Fast Company:

I couldn’t know it then, but the outcome of that battle would influence the purchase decisions of many thousands, if not millions, of people seeking a good night’s sleep. It would also reveal just how thoroughly the internet and the businesses that thrived there had blurred the lines between product reviews and advertisements. All I’d wanted was a mattress, but what I got was a look at a little-known and hugely lucrative annex of e-commerce, one where the relationships can often get a little too comfy—until they’re not.

What an insane story. We’ve all heard about these “online mattress” companies – they advertise on many podcasts – but you probably haven’t given them much thought beyond that. But its as cutthroat an industry as any other.

AppleInsider:

One of the advantages of Apple’s iMessage system is the ability to see and respond to iPhone texts across multiple Apple devices. AppleInsider shows you how to set up the feature and get messaging on your iPad, Mac and more.

I’ve always done this and found it very convenient to receive and respond to texts from whatever device/computer I have at hand.

Unsplash:

From space pics taken by NASA, to bewitching urban streetscapes, to astounding shots of nature taken by high-flying drones—find mesmerizing wallpaper for your Mac in seconds.

Two clicks. That’s it. No fidgeting around with the settings. We’ve made it dead simple.

After yesterday’s post about the Irvue app, Luke Chesser‏, one of the co-founders of Unsplash, tweeted to me about their very own app so I’m including it here.

Apparently, the Amazon Treasure Truck has been a thing Since February 2016. Amazon just announced that they were bringing this sort of ice cream truck for the Amazon crowd to a bunch of new cities.

This is a cool idea and some terrific marketing. This came to my attention when I was asking about SuperNES Classic Edition availability and someone pointed me to this tweet:

Today on the Truck: It’s the @nintendoamerica Super NES: Classic Edition! Say hello to nostalgic feels and banana peels. pic.twitter.com/yPpsr9Euo5

— Treasure Truck (@treasuretruck) September 29, 2017

Check the official Amazon Treasure Truck page, see if your city has one. If so, sign up for text notifications, grab yourself some treasure.

Reuters:

Apple Inc’s older iPhone 7 models are outselling the recently launched iPhone 8 ahead of the early November debut of the premium iPhone X, broker KeyBanc Capital Markets said, citing carrier store surveys.

Traditionally, new editions of the iPhone have sold quickly as fans queue for the latest upgrade, but early surveys have added to chatter that the iPhone 8 is not proving as popular as its predecessors.

1. Not clear if this is true. These are not Apple’s numbers.
2. If true, not clear if the motivation is demand for the iPhone X dimming demand for the iPhone 8, or a statement about the relative perceived values of the iPhone 7 vs iPhone 8.

No matter, this is the first time Apple has created this type of choice for the iPhone consumer, pitching a next generation product at the same time (give or take a month) as a new product that extends an existing line.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

If you own a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display released in Mid 2012 or Early 2013, and your notebook qualifies for battery service, the repair should be free if you are willing to wait for around one month.

To check if your MacBook Pro battery needs service:

Click on the Apple logo in the menu bar. Then, click on About This Mac > System Report > Power. In the Health Information section, the condition should say “Service Battery.”

Good stuff. Pass this along.

Cliff Kuang, FastCoDesign:

I systematically unfollowed every single person and organization in my network except the actual news outlets. That promptly turned my sprawling social network of friends, frenemies, and strangers into a mere news reader plugged into just a half-dozen publications. Problem solved! No more updates about people’s lives.

And:

There’s a follow-on effect that I didn’t realize either: If you unfollow people on Facebook, you drop out of their Facebook feed as well. So now, whenever I have something I really want to share–a new job, or the final draft of the book I’ve been writing for years–I’m met with crickets. I’m stranded on the digital equivalent of a deserted island.

And:

There’s no obvious way to get off this island. I could manually re-follow everyone I unfollowed. But even if I do that, I have no idea if Facebook automatically makes them follow me. For all intents and purposes, my Facebook is ruined.

My understanding is that Facebook is a two way street. Not a follow and follow-back model but a binary friend or not-a-friend model. In other words, if someone accepts your friend request, they are your friend and you are “following” each other.

That aside, there’s this:

This is a problem that Facebook hasn’t acknowledged directly, and it’s even worse on Twitter, where following people eventually makes your feed into an unruly mess. This dilemma will only grow as other services increasingly lean on passive choices to shape the user experience. I call it dead-end UX.

I think there’s a fair point here. Services like Facebook and Twitter are designed to grow in complexity as your graph of relationships grows. The more connections you have, the more your feed grows, and that growth is exponential. This means, the more people you follow, the easier it is to miss any particular post.

Also:

Let’s roll the clock back to the very first “Like” you record on the platform. Using that little bit of data, along with whatever else is available, Facebook tries to extrapolate what else you might like. Its entire view of you is filtered through that single data point. But if you go on to Like dozens and then hundreds of other things that it throws in front of you, it starts generating a stronger and stronger hypothesis of what you’ll react to.

Cliff makes some solid and interesting points here. Worth reading the rest. But one thing that springs to mind for me. This is both lessons learned for social network builders, and an opportunity for the next generation, a chance to build a better social network, one that is more easily tunable and one that does a better job of filtering fake news.

UPDATE: Feedback is, this is just point-by-point wrong. We try never to delete posts, or I would delete this one, but at the very least, file this one under, here’s a source I’ll not post from again.

Motley Fool:

One of the sources said that Apple will need to significantly improve the performance of its mobile processor technology to support a digital pen. The source also added that Apple “had to compromise on some touch performance of the latest iPhone X largely due to the less advanced chipset.”

And:

With the latest iPad Pro tablets, according to the company, when a user writes on the screen using the Apple Pencil, the screen begins to scan for input at a rate of 240Hz, or cycles per second. This is twice the peak refresh rate of the display (which is 120Hz).

And:

Apple reportedly tested a high-refresh rate display on the iPhone X (Apple calls such displays ProMotion displays) but ultimately chose not to ship the device with such a display. Instead, the iPhone X shipped with a display that could only refresh its contents at 60Hz — half that of the current iPad Pros.

In effect, the article makes the case that the current lineup of iPhones has too slow a refresh rate to support the Apple Pencil.

Apple has already patched the KRACK attack WPA2 Wi-Fi vulnerability in the developer and public betas for iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS.

Great news.

So when we ran out of buttons to hide our software’s UI behind, it really forced us to use our imagination. Instead of squeezing UI in where it didn’t fit, we built a new button to conceal it: it’s called the Camera Button.

I didn’t even think this was possible.

Some security-minded companies have already worked on fixes and are offering patches.

This is a list of companies that are offering a fix to the Wi-Fi issue we reported on this morning.

Privately owned Keyssa Inc, backed by iPod co-creator Tony Fadell is suing Essential Products Inc, a smartphone startup founded by Andy Rubin, the co-creator of the Android mobile phone operating system, accusing it of theft of trade secrets in a lawsuit filed on Monday in U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

Andy Rubin basically stole iOS to create Android, so is it out of the realm to think he stole this technology from Fadell? Absolutely not. Especially since Rubin was in talks with Fadell’s company for 10 months.

Mike Monteiro:

Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn’t realize the size of the bomb he’s sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it’s metaphorical. It’s not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he’s found himself responsible for.

Twitter would have you believe that it’s a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren’t free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.

Monteiro voices the frustration many of us have with Twitter and its seeming lack of direction and its inability to solved the problems that are so obvious.

The dismissals come at a crucial point for the company, which is pushing to increase vehicle production five-fold and reach a broader market with its new Model 3 sedan. The electric vehicle maker missed targets for producing the lower-cost sedan, manufacturing only 260 last quarter despite a wait list of more than 450,000 customers.

Twenty years ago, the spacecraft Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral on a journey to uncover the secrets of Saturn and its many moons. During its mission, Cassini recorded and sent nearly half a million pictures back to Earth, allowing scientists to reconstruct these distant worlds in unprecedented detail. Now you can visit these places—along with many other planets and moons—in Google Maps right from your computer. For extra fun, try zooming out from the Earth until you’re in space!

Very cool.

Consumerist:

Though many of the big box stores now open for Black Friday at some point on Thanksgiving, some retailers and mall owners have fought back against this trend. For the second year in a row, one of the nation’s largest mall operators has declared that its properties’ doors will remain shut this Thanksgiving.

CBL Properties is a real investment trust that operates more than 60 malls around the country. The company made this same decision last year and believes it was the right thing to do.

I think this is a great idea. We’ll all be madly shopping soon enough. Let Thanksgiving not be one of those days.

Irvue:

Don’t worry about where to find a new wallpaper for your Mac. There are tons of gorgeous high-resolution photos on Unsplash. Irvue brings them to your desktop.

I’m a big fan of Unsplash and this desktop app lets you tap into their collection of gorgeous images.

Dan Moren, Macworld:

Smart speakers are here, and they’re not going away anytime soon. In the last month or so alone, Amazon has rolled out an entirely new lineup of its Echo devices while Google has supplemented its standard Google Home with both a smaller and larger version. Even Microsoft has gotten into the game, with a Cortana-based smart speaker from Harman Kardon, and multiroom audio purveyor Sonos has announced an Alexa-based model of one of its speakers shipping later this month.

And in all that time, Apple has sat quietly, saying nothing more about its upcoming HomePod than was announced at this summer’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The company didn’t so much as mention its smart speaker during its event last month, though to be fair it had little time with the occasion packed full of iPhones as it was.

That means that with only a couple months left before the HomePod is out on the market, there are still more than a few questions about Apple’s smart speaker play.

A bit eerie how little has said about the HomePod. All is quiet. Holiday buying season is easing into view and there’s zero buildup so far.

Dan raises some interesting questions. It’ll be interesting to see if anything changes now that the Amazon Echo and Google Home product lines have matured/evolved.

If you love to cook, check out this kickstarter. Smart design let’s you measure ingredients more accurately. Not sure I’d lay out $24 for a measuring cup, but I know cooks/mixologists who would jump on this.

The math and the story behind the design are both interesting.

Marco Arment:

I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.

In practice, it’s not even close.

And:

USB-C normally transfers data by the USB protocol, but it also supports Thunderbolt… sometimes. The 12-inch MacBook has a USB-C port, but it doesn’t support Thunderbolt at all.

And:

If you bought a USB-C cable, it might support Thunderbolt, or it might not. There’s no way to tell by looking at it. There’s usually no way to tell whether a given USB-C device requires Thunderbolt, either — you just need to plug it in and see if it works.

This goes on and on. The most frustrating part of all this is the opacity of it all. All the details hidden. True for both ports and cables.

Be sure to scroll down to the end for conclusion. Marco nails this.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk had a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). If you are into cars or rockets, this is an exceptional read, full of nerdy detail.

But this one back and forth moment jumped out at me:

• Q: The concept of an internet connection on Mars is kinda awesome. You could theoretically make an internet protocol that would mirror a subset of the internet near Mars. A user would need to queue up the parts of the internet they wanted available and the servers would sync the relevant data. There could be a standard format for pages to be Mars renderable since server-side communication is impractical.

• ELON MUSK: Nerd.

Musk does go on to answer the question, but I loved the response. Musk is human.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

An air of unease set into the security circles on Sunday as they prepared for the disclosure of high-severity vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II protocol that make it possible for attackers to eavesdrop Wi-Fi traffic passing between computers and access points.

The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks. The research has been a closely guarded secret for weeks ahead of a coordinated disclosure that’s scheduled for 8 a.m. Monday, east coast time.

That reveal is scheduled for a few minutes from now. This is real “sky is falling” news, basically impacting the majority of WiFi using folk who use WPA2 to protect their WiFi connections.

More from the article:

The vast majority of existing access points aren’t likely to be patched quickly, and some may not be patched at all. If initial reports are accurate that encryption bypass exploits are easy and reliable in the WPA2 protocol, it’s likely attackers will be able to eavesdrop on nearby Wi-Fi traffic as it passes between computers and access points. It might also mean it’s possible to forge Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol settings, opening the door to hacks involving users’ domain name service.

Take a few minutes to read this announcement page, which lays out all the detail on the attack. At the very least, scroll down to the Q&A section a bit more than halfway down the page.

The bad news is, this impacts pretty much everyone using WPA1 and WPA2 and you can’t fix this by, say, changing your password.

The good news:

Implementations can be patched in a backwards-compatible manner. This means a patched client can still communicate with an unpatched access point, and vice versa. In other words, a patched client or access points sends exactly the same handshake messages as before, and at exactly the same moments in time. However, the security updates will assure a key is only installed once, preventing our attacks. So again, update all your devices once security updates are available.

A nightmare, but not a total unfixable nightmare. But things are going to be sketchy for some time. Check for HTTPS on your URLs. If you are using HTTP, assume someone can read every part of your communication.

UPS Dogs:

This page is operated by UPS drivers all around. Pictures of dogs and the UPS drivers they meet day to day.

I love dogs but, having been a delivery driver, I know the stress dogs can create. This is a fun Facebook page showing some of the wonderful dogs UPS drivers encounter during their day.

Huck Magazine:

In South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Torajan people “live to die.” Mummified corpses, preserved with Formalin, are kept in the family home for years or even decades after death. Until a funeral – a multi-day event that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with dozens of buffalo and hundreds of pigs being slaughtered – can be arranged, the lifeless are not dead. They are simply “To makula” – sick people.

For Torajans, the line between this life and the next is infinite and porous. After a funeral, when the dead have been helped along the way to “puya” (the afterlife), their corpses are interred in a cave. But every year, in August, there is Ma’Nene ritual, in which the bodies are brought out and re-clothed, their bones polished. Sometimes, the newly-freshened cadavers are even taken for a walk around the village.

When viewed through my “Western” eyes, The death rituals of this group of Indonesians seems grotesque. But after reading the story, maybe the way we treat the dead in the West is what is grotesque. Be sure to check out the photographer’s own page for more info and photos.

The San Diego-based company aims to inflict pain on Apple in the world’s largest market for smartphones and cut off production in a country where most iPhones are made. The product provides almost two-thirds of Apple’s revenue. Qualcomm filed the suits in a Beijing intellectual property court claiming patent infringement and seeking injunctive relief, according to Christine Trimble, a company spokeswoman.

Damn!

Apple has posted a support document noting that they are “aware of the issue” and are “investigating solutions” for an issue where some users are unable to open GarageBand after updating to iOS 11.

Mental Floss:

Spilling pepper, complimenting a baby, and cutting your fingernails after dark are just a few of the things that will earn you bad luck around the world.

I’ve always been fascinated by superstitions and their origins. Many of these are common to us here in North America and some seem “silly”. My mom was very superstitious – for example, she thought it was bad luck to let a rocking chair rock with no one in it. What are your “odd” superstitions?

TidBITS:

I humbly submit that Friday the 13th, whenever it rolls around, should be considered International Verify Your Backups Day. (The United Nations is welcome to make this official.) In 2017, we’ll be celebrating in January and October. If you’re reading this article on some other day, I’d encourage you to verify your backups right away and then continue with the Friday the 13th schedule.

Take a few minutes to identify some critical files and see if you can restore them successfully from your backups. If a bootable backup is part of your backup strategy, make sure you can actually boot from it.

That’s it. No costumes are necessary, there’s no obligatory greeting, and you aren’t expected to make a special meal.

This is just as fake as any of the made up “International Day of…” you see on Twitter but this one actually has a great message – your backups are useless if they can’t be used to restore your data.