Dead From Fraud
John:
okay see i just reloaded this page i know we're not up to this yet tom why do you give him bad ideas marco all right so we should probably explain what's going on i mean maybe all right so i'm i'm gonna try to make myself feel okay about this knowing how much crap you got last year but i still think it's a little bit a little bit weak sauce we we had an agreement yeah
Casey:
This is the payback for two consecutive years of making me donate under duress because last year I was recording analog and you two numbnuts were like, oh, we have to donate now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now.
John:
And so I'm pretty sure that's an exaggeration of what happened.
John:
I do not recall typing the word now multiple times in a row.
Casey:
That was the effective message.
Marco:
Well, here's what happened.
Marco:
So we're talking about the St.
Marco:
Jude, you know, Real AFM raising money for St.
Marco:
Jude during Child Cancer Awareness Month, which is now, September, and we're going to talk about that in a second.
Marco:
So we do donations as ATP hosts.
Marco:
We do three donations, and we try to do them roughly at the same time, so they show up three in a row on the page, and we try to match amounts, and we decide what the amount is going to be, and there it is.
Marco:
So last year...
Marco:
Casey apparently was recording analog at the time we decided to do this, and under duress, while meaning to allegedly type Casey and Aaron Liss, typed Casey asterisk Aaron Liss, which was followed by not only us giving him crap, but all of you gloriously giving him crap in your own donation names and notes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that follows so we ended up you know obviously it's amazing to raise a bunch of money for a really good cause um but to do it while being able to troll casey is extra amazing so we had decided you know a couple weeks ago all right we're gonna we're gonna make our donations before the show on a certain date and that date was a week from now next week's show is when we decided we were going to do it and we had it in the calendar and everything like that's when we're gonna make our donations right before the show and then we'll then we'll talk about the you know give it a big push during the show and everything
Marco:
well 15 minutes ago as we record yeah 15 minutes ago john you know writes in the chat like oh it's weird how the page is laid out like some complaint about the page layout showing his donation at the top of the screen a week early
John:
I was the top donor.
John:
And I was like, you know, I mean, what would have been worse is as the show approached, I would have been like, uh, guys, are you going to do the donation?
John:
Anyway, I got it wrong.
John:
It was right in the calendar.
John:
I think I'm the one who put it in the calendar.
John:
But the reminder on my phone came up and it said, oh, time to donate.
John:
And I just went and did it blindly because I do whatever my phone tells me to do.
John:
And apparently, however I seried that reminder into reminders, I...
John:
Got the date wrong.
John:
So I just did what my phone told me.
John:
I did it a week early.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
But anyway, I did it.
John:
I posted the funny thing about the UI, which made it look like I donated twice.
John:
But I didn't donate twice.
John:
It was just once.
John:
And then Marco saw what I had posted and he immediately donated.
John:
And so now it's two against one.
John:
And now Casey has to do it.
Casey:
Which in and of itself was fine, but I was in the middle of getting kids ready for bed and so on and so forth, and all of a sudden my phone is blowing up about how we're donating right now, and I'm like, what the hell?
Casey:
We said next week, but okay, whatever, that's fine.
Casey:
And so as I'm running over to my computer, which obviously this is not a big deal, but in the heat of the moment I was like, ha, ha, ha, ha, and so now I'm doing it under duress again, and we all saw how well that went last year, so I run over to my computer, and as I'm sitting down to do the donation,
Casey:
Somebody in the chat says, as punishment, you should donate $7,000 and one cent just to kick John off the top since it appears to not count a tie.
Casey:
If I did that, I'd be a jerk.
Casey:
But if Casey does it, it's funny.
Casey:
So I kind of did that and did $7,000, $7,001.
Casey:
I still think it's kind of jerky when you do it.
Casey:
Oh, well, come on.
Casey:
It was funny.
Marco:
So the most amazing part of this, so obviously Casey's now on top kicking John off, which I think is appropriate for what John did.
John:
That was an honest mistake.
John:
I wasn't doing something malicious.
John:
On the other hand, Casey's was not an honest mistake.
John:
It was in fact a malicious act.
Marco:
But also, because there was this delay, as Casey was, you know, I guess putting your kids to bed is important.
Marco:
So because there was this small delay between our donations, someone else got in right between...
Marco:
Mine and Casey's called Not Star Casey Star List for $1.
Marco:
Well done, person, whoever you are.
Casey:
We are a mess.
Casey:
All three of us are a mess.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, so let's have some unity here.
John:
How much has ATP the show donated to St.
Casey:
Jude this year?
Casey:
$21,001.
Right.
Casey:
So as I forget what we donated last year, I want to say it was $20,000 in sum between the three of us.
Casey:
And this year we thought, well, that seems silly because we were donating, what, $6,333.33 a piece.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Was it like 6667 or something?
Marco:
I can't do that.
Marco:
It's just like an ugly kind of number.
Marco:
So we're like, let's run it up.
Casey:
So we each donated... Well, two-thirds of us donated... Couldn't even get it out with a straight face.
Casey:
Two-thirds of us donated $7,000.
Casey:
And your favorite and best host donated $7,001.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
As much as we're poking fun at each other, I really do need to lock it up and get serious for a second.
Casey:
September, as Marco had mentioned, is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And for the third consecutive year, Relay FM, of which we are all a part, even if this show isn't, strictly speaking, a part of it, it is there in spirit, if not by URL.
Casey:
So we are all trying to raise money for the third consecutive year for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
So what is St.
Casey:
Jude?
Casey:
It's this hospital that's in Memphis, which is where Stephen Hackett lives.
Casey:
And it is of the belief that, you know, hey, if kids can still die from cancer, then we need to still try to figure out ways to prevent that from ever happening, ever.
Casey:
And so what's even greater about St.
Casey:
Jude is that St.
Casey:
Jude families pay nothing.
Casey:
for healthcare there.
Casey:
And that goes beyond just healthcare.
Casey:
I believe, I believe that like some, some travel costs can be covered on occasion.
Casey:
Food can be covered in many occasions.
Casey:
They, they really take care of their families.
Casey:
And if you live in a country that makes sense as in not America, this probably sounds like, yeah, okay, whatever.
Casey:
But I assure you for America, for Americans, this is a big deal.
Casey:
And so Steven's family has probably received millions of dollars of healthcare and they have paid literally nothing for it.
Casey:
That being said, it's because of donors, like the three of us and like all of you, that these families never receive a bill for treatment, for travel, for food, etc.
Casey:
Because as St.
Casey:
Jude says, all a family should have to worry about is helping their child stay alive.
Casey:
So for a little bit of context, the average cost to treat just one kid with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is the most common form of childhood cancer, is $203,000.
Casey:
So it's expensive.
Casey:
So with that said, to make this possible, about 80% of the funds necessary to sustain and grow St.
Casey:
Jude must be raised each year from donors like you, listener, to my voice.
Casey:
So if you have a dollar to your name that you can send to kids that are fighting cancer and their families, please, please, if you can, stjude.org.
Casey:
I'll spell it out for you, stjude.org.
Casey:
I cannot think of a better...
Casey:
organization to give money to obviously the three of us have given uh what i'd like to believe is a fair bit of money over the years now um please listeners st jude.org slash atp and i will repeat my offer of last year i will personally send you no matter where you live in the world i will personally use the united states postal service so i hope you live in the states but we'll see what are you gonna be like getting a helicopter like what
Casey:
I will personally send you a handful of ATP, not for sale, ATP stickers.
Marco:
Somebody go to Antarctica and invite Casey.
Casey:
I will send you a small batch of ATP stickers wherever you may be in the world if you can top the current leading contender.
Casey:
Let me check my notes here.
Casey:
The current leading donor, the List family.
Casey:
Oh, they seem very kind for having donated $7,001.
Casey:
$7,001.
Casey:
So if you can beat that by even one cent, send me a screenshot, send me your address, let me know, and I will put some ATP stickers in the mail.
Casey:
Additionally, I don't remember if we mentioned this last week, but if you donate $100 or more, you get a bespoke sticker pack from the Relay folks that have all sorts of fun stickers in it.
John:
Those are much less expensive stickers than ours.
Casey:
That is true.
John:
Only one winner is going to, just like the Hunger Games, only one winner is getting our stickers.
John:
And that is the top donor who, I guess, the top donor who tells us about it.
John:
If someone donates a huge amount, but they're not an ATP listener, they don't count.
John:
So don't worry about them.
John:
You're just competing with the people who contact us and say, hey, I donated this amount.
John:
It's more than the current top amount.
John:
And here's the question.
John:
Do they have to donate more than...
John:
they don't have to donate more than those other people who don't know about ATP, right?
John:
They just have to beat, right now, they just have to beat Casey, and then they have to compete with the other ATP listeners.
John:
But if someone donates a million dollars, but they're not an ATP listener, that doesn't count, right?
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
But I will say, unless the other two veto this...
Casey:
If you are at any moment the highest donor, even if you don't end the month at the highest donor, if you are at any point, if you are the highest donor, send me your address and a screenshot just in case the donor list changes, and I will send you stickers.
Casey:
Even if you don't persist as the highest donor, if somebody donates $7,002 right now and you want to send me your name and information, I will send you stickers.
Casey:
And then if 10 minutes later somebody donates $7,003, I'll send them stickers too.
Casey:
Just let me know.
John:
That's very generous of you, but I feel like the
John:
game theory would say like you want people to go as high as possible knowing it's their only shot but that's fine too because they're just stickers after all so please go for it and by the way you keep saying contact you casey how do people contact you uh well the best way would probably be twitter because i hate email but uh if you need to email me you can find my email address on my website and that's part of the game is finding my email second challenge
John:
You have to find Casey on Twitter, which may be very difficult.
John:
I know you might not know what Casey's Twitter handle is or how to spell it.
John:
But if you can find his website, also very difficult, then maybe you can get some contact information there.
Marco:
And we know that, like, you know, obviously not everyone is going to be able to donate this this kind of large sum.
Marco:
We also know that every dollar helps.
Marco:
So even if you can just donate a dollar, great, donate a dollar.
Marco:
We know also our rough audience demographics, and we also know that you can probably do more than that.
Marco:
And one thing to keep in mind, I say this every year, that in roughly probably two weeks or so, there's going to be an Apple event, and they're going to unveil a new $1,300 phone that we're all going to preorder.
Marco:
And when you're ordering a $1,300 phone that you might not necessarily need and you're thinking about, oh, should I tack on an extra $70 for the newest case because it's slightly different?
Marco:
Now I need a new $70 case or a new $150 AppleCare plan or any other – look at how much you're going to pay in sales tax.
Marco:
It's going to be $100.00.
Marco:
think about like donate that kind of amount or more because if you're willing to just kind of casually, you know, spend that for this frivolous hobby that we all have of buying gadgets that we, you know, quote, need in finger quotes, but like really, do we really need to buy the new one?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
So if you're able to do stuff like that, I encourage you to also be generous towards this because this is a really good cause and yeah, give them like, you know, a few hundred bucks if you can or, you know, whatever you can do, you know, give it a shot.
Casey:
Just skip your morning coffee one day.
Casey:
Send five bucks to stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
So thank you for anyone who has donated truly.
Casey:
Where do we stand right now?
Casey:
We are at $105,000 or thereabouts, which is excellent.
Casey:
And we are not that fast.
Casey:
far away.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
196,000 for the year or for this month would be a total of a million dollars across all three years that Relay has been doing this.
Casey:
So I think we can get there.
Casey:
Again, we're at $105,000 right now.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow up.
Casey:
Apparently we ruined Wirecutter.
Casey:
Do we have the same curse that like Connected did with photo sharing services or photo management services?
Casey:
Because we bring up Wirecutter and next thing you know, it's moved behind a paywall.
John:
I don't think that's ruining it.
John:
Like, I mean, it's we talked about finding product recommendations and mentioned Wirecutter.
John:
it's because it's a thing that people find valuable unlike imdb which does not deserve to be in any results for movie stuff because their website is terrible the wire cutter does more or less what it says you can disagree with their picks or whatever but they're fairly straightforward they explain their reasoning and you know they have affiliate links to products which is how they make money now they're behind a paywall i don't begrudge them that they're the type of site that i would be willing to pay for because they provide a valuable service and the plans are you can do it for five dollars five dollars every four weeks which is different than monthly but anyway
John:
If you're looking for a product, you could just say I'll just pay the five bucks and then cancel now that said the New York Times is somewhat notorious in our circles as being One of the few quote-unquote good companies that makes it next to impossible for you to unsubscribe You have to like call someone on the phone or do like a text chat with them or something and they try to convince you to stay which is crappy But the other alternative is the wire cutter is 40 bucks annually And if you already have a New York Times premium digital subscription, you get it for free so
John:
I think they can go behind a paywall because they have a service that people are willing to pay for.
John:
So kudos to them.
Marco:
What's the upgrade pick?
John:
I feel like the $40 is the upgrade pick I get.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I would pay extra to be able to cancel more easily.
John:
One of us needs to go first.
John:
Whoever needs to buy an appliance first, sign up for it and see how hard it is to cancel.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I think really the upgrade pick is having a Marco Arment in your life who has also bought the particular item in question, say like a flashlight or something.
Casey:
And then you can just say, hey, Marco, what should I buy?
Casey:
And then the bad news is you'll be spending an asinine amount of money.
Casey:
But the good news is you're going to get something really nice.
Casey:
So you just need a Marco in your life.
Casey:
And then tell me, speaking of the Wirecutter experience, the best blender is not a Wasteland?
Yeah.
John:
for some people.
John:
So Best Blender is a Wasteland was titled for last episode.
John:
It was about trying to Google, do a Google search for Best Blender and just finding all these terrible SEO type results and not trying what you want and saying if you type Best Blender Wirecutter, then you'll get the Wirecutter's recent review of Blenders and it will be more informative and useful than just typing Best Blender.
John:
So someone sent me a screenshot
John:
And they typed Best Blender into Google.
John:
And the number one hit was the Wirecutter's Blender review.
John:
So I was like, ah, look at that.
John:
Wirecutter's, you know, it's so popular.
John:
It's got so many, such good SEO and such good content that so many people link to it.
John:
They're the number one hit for Best Blender.
John:
So I was going to follow up with that information.
John:
But then I figured, you know what, as usual, confirm what listeners send in.
John:
I typed Best Blender into Google.
John:
I'll give Marco the screenshot of this, perhaps, for the show art.
John:
uh everything above the fold meaning within the viewport of my reasonably sized window is an ad when i do best blender i've got a row of ads with pictures on top then i've got consumer reports ad and recommendations and sublinks and a bunch of other pictures so literally every single thing i can see in my browser window after having best blender into google.com is an ad
John:
If I scroll, Wirecutter is right underneath that, and then another box where Google tries to answer the question, and then Good Housekeeping, and Forbes, and Homes and Gardens, and CNET, and Consumer Reports again, and then a map with a bunch of stores on it, and then NYMAG, and anyway.
John:
So I'm going to call this a medium.
John:
Best Blender is not really a wasteland.
John:
Maybe Google is a little bit of a wasteland, though, because nothing that's not an ad above the fold is pretty crappy.
Marco:
I mean, I would not argue with Google being a wasteland at this point.
Marco:
Google web search is a disaster most of the time.
Marco:
Although, to be fair, as a most-of-the-time DuckDuckGo user who jumps over to Google when I can't find what I'm looking for there, it seems like all web search is a disaster these days.
Marco:
So Google might be the least crappy of the options that are out there, but I think just the web is a wasteland right now.
Marco:
That's the real problem is, yeah, the web is a wasteland.
Casey:
Oh, man, that's tough.
Casey:
Yeah, DuckDuckGo has been doing what they need to survive, but I'm seeing more and more stuff that I don't want to see and fewer and fewer things that I do want to see, which is very frustrating.
Casey:
I do still love DuckDuckGo, but golly, there's more and more and more ads every year, and it's frustrating.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fastmail, my favorite email host.
Marco:
This is where I've hosted my own email for many, many years.
Marco:
For over 20 years, Fastmail has been a leader in email privacy because they believe that customers are the people to be cared for, not products to be exploited with ads.
Marco:
So if you're ready to move away from Gmail to a host that actually values your privacy and wants your business –
Marco:
Go to Fastmail.
Marco:
It is fantastic.
Marco:
It's super easy to set up, especially Mac and iOS users.
Marco:
You can just scan a QR code.
Marco:
I've been here for a long time with Fastmail.
Marco:
I've set up a lot of devices, and it's always super easy.
Marco:
They give you all the server details if you need them, but they have all these great shortcuts for very popular platforms like iOS and Mac OS.
Marco:
it's fantastic they even support apple push notifications natively they're the only email provider to do that but it's also it's great for everyone great web app if you need it you know there's lots of settings you can customize you can set up filters and rules and all that stuff there's a new fastmail sidebar as you read email your sidebar can connect you to your calendar contacts and email attachments it's all right there at your fingertips and you can be more efficient you can support a custom domain if you want to have email hosted a custom domain which is this is how i host all the email for any of my domains that have email fastmail is actually less expensive than gmail for that
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Each episode leaves you with their CTO's takeaways, which will put you on a practical path towards a better digital life.
Marco:
Subscribe to Digital Citizen wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Marco:
Anyway, people like you, you know great technology, choose Fastmail for your email.
Marco:
Fastmail lets you be the customer and you be the expert, putting you in control to do things your way.
Marco:
Stop paying for email with your privacy and be part of the very best in email at Fastmail.
Marco:
Try it free for 30 days and get 10% off your first year.
Marco:
at fastmail.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's fastmail.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Fast Mail for hosting my email and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Cryptographic hashes versus Apple's CSAM neural hash.
Casey:
We got a little bit of feedback about this, about how some of the things we said weren't 100% accurate.
Casey:
John, you want to correct the record here?
John:
Everything we said was accurate.
John:
It was just overly general, right?
John:
So there's different kinds of hashes, right?
John:
And we just described the general case of hashes, which is a thing that takes a bunch of different inputs and maps them to a much smaller finite number of outputs, right?
John:
So the whole world of possible files of any size and make a function that's going to map each one of the contents of those files to one of a finite number of hashes.
John:
Obviously, there will be collisions because it's a one-to-many relationship, right?
John:
And that's what we were talking about in broad strokes, right?
John:
In a more detailed view, there are different kinds of hashes for different purposes.
John:
One particular kind of hash that a lot of people brought up as an objection but that we didn't talk about specifically is called a cryptographic hash.
John:
In certain cases, when you're trying to do encryption, you want a hash that has certain properties because there are lots of different ways that you can map from an infinite number of inputs to a finite number of outputs.
John:
Like the hashing algorithm decides how you do that mapping.
John:
There's lots of different choices you can make.
John:
So we'll link to the Wikipedia page for cryptographic hash function, but I pulled out two points that are salient to what makes them a cryptographic hash.
John:
One is that it's infeasible to generate a message that yields a given hash value.
John:
In other words, to reverse the process, right?
John:
So...
John:
if we tell you the hash value is this number and i say you go get me something that hashes this value it's really hard to do right and two it's infeasible to find two different messages with the same hash value right so if i find one message hashes to this find me another message that has the same thing and we know there are collisions because it's a hash function but it's hard to find them it's infeasible to find right that's what we want out of a cryptographic hash function right now compare this to apple csam neural hash
John:
Like the purpose of this hashing algorithm is to take two different images and get the same hash.
John:
Like the purpose is to collide.
John:
What I mean by that is, remember, they're not just doing a one-to-one comparison against their database of pictures.
John:
They want to detect this picture even if it's been modified in some minor way.
John:
Scaled, rotated, blurred, new text added to it, turned black and white, right?
John:
So for this thing to operate correctly,
John:
Multiple images that are different from each other are supposed to map to the same hash That's how they tell if this is quote-unquote the same picture.
John:
That's what makes this a neural hash again It doesn't make it not a hash function.
John:
It is mapping for multiple values to a finite number of values But the way this hash function works is we want it to tell us that these three images even though they are technically different bite for bite They are the same picture just modified slightly and we want them to hash to the same thing
John:
So, and that's what makes this very difficult to do and tricky.
John:
And it's not that cryptographic hash functions are easier, but like the demands of this neural hash are for it to be, to have some kind of intelligent matching and collisions are what we want when it functions correctly.
John:
What we don't want are collisions that aren't the same picture.
John:
Like that is a different picture entirely.
John:
I don't want that to hash to the same thing as these three pictures, but these three pictures are all variants of the same picture.
John:
And so they should hash with Apple's neural hash to the same value.
Casey:
And then keeping in the same theme, Jonathan Trott wrote, if governments can mandate Apple make code changes to CSAM detection, then they can mandate making code changes to photo object recognition, machine learning, and always on OCR.
Casey:
So in other words, I think what Jonathan's point here is that they could say, oh, if you detect certain phrases in what's being shown in the camera, or if you detect certain things that they don't want you to see,
Casey:
then you could potentially be instructed to alert the authorities about it.
Casey:
So Jonathan continues, slippery slope arguments seem to skip over those.
John:
Yeah, the ML one is the most salient because people are like, I don't want my phone scanning all my pictures.
John:
Well, it's been doing that since Apple added the ML feature.
John:
This is the reason you can search for dog in your photos and find pictures of dogs.
John:
It's scanning every single one of your pictures and categorizing them using machine learning model.
John:
The only difference, obviously, with the CSAM thing is that it also sends some data back to Apple about it.
John:
But if people's hang up is I don't want my device scanning a bunch of my pictures or I don't want that capability to exist where my device is passively scanning all my photos all the time and categorizing them.
John:
Or if they're afraid like it's too open-ended, yeah, they say they're not going to add anything to that NCMEC database, but what if they get something else in there?
John:
They already have a completely open-ended, totally not audited or controlled ML service running over all your pictures that probably expands in every release to identify more and more things.
John:
uh the only difference is it just doesn't transfer anything back to apple so yeah like i alluded to in the first episode we talked about this trusting apple is a key component of of having an iphone if you don't trust apple don't get an iphone because apple makes the os and the hardware they can do whatever they want with all your stuff and they can inform you about it or not but it's very difficult for the average user to be able to audit that information like you can't expect the average user to
John:
know everything that's going on inside their phone.
John:
In the end, what it comes down to is trust that what Apple is telling you is true.
John:
And if you don't have that trust, don't get an iPhone.
John:
But like, that's the problem with anything you buy.
John:
You must trust the brand, the company, the thing that made this product for you.
John:
If you don't trust that, all bets are off.
Casey:
What was that paper on trusting trust or something like that?
Casey:
What is the name of it?
John:
It's a super old one.
John:
I think I read that many decades ago.
John:
What year did that come out?
John:
It was Thoughts on Trusting Trust.
John:
I think it was Dennis Ritchie, one of the C compiler guys.
John:
It was basically like a technical paper saying, hey...
John:
if you can exploit the lowest levels of a system like for example if you can mess with the compiler that's used to build the operating system or whatever like you can't trust anything like it's basically you know the computers are a big stack of stuff right from high level to low level and if you can insert yourself at a low level everything above it is suspect right because once you're once you're down there you can do all sorts of nefarious things it's really cool paper if you're a computer new to want to look at it we will find the link for the show
Casey:
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.
Casey:
Does that sound right?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
What was the year?
Casey:
Ken Thompson, not Dennis Ritchie.
Casey:
84.
John:
1984.
John:
I did not read it in 1984, but I did read it in like 1993.
Casey:
Well, I was two in 1984, just to make you feel really and truly old.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
So in the continued effort for Apple to own goal themselves as often as they possibly can when it comes to PR, Apple just banned a pay equity Slack channel.
Casey:
This is covered in The Verge.
Casey:
We're not going to go too deep into this, but I've been instructed by a dear colleague that I need to read the following.
Casey:
So from The Verge, Apple has barred employees from creating a Slack channel to discuss pay equity.
Casey:
Apple HR said that while the topic was, quote, aligned with Apple's commitment to pay equity, quote,
Casey:
It did not meet the company's Slack terms of use.
Casey:
Seriously, this is what we're hanging your hat on.
John:
Yeah, that's where I said last time, like, oh, you can probably come up with some reason to not allow it.
John:
But Apple is saying it's aligned with our commitment to pay equity.
John:
See, we're all on the same team here, but don't do it.
Casey:
Continuing from The Verge, quote, Slack channels are provided to conduct Apple business and must advocate the work, deliverables, or mission of Apple departments and teams, quote, the employee relations representative told employees.
Casey:
The company's rules for the in-office chat app say that, quote, Slack channels for activities and hobbies not recognized as Apple employee clubs or diversity network associations or DNAs aren't permitted and shouldn't be created, quote,
Casey:
This is continuing from The Verge, but that rule has not been evenly enforced.
Casey:
You don't say.
John:
How is that possible?
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
Apple employees have popular Slack channels to discuss fun dogs, which has more than 5,000 members, gaming with more than 3,000 members, and dad jokes, which I want to be a part of, which has more than 2,000 members.
Casey:
On August 18th, the company approved a channel called Company Foosball.
Casey:
The cat and dog channels are not part of official clubs, and all of these channels were specifically created to talk about non-work activities.
Casey:
So turns out that they also need to work on equity within Slack channels, too.
John:
What a mess.
John:
Yeah, I'm just like, what a flimsy excuse of like, oh, yeah, no, we're totally for pay equity.
John:
But here's some like weird letter of the law rule about, oh, you just can't do it in Slack.
John:
Sorry, it's because of our Slack terms of use.
John:
And just like App Store Review, it's not like you can go, but what about the dad jokes channel?
John:
Don't look over there.
John:
it's just like app review it's like this is the new part of apple's dna arbitrarily uh you know enforced or not rules and by the way you're not allowed to ask us it's not about what what little jimmy is doing this is about you right now can we focus on you your slack channel unfortunately doesn't meet the terms of use has nothing to do with the fact that it's pay equity we're committed to pay equity but really don't make that channel
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
Seriously, I'm telling you, Apple is just nothing but PR own goals for the last month or two.
Casey:
It's ridiculous.
Casey:
And if you don't believe me, listen to the last episode.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
We had some really interesting feedback from an anonymous feedbacker.
Casey:
This was with regard to how things are stored within like Apple Music and Spotify and whatnot.
Casey:
And what is an album?
Casey:
What is a track?
Casey:
What is a recording?
Casey:
And so on.
Casey:
This is a little bit long as well, but I do think it's absolutely worth it.
Casey:
So this anonymous person writes,
Casey:
For a while, I worked on music metadata at Spotify.
Casey:
The data model is generally like this.
Casey:
Recordings are an audio record of a specific performance.
Casey:
They may appear on many albums as tracks.
Casey:
So what are tracks?
Casey:
Tracks are like a slot on an album where recording goes.
Casey:
So, for example, track number three on the White Album is the song Glass Onion.
Casey:
Every recording, track, and album is attributed to an artist.
Casey:
But there are a lot of corner cases.
Casey:
Under Pressure is a recording by both Queen and David Bowie.
Casey:
Should you attribute it to both of them separately with an entry under each artist?
Casey:
Should you make a new artist called Queen and David Bowie?
Casey:
Or what about tracks that feature an artist?
Casey:
Is Snoop Dogg the same artist when he did a reggae thing under the name Snoop Lion?
Casey:
What about various artists' albums?
Casey:
And then that brings us, of course, to albums.
Casey:
Albums are way more complicated than they seem initially.
Casey:
There are usually many slightly different versions of an album to be released in different markets, U.S., Canada, U.K., etc., or with bonus tracks or with special art.
Casey:
The same album is often released digitally on CD and on vinyl.
Casey:
Attributes of the audio, like live or radio edit or remix, can also be supplied at the recording, track, or album level.
Casey:
So this is pretty bananas.
Casey:
And then this individual gave us a link to Music Brains, which is music, B-R-A-I-N-Z dot org, which has, according to them, a pretty good schema that represents most of this.
Casey:
So you can go and check that out if you want to dig deeper.
John:
So this tells me that Spotify, unlike Apple, did spend some time thinking about the data model for music and all the various choices they have to make and how things are connected and so on and so forth.
John:
So I'm glad to hear that.
John:
Although I have heard a lot of complaints about Spotify getting confused about artists that have the same name.
John:
Merlin complains about that a lot.
John:
No, it's very true.
Marco:
Not to mention they have spam issues.
Marco:
They're not just confused.
Marco:
They're being actively spammed.
John:
Yeah, well, that's part of anything where you allow people to submit content, even if it's not like the whole world, but just people who record music, it's a problem.
John:
But I'm glad there's some thought put into this stuff on Spotify's end.
John:
Hopefully they do better than Apple in terms of tracking these things.
John:
But I still feel like, yes, the data model is very complicated, but...
John:
There are more complicated data models and just like spend a week maybe whiteboarding it before you just go ahead and implement your thing.
John:
But Apple didn't do that, you know, a couple of decades ago and now we're stuck with what we have.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run my servers.
Marco:
Visit linode.com slash ATP and see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius.
Marco:
From their award-winning support, which is offered 24-7, 365 to every level of user, to
Marco:
To their ease of use and their setup, it's clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003.
Marco:
I've actually been a customer for most of that time, I think.
Marco:
You can deploy your entire application stack with Linode's one-click app marketplace, or build it off from scratch and manage everything yourself with supported centralized tools like Terraform.
Marco:
Linode offers the best price-to-performance value for all compute instances, including GPU compute instances, as well as block storage, Kubernetes, and their upcoming bare-metal release.
Marco:
This is, frankly, one of the reasons I use Linode, because they're always an amazing value.
Marco:
I've been a customer of theirs, I think, for about a decade, and it's been an amazing value the entire time I've been there.
Marco:
I know how important value is, because I run a lot of servers, and so those numbers add up.
Marco:
And Linode always has amazing price to performance ratio compared to everyone else in the business.
Marco:
In addition to all the other stuff that makes them a good host.
Marco:
You know, their stuff is fast.
Marco:
They have good support.
Marco:
They have a great API.
Marco:
They have a great control panel.
Marco:
It's all great over at Linode.
Marco:
See for yourself by visiting linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you create a free account there with your Google or GitHub account or your email address, you can get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You get $100 in credit with a new account.
Marco:
Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable, allowing you to focus on your projects, not your infrastructure.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and sponsoring our show.
Marco:
My kid is nine and is super, let's say, made of me in certain ways.
Marco:
Half his DNA came from me.
Marco:
So unsurprisingly, he's super into technology and computing devices.
Marco:
And he's very interested in learning how to write code.
Marco:
I recognize nine is a little young, but not too young.
Marco:
To give you some idea of where he is, he has already seemingly very much mastered the language of Minecraft command blocks and a lot of the various things you can do with that.
Marco:
And so he's interested in learning how to code enough that he can start actually making his own games.
Marco:
So I was wondering if the audience had any feedback, and John possibly as well, because I know you went through some of this, at least if not all of it.
Marco:
But I'm curious, what's a good...
Marco:
tool set and language and platform or whatever out there for kids to learn how to code.
Marco:
Some things to consider.
Marco:
So number one, I don't care what platform it's on.
Marco:
If he can do it on his iPad, that's better.
Marco:
But if it has to be on a Mac or PC laptop, that's fine too.
Marco:
We can make that work.
Marco:
I already have on his list of things to try that we're going to give a shot.
Marco:
Swift Playgrounds and Hopscotch.
Marco:
And I think I'm also going to have... He plays Roblox on his iPad.
Marco:
I don't know if you can create Roblox Worlds on the iPad.
Marco:
I don't know literally anything about it.
Marco:
Yes, I've seen that video about how people get ripped off, and I will show it to him when he's ready.
Marco:
But anyway, so maybe the answer is Roblox on a PC, where he can do the full-blown creative experience.
Marco:
I assume that's what that is.
Marco:
But he wants to be able to make games, and so I have concerns.
Marco:
I don't want to...
Marco:
Just dump him right into Swift as a game platform, because that's, I mean, I wouldn't even do that, I think.
Marco:
You know, because he wants to, he wants to, like, you know, make game worlds where, like, you know, okay, you're going to go to this, go to this place, and get this thing, go to this place, go to this thing, you know, these, like...
Marco:
multi-level game logic things that I feel like if I start him in a lower level language, I'm afraid that he might get intimidated by how much work that will be and how hard it is to get from zero to that and possibly give up too early or get frustrated.
Marco:
So
Marco:
I'm okay separating the concerns of making games and learning programming.
Marco:
That might be two different activities.
Marco:
If he wants to make something in Roblox as a game, and then in Swift Playgrounds or something like that, learn the more low-level coding stuff, that's fine too.
Marco:
This might be two different things.
Marco:
It might be one thing.
Marco:
he would get a lot of value in learning swift because he knows i use swift um and so that's like there's value there um maybe he can teach me some stuff about it um and so anyway so i'm curious like you know what people um have done for that recently like what's out there uh if it's gonna feel too much like a toy language i think it would turn him off
Marco:
And so I don't know.
Marco:
I looked at Hopscotch.
Marco:
I downloaded it.
Marco:
It might be too young for him.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
I'm going to find out, and I'll report back as this series goes on.
Marco:
But anyway, so if anybody has any really good stories about what language or environment you were able to start a kid on,
Marco:
who wants something that's not just a toy.
Marco:
He wants to make real stuff, obviously, but within the realm of what a nine-year-old can make.
Marco:
And so let me know if you have any good experiences because I learned programming on QBasic.
Marco:
And I thought briefly, I'm like, what if I just give him BASIC somehow?
Marco:
Whatever environment that would be, if I can get an emulator or if somebody makes a modern interpreter for it or whatever.
Casey:
You get DOSBox and run QBasic in that.
Marco:
Well, if Apple hasn't kicked it off the App Store yet...
Marco:
i'm talking about on your mac oh yeah yeah yeah so that i mean maybe that's maybe that's a fun answer i even thought like what maybe i should like get him an apple too and just like boot it up and just like you know just have him type in the command line like i do 10 print print high 20 go to 10 like yeah like
Marco:
you know because you know the more basic it is and not you know lowercase b basic the more basic it is i i think the more accessible it is and the more kids can can get into it even if they can't necessarily make you know the next minecraft which you know no individual could um so anyway uh yeah i'm i'd love to hear anybody's suggestions um and this is not going to be a one-week project this is going to be like you know probably a multi-month or multi-year project
Marco:
um as we try different things and and you know i we kind of have a feedback loop from him and see what he likes and what he doesn't like and and what he gets into and what he doesn't so anyway i appreciate any any stories or input you can provide on like what should kids learn today what you know what what makes a good balance between letting them do the kind of stuff they want to do but not being too frustrating up front
Casey:
The deal you're making, though, is that whatever you come up with, whatever you like, I want you to come back to the show, please, and let us all know.
Casey:
Because I'm probably, hopefully, not too far away from wanting to answer the same question.
Casey:
And granted, it'll be a little different then.
Casey:
But I would love to hear what you guys end up really, really liking, or not liking, for that matter.
Marco:
And once again, I have seen the Roblox video about how they rip everybody off.
Marco:
I don't need to be sent that.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
So here's a little bit of stories from my experience trying to get my kids into programming.
John:
And I think what you said about QBasic, that probably led me down the wrong path because...
John:
So every kid is different, blah, blah, blah.
John:
There's our disclaimer, right?
John:
But my impression from my kids and kids in general is a big part of the motivation is to do the thing, whatever the thing is, right?
John:
Make a game, let's say.
John:
We all know on this show that sort of the foundational programming knowledge is very important and transferable to lots of different uses and so on and so forth.
John:
But I think it's pretty rare the kid, especially young kid, that wants to learn how to program.
John:
It's only a means to an end.
John:
And if I think about how I learned to program and the reason why that wasn't in the forefront of my mind is the thing I wanted to do, like make the computer do the thing, computers couldn't do anything when I was learning.
John:
They could print, like a VIC-20 can print text and colored blocks the size of characters on the screen, right?
John:
Right.
John:
That's all it could do.
John:
And so when I wrote a program that, you know, 10 print hello, 20 go to 10, I was making the computer do the things that it does.
John:
Like, it wasn't like, oh, that's just, I'm just learning to program or learning conditionals or loops.
John:
That's all it could do, right?
John:
Colored blocks, characters, print output, accept input from the keyboard, show it on your TV, right?
John:
That's it.
John:
And so it seems like, oh, you know, when I was a kid, I learned the foundations of programming and I bet other kids would like to do it too.
John:
But I think the only reason I was satisfied that and probably the only reason Marco was satisfied with QBasic is they can make computers do the thing that you thought was the thing.
John:
QBasic could make Windows, right?
John:
Like Windows and Windows, right?
John:
Am I getting QBasic?
Marco:
You're talking about Visual Basic, which I went to right afterwards.
Marco:
QBasic was like the DOS one, just a big blue screen of text, and it had built-in documentation so I could just hop over and look up every function and make games like really basic text in and out games like you were just talking about.
Marco:
Or you could do graphics.
Marco:
I eventually got to that in my later years of playing with it, but it was initially just all text-based stuff, and then occasionally drawing...
John:
like ascii graphics basically like i made like a little like bomberman clone um using ascii as the graphics it was it was a mess but it was a lot of fun so but it was it was like at least it was closer to like what the computer could do all right so when i tried to pitch my kids and things i started with things like hopscotch and a bunch of other stuff of their like tried to gamify learning to program right so they were you know there's all like kind of like swift playgrounds is today i forget the names of the things but like swift playgrounds is like a little character that moves around is trying to make it fun for you to just be in a text window by
John:
pre-doing a bunch of stuff and and letting you feel like hey i'm making a cool looking character move around but you didn't make the character it's just already there right with my kids i had no success getting them to want to learn to program at any age i didn't really push it that hard but i always put it in front of them see if they ran to it see if it would grab them and they never got hooked and we all all three of us know like what it means to get hooked on programming like it just it's one of those things that just happens right it's like
John:
You can see when programming gets its claws into somebody.
John:
And, you know, it's not subtle.
John:
You'll find yourself just sucked in and just constantly working on this program.
John:
And just like we all experienced it.
John:
Like this is how we became who we are, right?
John:
But when that doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, right?
John:
And I don't know what it takes to make it up.
John:
So I tried a lot of those things of like let's gamify learning to program.
John:
Didn't work at all.
John:
I think what will work with a lot of kids and the reason Roblox and everything are exciting is fastest way to do the thing.
John:
And unfortunately for kids today, do the thing is make like a 3d game, 3d network connected game.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's so far above, you know, print and input a dollar sign.
John:
Like it's so it's like you, how are you going to go from zero to that?
John:
So you got to use these things like these, you know, these game game creation engines where they basically do almost all of it for you.
John:
They take care of the networking, uh,
John:
the multiplayer, the roster, the 3D graphics.
John:
And, you know, and you can start off with a bunch of canned stuff and make something that is recognizable to modern kids as a game.
John:
And that can get them hooked on programming because they start using like the pre-made models and the pre-made everything.
John:
But now they want to add some kind of behavior.
John:
When you hit this blocks, I want it to explode.
John:
And so now they're into like, okay, well, is there somewhere I can do that in the UI?
John:
Or do I have to type some kind of scripting thing?
John:
They start to learn about conditionals and variables, and then they're off to the races because they want to make the thing.
John:
And making the thing is tricky.
John:
I'm going to suggest something in a second that I think might not be that...
John:
popular but not for the reasons we expect so the play date is coming out soon and they have a web-based dev thing where you can have you can have no programming skill and make a game that will run on play date and also it has a scripting language built in and stuff like that i'll link to an article in the show notes where nevin mergen again uh talks about how this ide works right
John:
That's only useful if your son wants to make a game that runs on the play date.
John:
But does he want to make a game that runs on the play date?
John:
How many of his friends even know what a play date is unless they have nerdy parents, right?
John:
He might want to make a game that he can show to his friends and they can play on their PCs at home.
John:
And so this play date pulp thing is of no use and no interest to Adam because...
John:
he can make it for himself and play it on his dad's play data or his mom's play data or whatever that's in the house but it can't travel any farther do the thing means something different to a lot of kids for some kids it means it has to be a minecraft mod so because all my friends are in minecraft and they want to see the thing that i made some kids that wants to be a pc game or whatever it is
John:
So I feel like that really is going to determine how you approach this.
John:
And it could be Adam is super into programming as a programming thing, right?
John:
So who knows?
John:
Again, every kid is different.
John:
You'll find out.
John:
But I think that is the tricky part about this, that even though we as programmers value programming in the abstract, I think it's probably rare the kids that value it in that way.
John:
And then, so this is a story for my kids.
John:
My son, after I pitched him on, I tried to show him how to program Perl, of course.
John:
like hey look you can just get you monster text input i was trying to basically do the equivalent of like basic like hey you know you can print things and you can accept input you're trying to scare them away from programming really it's like you know like if you try if you're trying to look for like the equivalent of like basic where you you know you can print strings accept input do conditionals run subroutines right just like you can make a text adventure in it right so i try to show them those basics
John:
Not interested.
John:
Hopscotch, all that stuff.
John:
Not interested.
John:
Scratch from MIT.
John:
Not interested.
John:
And at various times, I would throw them in there.
John:
He played Minecraft like crazy.
John:
Was not into making mods at all.
John:
Had no interest.
John:
He just wanted me to bang my head against trying to install the terrible mods that other people made to see past episodes of the show.
John:
But eventually, in high school, he decided he was going to take a programming course.
John:
And in that programming course, he learned Swift and Java.
John:
And he took the computer science AP test.
John:
And then he took a course on iOS development.
John:
uh and now he's got an ios app and yesterday he was asking me how do i get an app on the app store i think and by the way this is my question to the audience i said i didn't know and i said to try to look it up and what he determined is i think miners can have an app on the app store even if it's free he just wants his app to be free he just wants to be on the app store but if anyone knows how is it that miners can get free apps on the app store without having their parent do it or something please let me know so that's the state we're at there but anyway he did that all on his own like
John:
What is it that clicked in his mind?
John:
And by the way, he's totally hooked now.
John:
It's like the programming thing got him.
John:
Not because of anything I did.
John:
Not because of any of my attempts to encourage or support it or anything like that.
John:
In fact, probably despite all my efforts.
John:
On his own, he decided at age, you know, 15 or 16 that he's going to look into programming and fast forward a few years and he's spending hundreds of hours sitting in front of his laptop in Xcode every, you know, three days coming out of his cave to ask me some question that I can't answer about why something's broken in Xcode.
John:
and he's using swift ui and swift and you know doing all the things and as far as i'm concerned he doesn't know the fundamentals of programming and didn't have a bottom-up education he just wanted to do the thing so he made an app for his school to like read his school's newspaper uh it's basically an rss reader combined with a podcast player i've sent marco a few screenshots where it looks a lot like overcast because he was quote-unquote inspired by overcast which is the only podcast player he's ever seen i think um
John:
But anyway, that happened like all on its own.
John:
So my advice to Marco is like, let Adam lead you where he wants to go.
John:
And if he, if it turns out that he's not into it, it doesn't mean that he's never going to be into it.
John:
It could just be that he's, you know, he's not interested in the way that you want him to be interested in, which is the story of kids all the time.
John:
Like, yeah, they, they can be led by what their parents do, but at a certain point, what their parents want them to do starts to become less attractive.
John:
He's nine.
John:
So that's probably not happening yet, but rest assured it will happen.
So yeah.
John:
My only suggestion is to look at pulp.
John:
If he's into it and he's into the play date, it's great.
John:
It's web-based, runs on every platform.
John:
You can program in it by writing code, but you can also make a complete game without writing a line of code just by clicking on stuff.
Marco:
It's also not out yet.
John:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
I mean, minor detail.
John:
He's nine and it's going to be out soon.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I actually I thought about the play as a possible thing because it is a simplified environment.
Marco:
Like it has this monochrome small screen.
Marco:
It has some of these really easy to use tools, allegedly.
Marco:
I haven't actually looked at them yet, but like this is one of the goals that they have of developing the play.
Marco:
It is like in addition to the available lower level languages, there's also this like easier thing that you can do.
Marco:
And so that's certainly something that I'll be happy to explore with him, you know, once we get ours.
Marco:
But I'm not sure like he might fall in love with the thing.
Marco:
But he might not.
Marco:
As you were saying, you kind of don't know, and so I was going to kind of wait and see on that.
Marco:
But I think he's very motivated to write code as a thing.
Marco:
He's also very motivated to create custom game worlds and stuff.
Marco:
That might not be tied together.
Marco:
That might be two different interests that happen to overlap, but maybe he'll get into the coding side for its own sake.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
So we'll see.
John:
He wants to write a spreadsheet.
Marco:
I mean, probably not that.
Marco:
But I mean, look, I've been programming for a very long time.
Marco:
I've never written a spreadsheet.
Marco:
So there's a lot more to this world than that.
Marco:
So yeah, so we'll see.
Marco:
I'm glad to hear that it worked out for your son.
John:
Well, I mean, it worked out.
John:
I mean, like he came to it on his own.
John:
The other thing I would suggest, by the way, is web programming.
John:
I know you're not super into that.
John:
But like you can do a lot of I mean, I don't have any, again, concrete suggestions.
John:
I'm sure listeners will send any good stuff.
John:
But there's
John:
a lot of stuff you can do with javascript and web pages and the advantages that has is that all his friends have access to web the web browser like it is a platform that everybody can access and you can write some pretty cool quote-unquote web-based games you know with using processing.js or all sorts of other stuff that my son was also into at various times web tech is easy um in terms of you don't need a complicated ide um
John:
the language is pretty friendly there's lots of examples you know you can create even just learning html and css and then learning css animation and then making some stupid fart thing with css animation like that's that's great that's fine like that may be you know it really depends on where his values are his values i want to make a cool thing for me are his values i want to make a cool thing to show off to my friends or his values like literally i want to learn about programming because i'm intellectually curious about it or is it a spectrum and like you said are they separate things or are they actually combined yeah i guess we'll find out i'll report back
Casey:
Please do.
Casey:
I'm really genuinely interested to hear.
Casey:
John, what is the latest?
Casey:
Because how old is your son?
Casey:
He's a rising junior?
Casey:
Senior.
Casey:
Senior.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
He's got his license to drive.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And I remember on Rectifs, you're starting to talk college.
Casey:
So sitting here now, is he going for like CSCPE or something equivalent?
John:
He's going to be a computer science major in college.
Marco:
Nice.
Casey:
Not CPE.
John:
Or computer engineering.
John:
I told him, if you're in computer science, it's probably going to be on a liberal arts college, and you have to take more English courses, and that's turning him off.
John:
So he'd rather be in engineering, but he does like computer science.
John:
So there are some cool schools with CE.
John:
And actually, I think Cornell lets you take computer science in the engineering school.
Casey:
So does Virginia Tech.
Casey:
Just saying.
John:
No, he's not going to Virginia, but yeah.
Casey:
Computer science, computer engineering.
Casey:
What the hell, man?
Casey:
What is that absolute disgust in your voice?
Casey:
He's trying to stay close to home.
Casey:
All right, all right.
Casey:
I'll allow it.
Casey:
I'll allow it.
Casey:
So in the last, I don't know, it was like a week ago or something like that.
Marco:
It was mere hours after we released the last episode of the show.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
There was brilliant news that Apple has made all of our lives so much better.
Casey:
According to the Washington Post, Apple loosens rules for developers in a major concession amid antitrust pressure.
Casey:
The Wall Street Journal says that Apple said to let app developers alert users to alternate payment methods.
Casey:
Financial Times says Apple makes App Store concession on payments.
Casey:
The Verge says Apple finally agrees to let app developers communicate with their customers.
Casey:
Finally, CNBC says in major policy change, Apple will allow developers to email customers about alternatives to App Store billing.
Casey:
Oh, hell yeah, gentlemen.
Casey:
We are going to be rich.
John:
And those headlines, by the way, are from Stratechery.
John:
Ben Thompson collected them all, and it is a great example of how the initial flurry of stories about this thing were reported.
John:
And I saw some of these headlines flying across on Twitter.
John:
I'm like, wow, what is this big news?
Casey:
Turns out, maybe not.
Casey:
So I don't think we really need to go that deep into this famous last words, but basically there aren't any concessions at all.
Casey:
And it seems like the only people that really understood what was happening here were Bloomberg, where their headline is Apple settles with app developers without making major concessions.
John:
Almost accurate headline.
John:
Almost accurate.
John:
Settles with app developers.
John:
Who are these app developers?
Marco:
Bingo.
Marco:
That's like...
Marco:
Look, and we did a lot about this on Under the Radar this week that came out today.
Marco:
So I will also refer people to that.
Marco:
I think it's a very good episode if you're a developer or not.
Marco:
And even if you don't listen to Under the Radar normally, I strongly recommend this week's episode.
Marco:
I think it was a really good one.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm going to cover some of the same ground here.
Marco:
But yeah.
Marco:
there there is no dealing with quote app developers app developers are not a unified group who no one speaks for me no one speaks for all the other developers like i'm not part of some organization i'm not part of a union i'm not part of some kind of trade group like i don't know any developers who are we all want different things like we have some common themes about what we want and and you know we have some communities that that are somewhat cohesive but
Marco:
it's a pretty big group of people with lots of different communities, lots of different cultures, lots of different priorities, lots of different needs.
Marco:
And there is no, you know, app developers suing Apple.
Marco:
There is no Apple settling with app developers because that group doesn't exist.
Marco:
Like, and so anyway, minor nitpick there.
Marco:
No one speaks for me.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Like I'm not part of any group that's like, Oh, I didn't agree to this.
Marco:
I didn't even, honestly, frankly, I didn't even know about this lawsuit until this press release.
Yeah.
John:
so it's a class action lawsuit and the class is developers on the app store and you know the nature of class action lawsuits is that they are a big payday for the lawyers involved and you may or may not be in the class and maybe you'll find out about it later right so here's what this the all right so the the overall story is that it seemed like that this class action lawsuit was going to fail that apple was going to win because it was a flimsy case i don't even remember what the details were it was just something like
John:
Oh, Apple being unfair, whatever.
John:
But it seemed to observers that Apple was probably going to win it.
John:
So Apple settled it.
John:
And they settled it on terms that, as the Bloomberg headline said, didn't give any major concessions.
John:
Because why give concessions when you're going to win the case anyway?
John:
You're settling it to save everybody time and money.
John:
Just take the settlement.
John:
Be lucky.
John:
Be happy with what you got.
John:
And what did the class of App Store developers get?
John:
Well, Apple put together a $100 million fund to help app developers out.
John:
And I think they're going to, like, if you're in the class, you can apply to essentially get, like, 3% of what you would have gotten if Apple's cut was 15% instead of 30.
John:
Like, so Apple recently reduced the cut for the small business program.
John:
You know, if you make less than $1 million in revenue per whatever, and you apply to this program and Apple approves you, then instead of taking 30% of all your sales, they'll take 15%.
John:
If you were in the class a developer and you choose to receive some of this money, this $100 million pool would be divided up amongst all the people who were in the class who paid 30% during the time that it was supposedly unfair.
John:
The lawyers also get paid out of this $100 million fund, and they want $30 million of it.
John:
So kiss that money goodbye.
Marco:
Which gloriously is 30%, which I love so much.
John:
Lawyers take 30%.
John:
So a handful of lawyers get $30 million.
John:
You may possibly get up to 3% back on what Apple took from you in some period of time.
John:
And by the way, if you take the settlement, if you take this money from Apple, this piddling amount of a couple hundred bucks that you're probably going to get,
John:
uh you also promise to never ever uh sue apple for anything ever again like this whole big legal agreement it's like by taking this money you agree that apple uh must be held harmless and didn't do anything wrong and you're not allowed to and you agree that the app store rules are fair and so on and so forth there's all these all these sort of stipulations right so that's one thing that's part of the second settlement second thing is apple has clarified and ben again ben thompson and strutekier you have to pay for this article but you should because he goes into way more detail than we're going to hear
John:
Also clarified an existing rule that says, Apple had flip-flopped back and forth on it, but previously they had said, app developers, you cannot communicate with your customers by collecting information in the app.
John:
So in other words, you couldn't make an app that says, hey, customer, enter your email address here.
John:
And then to sign up for my whatever.
John:
And then you would get their email address.
John:
And then you would use that email address to say, hey, customer, you gave me your email address.
John:
And I just wanted you to know that if you go to my website, you can sign up for an account or a subscription or blah, blah, blah.
John:
And if you do it through the web, you don't have to pay Apple 30%.
John:
There used to be a rule where Apple said you couldn't do that.
John:
And now Apple is clarifying.
John:
that developers can use communication such as email to share information about payment methods outside of their ios app but wait wait outside their ios app yeah outside your ios app well that's not a concession no it's not really they're basically saying if you want to email people and you already have their email address that you didn't get from the app that's fine
John:
thanks apple am i allowed to talk to the person sitting next to me or do i need your permission to do that too it's like apple's like you know we don't want you ever saying anything about other payment methods to your customers even if you do it outside of the app store but now you're allowed to it's fine you can talk you can talk to your friends we won't we won't i don't know i mean how would apple even stop us it's totally unenforceable apple's just saying now don't tell anybody about other payment methods outside of your app
John:
Anyway, so that's clarified.
John:
Apple also agreed to keep the small business program for at least three more years, which is nice, but it's like, wait a second, there's an end to this program?
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, I do not recall there ever being any mention of this being a temporary thing.
John:
They didn't say one way or the other, but they could say, hey, let's throw them a bone.
John:
It's like, oh, if you're worried about this program going away, it'll be here for at least three more years.
John:
And also Apple also agreed not to make the App Store search even worse by doing things like unfairly waiting its own apps, which is a thing that Apple totally did.
John:
Right.
John:
In the epic trial that came out that Apple had been unfairly waiting some of its apps for a while and then reverse that.
John:
So the Apple also agreed.
John:
Yeah, we won't do that anymore either.
John:
Aren't we great?
John:
So yeah, Apple gave basically nothing.
John:
I mean, $100 million is nothing.
Marco:
Well, by the way, that search thing is nothing because what the assignment allows them to do is use objective metrics like user downloads and reviews.
Marco:
Well, yeah, guess what apps have the most usage on the App Store?
Marco:
Apple's apps.
Marco:
So they can just say, oh, we're going to rank them by usage.
Marco:
There, Bing, Apple's apps come out on top.
John:
It's not artificially waiting.
John:
That's a meritocracy.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
The bottom line is Apple can do whatever it wants with its search.
John:
Like the only way we would ever find out that they did anything, like we have no visibility into their algorithm, right?
John:
It's the reason we didn't know that they had been unfairly waiting their app until we saw the discovery in the Epic trial.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, their algorithm is pretty easy to see because it's so terrible.
Marco:
I think it's like a MySQL-like query.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So basically, Apple didn't have to give anything here and they didn't give anything.
John:
And in some ways, this is like people saying, well, you know, what do you expect?
John:
Apple is going to win the case.
John:
They're not going to give any concessions.
John:
But it's actually a tricky situation, because if you know you're going to win, like I bet somebody thought if we do this one hundred million dollar thing, like that'll make us look good.
John:
But it doesn't.
John:
It doesn't make it only makes them look worse than doing nothing.
John:
Like if they had given no money to spend like, well, Apple won that case and didn't give anything.
John:
It's almost like a slap in the face.
John:
The hundred million dollars when you know that the lawyers take 30 million of it and then you're going to get pocket change out of it.
John:
And in exchange, you agree that Apple never did anything wrong on the app store.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple angles to this.
Marco:
Obviously some of this is probably over our heads in terms of like the legal ramifications and everything and some of the strategy behind some of it.
Marco:
But one theory I did hear a few times that makes a lot of sense is even though Apple was probably not going to lose this case if it went to trial, Apple I think has learned from the Epic trial that they really don't want to go to trial.
Marco:
it's it's bad for them in a number of ways to go to trial because then you start getting discovery and you start getting these like controversial emails coming out and and apple's executives making asses of themselves on the stand and so you just i think apple learned hopefully like yeah we'd actually don't really want to go to trial if we can help it like if there's a way to settle easy lawsuits like this so they don't even get that far it's better for us to settle them so that's probably what happened here as part of this um
Marco:
And for accepting the settlement, a lot of people keep asking me if I'm going to accept it.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
I have to look at what it means to accept it really in more detail.
Marco:
But if it's along the lines of you agree not to sue Apple over these particular claims in this particular time span, if I can't sue Apple for this same thing, like double jeopardy kind of thing, where like, okay, I can't say you took too much money from me between 2015 and 2020 or whatever –
Marco:
Oh, well.
Marco:
I wasn't going to do that anyway.
Marco:
I'm not going to sue Apple.
John:
None of us are going to sue Apple.
John:
They have bazillions of dollars.
John:
No individual on this podcast is ever going to sue Apple, probably.
John:
Unless it's like a wrongful death suit for a phone that explodes or something like that.
John:
Or a car.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Or a car.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
so I don't like, it's just like, it's mostly the optics.
John:
It's not mechanically like, Oh, you give up all these rights.
John:
Cause again, we're never going to sue Apple, but it just seems like a slap in the face for what I assume will be appealing amount of money.
John:
Um, and I'm kind of disappointed just, I mean, it's just dumb luck for me, but like all the money I've ever made in the app store came during the 30% times more or less.
John:
And then the 15%, like the, the small business program happened after my apps had like sold their initial burst of stuff or whatever.
John:
So I would love to have only had Apple take 15% of that first burst of money, but,
John:
Uh, you know, bad luck, bad timing.
John:
And if I can only get 3% of that difference back for me, it's like chump change is like 200 bucks or something.
John:
So who cares?
John:
Right.
John:
So I probably won't do it.
John:
Uh, but part of, I think part of this, like most class, class action lawsuits in theory depends on how many people, uh, ask for the money.
John:
So if more people ask the money, you get a smaller cut or something like that.
Marco:
Anyway, cool.
Marco:
There's a press release that just came out right now that's something else now.
John:
What the hell is this?
John:
What?
John:
We can't do this, Apple.
John:
Stop.
Marco:
Stop with the... I mean, at least it's now.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Japan Fair Trade Commission closes app store investigation.
Marco:
Apple will let developers of reader app, that has a special meaning we'll get to, around the world link to an external website to set up or manage an account beginning early next year.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Oh my god.
Marco:
This is big.
Marco:
Whoa.
Marco:
While in-app purchases through the app store, commerce system remain the safest and blah blah blah, Apple will also help developers of reader apps protect users when they link them to an external website to make purchases.
John:
Is this only in Japan?
Marco:
No, it says worldwide.
Casey:
While the agreement was made with the JFTC, Apple will apply this change globally to all reader apps on the store.
Casey:
Oh, it's reader apps only.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that has special meaning.
Marco:
So while I think about how this actually might be really big, but all right.
Marco:
if we're reading it obviously you gotta like you know get around apple's pr spin here but this might this might actually be a really big deal but what they're talking about reader apps means things like netflix amazon ebook uh you know kindle app um things like that it's like it's a special category of apps where they it's the same category that they would allow you to like have externally purchased stuff in these apps
Marco:
and not use an app purchase only if you didn't mention how to purchase it.
Marco:
It was that whole category of apps.
Marco:
They've used this term reader apps throughout the app store rule evolution, and it's grown in scope over time.
Marco:
If this is what we think it might be, what this would basically be is everything but games, basically, is what this would most likely mean in practice.
Marco:
The big companies that are giving them the most trouble, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, HBO, all that kind of stuff,
Marco:
they would all be able to link out to make external purchases.
Marco:
That would be a really big deal.
John:
Well, sort of.
John:
They said to set up or manage an account.
Marco:
No, no, no, but then it even says.
Marco:
See, this is...
Marco:
uh the the third paragraph here about safe guidelines this is where it can get tricky so they're saying you know before the change is going to effect next year apple will update its guidelines and review process to make sure users of reader apps continue to have a safe experience on the app store blah blah blah apple will also help developers of reader apps protect users when they link them through an external website to make purchases so that to me kind of sounds like apple's going to be
Marco:
reviewing and probably have a lot of rules around like if you link out for an external purchase what you can do there how you can do it what you might have to offer the users like safety wise or control wise which if this is as big as I think it kind of might seem like it is that might be a pretty good compromise but man this is what
Casey:
i'm gonna have to like analyze every word of this to really know for sure what's going on here yeah we'll see well to that end to that end in the end of the second paragraph apple agreed with the jftc to let developers of these apps share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account so do they get like a single like literally one link you get net netflix.com slash sign up or whatever
Marco:
It could be through the associated domain system.
Marco:
Right now, apps have the concept of the associated domain.
Marco:
This is how universal links work, where you open up certain links and they open up the app instead of the website.
Marco:
You have a way for an Apple system to verify between an app and a website or a web domain.
Marco:
I own this domain.
Marco:
This domain is related to this app.
Marco:
They could possibly use that system and have a field somewhere that says, this is my purchase page or whatever.
Marco:
This is my login or sign-up page.
Marco:
um and then maybe they can have some way for boy i don't i mean this is all like you know shot in the dark here maybe they could have some way to like you know have like a managed payments kind of kind of centralized control flow or something i don't know it this if this is what it sounds like it is this is a going to be a really big deal and be going to depend a lot on the implementation details like
Marco:
And there's a lot of details here that are kind of saying, all right, coming early next year, hand-wavy, and maybe it's going to take until that because this is kind of a big deal.
Marco:
It might require some software updates, infrastructure building in addition to working out the rules and trying to settle down the regulators around the world.
John:
You know, given how well the App Store review folks are at understanding and figuring out what apps do, like very often they will misunderstand like screens in the app or how to get between them or what is actually available.
John:
The idea of them clicking through to your website and making sure that your website is satisfactory according to some set of rules, like...
John:
I feel like their main skill set is finding where you hid the link to netflix.com.
John:
It is not.
John:
Once you get to netflix.com figuring out if the website complies with whatever rules they're going to make up or whatever.
John:
So anyway, this story is literally breaking news while we're recording the podcast.
John:
So we apologize if we got any of it wrong.
John:
Surely we'll talk about it more next week.
John:
But it transitions nicely into the next item.
Marco:
I love, by the way, I love the concept of like, we just were saying how all the initial headlines about the other thing were totally wrong.
Marco:
So I really hope that we didn't just make our own like totally wrong summary of it.
John:
Well, we have an excuse.
John:
We're going to get thrown at us in real time on a podcast.
John:
We didn't write an article and post it to the web about it.
John:
We would have done a little bit more research there.
Marco:
So actually, so here's a question before we move on.
Marco:
Just, you know, ballpark.
Marco:
If this is kind of what it sounds like and if it's actually, you know, that, you know, the reader apps, which by the way, those are the rules.
Marco:
So what reader apps is defined as apps that allow users, that may allow users to access to previously purchased content or content subscriptions, specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video.
Marco:
um so that's that's how they define reader apps so what this would basically mean is like you know that kind of app you know magazine new paper books audio music and video would be allowed to have external purchase systems but things like games would not and this is this is not unprecedented that i believe the google whatever store also has like you know the games have to do things a certain way but other apps were able to do things a different way although i believe that's now changed but anyway
Marco:
So, if this is what it sounds like, that external purchases would be allowed to be used for these kinds of apps, but not games and other stuff, do you think that's a good compromise?
John:
I think it kind of is.
John:
It really depends on the implementation.
John:
Obviously, from Apple's perspective, since we know that like 85% of their profits or whatever come from games, you can do a lot of stuff in the non-game part without hurting yourself too, too much.
John:
But...
John:
historically Apple has been like, but why would we give up that 15%?
John:
Like, why would we even screw with it?
John:
Like, I know it's not the majority.
John:
I know games are where all the big money is, but why are we giving up anything?
John:
And the answer is because world governments are getting up on your business and making you do it.
John:
Or like are threatening to make you do it.
John:
The U.S.
John:
government is doing stuff.
John:
This is the Japan Trade Commission.
John:
And the other story we have is in Korea where they're trying to say you have to, South Korea has passed a bill
John:
that is trying to make it so that app stores like Apple and Google have to allow alternate payment systems, right?
John:
This bill, it hasn't been signed into law by their president yet, but it looks like it's going to be, right?
John:
And so again, a country, you know, somewhere in the world, not in the US, is gonna have a law that's going to apparently affect both Apple and Google and their app stores.
John:
And, you know, what I was going to talk about before the Japan thing came out is like, okay, well, if some country makes some law that you have to, you know, allow alternate payment methods or, you know, do whatever with the reader app things and linking out to websites, do you just do it in that country or do you do it everywhere?
John:
And
John:
you know i'm glad that it seems like apple has chosen to do it everywhere at least in the case of the japan thing because it's just such a pain to try to have different sets of rules and different approvals uh you know of like what apps can and can't do based on country it's much better to have one set of rules if you can possibly help it especially for stuff like this and to build a system around it and the larger story is like look
John:
uh governments are making apple do what it previously wasn't doing on its own because various governments think that the current competitive landscape for app stores is not great for the people who live in those countries so they're passing laws to make these people do things and that apparently is literally the only thing that will make apple do this stuff either the threat of them like the small business program or whatever the threat of laws or actual laws
John:
I thought this story about Korea was interesting because it's got response quotes from both Google and Apple.
John:
Like, here's what spokespeople from those companies had to say about the idea that Korea says you have to allow alternate payment methods in the apps as a not in-app purchase, but some other way to pay for things inside your app, right?
John:
So here's Google.
John:
Just as it costs developers money to build an app, it costs us money to build and maintain an operating system in an app store.
John:
Oh, boohoo.
John:
It costs so much money to run an app store.
John:
Where is Google going to get all that money from?
John:
How can you take money away from Google?
John:
They're the ones trying to build, to maintain an operating system, build an app store.
John:
cry poverty google all right we'll we'll reflect on how to comply with this law while maintaining a model that supports high quality operating system and app store and we will share more in the coming weeks so google is going to reflect they're going to reflect on how they're going to comply they want to comply but they also want to provide that high quality experience after they just said uh feel bad for us because it costs so much money to make this operating system this is like soccer injuries
John:
I don't know how we're going to do now that people can use different payment methods.
John:
We needed that cut of that money because I don't know where else we would get money.
John:
It's really confusing, Google.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, Apple.
John:
Here's what Apple says.
John:
Their response is very different in tone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
to date with Apple.
John:
So they're basically saying, you are inviting fraud.
John:
You will cause confusion and delay.
John:
This is going to be a problem.
John:
You're going to destroy the app store and you're going to take money out of the mouths of those hardworking Korean app store developers.
John:
That's what Apple says.
John:
very different in tone they just go right to the dire consequences most of which are you know mostly bs because the whole ask to buy group had a good post about it ask this doesn't preclude continuing to support ask to buy and parental controls you know as we just read in that japan price release apple can totally make any external payment methods also feed into the ask to buy before approval like i can make an api for this this is a thing that apple's able to do like payment anyway whether they do or not it's entirely possible right
John:
This story – where is it from?
John:
Is this from The Verge, I think?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This story continues.
John:
Lobbyists for the two companies have reportedly argued to American officials that Korean legislation violates a trade agreement as it seeks to control the actions of U.S.-based companies.
John:
So they're lobbying the U.S.
John:
government to say, we don't have to follow that Korean law, right?
John:
Because we have a trade agreement with them and this violates the trade.
John:
So they're trying full court press.
John:
We don't want to have to do what this Korean thing says because it basically says –
John:
you know you in korea anyway you in your apps you're allowed to collect payment through some way other than an app purchase now obviously already ios apps can collect payment not through an app purchase for physical goods and somehow the world doesn't end or services you know things like ubers and stuff and services yeah
John:
somehow, somehow that happens.
John:
And we are not all just dead from fraud.
John:
Like we're going to allow people to enter credit card and amazon.com.
John:
The world will end.
John:
How will people know what to trust?
John:
How do people buy things online?
John:
It's like, it's okay.
John:
We buy things online all the time.
John:
Like it's fine.
John:
Right.
John:
And also on top of that, especially now, you know what you can buy things online with?
John:
apple pay it's really easy turns out and it's also apple service you don't even have to enter your address you use apple pay it apple pay is a product that succeeds based on its merits it's a convenient way to pay because we already have apple accounts they already have our address you do the little click you do touch id whatever apple pay right and but apple every time they talk about this is like i swear if you let anyone enter a credit card or pay with anything other than that purchase the world will end
John:
It's like the whole world outside of the app store is constantly buying stuff online with their credit cards.
John:
And they're doing inside your apps for physical goods and services, which, you know, like, would you think they'd be even more fraught of like, oh, you know, I have to get a physical good and who knows if it's actually going to arrive and I might get defrauded.
John:
But then once you touch, you know, what Apple never says is, but now you're touching our money because we get 30% of all the in-app purchases and please don't touch our money.
John:
And they frame it as a big fraud problem or whatever.
John:
So I don't know what's going to come of this Korean thing, especially in light of the Japan announcement of maybe they're going to take the Korea thing and say, well, if it turns out we have to do it in Korea, we'll do it everywhere as well.
Marco:
Well, we'll see.
Marco:
But either way, I'm reading the Japan press release a little more closely.
Marco:
It seems less.
Marco:
We'll just get fooled just like The Verge.
Marco:
well there's an important detail in the japan press release so it's in the second paragraph so you know they're talking about reader apps again what that you know what that means um to ensure a safe and seamless user experience the app store's guidelines require developers to sell digital service and subscriptions using apple's in-app payment system here's the here's the important part because developers of reader apps do not offer in-app digital goods and services for purchase apple agreed blah blah blah to let these share a single into the website so okay so here's here's what this means so it's for sign up only
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
What this what this means, if I'm reading it correctly now, is you are allowed to take purchases on your website and you are going to be allowed once this goes into effect to link people to your website to create to create your account.
Marco:
What you cannot still do is allow them to purchase stuff in the app using your system.
Marco:
So we're going to have a similar situation as we have now where you have that dumb situation with the Kindle app where you can go here and look at your books that you've already purchased.
Marco:
And we can't tell you how to purchase new ones, but you can look at these books.
Marco:
Look at them.
Marco:
How great are they?
Marco:
Oh, you want more books?
Marco:
Well, you've got to figure that out on your own.
Marco:
So it's going to probably still be that.
Marco:
But...
John:
but somewhere in the app they'll be allowed to link you probably out to safari like not definitely not like an in-app web i wonder if you'll be allowed to have a sentence next that link explaining that if you follow this link it's a place where you can buy ebooks and then you'll see them in this app i bet that's the key thing like the details right so if apple lets you have a link but all you can literally do is put a url that people can click on but you can't explain anything like you have to be able to put a sentence there that says hey
John:
Go to Amazon.com and buy Kindle books.
John:
And when you do that, you'll see them in this app.
John:
That's the key information that we can't get out to people.
John:
And like you said, they just have to figure it out on their own.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
My best guess here is that so there's still there's definitely not, you know, using your saved Amazon credit card to buy an e-book in the app.
John:
Except for maybe in Korea.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, that's true.
Marco:
Yes, in Korea, I believe by the wording of the laws we understand it, I believe that would be especially allowed in Korea.
Marco:
But what this is saying, I think, is we will literally just allow you to have a link in the app that will link out to your website to then have people do stuff there if they want to, but you're definitely not buying stuff in the app using their system, which is still an important change.
Marco:
That's still a really big deal, but it's not quite what people want.
John:
I skipped the important part of the Korean law.
John:
So the law is a thing that will prevent major platform owners like Google and Apple from restricting app developers to built-in payment systems.
John:
So basically saying, Apple and Google, you cannot restrict app developers to your payment systems, which implies that that means you'll be able to use other payment systems.
John:
It's no longer, you can't say you have to use in-app purchase, which leaves the door open to other things.
John:
And some people have been questioning, okay, well, what does Apple do?
John:
Do they have to build something or whatever?
John:
If Apple wanted and this becomes a law and Apple felt like they had to comply with it, like all their lobbying efforts to the U.S.
John:
government failed and they had to comply with it, they don't have to do anything.
John:
They just have to approve apps that do this because you can send an app to the app store app review right now that has a little web form that it takes a credit card.
John:
Like this is not complicated technology.
John:
Apple doesn't need to do anything.
John:
Apple probably should and will do something like by making APIs and so on and so forth.
John:
Right.
John:
They'll comply with the letter of the law, but say, hey, if you want to use alternate payment methods, use this new API that will trigger the parental controls and they ask to buy.
John:
And, you know, we'll be able to collect analytics on it and find out how bad we're doing against your payment.
John:
You know, like there are things Apple could do.
John:
But the thing about the Korean laws, Apple doesn't need to build or do anything technically.
John:
They just need to give thumbs up where previously they were giving thumbs down.
John:
uh because believe me app developer epic how epic shipped it already with it behind the toggle remember where they would uh take money you know for instead without using an app purchase app developers are more than capable of collecting money from people in iphone apps without any help from apple so i am interested to see how the korean thing shakes down assuming it gets signed into law and assuming apple has to comply with it then they have to choose are we just doing this in korea are we doing it worldwide and it seems like
John:
potentially more damaging than the Japan thing, now that we know more about it.
John:
The Japan thing seems like a
John:
you know, minor concession on the linking out thing subject to lots of details that we don't know the answers to in terms of how draconian is Apple going to make it?
John:
Are they going to let you explain what the link is for?
John:
Why do you only get one link?
John:
How annoying are they going to be during app review about getting your app through?
John:
Because Apple can say whatever it wants about the supposed rules on the app store, but experience has shown that even a 100% legit right down the middle within the rules thing can be very hard to get through app review because sometimes they just don't understand or disagree.
John:
about the reality of the app you've submitted to them well breaking news is that since we began is there any new press releases from apple besides the japan one i think only that one okay well just i don't know if we should wait a couple minutes to see if another one's okay i think this is the first time they've announced a significant app store rule change during our show what it's a wednesday what do they understand all right whatever
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
Marco:
It's that simple.
Marco:
Usually making websites, you know, if you were a nerd, it was at least time consuming.
Marco:
And if you weren't a nerd, it was basically impossible to make, you know, a cool website.
Marco:
And Squarespace just makes it super easy for anyone, regardless of your skill level, because there's no coding required at Squarespace.
Marco:
You can get in there and do everything you need visually with all these intuitive, easy to use, you know, drag and drop live previewing kind of tools.
Marco:
So everything is visual.
Marco:
There's no code anywhere.
Marco:
And so you can make sites incredibly quickly.
Marco:
And you start from an amazing place at Squarespace because all their templates are professionally designed.
Marco:
They look great on all devices all the time.
Marco:
And then you can customize them to fit your own preferences or branding or whatever you might need.
Marco:
So it doesn't all look like cookie cutter sites.
Marco:
Your site looks like your site because you've been able to customize it with all these amazing tools to have your colors, your branding, your arrangement of stuff even.
Marco:
It's really great at Squarespace.
Marco:
It's all backed by amazing support if you need it.
Marco:
Although...
Marco:
Frankly, it's so easy you probably won't need their support, but it's there if you need it.
Marco:
They're award-winning.
Marco:
They're really good.
Marco:
And you don't have to worry about things like keeping the servers running or applying security patches or dealing with high loads if you get a lot of traffic from somewhere.
Marco:
They take care of all that for you.
Marco:
See for yourself by starting a real free trial.
Marco:
You can build the whole site without giving them a credit card at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up after that trial, make sure to go back there again, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Casey:
So a week or two ago in the show notes, in the section that we keep for potential after show topics, the following appeared.
Casey:
Marco bought two new cameras.
Casey:
And then we were talking before the show and we thought, well, maybe we should upgrade that to an actual topic.
Casey:
So that time has come.
Casey:
Marco, what the hell are you spending money on, man?
Marco:
Uh, it's not what you think.
Marco:
And it's more than two now, actually.
Marco:
It was two.
Marco:
Oh God.
Casey:
Um, did you buy like a home, uh, security cameras?
Marco:
Yes, I did.
Marco:
Hey, you figured it out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Good.
Casey:
I want, I want all the knowledge you have about this because I want to do this on my, at, on whatever to my house, but I haven't done it yet.
Marco:
Okay, so I was hoping the trip of John with buying two new cameras, thinking I bought like, you know, a bunch of mirrorless stuff or whatever.
John:
No, my guess was, especially since I saw some stories about the new magnetic nest ones that has dissuaded me from buying those.
John:
So I hope you have some stories that are more encouraging than what I heard about those.
Marco:
So here's the deal here.
Marco:
So, you know, as I mentioned, you know, I kind of live in a party beach town.
Marco:
And as a result, you know, we have things like casual bike theft all the time.
Marco:
We also have, you know, we've – because it's a party town in the summertime, you definitely get people, you know, like –
Marco:
coming onto your property and doing weird stuff whether it's you know just like sneaking under your deck to drink if they're teenagers um or or worse uh it's just like you know it's certain things you kind of want to discourage and a lot of people around here have cameras and um so i thought you know what let me see i'll at least put a camera like where we park our bikes and in this area that that was under a part of our deck that that keeps getting like you know liquor bottles left there by strangers and we've
Marco:
caught people um enjoying each other there a few times and so like okay so you know let me put up some cameras and maybe that'll you know make the people go somewhere else um so uh i've had a little bit of experience before uh with nest cams uh we've we use nest cams um and for for a few years now um to like watch our porch to see like where packages delivered you know and we could like you know make sure we bring them in or whatever else
Marco:
we also would have nest cameras um like if we were like if we're going to be away from home for a while we would we put one like in the bedroom just in case like somebody broke in who knows right which has never happened but um we that's kind of the context of how we're using them um so the nest cameras we don't have the current models we have we have whatever the nest cams were that that were available like four years ago
Marco:
So the Nest Cams we have are admittedly very out of date.
Marco:
But at the time, they were something like $200 each.
Marco:
They weren't cheap, like $200 or $300 each.
Marco:
And we have a couple outdoor ones, a couple indoor ones.
Marco:
The ones I bought for this, I decided not to go with Nest because...
Marco:
First of all, Nest as a software and services company has just been going so far down the tubes in recent years.
Marco:
I believe I mentioned in the show a little while ago that I ripped out all the Nest thermostats in this house and replaced them all with the Echobee home-compatible ones because I was just so tired of dealing with Nest crap.
Marco:
Their stuff just is very unreliable.
Marco:
It's hard to set up.
Marco:
Their web service is down all the time.
Marco:
They're making this weird transition to thread radios that has a lot of bugs in this transition and makes it very hard to manage their thermostats and set them up and get them on the network.
Marco:
So I'm just like, I'm done with Nest.
Marco:
I'm so done with Nest.
Marco:
And then setting aside the fact that they are owned by Google, which has always been a little bit creepy.
Marco:
And when I first bought their stuff, they weren't.
Marco:
But anyway, so Nest, I wasn't super happy with.
Marco:
I also know from having Nest cameras for the last four or five years, whatever it's been, I know that...
Marco:
They are reliable in the sense that you will record video footage, but I also know that their object detection and people detection is really bad.
Marco:
It's really unreliable.
Marco:
I get false alarms all the time.
Marco:
The camera that I have set up all the time that's a nest in another location, I get an alert every single day that there's movement detected in my room because the sun moves.
Marco:
And the sun moves very slowly throughout every day.
Marco:
And you would think that Nest would accommodate for this and maybe design their algorithms to account for the fact that the sun is real.
Marco:
But they don't.
Marco:
I don't know if the new ones are better in this regard, but the old ones, they literally alert me every day that the sun has moved at about the same time every day.
Marco:
I've tried a little bit different positions of the camera.
Marco:
It doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
It always happens.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
Not super thrilled with Nest.
Marco:
Nest is also somewhat expensive.
Marco:
Nest is only cloud-based.
Marco:
It's recording and streaming stuff to the cloud.
Marco:
There is no local storage.
Marco:
There is no option for local storage.
Marco:
And you pay for their cloud service to retain your stuff for however you need to be retained.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Those are the downsides of Nest.
Marco:
So for this, I decided, let me look at other stuff.
Marco:
If it ends up I need to go to Nest, fine, but let me look at other stuff.
Marco:
So the two things I wanted to try were, first, I wanted to try HomeKit Secure Video, because this is what Apple keeps talking about in the keynotes and everything, and it looks really cool, and I love the idea that I'm not sending my video to some weird company's service.
Marco:
I'm sending it to Apple's weird service.
Casey:
Marco, you have a solution in your house already, but carry on.
Casey:
Synology does this, man.
Casey:
Synology does this.
Casey:
But carry on, carry on.
Casey:
Hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Did you really get a vibra-slap for Synology?
Casey:
I sure did.
John:
It doesn't have the elegance of the bell, I feel like.
John:
Maybe you need to get closer to the mic.
Marco:
It's more of an operation to pick it up and you got to hit it.
John:
The other solution you have in your house is your, what do you call it?
John:
What's your fancy Wi-Fi thingy?
John:
Ubiquity.
Marco:
yeah ubiquity they have they have security cameras too right yes they do but the thing is like i don't have a nas set up here i don't want one and i'm trying to get myself out of operating that kind of stuff like i don't want i don't want to deal with that my needs are not big enough for that anymore and so i don't want that kind of thing also you know the the cameras that are that are made for these kind of things are like they're like you know bigger bulkier you know like it's like it's more serious stuff and and that's my needs aren't that high either
John:
Even the Ubiquiti ones?
John:
I thought they were tiny, the Ubiquiti security cameras.
John:
Maybe I don't have a sense of scale when I see them online.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I'll have to look.
Marco:
But the impression I got was that they were bigger, higher-end stuff.
Marco:
Anyway, so the ones I first tried to get the Logitech Circle View...
Marco:
Uh, and, and the problem with the logic circle view is it's, it's like weirdly backordered and it's hard to get in there.
Marco:
It was going to be a long wait.
Marco:
And so I decided to take another risk also on the Eufy line, E-U-F-Y.
Marco:
This is Anchor's home security brand.
Marco:
Um, so Eufy has a bunch of options and some of them are HomeKit compatible.
Marco:
Some of them, most of them aren't.
Marco:
Um, but I decided, you know, let me, I'll get both.
Marco:
So I'll get a Logitech circle view and I'll get, um, I got the Eufy solo indoor cam C24.
Marco:
So a point of comparison here.
Marco:
So, you know, I said, I said Nest cams are like, you know, 150 to 200 bucks.
Marco:
Usually the Eufy indoor cams are $70 for a two pack.
Marco:
Oh my.
Marco:
And the outdoor models are like 80 to 150.
Marco:
The Logitech circle view is 160 and is outdoor sort of.
Marco:
And that sort of is important.
Marco:
The Logitech Circle View is outdoor compatible in the sense that the power cord is sealed around its back and it has no openings.
Marco:
But the power adapter it comes with, which is a USB power adapter, is not waterproof.
Marco:
So you can mount the camera in the elements, but then you have to run the cable to somewhere that's inside or sheltered.
John:
That's what I was thinking about.
John:
With your house, I would not want to drill any holes in your house.
John:
And I haven't.
John:
Maybe it's just me.
John:
So if the requirement is you must drill a hole in your house, I would pass on.
Marco:
no and i i definitely wouldn't do that i also you know i'm only trying to cover a couple of small areas here critically the areas that i want to cover are not visible from the street because i don't want my house to look like a prison like i i don't want to have like look at my cameras stay away like i don't want that i just want if people sneak under my house i want them to be discouraged and leave all that aside so here's how this stuff works in practice so first of all the eufy
Marco:
HomeKit support is terrible.
Marco:
It does not work reliably.
Marco:
It was very hard to set up.
Marco:
I did eventually get it working.
Marco:
It kept like disconnecting.
Marco:
And what you find out when you hook it up to HomeKit is that only a small subset of the camera's features are actually supported if it's in HomeKit mode.
Marco:
So I would not recommend the Eufy cameras for HomeKit.
Marco:
I did eventually, as I was playing with these over the last few weeks, my Logitech circle views did eventually come in.
Marco:
And so I mounted a circle view right next to a Eufy, looking at the same area.
Marco:
And I set up, you know, the Eufy, I set it up in just its own app.
Marco:
And the Logitech I set up, and yes, I did put a Eufy indoor camera outdoors.
John:
It's under shelter, so it's fine.
John:
This is your big thing now.
John:
You like to take non-outdoor electronics and put them outdoors because you think it's fine.
John:
yeah well because the eufy ones that that are outdoor compatible they weren't shipping yet like the ones that i wanted um is that is that an explanation like the problem here is putting thing electronics that aren't waterproof outside where there's water and you're like well the other one wasn't shipping so it's okay yeah well it's when when it's a two-pack for 70 bucks and i can put it under a shelter and they're practically practically disposable
Marco:
so um so yeah so i i have like the eufy and the logitech right next to each other to to kind of compare like how good these are and i have the eufy running only through its own app now and what's interesting about the eufy is that it they don't have well i guess i think they do have a cloud service but you don't have to use their cloud service they you can view their cameras remotely which i guess it just like you know relays through them to like to like you know set up the ip connection but but your camera is not recording to their cloud
Marco:
Your camera has local storage.
Marco:
Like you put a micro SD card on it or some of the other ones have like built in, you know, solid state storage.
Marco:
So when you connect to your camera, you're just having it play back from its own local storage.
John:
And I like that a lot because this is I've thought about this, like with the storage question.
John:
And I know why people don't want like their private footage from like especially inside their house going up to a cloud thing.
John:
But anything where there's storage in your house, and especially if the storage is in the camera, I feel like almost defeats the purpose because, you know, I don't know.
John:
I don't know how smart thieves are, but it's like, look, you just yank the camera off the wall, and now you've got the camera and all the footage.
John:
So you commit the robbery, break into the house, get the stuff, and on your way out, yank the camera off the wall.
John:
And you're on your way, and you've got the little SD card with the footage of you doing the crime.
John:
And you're all set.
John:
And if it's in your house, same deal.
John:
If they break into your house, they can just go find your servers, yank all this.
John:
I mean, that's hard, obviously.
John:
Yank all this stuff out and they got the footage.
John:
Wherever it's recording constantly to the cloud, there's nothing they can do to your house that prevents the recording from happening.
John:
Never mind that having a recording of someone breaking into your house means nothing because the police are never going to do anything about it and you're never going to get your stuff back.
John:
But just let's pretend for a second.
John:
I'll get to that.
John:
That's not the case.
Marco:
But yeah, you're right.
Marco:
And this is why I think HomeKit Secure Video is an interesting option because HomeKit is streaming to the cloud.
Marco:
But here's a key difference for HomeKit Secure Video.
Marco:
It is not a constant recording.
Marco:
It is event-based.
Marco:
So it doesn't record 24-7 to the cloud.
Marco:
It's looking for motion.
Marco:
And if it detects motion, then it records for some brief amount of time until it stops detecting motion.
Marco:
So you have only events.
Marco:
So one thing I was curious to see, it's like,
Marco:
Well, how responsive are they?
Marco:
Like if somebody walks into this area real fast, grabs my bike and walks out, is it going to react fast enough to start that recording and send that to me or not?
Marco:
And so if you actually want continuous recording, 24-7 recording, Nest does that to the cloud.
Marco:
and Eufy's cameras will do it to their internal storage.
Marco:
Obviously, it'll probably wear out your microSD card faster, but they will do it.
Marco:
If it's an option, it's off by default.
Marco:
So anyways, that's an option you have with those.
Marco:
You don't have that option with HomeKit Secure Video.
Marco:
Basics here, the image quality on the modern cameras, the Eufy and the Logitech's, is great.
Marco:
This is one of those areas where the progress of technology...
Marco:
i can't believe the eufy image quality for 70 for a two-pack it's really good um the logitech circle view is a much more like almost a fisheye view it's ultra wide i think i think it's actually 180 degree it's right there in the name circle and a circle as we know is 180 degrees the front of every camera is a circle
John:
The opening to the lens is a circle.
John:
A circle is in profile, not head on.
John:
Yes, I know.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I swear if someone writes and tells us a circle is 360.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, go ahead.
John:
Sometimes I make a joke and I think better of it.
John:
Let me just save myself.
John:
I was trying to make a joke.
John:
Was it funny?
John:
No, but please.
Marco:
So anyway, so the motion detection, the image quality.
Marco:
So the image quality is actually great.
Marco:
As I said, the new ones, they're far better than whatever my old Nest cameras are, which, of course, that makes sense.
Marco:
That's like five years later.
Marco:
The ultra wide fisheye view of the Logitech is nice in a small space.
Marco:
But it's less useful if your camera is going to be higher up or further away from the area you're looking at.
Marco:
And the problem with HomeKit Secure Video is that there's almost no cameras that support it.
Marco:
It's like two or three models of cameras that are actually on the market that support it.
Marco:
And the Logitech is the only outdoor one.
Marco:
uh that's currently the market so that's that's a little bit you know the again welcome to home kit right like you have less choice but i will say the logitech again the eufy it has home kit support officially on this model but it sucks don't use it it doesn't and i couldn't even get recordings working like i can only get live view working through home kit on the eufy
Marco:
The Logitech works perfectly.
Marco:
Like it is exactly what I want.
Marco:
So Logitech circle view to HomeKit secure video is a great setup if that fits what you want.
Marco:
Again, it is an outdoor camera, but you have to, the power cord is something like maybe like about 10 feet long.
Marco:
So you have to, you know, not put it too far from some kind of sheltered area where you could have the power adapter.
Marco:
The video quality is great.
Marco:
And one thing I noticed for a while,
Marco:
And so I ran this in our bike area, which gets multiple events per day because me and Tiff and Adam, we're going in and out of the area all the time.
Marco:
Occasionally, somebody will creep and try to look under our house.
Marco:
So we have the actual use case there as well.
Marco:
All of this has happened a lot over the few weeks that I've had these cameras up.
Marco:
And so I have a good amount of data now.
Marco:
And I can tell you that the...
Marco:
the person detection for them like the motion and you can you can say like detect any motion or detect people or animals i think one other thing um and that works great and in fact between the logitech using home kit and the eufy camera using its own app
Marco:
Both of them would notify me at almost exactly the same time.
Marco:
Every time I would go under there to get my bike out or somebody else would go under there, I was notified on time every time.
Marco:
And as far as I remember, I had zero false positives.
Marco:
There was never a time when either camera said it detected a person and there wasn't a person there.
Marco:
So good on them.
Marco:
And there were also zero times where I went under there and it didn't detect me.
Marco:
So it seems like the the people detection for both for both Eufy and, you know, HomeKit secure video are it's great.
Marco:
And it worked so much better than Nest.
Marco:
I can't even tell you.
Marco:
So big, big thumbs up there.
Marco:
The HomeKit, the Eufy one, you can you can configure it to put a thumbnail like a still thumbnail in.
Marco:
in the notification payload so that when you get the notification on your watch or your phone or whatever, you can pop it up right there and you can see that.
Marco:
Eufy's app, you can also install on a Mac if you have an M1 Mac because it's in the Mac App Store because they didn't opt out of the M1 iPad app compatibility.
Marco:
So that's all really nice.
Marco:
The Logitech one, it just shows up in the home app.
Marco:
so for all the pluses and minuses that means the logitech one it's right there in the home app it's very convenient um it does alert everyone in the home so like tiff was complaining that she's getting all these alerts but but i was gonna say one of the things i always see about home kit video is they always show the picture of someone watching tv and then someone's at the front door and this little picture and picture pops up on their apple tv and i don't want that is there a way to not make that happen
Marco:
You know, I didn't actually see if that works.
Marco:
There was never a time we were watching TV when somebody did was under there.
John:
So I have to be watching Apple TV, I assume, too.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Well, we usually are.
Marco:
But yeah, but I will.
Marco:
I'll take a look.
Marco:
I'll try to reproduce that and see if I can get it to work.
John:
I don't know if that feature is actually out yet or if that's like I feel like that's an anti feature.
Marco:
I mean, you could probably turn it off.
John:
Like if you're watching TV, that's the last thing that I want.
John:
Like, sure, by all means, notify me on my phone.
John:
And if I have my phone on, do not disturb.
John:
That's a signal I don't even want to be notified about that.
John:
But don't pop it up on top of the TV show I'm watching.
John:
It's basically letting someone outside your house screw with your television show.
Marco:
One of the problems of HomeKit is that there aren't a lot of settings and options.
Marco:
There's some, and the ones they have do seem to work pretty well.
Marco:
I'm happy with that overall.
Marco:
Also, the Eufy app
Marco:
has i mean yeah it's it's what you'd expect from like a manufacturer making an app it's not like the best ui but it works really well and the only the only thing that home kit really outclassed it on is that the home kit notifications would have video clips instead of image clips so the home notifications you could like hit little play on them or like you know open it up to you know make it you know
Marco:
you push it so it opens it up and you can actually see a brief video clip of what's going on so that's really nice um so again the home kit just seems like a little bit of an upgrade in like how well it integrates with your apple stuff obviously uh but the eufy app is really good and for 70 bucks for a two-pack again for the indoor camera but still
Marco:
That's really good.
Marco:
And so I'm actually going to keep the oofy ones, even though I think I'm going to go all HomeKit for the outside needs with one little possible change in the future, which I'll get to in a second.
Marco:
So a couple of weeks ago, during recording this show...
Marco:
i got a notification on my watch that somebody was spotted under the deck and again we are recording the show while this is happening and i open up the app on the phone to see what's going on and i see you know a young couple enjoying each other and i'm like oh god i don't want to deal with this oh my no i mean it wasn't you know quite that bad but it would have i mean it would have gotten there
Marco:
it was going that direction and so i'm like all right i'm like i don't i don't i just want them to leave like i don't i don't want to deal with this i don't want to like call the cops either and also i'm recording a podcast it's like i don't want someone there's like i don't want to i just don't want to deal with this right so at first i messaged tiff i'm like hey can you go like you know go down there like turn the light on or something um and eventually i learned she's not home and so i'm like okay what do i do and i see in the eufy app there's one of those options that you can speak through the camera
Marco:
oh nice and i'm like okay great so i just i held down my mute button here to you guys and i talked to the camera and i said something like you should leave nice like what do you say right and you could tell they kind of like looked up for a second and then like kind of you know went back to it i'm like oh crap so i'm like maybe that maybe they're just like you know they're gonna get up in a second
John:
they didn't so if like you know a few seconds later i i said something something i like you leave now or so i forget exactly what it was something like that then they got up and left why don't you just say i am watching you on my security camera and i would like you to leave like you could say full sentences like you have to spell it out because they're highly motivated not to stop what they're doing so you really need to you really need to make the case
Marco:
i didn't i i wasn't sure like how clear the voice would be coming through you know i don't want it to sound just like i chose like few words you know anyway and i and i don't know what to say what am i gonna do like and the other thing is i don't want to sound like a jerk because what if they vandalize my house you know like i don't it's like there's no good way out of this right so anyway so you know they they left and so all right fine you know problem solved i didn't have to like involve the cops or go out there and interrupt the show or anything like that so good okay
Marco:
so that's i caught that and i guess took care of it um i also you know there were a number of occasions where we've seen people literally just walk up to our house and like peer under it and like look around and then they see the camera they kind of like run a little bit um but like the other day somebody came under the house where this where the young couple was being that and um some guy just comes under and like changes his bathing suit
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
In the middle of the day.
Casey:
And I'm like, that's spectacular.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, I have cameras.
Marco:
They work.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But I wonder, was I better off not knowing before?
Marco:
Maybe, is this actually serving an actionable role here?
Marco:
Am I actually getting actionable information from these cameras?
Marco:
And I'm not sure that I am.
Marco:
So if things were actually getting stolen or broken into, then we'd have a different story.
Marco:
Then I could try to bring these videos to the police and have what John said happen, which is nothing.
Marco:
So again, it's like,
Marco:
i don't even know how actionable this would be and the other problem is that people don't seem to be seeing the cameras so i think what i actually want to do is add like motion lights i think that no no not motion lights you need what you first of all
John:
If you could buy like, you know when you go to Ikea and they have the little like cardboard television sets to show the furniture?
John:
You don't need cameras.
John:
You just need like the shell of a camera, like a little blown plastic thing that looks like a camera.
John:
They sell those.
John:
What you need is signage.
John:
You learned anything from if you've ever done anything like in upstate New York or whatever that say this area under surveillance with a giant red arrow pointing to your fake camera.
John:
Right.
John:
That might get people's leave.
John:
And motion lights can contribute to that because how are they going to read the sign when it's dark?
John:
Like, so that's part of it.
John:
But like, it's the reason people have all those signs on their lawn of like burglar.
John:
You know, the cameras only work as a deterrent if people know they're there.
John:
So you need signage.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Well, but again, I don't want my house to look like a prison and I don't want it.
Marco:
And I don't want to be a jerk.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So I'm trying to avoid that.
Marco:
Like, again, this is like my goal here is can I just make these problems go away?
Marco:
I don't I don't want to be a jerk.
Marco:
I don't want to, you know, look like I'm a massive Republican.
Marco:
Like, I just want people to not be doing weird stuff under my house.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, like, what I'm going to try next is I just ordered the new Eufy camera that has a built in light on the camera.
Marco:
That's a real certified outdoor camera.
Marco:
So John is happy.
Marco:
So I ordered one of those.
Marco:
I'm going to try that in one of these areas and see how it is.
John:
Which model is that?
John:
I was looking at these UV things.
John:
I can't find the model that you were talking about.
John:
It's two for 70 bucks or something.
John:
Tell us model numbers.
Marco:
Two for 70 bucks is the Solo Indoor Cam C24.
Marco:
And the one I just ordered is the L20.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's the L20.
Marco:
It just came out like last week.
Marco:
So I'm hoping this will improve things.
Marco:
He's like, I actually don't want video footage of people doing stupid stuff under my house.
Marco:
I just want them to not do it.
Marco:
Or if they're thinking about starting to do it, maybe they run away before they leave liquor bottles and stuff behind.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's the main goal here.
Marco:
So I'm going to try some kind of motion light options and see if that does better because ultimately the cameras are working great, but I'm not sure I actually am benefiting from having them in my life.
Marco:
Now, I do intend to keep at least the Euphys going indoors sometimes because what I want is also during this few weeks that I've had these cameras, we had to evacuate because of a hurricane coming up the coast.
Marco:
And so I set up the indoor cams indoors, John.
Marco:
To look at areas of my house that I was afraid might be like water leak risks or damage risk areas if a hurricane came that was really strong.
Marco:
And so I was able, as we were not here anymore because we were evacuated, I was able to monitor how my house was doing in the storm.
Marco:
And that was great.
Marco:
I was very happy to have that ability.
Marco:
And again, to have that with no cloud service monthly fee kind of stuff, to have that just be on these cameras in here, that was awesome.
Marco:
And so that was, again, for $70 for a two-pack, highly recommended.
John:
That's kind of the same thing, though, is your question about what value am I getting?
John:
Like...
John:
being able to see in real time as a lawn chair comes through your windows i mean i suppose it could be uh diverting and entertaining but the bottom line is you're not there there's nothing you can do about it and you're going to come back to your house and we know people who were here including our contractor like we we know people who could who could come and so you're going to send someone over and say hey a chair just went through our our uh sliding glass door could you go over there and what remove the chair and put plywood up on our house like it's
Marco:
Not during the storm, but afterwards, I could say, oh, we can't come back for another day or two or whatever.
Marco:
Can you go put plastic over it?
Marco:
Obviously, I hope that never happens, but it does provide a level of peace of mind to be able to look directly at, look, here is my sliding door that leaks water during heavy storms sometimes, and look, it's not leaking.
John:
Yeah, I guess it's better to know that it's safe.
John:
Like you want to know you want a positive result.
John:
If you have a negative result, that doesn't really help.
John:
It's almost like, well, we'll find out when we get there.
John:
But the positive result is you can sleep easy knowing that nothing bad happened to your house.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I was nervous as hell all night and I kept I like woke up a couple of times and checked the cameras.
Marco:
and it's like a baby monitor like you wake up you look at it you know it's like that's because when because you're nervous right so that's it made sense that's not the kind of thing that would be healthy to do all the time but in a situation where like oh i live near the coast and there's a hurricane like that's that's a big thing to do like that that helps a lot um so i i definitely will love keeping the indoor cams around for that kind of thing when you know if we can't be here and some kind of severe weather is happening or something
Marco:
That's a great time to have indoor cams.
Marco:
I do not intend to have indoor cameras in my house all the time.
Marco:
That to me is not the kind of lifestyle that I want to leave.
Marco:
But the outdoor cams, hopefully I can find some kind of balance with maybe motion light integration to serve as the deterrent role that I want them to serve without being too oppressive.
John:
Yeah, I feel like you can mount all sorts of like what would otherwise be fairly ugly and, you know, like oppressive stuff under the bottom of your house where it's not visible until you go under there to change your bathing suit.
John:
And then you see the big sign with the arrow pointing to smile for the camera.
John:
Right.
John:
And then the motion light comes on the one under your house.
John:
And hopefully you can also mount the stuff under your house to point at the bike area.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like no one can see that unless you are, in fact, trespassing and wandering around under your house.
John:
Right.
John:
But otherwise your house looks normal.
Marco:
I mean, that's how they are now.
Marco:
The problem is they're too subtle now.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
But I'm saying, like, you should feel free to get less subtle with big scary signs and humor and motion lights because it doesn't make your house look like a prison because it's all underneath.
Marco:
Well, but I also, like, I don't want... Like, every time I go get my bike out, I don't want to have a sign saying, smile for the camera.
Marco:
Like, that's such a jerk move.
Marco:
Because, like, I always, like... On my old dog walk route, there was this house that has...
Marco:
You've probably seen these.
Marco:
It's like it's like a cast iron thing you stick in the ground that is a silhouette of a dog pooping.
Marco:
And it says under it, no.
John:
They've made their house ugly.
John:
Right.
Marco:
These people are so obsessed with dogs not pooping on their lawn that they have a statue of a dog pooping.
Marco:
on their lawn like that to me that's ridiculous like i i would never want that that that to me is like a weird like toxic attitude thing so i don't want an intimidating sign in front of my bike all the time that i'm going to multiple times a day and that my whole family is going to like i don't want signs to be like look look at the camera you're under surveillance like that's that's not the kind of thing i want to do so that's why i'm hoping like i'm hoping a motion light setup combined with a visible camera
John:
should probably make this a balance that that works enough but it doesn't make it doesn't like you know make me feel like i live in a prison take a look at the the most obnoxious dog uh you know deterrent sign i've ever seen in my life i just put it in the slack oh my god this is a whole paragraph yes very poorly written casey would you like to read this because because i feel like it has some of your my goodness i also like the the dollar sign s that reminds me of you casey would you like to do a dramatic reading here
Casey:
Hi, we hope you're enjoying your dog walk.
Casey:
Just in an off chance you don't realize that what your dog does in our lawn costs us hundreds dollar sign letter S every year to fix.
Casey:
We assure you it does.
Casey:
Please keep your dog off our lawn.
Casey:
If you still decide to let your dog use our lawn, please smile for the camera.
Casey:
Have a nice day.
John:
They've got a comma splice.
John:
They've got dollar sign S and they've got a lot of attitude.
Marco:
And can you imagine like having this on your house?
Marco:
So you see it all the time.
Marco:
Like that's, that's not the kind of attitude.
Marco:
Like I, I just, I don't want that kind of attitude, you know?
John:
And this is, this gets into the same problem that Marco was just saying before.
John:
If you still decide to let your dog use her lawn, please smile for the camera.
John:
Okay.
John:
What the hell is the camera going to do?
John:
Are you going to use the photo to track me down?
John:
And what?
John:
Nothing's going to come of this.
John:
You can't get anything to happen from having footage of something.
John:
Maybe if you're, if you're the neighbor down the street and they'll be like, and now I know the neighbor down the street is doing it.
John:
so what now you're going to sick the police on your neighbor you're going to sue your neighbor like this is the type of and what do you have at the end of the day you have a bunch of videos of dog pooping like why why who wants that right and then you have to use them as evidence to say this dog is doing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to our lawn you're going to bring your neighbor to small claims court it's like what kind of what kind of life do you want to lead at that point exactly yeah it's like i don't want like you don't want
Marco:
If you're so obsessed with dogs not pooping on your lawn, but then you spend time in your day reviewing footage of dogs pooping on your lawn.
John:
And planning your lawsuits, right?
John:
Whatever you're going to do, like turn them into the police.
John:
Like it's just, yeah, you're not going to be a popular neighbor and you may want to pick your battles slightly different.
John:
And honestly, I walked past their lawn.
John:
There was no dog poop on their lawn.
John:
Like, I think maybe it's a different neighborhood than I live in, but I think everyone around here is pretty good about picking up her dog poop.
John:
People should pick up the dog poop, for sure.
John:
But that sign feels like overkill.
John:
Maybe it works.
John:
Maybe that's why there's no dog poop.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
Maybe no dogs live in this neighborhood, and they're just waiting for somebody.
John:
Like, the person who buys a gun just waiting for someone to break into their house so they can be a hero.
Yeah.
Casey:
So, Marco, I have to ask you, why didn't you look at power over Ethernet powered cameras?
Casey:
Because I know almost nothing about any of this.
Casey:
And I have not started my research or anything.
Casey:
But it seemed to me like if I were to do it, I would do something that is powered via PoE.
Casey:
And would be streamed either to my Synology or I am right there with you with HomeKit Secure Video or whatever it's called.
Casey:
I think one of those two options.
Casey:
So if you do PoE, then it makes a lot of the indoor-outdoor, in terms of power anyway, go away, doesn't it?
Casey:
Or is that not solving the problem I think it's solving?
John:
So you'd have PoE Eufy.
John:
Eufy is such a terrible name.
John:
It's like someone trying to hold in a sneeze.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, so if I was doing like a really serious setup for something that had larger needs, or if I was putting a camera somewhere where there weren't nearby outlets for USB cables, fine.
Marco:
But these cameras, they need like a micro USB one amp.
Marco:
Like you can feed them off of anything.
Marco:
And so their needs just aren't that high.
Marco:
Now, as you get into things like cameras with bright lights in them,
Marco:
then you have more serious needs.
Marco:
And that being said, usually most of the cameras in this space, at least the outdoor ones at least, most of them have batteries.
Marco:
And the idea usually is because they're not doing continuous recording, because they're doing event-based recording, motion-based recording, then they can run on battery for months at a time without needing to be recharged.
Marco:
Some of them have batteries and USB, and you can run USB to them if you want to, to have continuous power or not.
Marco:
So there's lots of options here.
Marco:
And again, this is why I was actually pretty impressed with Eufy's offerings if you don't need HomeKit compatibility, because they have tons more models that don't have HomeKit.
Marco:
And
Marco:
because like you know the home kit secure video thing it works great again as i said but there's just so few hardware options to choose from so if you have certain needs like that like you have way more options in other people's ecosystems but yeah the poe stuff my needs just aren't that that high you know if i if i my main need here is a deterrent and if i really need like you know
Marco:
perfect crisp 4k video to to turn into the police and have them you know analyze it like csi like that's one thing but that's not reality for if definitely not for me and theoretically for not for anybody like that's that's not a kind of thing that i really need um so in this case you know deterring people from stealing our bikes and having fun under our deck um that's that's all i really want to do
Casey:
Well, then, to build on your call for listeners' help with regard to Atom and programming, if, listeners, you have a power-over-ethernet-powered camera that works well with HomeKit and or Synology surveillance station, then I would like to hear about it via Twitter.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
So do let me know.
Marco:
See, I don't even want to use something called surveillance station.
Marco:
Like, that to me, that's so, like, imposing.
Marco:
I don't want that.
Casey:
home kit secure video is so much more friendly it is the same thing though it's cameras that record people doing stuff under your neck i know i know exactly i don't know i i my dad uses um surveillance station with like three or four cameras in and in and out of his house and he seems to think it works pretty well um i have only very briefly looked at you know his setup and i haven't quizzed him about what he's done and how he's done it and so on and so forth but
Casey:
Yeah, if you have a suggestion for a camera, indoor or outdoor, please let me know.
Casey:
I'm probably more concerned about out than in.
Casey:
Actually, I am more concerned about out than in.
Casey:
But if you have a suggestion, please let me know on Twitter.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Fastmail.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So Casey, it says here in the show notes, you are trying out bottom doc.
John:
Is that code for something?
Marco:
It's something that happens under my deck.
Casey:
Well played.
Casey:
No, this is with regard to Connected episode 358, which I think it was a couple of weeks ago at this point.
Casey:
And the title of the episode was Roast My Doc.
Casey:
And this was, I think it was Mike and Steven.
Casey:
I think Federico was out that week, if I recall correctly.
Casey:
And, um, and they were, you know, making fun of each other's docs.
Casey:
And I have very strong opinions as I am want to do about where the doc should be.
Casey:
And for forever in a day, I have been of the opinion that the doc should be on the left-hand side of the screen and it should be always auto hidden.
Casey:
I am, and this is where everyone's going to get very angry at me.
Casey:
I do like magnification.
Casey:
I am a magnification user, which I know drives everyone nuts.
Casey:
I don't have it magnifying very much, but I do like it.
Casey:
And that is the way I had my doc.
Casey:
Now, I am not really looking to turn this into a roast my doc, like reprise, if you will.
Casey:
But just for context, John, where do you keep your doc generally speaking?
John:
Bottom on desktops and on laptops, either bottom or right.
John:
Doing it on the left is ridiculous because we live in a country where the predominant language is left to right.
Casey:
So why does that make the left ridiculous?
John:
Because that's where your windows start with the text in them.
John:
And I don't want to dock...
John:
overlapping them and i don't have to avoid it that's prime real estate that's why the cursor starts in the upper left hand corner of the mac screen when you boot or i think it still does but like that's that's the origin upper left you read from left to right top to bottom in english and we're all reading using our macs in english so left hand dock is ridiculous now you hide it so it's not that big of a deal it's not really messing with your window space so it's whatever but anyway that's what i do bottom everywhere pretty much but if i do it on a side because i have a small laptop screen i do it on the right side
John:
And pinned to the bottom back when I could pin.
Casey:
Yeah, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
All right, and Marco, what's your situation?
Marco:
I'm a left docker with no auto-hide, except on laptops where I do auto-hide.
Marco:
Interesting.
Marco:
I am a side docker, which is for the same reason that almost everyone, except apparently you and John, but almost everybody would choose the side because...
Marco:
we usually have much more width in our screens these days than height.
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep.
Casey:
And I'm glad you brought that up because that's exactly how I landed on a side dock myself.
Casey:
It occurred to me, wait, what am I doing?
Casey:
And this is early on in my Mac life when I would not auto-hide.
Casey:
What am I doing having this dock taking up all of this precious vertical real estate when every Mac I own is a widescreen?
Casey:
So why would I not put it on the side?
John:
Well, I can give you an answer to that question.
John:
So everyone, yes, the screens are wider than they are tall, unless you have an XDR and rotate it, which is a possibility.
John:
But still, they're wider than they are tall.
John:
But that doesn't mean that vertical space is more valuable to you than horizontal, because being able to make a window an extra inch tall
John:
might have less value to you than having an extra inch of width in which to arrange more windows.
John:
So maybe you could have three nicely sized window, but oh, the dock is overlapping one of them.
John:
So I have to make one window narrower than I want it.
John:
Whereas if you have to cut an inch off the bottom, it's probably not that big a deal because in general, width is more important than height when reading stuff because you want a reasonable size width to contain the content.
John:
But of course, you're always going to scroll, especially if they're web browser windows or text editor windows is always more vertically, but you want to get a good size horizontally.
John:
So
John:
I'm not saying this is wrong.
John:
Like, you know, again, there is more horizontal space and you can divide it up how you want.
John:
But I would introduce the thought technology that it could be in your situation, depending on how you do window management, that horizontal space is more valuable to you, even though there is more of it around than vertical space.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
I can't say I agree with you.
Casey:
And I've reached the same conclusion as Marco.
John:
Try bottom dock for a while, Steve.
John:
What'd you think?
Casey:
Well, it's funny you bring that up because it occurred to me, well, I'm not doing the always visible dock anymore.
Casey:
And I haven't for, I don't even know how long.
Casey:
I don't recall when I made the switch from always visible to auto hide, but it was many, many, many years ago.
John:
Do you have the animation cranked down?
John:
no no so using the default animation delay with auto hot i find that a little bit i feel like i'm waiting around and if people don't know that you can do that you can make the animation delay basically zero so as soon as your cursor hits the edge the dock just appears fully formed in its position and i feel like auto hide in general if you do that the edge is so much less important because the dock isn't getting in the way of any of your windows because it's not visible all the
Casey:
And that's exactly it.
Casey:
It occurred to me, well, wait a second.
Casey:
Since I'm auto-hiding anyway, it doesn't matter what side of the screen I'm on.
Casey:
I can put it wherever I want because it's not taking up real estate always, always, always, always.
Casey:
And so for the last couple of weeks now, I've been trying BottomDoc and my...
Casey:
probably decade maybe less than that but many years of muscle memory is I'm still reaching for the left hand side of the screen as my like default idle gesture but I think I kind of like having bottom dock again especially since for better or worse I often have many different applications running and my dock is often relatively large so I wanted to encourage those of you who maybe had very strong feelings about side dock when you were not auto hiding if you're an auto hide person like I am maybe consider using the bottom dock again
John:
And one advantage to what you just said is like now you can, you know, you have more room for your dock.
John:
You can also make your dock bigger.
John:
Like I like looking at nice icons.
John:
I mean, granted, we're not in a good age of Mac icons right now because the current predominant style is pretty boring.
John:
But, you know, I still use custom icons for some things or whatever.
John:
It's nice to see pretty icons for your apps.
John:
And if you're auto hiding.
John:
like why not have big meaty click targets when they come up, right?
John:
Make them really big.
John:
They'll shrink if there's not enough room, right?
John:
But you've got all that room down there.
John:
And for magnification, I haven't tested this in recent years, but magnification as originally implemented doesn't actually make the click targets any bigger.
John:
So if you want to make the click targets bigger, you kind of have to actually just make the dock bigger.
John:
But again, if you're auto hiding, no big deal.
John:
So I would say try that.
John:
Try giving yourself a little bit bigger dock than you expect.
John:
And then maybe try turning magnification off and see if you prefer that, because I get what you like the magnification.
John:
It feels like it's bigger and it's the one you're going to click on is more prominent and you can kind of make sure you're on the one that you wanted.
John:
But if you just made all the icons as big as your current magnification size, try that for a little bit.
Casey:
I take your point.
Casey:
Anyway, I just thought it was a fun observation because I was very, very devout in my side dock only.
Casey:
You would be a monster to use the bottom dock until I had that epiphany slash apostrophe that I could put it on the bottom with auto hide and everyone's still happy.
John:
Or you could be like me and have two docs on your screen at all times.
John:
I mean, talk about bad, like hard habits to break, like from, you know, from Mac OS 8, whatever.
John:
Like I'm so used to having the list of running applications and a little, you know, vertical, running application icons and a vertical list in the upper right corner of my screen.
John:
And my cursor just goes up there.
John:
And so I have, yes, Switch Glass, my silly little thing that basically has a little icons for all our running apps in the upper right.
John:
And then I also have the dock, which also features all my running apps, plus a bunch of folders, plus the trash can.
John:
As I've said many times, I would love to not have to run the dock.
John:
But I do because a bunch of the stuff that the doc does can't be done with public APIs anywhere else.
John:
And no one is willing to maintain, including me, to maintain an application that somehow hacks into the private APIs to get the notification badges and the menus and the notification bounces and all the other things that only the doc can do.
John:
You know, so I'm kind of stuck with it.
John:
But hey, that's another reason I have this giant screen.
John:
I can afford to have two always visible things showing all my running apps and still have plenty of room for everything.