ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Christina Larson, writing for Foreign Policy, has a devastating take-down of Apple’s operations in China, specifically the company’s indifference to “labor rights and environmental enforcement.” That’s in addition to its well-known secrecy and obfuscation. Instead of a marketing emphasis on rebellion that works so well in the west, Apple has focused its marketing on the luxurious nature of its goods. But those are first-world problems. The depth of Apple’s corporate depravity is tapped when Larson looks at how Apple treats its low-level manufacturing employees. They’re not actually Apple employees, but rather employees of convenience for Apple’s subcontractors and manufacturing partners.

ESRD

Researchers at the University of Miami Medical School claim to have identified a protein in the blood—suPAR—that is capable of scarring the kidney and reducing its filtering capabilities. Locating and removing suPAR in a patient’s bloodstream can slow the progression of chronic kidney disease. Jochen Riser tells Fred Tasker, writing for the Miami Herald, “This will have a significant impact on chronic kidney disease. It can reduce the need for dialysis and kidney transplantation, and increase the success when you do have transplantation.” The results of Riser’s study were published in Nature Medicine‘s July issue. Martin Pollak at the Harvard Medical School told Tasker that Riser’s discovery helps medical practitioners understand chronic kidney disease.

The Colorado US Attorney’s Office has opened a grand jury investigation into the practices of dialysis provider DaVita, Inc. This appears to overlap with a US Justice Department investigation into overuse of Epogen, the drug used to treat anemia in dialysis patients. In an earnings call, Kent Thiry, DaVita’s chief executive, said the company’s relationships with physicians is of particular interest to the Coloradio US Attorney’s Office, report Christopher N. Osher and Jennifer Brown, writing for the Denver Post.

Intellectual property

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a remarkable response by Corynne McSherry and Eric Goldman to the deal recently announced by the entertainment cartel and the large US internet service providers to work together in a “graduated response” to alleged copyright infringement on the internet. What would have happened if users were at the bargaining table, asks McSherry and Goldman. Most importantly, “The burden should be on the content owners to establish infringement, not on the subscribers to disprove infringement ... Subscribers should be able to assert the full range of defenses to copyright infringement ... Content owners should be accountable if they submit incorrect infringement notices…,” write McSherry and Goldman.

Internet

Researchers at Microsoft and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University have discovered that some internet service providers (ISPs) are using malicious domain name service (DNS) servers to make extra money. Almost two percent of all US internet users are victims of the practice. According to Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica, “specific search queries (usually for brand names) made from an address bar no longer return the expected web search results page from Bing or Google or Yahoo. If your ISP has such DNS servers configured, and your computer points to them (most ISP subscribers will by default), typing ‘Apple’ into a browser search bar will take you directly to Apple’s webpage, bypassing the expected search results page.” Multiple site redirections take place in this case, with the query being passed through several online advertisers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has additional information about the problem and measures you can take to detect it.

Danah Boyd makes a compelling case that “real name” policies, like the one instituted on Google+, are an abuse of power. Boyd maintains there’s value in pseudonymity because her research indicates, “The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. ‘Real names’ policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people.”

Google has launched Page Speed Service, its new content delivery network (CDN). CDNs work—and Page Speed Service is no exception—by caching replicas of a website at geographically dispersed physical locations. Pages from the website are subsequently served from these local caching servers, rather than the authoritative home server. Google’s Page Speed Service adds some code optimization to the pages it caches. Use of Page Speed Service requires only an account and modifying domain name service (DNS) entries to point to Google’s servers. Page Speed Service is currently free, but Google has announced it will charge for it in the future. Be aware that when you change your webservers’ DNS entries to point to Google, you’re explicitly giving Google permission to modify your web pages and serve them from its servers. Much more interesting to me is an Apache plugin (mod_pagespeed) that Google has created that does much of the code optimization on your own server.

Law

Security expert Bruce Schneier has written an outstanding commentary, “Refuse to be terrorized,” for Wired. The targets of terrorism are the rest of us, not the individuals that die in the bombings, plane crashes, and all the rest. And we’re playing right into the terrorists hands. “Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic,” Schneier writes. “The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.”

Media

Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s film, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, is finally on the verge of release. In what they call “archival verite,” Gibney and Ellwood use Kesey’s archive footage to create a documentary about Kesey’s trip across the US in 1964 with his band of Merry Pranksters. Kesey and the Pranksters shot more than 40 hours of 16mm film on the trip and, as Charles McGrath, writing for the New York Times, cites Tom Wolfe (who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the trip) explaining why the project was never finished: “Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.”

Politics

US Senator Bernie Sanders‘s (I-Vermont) opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal is the sanest explanation why the thinking half of the American citizenry is so pissed off.

Drew Westen, in a New York Times opinion piece, deconstructs exactly what happened to the promise that was Barack Obama. Obama failed to provide a narrative—a story—telling us what went wrong, who did it, and how we were going to fix it. Instead Obama emitted a series of “inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence.” Obama’s conflict-averse nature and “profound failure to understand bully dynamics—in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action…” resulted in his breaking the “arc of history” the same arc Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to when he said “... the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Westen argues that Obama not only broke that arc but “bent it backward for at least a generation.” Instead of staring the bullies down, Obama looked away; instead of indicting the criminals that broke the economy, Obama put them in charge. It doesn’t stop there, of course, and Westen hits the high points of why, precisely, I’ll never vote for Barack Obama ever again.

Privacy

Rainey Reitman, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a stunning analysis of proposed legislation working its way through the US House of Representatives that would mandate internet service providers spy on their customers. The House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 to recommend passage of H.R. 1981, Representative Lamar Smith‘s (R-Texas) “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” The bill, as currently written, includes a mandatory data retention provision, requiring internet service providers to retain a full year’s worth of customer information including the websites visited and content posted online.

Publishing

O’Reilly is using the agile development model to publish Todd Sattersten’s Every Book Is a Startup, which itself is about using agile development in publishing.

Push Pop Press, an ebook developer founded by two former Apple engineers has been acquired by Facebook. The developer has plans to push the epublishing platforms further than ever before—into interactive apps—and published Al Gore’s Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis as a proof-of-concept. But Facebook couldn’t have less interest in epublishing and even Push Pop acknowledges no plans for new titles or even release of its publishing platform. Facebook acquired Push Pop solely to prevent the new publishing platform from gaining a foothold.

Technology

Apple is beginning to dribble out a little more information about its forthcoming iCloud service, allowing users to sync content and data between multiple devices. Apple, like your friendly neighborhood dealer, will give you 5GB of storage space for free. Additional storgage will cost US$20 per 10GB per year.

Adobe, admitting Flash defeat, has embraced HTML5 with the preview release of Adobe Edge supporting HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript instead of Flash. In a flash of dissemble, Mark Anders, Adobe fellow and Adobe Edge project lead, told Nick Bilton, writing for the New York Times, the product “doesn’t have anything to do with Apple, other than they have been helping to drive the HTML standard on the web. Although they put up some roadblocks with Flash on their devices, it was really the community asking for it.”

User experience

Indi Young, writing for Rosenfeld Media, has outlined a tremendous way to create mental models in OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. This is rather old (from 2009) but still incredibly useful and I’ve been meaning to point to it for quite some time.