Posts

Panic Software has a long post explaining code signing and Apple’s new Gatekeeper feature in OS X Mountain Lion. Gatekeeper provides a way for developers to digitally sign their applications, verifying their origin, and for those signatures to be revoked so that the applications cannot run any longer if they are shown to be compromised by malware. Users can decide for themselves whether they want to let their Mac run any application or only applications which have been signed. (Or only applications from the App Store, although I think you’d have to be crazy to do that.) What I find particularly interesting about this is that Apple had decided last year to implement much more draconian rules that would essentially force developers into the App Store by making that the only way that developers could distribute signed applications. Wil Shipley beseeched Apple to take another course and allow developers to sign apps themselves. Here’s the recommendation he made last November: ...

Matthew Yglesias on how societies stock up for the future: A lot of the stuff we make has a pretty short shelf-life. Computer software gets obsolete super fast. Clothing wears out. Food spoils (even Twinkies). Durable goods like cars last longer. Airplanes last even longer. But the real durability is in structures. Houses, office buildings, bridges, tunnels, factories, train tracks. As a society, we save for the future by channeling resources—steel, elecricity, human labor power—into the production of things that last a long time rather than things that are more perishable. ...

The big online privacy scandal of the past couple of weeks has been the discovery that the social networking app Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers without asking for your permission. People were not only surprised that Path does this, but also that Apple lets them do it. Shortly after this was discovered, we learned that lots of other companies upload your address book as well. The Verge has a rundown of which applications access your address book and whether they ask for permission first. ...

Lately, working conditions in Chinese factories that produce consumer electronics that we all use and love have gotten a lot of press. Mike Daisey has been touring and presenting a one man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, on this subject. Portions of it were recently aired on This American Life. Perhaps not coincidentally, the New York TImes published an exposé on Foxconn last month that looked into the poor pay, unlawfully long hours, and dangerous work conditions at the company’s factories. ...

Eolas has been tormenting browser makers for over a decade with patents they claim cover browser plug-ins, but last week a jury in Tyler, Texas invalidated their patents after defendants presented compelling prior art. In other words, it took years of litigation and massive legal expenses to do something that patent examiners could easily have taken care of with a Google search. Wikipedia has a useful history of Eolas, including Microsoft’s embarrassing “click to activate” change to Internet Explorer to try to get around Eolas’ patent. ...

Matthew Yglesias makes the argument that Chipotle is the Apple of fast food. America may not be manufacturing consumer electronics, but it is manufacturing more burritos. It’s an interesting and provocative piece. For what it’s worth, I love Chipotle. Specifically, the carnitas burrito with rice, black beans, cheese, corn salsa, and hot salsa.

Matthew Yglesias explains how Facebook’s ownership structure insures that if he so chooses, Mark Zuckerberg will have complete control over Facebook for the rest of his life. I find that fascinating: To purchase a share in Facebook is to bet that at some future point some future person will want to take it off your hands for more money. You’re not getting even a notional slice of control in the company. There are no limits on the CEO’s ability to channel Facebook’s profits directly into his own pocket rather than yours. There’s not even a cheap-talk promise that he’s going to try to maximize the value of your investment. He created the company, he controls the company, he will always control the company, and he’s graciously allowing you to turn some of your working capital over to him. ...

I’ve recently had the opportunity to both be the new person on a team and to integrate new team members onto a team that I had been a part of for a long time. Having seen it from both sides, I have some thoughts on how to join a new team without driving everyone crazy. It doesn’t matter how you became a member of the new team, everybody starts in the same place, which is to say, not really knowing the code base or the culture of the team. Learning to mesh well with the culture of a new team is almost certainly more difficult than learning to work in a new code base. ...

It turns out I had no idea how file sharing actually works these days. I mean, I know how BitTorrent works, but I didn’t know how sites like the recently terminated MegaUpload worked. TorrentFreak has a good post explaining how they work – specifically how people get paid for sharing copyrighted material – and the effect that the MegaUpload shutdown has had on other sites in the same business. In short, a lot of content has been taken down as a result because people don’t want to go to jail. Interesting stuff. ...

I liked this, from DHH: The progress of technology is throwing an ever greater number of optimizations into the “premature evil” bucket never to be seen again. That can be a tough lesson for those of us who have been developing software for awhile to internalize. It becomes ever more sensible to optimize for simplicity rather than performance.