Owned With a P
Marco:
So, I almost didn't make the show tonight.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Stuck in the sand?
Casey:
No, because he forgot to fill up with gas.
Marco:
No, although I'll tell you one thing, man.
Marco:
Driving on the sand uses a lot of gas.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's kind of like running on the sand, dude.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And, you know, because like, you know, A, I'm running on, you know, low tire pressure, right?
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
driving on sand is like, you know, walking through maple syrup.
Marco:
Like, you know, it's just it's a very inefficient way to move.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I mean, that's I think like I think my my living here, you know, especially in a house that generates a very large quantity of solar power and not going to work every day.
Marco:
Like, I think overall, my carbon footprint is probably not too bad.
Marco:
Um, but certainly the, when I do, when I do have to drive here, oh my God, it's, it's, uh, it's embarrassing.
Marco:
You know, we recorded at 8 PM at about 6 30 PM.
Marco:
Um, my son started a project that required having to print things to a printer.
Marco:
Oh no.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong along this process.
Marco:
So, you know, first of all, we start out.
Marco:
Oh, it's out of paper.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Go get paper.
Marco:
And this is like, you know, because like, OK, this house was designed to be a summer house.
Marco:
And so we don't have large storage, you know, large closets.
Marco:
My office here is very small.
Marco:
And where this printer is is on a shelf in a closet.
Marco:
The water shelf.
John:
Well, the one below the water shelf.
John:
It's a nice damp stacks of paper right next to it.
Marco:
yeah exactly no actually it's the same shelf yeah so getting to like the paper trays and you know it's it's an ordeal with this printer you have to like you know take it out of the shelf it's on oh and the whole time to reach it you're like on a step stool anyway like you know so it's it's a whole thing stop putting electronics in closets can we just stop that that should have stopped as soon as devices required active cooling
Marco:
We hardly ever use... It's an Epson all-in-one ink whatever printer.
Marco:
It's an inkjet.
Marco:
It's hardly ever even on.
Marco:
Okay, so number one, to use this printer, I have to pull out the stepstool from the closet that it's in, step up, and turn it on.
Marco:
Wait for it to make all of its noises.
Marco:
Why not just leave it on?
Marco:
Because if you leave Epson printers on all the time, they keep their ink heads warm, allegedly, and it basically makes them permaclog in less time.
Marco:
If you have an Epson printer, you will probably know that over time, eventually the head gets so clogged or otherwise messed up that no cleaning cycle will fix it and you have to replace the printer.
Marco:
So I've learned a long time ago that if you don't leave it powered on,
Marco:
But with Epson in particular, you can make the printer last way longer because it apparently, you know, lengthens that process.
Marco:
So anyway, so, you know, we start printing, you know, get the step letter out, turn the printer on.
Marco:
Oh, no paper.
Marco:
Oh, got to get paper.
Marco:
Oh, it's special photo paper.
Marco:
Well, we have to, the photo paper package we have is empty.
Marco:
We have to open a new package of photo paper, find that, you know, this whole thing.
Marco:
First couple prints go through.
Marco:
At one point, oh, out of ink.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Go get the box of spare ink.
Marco:
Now, again, a printer that lives in a shelf replacing the ink on it.
Marco:
You've got to pull it out.
Casey:
It shouldn't be in a closet.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I think the shelf here might be the crux of the issue.
Marco:
There's nowhere else to put it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
eventually you know get out get the we i replace all of the colors because there are one one was out and this is the kind of printer that if it thinks the ink is out which i know it's really not it's just based on page count or whatever but if it thinks the ink is out this printer will not print anything except black and white and these are we're printing photos so it's like okay that's not gonna work so replace all the cartridges fine get it back in there print a couple more then
Marco:
It starts complaining, hey, paper's not in tray one.
Marco:
Well, yeah, I know it's in tray two, but there's no option to tell it, like, just load it from tray two.
Marco:
All you can do is either put paper in tray one, which is the CD printing tray, so you can't, or cancel the print job.
Marco:
okay so go through all right try this try this setting oh and he's printing it from an ipad so go find out is there something wrong there reboot everything i even rebooted the router like just reboot everything trying to get it to say it just would not draw from tray 2 no matter what i did finally we got it to print to tray 2 and it comes out and it's tiny it's pretty tiny now
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Eventually, it took another like, you know, half hour of troubleshooting and four or five, you know, wrong prints that are now just garbage before we finally realized that somewhere deep in the setting, something had turned to four by six size paper instead of, you know, letter size paper.
Marco:
It just, it took so long.
Marco:
It's like printers.
Marco:
I hate printers so much.
Marco:
This is why like my giant HP like tank that I have.
Marco:
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Marco:
It's the only printer that's ever, never let me down.
John:
Would have been faster for you to print to the other house and then drive and go get it.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
By the time you got there, it would already be out.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, I mean, it's, you know, it's a two hour drive, but it might've been faster.
Oh my word.
Casey:
So why is it an inkjet printer and not a color laser?
Casey:
I thought you were at least a black and white laser fan, hence the refrigerator printer at home.
Casey:
But I thought you also enjoyed a color laser, no?
Casey:
I have both.
Casey:
Why would you use inkjet for anything in modern society?
Marco:
Inkjet printers are way better at photos than even very good color lasers.
Marco:
That's why.
Marco:
It's purely for photos.
Casey:
You bring that to, like, Costco or something, or, like, you can't bring them to Costco anymore because Costco Photo Center closed, but you, like, have Costco print them and mail them to you or whatever.
Casey:
It's not that expensive.
Marco:
Yeah, see, also, the living on the island situation.
Marco:
This is a good place to have, like, a little print shop in your house, basically.
Casey:
Basically, past Marco made a bunch of really dubious choices, and today Marco really paid the price.
John:
For photo printing, you can just send away and get, you know, real prints from someplace nice, and even on the island, you can get those, but...
John:
Yeah, if you need a thing for a school assignment tomorrow, you've got to print it in your house.
Marco:
Well, yeah, it's that kind of thing where this is why living here, you kind of have to – because there's the situation with the ferries in the summer that you might need something that's past the last ferry departure time or something.
Marco:
And so you kind of have to be a little more self-sufficient here than you would in most places.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because you can't just drive over to a Walmart real quick and get what you need at all times of day.
Marco:
It's more involved in that.
Marco:
I have to be my own bike mechanic, for instance.
Marco:
I've learned how to do all sorts of crazy maintenance and upgrades and stuff on bikes because I had to.
Marco:
Because there's no one around.
Marco:
Tiff has learned how to do certain plumbing operations herself because she had to because there was no one around.
Marco:
It's an interesting place.
Marco:
You kind of have to be independent in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And
Marco:
One of those ways for us is we keep both kinds of printers because printing photos on color lasers sucks.
Marco:
And I love lasers for anything else that isn't a photo.
Marco:
They're way better for anything else.
Marco:
But for photos, they are terrible.
Casey:
So Adam was printing photos?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Specifically, he was printing art that he drew in Procreate on the iPad for a school project.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
Marco:
But he was printing color illustrations he made.
Casey:
With utmost respect to both you and your child, perhaps in this one scenario, it might have been simpler and easier to simply print on the color laser printer and be done with it.
Marco:
No, but these had to look nice.
Marco:
It's for a thing.
Marco:
So I have the glossy photo paper, the Epson paper, and the Epson printer, all that stuff.
Marco:
And if you want a nice, glossy, bright photo, you're never getting that out of a laser.
Marco:
You just can't.
Marco:
The way toner works, it just doesn't work that way.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
All right, all right, all right.
Casey:
I'll allow it.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad you made the show.
Casey:
That would have been quite funny.
Casey:
Oh, I can't make the show.
Casey:
Oh, no, what's wrong?
Casey:
Who's sick?
Casey:
What's happened?
Casey:
Well, printers.
Casey:
That's what happened.
Marco:
Printers can make any 10-minute project take three hours.
Marco:
That's the...
Marco:
That's what it means.
John:
We need the OLED TV revolution, but for printers.
John:
Because all these things with physical realities, we're kind of like in the dark ages with printers still.
John:
There is no printer technology that is just clearly better and more reliable.
John:
I guess more like the LCD resolution.
John:
Sort of when LCDs took over all displays, we found a display technology that's flat, low power, looks good.
John:
Setting aside the OLED debate, just plain old high-quality...
John:
led backlit lcds were such a revolution that kind of made screens not be made screens ubiquitous and you know and basically work to do their job and we don't have that with printers we just have pick a crappy technology from ages ago depending on what trade-offs you can handle and and then connect crappy electronics to all of them
Marco:
Yeah, and take all of the profit margin out of it, basically.
Marco:
And so you have these mechanically – I think this is why.
Marco:
This is mechanically very complicated.
Marco:
There is no way to make a printer that is not mechanically complicated.
Marco:
And that's the kind of thing that's very difficult to make good and reliable and also super, super cheap.
John:
there was one technology that was mechanically not as complicated it was just crappy i think it was one of the past technologies instead of having like a print head essentially well and laser printers do this too like but laser printers well the led ones the okidata led ones were they were kind of cool but that's not not up to modern standards like we do you know we need the lcd screen resolution something that with very few or no moving parts that prints high resolution in color and
John:
It doesn't bleed when you get the paper wet.
John:
It looks good, glossy.
John:
That just doesn't exist yet.
John:
But someday, once that happens, I feel like we'll finally cross printers off the list of technology that always sucks.
John:
Because it always sucks for reasons that are explicable.
John:
Because printing is complicated.
John:
And because the business model is basically make the cheapest thing and then get people to buy your printer ink or whatever.
John:
But
John:
you know with the right technology we can get there kind of like a fusion for energy we have two big projects one uh break-even fusion for energy uh better than breaking fusion for energy production to save the planet and also printers it's funny that's
Marco:
That's like, you know, you got all these like, you know, these like tech bros who start all these companies.
Marco:
We're going to change the world.
Marco:
None of them try to change the world for printers.
Marco:
Like that's, you know, you can have your startups like we're going to connect people's social graph to their self-driving cars.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
Fix printers.
Marco:
Now I'm impressed.
John:
How about you put a camera in my toaster oven so you can tell how brown the bread is.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, that's didn't didn't the June oven do that?
John:
Yes.
John:
There's a whole there's a whole class of products that do that now.
John:
It's not just one.
John:
I still didn't fix printers.
Casey:
yeah you know and i was listening to the most recent upgrade which we're going to talk about or at least make passing reference to later and i was listening to uh you and in uh jason talk about good products and the breville and breville is basically let's give a a modicum of a crap about how our products are and that puts them light years ahead of everyone else and i feel like we need the breville of printers you know just care just the tiniest bit just
Marco:
the tiniest littlest bit care that much and we'll all love you no that's because like that is such a thing like there are so many product categories now where due to various you know globalization market pressures whatever you know consolidation whatever it is due to lots of like you know reasonable conditions that like you know there's reasons why they are this way
Marco:
the entire category of product just sucks.
Marco:
Like there's no, there's like all the quality has been drained out of it.
Marco:
And it's like, you can't get something good at any price in a lot of categories.
Marco:
And I think printers are, are not, I wouldn't say they're all necessarily there, but certainly the, you know, what we're trying to do here is get something that is like super reliable and also solves many different needs.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you, if you have just a basic laser printer, especially black and white lasers,
Marco:
They are so fast and simple.
Marco:
But once you start involving either ink or dye, like in this case of dye sub, or even I once had a solid wax printer.
Marco:
That was fun.
Marco:
The Xerox phaser.
Marco:
Those things have the same problem as ink.
John:
That wax can melt.
John:
That's how they get it on the paper.
Marco:
Yeah, the wax was the worst of both worlds.
Marco:
It was the dull photos of color lasers, but with the non-permanence of ink.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
That was not a good printer.
Marco:
I didn't have it for very long.
Marco:
It was not very good.
John:
I mean, you might say the solution is, you know, in the future, you know, your child's assignment won't ever need to be printed because it will just be communicated electronically to the teacher for display.
John:
But, you know, we're not there yet.
Marco:
Well, and I think that's ultimately that's the problem.
Marco:
Like the reason like who who would who would innovate in the printer business today?
Marco:
There is no growth in that category.
Marco:
Who is using printers anymore except me?
Marco:
Using using a printer is like carrying around cash.
Marco:
where i do it and in my life it seems very necessary very frequently but when you talk to anybody under the age of 30 like what are you talking about what you never need that and i'm like well i kind of frequently need these things but they're like no no one needs it and i don't i have i've never even touched cash you know it's like it and you get a lot of that with printers too like why would you have a printer that's so antiquated you might as well have a fax machine it's like no there's there's lots of reasons but you know
Marco:
What are you going to do?
Marco:
The youths these days.
Casey:
The youths.
Casey:
What are we going to do with them?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like I agree with what you're saying that printers are to some degree a dying breed.
Casey:
But with that said, you would make money hand over fist.
Casey:
You could charge $11 billion for a printer that was reliable and worked every time and the ink lasted more than four minutes.
Casey:
There are advantages.
Casey:
That's all I'm going to say.
Marco:
Backblaze.
Marco:
And that can be lots of things, you know, fire, flood, theft, lightning strikes, whatever.
Marco:
And so cloud backup is great for peace of mind like that, but then it can also offer incredible utility above the peace of mind.
Marco:
So for instance, if you're out somewhere, you can just log into Backblaze and have access to all of your files from your home computer.
Marco:
So whether you're on your phone, if you're out somewhere and you're, oh, I got to look up that document that I have like on my desktop, you know, at home, you can do that right from the Backblaze app on your phone.
Marco:
Or if you're, you know, say you're on vacation, you have a laptop or something and you want to download files off your home computer, you can do that again from Backblaze.
Marco:
You can pull whatever files you want right off.
Marco:
And of course, you can restore larger amounts.
Marco:
If you actually have data loss, you can restore your files from the web interface.
Marco:
Or if you have like a huge amount of data to recover, you can have them mail you a hard drive or a flash key with all your data right to your door.
Marco:
And if you return it, you get a refund on the cost of it.
Marco:
So it's just an incredible service at Backblaze.
Marco:
They even have other features too, like version history.
Marco:
And in fact, for an extra $2 a month, you can increase your retention history to a year.
Marco:
So I love Backblaze.
Marco:
It's a great backup service for not only peace of mind, but just really useful features as well.
Marco:
See for yourself at backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can start a free trial there for 15 days with no credit card required.
Marco:
You can see how the whole thing works.
Marco:
See if it works for you.
Marco:
Backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Go there now.
Marco:
Get going.
Marco:
Don't delay this until it's too late and you lose something.
Marco:
Go get Backblaze today.
Marco:
Backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Go there right now.
Marco:
You won't be sorry.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Backblaze for being an awesome backup service and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
One of you put in here Mastodon instances, and an FYI that I'm not really sure why we need to share this, but somebody wanted to let you know, probably John, that you don't need to be in the same instance as someone in order to follow them or reply to them.
John:
I kept getting people asking me on Twitter mostly,
John:
I heard you guys talk about Mastodon.
John:
I really want to try it, but Mastodon.social says they're not taking signups, so I guess I can't do it.
John:
You don't need to be on Mastodon.social.
John:
I think I've got like seven people who asked that same question.
John:
You do not need to be on Mastodon.social.
John:
You can be on any instance.
John:
Now this gets to our problem.
John:
The next question is always, okay, what instance should I use?
John:
And what I have to say is, I don't know.
John:
I just want people to know...
John:
if you pick an instance one it's not the end of the world because you can always move to another instance right and two you do not need to be on the same instance as people that you follow like that's the point of federation and maybe we haven't made that point strongly enough mastodon does not equal equal as merlin would say mastodon.social you can basically pick any instance and if you go to any kind of mastodon thing it will show you a list of instances and how do you pick among them
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like, it's a problem, right?
John:
And I don't know what the solution is, but at least it's not a dire problem, because if you do pick wrong or whatever, you can switch instances.
John:
Or you could be like me and get an account on 50 different instances and use that as your hedge.
John:
But don't worry if you're not on the same instance as the hosts of your favorite podcast, because you will be able to follow them no matter where you are, unless you're on a server full of Nazis that got defederated.
John:
So don't pick those instances.
John:
But other than that, you should be fine.
Marco:
There's multiple reasons.
Marco:
yeah and overall i would say like every time i keep going back to um what's the the masto the good friend finder one what's it called uh move to don move to don that's it yeah i keep going back to move to don every couple of days i have you know i can't have the tab open on my phone in safari and i just go back every couple days and refresh it and there's a few more people there and it's it's it's happening like people are really moving there in large numbers and
Marco:
And again, I don't think Twitter is going to lose to Mastodon, in quotes.
Marco:
But certainly a lot of people who I follow on Twitter are now on Mastodon and are oftentimes posting more there.
Marco:
And so if you are the kind of person who might want to follow nerdy people or people who care about that kind of stuff, check it out.
Marco:
I would also very strongly encourage everyone.
Marco:
John mentioned this last week, but the way Mastodon and FetaFinder work is
Marco:
is they look in your Twitter profile for links to a Mastodon page.
Marco:
So if you have a question on the format, go look at my profile on Twitter.
Marco:
You can see the format of the link.
Marco:
It's just, you know, instance name dot whatever slash at your username.
Marco:
That format, they look for that format.
Marco:
And so if you out there, if you have created a Mastodon account in your Twitter bio, go put that kind of link somewhere in the bio.
Marco:
It doesn't even have to be like the URL field.
Marco:
It can be anywhere in the Twitter bio.
Marco:
Put that link in there so these tools can find you.
Marco:
And then so that anybody who follows you can automatically find you over at Mastodon without having to ask and search and everything like that.
Marco:
So everyone, please do that.
Marco:
And I think this is a big enough thing now.
Marco:
that even if you're not sure whether you'll use it, you should probably go create an account somewhere.
Marco:
And again, as John was saying, it doesn't really matter which instance you pick for the most part, as long as it's going to keep existing in all likelihood.
Marco:
For now, that's fine.
Marco:
But go create an account if you haven't yet, because it seems like there's a good amount of traction happening here.
Marco:
And frankly, I'm telling you, once I switched over to the ivory beta, the Tapos for Macedon thing,
Marco:
I will oftentimes be using either TweetBot or Ivory on my phone and forget which service I'm using.
Marco:
Because unless you look really closely at the design of the icons, you actually can very easily forget that.
Marco:
It really is like a drop-in replacement at this point.
Marco:
And as soon as the Mac situation gets worked out, again by Ivory probably, that's going to be even better.
Marco:
But
Marco:
But again, stuff's happening.
Marco:
And this is the time.
Marco:
If you haven't yet jumped into Mastodon, go make an account.
Marco:
Even if you don't end up using it, at least you'll have a good username reserved somewhere.
Marco:
And it's the worst case scenario.
Marco:
Best case scenario, you actually might use it.
Marco:
I have found that it is... In many ways, Twitter is...
Marco:
Twitter is our favorite bar that we hung out in every single day for 15 years, and now a bunch of jerks keep coming in, and that's always been a bit of a problem, but now even more jerks are coming in, and the new owner now is encouraging the jerks and letting them back in who have been previously kicked out, who were even the biggest jerks and the most ridiculous, outrageous kind of jerks, possible violent jerks.
Marco:
So our favorite bar...
Marco:
You know, it's it's going a little bit south and it's not, you know, meanwhile, you can go down the street and go to like a nice, cozy, friendly bar where all your friends are basically or at least many of your friends.
Marco:
And it's like, wait, this is just kind of nicer.
Marco:
And that's the experience I've had so far in Mastodon because it is smaller.
Marco:
And that's probably the biggest reason.
Marco:
But also, you know, because it's a different vibe, a little bit different scene.
Marco:
But mostly because it's smaller, it is just a nicer place to hang out for a lot of people a lot of the time.
Marco:
And it seems like it's kind of a nerd haven in a lot of ways if you follow the nerdy scene like I do.
Marco:
There's just a whole bunch of nerds there posting good nerdy stuff and I love it.
Marco:
So anyway, if you haven't made an account yet on a Macedon thing, please go do it.
Marco:
Even if you don't end up using it, you should at least try it.
John:
i just went to moved it on while you're doing that and i refreshed it i had it open in a tab as well and i found two new accounts and i clicked the follow button on them i didn't even look to see what instance they're on it does say but now that now that i look i see one of them was on hatchederm.io yeah one of them was on mas.to but like the point is i didn't even have to look at that i just saw that they had a button that said follow because i wasn't already following them i just said click click done and done
Marco:
Yeah, if I was starting new right now, I might go to Hackaderm because it seems like it's a pretty cool group of nerds over there.
John:
I've got an account there.
John:
Yeah, of course.
John:
If I see a thing, when I try to go, that server seems super overwhelmed.
John:
I don't know if it still is, but when I was trying to create my account there to squad on my username, it was super slow.
Marco:
the admin was made a post a few days ago saying like they're, they're doing upgrades and stuff.
Marco:
So they, because it's, it's run by a bunch of like nerds know what they're doing.
Marco:
So they're doing a lot of server stuff over there.
Marco:
But, and, and again, I do think the, the, you know, server scaling, um, cost management side of things like that.
Marco:
There's a lot there that could go south in the future, but right now it's a cool place to hang out and I hope it stays that way.
Marco:
So yeah, go, go pick a mass on instance.
Marco:
Hackaderm is a pretty cool one, I think.
Marco:
Um, and, uh,
Marco:
Go check it out because this is the time.
Marco:
Like this is like the early fun days before it gets crazy or turns south.
Marco:
Like this is when everyone's still having fun.
Marco:
And, you know, there's not a lot of places like that left on the Internet where, you know, new social networks or people are still having fun.
Marco:
Like that's that's not really a thing.
Marco:
So anyway, yeah, check it out.
John:
I get it.
John:
It's supposed to be like pachyderm, hackyderm.
John:
I was not reading it that way.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The good news is if you don't like Mastodon, you can go to Hive Social.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
Never mind.
Casey:
So Hive Social is that startup that allegedly is being run by just two people.
Casey:
And Ars Technica reports that it basically self-terminated or self-suspended, I guess I should say, because a security research group or whatever said, hey, you guys have got a bunch of problems.
Casey:
So reading from the Ars Technica article, this is a quote, the issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media, and even deleted direct messages, the advisory published on Wednesday by Berlin-based security collective Zervorschung claimed.
Casey:
This is this also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.
Casey:
Cool.
Oh, my God.
John:
They got all their security flaws out of the way.
John:
And by just having one big one, which is like all access to all data, complete access to do anything as anybody all the time.
John:
That's pretty much you don't need to ever have any other security problems because you're like, we did it.
John:
we covered everything oh also the things that should have been deleted they don't actually get deleted they're soft deleted yeah right bonus content yeah so the hive social thing like I said a couple shows back when I brought this up that I didn't understand how uh
John:
like how it snowballed like how i suddenly saw everyone from the gaming community that i follow saying come over to hive everyone come over to hive and then looking at the numbers like they crossed 1 million users and the next day they crossed 2 million users they were adding you know 500 000 users every 10 hours or something like and i was like what is what is causing that what made it snowball what was the seed of this did some super popular influencer go there and tell or like i still have no answer to that question all i know is they were experiencing insane growth
John:
and i don't blame the people who made the app for the growth i don't think they did anything to make it happen in particular but it was like yeah like one developer and two other people helping uh and the first the first sign of things being terribly wrong other than just knowing the numbers i just told you uh was that uh after i had gone through all the stuff of me trying to sign up with my email address and it wouldn't let me so i did like sign in with apple instead uh it was i was like i just i wanted to get my uh my username right someone pointed out at that point uh yeah hive doesn't enforce uniqueness of usernames
John:
And it showed like a screen saying, hey, search for at, you know, at whatever.
John:
There was like 17 at whatever.
John:
I forget what it was.
John:
It was Genshin Impact at Genshin Impact.
John:
It was a screen full of people, all of whom had at Genshin Impact as their handle.
John:
So they weren't even enforcing uniqueness of handles, which seems like to me.
John:
a fairly fundamental feature of you know and apparently i was like well maybe that's like a decision they made because that's they don't want that to be unique identifier but no apparently that was a bug the other bug was that the other bug was that it's apparently trivially easy to get access to everyone's messages everywhere to be able to tweet as them to be able to see the direct messages to be able like their security problem that they had they were like 100 hacked like i don't know what the bug was but like
John:
It apparently wasn't too difficult for people, if you knew how, to just basically completely own them with a P. And so their response to that was not great because they were aware of this bug for like 72 hours or something before they did the only thing that was possible for them to do, which was we have to stop this service and regroup, which again, I don't particularly blame them for.
John:
A three-person company makes this iOS app and they have 2 million users within a few days.
John:
they're obviously in over their head uh and so yeah they shut down hive uh will it rise again we'll see but anyway uh that is slash was hive oh my god what a mess that's like i mean look i don't want to take too much joy on other people's mistakes but those are some big mistakes like that's those that's really outrageous yeah this is like learning learning on hard mode for sure but like i still don't understand or know why they snowballed the way they did right
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
I have good news and bad news.
Casey:
I'm mostly talking to our friend Merlin Mann.
Casey:
The good news is, Sharo is a real thing.
Casey:
Merlin is vindicated, baby!
Casey:
Except it doesn't mean a box with an arrow coming out of it.
John:
Or does it?
Casey:
Or does it?
Casey:
So we got a bunch of different feedback about this.
Casey:
There was a great summary that was sent to us by Wes Davis.
Casey:
Wes writes, I'm sure you've gotten plenty of feedback on this, but in the event that I'm the only bike nerd listening, and I think at the time I read this, this was the first piece of feedback about it, but anyway.
Casey:
The first of many.
Casey:
The first of many.
Casey:
I wanted to point out that Merlin didn't invent the term shero.
Casey:
It's actually a term used by cyclists and city planners to refer to the double chevron symbols above a bicycle symbol you sometimes see on roads lacking bike lanes to indicate to cars that A, cyclists will be here and that's okay, and B, this is the general area that they will exist.
Casey:
It's a special kick in the face when a cyclist is on a road with plenty of space for cars and bike lanes and they've painted a shero near the right-hand side of the road where, you know, a bike lane could be, which I thought was quite fascinating.
John:
People do not like charrows.
John:
Like bike riders don't like them.
John:
It's basically like you did the minimum possible instead of making a real protected bike lane.
John:
And the studies have shown that it actually makes it more dangerous for bike riders, not less.
John:
So charrows get a big thumb down from biking.
John:
And here's the thing about this with respect to Merlin.
John:
Merlin has recently been in a little bit of a rabbit hole learning about like road design and urban design.
John:
So he may have been exposed to this exact term in that context.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Uh, from the first anonymous person, I'd like this to be kept anonymous, but I can confirm internally within Apple on Slack.
Casey:
I've absolutely seen a Shero in use.
Casey:
Just thought you'd appreciate knowing.
Casey:
So Merlin is vindicated, uh, from another anonymous person regarding the word Shero.
Casey:
I don't think Merlin invented it, but regardless if he did or not, I'm 95% sure I heard designers inside Apple use it when I was there.
Casey:
So it's at least spread that far by 2019 or so.
Casey:
And then from our final anonymous birdie, perhaps it will surprise you to know that when I began working in Apple retail eight years ago, the word share-o was already in use, taught to me by a coworker and used regularly by our creative team when teaching customers.
John:
Yeah, the people who talked about share-o being used for the share-o...
John:
often said that yeah we used it in this context or whatever but like it hasn't i mean it it hasn't doesn't seem to like have caught on lots of things are used inside apple and not outside apple uh and but if apple retail is teaching it to people you think maybe it would catch on in the wider community anyway there's still a chance it could happen there's still a chance we could circle back a year from now and everybody uses the term shower we could be making it happen right now just by talking about it unintentionally uh but yeah
John:
It's not on Merlin to make it happen, is what I'm saying.
John:
Apple has been apparently trying to make Sharo happen for years.
John:
It just hasn't broken through yet, like Hive.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So they have all these different settings and quizzes you can take so that you can really know that you're going to be sent something that you like a lot.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can do all that with trade, and it is just great.
Marco:
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Marco:
This is awesome for, you know, if you have somebody in your life who's difficult to shop for,
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You just quickly buy a gift subscription to trade and it's just awesome.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Trade Coffee for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
A couple of episodes ago, we were discussing a gift that Marco gave me, and I thought that was really fun.
Casey:
And then I was looking around at this piece of code, and this particular piece of code I was looking at, it's a new open source thing.
Casey:
It has unit tests, just like the gift Marco gave me a couple of weeks ago.
Casey:
It has combined publishers.
Casey:
It has Async Await.
Casey:
It has all sorts of delightful things.
Casey:
I have almost fallen over.
Casey:
I am so excited.
Casey:
Even though this is code I don't think I'll ever use because it doesn't really do anything for me personally.
Casey:
The fact that these things exist is such a gift to me.
Casey:
And I want to use all sort of vulgar euphemisms about how happy I am about this, but I will refrain and I will keep them to myself.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
uh blackbird has been open sourced and so you can check out marco's in progress uh sequel uh what is it but db yes but db uh you can see his in progress sequel light uh wrapper and i have only taken but a few minutes spelunking through the code but as much as i'm i'm kind of being snarky about it for real there's publishers there's unit tests there's async await it's all there baby i'm so excited this is this is very cool
Marco:
thank you yeah i uh and i even yesterday i put a whole big uh swift ui thing out um with like some you know fancy property wrappers for like live updating instance groups and stuff like that uh yeah so it's so far it's going along great i even had a friend of the friend of the show and the world guy english even already contributed a pretty substantial pull request for adding performance counters and stuff that show up in instruments so that's pretty cool did you also get something for like a what was it for the string literals with the inline interpolation thing
Marco:
Yeah, that wasn't a pull request, but it was a few people on Twitter who pointed that out, including I think one of the authors of a project that did that.
Marco:
I don't know if I want to do that.
Marco:
That feels a little bit like unexpected magic from the call site end.
Marco:
I don't think I would expect that to happen at the call site.
John:
It makes it look like you're making SQL injection bugs, but you're not.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, that's why I don't... I see the advantage of it in terms of you're putting the arguments right where they go.
Marco:
I see that value, but I think most people, including my own future self, at the call site would not expect that to be the behavior.
Marco:
And so I don't think I want to do that.
Marco:
Unless custom string interpolation becomes a much more common pattern that's used a lot in Swift.
Marco:
But I don't think it is or is going to be.
Marco:
So we'll see.
John:
I think the coolest thing about that is if you were able to do it pervasively, it essentially protects against people who don't know how to avoid SQL injection attacks.
John:
You would look at the code and it's like, oh no, this beginner made a SQL injection attack.
John:
They have no idea that that...
John:
You know, custom interpolation is there, but that custom interpolation would in fact be protecting them against that injection attack.
John:
But I'm not sure you could ever get to that level of a safety net where you could say, you don't even need to know about this.
John:
Just write any old code and you'll always be protected against injection.
Marco:
yeah yeah i don't know it doesn't seem like it's a good idea um i did also i tried uh earlier today um somebody submitted a pull request that turned on the um the swift concurrency warnings for like all the all the sendable stuff and i tried for a little while to get that to you know not show 88 warnings when i compiled the app
Marco:
That's a bigger project.
Marco:
I am going to try to make that all correct, you know, just for future looking stuff.
Marco:
But I tried doing it like today.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, this is way bigger than a one-day project.
Marco:
So I'll work on that.
Marco:
But overall, actually, I do intend to do stuff like that because...
Marco:
Again, my plan is for this to be what I write my apps against for the next X years where X is however long I'm writing Swift apps.
Marco:
That's hopefully going to be a long time.
Marco:
I do intend for this to be very forward-looking, forward-compatible, cover as many of my forward needs as possible.
Marco:
um i'm gonna possibly write a cloud kit adapter for it but i'm gonna see i haven't long story short i haven't yet fully decided if i'm even going to be using cloud kit for overcast but if i do then that's going to be the next step here is i'm going to make cloud kit wrapper for this probably but anyway yeah so so blackbird yeah it's going pretty well uh i you know i don't i don't think anyone's using it yet and you shouldn't i tell you right in the faq like don't use it before i use it because if i use it and it turns out something doesn't work right or the api is clunky in some way i'm going to change it
Marco:
And, you know, that could break how you're using it.
Marco:
So, yeah, this is not ready for you.
Marco:
It's open sourced only, you know, for like people's curiosity and possibly learning and me learning from you.
Marco:
Not actually intended to be used yet.
Casey:
I am super pleased that you are using all this new and fancy stuff, in part because this is...
Casey:
And this is going to come out mean, and I don't intend it to, but that's not typically your MO.
Casey:
You're typically a little more conservative, and I'm excited that you're living more on the cutting edge than you typically do.
Casey:
And plus, I plan to dig through this with a more fine-tooth comb for my own knowledge, not because I want to be that guy that's, wow, did you consider that you should do this?
Casey:
But no, I feel like I could learn from this.
Casey:
And so I'm very excited to dig into this and see more of it.
Marco:
thank you i mean if it fits my my usual pattern it's just a pattern that has a very long cycle time uh like when when i was first when we were first doing tumblr um we the php5 i believe had just come out it was or it was like 5.2 everyone added late static binding that was like right in early tumblr days i think it was like 2007 ish uh maybe 2006 but yeah i think it was 5.2 that late static binding and
Marco:
And that made a bunch of much more, you know, I mean, by today's standards, fairly primitive stuff.
Marco:
But for PHP in 2006 standards, some much more advanced object oriented programming was possible thanks to that update.
Marco:
And it was it made such a big difference in how you would write an app like that, that we require that from all of our servers.
Marco:
And we jumped in and made all of like the most advanced PHP stuff you could do at that time.
Marco:
That was the basis for that.
Marco:
I am still using that PHP framework today, or at least a, a very, very, very distant derivative of it.
Marco:
Um, still using, you know, many of those basic, uh, structures and stuff today because, you know, I jumped in when it was super advanced and, you know, and it was very cutting edge at the time.
Marco:
And now I still have no reason to really change it.
Marco:
Uh, so that's kind of how I see this.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
I have a lot of ancient Objective-C code that I wrote 10 years ago that I'm still using today because I wrote it a long time ago to be cutting edge then, and it's still fine now.
Marco:
Well, I hope this is going to be one of those pieces of Swift code for me, that I'm writing this all to be cutting edge now so that 10 years from now, it's not out of date or broken, hopefully not.
Marco:
And this is hopefully still a good way to do things 10 years from now.
Casey:
Yeah, before we leave this topic, I wanted to call out one thing.
Casey:
You put in your readme wishlist for future Swift language capabilities.
Casey:
And I know you didn't see it, but I gave the following a standing friggin' ovation because I could not agree with you more.
Casey:
Type reflection for automatic or cleaner schema definitions.
Casey:
Swift currently has no way to reflect a type's properties.
Casey:
Mirror only reflects property names and values of given instances.
Casey:
If the language adds type reflection in the future, I'd love to add an optional automatic table definitions that didn't require repeating the column names and types in my static var table equals blah, blah, blah definition.
Casey:
It could also be based on property wrappers, e.g., you know, at column or at index column, etc.
Casey:
Amen, brother.
Okay.
John:
thank you i could not agree with you more i think there's a proposal for that already uh for type reflection isn't there i can't imagine there wouldn't be yeah it's like it's such an obvious thing i think i read it recently i know but i'm not not just like it's on the list but like someone already has a proposal for it i think
Marco:
try to find it for the show notes if not someone will send it to us for next week but yeah um that that's one of the things i read recently as a uh actual thing yeah i couldn't agree with you more yeah and if and this is another reason why you shouldn't you know this is a rely on this framework being stable where it is now it's like if that comes out next year i'm moving all this entire framework to it like that's i'm just gonna do it and i'll update my code and you know hope yours works it might not be sufficient for all the things that you want out of it yeah probably not but but you'll see
John:
Plus, those features like that tend to like Apple like hoards them for each major Swift version.
John:
Like you can see them in the like, you know, it's all in the open.
John:
So it's not like it's a mystery.
John:
But when they come out with like, oh, here's the new version of Swift or WWDC, you know, everything is going to be in it.
John:
But Apple does tend to wait for those yearly Xcode releases to sort of package it all up and deliver it to their developers in a way that it's safe to use with App Store stuff.
Marco:
yeah right yeah like yeah even even if they release that you know or somebody adds up to swift like in the spring there's no way we'd be able to ship code with it until the fall and it would and then it would probably even then probably require the latest releases to run too because that also that's one of the cool proposal things that one of the things that actually is going in is uh i think it's going in i'm assuming it will pass is the
John:
a way to backport apis to older uh things so you don't just say oh i added this new method but you only get it if you're on venture right a way to basically uh to to back compat things to previous version i mean it's it's another feature you're looking like oh this is a feature apple could use well yeah duh
John:
um it's actually kind of clever how they did it if you read the proposal it's built on a feature they already had but just extending it a little bit making it so if you if you're running on the older version of the os you'll get the implementation copied down into you but you don't have to get the entire library copied down anyway um stuff like that uh makes me think that you know features that are useful to apple will come sooner than features features that aren't and i think type reflection would be useful for apple so i think that is a good shot of getting in for next year
Marco:
Yeah, because we still don't really have Apple's core data solution for Swift.
Marco:
Core data is compatible with Swift, but it's not a very Swift-y way to do things.
Marco:
And I still don't think we have, like, what is Apple's answer to the next generation of core data designed with Swift in mind?
Marco:
I don't think we have that yet, and maybe they would use features like that to make that happen.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
I just would really like it.
Casey:
When I was heavy in .NET and C Sharp, this was when Reflection was new to me, and man, there was not a problem that could not be solved with Reflection.
Casey:
And obviously, I've grown up since then, and I think I would use it far more sparingly.
Casey:
But it is something very, very useful to have, and something that I wish Swift had more than a passing implementation of.
Casey:
And even then,
Casey:
Like you said in your README, the implementation is half-butted, to use your term, if anything.
Casey:
So I'd really love a full-butt implementation of Mirror.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, a 1J Syracusea in the chat room seems to have found the – oh, no, this is function back-deployment.
Casey:
I was going to say this is a reflection, but no, this is the function back-deployment you were talking about.
Casey:
which is cool stuff as well.
John:
It's a Swift Evolution 0376 function back deployment.
John:
Even if you don't know too much about programming, the great thing about these proposals, Swift Evolution proposals, they tend to explain things more or less in first principles.
John:
So you can just read it and kind of understand what they're proposing, even if you have no idea about Swift or language design or anything.
John:
You have to know a little bit about programming, but they're usually very clear.
Marco:
The other thing, though, I do have one, I don't know if it's necessarily a concern or a complaint, but one kind of effect to notice is as I'm diving into a lot of this, a lot of kind of deeper Swift functionality and Swift UI functionality as well,
Marco:
There is just so much here.
Marco:
It is a huge language and it keeps getting bigger.
Marco:
There are so many ways you can write things.
Marco:
There are so many capabilities down below everything.
Marco:
There are so many weird little at prefixes you can stick on things that change behavior in certain ways.
Marco:
It is a massively complex language and it's getting more and more complex every year.
Marco:
And I do kind of worry about that from the point of view of just manageability of complexity.
Marco:
Like, you know, I heard somewhere recently that, that, that programming, like the biggest challenge in programming is managing complexity.
Marco:
And, and that is first of all, insanely correct and wise.
Marco:
And that's so much bigger than like, you know, cash and validation and naming things and all that stuff.
Marco:
But, you know, managing complexity is by far our industry's biggest challenge always, you know, from one, from one coder all the way up to big teams and,
Marco:
That's just software development in a nutshell is managing complexity in some kind of reasonable way.
Marco:
And the language itself, like Swift makes so much complexity possible that I'm concerned that it's, first of all, not only extremely difficult for people to really learn and get a good handle on because all the stuff under the covers and behind the scenes that you eventually do have to deal with.
Marco:
But also, you know, I'm concerned about like,
Marco:
just the language itself becoming so big and bloated, are developer tools going to still be fairly unreliable and bloated and slow forever with this language?
Marco:
How about documentation and community forums and Stack Overflow and stuff like that?
Marco:
There's a lot of complexity in this language, and I think that's going to ripple out in pretty significant ways that are probably already happening.
Marco:
Some of the complexity, I guess, is necessary to build what they want to build, but
Marco:
i i do think there's not maybe maybe not enough prioritization on saying no to certain features in the language but i don't know i'm not a language designer so maybe i'm maybe i'm you know off base here but it is just a way way bigger language than anything we've used before i think they're mostly going in the right direction like the kind of proposals that i see a lot of that makes sense again being something useful for apple you'll see a
John:
why do they care about this feature and when you look at it and read it and start looking at some of the examples what you learn is basically like the swift standard library like the part you know the big part of swift is the library that it comes with that has all the stuff and that are not quote unquote part of the language there but they're in a library
John:
if you look at the code for the swiss standard library some of it looks really awful you're like oh why do they have this looks hacky and weird and there's weird repetition of code and they have to do things in weird ways and you're like boy i'm glad i don't have to maintain this code and then you look back at the proposal and you realize the proposal lets them delete like all this code and replace it with like something simple and straightforward right
John:
And so when you look at the feature, like, why are they adding new features?
John:
It's because they wanted to do a thing like a useful thing, because the standard library is not magic, like it doesn't do anything that regular code doesn't do.
John:
But it's super important.
John:
And they want it to be, you know, high performance, safe, you know, easy to use, have a nice API.
John:
And by doing all that, they like boy to make a good standard library, we have to do this ugly crap.
John:
Why do we have to do this ugly crap?
John:
And it's like, oh, because you can't do x, y and z and Swift because of some limitation.
John:
So they add a feature that lets them basically jump into the standard library and just delete like pages of code and condense it down to like one concise paragraph.
John:
And you on the outside think, oh, they're adding more features to Swift.
John:
But if you have a substantial Swift code basis that you try to write to be like the best it can be, you realize that by having this feature, it simplifies the code so much.
John:
Like you don't have to do this weird hack.
John:
You don't have to repeat yourself.
John:
You don't have to do a workaround because you're not allowed to do this one thing that you wanted to do.
John:
And a lot of the Swift proposals I see are like that.
John:
For example, reflection with type data.
John:
There are probably places in the standard library where that would come in so handy and save them a lot of time and energy where now they're like, well, we can't do that.
John:
So just, you know, repeat this code block 50 different times with different parameters on it because there's no way for us to sort of programmatically figure out the answer to this question.
John:
We just have to sort of bake our knowledge into the standard library by repeating the code.
John:
There are boondoggles here and there, but for the most part, I like the direction I see most of the proposals because I think they're the type of proposals that let somebody, usually Apple, delete a lot of code and replace it with less.
Casey:
I think my favorite of this was the DSL stuff that landed before SwiftUI did.
Casey:
And so, you know, there's all this, oh, how do we make, like, you know, a domain-specific language for something?
Casey:
I don't know what it could possibly be.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And a few of us were smart enough to put together what this apparently would probably be.
Casey:
And we're right.
Casey:
And then it got used for stuff like their absolutely awesome Regex stuff, which is coming soon and is so much better than Perl.
Casey:
We can all agree.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So anyway, Apple has dropped a bunch of stuff in our laps.
Casey:
Thank you, Apple, for doing it on a Wednesday and not a different day.
Casey:
We appreciate that.
Casey:
They've announced three new, quote, advanced security features, quote.
Casey:
And we're going to start with the things that are not that dramatic and then move to the dramatic one.
Casey:
First is iMessage contact key verification.
Casey:
This will be available globally in 2023.
Casey:
And from the newsroom, their announcement says, now with iMessage contact key verification, users who face extraordinary digital threats, such as journalists, human rights activists, and members of government, quick aside, it's pretty sick that human rights activists are in the category of extraordinary digital threats, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
can choose to further verify that they are messaging only with the people they intend.
Casey:
Conversations between users who have enabled iMessage Contact Key Verification receive automatic alerts if an exceptionally advanced adversary, such as a state-sponsored attacker, were ever to succeed breaking cloud servers and inserting their own device to eavesdrop on these encrypted communications.
Casey:
And for even higher security, iMessage Contact Key Verification users can compare a contact verification code in person on FaceTime or through another secure call.
Casey:
And they have a screenshot of this.
Casey:
And in the screenshot, it shows a little like warning triangle.
Casey:
And it says this is within the context of an iMessage thread.
Casey:
An unrecognized device may have been added to such and such account.
Casey:
Options.
Casey:
And then you can click on options or tap on options.
Casey:
And it's not clear what happens then.
Casey:
But basically, I guess it I'm unclear how this works.
Casey:
I'm not sure if either of you two know.
Casey:
But does it just alert you when a new device is added to an existing thread?
Casey:
Because that seems.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think this is this is like a human factors security enhancement rather than a sort of, you know, data driven ones and zero security enhancement.
John:
It's basically seems to me a combination of heightened awareness when things have changed because people get new devices all the time.
John:
But like sort of communicating that is something that good services have done for many years now.
John:
Like.
John:
Did you know that a new computer was authorized to log into your iCloud account?
John:
Did you know that you just signed on to Amazon.com from a device we've never seen before?
John:
Those type of things where they would send you emails and stuff.
John:
That sort of increases awareness that someone couldn't be doing something behind your back that you would have no way of knowing about.
John:
And so this is adding that to iMessage.
John:
Like, oh, you think you're messaging with this person, and it's not like we're telling you that you're not messaging with that person, but it seems like they're using a device they've never used before.
John:
And so maybe you're not talking to them.
John:
Maybe you're talking to someone else who has figured out how to hack into their iCloud account.
John:
on you know and so they're using a new device but communicating with them so there's that there's the heads up thing and then this other part is the key verification i guess the idea is underneath that options thing this is why i wish they'd shown a demo of this i guess it's not ready yet but underneath the options thing it would basically say hey uh if you want to like validate that this person is who they say they are like here's some kind of workflow whereby out of band in some place other than messages you have a way to communicate with that person to to
John:
exchange some information that only they would know or i mean like honestly i guess you could like facetime them and if you recognize their face and there's not a gun to their head that it's probably them or you could call them on the phone or you know whatever but this is sort of facilitating that so it's a combination of something might be weird and apple might have a way for you to check whether things are okay you don't need apple to to uh to check whether things are okay you
John:
Call them on a phone number or something or walk over to where they live if you're nearby.
John:
You know, there's other ways you can do that.
John:
But what you do need Apple to do is say, you know, oh, we haven't seen this person use this device before.
John:
So if you think you're just messaging with Yoshimo on their usual phone, you're not.
John:
And what you want to do with that information is up to you.
Casey:
They also announced hardware two-factor authentication with security keys.
Casey:
This will be available globally in early 2023.
Casey:
Apple writes, today, with more than 95% of active iCloud accounts using two-factor authentication, it is the most widely used two-factor account security system in the world that we're aware of.
Casey:
I just thought that was kind of neat.
Casey:
Now, with security keys, users will have the choice to make use of third-party hardware security keys in order to enhance this protection.
Casey:
For users who opt in, security keys strengthens Apple's two-factor auth by requiring a hardware security key as one of the two factors.
Casey:
This takes our two-factor auth even further, preventing even an advanced attacker from obtaining a user's second factor in a phishing scam.
Casey:
and here again they show a screenshot and there's a little like a pop-up or sheet that says to sign in insert and activate one of your security keys if you have an nfc key bring it near the top of this iphone all right so i don't personally have any of these hardware security keys i used to many many many jobs ago and it was a little clunky but it worked okay at the time my understanding is they're very fancy now i mean heck it apparently you can get some that have like a lightning connector which is kind of neat
Casey:
I don't know, John, you were the one with the most recent real job.
Casey:
Did you ever use one of these?
Casey:
Do you have any interest in using one of these?
Casey:
What's the story here?
John:
I think, well, I would say we all have had, but Marco certainly hasn't.
John:
Back in the day before, authenticator apps were very common on smartphones, the ones that give you the set of numbers that roll over every minute or whatever, right?
John:
Back before those were common, and certainly back before they were built into iOS and macOS,
John:
You'd get a little hardware dongle that had those numbers on it with a little battery in it or whatever.
John:
This is not that.
John:
What they've added is support for hardware security keys.
John:
So basically to log in successfully instead of used to be like, oh, I'll enter my password and then I'll get a text message or enter my password and then it will prompt me to enter one of those six digit codes from from like an authenticator app or from this little dongle.
John:
Right.
John:
this says to log in you would need your password or whatever and also a hardware thing that you own that has a secret on it and you plug it in and say if you don't have that thing even if you if someone knows your password even if someone has somehow has access to your like six digit rolling authentication thing like they somehow got access to that because they stole the qr code or whatever right they still need
John:
The little dongle-y thing, the little YubiKey is the brand name, but they still need an actual hardware thing.
John:
It's like a physical key kind of, right?
John:
But it's just a drive with a secret on it, right?
John:
That's what this is.
John:
And for people who want that, it does add an extra layer of protection.
John:
This is where we get into the territory for this whole announcement.
John:
It's like when you're hearing all these things, just because a security feature exists does not mean you have to use it.
John:
think about the trade-offs you're making before you decide to do this.
John:
Because having to plug in a physical thing into your phone or computer to get logged into your iCloud account is a big step up in security and a big step down in convenience, right?
John:
So if you are not a reporter, a human rights activist, an important politician, a celebrity, think about whether you want to do this, right?
John:
And the other thing I'll say about these increased security things is
John:
the people well not the people should do it the most but there is there are definitely large classes of people who probably should do this like for example celebrities who absolutely will not because it's too annoying like celebrities don't want to be annoyed by technology but people hacking celebrities phones to get their pictures is a thing that happens so they should do it but they won't but tech nerds on the other hand probably no one's hacking your phone to get your photos of you because they're not as valuable as the photos of celebrities and
John:
But tech nerds will do it and inconvenience themselves and everyone else.
John:
So I'm not saying whether you particularly should or shouldn't do this, but think about the tradeoffs, because this is not a one sided thing.
John:
There is increased security and then the tradeoff is decreased convenience.
John:
So choose widely.
John:
And to that end, related to things about like trading off security for convenience for protecting your account.
John:
Apple also has a way.
John:
I don't know if this is new or not, but it was in one of the same documents and linked to it.
John:
to make a recovery key.
John:
And this may sound like the recovery codes that you can send, but it's not quite the same.
John:
If you get the recovery key, it means it turns off the other recovery process.
John:
Apple has an existing recovery process.
John:
It's like, I forgot all my stuff.
John:
My phone is at the bottom of the ocean.
John:
I don't remember anything.
John:
How can I get my account back?
John:
to try to get into your account by claiming, oh, I dropped my phone on the ocean.
John:
I don't remember my password or whatever.
John:
So that process is there to help save your butt when you forget everything.
John:
But that process is also a way that people get hacked.
John:
So what they do is offer a thing and say, hey, we can turn off recovery for you and instead give you this 28 character code that you can use to reset your password.
John:
It's up to you to put in a safe or something.
John:
But if you lose that 28 character code,
John:
You can't recover it the way we have for other people.
John:
We turn off recovery.
John:
We are securing your account by trusting you with this 28-character code.
John:
Don't lose it because if you lose it, you're out of luck.
John:
And that is one of the more dangerous, I think, trade-offs that a normal person can make.
John:
It's the trade-off that you should make if you're like a head of state or, you know, someone who's in danger from an oppressive governor.
John:
You should do it then.
John:
But the average person who just thinks it's cool to have super good security,
John:
probably shouldn't do this because the chances of you losing all of your iCloud photos, and we'll get to that in a second, because you lost your 28 character recovery code, are probably higher than the chances that, you know, China's going to hack you.
Casey:
Yep, I think that's fair.
Casey:
And then finally, and this is the real juicy stuff, advanced data protection for iCloud.
Casey:
It is available right now in beta for the rest of the U.S.
Casey:
by the end of the year and the rest of the world in early 2023.
Casey:
So the TLDR on this is end-to-end encryption on iCloud almost everywhere with some gotchas.
Casey:
So from Apple's newsroom announcement, for users who opt in, advanced data protection keeps most iCloud data protected, even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.
Casey:
iCloud already protects 14 sensitive data categories using end-to-end encryption by default.
Casey:
For users who enable advanced data protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption rises to 23, including iCloud backup, notes, and photos.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Boom.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So there's a KBase article or whatever, a support article that we'll link in the show notes that shows a chart that is very, very helpful.
Casey:
And it has several columns.
Casey:
It has data category is one of the columns.
Casey:
So iCloud mail, contacts, calendars, et cetera.
Casey:
And then it shows for standard data protection, where is it encrypted and who has the key?
Casey:
And then in advanced data protection, where is it encrypted, which generally speaking is either the same or a little bit better.
Casey:
And then who has the key, which generally speaking is no longer Apple and is now you.
Casey:
Again, there's some caveats and gotchas.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about the specifics about this?
Casey:
Would you rather me continue with the overview?
John:
yeah well let's talk about so but we just said oh 14 categories of data and now 23 it sounds like it's a non not a big deal like who cares what are those categories when we say categories of data we're talking about like things on your phone or on your mac uh that are end-to-end encrypted right and mostly what we care about is because we talk about this in the past and we'd say oh apple has everything encrypted and everything's safe we'd say oh except for your photos and your messages yeah
John:
Which is kind of two really big categories of things that people might want to protect, right?
John:
Because if, you know, the government comes knocking and says, Apple, please give us the, you know, the contents of this person's messages and the contents of this person's photos, you know, Apple had the ability to do that because they had the keys, right?
John:
And we said, oh, messages is end-to-end encrypted.
John:
Unless you enable iCloud backup because the backups aren't end-to-end encrypted and Apple can just give them the backups, right?
John:
And so we were always wondering, like, when is Apple going to finally get around to end-to-end encrypting this?
John:
And when they were doing the CSAM stuff, the, you know, child sexual abuse material stuff that we talked about many moons ago,
John:
We saw in the plumbing for that feature, that very controversial feature we'll be more on in a little bit.
John:
We saw in the plumbing of that feature preparing for the ability to do end-to-end encryption on photos.
John:
And now that day has finally come.
John:
The CSAM stuff is a different story.
John:
We'll get to it in a little bit.
John:
But now finally, iCloud backups.
John:
And why do you care about that?
John:
Because that's where your messages are backed up.
John:
iCloud backups are in-dened encrypted.
John:
Photos are in-dened encrypted.
John:
Notes are in-dened encrypted.
John:
The big categories of stuff that previously was Apple could access.
John:
Now, if you enable advanced data protection for iCloud, Apple can't access it.
John:
They literally don't have the key.
John:
If the government comes to them and says, we need to see these people's photos and you've enabled...
John:
advanced data protection of icloud apple literally can't give them they can't see your photos period they don't have the key only you have it and in the past that has been true for like one of those 14 categories your passwords icloud keychain has always been like this your health data i think has already been like this and you're probably looking at the
John:
A bunch of stuff was always like this.
John:
This is not Apple's first time doing this.
John:
It's just that there were these big categories of data that weren't like that.
John:
And Apple sort of, you know, in the Craig Federighi interview, which we'll get to in a little bit, was saying like, oh, we were, you know, we were using this feature and other things to sort of get good at it.
John:
And now we're finally ready to roll it everywhere.
John:
Almost everywhere.
Casey:
Yeah, just very quickly.
Casey:
So like you said, a lot of stuff was already end-to-end encrypted, including, I'm happy to report your Memoji, but the stuff, the categories, nine or whatever categories that would be end-to-end encrypted that previously were not are wallet passes.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that's not your credit card, but like your boarding passes and things like that.
Casey:
Voice memos, Siri shortcuts, Safari bookmarks, reminders, notes, photos, iCloud drive, iCloud backup, including device and messages backup,
Casey:
And oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
And then the three that remain that will never, ever, ever be end-to-end encrypted, or at least not as of right now, are calendars, contacts, and mail.
Casey:
And the shorter version on why is because, oh, we have to integrate with the rest of the world.
Casey:
And so we need to be able to like insert data, remove data, et cetera, et cetera.
John:
Before we get to those caveats thing, this question in the chat room is addressed by the Wall Street Journal article, which I think is behind a paywall, but snippets have been extracted.
John:
They said the new encryption system will roll out as an option in the U.S.
John:
by year's end and then worldwide, including China in 2023.
John:
Because that's the question.
John:
Like, does this include China?
John:
And according to Federighi in his interview with the Wall Street Journal that we'll link to in the show notes, he said, yeah, no, we're planning on rolling it out in China.
John:
He didn't sound super confident.
John:
It's like, I haven't heard anything from the Chinese government, but I do wonder how this is going to work.
John:
Because, you know, Apple's had to make a lot of compromises with their security to be in China, that China gets to run the data centers or whatever.
John:
But China running the data centers matters a lot less if the data centers don't have the keys to your data.
John:
And somehow I don't see this going well for Apple.
John:
Because once China realizes what features are in this...
John:
like maybe they could request that okay but in the in in ios in china just don't enable this feature i don't i don't i don't know what the plan is there but uh stay tuned for more news now but as of right now the intention is this will roll out worldwide including china yeah
Marco:
There's no way China gets this enabled for them for very long.
Marco:
Maybe it rolls out initially because the government hasn't gotten wind of it yet.
Marco:
I guarantee you, as soon as they get wind of it, which has probably happened today, I guarantee you they're going to have a problem with this.
Marco:
You look at the Chinese government's history with data they can't access being generated by their citizens, not a chance.
Marco:
There is no way this stays like this.
Casey:
Yep, I agree with you.
Casey:
And we should just make it clear that there was a article by Joanna Stern in the Wall Street Journal, and we'll link that, both the raw version and the Apple News version, because I believe a lot of times you can get to the Apple News version if you're, you know, what is it, Apple One subscriber, what have you.
Casey:
We'll link that, both of them in the show notes.
Casey:
And she also had a YouTube video, which was in the article and also is on, excuse me, there was a video that was in the article and also on YouTube.
Casey:
It was like six and a half minutes, and that was an interview or a discussion between her and Craig Federighi.
Casey:
And that was very good.
Casey:
And we'll put that in the show notes as well.
Casey:
Additionally, in the show notes will be the platform security guide, which is, I think, something that has existed for quite a while now, but it has new stuff for advanced data protection in iCloud.
Casey:
I took a quick spin through this earlier today, and I thought that there were some interesting pieces to this.
Casey:
So reading from various portions of that guide.
Casey:
iWork collaboration, the shared albums feature and photos, and sharing content with, quote, anyone with a link, quote, do not support advanced data protection.
Casey:
When you use these features, the encryption keys for the shared content are securely uploaded to Apple data centers so that iCloud can facilitate real-time collaboration or web sharing.
Casey:
This means the shared content is not end-to-end encrypted, even when advanced data protection is enabled.
Casey:
Now, quick note, point of fact, I had read this as shared photo library, which is not what it says.
Casey:
It's shared albums, which makes a lot more sense.
John:
The very unfortunately named feature that's going to be a problem if and when Apple actually adds album sharing to shared photo library, because what the hell are you going to call it?
John:
So unlike the thing that you said before, like they said, oh, mail, contacts, and calendar aren't end-to-end encrypted because they need to interoperate.
John:
Some of those, if you squint, make some kind of sense.
John:
Basically, here's the main thing that prevents them from doing an end-to-end.
John:
If you need to have a URL that anyone can load and get info, you can't use end-to-end encryption unless you're willing to force everyone who loads that URL to somehow...
John:
get into your system enough that you can validate and share keys with them, you know what I mean?
John:
But a lot of this stuff, the way it works, like integration with other systems is no, they just expect to be able to load the URL.
John:
So the anyone with a link thing is a great example.
John:
Whenever you see one of those like share this with anyone who has the link can view it, that means you're using basically security through obscurity.
John:
If you don't know the URL, you're probably not gonna find this if we've done a good job, but anybody who knows the URL, they can just load it, right?
John:
Lots of things work that way.
John:
you can't make an Anyone With Link link that says, oh, well, yeah, I know what you want to get at here, but you need to either sign into your Apple ID and then trade a secret key with the person who's sharing this with you or get an Apple ID if you don't have one.
John:
And at that point, people are already leaving, right?
John:
Because the whole point of Anyone With Link is...
John:
Give it to someone.
John:
They don't need to have an Apple ID.
John:
They don't need to get an Apple ID.
John:
They don't need to exchange anything with you.
John:
You don't even need to know who they are.
John:
Anyone with a link means anyone with a link.
John:
Some aspects of mail, contact, and calendar are like that.
John:
And it's not just other people that interact with them, but there's third-party software and services.
John:
that expect to be able to interact with the various protocols that run mail contacts and calendaring that would break if they tried to roll this out so i i kind of understand that and shared albums similarly like if you can you can make a shared album and there's a web view of that so if you want to share pictures with someone in your family who does not have an apple device or maybe they don't even have a phone at all they just have a computer whatever unlikely it's probably the reverse but anyway
John:
Those features don't do end-to-end encryption because the whole point of them is for sharing.
John:
And then the iWork collaboration, that just seems like something that's sort of, well, I guess it's the anyone with a link thing.
John:
So the things that don't use it are kind of the things that you would expect, but this is another caveat that people tend not to think about when we talked about, oh, now finally my messages will be end-to-end encrypted, so I'm secure, right?
John:
Well, your messages, kind of like your email,
John:
If you secure, if you had secured your email somehow using some secure email system or you'd secure your messages, it doesn't really matter because everyone you've ever emailed also has those emails.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like half your email is not yours.
John:
And the same thing with messages.
John:
Everybody you talk to over messages, if they're not also encrypting, your messages could be subpoenaed through them.
John:
That's part of the nature of communication.
John:
You give them your half of the conversation and then it's up to them
John:
to safely store that somewhere.
John:
So that's true of email, and that's true of messages.
John:
So if you think, now I've end-to-end my messages, the government can never see what I write on messages.
John:
Has everyone you've ever talked to on iMessage also enabled advanced data protection?
John:
If not, government can still get it.
John:
So just keep that in mind.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Devices where the user is signed in with their Apple ID must be updated to iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, macOS 13.1, tvOS 16.2, watchOS 9.2, and the latest version of iCloud for Windows.
Casey:
This requirement prevents a previous version of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, or watchOS from mishandling the newly created service keys by re-uploading them to the available after authentication HSM, I'm not sure what that means off the top of my head, in a misguided attempt to repair the account state.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dupsies.
John:
uh so yeah so another a couple of caveats as well basically everything that you touch needs to be latest and greatest and i hope you don't like icloud.com unless and if you do you have to turn it on explicitly hsm is hardware security module yeah this is this is the thing that's really going to trip people up uh you need to just in case this isn't clear if you have like an old phone in a drawer that's running an old version of ios and it's still logged into your apple id you can't enable this feature it
John:
you have to be updated everywhere so what that means is finding the old devices and either erasing them or signing out of your apple id on them like they're trying to basically prevent like you thinking you're secure where really you have some old device that doesn't have any of this code that's leaking your information out or like subverting it or whatever and this is going to be i think the main barrier to adoption so this isn't enabled by default first of all and second of all for all the tech nerds are like yeah i'm going to try it tech nerds are very likely to have a bunch of devices that haven't been updated you think
John:
oh tech nerds update their stuff right away they're gonna have everything updated soon no it's all the devices that are in drawers that you forgot about that are still signed into your apple id so you have to go and hunt them down and sign out um and related to that the last time i personally ran across this and probably a lot of tech nerds did is a feature that was laying the groundwork for this which is the i forget what apple calls it but it's like the hey designate some other person to be like your backup if you forget everything
John:
what is that one called recovery contact right yeah something like that it's a feature of ios and mac you basically designate a person to say i trust this person enough so that if i lose all my stuff and i lose all my recovery this is part of the recovery process i think you also give this up if you do that 28 character thing so be careful but anyway for normal people who are wise and are not going to do that you would designate a recovery contact but to even do that you had to make sure everything was like update i figure what the requirements are but you had to go through and update a bunch of stuff so the first time i tried to go through it it says
John:
You can't use this feature until devices X, Y, Z, and Q are all logged out of your Apple ID.
John:
So I had to go around my house and hunt those things down.
John:
Or you can even go on the website.
John:
I think it's either appleid.apple.com or icloud.com.
John:
You can delete devices from your Apple ID, which basically invalidates their keys.
John:
You would have to do that before you could even designate a recovery contact.
John:
Well, this whole process is going to have to repeat.
John:
Only now what you're going to need are a bunch of versions of OSs that aren't even out yet.
John:
in particular the one that might trip people up is mac os 13.1 because who updates their macs right you gotta update everything so if you're excited about this feature and i think unlike the hardware recovery key and unlike the the hardware recovery device and the the 28 character code i think advanced data protection is reasonable for pretty much everybody to do and it's probably a good idea because you are still protected by apple's recovery procedure and i think it will force you i don't know if this is in the notes anymore but i think it will force you to have a recovery contact like that
John:
to enable advanced data protection it will either force you or strongly suggest that you have a recovery contact so you'll still mostly be protected and apple's customer support will still mostly not be totally destroyed by people locking themselves out of all their data but you will need to update everything everywhere to get this to run
Casey:
Yeah, it was in the video interview with Joanna Stern that she said to Craig, well, what took so damn long?
Casey:
And almost verbatim, I believe.
Casey:
And he said, well, one of the things we have to worry about is customer support because, you know, you're now putting the onus on yourself to be able to recover.
Casey:
And so I believe that Craig had said you must choose a designated contact or alternatively print out, you know, this 28 character or whatever it is, you know, recovery code.
Casey:
And they will compel you to do one or the other.
Casey:
Because if you lose your backup person and or your backup code, there is literally nothing Apple can do by design.
Casey:
The whole point is that they have no mechanism to get into your data.
Casey:
And it was interesting that for all of the different things that were said...
Casey:
And naturally, none of them involved, oh, well, and by the way, law enforcement also cannot get into your data.
Casey:
Like, this is all about, oh, just having good security practices.
Casey:
They never said either directly or indirectly.
Casey:
This is about preventing law enforcement from getting at your stuff if you don't want them to, which I thought was kind of funny.
Casey:
Anyway, Jason over at Six Colors had a really good summary, and he made a few points I wanted to quickly read.
Casey:
Another reason Apple has fought against encrypting all the things is that it has some serious side effects for users, most notably that Apple can't unlock your data if you no longer have the password to your Apple ID.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
To solve this problem, see, I should have read ahead my own show notes, and I was the one who put them in.
Casey:
Hooray!
Casey:
To solve this problem, Apple's placing these new nine encryption services in a new feature called Advanced Data Protection that isn't owned by default, just like John said a moment ago.
Casey:
And according to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, requires that users generate at least one additional method of unlocking their account.
Casey:
Methods include a printout of a very long string that can be stored somewhere secure or the designation of a different Apple ID as having the authority to unlock the account.
Casey:
Anything else about this before we talk about the other bomb that was dropped today?
John:
yeah i am interested though because based on what i had earlier in the notes about the the fact that when you create that 28 character code it turns off account recovery i wonder if i'm either have that wrong or if that will be communicated clearly in the sort of onboarding procedure because if it does turn off recovery it's like all right so obviously trusting someone else is also a risk because now that's another vector that they can get to you like if someone if someone hacks them because they don't use good security
John:
And they're a recovery thing for you.
John:
In theory, the person you designated as a recovery contact also needs you to participate to get access.
John:
But in practice, the whole point is that if you've forgotten everything, just them, plus knowing enough about you, like your app light.
John:
Anyway, it seems like that that is another potential vector for people to hack you is whoever you trust is a security contact.
John:
But on the other hand.
John:
If you just do the 28 character code, then you're trusting yourself with that slip of paper.
John:
And if you lose that, you can't go whining to anybody and say, but isn't there some kind of recovery procedure where I can show who I am and this person will vouch for me?
John:
And they'd be like, no, you took the 28 character code.
John:
If you don't have that piece of paper, tough luck.
John:
And that's not a place where I want to be.
John:
So I am deaf.
John:
I've already designated the backup contact.
John:
I think I picked my wife or something.
John:
But like that seems much safer for me again for normal people.
John:
Those features that exist for like the 28 character code and the message verification.
John:
That's for heads of state, journalists, celebrities, probably not you.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then the other bomb that was dropped, which I don't think was any official announcement anywhere, but... Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Casey:
There was an official announcement.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
So Apple has a statement.
Casey:
After extensive consultation with experts to gather feedback on child protection initiatives we proposed last year, we are deepening our investment in the communication safety feature that we first made available in December 2021.
Casey:
We have further decided not to move forward with our previously proposed CSAM detection tool for iCloud Photos.
Casey:
Children can't be protected without companies combing through personal data, and we will continue working with governments, child advocates, and other companies to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place for children and for us all.
Casey:
So, in summary, Apple now says it's stopped the development of their CSAM system, following criticism, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Federighi said that Apple's focus is related to protecting children and
Casey:
Additionally, Wired had a different article where they wrote...
Casey:
Apple has told Wired that while it is not ready to announce a specific timeline for expanding its communication safety features, the company is working on adding the ability to detect nudity in video sensory messages when the protection is enabled.
Casey:
The company also plans to expand the offering beyond messages to its other communication applications.
Casey:
Ultimately, the goal is to make it possible for third-party developers to incorporate the communication safety tools into their own applications.
John:
So this is a big retreat from the idea that Apple is going to scan the photos on your device looking for for child sexual abuse material to changing to a very different posture, which is the whole heading it off before it happens.
John:
Basically saying as data is sent from or perhaps received by your device, we will look at it at that moment and try to, you know, like.
John:
The feature that they told Wired, like, oh, well, maybe you eventually have a third-party framework where you can detect nudity.
John:
Like, detecting nudity and child sexual abuse material are two very different things, right?
John:
Because you could be sending a picture of yourself naked to your, you know, significant other, and that is not child sexual abuse material, but it would trip off the nudity filter.
John:
So I'm not sure what they're trying to say there other than, hey, here's a cool machine learning tool that will package up that you could use in your application if you wanted.
John:
But end-to-end encryption combined with a retreat from scanning on device kind of puts them back to where they were before, where, well, they said they weren't scanning it on the server.
John:
Now they won't be able to scan it on the server if you enable advanced data protection.
John:
And also, they're not going to scan it on your device.
John:
What they are going to do is the features they described of like, hey, if a minor tries to send a picture of themselves naked through messages, it will pop up a little thing and say, you sure you want to do this and try to educate them and head them off at the pass.
John:
And I'm not sure where they stand on the whole parental notification feature was like if they're if they're young, we'll send a message to their parent and tell them they're doing it.
John:
But I think they retreated from that as well.
John:
Uh, this is this message where they said they're quote unquote deepening our investment in the communication safety features that we first made available.
John:
If by deepening our investment, you mean totally changing what you plan to do because people yelled at you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I guess you're deepening something.
John:
Um, like I'm, we talked a lot about this when it was announced, but like, uh,
John:
they've changed their position based on essentially criticism and consultation from lots of people from, you know, from security researchers, from privacy advocates, uh, from lots of people who had scenarios where this feature could be abused by governments for nefarious purposes or used by hackers.
John:
Uh,
John:
So what they're basically doing is for now playing it safe, which is we're not doing any of those things that we thought might be risky.
John:
We are doing end to end encryption, which everybody wants and is good.
John:
But of course, that same feature can be used for nefarious actors to hide their activities.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the nature.
John:
That's the nature of security.
John:
If you do security right.
John:
It helps the good guys and the bad guys equally.
John:
There's no, you know, despite what everybody in Congress and our country wants, there's no way to magically protect all the good people's data, but not the bad people's.
John:
We'll just add a backdoor that only the good people know, but that's not how security works.
John:
If you add a backdoor, it's a backdoor for everybody.
John:
And there's no way to have a backdoor and also have security.
John:
Uh, so Apple has opted to have security and, and then the on-device scanning was a way to get around.
John:
That was like, well, Apple won't have the keys.
John:
Governments can't get the keys.
John:
It'll just be scanned on your device, which will try to make a secure hardware thing.
John:
And then people were not up for that.
John:
They said, no, we don't want that to happen.
John:
So Apple said, okay, that won't happen.
John:
Uh, but here's your indebted encryption.
John:
So, uh,
John:
I guess this is a pretty good outcome in terms of Apple proposed something.
John:
There was a lot of public feedback that it wasn't a good idea, but they continued to pursue the end to end encryption.
John:
Despite the fact that that seemed almost tied to the CSAM stuff, they separated it and said end to end encryption.
John:
Good.
John:
Everyone's going to get it.
John:
Here you go.
John:
And then the CSAM stuff, we're still trying to figure that out.
Casey:
Anything else on all this?
Casey:
I am excited.
Casey:
I'm pleased that it's happening.
Casey:
Of course, I wish it happened yesterday, but the next best time is now.
Casey:
And I do, I'd have to look at it more.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I do plan to turn it on once it's out of beta and once it's available to everyone.
Casey:
And I will probably advise Aaron to do the same thing.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, what is your sitting here knowing what you know today?
Casey:
Would you turn this on?
Marco:
probably but not yet i want to wait until you know i mean i'm sure they've been very careful and everything but the stakes are so high if things go wrong here that i'm not going to jump on it like you know on day one i might wait you know i'm not even on ventura yet like you know i'm waiting i actually get ventura it's fine i i would you know the point one is about to come out i'll probably jump on that when they when they do that but you need the point one to do this anyway
John:
that's true that's true yeah so for people who don't uh know how to think about this this all this data that we just talked about it's already encrypted so if you're like i want apple to have an unencrypted version of my photos they don't they have an encrypted version everything they have is encrypted the difference is that they also have the key so this is not like oh this is going to scramble all my data your data is already scrambled on apple servers it's already nonsense like if you were to break into apple servers and just grab your photos you'd have a bunch of binary garbage
John:
You need the key.
John:
Apple also currently has the key.
John:
All this feature is not all this feature is doing to minimize what they're doing.
John:
But like, logically speaking, they're just taking the key away from Apple.
John:
They're really making a new key and you only you have.
John:
But anyway, Apple will not have the key and you will have it.
John:
Right now, you both have the key.
John:
But it doesn't change the nature of your data.
John:
So there's not going to be some long process that goes through and re-encrypts all your data or whatever.
John:
It's already encrypted in all places, right?
John:
The only difference is who has the key.
John:
And this move is changing it from you have the key and Apple has the key to just you.
John:
And all your trusted devices and so on and so forth.
John:
And Marco is right that any change like this is a risk because if they have a bug or something and it screws up, now your key is in one fewer place, right?
John:
Apple used to have your key and now they don't.
John:
So if they screw something up such that you lose all your keys or something and their backup solution doesn't work, Apple doesn't have one more copy of the key.
John:
I think that's highly unlikely to happen.
John:
But if you're listening to this and you're worried like, oh, I don't want to do this because I don't want my data to be encrypted.
John:
It's already encrypted everywhere.
John:
It is encrypted at rest, as they say.
John:
It's just a question of who has the keys.
John:
How many copies of the key are there and who has them?
Casey:
So this is good news.
Casey:
I'm excited for it.
Casey:
I am sure China and other similar governments are going to be equally enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
And to be honest, I'm not so confident that American government will be particularly enthusiastic about it, but we shall see.
John:
yeah i mean the american government's not i mean they're whatever they're always making noises but apple is not the first company to do this like and encrypted backups i think android's had it for years and years like it is a common feature of all sorts of like keychain your health data like this is not a new thing they're just extending it to more data so they were it was overdue like apple was behind the times they had done it for a bunch of important data and your memoji but but they hadn't done it for your photos and your backups and now they finally have those are the two biggies that we really care about
John:
all right uh additionally apple has added 700 new price points the app store cool no this is good look okay i don't know first of all this is a small deal not a big deal but i think i think they have to start by letting people know that there are price points on the app store because i think a lot of people think if you haven't ever sold an app that you when you just sell an app you decide what the price is going to be and you type it into a text field and that's not how it works
Marco:
Yeah, so the way App Store pricing has worked to date, there's a few exceptions around subscriptions, stuff like that, but for the most part, the way it has worked to date is when you post your app to the App Store, you select a, quote, price tier, and that's what it is everywhere.
Marco:
And the price tier is basically like every dollar in the US dollar with 99 at the end.
Marco:
So that's why 99 cents was the base price, and that's tier one.
Marco:
Or tier zero is free.
Marco:
So then, anyway...
Marco:
You can do tier two.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Then that's $1.99 or whatever.
Marco:
And there's been limited to no ability so far to customize prices by region.
Marco:
Although, again, the subscription pricing has been a little bit different in that regard.
Marco:
They've had a few more options than straight up in-app purchases.
John:
But Apple does that for you, like for the price.
John:
When you say, I want tier one, whatever that is, dollar ninety nine.
John:
Apple tells you, OK, here's what tier one is in euros.
John:
Here's what tier one is in this country.
John:
Here's what tier one isn't like.
John:
Apple decides that you don't get to pick that.
John:
So not only do you not get to pick the exact price, I want my thing to be a dollar and twenty three cents.
John:
Nope.
John:
Sorry, you can't do that.
John:
But then after you pick the price tier, Apple says, OK, for that tier, here's how much it is in all these currencies in other countries.
John:
And they adjust that from time to time.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
There's a number of reasons why this is actually very convenient for people like me who don't know how things should be priced in the entire world.
Marco:
I know my own market, and I can hear from a few people here and there about some of the other big markets, but for the most part, hey, I want my annual Overcast Premium purchase, which is I think currently my only in-app purchase I offer in the App Store.
Marco:
It's just $10 a month in the U.S., and
Marco:
roughly that same thing everywhere else, like whatever the equivalents are.
Marco:
And I don't have to think about that for the most part.
Marco:
Like I just let it go and I let Apple figure out what that means in each currency and they deal with tax and everything and that's it.
John:
Sorry, a year.
Marco:
Sorry, $10 a year.
John:
Don't let people get scared away.
John:
It's not $10 a month.
Marco:
No, it's $10 a year.
Marco:
And in fact, I think I actually am undercharging.
Marco:
This is just an unrelated side note.
Marco:
But if you look around, like, oh, God, again, more App Store stuff.
Marco:
The other day, Adam asked if he can get an app for his iPad that all of his friends are using.
Marco:
A, quote, meme generator app.
Marco:
And what this means is an app that basically searches public databases of, like, you know, Giphy and stuff for images, unless you type impact text over them.
Marco:
Like, that's basically, it's the most simple app in the world.
Marco:
five dollars a month what at least it's not per week probably was in the past before they stopped letting you do that i believe there was a weekly option but the cheapest option was five dollars a month and and not just one app like every app that was popular that showed up in search results that did this is is some kind of monthly at least subscription of about that magnitude
John:
They're trying to find apps the kids want to use and they'll just ask their parents to do it and the parents will say yes and then not notice another $5 a month is coming out so they can literally type text over an image.
John:
That's it.
Marco:
Like, I just, it makes me so mad.
Marco:
Like, and I, I try not to like, you know, show it too much because I don't want to like discourage him from using stuff on his iPad and stuff.
Marco:
So I try, I try to hide my anger.
Marco:
But the fact that this stuff exists in iOS and that it is doing so well.
Marco:
And these are apps that had tens of thousands of ratings.
Marco:
I'm sure they're all legit.
Marco:
I know, right?
Marco:
But I bet some of them are.
Marco:
I mean, they're high-ranking.
Marco:
If you look at what the App Store has generated, in order to rank highly on the App Store these days,
Marco:
You have to be able to put a lot of money into buying search ads, buying installs on Facebook and stuff, and paying people to review it probably.
Marco:
You have to put a lot of money into getting a higher ranking.
Marco:
And so what ends up getting the highest ranking is the stuff that has the most in-app purchase income from it.
Marco:
And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Marco:
And so the prices of everything just goes up and up and up for common needs for everything that's actually ranking well because it's full of all these scams and they keep outranking everything else because they can afford to.
Marco:
And then the result is everything just costs more and sucks more for users.
Marco:
But Apple just makes more money.
Marco:
And so it's going to stay that way.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to the subject.
Marco:
So, you know, when you're designing an app purchase.
Marco:
Oh, anyway, and I think Overcast is underpriced for what it is.
Marco:
Because even if you look around like other podcast apps that have an app purchase stuff, like I'm cheaper than all of them.
Marco:
And maybe I shouldn't be.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I probably shouldn't change it.
Marco:
But anyway.
Marco:
But yeah, it makes me so mad.
Marco:
Like, wow, I can type text over an image for $5 a month.
Marco:
Or I can pay, like, if somebody can pay, like, 80 cents a month or whatever for my podcast app.
Marco:
Like, mmm.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
um so yeah so there's been limited control by developers over what these price points are and how how they are targeted in different markets um etc and so and there's been weird awkwardness too like because all the prices were forced to end in 99 in the u.s and whatever the equivalents are in a lot of other places um
Marco:
certain pricing didn't make sense like especially when you look at like bundles or you'd have like you know oh you know buy buy two months for the price or for the price of two or three or whatever like sometimes the math would work out in such a way that didn't really make sense for like oh you're actually paying like 10 cents more if you buy it this way because of the stupid 99 pricing that should have been like 98 or 90 or something depending on how the rounding would work out so anyway what they're doing is adding a whole bunch more price tiers now
Marco:
We're not going to notice much of this in the U.S.
Marco:
market and in North America, Europe.
Marco:
Most of the stuff is not going to affect us that much because people are going to keep charging what they've been charging because it makes sense and it makes the most sales.
Marco:
However, there are a few little tricks, one of which is that the lowest price point, instead of being 99 cents in the U.S., is now going to be 29 cents in the U.S.,
Marco:
that we're going to notice that's going to become a thing uh i don't know to what degree i mean it the the idea of like you know the rush to the bottom with pricing everything going to 99 cents in the app store was mainly a problem or or rather an effect of paid up front apps
Marco:
And we don't really live in that world anymore.
Marco:
Very few apps are paid up front anymore.
Marco:
Although I did just buy one the other day for a stupid camera remote.
Marco:
Long story short, John, you were right.
Marco:
I should have upgraded the firmware on my Sony camera.
Marco:
It was 1.00.
Marco:
not a reassuring number yeah it is now like three point something it's yeah it turns out the wi-fi didn't work before and it does and now it does uh animal eye detection you can take good hops pictures oh good yeah i'll go i'll look at that now because the autofocus performance really is not very good anyway um so i think what one interesting thing about this is that you know yeah you know people who want to really fine grain control their pricing will now have more options to do that um
Marco:
I think the $0.29 thing could be more interesting in the sense that it's almost a micropayment level now where you can now have in-app purchase of that price.
Marco:
So again, I'm not thinking there's going to be a whole bunch of $0.29 apps.
Marco:
I think apps that are going to succeed the most are going to still have to be free up front, just like they have been for a long time.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
$0.29 for an in-app purchase, I think that could actually really affect things.
Marco:
I don't think for the worse.
Marco:
I think it's probably just going to be additive in the world.
Marco:
I'm not thinking of any reason why this is a bad thing to have more options.
Marco:
It's up to developers how they use them.
Marco:
there's already rampant abuse of in-app purchase everywhere all over the App Store.
Marco:
There's already tons of scams and frauds and tricks and exploits that people do with psychology and the App Store rules a little bit to do sleazy crap in the App Store.
Marco:
So this isn't going to change any of that.
Marco:
I think whatever potential for
Marco:
Sleaziness in the App Store this will enable has already been enabled for years and is being let flourish by Apple either by neglect or actively encouraging.
Marco:
So I don't think this is anything bad here.
Marco:
I think it's only good.
Marco:
The reason they're doing it are multifaceted.
Marco:
Part of the reason they're doing it is they want to make the App Store better.
Marco:
Part of the reason they're doing it is they keep getting sued.
Marco:
And I believe this was actually part of a settlement to add more price tiers that they had to do as part of some suit.
Marco:
So the reality is the in-app purchase system is still very limited in its capabilities.
Marco:
It is still fairly overpriced in the market in terms of its commission of what we have to pay them to use it.
Marco:
And it is still...
Marco:
Competing by fiat instead of by actual merit in most ways because we aren't allowed to use anything else on the iPhone.
Marco:
And so this is a sign of Apple making their system better.
Marco:
And that's good.
Marco:
It shouldn't have taken this long to do this.
Marco:
And their system is still not as good as it should be.
Marco:
But I'm glad they're making progress better.
Marco:
And I wish that they were more forced to compete on merit rather than gracing us with occasional enhancements just out of the goodness of their heart slash lawsuits.
Marco:
I wish they were actually being forced to compete on merit because...
Marco:
What they're doing here is really trying to get like the bare minimum functionality that they can get away with.
Marco:
While if they had to actually compete on merit, you know, look at all their competitors out there, all the different payment processors and payment platforms and everything.
Marco:
And, you know, this is a drop in the bucket compared to what they offer.
Marco:
They did increase the top price tier up to $10,000.
Marco:
What was it before?
Marco:
What was the top before?
John:
I believe $1,000 before.
John:
I could be wrong.
Casey:
And it's $10,000 upon request.
John:
Yeah, well, I mean, $10,000 is so weird because, like, enterprise software costs more than that, but regular software costs less.
John:
So what the hell is $10,000?
John:
That's just, like, in the middle of nowhere, kind of.
John:
Anyway, whatever.
John:
It's a lot of gems and loot boxes and candy crush.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Speaking of doing things better and having competition, this is...
John:
relevant to uh the discussion jason and i had on the upgrade that i guess said on recently that we will link in the show notes um when i was using the uh i tried out that lens app that everyone's trying now with the ai image processing and you can hear me get very angry about that app uh on upgrade but not for this particular reason one of the things that i was angry about not the main one but one of them when i was playing with this was it has an app purchase to for everything and
John:
uh and it's you know it's fairly expensive pay six dollars so they can uh illegally exploit the work of others to give you a bunch of avatar images um but i did one and the you know i double tapped the side button and face id and you know in-app purchase went through right and i saw on my apple card the charge come up but nothing ever happened in the app it had no history of me doing that it's like oh you paid for a thing and it should be appear on the screen but it's not there um
John:
And so you go to their little help in the app and it's like one of the fact items is like payment problem, whatever.
John:
Like, oh, you know, I paid for a thing and I don't see it.
John:
And they basically say, you know, we can't give you a refund, which is true.
John:
You should know from listening to ATP that developers cannot give you a refund.
Casey:
That's not entirely true now.
Casey:
With Storkit 2, you can.
Marco:
Wait, what?
Casey:
You know, with Storkit 2, there's an in-app refund flow.
Marco:
I thought it was just like a request a refund.
Marco:
You could kick them to a certain screen, right?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
It's been a while since I've looked at this.
Casey:
But with Storkit 2, which is the new async await powered Storkit stuff, there's absolutely a way.
Casey:
I think it...
Casey:
kicks to an apple provided screen which is i think what you just said i forget i'd have to look at it again but there is absolutely a new way that you can tell apple hey this user wants a refund and i forget exactly how it's processed from there right well the point is the request goes to apple the request i mean the developer can facilitate the flow but in the end apple and and to most of the part apple will will fulfill that request they will give you the refund
John:
But the cost of it, you know, the $6 charge that I got that I got nothing for, right?
John:
Probably because of a bug in their program or their servers were overwhelmed or who knows what the problem was, right?
John:
I made the calculation that it would be more annoying than the $6 that I would get back to try to go through the process.
John:
Because now I have to go to, you know, they didn't have that flow facilitated.
John:
So maybe if they had done that with Storkid 2, I would have tried it.
John:
But, like, I have to go through sort of the out-of-band, go to this form, fill it out, and say, hey...
John:
I made an in-app purchase in this thing.
John:
It was for this amount.
John:
I made it roughly around this time, and I didn't get the thing for it.
John:
Give me a refund.
John:
Well, I made a bunch of $6 purchases because I was playing with the program.
John:
Which one of them didn't work?
John:
I don't have even a way to identify it to say, like, the fifth one for this amount made on this day was the one I didn't get.
John:
And it's just like, ugh.
John:
It just seemed like such a headache.
John:
I'm like, well, you win this time.
John:
You get my $6 and you didn't get anything from it because of how annoying it is.
John:
In a competitive market, every purchase that you make through an in-and-out purchase system, you'd be able to go to a web page and see a history of all your transactions.
John:
And each line item would have a refund button at the end.
John:
Request a refund, right?
John:
Like, how hard is it to return something to Amazon?
John:
How hard is it to request a refund?
John:
Like basic e-commerce functionality from the 90s is I can see a list of all my transactions and I can do stuff to them right there.
John:
I can look at the details of the order.
John:
I can go link back to the pages of things.
John:
And if I want to get a refund, I don't have to go to someplace else and dig something out right there.
John:
It should say, do you want a refund in this order?
John:
Do you want to initiate a return?
John:
That's what the web is for.
John:
But in the world of Apple, it's like, oh, go to a form on an Apple web page.
John:
And now I guess in StoreCut 2, we'll try to facilitate that flow.
John:
Forget about involving the developer and allowing you to do a refund or to do a refund programmatically or whatever.
John:
Just give the user enough knowledge.
John:
Like all I had literally to know that this even happened is I can go to transactions on my Apple card and see a charge.
John:
But beyond that, there's no record that this thing ever happened anywhere else and no way for me to identify it.
John:
There's not even like an order number or a transaction ID that's visible to me.
John:
So frustrating.
John:
Definitely not.
John:
And this is like up to the standards of like, you know, maybe not 90s, but like a
John:
Early 2000s-era e-commerce platforms, and the App Store does not meet that line.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And it's no good.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
Casey:
But, yeah, so apparently you can define all new – or you can't define new price points, but you can use a bunch of new price points.
Casey:
They can end in various ending decimals, so like something 95, something 99 –
Casey:
Zero, zero, finally.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, I think you can do zero, zero, like all sorts of different stuff.
Casey:
And that's kind of exciting, I guess.
Casey:
But yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
This is nice, but it is far from revolutionary, which I guess I shouldn't complain.
Casey:
It's still better than nothing.
Casey:
And then finally, very briefly, Apple introduced Apple Music Sing, which I don't think, yeah, it's available later this month.
Casey:
But anyways, Apple Music Sing is an exciting new feature that allows users to sing along with their favorite songs with adjustable vocals and real-time lyrics.
Casey:
Apple Music Sing offers multiple lyric views to help fans take the lead, perform duets, sing backup, and more, all integrated within Apple Music's unparalleled lyrics experience.
Casey:
Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog that features tens of millions of the world's most singable songs, Apple Music Sing makes it fun and easy for anyone to participate, however and wherever they choose.
Casey:
Available later this month to Apple Music subscribers worldwide.
Casey:
You can do it on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.
Casey:
uh vatici has i think taken a spin with this or or has at least posted some screenshots of it one way or another i will put a link to a tweet of his in the show notes i i don't personally care for karaoke because i cannot carry a tune to save my life but i think that's kind of cool i think it could be a fun party game we actually i think i might have mentioned we recently dug out our wii and uh our rock band equipment in order to play that with the kids from time to time and that and that's been quite fun although
Casey:
uh as always with rock band uh and you never really find anyone volunteering to be the singer what are you gonna do i mean that's a high risk move what not what being the singer yeah it's terrible yeah you know everyone else is having fun you're the singer like you're you're gonna be under some scrutiny yep no i couldn't agree more but there are musical families like the von traps or whatever where everyone wants to be the singer because they can all carry a tune must be nice must be friggin nice
Casey:
Anyway, this is cool.
Casey:
I don't personally have a lot to say about it, but I think it's neat.
Casey:
And I'll definitely at least check it out.
Casey:
And I'm curious what the user interaction looks like for this.
Casey:
Obviously, again, we've seen some screenshots, but I think this is one of those things you're going to have to use it to really see how it feels.
Casey:
But hey, that's kind of cool.
Casey:
Yeah, I think it's really cool.
John:
When I saw this feature, my first thought was...
John:
Are they extracting the vocals using like machine learning?
John:
But the answer seems to be no.
John:
They're just using the fact that they have multi-track versions of these songs for like their Dolby Atmos versions.
John:
Like they already have isolated vocals.
John:
That's why they can just, you know, they're not extracting the vocals.
John:
The vocals are already extracted.
John:
And that's why I think it's not going to be on every song in their catalog.
John:
But however, only however many million they have these Dolby Atmos multi-track things for.
John:
um but there are lots of really cool machine learning things that can extract vocals from songs you don't need machine learning machine learning is such a term you got to put it on everything now to get vc funding or whatever but like you can extract vocals from songs like like subtracting from the left channel from the right channel if the vocal is right in the middle or whatever like there's very dumb digital signal processing things you can do to try kind of get the vocals out uh but machine learning things can do a really scary good job of doing it
John:
with even if you just have a mixed thing but apple doesn't have to worry about any of that because they've got the individual tracks um and yeah this definitely looks fun and apple's lyrics things are actually pretty good i don't know if you ever accidentally tapped on that little uh uh double quote mark in a in a in a speech bubble in the bottom of apple music on your phone and see the words come up uh but they do a good job of like scrolling them they almost always look like a karaoke thing because they would scroll the lyrics and highlight the ones as they're saying them and the timings are really good the lyrics are usually pretty good
John:
The screenshot Fatici put in there, he put in I've Had the Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing, which is like a duet.
John:
And it shows one person's vocals on the left side and the other person's vocals on the right side.
John:
So two people can sing at the same time.
John:
Again, not advanced technology, but a fun feature that they basically had all the pieces up in Apple Music and now they have the final one.
John:
So I give this a thumbs up for all those people out there who can actually carry a tune.
Marco:
I think if the catalog is actually broad enough that you can find stuff in there that you want to sing where they actually do have the vocals isolated out, that's really cool.
Marco:
I don't know if Spotify has the same feature.
Marco:
I don't really pay attention to the karaoke world, but that's a cool thing to do when you have the position they have in the music business where they can actually get all these mixes with the vocals isolated out.
Marco:
That's a really cool thing to offer.
Marco:
Now, anybody who has an iPhone...
John:
can anywhere do a karaoke party or whatever like that's that's a pretty cool thing and i like the fact that you can you can control the vocal volume because if you're not confident enough and you're singing you can have the real vocals like 50 and it'll be a little bit more like you're singing in the shower and you just it's a mercy that you can't even hear yourself over the sound of the uh the actual vocals i mean just think about how much parents can torture their kids in the car with this oh my god
John:
yeah some people are pointing out in the chat like you you read the thing before that's available on apple tv 4k is it not available on the previous apple tv 4ks and on the pre-4k apple tvs i don't know that's a good question and of course the mac no one cares about the mac but the mac was not mentioned i guess you can't do this on your mac you can only do it on iphone ipad and the new apple tv 4k that apple tv 4k thing seems suspect to me but the lack of mac seems very clear
Marco:
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Oh.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Daryl Thornton writes, now that he has had a Mac studio running under his desk for some time, can John give us an update of how it compares to his ideal computer, the Mac Pro, and what things a new Mac Pro should have that the studio does not, above and beyond a separate video card, of course.
John:
I mean, the new Mac Pro doesn't need a separate video card, but it needs more of everything, right?
John:
What does the Mac Studio not have that I want?
John:
More GPU, right?
John:
It can be built in, but it just needs more of it, a lot more of it.
John:
And it's gonna have a lot more of it, right?
John:
And then also things, boring things, more RAM.
John:
The Mac Studio maxes out at what, 64?
John:
I've got more than that in my Mac Pro.
John:
You can't get more than that in a Mac Studio.
Casey:
I thought the Studio could do 128.
Casey:
With the Ultra, maybe?
Casey:
I think that's right.
John:
The Mac Pro can go up to like 1.5 terabytes, right?
John:
So it's in a different league there.
John:
Now, the new Mac Pro probably won't go that high, but what does it need over the Mac Studio?
John:
More than that.
John:
Maybe even simple things like more storage.
John:
It might max out at the same size because it's not like SSDs take up that much room.
John:
And I think the Studio maxes out at 8 terabytes, maybe?
Marco:
Yeah, 8 terabytes, and it is 128, by the way.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, the Mac Pro could go higher than that.
John:
And then obviously there's expansion.
John:
We don't know where they're going to go in that direction, but the Mac Studio kind of doesn't have much of any.
John:
It's really small.
John:
The Mac Pro could have expansion to add even more stuff.
John:
But even setting aside expansion, just ignore expansion entirely.
John:
It should just have the capacity for more stuff, more CPU cores, more RAM, more GPU cores, more power.
John:
So there you go.
John:
That's a Mac Pro.
Casey:
Mark Romerman writes, how are you backing up the shared photo library from your Mac?
Casey:
Does it create another accessible photo library on the Mac or is it hidden away in a library directory somewhere?
Casey:
For me, I don't do that much to the library.
Casey:
I favorite some stuff.
Casey:
I don't really make many albums.
Casey:
So I don't actively...
Casey:
I don't do anything specific to back this stuff up.
Casey:
I have Backblaze, I have Time Machine, but I don't do anything explicit or specific to back this stuff up, in part because I consider the one true copy of my photos the files on the file system on my Synology.
Casey:
But I suspect that, John, you have some sort of opinion and or strategy about this.
John:
Yeah, I think that what this is asking is like, all right, so say I'm participating in a shared library.
John:
When I back up my photo library, like if I go to where my photo library is, you know, whatever .i photo library file or whatever, are the shared library photos in there or are they only in the cloud, right?
John:
And I tried to answer this question as best I could without an official Apple answer by just looking inside that package file and seeing what's in there.
John:
As far as I can tell on my computer, I have the shared library...
John:
you know, participating in the shared library on my wife's account on my computer set to download originals.
John:
And the iCloud, the iPhoto library package thing is the size I would expect it to be if all the photos are in there.
John:
Because when you go to like view my wife's personal library on her account and her thing, there's nothing in it.
John:
And yet the library thing is like over a terabyte, right?
John:
So I think when you do that, it doesn't make a separate library somewhere.
John:
In your existing iPhoto library package thingy, that's where it will download all of the photos from the shared photo library.
John:
into that package and then it'll be backed up just like it has been in the past i'm not 100 certain of that if anyone can get an official answer from apple that would be great but as far as i can tell that's how it works so whatever your backup procedure was like you were saying casey oh i back it up with time machine i back it up with backblaze it's the same rules as before if you set it to download originals and you use any backup software on that package you'll have backups of everything
Casey:
And finally, Guillermo Ales writes, I've been a Mac user for about 10 years.
Casey:
One thing that I've never understood about the Mac is why I can't properly close the Finder app.
Casey:
It is the only app I can think of that just refuses to accept a command Q command.
Casey:
And I can't figure out why, since it is, quote unquote, just a file manager.
Casey:
Why is Finder so stubborn, John?
John:
I remember one of the very early things I did with ResEdit on the classic macOS was added command Q quit menu item to the Finder.
John:
And then you could just hit command Q in the Finder and it would quit.
John:
I mean, there is a interface reason why it's always running, because back in the original Mac, the Finder was kind of that that was your computer kind of when you turned it on.
John:
There it was.
John:
and it didn't make sense for it to go away because of what would be in its place.
John:
In the modern era, the dock has taken over a lot of this, but still a lot of things in the system expect the Finder to be running and they expect to be able to send messages to the Finder through Apple events and have things work.
John:
So there are Mac applications that you may use, probably older ones at this point, that may just expect to be able to fire off an Apple event to the Finder
John:
and expect it to already be running and to be able to process it.
John:
I believe the Finder will launch in response to that if it's not running, but it's just what the rest of the system expects.
John:
So you can quit the Finder.
John:
It will relaunch automatically, but there are ways to sort of make it stay dead.
John:
But you don't want to do that because every other part of the system expects it to already be running and will ask it to do things as if it's running and will relaunch it if it's not running.
John:
And it's there because that's sort of like that's what's on the computer when you aren't running any applications.
John:
That's just the way the Mac works.
John:
It's not just a file manager.
John:
Again, the doc has taken over a lot of stuff like the doc runs.
John:
I think the doc runs mission control.
John:
The doc does all sorts of things that you wouldn't expect it to do.
John:
But the finder also does lots of important jobs.
John:
In particular, I think a lot of things that the launch services do may not require the finder to be running, but expect it to be running.
John:
And that may also trigger it to launch when it's not running.
John:
uh but yeah it's mostly historical and uh the historical stuff has ramifications in your life so don't don't try to quit it and kill it hopefully finder is not using all your ram or grinding your disc just just let it be there in the background i think what runs the desktop background is that the finder that's probably also the dock the dock has really really taken over a lot of stuff from the finder you kind of can't quit the dock either i mean you can but it pops right back up so don't don't quit either one of those things just let them run
Marco:
yeah i kind of consider finder to be the shell even though i know kind of like the doc process kind of is but like to be like finder is like the shell process of mac os like it's always it's always there it really login window is the shell process don't kill don't kill login window bet yeah all right thank you to our sponsors this week trade coffee collide and backblaze and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Marco:
Being too accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
I killed a mouse.
Marco:
Like, not the, you know, runny-aroundy kind.
Marco:
The harpoon-y belly kind?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I've never, like, worn out a magic mouse before, but... What part of it wears out?
Marco:
The button?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
The button is actually totally fine.
Marco:
I've worn out, like, you know, all the crappy Razer gaming mice.
Marco:
No, it started tracking badly.
Marco:
Like, it was...
Marco:
The vertical tracking was okay, but the horizontal tracking, for some reason, it kept juddering and everything.
Marco:
At first, I thought interference, low battery, whatever.
Marco:
I tried it on different Macs in different rooms.
Marco:
I tried, obviously, charging it, turning it off, turning it on.
Marco:
It just is breaking.
John:
That sounds like what happened to my two Microsoft mice.
John:
It was the same thing.
John:
The tracking started getting all wonky, and I thought it was all sorts of other things, and eventually realized this is what it was.
John:
I wonder what causes that.
John:
It could be you have to clean the plastic lens or whatever, but I think it seems like some kind of hardware failure inside the thing.
Marco:
Yeah, you know, I tried, obviously, you know, blowing out the sensor, you know, nothing appears to be in there.
Marco:
I mean, I have, this was the mouse that came with my iMac Pro, which is what, 2017?
Marco:
And I've used it heavily as my main desktop mouse for that entire time.
Marco:
So I've used the crap out of this mouse.
Marco:
So, you know, if something is going to wear out over time, that's a fairly reasonable thing to wear out.
Marco:
uh after whatever it's been five six years but it's weird isn't it weird that the electronics and the optical sensing parts of things with no moving parts would be the things to wear out yeah for real yeah that's why it was it was very surprising to me that it died in that way anyway i feel like i've like achieved something i don't think i've ever killed an apple mouse before we can hang it up on the wall yeah it's your trophy
Casey:
Actually, you could just hang it on a nail because if I remember right, I haven't used it in a while.
John:
Hang it on the lighting port.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, that's true.
Casey:
No, I meant the optical sensor.
Casey:
You could just stick the nail or the optical sensor, that little circle, that hole right on the nail and it's perfect.