ARTS & FARCES internet

Last year, the US wireless telecommunications carriers along with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began rolling out the Commercial Mobile Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts. The system allows government public safety officials to send geographically targeted alerts to users’ smartphones.

Four basic types of alerts can be sent: National Weather Service, Presidential, Amber Alerts, and Imminent Threat alerts.

According to the FEMA website for the system, it is incapable of tracking an individual’s physical location, “as it uses SMS-CB, a broadcast (one-way) technology.”

But Julio Ojeda-Zapata, writing for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, reported last June that “This mobile alert system is designed to flag handset users based on their current locations—not where they live or work. Someone who lives in Saint Paul but is visiting Cincinnati would receive the same alerts residents of that city receive.” Ojeda-Zapata goes on to quote Todd Krause the Twin Cities weather-warning coordinator for the National Weather Service: “‘What the system does is actually follow you around wherever you are going,’ based on users’ proximity to cellular towers.”

And therein lies the rub. Getting timely, informative warning alerts to the populace as quickly as possible in an impending emergency is an unquestionably good thing. But the possibility of simultaneously tracking those users under the guise of making sure they get location-appropriate alerts is an unquestionably bad thing.

So, is the US government tracking your location—or at least the location of your smartphone through this new system? It says no, insisting that it uses the Short Message Service-Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) service, a “one-to-many geographically focused messaging service.” But, the US government also says it doesn’t use torture and the current administration promised to make closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp a top priority. Nonetheless, the SMS-CB system has been in place long enough for any privacy deficiencies to be flagged and publicized. Barring receipt of any new information or new developments, this one goes in the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory file.

On 20 February the system was used for the first time here in the Twin Cities where some smartphone users received an Amber Alert accompanied by a screech. An infant had been kidnapped from south Minneapolis and within minutes a teenager (who had received the alert) placed a 911 call notifying law enforcement of the suspect’s location, according to Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s report for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

My wife and I both have iPhone 4 smartphones running Apple’s iOS 6.1.2 on AT&T’s 3G network. Neither of us received the Amber Alert.

My wife/business partner and I each have 15-inch MacBook Pros (a late 2008 and a mid 2009, respectively). Both are fine machines (although I very much prefer the matte screen on mine) and—surprisingly—neither has needed to be repaired under AppleCare.

Everyone paying attention knew that a MacBook Pro with Retina display would be coming sooner or later. Frankly, I was a bit surprised that it came sooner rather than later. Looking at the computer’s specifications, the MacBook Pro with Retina display looks like a dream machine for anyone needing a professional laptop. 2880 x 1800 resolution (220 pixels per inch) is double the resolution of past 15-inch MacBook Pros. 2.3GHz, 2.6GHz, or 2.7GHz quad-core Intel i7 processor, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB, 512GB, or 768GB of flash storage, an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 video RAM, and about 7 hours of battery life on a single charge are all quite impressive. Add two Thunderbolt ports plus a USB2/3 port and sign me up.

But wait a minute, there has to be a catch. And, of course, there is. Actually two of them.

First, the price makes this a non-starter for me. I’ve paid US$4,000 for laptops in the past but I’ve gotten comfortable with a US$2,500 price point. Configuring the MacBook Pro with Retina display to suit me is just way too expensive. Start with the mid-level 2.6GHz processor, to be sure (US$2799). Add the 16GB RAM option (US$200) because the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and not user-upgradeable. 512GB of flash storage just isn’t enough, so let’s max it out at 768GB (US$500). We buy AppleCare for all of our laptops but nothing else (US$349). There’s no Ethernet port on the MacBook Pro with Retina display so we’ll have to buy a dumb-ass dongle—there goes one of those fancy Thunderbolt ports—that will almost surely be lost in a month or so (US$29). What’s that? A new MagSafe connector. We’ll need a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter (US$9.99). That brings us to a whopping US$3,886.99. Not going to happen.

Second, as ifixit’s Kyle Wiens observes, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is “unfixable, unhackable, untenable.” Instead of drooling over new equipment like the rest of us, ifixit takes them apart so we don’t have to. Wiens calls the new MacBook Pro “... the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart….” Here are his findings to justify those statements:

1. The display is fused to the glass
2. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard
3. The battery is glued to the case; replacement costs US$200

Wiens notes that Apple started this trend as an experiment with its non-upgradeable MacBook Air in 2008. It had a built-in kill switch: The battery was rated for only 300 charge cycles.

For now, we have a choice between thin-and-light or easy-to-repair and user-upgradeable. I wonder for how long. “If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still,” writes Wiens. “When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves. They gave us the choice.”

Maybe I’ll just replace the superdrive in my 2009 MacBook Pro with a second hard drive. I maxed out its RAM the day I got it.

I spent yesterday with the Twin Cities’ best and brightest at the local BarCamp event, MinneBar. The only tech events I attend any more are the un-conferences like MinneBar. I’m an old and jaded from too many past events where too many hucksters used invitation-only events to sell their (almost always) useless ideas and wares.

This was the seventh annual edition of the MinneBar spring event and it always brings together the best of the technology and design communities in the Twin Cities. This year, some 1,300 people attended; a new record. Passion—not money—drives the content of these events and I go because it makes me feel better about where we’re collectively headed.

One session—Chris Coyier‘s “What we don’t know”—was exceptional. As I tweeted from the session, I deeply wish all web front-end developers had the wisdom, humor, and just plain humanity of Coyier. It was the best tech presentation I’ve seen in more than a few years.

Food was provided by Chow Girls, and it was outstanding. Bagel and fruit for breakfast; pulled pork, pasta, and salad for lunch (I probably should have had the chicken or vegetarian sandwich, but I couldn’t resist). No small feat to feet a crowd of 1,300 well and timely. Hats off.

This morning I woke up with my brain still buzzing from yesterday’s event, took Annabelle Joy out for her morning constitutional, not fully awake but fully aware I was back in the real world. A guy was pawing through the trash in the alley between Summit and Grand Avenues. Now I’ve been known to dumpster dive—it’s truly mind-blowing what the University of St. Thomas and Macalester College kids throw away—so has Karen. But this man was looking mostly for food. I wished him a happy Easter as he trundled on down the alley.

The level of inequality in the United States today is heartbreaking—absolutely crushingly heartbreaking. And the disparity—lots of headhunters and human resource folks were plying their trade at yesterday’s MinneBar—simply takes my breath away. Economic recovery my ass. This was a middle-aged white man foraging in my alley. This is the new normal, brothers and sisters. The new normal.

Something on the order of 600,000 Macintosh computers have been infected by the most recent variation of the Flashback trojan that first surfaced in 2007. The most recent variation of the malware targets Macs with an older version of the Java Runtime software installed. Earlier this week Apple released an update to the software that addresses the flaw, but here’s how to check your machines:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment. If the message The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment) does not exist appears, so far so good.
3. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES. If the message: The domain/default pair of (/Users/[username]/MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist appears, the machine has not been infected by the Flashback trojan.
4. If anything other than the above messages appear, your computer has been infected by the Flashback trojan. Use the instructions on the F-Secure website to manually remove it.

Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, reports that multiple monitors on a desktop are apparently the latest fashion accessory in the office. “For multiscreen multitaskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up internet,” writes Richtel.

Really? I’ve been using a 15-inch laptop—and its native screen—(most recently a mid-2009 MacBook Pro) for the last 20 years or more. I’m plenty productive. When I was writing full time I could easily manage 5,000 words a day. Now I’m supposed to buy that it takes three 17-inch monitors to edit a blog about Facebook.

One of the things that caught my eye in Richtel’s piece was his citation of James A. Anderson, a professor of communications at the University of Utah. He authored a study—commissioned with US$50,000 by NEC—finding “productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one.” Anderson, who uses three monitors himself, tells Richtel, “more monitors cut down on toggling time among windows on a single screen, which can save about 10 seconds for every five minutes of work.”

If you’re working on something in only five minute bits, what are you really getting done? Is this a generational thing? I’ll cop to being an old, but I need much more than five minutes just to reflect on something I’ve just read.

I remember being ecstatic when I added a large monitor to my Mac SE, but I’ve been working productively on a 15-inch laptop for years.

My friend Jerry Daniels (also an old) tweets that he’s of the same, minimalist mindset: I got rid of everything and got an 11” MacBook Air for $999. No desk. Use recliner and my lap. SO much less.”

Is there something to this multi-monitor business, or is it a marketing attempt to goose unnecessary consumption?