blogger, but the head of The Daring Fireball Company LLC. With the newfound experience in running a small-business, let’s see if he has improved in his press release interpretation skill set.

One of the things I admire about Apple is their plainspokenness, both in advertising and in press releases.

plain·spo·ken. adjective. \ˈplānˈspō-kən\

Frank; straightforward; blunt; candid.

I don’t think describing Siri as magical or Maps as the most powerful mapping service ever would qualify as being plainspoken, but that’s good. Gruber is beginning to confuse hyperbole as candor. He is becoming fluent in press relation-ese.

At first glance, the headline of the press release announcing Forstall’s departure seemed to go against this: “Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services”. That was followed by a subhead: “Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Add Responsibilities to Their Roles”.

Ah, we can see young Gruber struggling. He wants to show evidence of Apple’s candor, but Apple has just spent 25 words without telling you what just happened – they just fired Scott Forstall.

Thinking about it some more, though, and considering what I know about Forstall’s reputation within the company, I think that headline, euphemistic though it is, tells the plain truth:

This is an awesome graf. He’s already resorting to doublespeak, to excuse it. “Euphemistic though it is, [it] tells the plain truth.” Of course, the truth is only revealed if you have prior knowledge of the company.

Forstall was an obstacle to collaboration within the company. Now he’s gone, and his responsibilities are being divided between four men who foster collaboration: Ive, Mansfield, Cue, and Federighi.

So truthful, it takes an outside blog to lay plain the rationale behind the changes. Also note in the actual press release, the announcement of Forstall’s departure is the last sentence of the opening paragraph. And nowhere within the actual press release does it say Forstall was an obstacle.

Of course, it’s rare for a press release to simply say that a senior-executive was fired. People high enough in the hierarchy can afford attorneys to make sure such offensive and harsh words like “fired” and “dismissed” are never uttered. They also exist to ensure that a parachute of appropriate size made of dollar bills is awarded to the ex-executive.

So, yeah, Gruber has gotten much better at reading a press release. Unfortunately, he has much worse at calling out self-serving PRese for what it is.

Above is what Daring Fireball looked like when I visited Saturday night. The only visible content was two ads, navigation, with only the hint of a blog should I choose to scroll down some more. I am the first to admit that the image above is unfair. I lucked into visiting the site at exactly the wrong time, and that the sponsorship testimonial he wrote was unusually long this week. Still, I note this because of his reaction to his discovery that some bundled apps in Windows 8 displayed ads: “Gross”, which is in line with his general distain for advertisements.

Now, I could point out the various promotional interruptions that sometimes greet your Mac or iPad-using day, but I thought it was probably already beside the point when now the major operating systems come with actual stores built into them. Windows 8 has the Store tile which loads what I guess is called “Windows Store” which is the only place to acquire and install the new ‘Metro’-style applications.  Ubuntu has reconfigured its package management application and turned it into a store. (Additionally, Canonical altered its desktop search interface to also search Amazon.com and place products it finds from that store into the search results.) And Apple, which had two stores built in since Snow Leopard, has routed its software update feature through the Mac App Store, as well as selling operating system upgrades solely through the store. Thus, you have to interact with the store to keep on top of system security updates, and to get new OS X releases. Windows system updates still come through a separate applet via the Control Panel, but ‘Metro’-app updates have to be downloaded through the store, too. It remains to be seen, though, if Windows will push new OS versions through its store. It seems a bit late to complain about ads here and there, when the OSes already direct you to exit through the gift shop.

Some weeks ago, Apple released the iPhone 5 and iOS6 to wide-acclaim. Well, except for the Maps applications. Well, I was following reaction, reporting, analysis and opinionizing on the iOS Maps saga, with the intent on writing something. But as posting about Maps now isn’t very timely, I pretty much scrapped that post. However, one particular blogger does merit mention.

OK, a summary. Apple previewed iOS6 and Apple Maps at the WWDC earlier in the summer. People found it to be less than complete, but hoped it would improve; it was an unreleased beta, of course. Unfortunately, the developers saw it was atrocious and it was not improving as release time closed in. Still, the iPhone 5 and iOS6 is released to largely rave reviews. Curiously, many initial reviews do not mention Maps problems. However, these problems prove viral, even inspiring a Tumblr blog. But then, the defenders came out.

A few argued that “well, it worked for me.” Most defended not Maps but Apple’s corporate strategy. Some are consoling us with promises that “Maps has to get better, right?”. But no one is arguing that Apple’s Maps, even as it is now, is better than Google’s.

“Kontra” at CounterNotions:

Q: You’re exaggerating. Google Maps has the best user experience of any company in this business, does it not?

A: Yes it does, if you walk on water, like Google does from Alicante to Valencia in Spain:

Q: C’mon that must be old data.

A: Well, the map says it’s current:

Q: Maybe Google just didn’t get to it yet. Google Maps is in beta anyhow.

A: Yes, it must be:

 

Well, um, wow. And, well, I guess he has a point. If you’re not the Messiah or The Flash or Aquaman you may have trouble making that trek… wait a second, are those dots cities? What’s the scale of that map? Let’s me try to enter that plan.

One hundred sixty kilometers? That’s about one hundred miles! Kontra is actually presenting a 100-mile walking trip as an example to demonstrate Google’s failing. OK, but what of this route where Google suggested you take a detour across the Balearic Sea? That’s the first one (and notice Kontra neglects to mention Google suggested more than one route) and… wait a moment. It’s far longer in distance, but it says it takes less time. What is going on there?

IT’S A FERRY! It’s not “walk on water”, it’s “take a boat and save six hours on a ridiculous trip”. Or as also visible in the last picture, Google suggests you take public transit!

Well, I confronted Kontra on Twitter over this and had a back and forth which lead to him eventually blocking me. It’s probably because I called him a liar. When someone goes out of his way to crop out all exculpatory information, I don’t think questioning his integrity is unwarranted.

Well, this was all two weeks ago. I wouldn’t have even brought this except Kontra recently tweeted this:

More hilarity. Google Maps directions from NY to Paris bit.ly/USkSnl (19,168 mi, 519 hrs) via @theromit

— Kontra (@counternotions) October 11, 2012

Maybe I was too hasty. Maybe Kontra isn’t a liar. Maybe he just doesn’t realize that if you ask Google for “implausible” directions, it will give you humorous results that are coded in. Maybe he isn’t trolling, but is just stupid.

✪ introduces a new standard for judging tech products:

If even the “terrible” reviews declare that the new EarPods are a clear improvement over Apple’s previous earphones, I think that’s pretty good. Are they worth $29 on their own? That’s a good question. . .

…which he had been answering by linking to the good reviews he had been finding. Remind me later to write my post on bias in editorial judgment. Examples of such is through things like the choice of links, choice of text excerpted from each link. All in addition to the actual commentary written under his pen.

Business Insider:

Here's today's statement: "Pre-orders for iPhone 5 have been incredible ...  We’ve been completely blown away by the customer response."

Last year Apple's statement was part of bigger press release. This year's  statement wasn't a press release, just two sentences given to certain news outlets.

Gizmodo:

Apparently emails are rolling out to some iPhone-buyers explaining that despite what they heard before, they won't actually have to wait the two weeks after all; they'll get their iPhone 5 on release date just like they'd hoped.

Played like a ... you know. Right, Jim.

I’m wondering if the folks who are rewriting the reports from Apple about the unprecedented demand for iPhones realize how much each one of them is like the Stradivarius in the picture over there.

I am also curious as to how many people have noted, at least, that demand has been building by almost one quarter by folks waiting for the yearly refresh that usually comes out in June or July. (Remember how with last quarter the number of iPhones shipped came in on the low end of expectations, rather than exceeding it as folks have come to expect.)

Then again, some folks have decided they’d rather be played on by Apple than by others.

★ July 22, 2012

Who gives a shit about Windows apps?

Apparantly, Lytro does. What's Lytro? Oh, it was that camera whose Mac-only support was seen as evidence that Apple was finally winning over Microsoft. Never mind ancient and recent history showed single platform launches that evolve to multiplatform apps. Like the Lytro camera that now supports Windows.

So, should I place a cryptic link here that readers won’t understand unless they hire a private eye to make sense of things? Nah, that’s not me. It’s just that I just read an interesting story on how IBM has blocked Siri because they fear she’ll leak secrets to Apple, and now I have an excuse to post another Zatanna picture. Honestly, I’m surprised that this story is taken as a surprise.

Now, if I’ve somehow gathered new readers they may be wondering what is going on where I’m not writing all that frequently. To those readers, I must confess that sadly, those long sabbaticals between posts are the norm around here. That said, I am in the middle of a move, which may be followed by a second move (because I can’t do anything the easy way). So for this time, I do have a excuse for not posting. I haven’t burnt out yet.

Still, given how I always make the “I can retire” joke when I find any other blog or site that tries to cast a critical eye, I can see how others can be concerned if I will abandon this place, too. I joke about it, but I know the feeling that can come when it feels like the hope of improving the conversation has faded visible and that you’re just snarking into the aether. It does help to step away, not to do this every day. (It’s funny that the point of this blog wasn’t initially to be the tech press critic, but I just stumbled into it.) I guess the above picture fits this statement as well.

Often there are two ways to tell a story.

Dustin Rowles of Pajiba has this to say about the unlikely success of The Avengers.

A collection of second-tier superheroes from a comic-book brand that had been churning out mediocre efforts in a marketplace suffering from superhero fatigue directed by a guy with a series of low-rated mostly unsuccessful television series and only one feature film to his name, a $25 million grossing cult film. That’ll never work.

A commenter to that very article takes issue with the “unlikely” part of the equation.

I, too, am completely blown away that a massively-hyped culmination of years of movies and a marketing blitz that most franchises would kill for combined with a director and property that the entire internet has had sloppy nerd boners over for years made money.

That sure showed them!

 

You don’t really notice this, but most iconic representations of actions and objects are based on objects from ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more. Scott Hanselman noticed this.

One of the funnier things from John Gruber’s blog was his ongoing crusade against the floppy-disk icon used to denote the Save action, which concluded with this post promoting the idea of doing away with the icon and saving altogether. (Ironically, when he got his wish, he had trouble coping.) Apparantly lost on him was that even his dear iPhone, iPad and Macs (along with almost every other device) also used icons based on obsolete items.  The phone icon of an iPhone is a curved handset. Voice mail is represented by a spool of audio-cassette tape. Electronic mail, and maybe other types of instant messaging is represented by pictures of envelopes, postage stamps or even outdoor free-standing mailbox. You’ll see a Larry King Live or game-show host microphone to represent audio input of most stripes. There are no gears in an iPad, an iPhone or a laptop computer (aside for perhaps the mechnical hard drive in many of the latter), but that is Apple’s representation for altering the settings in a control panel.

And about control panels, what we call that stuff betray that these concepts predated the iPhone. With machines, there once was a whole panel where the major controls of the device resided. Or dialing a phone number, a phrase still used even though dials disappeared from phones in the 1970s or 80s. Speaking of dials, Tiny Toon Adventures exhorted people to not “touch that dial”, even though dials disappeared from televisions (and most radios for that matter) roughly around the same time.

Icongraphy and pictography are very much like languages and as such the pictures, like words in languages, can grow on and outlive the the initial physical object or idea that inspired it. We still refer to lunacy even though we really don’t think the moon drives people crazy. We don’t think this day of the week, Sunday, has any closer connection to the sun than the other days. Likewise, despite decades of women wearing jeans without controversy and the continued existance of Scotsmen in kilts, pictograms will still distinguish men and women by placing the woman in a skirt/dress and the man in pants. Or to be much more cryptic, Venus’ hand mirror (♀) and Mars’ shield and spear (♂) could be used instead, though fewer men will ever make use of a spear while many do make use of hand mirrors.

In other words, it’s not really that big of a deal we still save to floppy. We are writing commentary about it using pictures even older than that whose original physical world meaning has long been lost. I am, of course, referring to these letters which have been put together in the words that populate this post and the posts I have linked to.

Embarassing.

(David Foster Wallace would not be proud.)

Remember again that the fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” ended with all of the sheep being slaughtered by the wolf. Still, the blame was lain at the feet of the boy, so obviously the ones at fault for this are the anti-virus companies who spent years trying to warn people that Macs don’t provide a magic cloak of protection from malware. Please don’t blame the charlitans who sold you on the magic cloak.

It’s telling that ∞ and ✪ has spent more time and words — many more words in ∞’s case — discussing ᔥ & ↬ than reports of the US DOJ looking to take antitrust action against Apple and various book publishers. That said, any discussion of economics, law and business from ∞ & ✪ should only be read for its comedic value.

ᔥ ✪
↬ ∞
↯ ↵

Yeah, that is total bullshit.

I am in a magnanimous mood, and in fairness, when someone does right he should be praised. It wouldn’t be fair to just attack, attack, attack. Siegler, is half-right here, even though he has to sneak in a compliment to Apple, though while Apple was “keeping it real”, they were working with AT&T to make it faux-G.

So, half a cookie for Siegler. It’d have been a whole cookie, but he couldn’t keep it real the whole way.