Listened to Episode 400: With The Help Of Mark Zuckerberg by Manton Reece, Daniel Jalkut from Core Intuition

Manton and Daniel celebrate episode 400 by inviting Oisín Prendiville to join them for a conversation ranging from Oisín’s podcasting app Castro and the virtues of selling it to Tiny, to the state of the podcasting industry, to a story of bicycle theft and recovery.

Coverart for Core Intuition

Discovery feature: Podcast Shuffle – Manton’s 2005 blog post announcing a hack for listening to a random podcast episode. (Sadly this link seems to be gone from the web and isn’t on archive.org.)

–Originally bookmarked December 21, 2019 at 10:51AM

👓 2 Students Allegedly Cheated Apple Out Of Nearly $900,000 In Fake iPhone Scheme | NPR

Read 2 Students Allegedly Cheated Apple Out Of Nearly $900,000 In Fake iPhone Scheme (NPR.org)
Prosecutors say it was an elaborate deception that involved roping in friends and family, while using nonsensical pseudonyms and a slew of mailing addresses. The plot seems to have come from China.

👓 Maybe Only Tim Cook Can Fix Facebook’s Privacy Problem | New York Times

Read Maybe Only Tim Cook Can Fix Facebook’s Privacy Problem (New York Times)
The cold war between Facebook and Apple over data use and privacy is heating up. How far should Mr. Cook take it?

🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv

Listened to This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham from TWiT.tv
Foldable Phone, Online Civility

  • The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.
  • Android will support foldable phones.
  • Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment
  • Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web
  • How to encourage civility online
  • YouTube Content ID
  • Facebook and "White Genocide"
  • Young people are deleting Facebook in droves
  • Facebook's holiday pop-up store
  • Everybody gets free Amazon shipping
  • Amazon's new HQ2(s)
  • 8 new Chromebook features
  • Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora
  • Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls

Picks of the Week

  • Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals
  • Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights
Leo Laporte doesn’t talk about it directly within an IndieWeb specific framework, but he’s got an interesting discussion about YouTube Content ID that touches on the ideas of Journalism and IndieWeb and particularly as they relate to video, streaming video, and YouTube Live.

While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.

Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.

The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.

This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.

 

👓 Deplatforming Works | Motherboard

Read Social Media Bans Actually Work (Motherboard)
Alex Jones says getting banned by YouTube and Facebook will only make him stronger. The research says that's not true.

👓 Fortnite is putting users at risk, to prove a point about Google’s Android monopoly | CNet

Read Fortnite is putting users at risk, to prove a point about Google's Android monopoly (CNET)
Commentary: Fortnite gives Google the middle finger, but both are failing us to some degree.
30% is a pretty high tax, particularly for such a massively large platform versus the direct costs for maintaining it. One would think that at their scale the cost would be significantly lower.

👓 Icro 1.0 | Manton Reece

Read Icro 1.0 by Manton Reece (manton.org)

For Micro.blog, I always want to encourage third-party apps. We support existing blogging apps like MarsEdit, and we have an API for more Micro.blog-focused apps to be built. I’m excited to say that a big one just shipped in the App Store: Icro.

Icro is well-designed, fast, and takes a different approach to some features compared to the official Micro.blog app. In a few ways, it’s better than the app I built. This is exactly what I hoped for. We wanted an official app so that there’s a default to get started, but there should be other great options for Micro.blog users to choose from.

I’m wondering if any of the pnut or ADN crowd have migrated over to micro.blog yet? I suspect that many of their apps (and especially mobile apps) could be re-purposed as micropub applications. I’m particularly interested in more Android related apps as a lot of the micro.blog crowd seems to be more directly focused on the Apple ecosystem.

👓 A Simple Design Flaw Makes It Astoundingly Easy To Hack Siri And Alexa | FastCo Design

Read A Simple Design Flaw Makes It Astoundingly Easy To Hack Siri And Alexa (Fast Company)
Hackers can take control of the world’s most popular voice assistants by whispering to them in frequencies humans can’t hear.
 

 

How Authors and Publishers Can Increase Book Discovery | DBW

Read How Authors and Publishers Can Increase Book Discovery by Daniel Berkowitz (Digital Book World)
Chris Sim, founder and CEO of Kadaxis, spoke at Digital Book World about how indie authors and publishers can better use keywords to increase book sales.
Continue reading How Authors and Publishers Can Increase Book Discovery | DBW

Tim Cook On Why He Met With President Elect Trump | TechCrunch

Read Tim Cook explains to Apple employees why he met with President-elect Trump by Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch)

In a series of answers to questions posted on Apple’s internal employee info service Apple Web today, CEO Tim Cook commented to employees on some hot-button topics. We obtained some of the answers to interesting questions about a few topics, including the fate of the Mac — but more on that later.

First up is probably the most topical: Why did he feel it was important to meet with President-elect Trump? The short answer: You have to show up to have a say.