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ATP

512: Owned With a P

 

00:00:00 ◼   ► So I almost didn't make the show tonight.

00:00:03 ◼   ► - Oh no, stuck on the sand?

00:00:05 ◼   ► - No, because you forgot to fill up with gas.

00:00:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:09 ◼   ► - No, although I'll tell you one thing, man,

00:00:10 ◼   ► driving on the sand uses a lot of gas.

00:00:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's kind of like running on the sand.

00:00:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, 'cause like, you know,

00:00:17 ◼   ► A, I'm running on low tire pressure, right,

00:00:19 ◼   ► and then driving on sand is like, you know,

00:00:22 ◼   ► walking through maple syrup.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Like, you know, it's just,

00:00:25 ◼   ► it's a very inefficient way to move.

00:00:28 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I mean, that's,

00:00:30 ◼   ► I think my living here,

00:00:33 ◼   ► especially in a house that generates

00:00:35 ◼   ► a very large quantity of solar power

00:00:37 ◼   ► and not going to work every day,

00:00:39 ◼   ► I think overall my carbon footprint is probably not too bad,

00:00:44 ◼   ► but certainly when I do have to drive here,

00:00:48 ◼   ► oh my God, it's embarrassing.

00:00:53 ◼   ► You know, we recorded at 8 p.m.

00:00:56 ◼   ► At about 6.30 p.m., my son started a project

00:01:00 ◼   ► that required having to print things to a printer.

00:01:04 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Oh no.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong

00:01:09 ◼   ► along this process, so, you know,

00:01:12 ◼   ► first of all, we started out, oh, it's out of paper.

00:01:14 ◼   ► All right, go get paper.

00:01:15 ◼   ► And this is like, you know, because, like, okay.

00:01:19 ◼   ► This house was designed to be a summer house.

00:01:22 ◼   ► And so we don't have large storage, large closets.

00:01:27 ◼   ► My office here is very small.

00:01:31 ◼   ► And where this printer is is on a shelf in a closet.

00:01:36 ◼   ► The water shelf, well the one below the water shelf.

00:01:38 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:39 ◼   ► So it's-- - You got some nice

00:01:41 ◼   ► damp stacks of paper right next to it.

00:01:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, no actually it's the same shelf, yeah.

00:01:44 ◼   ► So getting to like the paper trays

00:01:47 ◼   ► and it's an ordeal with this printer.

00:01:49 ◼   ► You have to like, you know, take it out of the shelf it's on.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Oh, and the whole time to reach it,

00:01:53 ◼   ► you're like on a step stool anyway, like, you know.

00:01:56 ◼   ► So it's a whole thing.

00:01:58 ◼   ► - Stop putting electronics in closets.

00:01:59 ◼   ► Can we just stop that?

00:02:01 ◼   ► That should have stopped as soon as devices

00:02:02 ◼   ► required active cooling.

00:02:03 ◼   ► - We hardly ever use, it's an Epson all-in-one ink

00:02:07 ◼   ► whatever printer, it's an inkjet,

00:02:08 ◼   ► it's hardly ever even on.

00:02:10 ◼   ► So, okay, so number one to use this printer.

00:02:12 ◼   ► I have to pull out the step stool from the closet

00:02:14 ◼   ► that it's in, step up and turn it on.

00:02:17 ◼   ► Wait for it to make all of its noises.

00:02:18 ◼   ► Why not just leave it on?

00:02:20 ◼   ► - 'Cause if you leave Epson printers on all the time,

00:02:22 ◼   ► they keep their ink heads warm, allegedly,

00:02:24 ◼   ► and it basically makes them permaclog in less time.

00:02:28 ◼   ► If you have an Epson printer,

00:02:29 ◼   ► you will probably know that over time,

00:02:31 ◼   ► eventually, it gets so,

00:02:32 ◼   ► like the head gets so clogged or otherwise messed up

00:02:36 ◼   ► that you, like, that no cleaning cycle will fix it

00:02:38 ◼   ► and you have to replace the printer.

00:02:40 ◼   ► So I've learned a long time ago

00:02:42 ◼   ► that if you don't leave it powered on,

00:02:44 ◼   ► with Epson in particular,

00:02:46 ◼   ► you can make the printer last way longer

00:02:48 ◼   ► because it apparently lengthens that process.

00:02:50 ◼   ► So anyway, so we start printing,

00:02:53 ◼   ► get the stepladder out, turn the printer on.

00:02:55 ◼   ► Oh, no paper, oh, gotta get paper.

00:02:57 ◼   ► Oh, it's special photo paper.

00:02:58 ◼   ► Well, the photo paper package we have is empty.

00:03:00 ◼   ► We have to open a new package of photo paper,

00:03:02 ◼   ► find that, this whole thing.

00:03:04 ◼   ► First couple prints go through.

00:03:06 ◼   ► At one point, oh, out of ink.

00:03:08 ◼   ► All right, go get the box of spare ink.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Now again, a printer that lives in a shelf

00:03:15 ◼   ► replacing the ink on it.

00:03:16 ◼   ► You gotta like pull it out, like it's a whole thing.

00:03:19 ◼   ► - It shouldn't be in a closet.

00:03:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, seriously, I think the shelf here

00:03:22 ◼   ► might be the crux of the issue.

00:03:23 ◼   ► - There's nowhere else to put it.

00:03:25 ◼   ► So eventually, you know, I replace all of the colors

00:03:31 ◼   ► 'cause one was out and this is the kind of printer

00:03:33 ◼   ► that if it thinks the ink is out,

00:03:35 ◼   ► which I know it's really not,

00:03:36 ◼   ► it's just based on page count or whatever,

00:03:37 ◼   ► but if it thinks the ink is out,

00:03:39 ◼   ► this printer will not print anything except black and white.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And these were printing photos,

00:03:43 ◼   ► so it's like, okay, that's not gonna work.

00:03:45 ◼   ► So replace all the cartridge, fine, get it back in there.

00:03:48 ◼   ► Print a couple more.

00:03:49 ◼   ► Then it starts complaining, hey, paper's not in tray one.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Well, yeah, I know it's in tray two,

00:03:57 ◼   ► but there's no option to tell it,

00:03:58 ◼   ► like, just load it from tray two.

00:04:01 ◼   ► All you can do is either put paper in tray one,

00:04:04 ◼   ► which is the CD printing tray, so you can't,

00:04:09 ◼   ► or cancel the print job.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Okay, so go through, all right, try this, try this setting.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Oh, and he's printing it from an iPad.

00:04:15 ◼   ► So good, find out is there something wrong there?

00:04:18 ◼   ► Reboot everything.

00:04:19 ◼   ► I even rebooted the router.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Like just reboot everything trying to get it to say,

00:04:23 ◼   ► it just would not draw from tray two no matter what I did.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Finally, we got it to print to tray two

00:04:29 ◼   ► and it comes out and it's tiny.

00:04:31 ◼   ► It's pretty tiny now.

00:04:33 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:04:35 ◼   ► Eventually it took another like, you know,

00:04:36 ◼   ► half hour of troubleshooting and four or five, you know,

00:04:40 ◼   ► wrong prints that are now just garbage

00:04:43 ◼   ► before we finally realized that somewhere deep

00:04:44 ◼   ► in the setting, something had turned to four by six

00:04:47 ◼   ► size paper instead of letter size.

00:04:49 ◼   ► It just, it took so long.

00:04:52 ◼   ► It's like, printers, I hate printers so much.

00:04:55 ◼   ► This is why my giant HP tank that I have,

00:04:59 ◼   ► - Yes, yes, yes, yes.

00:05:00 ◼   ► - It's the only printer that's ever never let me down.

00:05:03 ◼   ► - Would it have been faster for you to print

00:05:05 ◼   ► to the other house and then drive and go get it?

00:05:07 ◼   ► - Maybe.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - By the time you got there, it would already be out.

00:05:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's a two hour drive,

00:05:11 ◼   ► but it might have been faster.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - So why is it an inkjet printer and not a color laser?

00:05:18 ◼   ► I thought you were at least a black and white laser fan,

00:05:21 ◼   ► hence the refrigerator printer at home,

00:05:23 ◼   ► but I thought you also enjoyed a color laser, no?

00:05:25 ◼   ► - I have both.

00:05:27 ◼   ► - Why would you use inkjet for anything in modern society?

00:05:30 ◼   ► - Inkjet printers are way better at photos

00:05:34 ◼   ► than even very good color lasers.

00:05:37 ◼   ► That's why, it's purely for photos.

00:05:39 ◼   ► - You bring that to like Costco or something,

00:05:41 ◼   ► or like you can't bring them to Costco anymore

00:05:42 ◼   ► 'cause Costco photo center closed,

00:05:44 ◼   ► but you like have Costco print them

00:05:45 ◼   ► and mail them to you or whatever.

00:05:47 ◼   ► It's not that expensive.

00:05:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, see also the living on the island situation.

00:05:49 ◼   ► This is a good place to have like a little print shop

00:05:52 ◼   ► in your house basically.

00:05:53 ◼   ► - Basically past Marco made a bunch of really dubious choices

00:05:56 ◼   ► and today Marco really paid the price.

00:05:59 ◼   ► - For photo printing you can just send away

00:06:01 ◼   ► and get real prints from someplace nice

00:06:04 ◼   ► and even on the island you can get those.

00:06:07 ◼   ► But yeah, if you need a thing for a school assignment

00:06:09 ◼   ► tomorrow you gotta print it in your house.

00:06:11 ◼   ► - Well yeah, it's that kind of thing where

00:06:14 ◼   ► this is why living here you kinda have to,

00:06:18 ◼   ► because there's the situation with the ferries

00:06:21 ◼   ► in the summer that you might need something

00:06:24 ◼   ► that's past the last ferry departure time or something.

00:06:26 ◼   ► And so you kinda have to be a little more self-sufficient

00:06:29 ◼   ► here than you would in most places

00:06:30 ◼   ► 'cause you can't just drive over to a Walmart real quick

00:06:33 ◼   ► and get what you need at all times of day.

00:06:35 ◼   ► It's more involved in that.

00:06:37 ◼   ► And so I have to be my own bike mechanic, for instance.

00:06:40 ◼   ► I've learned how to do all sorts of crazy maintenance

00:06:43 ◼   ► and upgrades and stuff on bikes because I had to,

00:06:46 ◼   ► because there's no one around.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Tiff has learned how to do certain plumbing operations

00:06:51 ◼   ► herself because she had to, because there was no one around.

00:06:55 ◼   ► It's an interesting place.

00:06:57 ◼   ► You kind of have to be independent in a lot of ways.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And one of those ways for us is we keep both kinds of printers,

00:07:04 ◼   ► because printing photos on color lasers sucks.

00:07:06 ◼   ► and I love lasers for anything else that isn't a photo.

00:07:10 ◼   ► They're way better for anything else,

00:07:12 ◼   ► but for photos, they are terrible.

00:07:13 ◼   ► - So Adam was printing photos?

00:07:16 ◼   ► - Yes, specifically he was printing art

00:07:19 ◼   ► that he drew in Procreate on the iPad for a school project.

00:07:23 ◼   ► It's a whole thing, but he was printing

00:07:26 ◼   ► like color illustrations he made.

00:07:27 ◼   ► - With utmost respect to both you and your child,

00:07:32 ◼   ► perhaps in this one scenario,

00:07:35 ◼   ► It might have been simpler and easier to simply print

00:07:37 ◼   ► on the color laser printer and be done with it.

00:07:39 ◼   ► - No, but these had to look nice.

00:07:41 ◼   ► It's for a thing.

00:07:42 ◼   ► They had to look, so I have like the glossy photo paper,

00:07:46 ◼   ► the Epson paper and the Epson printer,

00:07:48 ◼   ► like you know, all that stuff.

00:07:49 ◼   ► And you know, if you want like a nice glossy bright photo,

00:07:51 ◼   ► you're never getting out of a laser.

00:07:53 ◼   ► You just can't, like the way toner works,

00:07:54 ◼   ► it just doesn't work that way.

00:07:56 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm, all right, all right, all right, all out.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Yeah, well I'm glad you made the show.

00:08:00 ◼   ► That would have been quite funny.

00:08:02 ◼   ► Oh, I can't make the show.

00:08:03 ◼   ► Oh no, what's wrong?

00:08:04 ◼   ► Who's sick?

00:08:05 ◼   ► Well, printers. That's what happened.

00:08:08 ◼   ► Printers can make any 10-minute project take three hours.

00:08:11 ◼   ► That's what it means.

00:08:14 ◼   ► We need the OLED TV revolution but for printers

00:08:17 ◼   ► because all these things with physical realities

00:08:20 ◼   ► we're kind of like in the dark ages with printers still.

00:08:22 ◼   ► There is no printer technology that is just clearly better and more reliable.

00:08:26 ◼   ► I guess more like the LCD resolution.

00:08:29 ◼   ► When LCDs took over all displays, we found a display technology that's flat,

00:08:32 ◼   ► flat, low power, looks good, you know, setting aside the OLED debate, just plain old high-quality

00:08:37 ◼   ► LED backlit LCDs were such a revolution that kind of made screens not be made screens ubiquitous,

00:08:44 ◼   ► and you know, and basically work to do their job. And we don't have that with printers, we just have

00:08:49 ◼   ► pick a crappy technology from ages ago, depending on what trade offs you can handle and, and then

00:08:54 ◼   ► connect crappy electronics to all of them. Yeah, and and and take all of the profit margin out of

00:09:00 ◼   ► of it basically and so you have these mechanically,

00:09:05 ◼   ► so I think this is why,

00:09:06 ◼   ► this is mechanically very complicated.

00:09:09 ◼   ► There is no way to make a printer

00:09:10 ◼   ► that is not mechanically complicated

00:09:12 ◼   ► and that's the kind of thing that's very difficult

00:09:14 ◼   ► to make good and reliable and also super, super cheap.

00:09:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, there was one technology

00:09:19 ◼   ► that was mechanically not as complicated,

00:09:21 ◼   ► it was just crappy I think.

00:09:22 ◼   ► It was one of the past technologies,

00:09:24 ◼   ► instead of having a print head essentially,

00:09:27 ◼   ► well and laser printers do this too,

00:09:29 ◼   ► but laser printers--

00:09:29 ◼   ► Well, the LED ones, the OkiData LED ones,

00:09:33 ◼   ► they were kind of cool.

00:09:34 ◼   ► - But that's not up to modern standards.

00:09:36 ◼   ► Like, we need the LCD screen resolution,

00:09:38 ◼   ► something that with very few or no moving parts

00:09:40 ◼   ► that prints high resolution, in color,

00:09:43 ◼   ► that doesn't bleed when you get the paper wet,

00:09:44 ◼   ► that looks good, glossy, like, that doesn't exist yet.

00:09:47 ◼   ► But someday, once that happens,

00:09:49 ◼   ► I feel like we'll finally cross printers off the list

00:09:52 ◼   ► of technology that always sucks,

00:09:54 ◼   ► 'cause it always sucks for reasons that are explicable,

00:09:57 ◼   ► like, because printing is complicated,

00:09:59 ◼   ► And because the business model is basically

00:10:01 ◼   ► make the cheapest thing and then get people

00:10:03 ◼   ► to buy your printer ink or whatever.

00:10:05 ◼   ► But with the right technology, we can get there.

00:10:09 ◼   ► Kind of like a fusion for energy.

00:10:11 ◼   ► We have two big projects.

00:10:12 ◼   ► One, breakeven fusion for energy--

00:10:15 ◼   ► better than breakeven fusion for energy production

00:10:17 ◼   ► to save the planet, and also printers.

00:10:20 ◼   ► It's funny.

00:10:22 ◼   ► You've got all these tech bros who start all these companies.

00:10:25 ◼   ► We're going to change the world.

00:10:27 ◼   ► None of them try to change the world for printers.

00:10:30 ◼   ► You can have your startups like,

00:10:31 ◼   ► we're gonna connect people's social graph

00:10:33 ◼   ► to their self-driving cars.

00:10:35 ◼   ► I don't care.

00:10:36 ◼   ► Fix printers, now I'm impressed.

00:10:37 ◼   ► - How about you put a camera in my toaster oven

00:10:39 ◼   ► so you can tell how brown the bread is?

00:10:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, right.

00:10:42 ◼   ► - Right, well that's, didn't the June oven do that?

00:10:44 ◼   ► - Yes, there's a whole class of products that do that now.

00:10:46 ◼   ► It's not just one.

00:10:47 ◼   ► - Still didn't fix printers.

00:10:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, you know, and I was listening

00:10:50 ◼   ► to the most recent upgrade, which we're gonna talk about,

00:10:52 ◼   ► or at least make passing reference to later,

00:10:54 ◼   ► and I was listening to you and Jason talk about

00:10:58 ◼   ► good products and the Breville,

00:11:00 ◼   ► and Breville is basically,

00:11:01 ◼   ► let's give a modicum of a crap about how our products are,

00:11:06 ◼   ► and that puts them light years ahead of everyone else,

00:11:09 ◼   ► and I feel like we need the Breville of printers.

00:11:11 ◼   ► Just care just the tiniest bit,

00:11:14 ◼   ► just the tiniest littlest bit,

00:11:16 ◼   ► care that much and we'll all love you.

00:11:18 ◼   ► - No, that's, 'cause like, that is such a thing,

00:11:20 ◼   ► like there are so many product categories now

00:11:22 ◼   ► where due to various globalization, market pressures,

00:11:26 ◼   ► whatever, consolidation, whatever it is,

00:11:28 ◼   ► due to lots of reasonable conditions that,

00:11:31 ◼   ► there's reasons why they are this way,

00:11:33 ◼   ► the entire category of product just sucks.

00:11:36 ◼   ► All the quality's been drained out of it,

00:11:39 ◼   ► and it's like, you can't get something good at any price

00:11:42 ◼   ► in a lot of categories.

00:11:44 ◼   ► And I think printers are not,

00:11:47 ◼   ► I wouldn't say they're all necessarily there,

00:11:49 ◼   ► but certainly what we're trying to do here

00:11:52 ◼   ► is get something that is super reliable

00:11:54 ◼   ► and also solves many different needs.

00:11:57 ◼   ► If you have just a basic laser printer,

00:12:00 ◼   ► especially black and white lasers,

00:12:02 ◼   ► they are so fast and simple.

00:12:05 ◼   ► But once you start involving either ink or dye,

00:12:09 ◼   ► like in the case of DyeSub,

00:12:10 ◼   ► or even, I once had a solid wax printer, that was fun.

00:12:12 ◼   ► The Xerox Phaser.

00:12:15 ◼   ► - The other thing that was the same problem

00:12:15 ◼   ► with inkjet though is that wax can melt.

00:12:17 ◼   ► That's how they get it out of the paper.

00:12:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, the wax was the worst of both worlds.

00:12:21 ◼   ► It was the dull photos of color lasers,

00:12:24 ◼   ► but with the non-permanence of ink.

00:12:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know, that was not a good printer.

00:12:31 ◼   ► I didn't have it for very long.

00:12:32 ◼   ► It was not very good.

00:12:33 ◼   ► - I mean, you might say that the solution is,

00:12:35 ◼   ► you know, in the future, you know,

00:12:37 ◼   ► your child's assignment won't ever need to be printed

00:12:39 ◼   ► because it'll just be communicated electronically

00:12:41 ◼   ► to the teacher for display, but yeah, we're not there yet.

00:12:44 ◼   ► - Well, and I think that's ultimately, that's the problem.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Like, the reason, like, who would innovate

00:12:50 ◼   ► in the printer business today.

00:12:51 ◼   ► There's no growth in that category.

00:12:53 ◼   ► Who is using printers anymore except me?

00:12:55 ◼   ► Using a printer is like carrying around cash.

00:12:59 ◼   ► Where I do it, and in my life it seems

00:13:02 ◼   ► very necessary very frequently,

00:13:04 ◼   ► but when you talk to anybody under the age of 30,

00:13:06 ◼   ► like, what are you talking about?

00:13:08 ◼   ► You never need that.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, I kind of frequently need these things,

00:13:12 ◼   ► but they're like, no, no one needs it.

00:13:14 ◼   ► And I've never even touched cash.

00:13:16 ◼   ► You know, it's like, and you get a lot of that

00:13:18 ◼   ► with printers too.

00:13:19 ◼   ► "Why would you have a printer?

00:13:20 ◼   ► "That's so antiquated, you might as well

00:13:21 ◼   ► "have a fax machine."

00:13:22 ◼   ► It's like, no, there's lots of reasons, but you know.

00:13:26 ◼   ► What are you gonna do?

00:13:27 ◼   ► The youths these days.

00:13:28 ◼   ► - The youths, what are we gonna do with them?

00:13:30 ◼   ► I don't know, I feel like I agree with what you're saying,

00:13:33 ◼   ► that printers are to some degree a dying breed,

00:13:36 ◼   ► but with that said, you would make money hand over fist.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Like you could charge $11 billion for a printer

00:13:42 ◼   ► that was reliable and worked every time

00:13:44 ◼   ► and the ink lasted more than four minutes.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Like, there are advantages, that's all I'm gonna say.

00:13:49 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

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00:14:00 ◼   ► So first of all, cloud backup as a concept

00:14:02 ◼   ► is something you really should have in your life

00:14:04 ◼   ► because if anything happens to your computer,

00:14:07 ◼   ► your office, your house, and any hard drives

00:14:10 ◼   ► or whatever that are attached to it,

00:14:11 ◼   ► if that's your only backup, you're out of luck.

00:14:14 ◼   ► And that can be lots of things, you know,

00:14:15 ◼   ► fire, flood, theft, lightning strikes, whatever.

00:14:18 ◼   ► And so Cloud Backup is great for peace of mind like that,

00:14:20 ◼   ► but then it can also offer incredible utility

00:14:23 ◼   ► above the peace of mind.

00:14:24 ◼   ► So for instance, if you're out somewhere,

00:14:26 ◼   ► you can just log into Backblaze and have access

00:14:29 ◼   ► to all of your files from your home computer.

00:14:32 ◼   ► So whether you're on your phone if you're out somewhere,

00:14:34 ◼   ► and you're, oh, I gotta look up that document

00:14:36 ◼   ► that I have on my desktop at home,

00:14:39 ◼   ► you can do that right from the Backblaze app on your phone.

00:14:41 ◼   ► Or if you're, say you're on vacation,

00:14:44 ◼   ► you have a laptop or something,

00:14:45 ◼   ► and you wanna download files off your home computer,

00:14:47 ◼   ► You can do that again from Backblaze.

00:14:49 ◼   ► You can pull whatever files you want right off.

00:14:51 ◼   ► And of course you can restore larger ones.

00:14:53 ◼   ► So if you actually have data loss,

00:14:55 ◼   ► you can restore your files from the web interface,

00:14:57 ◼   ► or if you have like a huge amount of data to recover,

00:15:00 ◼   ► you can have them mail you a hard drive or a flash key

00:15:03 ◼   ► with all your data right to your door.

00:15:06 ◼   ► And if you return it, you get a refund on the cost of it.

00:15:08 ◼   ► So it's just an incredible service at Backblaze.

00:15:10 ◼   ► You even have other features too, like version history.

00:15:13 ◼   ► And in fact, for an extra $2 a month,

00:15:15 ◼   ► you can increase your retention history to a year.

00:15:17 ◼   ► So I love Backblaze, it's a great backup service

00:15:20 ◼   ► for not only peace of mind,

00:15:21 ◼   ► but just really useful features as well.

00:15:24 ◼   ► See for yourself at backblaze.com/atp.

00:15:27 ◼   ► You can start a free trial there for 15 days

00:15:31 ◼   ► with no credit card required.

00:15:32 ◼   ► You can see how the whole thing works,

00:15:34 ◼   ► see if it works for you.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Backblaze.com/atp.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Go there now, get going.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Don't delay this until it's too late and you lose something.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Go get Backblaze today.

00:15:44 ◼   ► backblaze.com/atp.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Go there right now, you won't be sorry.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Thank you so much to Backblaze

00:15:50 ◼   ► for being an awesome backup service

00:15:52 ◼   ► and for sponsoring our show.

00:15:53 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:15:56 ◼   ► One of you put in here Mastodon instances

00:15:59 ◼   ► and an FYI that I'm not really sure

00:16:01 ◼   ► why we need to share this,

00:16:02 ◼   ► but somebody wanted to let you know, probably Jon,

00:16:05 ◼   ► that you don't need to be in the same instance

00:16:07 ◼   ► as someone in order to follow them or reply to them.

00:16:09 ◼   ► - I kept getting people asking me on Twitter mostly,

00:16:13 ◼   ► I heard you guys talk about Mastodon,

00:16:14 ◼   ► I really wanna try it, but mastodon.social says

00:16:17 ◼   ► they're not taking signups, so I guess I can't do it.

00:16:19 ◼   ► You don't need to be on mastodon.social.

00:16:22 ◼   ► I think I've got like seven people

00:16:24 ◼   ► who asked that same question.

00:16:25 ◼   ► You do not need to be on mastodon.social.

00:16:27 ◼   ► You can be on any, now this gets to our problem.

00:16:29 ◼   ► The next question is always, okay,

00:16:31 ◼   ► what instance should I use?

00:16:32 ◼   ► And what I have to say is, I don't know.

00:16:34 ◼   ► I just want people to know, if you pick an instance,

00:16:37 ◼   ► one, it's not the end of the world,

00:16:38 ◼   ► because you can always move to another instance, right?

00:16:41 ◼   ► And two, you do not need to be on the same instance

00:16:44 ◼   ► as people that you follow.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Like that's the point of federation.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And maybe we haven't made that point strongly enough.

00:16:49 ◼   ► Mastodon does not equal equal, as Merlin would say,

00:16:52 ◼   ► mastodon.social.

00:16:53 ◼   ► You can basically pick any instance.

00:16:55 ◼   ► And if you go to any kind of Mastodon thing,

00:16:57 ◼   ► it will show you a list of instances

00:16:59 ◼   ► and how do you pick among them?

00:17:00 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:01 ◼   ► Find one where somebody you know is, right?

00:17:04 ◼   ► I mean, I guess that's how people are finding out

00:17:06 ◼   ► about Mastodon.social because that's where we are.

00:17:08 ◼   ► But you don't have to be where we are.

00:17:09 ◼   ► All the people I follow aren't on the same instance as me.

00:17:12 ◼   ► That's the point of federation.

00:17:13 ◼   ► So don't feel like it's that big a deal.

00:17:15 ◼   ► Yes, this is a weakness of mass that we talked about it.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Every time we bring it up, how do I pick an instance?

00:17:20 ◼   ► I'm just kind of guessing, what if I pick the wrong instance?

00:17:24 ◼   ► It's a problem.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And I don't know what the solution is.

00:17:26 ◼   ► But at least it's not a dire problem.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Because if you do pick wrong or whatever,

00:17:30 ◼   ► you can switch instances.

00:17:31 ◼   ► Or you could be like me and get an account

00:17:33 ◼   ► on 50 different instances and use that as your hedge.

00:17:35 ◼   ► But don't worry if you're not on the same instance

00:17:38 ◼   ► as the host of your favorite podcast

00:17:41 ◼   ► because you will be able to follow them

00:17:42 ◼   ► no matter where you are,

00:17:43 ◼   ► unless you're on a server full of Nazis

00:17:46 ◼   ► that got defaturated, so don't pick those instances,

00:17:48 ◼   ► but other than that, you should be fine.

00:17:50 ◼   ► - There's multiple reasons.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Yeah, and overall, I would say,

00:17:54 ◼   ► every time I keep going back to,

00:17:56 ◼   ► what's the Masto, the good Friend Finder one,

00:17:59 ◼   ► what's it called?

00:18:00 ◼   ► - Move to Dawn.

00:18:00 ◼   ► - Move to Dawn, that's it, yeah.

00:18:01 ◼   ► I keep going back to Move to Dawn every couple of days.

00:18:04 ◼   ► I have the tab open on my phone in Safari,

00:18:06 ◼   ► and I just go back every couple days and refresh it,

00:18:08 ◼   ► and there's a few more people there.

00:18:09 ◼   ► And it's happening.

00:18:11 ◼   ► People are really moving there in large numbers.

00:18:14 ◼   ► And again, I don't think Twitter is gonna lose to Mastodon,

00:18:19 ◼   ► like in quotes, but certainly a lot of people

00:18:23 ◼   ► who I follow on Twitter are now on Mastodon

00:18:26 ◼   ► and are oftentimes posting more there.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And so if you are the kind of person

00:18:31 ◼   ► who might wanna follow nerdy people

00:18:33 ◼   ► or people who care about that kind of stuff, check it out.

00:18:36 ◼   ► I would also very strongly encourage everyone.

00:18:38 ◼   ► John mentioned this last week,

00:18:39 ◼   ► but the way Movtodon and Feta Finder work

00:18:43 ◼   ► is they look in your Twitter profile

00:18:46 ◼   ► for links to a Mastodon page.

00:18:49 ◼   ► So if you have a question on the format,

00:18:51 ◼   ► go look at my profile on Twitter.

00:18:53 ◼   ► You can see the format of the link.

00:18:54 ◼   ► It's just instance name, dot whatever,

00:18:56 ◼   ► slash at your username.

00:18:58 ◼   ► That format, they look for that format,

00:19:01 ◼   ► and so if you out there,

00:19:03 ◼   ► if you have created a Mastodon account

00:19:05 ◼   ► in your Twitter bio, go put that kind of link

00:19:08 ◼   ► somewhere in the bio.

00:19:09 ◼   ► It doesn't even have to be like the URL field,

00:19:10 ◼   ► it can be anywhere in the Twitter bio.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Put that link in there so these tools can find you

00:19:15 ◼   ► and then so that anybody who follows you

00:19:17 ◼   ► can automatically find you over at Mastodon

00:19:20 ◼   ► without having to ask and search and everything like that.

00:19:22 ◼   ► So everyone please do that.

00:19:24 ◼   ► And I think this is a big enough thing now

00:19:28 ◼   ► that even if you're not sure whether you'll use it,

00:19:30 ◼   ► you should probably go create an account somewhere.

00:19:32 ◼   ► Like again, as John was saying,

00:19:34 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter which instance you pick

00:19:36 ◼   ► for the most part, as long as it's going to keep existing

00:19:38 ◼   ► in all likelihood for now, that's fine.

00:19:41 ◼   ► But go create an account if you haven't yet

00:19:44 ◼   ► because it seems like there's a good amount

00:19:46 ◼   ► of traction happening here.

00:19:47 ◼   ► And frankly, I'm telling you, once I switched over

00:19:52 ◼   ► to the Ivory beta, the Tapos for Mastodon thing,

00:19:55 ◼   ► it's really, I will oftentimes be using either Tweetbot

00:19:59 ◼   ► or Ivory on my phone and forget which service I'm using.

00:20:03 ◼   ► Because unless you look really closely

00:20:05 ◼   ► at the design of the icons,

00:20:06 ◼   ► you actually can very easily forget that.

00:20:08 ◼   ► It really is like a drop-in replacement at this point.

00:20:12 ◼   ► And as soon as the Mac situation gets worked out,

00:20:14 ◼   ► again by Ivory probably, that's gonna be even better.

00:20:17 ◼   ► But again, stuff's happening and this is the time

00:20:21 ◼   ► if you haven't yet jumped into Mastodon,

00:20:23 ◼   ► go make an account.

00:20:24 ◼   ► Even if you don't wanna be using it,

00:20:25 ◼   ► at least you'll have a good username reserved somewhere.

00:20:28 ◼   ► And it's the worst case scenario.

00:20:29 ◼   ► Best case scenario, you actually might use it.

00:20:31 ◼   ► I have found that it is, in many ways,

00:20:35 ◼   ► like Twitter is, Twitter is like our favorite bar

00:20:39 ◼   ► that we hung out with, that we hung out in every single day

00:20:41 ◼   ► for 15 years, and now a bunch of jerks keep coming in,

00:20:45 ◼   ► and that's always been a bit of a problem,

00:20:47 ◼   ► but now even more jerks are coming in,

00:20:49 ◼   ► and the new owner now is encouraging the jerks

00:20:52 ◼   ► and letting them back in who have been previously kicked out

00:20:54 ◼   ► who were even the biggest jerks

00:20:56 ◼   ► and the most ridiculous, outrageous kind of jerks,

00:20:59 ◼   ► possible violent jerks.

00:21:01 ◼   ► So our favorite bar, it's going a little bit south

00:21:06 ◼   ► and it's not, you know.

00:21:08 ◼   ► Meanwhile, you can go down the street

00:21:10 ◼   ► and go to a nice, cozy, friendly bar

00:21:13 ◼   ► where all your friends are, basically,

00:21:15 ◼   ► or at least many of your friends.

00:21:17 ◼   ► And it's like, wait, this is just kind of nicer.

00:21:20 ◼   ► And that's the experience I've had so far in Mastodon

00:21:22 ◼   ► because it is smaller, and that's probably

00:21:24 ◼   ► the biggest reason, but also because it's a different vibe,

00:21:27 ◼   ► a little bit different scene.

00:21:29 ◼   ► But mostly because it's smaller,

00:21:31 ◼   ► it is just a nicer place to hang out

00:21:34 ◼   ► for a lot of people a lot of the time.

00:21:36 ◼   ► And it seems like it's kind of a nerd haven

00:21:39 ◼   ► in a lot of ways if you follow the nerdy scene like I do.

00:21:41 ◼   ► There's just a whole bunch of nerds there

00:21:42 ◼   ► posting good nerdy stuff and I love it.

00:21:44 ◼   ► So anyway, if you haven't made an account yet

00:21:47 ◼   ► on an mass on thing, please go do it.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Even if you don't end up using it,

00:21:50 ◼   ► you should at least try it.

00:21:52 ◼   ► - I just went to move to non while you're doing that

00:21:54 ◼   ► and I refreshed it, I had it open in a tab as well

00:21:56 ◼   ► and I found two new accounts

00:21:57 ◼   ► and I click the follow button on them.

00:21:59 ◼   ► I didn't even look to see what instance they're on.

00:22:01 ◼   ► It does say, but now that I look,

00:22:03 ◼   ► I see one of them was on hackaderm.io,

00:22:06 ◼   ► and one of them was on-- - Hackaderm, yeah.

00:22:07 ◼   ► - One of them was on mas.to.

00:22:10 ◼   ► But the point is, I didn't even have to look at that.

00:22:11 ◼   ► I just saw that they had a button that said follow,

00:22:13 ◼   ► because I wasn't already following them,

00:22:15 ◼   ► and I just said click, click, done and done.

00:22:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, if I was starting new right now,

00:22:19 ◼   ► I might go to hackaderm, because it seems like

00:22:21 ◼   ► it's a pretty cool group of nerds over there.

00:22:23 ◼   ► - I've got an account there.

00:22:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, of course.

00:22:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:27 ◼   ► - When I tried to go, that server seems super overwhelmed.

00:22:29 ◼   ► I don't know if it still is, but when I was trying

00:22:31 ◼   ► to create my account there to squad on my username,

00:22:33 ◼   ► it was super slow.

00:22:35 ◼   ► - The admin made a post a few days ago saying

00:22:37 ◼   ► they're doing upgrades and stuff,

00:22:39 ◼   ► because it's run by a bunch of nerves

00:22:41 ◼   ► to know what they're doing, so they're doing

00:22:42 ◼   ► a lot of server stuff over there.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And again, I do think the server scaling,

00:22:49 ◼   ► cost management side of things, there's a lot there

00:22:53 ◼   ► that could go south in the future,

00:22:55 ◼   ► but right now it's a cool place to hang out,

00:22:56 ◼   ► and I hope it stays that way.

00:22:57 ◼   ► So yeah, go pick a mass on instance.

00:23:00 ◼   ► Hackaderms are pretty cool one I think.

00:23:02 ◼   ► And go check it out because this is the time.

00:23:05 ◼   ► This is like the early fun days before it gets crazy

00:23:09 ◼   ► or turns south.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Like this is when everyone's still having fun.

00:23:12 ◼   ► And you know there's not a lot of places like that left

00:23:14 ◼   ► on the internet where new social networks

00:23:17 ◼   ► or people are still having fun.

00:23:18 ◼   ► Like that's not really a thing.

00:23:21 ◼   ► So anyway, yeah, check it out.

00:23:23 ◼   ► - I get it, it's supposed to be like packaderm hackaderm.

00:23:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:23:26 ◼   ► I was not reading it that way.

00:23:28 ◼   ► - All right, the good news is if you don't like Mastodon,

00:23:32 ◼   ► you can go to Hive social, shoot, nevermind.

00:23:35 ◼   ► - Nope.

00:23:36 ◼   ► - So Hive social is that startup that allegedly

00:23:40 ◼   ► is being run by just two people.

00:23:42 ◼   ► And Ars Technica reports that it basically self terminated

00:23:46 ◼   ► or self suspended, I guess I should say,

00:23:49 ◼   ► because a security research group or whatever said,

00:23:53 ◼   ► hey, you guys have got a bunch of problems.

00:23:55 ◼   ► reading from the Ars Technica article,

00:23:57 ◼   ► "The issues we," this is a quote,

00:23:58 ◼   ► "The issues we reported allow any attacker

00:24:00 ◼   ► "to access all data, including private posts,

00:24:01 ◼   ► "private messages, shared media,

00:24:03 ◼   ► "and even deleted direct messages,"

00:24:05 ◼   ► the advisory published on Wednesday

00:24:06 ◼   ► by Berlin-based security collective Zurforschung claimed.

00:24:10 ◼   ► This also includes private email addresses

00:24:12 ◼   ► and phone numbers entered during login.

00:24:14 ◼   ► Cool.

00:24:15 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

00:24:16 ◼   ► - They got all their security flaws out of the way

00:24:19 ◼   ► and by just having one big one,

00:24:20 ◼   ► which is like all access to all data,

00:24:22 ◼   ► a complete access to do anything as anybody all the time.

00:24:25 ◼   ► That's the, pretty much, you don't need to ever have

00:24:28 ◼   ► any other security problems, 'cause you're like,

00:24:30 ◼   ► we did it, we covered everything.

00:24:31 ◼   ► - Oh, also, the things that should have been deleted

00:24:33 ◼   ► are, they don't actually get deleted, they're soft deleted.

00:24:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:24:36 ◼   ► - Bonus content. - I mean, that's fun.

00:24:38 ◼   ► So the Hive social thing, I said a couple shows back

00:24:41 ◼   ► when I brought this up that I didn't understand

00:24:44 ◼   ► how it snowballed, like how I suddenly saw everyone

00:24:48 ◼   ► from the gaming community that I follow saying,

00:24:50 ◼   ► come over to Hive, everyone come over to Hive.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And then looking at the numbers,

00:24:53 ◼   ► like they crossed 1 million users,

00:24:55 ◼   ► and the next day they crossed 2 million users,

00:24:56 ◼   ► they were adding, you know,

00:24:58 ◼   ► 500,000 users every 10 hours or something.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Like, and I was like, what is causing that?

00:25:03 ◼   ► What made it snowball?

00:25:04 ◼   ► What was the seed of this?

00:25:05 ◼   ► Did some super popular influencer go there and tell,

00:25:09 ◼   ► like, I still have no answer to that question.

00:25:11 ◼   ► All I know is they were experiencing insane growth.

00:25:14 ◼   ► And I don't blame the people who made the app for the growth.

00:25:16 ◼   ► I don't think they did anything

00:25:17 ◼   ► to make it happen in particular,

00:25:19 ◼   ► but it was like, yeah, like one developer

00:25:21 ◼   ► and two other people helping.

00:25:23 ◼   ► And then the first sign of things being terribly wrong,

00:25:25 ◼   ► other than just knowing the numbers I just told you,

00:25:27 ◼   ► was that after I had gone through all the stuff of me

00:25:30 ◼   ► trying to sign up with my email address

00:25:32 ◼   ► and it wouldn't let me,

00:25:33 ◼   ► so I did like sign in with Apple instead,

00:25:35 ◼   ► it was, I was like, I just need,

00:25:36 ◼   ► I wanted to get my username, right?

00:25:39 ◼   ► Someone pointed out at that point,

00:25:41 ◼   ► yeah, Hive doesn't enforce uniqueness of usernames.

00:25:44 ◼   ► And it showed like a screen saying,

00:25:45 ◼   ► hey, we search for @whatever.

00:25:47 ◼   ► There was like 17 @whatever.

00:25:49 ◼   ► I forgot what it was.

00:25:50 ◼   ► It was Genshin Impact, @GenshinImpact.

00:25:52 ◼   ► It was a screen full of people,

00:25:54 ◼   ► all of whom had @GenshinImpact as their handle.

00:25:57 ◼   ► So they weren't even enforcing uniqueness of handles,

00:26:00 ◼   ► which seems like to me a fairly fundamental feature of,

00:26:05 ◼   ► you know, and apparently I was like,

00:26:07 ◼   ► well, maybe that's like a decision they made

00:26:08 ◼   ► 'cause they don't want that to be unique identifier,

00:26:11 ◼   ► but no, apparently that was a bug.

00:26:12 ◼   ► The other bug was that it's apparently trivially easy

00:26:16 ◼   ► to get access to everyone's messages everywhere,

00:26:20 ◼   ► to be able to tweet as them,

00:26:21 ◼   ► to be able to see the direct messages,

00:26:23 ◼   ► to be able to, like, their security problem that they had,

00:26:25 ◼   ► they were like 100% hacked.

00:26:27 ◼   ► Like, I don't know what the bug was,

00:26:28 ◼   ► but like, it apparently wasn't too difficult for people,

00:26:32 ◼   ► if you knew how, to just basically

00:26:34 ◼   ► completely own them with a P.

00:26:36 ◼   ► And so their response to that was,

00:26:40 ◼   ► their response to that was not great,

00:26:41 ◼   ► because they were aware of this bug

00:26:43 ◼   ► for like 72 hours or something,

00:26:46 ◼   ► before they did the only thing that was possible for them

00:26:48 ◼   ► to do, which was we have to stop this service and regroup.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Which again, I don't particularly blame them

00:26:54 ◼   ► for a three person company makes this iOS app

00:26:56 ◼   ► and then they have 2 million users within a few days.

00:26:59 ◼   ► They're obviously in over their head.

00:27:01 ◼   ► And so yeah, they shut down Hive.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Will it rise again?

00:27:04 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:27:05 ◼   ► But anyway, that is /was Hive.

00:27:08 ◼   ► - Oh my God, what a mess.

00:27:10 ◼   ► I mean, look, I don't wanna take too much joy

00:27:12 ◼   ► on other people's mistakes,

00:27:13 ◼   ► but those are some big mistakes.

00:27:15 ◼   ► That's really outrageous.

00:27:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's just like learning on hard mode for sure,

00:27:20 ◼   ► but I still don't understand or know

00:27:22 ◼   ► why they snowballed the way they did, right?

00:27:25 ◼   ► - Who knows?

00:27:26 ◼   ► I have good news and bad news.

00:27:28 ◼   ► I'm mostly talking to our friend Merlin Mann.

00:27:31 ◼   ► The good news is, Sharrow is a real thing.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Merlin is vindicated, baby!

00:27:36 ◼   ► Except it doesn't mean a box with an arrow coming out of it.

00:27:40 ◼   ► - Or does it?

00:27:41 ◼   ► - Or does it?

00:27:42 ◼   ► So we got a bunch of different feedback about this.

00:27:45 ◼   ► There was a great summary that was sent to us by Wes Davis.

00:27:47 ◼   ► Wes writes, "I'm sure you've gotten plenty of feedback

00:27:49 ◼   ► on this, but in the event that I'm the only bike nerd

00:27:51 ◼   ► listening," and I think at the time I read this,

00:27:53 ◼   ► this was the first piece of feedback about it, but anyway.

00:27:55 ◼   ► - The first of many.

00:27:57 ◼   ► - The first of many.

00:27:58 ◼   ► "I wanted to point out that Merlin

00:27:59 ◼   ► didn't invent the term 'sharrow.'

00:28:01 ◼   ► It's actually a term used by cyclists and city planners

00:28:03 ◼   ► to refer to the double chevron symbols

00:28:05 ◼   ► above a bicycle symbol you sometimes see on roads

00:28:07 ◼   ► lacking bike lanes to indicate to cars that A,

00:28:09 ◼   ► cyclists will be here and that's okay,

00:28:11 ◼   ► And B, this is the general area that they will exist.

00:28:15 ◼   ► It's a special kick in the face when a cyclist is on a road

00:28:17 ◼   ► with plenty of space for cars and bike lanes,

00:28:19 ◼   ► and they've painted a sharrow

00:28:22 ◼   ► near the right-hand side of the road

00:28:23 ◼   ► where, you know, a bike lane could be,

00:28:26 ◼   ► which I thought was quite funny.

00:28:27 ◼   ► - People do not like sharrows.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Bike riders don't like them.

00:28:30 ◼   ► It's basically like you did the minimum possible

00:28:33 ◼   ► instead of making a real protected bike lane,

00:28:36 ◼   ► and the studies have shown that it actually

00:28:37 ◼   ► makes it more dangerous for bike riders, not less.

00:28:40 ◼   ► So, Sharrows get a big thumb down from biking.

00:28:43 ◼   ► Here's the thing about this with respect to Merlin.

00:28:45 ◼   ► Merlin has recently been in a little bit of a rabbit hole

00:28:48 ◼   ► learning about like road design and urban design.

00:28:50 ◼   ► So he may have been exposed to this exact term

00:28:52 ◼   ► in that context, but.

00:28:54 ◼   ► - That's true, that's true.

00:28:55 ◼   ► From the first anonymous person,

00:28:57 ◼   ► "I'd like this to be kept anonymous,

00:28:59 ◼   ► "but I can confirm internally within Apple on Slack,

00:29:02 ◼   ► "I've absolutely seen Sharrow in use.

00:29:04 ◼   ► "Just thought you'd appreciate knowing."

00:29:06 ◼   ► So Merlin is vindicated from another anonymous person.

00:29:09 ◼   ► Regarding the word share-o,

00:29:10 ◼   ► I don't think Merlin invented it,

00:29:12 ◼   ► but regardless if he did or not,

00:29:13 ◼   ► I'm 95% sure I heard designers inside Apple

00:29:15 ◼   ► use it when I was there.

00:29:17 ◼   ► So it's at least spread that far by 2019 or so.

00:29:19 ◼   ► And then from our final anonymous birdie,

00:29:22 ◼   ► perhaps it will surprise you to know

00:29:23 ◼   ► that when I began working in Apple retail eight years ago,

00:29:26 ◼   ► the word share-o was already in use,

00:29:28 ◼   ► taught to me by a coworker,

00:29:29 ◼   ► and used regularly by our creative team

00:29:31 ◼   ► when teaching customers.

00:29:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, the people who talked about share-o

00:29:34 ◼   ► being used for the share-o often said that,

00:29:37 ◼   ► yeah, we used it in this context or whatever,

00:29:39 ◼   ► but like it hasn't, I mean, it hasn't seemed

00:29:43 ◼   ► to like have caught on.

00:29:44 ◼   ► Lots of things are used inside Apple and not outside Apple.

00:29:47 ◼   ► But if Apple retail is teaching it to people,

00:29:50 ◼   ► you'd think maybe it would catch on

00:29:51 ◼   ► in the wider community, anyway.

00:29:52 ◼   ► There's still a chance it can happen.

00:29:53 ◼   ► There's still a chance we could circle back a year from now

00:29:55 ◼   ► and everybody uses the term Sharrow.

00:29:57 ◼   ► We could be making it happen right now

00:29:58 ◼   ► just by talking about it unintentionally.

00:30:01 ◼   ► But yeah, it's not on Merlin to make it happen

00:30:04 ◼   ► is what I'm saying.

00:30:05 ◼   ► Apple has been apparently trying to make Sharrow

00:30:07 ◼   ► happen for years, it just hasn't broken through yet.

00:30:09 ◼   ► I like hive.

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00:32:02 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:32:06 ◼   ► A couple of episodes ago, we were discussing a gift that Marco gave me and I thought that

00:32:11 ◼   ► was really fun.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And then I was looking around at this piece of code and this particular piece of code

00:32:16 ◼   ► I was looking at, it's a new open source thing.

00:32:20 ◼   ► It has unit tests just like the gift Marco gave me a couple of weeks ago.

00:32:24 ◼   ► It has combined publishers.

00:32:27 ◼   ► It has async await.

00:32:28 ◼   ► It has all sorts of delightful things.

00:32:31 ◼   ► I have almost fallen over.

00:32:33 ◼   ► I am so excited.

00:32:34 ◼   ► Even though this is code I don't think I'll ever use because it doesn't really do anything

00:32:36 ◼   ► for me personally.

00:32:37 ◼   ► The fact that these things exist is such a gift to me and I want to use all sort of vulgar

00:32:43 ◼   ► euphemisms about how happy I am about this but I will refrain and I will keep them to

00:32:47 ◼   ► myself.

00:32:48 ◼   ► But anyways, Blackbird has been open sourced and so you can check out Marco's in progress

00:32:54 ◼   ► sequel, what is it, ButtDB.

00:32:59 ◼   ► You can see his in progress SQLite wrapper.

00:33:02 ◼   ► And I have only taken but a few minutes

00:33:04 ◼   ► spelunking through the code.

00:33:06 ◼   ► But as much as I'm kind of being snarky about it,

00:33:09 ◼   ► for real, there's publishers, there's unit tests,

00:33:11 ◼   ► there's async await, it's all there, baby.

00:33:13 ◼   ► I'm so excited.

00:33:14 ◼   ► This is very cool.

00:33:16 ◼   ► - Thank you.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Yeah, and I even, yesterday,

00:33:18 ◼   ► I put a whole big Swift UI thing out

00:33:21 ◼   ► with some fancy property wrappers

00:33:24 ◼   ► for live updating instance groups and stuff like that.

00:33:26 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's, so far it's going along

00:33:29 ◼   ► 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

00:33:36 ◼   ► Adding performance counters and stuff that it show up in instruments. So that's pretty cool

00:33:39 ◼   ► Did you also get something for like a what was it for the string literals with the inline interpolation thing?

00:33:45 ◼   ► That well, yeah, that wasn't a pull request

00:33:46 ◼   ► But that was it was a few people on Twitter who pointed that out including I think one of the authors of a project that

00:33:51 ◼   ► Did that I?

00:33:53 ◼   ► Don't know if I want to do that that feels a little bit like

00:33:57 ◼   ► expected magic from the call site end,

00:33:59 ◼   ► like I don't think I would expect that to happen

00:34:02 ◼   ► at the call site.

00:34:03 ◼   ► - It makes it look like you're making SQL injection bugs,

00:34:06 ◼   ► but you're not.

00:34:07 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah, that's why I don't,

00:34:09 ◼   ► I see the advantage of it in terms of like,

00:34:12 ◼   ► you're putting the arguments right where they go,

00:34:13 ◼   ► like that, I see that value, but I think most people,

00:34:17 ◼   ► including my own future self, like at the call site,

00:34:20 ◼   ► would not expect that to be the behavior,

00:34:22 ◼   ► and so I don't think I wanna do that.

00:34:24 ◼   ► Unless custom string interpolation becomes

00:34:27 ◼   ► much more common pattern that's used a lot in Swift.

00:34:29 ◼   ► But I don't think it is or is going to be, so we'll see.

00:34:33 ◼   ► - I think the coolest thing about that is

00:34:34 ◼   ► if you were able to do it pervasively,

00:34:36 ◼   ► it essentially protects against people who don't know

00:34:40 ◼   ► how to avoid SQL injection attacks.

00:34:42 ◼   ► Like they think, you would look at the code

00:34:44 ◼   ► and it's like, oh no, this beginner

00:34:46 ◼   ► made a SQL injection attack.

00:34:47 ◼   ► They have no idea that that custom interpolation is there,

00:34:50 ◼   ► but that custom interpolation would in fact

00:34:52 ◼   ► be protecting them against that injection attack.

00:34:55 ◼   ► but I'm not sure you could ever get to that level

00:34:57 ◼   ► of a safety net where you could say,

00:34:59 ◼   ► you don't even need to know about this,

00:35:00 ◼   ► just write any old code and you'll always be protected

00:35:03 ◼   ► against injection.

00:35:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Doesn't seem like it's a good idea.

00:35:08 ◼   ► I did also, I tried earlier today,

00:35:11 ◼   ► somebody submitted a pull request that turned on

00:35:14 ◼   ► the Swift concurrency warnings for all the sendable stuff

00:35:19 ◼   ► and I tried for a little while to get that

00:35:22 ◼   ► to not show 88 warnings when I compiled the app.

00:35:26 ◼   ► That's a bigger project.

00:35:29 ◼   ► I am gonna try to make that all correct,

00:35:32 ◼   ► just for future looking stuff,

00:35:33 ◼   ► but I tried doing it like today,

00:35:35 ◼   ► I'm like oh, this is way bigger than a one day project.

00:35:39 ◼   ► So I'll work on that.

00:35:40 ◼   ► But overall, I actually do intend to do stuff like that

00:35:43 ◼   ► because again, my plan is for this to be

00:35:47 ◼   ► what I write my apps against for the next X year

00:35:49 ◼   ► where X is however long I'm writing Swift apps.

00:35:52 ◼   ► And that's hopefully gonna be a long time.

00:35:55 ◼   ► And so I do intend for this to be very forward looking,

00:36:00 ◼   ► forward compatible, cover as many of my forward needs

00:36:06 ◼   ► as possible, I'm gonna possibly write a CloudKit adapter

00:36:10 ◼   ► for it, but I'm gonna see, long story short,

00:36:13 ◼   ► I haven't yet fully decided if I'm even going

00:36:15 ◼   ► to be using CloudKit for Overcast, but if I do,

00:36:18 ◼   ► then that's gonna be the next step here

00:36:19 ◼   ► I'm going to make a CloudKit wrapper for this probably.

00:36:21 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah, so Blackbird, yeah, it's going pretty well.

00:36:24 ◼   ► I don't think anyone's using it yet, and you shouldn't.

00:36:27 ◼   ► I tell you right in the FAQ, don't use it before I use it.

00:36:30 ◼   ► Because if I use it and it turns out something doesn't work

00:36:33 ◼   ► right or the API is clunky in some way,

00:36:35 ◼   ► I'm going to change it.

00:36:36 ◼   ► And that could break how you're using it.

00:36:39 ◼   ► So yeah, this is not ready for you.

00:36:41 ◼   ► It's open sourced only for people's curiosity

00:36:45 ◼   ► and possibly learning and me learning from you,

00:36:48 ◼   ► not actually intended to be used yet.

00:36:51 ◼   ► - Yep, now I am super pleased that you are using

00:36:54 ◼   ► all this new and fancy stuff,

00:36:56 ◼   ► in part because this is,

00:36:58 ◼   ► and this is gonna come out mean,

00:37:01 ◼   ► and I don't intend it to,

00:37:02 ◼   ► but that's not typically your MO.

00:37:04 ◼   ► You're typically a little more conservative,

00:37:06 ◼   ► and I'm excited that you're living more on the cutting edge

00:37:09 ◼   ► than you typically do.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And plus, I plan to dig through this

00:37:12 ◼   ► with a more fine-tooth comb for my own knowledge,

00:37:15 ◼   ► not because I wanna be that guy that's,

00:37:16 ◼   ► "Wow, did you consider that you should do this?"

00:37:18 ◼   ► But no, I feel like I could learn from this.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And so I'm very excited to dig into this

00:37:24 ◼   ► and see more of it.

00:37:25 ◼   ► - Thank you, it fits my usual pattern.

00:37:28 ◼   ► It's just a pattern that has a very long cycle time.

00:37:31 ◼   ► Like when I was first, when we were first doing Tumblr,

00:37:35 ◼   ► PHP 5, I believe, had just come out.

00:37:40 ◼   ► It was like 5.2, whichever one added late static binding.

00:37:44 ◼   ► That was like right in early Tumblr days.

00:37:46 ◼   ► I think it was like 2007-ish, maybe 2006,

00:37:50 ◼   ► but yeah, I think it was 5.2, the Adelaide static binding,

00:37:52 ◼   ► and that made a bunch of much more,

00:37:56 ◼   ► I mean, by today's standards, fairly primitive stuff,

00:37:58 ◼   ► but for PHP in 2006 standards,

00:38:02 ◼   ► some much more advanced object-oriented programming

00:38:04 ◼   ► was possible thanks to that update.

00:38:06 ◼   ► And it made such a big difference

00:38:08 ◼   ► in how you would write an app like that,

00:38:11 ◼   ► that we require that from all of our servers,

00:38:15 ◼   ► and we jumped in and made all of the most advanced

00:38:18 ◼   ► PHP stuff you could do at that time,

00:38:20 ◼   ► that was the basis for that.

00:38:22 ◼   ► I am still using that PHP framework today,

00:38:25 ◼   ► or at least a very, very, very distant derivative of it.

00:38:29 ◼   ► Still using many of those basic structures and stuff today

00:38:33 ◼   ► because I jumped in when it was super advanced

00:38:36 ◼   ► and it was very cutting edge at the time

00:38:38 ◼   ► and now I still have no reason to really change it.

00:38:42 ◼   ► So that's kinda how I see this.

00:38:44 ◼   ► I have a lot of ancient objective C code

00:38:47 ◼   ► that I wrote 10 years ago that I'm still using today

00:38:51 ◼   ► because I wrote it a long time ago to be cutting edge then

00:38:54 ◼   ► and it's still fine now.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Well, I hope this is gonna be one of those pieces

00:38:59 ◼   ► of Swift code for me, that I'm writing this all

00:39:02 ◼   ► to be cutting edge now so that 10 years from now

00:39:05 ◼   ► it's not out of date or broken, hopefully not.

00:39:10 ◼   ► And this is hopefully still a good way

00:39:11 ◼   ► to do things 10 years from now.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Now, before we leave this topic,

00:39:14 ◼   ► I wanted to call out one thing.

00:39:16 ◼   ► You put in your README,

00:39:18 ◼   ► wishlist for future Swift language capabilities.

00:39:21 ◼   ► And I know you didn't see it,

00:39:23 ◼   ► but I gave the following a standing friggin' ovation

00:39:26 ◼   ► because I could not agree with you more.

00:39:28 ◼   ► Type reflection for automatic or cleaner schema definitions.

00:39:31 ◼   ► Swift currently has no way to reflect a type's properties.

00:39:33 ◼   ► Mirror only reflects property names

00:39:35 ◼   ► and values of given instances.

00:39:37 ◼   ► If language adds type reflection in the future,

00:39:39 ◼   ► I'd love to add an optional automatic table definitions

00:39:41 ◼   ► that didn't require repeating the column names and types

00:39:44 ◼   ► in my static var table equals blah, blah, blah definition.

00:39:47 ◼   ► It could also be based on property wrappers,

00:39:48 ◼   ► e.g., you know, @column or @index column, et cetera.

00:39:52 ◼   ► Amen, brother.

00:39:54 ◼   ► - Thank you. - I could not agree

00:39:56 ◼   ► with you more. - I think there's a proposal

00:39:58 ◼   ► for that already for type reflection, isn't there?

00:40:01 ◼   ► - I feel like, I can't imagine there wouldn't be.

00:40:03 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It's like,

00:40:04 ◼   ► it's such an obvious thing.

00:40:05 ◼   ► - I think I read it recently.

00:40:06 ◼   ► I know, but I'm not just like, it's on a list,

00:40:08 ◼   ► but like someone already has a proposal for it, I think.

00:40:10 ◼   ► We'll try to find it for the show notes.

00:40:12 ◼   ► If not, someone will send it to us for next week.

00:40:14 ◼   ► But yeah, that's one of the things I've read recently

00:40:17 ◼   ► as an actual thing.

00:40:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is another reason why

00:40:22 ◼   ► you shouldn't rely on this framework being stable

00:40:25 ◼   ► where it is now.

00:40:26 ◼   ► If that comes out next year, I'm moving this entire framework

00:40:29 ◼   ► to it.

00:40:30 ◼   ► I'm just going to do it, and I'll update my code,

00:40:32 ◼   ► and I hope yours works.

00:40:34 ◼   ► It might not be sufficient for all the things

00:40:36 ◼   ► that you want out of it.

00:40:37 ◼   ► Yeah, probably not.

00:40:38 ◼   ► But you'll see.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Plus those features like that tend to like,

00:40:42 ◼   ► Apple hoards them for each major Swift version.

00:40:45 ◼   ► You can see them in the, it's all in the open,

00:40:48 ◼   ► so it's not like it's a mystery,

00:40:49 ◼   ► but when they come out with like,

00:40:50 ◼   ► oh, here's the new version of Swift,

00:40:51 ◼   ► it'll be able to see,

00:40:52 ◼   ► you know everything that's gonna be in it.

00:40:54 ◼   ► But Apple does tend to wait for those yearly Xcode releases

00:40:57 ◼   ► to sort of package it all up and deliver it

00:40:59 ◼   ► to their developers in a way that it's safe to use

00:41:01 ◼   ► with App Store stuff.

00:41:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, yeah.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Even if they release that,

00:41:06 ◼   ► or somebody adds that to Swift in the spring,

00:41:08 ◼   ► there's no way we'd be able to ship code with it

00:41:11 ◼   ► until the fall.

00:41:11 ◼   ► And it would probably even then probably

00:41:14 ◼   ► require the latest releases to run, too.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Because that also involves some runtime.

00:41:18 ◼   ► That's one of the cool proposal things.

00:41:19 ◼   ► One of the things that actually is going in is-- I

00:41:22 ◼   ► think it's going in-- I'm assuming it will pass--

00:41:24 ◼   ► is a way to backport APIs to older things.

00:41:28 ◼   ► So you don't just say, oh, I added this new method,

00:41:30 ◼   ► but you only get it if you're on venture, right?

00:41:32 ◼   ► A way to basically backcompat things to previous versions.

00:41:36 ◼   ► I mean, it's another feature you're looking at.

00:41:37 ◼   ► like oh this is a feature Apple could use well yeah duh it's actually kind of

00:41:41 ◼   ► clever how they did it if you read the proposal it's built on a feature they

00:41:44 ◼   ► already had but just extending it a little bit making it so if you if you're

00:41:48 ◼   ► running on the older version of the OS you'll get the implementation copied

00:41:52 ◼   ► down into you but you don't have to get the entire library copied in anyway stuff

00:41:55 ◼   ► like that makes me think that you know features that are useful to Apple will

00:41:59 ◼   ► come sooner than features features that aren't and I think type reflection would

00:42:03 ◼   ► be useful for Apple so I think that a good shot of getting in for next year

00:42:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause we still don't really have

00:42:08 ◼   ► like Apple's core data solution for Swift.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Like core data is compatible with Swift,

00:42:14 ◼   ► but it's not a very Swift-y way to do things,

00:42:18 ◼   ► and I still don't think we have,

00:42:19 ◼   ► like what is Apple's answer to like the next generation

00:42:23 ◼   ► of core data designed with Swift in mind?

00:42:26 ◼   ► I don't think we have that yet,

00:42:27 ◼   ► and maybe they would use features like that

00:42:30 ◼   ► to make that happen.

00:42:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, we'll see.

00:42:32 ◼   ► I just would really like it.

00:42:34 ◼   ► When I was heavy in .NET and C#, this was when reflection was new to me, and man, there

00:42:40 ◼   ► was not a problem that could not be solved with reflection.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And obviously I've grown up since then, and I think I would use it far more sparingly,

00:42:48 ◼   ► but it is something very, very useful to have and something that I wish Swift had more than

00:42:52 ◼   ► a passing implementation of.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And even then, like you said in your readme, the implementation is half-butted, to use

00:42:59 ◼   ► your term, if anything.

00:43:01 ◼   ► So I'd really love a full butt implementation of Mirror.

00:43:04 ◼   ► Real time follow up, a one J. Seracusa in the chat room

00:43:08 ◼   ► seems to have found the, oh no,

00:43:10 ◼   ► this is function back deployment.

00:43:11 ◼   ► I was gonna say this is reflection,

00:43:12 ◼   ► but no, this is the function back deployment

00:43:14 ◼   ► you were talking about, which is cool stuff as well.

00:43:17 ◼   ► - It's Swift Illusion 0376, function back deployment.

00:43:21 ◼   ► Even if you don't know too much about programming,

00:43:23 ◼   ► the great thing about these proposals,

00:43:25 ◼   ► Swift Illusion proposals, they tend to explain things

00:43:28 ◼   ► more or less in first principles.

00:43:29 ◼   ► So you can just read it and kind of understand

00:43:31 ◼   ► what they're proposing, even if you have no idea

00:43:34 ◼   ► about Swift or language design or anything.

00:43:37 ◼   ► You have to know a little bit about programming,

00:43:38 ◼   ► but they're usually very clear.

00:43:40 ◼   ► - The other thing, though, like, I do have one,

00:43:43 ◼   ► I don't know if it's necessarily a concern or a complaint,

00:43:45 ◼   ► but one kind of effect to notice is,

00:43:50 ◼   ► as I'm diving into a lot of this,

00:43:51 ◼   ► a lot of kind of deeper Swift functionality

00:43:54 ◼   ► and Swift UI functionality as well,

00:43:57 ◼   ► there is just so much here.

00:43:58 ◼   ► It is a huge language and it keeps getting bigger.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Like there are so many ways you can write things.

00:44:06 ◼   ► There are so many capabilities down below everything.

00:44:09 ◼   ► There are so many weird little @ prefixes

00:44:10 ◼   ► you can stick on things that change behavior

00:44:13 ◼   ► in certain ways.

00:44:14 ◼   ► It is a massively complex language

00:44:17 ◼   ► and it's getting more and more complex every year.

00:44:20 ◼   ► And I do kind of worry about that from the point of view of,

00:44:24 ◼   ► just manageability of complexity.

00:44:27 ◼   ► I heard somewhere recently that the biggest challenge

00:44:30 ◼   ► in programming is managing complexity.

00:44:33 ◼   ► And that is, first of all, insanely correct and wise,

00:44:36 ◼   ► and that's so much bigger than cache validation

00:44:38 ◼   ► and naming things and all that stuff.

00:44:41 ◼   ► But managing complexity is by far our industry's

00:44:44 ◼   ► biggest challenge, always, from one coder

00:44:46 ◼   ► all the way up to big teams.

00:44:48 ◼   ► That's just software development in a nutshell,

00:44:50 ◼   ► is managing complexity in some kind of reasonable way.

00:44:53 ◼   ► and the language itself, like Swift makes

00:44:58 ◼   ► so much complexity possible that I'm concerned

00:45:02 ◼   ► that it's first of all not only extremely difficult

00:45:06 ◼   ► for people to really learn and get a good handle on

00:45:09 ◼   ► because all the stuff under the covers

00:45:11 ◼   ► and behind the scenes that you eventually

00:45:13 ◼   ► do have to deal with, but also I'm concerned

00:45:17 ◼   ► about just the language itself becoming so big

00:45:20 ◼   ► and bloated, like are developer tools gonna still be

00:45:24 ◼   ► fairly unreliable and bloated and slow forever

00:45:27 ◼   ► with this language?

00:45:28 ◼   ► How about documentation and the community forums

00:45:34 ◼   ► and stack overflow and stuff like that?

00:45:35 ◼   ► There's a lot of complexity in this language

00:45:37 ◼   ► and I think that's gonna ripple out

00:45:38 ◼   ► in pretty significant ways that are probably

00:45:41 ◼   ► already happening and some of the complexity

00:45:43 ◼   ► I guess is necessary to build what they wanna build

00:45:45 ◼   ► but I do think there's not,

00:45:48 ◼   ► maybe not enough prioritization on saying no

00:45:53 ◼   ► to certain features in the language.

00:45:55 ◼   ► But I don't know, I'm not a language designer,

00:45:57 ◼   ► so maybe I'm off base here,

00:45:59 ◼   ► but it is just a way, way bigger language

00:46:02 ◼   ► than anything we've used before.

00:46:05 ◼   ► - I think they're mostly going in the right direction.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Like the kind of proposals that I see a lot of

00:46:08 ◼   ► that make sense again being something useful for Apple,

00:46:11 ◼   ► you'll see a proposal and you'll be like,

00:46:12 ◼   ► "Huh, why do they care about this feature?"

00:46:15 ◼   ► And when you look at it and read it and start looking at some of the examples,

00:46:18 ◼   ► what you learn is basically like the Swift standard library, like the part,

00:46:21 ◼   ► you know,

00:46:22 ◼   ► the big part of Swift is the library that it comes with that has all the stuff

00:46:25 ◼   ► in that are not quote unquote part of the language there,

00:46:27 ◼   ► but they're in a library. If you look at the code for the Swift standard library,

00:46:30 ◼   ► some of it looks really awful. You're like, Oh, why do they have to do this?

00:46:34 ◼   ► It looks hacky and weird and there's some weird repetition of code and they have

00:46:38 ◼   ► to do things in weird ways. And you're like, boy,

00:46:40 ◼   ► I'm glad I don't have to maintain this code.

00:46:42 ◼   ► And then you look back at the proposal and you realize the proposal,

00:46:44 ◼   ► lets them delete all this code and replace it

00:46:46 ◼   ► with something simple and straightforward, right?

00:46:48 ◼   ► And so when you look at the feature,

00:46:49 ◼   ► why are they adding new features?

00:46:51 ◼   ► It's because they wanted to do a thing, a useful thing,

00:46:54 ◼   ► 'cause the standard library's not magic.

00:46:56 ◼   ► It doesn't do anything that regular code doesn't do,

00:46:58 ◼   ► but it's super important, and they want it to be

00:47:00 ◼   ► high performance, safe, easy to use, have a nice API,

00:47:04 ◼   ► and by doing all that, they're like,

00:47:06 ◼   ► "Boy, to make a good standard library,

00:47:07 ◼   ► "we have to do this ugly crap.

00:47:09 ◼   ► "Why do we have to do this ugly crap?"

00:47:10 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, 'cause you can't do X, Y, and Z in Swift

00:47:13 ◼   ► because of some limitation.

00:47:15 ◼   ► So they add a feature that lets them basically

00:47:17 ◼   ► jump into the standard library and just delete pages of code

00:47:20 ◼   ► and condense it down to one concise paragraph.

00:47:23 ◼   ► And you on the outside think, oh, they're

00:47:25 ◼   ► adding more features to Swift.

00:47:26 ◼   ► But if you have a substantial Swift code base

00:47:29 ◼   ► that you try to write to be the best it can be,

00:47:31 ◼   ► you realize that by having this feature,

00:47:34 ◼   ► it simplifies the code so much.

00:47:36 ◼   ► Like you don't have to do this weird hack.

00:47:38 ◼   ► You don't have to repeat yourself.

00:47:39 ◼   ► You don't have to do a workaround because you're not

00:47:42 ◼   ► allowed to do this one thing that you wanted to do.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And a lot of the Swift proposals I see are like that.

00:47:47 ◼   ► For example, reflection with type data.

00:47:49 ◼   ► There are probably places in the standard library

00:47:51 ◼   ► where that would come in so handy

00:47:53 ◼   ► and save them a lot of time and energy

00:47:55 ◼   ► where now they're like, well, we can't do that,

00:47:57 ◼   ► so just repeat this code block 50 different times

00:48:00 ◼   ► with different parameters on it, because there's no way for us

00:48:02 ◼   ► to programmatically figure out the answer to this question.

00:48:06 ◼   ► We just have to bake our knowledge

00:48:07 ◼   ► into the standard library by repeating the code.

00:48:09 ◼   ► So there are boondoggles here and there,

00:48:12 ◼   ► but for the most part,

00:48:12 ◼   ► I like the direction I see most of the proposals

00:48:15 ◼   ► because I think that at the time of proposals,

00:48:17 ◼   ► they'll let somebody, usually Apple,

00:48:19 ◼   ► delete a lot of code and replace it with less.

00:48:22 ◼   ► - I think my favorite of this was the DSL stuff

00:48:25 ◼   ► that landed before SwiftUI did.

00:48:27 ◼   ► And so, you know, there's all this,

00:48:29 ◼   ► oh, how do we make like, you know,

00:48:31 ◼   ► a domain specific language for something?

00:48:34 ◼   ► I don't know what it could possibly be.

00:48:37 ◼   ► And a few of us were smart enough to put together

00:48:41 ◼   ► what this apparently would probably be and were right.

00:48:44 ◼   ► And then it got used for stuff like their

00:48:46 ◼   ► absolutely awesome Regex stuff, which is coming soon

00:48:49 ◼   ► and is so much better than Perl, we can all agree.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Right, so anyway, Apple has dropped a bunch of stuff

00:48:54 ◼   ► in our laps.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Thank you Apple for doing it on a Wednesday

00:48:57 ◼   ► and not a different day, we appreciate that.

00:48:59 ◼   ► They've announced three new quote,

00:49:01 ◼   ► advanced security features quote.

00:49:04 ◼   ► And we're gonna start with the things that are not

00:49:08 ◼   ► that dramatic and then move to the dramatic one.

00:49:11 ◼   ► First is iMessage Contact Key Verification.

00:49:14 ◼   ► This will be available globally in 2023.

00:49:17 ◼   ► And from the newsroom, their announcement says,

00:49:22 ◼   ► "Now with iMessage Contact Key Verification,

00:49:24 ◼   ► "users who face extraordinary digital threats

00:49:26 ◼   ► "such as journalists, human rights activists,

00:49:28 ◼   ► "and members of government, quick aside,

00:49:30 ◼   ► "it's pretty sick that human rights activists

00:49:33 ◼   ► are in the category of extraordinary digital threats,

00:49:36 ◼   ► but that's neither here nor there,

00:49:37 ◼   ► can choose to further verify that they are messaging

00:49:39 ◼   ► only with the people they intend.

00:49:41 ◼   ► Conversations between users

00:49:42 ◼   ► who have enabled iMessage Contact Key Verification

00:49:44 ◼   ► receive automatic alerts

00:49:45 ◼   ► of an exceptionally advanced adversary,

00:49:47 ◼   ► such as a state-sponsored attacker,

00:49:49 ◼   ► where efforts to succeed breaking cloud servers

00:49:52 ◼   ► and inserting their own device to eavesdrop

00:49:54 ◼   ► on these encrypted communications.

00:49:56 ◼   ► And for even higher security,

00:49:57 ◼   ► iMessage Contact Key Verification users

00:50:00 ◼   ► can compare a contact verification code

00:50:02 ◼   ► in person on FaceTime or through another secure call.

00:50:05 ◼   ► And they have a screenshot of this,

00:50:06 ◼   ► and in the screenshot it shows a little warning triangle,

00:50:09 ◼   ► and it says, this is within the context

00:50:10 ◼   ► of an iMessage thread,

00:50:12 ◼   ► an unrecognized device may have been added

00:50:14 ◼   ► to such and such account.

00:50:16 ◼   ► Options, and then you can click on options

00:50:18 ◼   ► or tap on options, and it's not clear what happens then.

00:50:20 ◼   ► But basically, I guess it, I'm unclear how this works.

00:50:25 ◼   ► I'm not sure if either of you two know,

00:50:26 ◼   ► but does it just alert you when a new device

00:50:29 ◼   ► is added to an existing thread?

00:50:30 ◼   ► 'Cause that seems--

00:50:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think this is like a human factors

00:50:34 ◼   ► security enhancement rather than a sort of, you know,

00:50:38 ◼   ► data-driven one to zero security enhancement.

00:50:40 ◼   ► It's basically, seems to me, a combination

00:50:43 ◼   ► of heightened awareness when things have changed.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Because people get new devices all the time,

00:50:48 ◼   ► but like sort of communicating that is something

00:50:50 ◼   ► that good services have done for many years now.

00:50:52 ◼   ► Like, did you know that a new computer was authorized

00:50:56 ◼   ► to log into your iCloud account?

00:50:57 ◼   ► Did you know that this, you know, you just signed on

00:50:59 ◼   ► to Amazon.com from a device we've never seen before.

00:51:03 ◼   ► Those type of things where they would send you emails

00:51:05 ◼   ► and stuff, that sort of increases awareness

00:51:07 ◼   ► that someone couldn't be doing something behind your back

00:51:09 ◼   ► that you would have no way of knowing about.

00:51:12 ◼   ► And so this is adding that to iMessage.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Like, oh, you think you're messaging with this person

00:51:16 ◼   ► and it's not like we're telling you

00:51:17 ◼   ► that you're not messaging with that person

00:51:18 ◼   ► but it seems like they're using a device

00:51:20 ◼   ► they've never used before.

00:51:22 ◼   ► And so maybe you're not talking to them.

00:51:24 ◼   ► Maybe you're talking to someone else

00:51:26 ◼   ► who has figured out how to hack into their iCloud account

00:51:29 ◼   ► on, you know, and so they're using a new device,

00:51:31 ◼   ► but communicating with them.

00:51:31 ◼   ► So there's that, there's the heads up thing.

00:51:33 ◼   ► And then this other part is the key verification.

00:51:36 ◼   ► I guess the idea is underneath that options thing,

00:51:39 ◼   ► this is why I wish they'd shown a demo of this.

00:51:40 ◼   ► I guess it's not ready yet,

00:51:41 ◼   ► but underneath the options thing,

00:51:42 ◼   ► it would basically say, hey,

00:51:44 ◼   ► if you want to like validate that this person

00:51:46 ◼   ► is who they say they are,

00:51:47 ◼   ► like here's some kind of workflow

00:51:49 ◼   ► whereby out of band in someplace other than messages,

00:51:53 ◼   ► you have a way to communicate with that person

00:51:55 ◼   ► to exchange some information that only they would know,

00:51:59 ◼   ► I mean like honestly I guess you could like facetime them and if you recognize their face

00:52:02 ◼   ► 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

00:52:06 ◼   ► 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

00:52:13 ◼   ► Check whether things are okay. You don't need Apple to to to check whether things are okay

00:52:18 ◼   ► You could just you know again call them on a phone number or something or walk over to where they live if you're nearby

00:52:23 ◼   ► You know there's other ways you can do that, but what you do need Apple to do is say

00:52:27 ◼   ► "Oh, we haven't seen this person use this device before."

00:52:31 ◼   ► So if you think you're just messaging with Doshimo

00:52:34 ◼   ► on their usual phone, you're not.

00:52:35 ◼   ► And what you want to do with that information is up to you.

00:52:38 ◼   ► - They also announced hardware two-factor authentication

00:52:41 ◼   ► with security keys.

00:52:41 ◼   ► This will be available globally in early 2023.

00:52:44 ◼   ► Apple writes, "Today, with more than 95%

00:52:47 ◼   ► "of active iCloud accounts using two-factor authentication,

00:52:50 ◼   ► "it is the most widely used two-factor account security

00:52:52 ◼   ► "system in the world that we're aware of."

00:52:54 ◼   ► I just thought that was kind of neat.

00:52:55 ◼   ► Now with security keys,

00:52:56 ◼   ► users will have the choice to make use of third-party hardware security keys in order

00:53:02 ◼   ► to enhance this protection. For users who opt-in, security keys strengthens Apple's two-factor auth

00:53:06 ◼   ► by requiring a hardware security key as one of the two factors. This takes our two-factor auth even

00:53:11 ◼   ► further, preventing even an advanced attacker from obtaining a user's second factor in a phishing

00:53:15 ◼   ► scam. And here again, they show a screenshot and there's a little like a pop-up or sheet

00:53:20 ◼   ► that says sign in and certain activate one of your security keys. If you have an NFC key,

00:53:24 ◼   ► bring it near the top of this iPhone.

00:53:25 ◼   ► All right, so I don't personally have

00:53:28 ◼   ► any of these hardware security keys.

00:53:29 ◼   ► I used to many, many, many jobs ago,

00:53:31 ◼   ► and it was a little clunky, but it worked okay at the time.

00:53:34 ◼   ► My understanding is they're very fancy now.

00:53:37 ◼   ► I mean, heck, it apparently you can get some

00:53:39 ◼   ► that have a lightning connector, which is kind of neat.

00:53:42 ◼   ► I don't know, Jon, you were the one

00:53:43 ◼   ► with the most recent real job.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Do you have, did you ever use one of these?

00:53:47 ◼   ► Do you have any interest in using one of these?

00:53:48 ◼   ► What's the story here?

00:53:49 ◼   ► - No, I mean, like, I think, well, obviously,

00:53:52 ◼   ► say we all have had, but Marco certainly hasn't.

00:53:55 ◼   ► Back in the day before authenticator apps

00:53:58 ◼   ► were very common on smartphones, the ones that

00:54:00 ◼   ► give you the set of numbers that roll over every minute

00:54:02 ◼   ► or whatever, back before those were common,

00:54:05 ◼   ► and certainly back before they were built into iOS and MacOS,

00:54:07 ◼   ► you'd get a little hardware dongle

00:54:09 ◼   ► that had those numbers on it with a little battery in it

00:54:12 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:54:13 ◼   ► This is not that.

00:54:14 ◼   ► What they've added is support for a hardware security key.

00:54:17 ◼   ► So basically, to log in successfully,

00:54:19 ◼   ► instead of-- it used to be like, oh, I'll enter my password,

00:54:21 ◼   ► and then I'll get a text message or enter my password

00:54:24 ◼   ► and then it will prompt me to enter one of those

00:54:25 ◼   ► six digit codes from like an authenticator app

00:54:28 ◼   ► or from this little dongle, right?

00:54:30 ◼   ► This says to log in you would need your password

00:54:34 ◼   ► or whatever and also a hardware thing that you own

00:54:38 ◼   ► that has a secret on it and you plug it in and say,

00:54:40 ◼   ► if you don't have that thing,

00:54:42 ◼   ► even if someone knows your password,

00:54:44 ◼   ► even if someone has somehow has access

00:54:46 ◼   ► to your like six digit rolling authentication thing,

00:54:49 ◼   ► like they somehow got access to that

00:54:51 ◼   ► 'cause they stole the QR code or whatever, right?

00:54:53 ◼   ► They still need the little dongly thing,

00:54:56 ◼   ► the little YubiKey is the brand name,

00:54:57 ◼   ► but like, you know, they still need an actual hardware thing.

00:55:00 ◼   ► It's just like, it's like a physical key kind of, right?

00:55:02 ◼   ► But it's just, you know, a drive with some,

00:55:05 ◼   ► with a secret on it, right?

00:55:06 ◼   ► That's what this is.

00:55:08 ◼   ► And for people who want that,

00:55:09 ◼   ► it does add an extra layer of protection.

00:55:12 ◼   ► This is where we get into the territory

00:55:14 ◼   ► for this whole announcement.

00:55:15 ◼   ► It's like, when you're hearing all these things,

00:55:16 ◼   ► just because a security feature exists

00:55:18 ◼   ► does not mean you have to use it.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Think about the trade-offs you're making

00:55:23 ◼   ► before you decide to do this,

00:55:24 ◼   ► because having to plug in a physical thing

00:55:27 ◼   ► into your phone or computer

00:55:29 ◼   ► to get logged into your iCloud account

00:55:31 ◼   ► is a big step up in security

00:55:33 ◼   ► and a big step down in convenience, right?

00:55:36 ◼   ► So if you are not a reporter, a human rights activist,

00:55:40 ◼   ► an important politician, a celebrity,

00:55:42 ◼   ► think about whether you wanna do this, right?

00:55:44 ◼   ► And the other thing I'll say

00:55:45 ◼   ► about these increased security things is,

00:55:47 ◼   ► the people, well, not the people should do it the most,

00:55:49 ◼   ► but there are definitely large classes of people

00:55:51 ◼   ► who probably should do this, like for example,

00:55:54 ◼   ► celebrities who absolutely will not,

00:55:56 ◼   ► because it's too annoying.

00:55:57 ◼   ► Celebrities don't want to be annoyed by technology,

00:56:00 ◼   ► but people hacking celebrities' phones

00:56:02 ◼   ► to get their pictures is a thing that happens,

00:56:04 ◼   ► so they should do it, but they won't.

00:56:05 ◼   ► But tech nerds, on the other hand,

00:56:07 ◼   ► probably no one's hacking your phone

00:56:09 ◼   ► to get your photos of you, because they're not as valuable

00:56:12 ◼   ► as the photos of celebrities,

00:56:14 ◼   ► but tech nerds will do it, and inconvenience themselves,

00:56:16 ◼   ► and everyone else.

00:56:17 ◼   ► So, I'm not saying whether you particularly should

00:56:20 ◼   ► or shouldn't do this, but think about the trade-offs

00:56:22 ◼   ► because this is not a one-sided thing.

00:56:24 ◼   ► There is increased security,

00:56:26 ◼   ► and then the trade-off is decreased convenience.

00:56:29 ◼   ► So choose wisely.

00:56:30 ◼   ► And to that end, related to things about like,

00:56:33 ◼   ► trading off security for convenience

00:56:34 ◼   ► for protecting your account, Apple also has a way,

00:56:37 ◼   ► I don't know if this is new or not,

00:56:38 ◼   ► but it was in one of the same documents, I'm linked to it,

00:56:40 ◼   ► to make a recovery key.

00:56:43 ◼   ► And this may sound like the recovery codes

00:56:44 ◼   ► that you can send, but it's not quite the same.

00:56:46 ◼   ► If you get the recovery key,

00:56:48 ◼   ► it means it turns off the other recovery process.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Apple has an existing recovery process.

00:56:53 ◼   ► It's like, I forgot all my stuff.

00:56:54 ◼   ► My phone is at the bottom of the ocean.

00:56:57 ◼   ► I don't remember anything.

00:56:58 ◼   ► How can I get my account back?

00:56:59 ◼   ► Apple has this complicated process

00:57:01 ◼   ► where you try to prove who you are

00:57:02 ◼   ► to get back into your account.

00:57:04 ◼   ► That is exactly the venue that hackers

00:57:06 ◼   ► would try to social engineer their way into

00:57:08 ◼   ► because they may not know your password.

00:57:10 ◼   ► They may not have your phone.

00:57:12 ◼   ► They may not even be able to clone your SIM or whatever.

00:57:14 ◼   ► but if they haven't know enough about you,

00:57:16 ◼   ► they can initiate Apple's recovery protocol

00:57:19 ◼   ► to try to get into your account by claiming,

00:57:21 ◼   ► "Oh, I dropped my phone in the ocean,

00:57:22 ◼   ► "I don't remember my password," or whatever.

00:57:24 ◼   ► So that process is there to help save your butt

00:57:27 ◼   ► when you forget everything,

00:57:28 ◼   ► but that process is also a way that people get hacked.

00:57:31 ◼   ► So what they do is offer a thing that say,

00:57:32 ◼   ► "Hey, we can turn off recovery for you

00:57:35 ◼   ► "and instead give you this 28-character code

00:57:37 ◼   ► "that you can use to reset your password

00:57:39 ◼   ► "that is up to you to put in a save for something,

00:57:41 ◼   ► "but if you lose that 28-character code,

00:57:43 ◼   ► "You can't recover it the way we have for other people.

00:57:45 ◼   ► "We turn off recovery.

00:57:46 ◼   ► "We are securing your account by trusting you

00:57:50 ◼   ► "with a 28 character code.

00:57:51 ◼   ► "Don't lose it because if you lose it, you're out of luck."

00:57:54 ◼   ► And that is one of the more dangerous, I think, trade-offs

00:57:57 ◼   ► that a normal person can make.

00:57:58 ◼   ► It's the trade-off that you should make

00:58:00 ◼   ► if you're like a head of state or someone who's in danger

00:58:04 ◼   ► from an oppressive government or you should do it then.

00:58:06 ◼   ► But the average person who just think it's cool

00:58:09 ◼   ► to have super good security probably shouldn't do this

00:58:12 ◼   ► because the chances of you losing all of your iCloud photos,

00:58:15 ◼   ► and we'll get to that in a second,

00:58:16 ◼   ► because you lost your 28 character recovery code,

00:58:21 ◼   ► are probably higher than the chances

00:58:22 ◼   ► that China's gonna hack you.

00:58:25 ◼   ► - Yep, I think that's fair.

00:58:26 ◼   ► And then finally, and this is the real juicy stuff,

00:58:29 ◼   ► advanced data protection for iCloud.

00:58:32 ◼   ► It is available right now in beta for the rest of the US

00:58:36 ◼   ► by the end of the year and the rest of the world

00:58:37 ◼   ► in early 2023.

00:58:39 ◼   ► So the TLDR on this is end-to-end encryption on iCloud almost everywhere with some gotchas.

00:58:46 ◼   ► So from Apple's newsroom announcement, "For users who opt in, advanced data protection keeps most

00:58:51 ◼   ► iCloud data protected even in the case of a data breach in the cloud. iCloud already protects 14

00:58:57 ◼   ► sensitive data categories using end-to-end encryption by default. For users who enable

00:59:01 ◼   ► advanced data protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption

00:59:05 ◼   ► rises to 23, including iCloud backup, notes, and photos. Boom! There you go. So there's a

00:59:14 ◼   ► KBase article or whatever, a support article that we'll link in the show notes that shows a chart

00:59:19 ◼   ► that is very, very helpful. And it has several columns. It has data category is one of the

00:59:24 ◼   ► columns. So iCloud mail, contacts, calendars, et cetera. And then it shows for standard data

00:59:28 ◼   ► protection, where is it encrypted and who has the key? And then in advanced data protection,

00:59:35 ◼   ► Where is it encrypted, which generally speaking

00:59:37 ◼   ► is either the same or a little bit better,

00:59:40 ◼   ► and then who has the key, which generally speaking

00:59:43 ◼   ► is no longer Apple and is now you.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Again, there's some caveats and gotchas.

00:59:47 ◼   ► Do we wanna talk about the specifics about this?

00:59:51 ◼   ► Would you rather me continue with the overview?

00:59:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, well let's talk about, so what we just said,

00:59:55 ◼   ► oh, 14 categories of data, and now 23.

00:59:57 ◼   ► It sounds like it's a not a big deal.

01:00:00 ◼   ► Like who cares, what are those categories?

01:00:01 ◼   ► When we say categories of data, we're talking about

01:00:03 ◼   ► like things on your phone or on your Mac that are end-to-end encrypted, right?

01:00:08 ◼   ► And mostly what we care about is we talk about this in the past and we'd say,

01:00:11 ◼   ► "Oh, Apple has everything encrypted and everything's safe."

01:00:14 ◼   ► We'd say, "Oh, except for your photos and your messages,"

01:00:18 ◼   ► which is kind of two really big categories of things that people might want to protect, right?

01:00:23 ◼   ► Because if the government comes knocking and says, "Apple, please give us the contents

01:00:29 ◼   ► of this person's messages and the contents of this person's photos,"

01:00:32 ◼   ► Apple had the ability to do that because they had the keys.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And we said, oh, messages is end-to-end encrypted,

01:00:37 ◼   ► unless you enable iCloud backup,

01:00:39 ◼   ► because the backups aren't end-to-end encrypted

01:00:41 ◼   ► and Apple could just give them the backups.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And so we were always wondering,

01:00:45 ◼   ► when is Apple gonna finally get around

01:00:46 ◼   ► to end-to-end encrypting this?

01:00:47 ◼   ► And when they were doing the CSAM stuff,

01:00:50 ◼   ► the child sexual abuse material stuff

01:00:53 ◼   ► that we talked about many moons ago,

01:00:55 ◼   ► we saw in the plumbing for that feature,

01:00:58 ◼   ► that very controversial feature,

01:00:59 ◼   ► but we're more on it in a little bit,

01:01:01 ◼   ► We saw in the plumbing of that feature preparing

01:01:04 ◼   ► for the ability to do end-to-end encryption on photos.

01:01:06 ◼   ► And now that day has finally come.

01:01:08 ◼   ► The CSAM stuff is a different story.

01:01:10 ◼   ► We'll get to in a little bit.

01:01:11 ◼   ► But now finally, iCloud backups,

01:01:14 ◼   ► and why do you care about that?

01:01:15 ◼   ► Because that's where your messages are backed up.

01:01:16 ◼   ► iCloud backups are end-to-end encrypted.

01:01:18 ◼   ► Photos are end-to-end encrypted.

01:01:20 ◼   ► Notes are end-to-end encrypted.

01:01:21 ◼   ► The big categories of stuff that previously was,

01:01:25 ◼   ► Apple could access.

01:01:26 ◼   ► Now, if you enable advanced data protection for iCloud,

01:01:29 ◼   ► Apple can't access it.

01:01:30 ◼   ► They literally don't have the key.

01:01:31 ◼   ► If the government comes to them and says,

01:01:32 ◼   ► "We need to see these people's photos

01:01:33 ◼   ► "and you've enabled advanced data protection of iCloud,"

01:01:36 ◼   ► Apple literally can't give them.

01:01:38 ◼   ► They can't see your photos, period.

01:01:39 ◼   ► They don't have the key, only you have it.

01:01:41 ◼   ► And in the past, that hasn't been true

01:01:43 ◼   ► for like, what are those 14 categories?

01:01:45 ◼   ► Your passwords.

01:01:46 ◼   ► iCloud key chain has always been like this.

01:01:48 ◼   ► Your health data, I think, has already been like this.

01:01:50 ◼   ► You're probably looking at the Oracle case.

01:01:52 ◼   ► A bunch of stuff was always like this.

01:01:54 ◼   ► This is not Apple's first time doing this.

01:01:56 ◼   ► It's just that there were these big categories of data

01:01:58 ◼   ► that weren't like that and Apple sort of,

01:02:01 ◼   ► you know, the Craig Federighi interview,

01:02:03 ◼   ► which we'll get to in a little bit,

01:02:04 ◼   ► was saying like, oh, we were using this feature

01:02:07 ◼   ► and other things to sort of get good at it

01:02:09 ◼   ► and now we're finally ready to roll it out everywhere,

01:02:12 ◼   ► almost everywhere.

01:02:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, just very quickly.

01:02:14 ◼   ► So like you said, a lot of stuff was already

01:02:16 ◼   ► end-to-end encrypted, including,

01:02:18 ◼   ► I'm happy to report, your Memoji.

01:02:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:02:20 ◼   ► But it's the stuff, the categories,

01:02:23 ◼   ► nine or whatever categories that would be

01:02:25 ◼   ► end-to-end encrypted that previously were not.

01:02:27 ◼   ► our wallet passes.

01:02:28 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that's not your credit card,

01:02:30 ◼   ► but like your boarding passes and things like that.

01:02:32 ◼   ► Voice memo, Siri shortcuts, Safari bookmarks,

01:02:35 ◼   ► reminders, notes, photos, iCloud drive,

01:02:37 ◼   ► iCloud backup, including device and messages backup,

01:02:41 ◼   ► and oh, I'm sorry, and that's it.

01:02:42 ◼   ► And then the three that remain

01:02:43 ◼   ► that will never ever, ever be end-to-end encrypted,

01:02:45 ◼   ► or at least not as of right now,

01:02:47 ◼   ► are calendars, contacts, and mail.

01:02:49 ◼   ► And the short-short version on why is because,

01:02:51 ◼   ► oh, we have to integrate with the rest of the world.

01:02:54 ◼   ► And so we need to be able to insert data,

01:02:57 ◼   ► remove data, et cetera, et cetera.

01:02:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, before we get to those caveats,

01:03:00 ◼   ► I think there's a question in the chat room

01:03:01 ◼   ► that's addressed by the Wall Street Journal article,

01:03:03 ◼   ► which I think is behind a paywall,

01:03:05 ◼   ► but snippets have been extracted.

01:03:07 ◼   ► They said, "The new encryption system will roll out

01:03:09 ◼   ► "as an option in the U.S. by year's end,

01:03:11 ◼   ► "and then worldwide, including China, in 2023."

01:03:15 ◼   ► 'Cause that's the question, does this include China?

01:03:17 ◼   ► And according to Federighi in his interview

01:03:19 ◼   ► with the Wall Street Journal

01:03:20 ◼   ► that we'll link to in the show notes,

01:03:21 ◼   ► he said, "Yeah, no, we're planning on rolling it out

01:03:23 ◼   ► "in China."

01:03:24 ◼   ► I didn't sound super confident.

01:03:26 ◼   ► It's like, oh, I haven't heard anything

01:03:27 ◼   ► from the Chinese government,

01:03:28 ◼   ► but I do wonder how this is gonna work

01:03:29 ◼   ► because Apple's had to make a lot of compromises

01:03:33 ◼   ► with their security to be in China,

01:03:35 ◼   ► that China gets to run the data centers or whatever,

01:03:37 ◼   ► but China running the data centers matters a lot less

01:03:40 ◼   ► if the data centers don't have the keys to your data.

01:03:43 ◼   ► And somehow I don't see this going well for Apple

01:03:48 ◼   ► 'cause once China realizes what features are in this,

01:03:53 ◼   ► Maybe they could request that, okay,

01:03:55 ◼   ► but in iOS in China, just don't enable this feature?

01:03:58 ◼   ► I don't know what the plan is there,

01:04:00 ◼   ► but stay tuned for more news and that.

01:04:02 ◼   ► But as of right now, the intention is

01:04:04 ◼   ► that this will roll out worldwide, including China.

01:04:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's no way this,

01:04:08 ◼   ► there's no way China gets this enabled for them

01:04:11 ◼   ► for very long.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Maybe it rolls out initially,

01:04:14 ◼   ► because the government hasn't gotten wind of it yet.

01:04:16 ◼   ► I guarantee you, as soon as they get wind of it,

01:04:18 ◼   ► which has probably happened today,

01:04:20 ◼   ► I guarantee you they're gonna have a problem with this.

01:04:24 ◼   ► You look at the Chinese government's history

01:04:26 ◼   ► with data they can't access being generated

01:04:29 ◼   ► by their citizens, not a chance.

01:04:32 ◼   ► There is no way this stays like this.

01:04:35 ◼   ► - Yep, I agree with you.

01:04:36 ◼   ► And we should just make it clear

01:04:38 ◼   ► that there was a article by Joanna Stern

01:04:40 ◼   ► in the Wall Street Journal, and we'll link that,

01:04:42 ◼   ► both the raw version and the Apple News version,

01:04:45 ◼   ► because I believe a lot of times

01:04:47 ◼   ► you can get to the Apple News version

01:04:48 ◼   ► If you're, you know, what is it, Apple One subscriber, what have you, we'll link that

01:04:53 ◼   ► and both of them in the show notes.

01:04:54 ◼   ► And she also had a YouTube video, which was in the article and also is on, excuse me,

01:04:58 ◼   ► there was a video that was in the article and also on YouTube.

01:05:00 ◼   ► It was like six and a half minutes and that was an interview or a discussion between her

01:05:04 ◼   ► and Craig Federighi.

01:05:06 ◼   ► And that was very good.

01:05:07 ◼   ► And we'll put that in the show notes as well.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Additionally, in the show notes will be the platform security guide, which is I think

01:05:12 ◼   ► something that has existed for quite a while now, but it has new stuff for advanced data

01:05:16 ◼   ► protection on iCloud.

01:05:17 ◼   ► I took a quick spin through this earlier today,

01:05:20 ◼   ► and I thought that there were some interesting pieces

01:05:23 ◼   ► to this, so reading from various portions of that guide.

01:05:27 ◼   ► I work collaboration, the shared albums feature in photos,

01:05:30 ◼   ► and sharing content with quote, anyone with link quote.

01:05:33 ◼   ► Do not support advanced data protection.

01:05:35 ◼   ► When you use these features, the encryption keys

01:05:36 ◼   ► for the shared content are securely uploaded

01:05:38 ◼   ► to Apple data centers so that iCloud can facilitate

01:05:41 ◼   ► real-time collaboration or web sharing.

01:05:43 ◼   ► This means the shared content is not end-to-end encrypted

01:05:46 ◼   ► even when advanced data protection is enabled.

01:05:48 ◼   ► Now, quick note, point of fact,

01:05:50 ◼   ► I had read this as shared photo library,

01:05:53 ◼   ► which is not what it says.

01:05:54 ◼   ► - It's a shared album feature.

01:05:55 ◼   ► - Shared albums, which makes a lot more sense.

01:05:58 ◼   ► - The very unfortunately named feature

01:05:59 ◼   ► that's gonna be a problem if and when Apple

01:06:01 ◼   ► actually adds album sharing to shared photo library,

01:06:04 ◼   ► 'cause what the hell you gonna call it?

01:06:06 ◼   ► So unlike the thing that you said before,

01:06:07 ◼   ► like they said, oh, mail, contacts, and calendar

01:06:10 ◼   ► aren't end-to-end encrypted

01:06:11 ◼   ► because they need to interoperate.

01:06:13 ◼   ► Some of those, if you squint, make some kind of sense.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Basically, here's the main thing that prevents them

01:06:20 ◼   ► from doing end-to-end is if you need to have a URL

01:06:23 ◼   ► that anyone can load and get info,

01:06:26 ◼   ► you can't use end-to-end encryption

01:06:29 ◼   ► unless you're willing to force everyone who loads that URL

01:06:32 ◼   ► to somehow get into your system enough

01:06:35 ◼   ► that you can validate and share keys with them,

01:06:37 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

01:06:38 ◼   ► But a lot of this stuff, the way it works,

01:06:40 ◼   ► like integration with other systems is no,

01:06:42 ◼   ► they just expect to be able to load the URL.

01:06:43 ◼   ► So the anyone with a link thing is a great example.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Whenever you see one of those like share this

01:06:47 ◼   ► with anyone who has the link can view it,

01:06:49 ◼   ► that means you're using basically security through obscurity.

01:06:51 ◼   ► If you don't know the URL,

01:06:52 ◼   ► you're probably not gonna find this

01:06:54 ◼   ► if we've done a good job,

01:06:55 ◼   ► but anybody who knows the URL,

01:06:57 ◼   ► they can just load it, right?

01:06:58 ◼   ► Lots of things work that way.

01:07:00 ◼   ► You can't make an anyone with link link that says,

01:07:03 ◼   ► oh, well, yeah, I know what you wanna get at here,

01:07:06 ◼   ► but you need to either sign into your Apple ID

01:07:08 ◼   ► and then trade a secret key with the person

01:07:10 ◼   ► who's sharing this with you,

01:07:12 ◼   ► or get an Apple ID if you don't have one,

01:07:14 ◼   ► and at that point, people are already leaving, right?

01:07:15 ◼   ► 'Cause the whole point of Anyone with a Link is,

01:07:18 ◼   ► give it to someone, they don't need to have an Apple ID,

01:07:19 ◼   ► they don't need to get an Apple ID,

01:07:21 ◼   ► they don't need to exchange anything with you,

01:07:22 ◼   ► they don't need to, like,

01:07:23 ◼   ► you don't even need to know who they are.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Anyone with a Link means Anyone with a Link.

01:07:26 ◼   ► Some aspects of mail, contact, and calendar are like that,

01:07:30 ◼   ► and it's not just other people that interact with them,

01:07:32 ◼   ► but there's third-party software and services

01:07:34 ◼   ► that expect to be able to interact

01:07:36 ◼   ► with the various protocols that run mail, contacts,

01:07:39 ◼   ► and calendaring that would break if they tried to roll this out.

01:07:42 ◼   ► So I kind of understand that.

01:07:44 ◼   ► And shared albums, similarly, you can make a shared album,

01:07:47 ◼   ► and there's a web view of that.

01:07:49 ◼   ► So if you want to share pictures with someone in your family who

01:07:51 ◼   ► does not have an Apple device, or maybe they don't even

01:07:52 ◼   ► have a phone at all, they just have a computer,

01:07:54 ◼   ► or whatever, unlikely it's probably the reverse.

01:07:56 ◼   ► But anyway, those features don't do

01:07:59 ◼   ► undead encryption, because the whole point of them is

01:08:01 ◼   ► for sharing.

01:08:02 ◼   ► And then the iWork collaboration,

01:08:04 ◼   ► that just seems like something that's sort of, well,

01:08:06 ◼   ► I guess it's the anyone with a link thing.

01:08:09 ◼   ► So the things that don't use it are kind of the things

01:08:13 ◼   ► that you would expect.

01:08:14 ◼   ► But this is another caveat that people tend not

01:08:16 ◼   ► to think about when we talked about, oh, now finally

01:08:19 ◼   ► my messages will be end-to-end encrypted.

01:08:21 ◼   ► So I'm secure, right?

01:08:22 ◼   ► Well, your messages kind of like your email.

01:08:27 ◼   ► If you secure-- if you had secured your email somehow

01:08:30 ◼   ► using some secure email system or you'd secure your messages,

01:08:33 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter because everyone you've ever emailed also has those emails.

01:08:39 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:08:40 ◼   ► Like half your email is not yours.

01:08:41 ◼   ► And the same thing with messages.

01:08:44 ◼   ► Everybody you talk to over messages, if they're not also encrypting, your messages could be

01:08:49 ◼   ► subpoenaed through them.

01:08:50 ◼   ► That's part of the nature of communication.

01:08:52 ◼   ► You give them your half of the conversation and then it's up to them to safely store that

01:08:57 ◼   ► somewhere.

01:08:58 ◼   ► So that's true of email and that's true of messages.

01:09:00 ◼   ► So if you think, "Now I've end-to-end encrypted my messages.

01:09:02 ◼   ► The government can never see what I write in messages.

01:09:05 ◼   ► Has everyone you ever talked to on iMessage

01:09:08 ◼   ► also enabled advanced data protection?

01:09:10 ◼   ► If not, government can still get it.

01:09:11 ◼   ► So just keep that in mind.

01:09:13 ◼   ► - Continuing from the same document,

01:09:15 ◼   ► when advanced data protection is enabled,

01:09:17 ◼   ► access to your data via iCloud.com is disabled by default.

01:09:20 ◼   ► You have the option to turn on data access on iCloud.com,

01:09:23 ◼   ► which allows the web browser that you're using

01:09:25 ◼   ► and Apple to have temporary access

01:09:27 ◼   ► to data-specific encryption keys provided by your device

01:09:30 ◼   ► to decrypt and view your information.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Devices where the user is signed in with their Apple ID

01:09:34 ◼   ► must be updated to iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, Mac OS 13.1,

01:09:39 ◼   ► TVOS 16.2, watchOS 9.2, and the latest version of iCloud

01:09:43 ◼   ► for Windows.

01:09:43 ◼   ► This requirement prevents a previous version of iOS, iPadOS,

01:09:46 ◼   ► Mac OS, TVOS, or watchOS from mishandling the newly created

01:09:50 ◼   ► service keys by re-uploading them to the available

01:09:52 ◼   ► after authentication HSM--

01:09:54 ◼   ► I'm not sure what that means off the top of my head--

01:09:55 ◼   ► in a misguided attempt to repair the account state.

01:09:58 ◼   ► Whoopsie-doopsies.

01:10:00 ◼   ► So yeah, so another couple of caveats as well.

01:10:01 ◼   ► Basically everything that you touch

01:10:03 ◼   ► needs to be latest and greatest,

01:10:04 ◼   ► and I hope you don't like iCloud.com unless,

01:10:07 ◼   ► and if you do, you have to turn it on explicitly.

01:10:09 ◼   ► - HSM is hardware security module.

01:10:11 ◼   ► Yeah, this is the thing that's really gonna trip people up.

01:10:14 ◼   ► You need to, just in case this isn't clear,

01:10:16 ◼   ► if you have like an old phone in a drawer

01:10:18 ◼   ► that's running an old version of iOS,

01:10:21 ◼   ► and it's still logged into your Apple ID,

01:10:22 ◼   ► you can't enable this feature.

01:10:24 ◼   ► You have to be updated everywhere.

01:10:26 ◼   ► So what that means is finding the old devices

01:10:29 ◼   ► and either erasing them or signing out

01:10:31 ◼   ► of your Apple ID on them.

01:10:32 ◼   ► They're trying to basically prevent you thinking you're

01:10:34 ◼   ► secure, where really you have some old device that

01:10:37 ◼   ► doesn't have any of this code that's

01:10:38 ◼   ► leaking your information out or subverting it or whatever.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And this is going to be, I think,

01:10:43 ◼   ► the main barrier to adoption.

01:10:44 ◼   ► So this isn't enabled by default, first of all.

01:10:46 ◼   ► And second of all, for all the tech nerds, they're like, yeah,

01:10:47 ◼   ► I'm going to try it.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Tech nerds are very likely to have a bunch of devices that

01:10:51 ◼   ► haven't been updated.

01:10:51 ◼   ► You think, oh, tech nerds update their stuff right away.

01:10:53 ◼   ► They're going to have everything updated soon.

01:10:55 ◼   ► No, it's all the devices that are in drawers

01:10:57 ◼   ► that you forgot about that are still signed into your Apple ID.

01:11:00 ◼   ► So you have to go and hunt them down and sign out.

01:11:03 ◼   ► And related to that, the last time I personally

01:11:06 ◼   ► ran across this, and probably a lot of tech nerds did, is

01:11:08 ◼   ► a feature that was laying the groundwork for this, which

01:11:11 ◼   ► is the-- I forget what Apple calls it,

01:11:12 ◼   ► but it's like the, hey, designate some other person

01:11:15 ◼   ► to be like your backup if you forget everything.

01:11:17 ◼   ► What is that one called?

01:11:19 ◼   ► Recovery contact, right?

01:11:20 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

01:11:21 ◼   ► It's a feature of iOS and Mac.

01:11:22 ◼   ► You basically designate a person to say,

01:11:24 ◼   ► I trust this person enough so that if I lose all my stuff

01:11:27 ◼   ► and I lose all my recovery code,

01:11:29 ◼   ► this is part of the recovery process.

01:11:30 ◼   ► I think you also give this up

01:11:31 ◼   ► if you do that 28 character thing, so be careful.

01:11:33 ◼   ► But anyway, for normal people who are wise

01:11:35 ◼   ► and are not gonna do that,

01:11:36 ◼   ► you would designate a recovery conduct.

01:11:38 ◼   ► But to even do that, you had to make sure

01:11:40 ◼   ► everything was like updated.

01:11:42 ◼   ► I forget what the requirements were,

01:11:42 ◼   ► but you had to go through and update a bunch of stuff.

01:11:44 ◼   ► So the first time I tried to go through it, it says,

01:11:46 ◼   ► you can't use this feature until devices X, Y, Z, and Q

01:11:50 ◼   ► are all like logged out of your app ID.

01:11:52 ◼   ► So I had to go around my house and hunt those things down,

01:11:54 ◼   ► or you can even go on the website.

01:11:56 ◼   ► I think it's either at appleid.apple.com or iCloud.com.

01:11:59 ◼   ► You can delete devices from your Apple ID,

01:12:01 ◼   ► which basically invalidates their keys.

01:12:03 ◼   ► You would have to do that before you could even

01:12:05 ◼   ► designate a recovery contact.

01:12:06 ◼   ► Well, this whole process is gonna have to repeat,

01:12:09 ◼   ► only now what you're gonna need are a bunch of versions

01:12:11 ◼   ► of OSs that aren't even out yet.

01:12:13 ◼   ► In particular, the one that might trip people up

01:12:15 ◼   ► is Mac OS 13.1, because who updates their Macs?

01:12:18 ◼   ► You gotta update everything.

01:12:19 ◼   ► So if you're excited about this feature,

01:12:21 ◼   ► And I think unlike the hardware recovery key

01:12:23 ◼   ► and unlike the hardware recovery device

01:12:26 ◼   ► and the 28 character code,

01:12:27 ◼   ► I think advanced data protection is reasonable

01:12:29 ◼   ► for pretty much everybody to do

01:12:31 ◼   ► and it's probably a good idea

01:12:32 ◼   ► because you are still protected

01:12:33 ◼   ► by Apple's recovery procedure

01:12:35 ◼   ► and I think it will force you,

01:12:36 ◼   ► I don't know if this is in the notes here,

01:12:38 ◼   ► but I think it will force you to have a recovery contact.

01:12:40 ◼   ► Like to enable advanced data protection,

01:12:43 ◼   ► it will either force you or strongly suggest

01:12:46 ◼   ► that you have a recovery contact.

01:12:48 ◼   ► So you'll still mostly be protected

01:12:50 ◼   ► And Apple's customer support will still mostly not be totally

01:12:53 ◼   ► destroyed by people locking themselves out of all their data.

01:12:55 ◼   ► But you will need to update everything everywhere to get this to run.

01:12:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it was in the video interview with Joanna Stern that, um, she said to,

01:13:04 ◼   ► to, to Craig, well, what took so damn long and almost verbatim, I believe.

01:13:09 ◼   ► And he said, well, one of the things we have to worry about is customer support

01:13:12 ◼   ► because, you know, you're now putting the onus on yourself to be able to recover.

01:13:17 ◼   ► And so I believe that Craig had said,

01:13:19 ◼   ► "You must choose a designated contact

01:13:22 ◼   ► "or alternatively print out this 28 character,"

01:13:26 ◼   ► whatever it is, "recovery code."

01:13:28 ◼   ► And they will compel you to do one or the other

01:13:32 ◼   ► because if you lose your backup person

01:13:35 ◼   ► and/or your backup code,

01:13:37 ◼   ► there's literally nothing Apple can do by design.

01:13:40 ◼   ► The whole point is that they have no mechanism

01:13:44 ◼   ► to get into your data.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And it was interesting that for all of the different things

01:13:49 ◼   ► that were said, naturally none of them involved,

01:13:53 ◼   ► oh, well, and by the way,

01:13:54 ◼   ► law enforcement also cannot get into your data.

01:13:56 ◼   ► Like this is all about,

01:13:58 ◼   ► oh, just having good security practices.

01:14:00 ◼   ► They never said either directly or indirectly.

01:14:02 ◼   ► This is about preventing law enforcement

01:14:04 ◼   ► from getting at your stuff if you don't want them to,

01:14:06 ◼   ► which I thought was kind of funny.

01:14:08 ◼   ► Anyway, Jason over at Six Colors had a really good summary

01:14:12 ◼   ► and he made a few points I wanted to quickly read.

01:14:14 ◼   ► Another reason Apple has fought against encrypting

01:14:16 ◼   ► all the things is that it has some serious side effects

01:14:18 ◼   ► for users, most notably that Apple can't unlock your data

01:14:20 ◼   ► if you no longer have the password to your Apple ID.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Oh, here we go, to solve this problem,

01:14:23 ◼   ► see I should have read ahead my own show notes

01:14:25 ◼   ► and I was the one who put them in, hooray.

01:14:27 ◼   ► To solve this problem, Apple's placing these new

01:14:29 ◼   ► nine encryption services in a new feature called

01:14:31 ◼   ► Advanced Data Protection that isn't on by default,

01:14:33 ◼   ► just like John said a moment ago,

01:14:34 ◼   ► and according to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal,

01:14:37 ◼   ► requires that users generate at least one additional method

01:14:39 ◼   ► of unlocking their account.

01:14:39 ◼   ► Methods include a printout of a very long string

01:14:42 ◼   ► that can be stored somewhere secure,

01:14:43 ◼   ► or the designation of a different Apple ID

01:14:44 ◼   ► is having the authority to unlock the account.

01:14:47 ◼   ► Anything else about this before we talk about

01:14:49 ◼   ► the other bomb that was dropped today?

01:14:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, I am interested though,

01:14:52 ◼   ► because based on what I had earlier in the notes

01:14:54 ◼   ► about the fact that when you create that 28 character code,

01:14:57 ◼   ► it turns off account recovery,

01:14:58 ◼   ► I wonder if I'm either have that wrong

01:15:00 ◼   ► or if that will be communicated clearly

01:15:03 ◼   ► in the sort of onboarding procedure.

01:15:06 ◼   ► Because if it does turn off recovery, it's like,

01:15:08 ◼   ► all right, so obviously trusting someone else is also a risk

01:15:10 ◼   ► 'cause now that's another vector that they can get to you,

01:15:12 ◼   ► Like if someone hacks them because they don't use good security and they're a recovery thing

01:15:17 ◼   ► for you, in theory, the person you designate as a recovery contact also needs you to participate

01:15:22 ◼   ► to get access, but in practice, the whole point is that if you've forgotten everything,

01:15:27 ◼   ► just them plus knowing enough about you, like your applet, anyway, it seems like that is

01:15:32 ◼   ► another potential vector for people to hack you is whoever you trust as a security contact.

01:15:36 ◼   ► But on the other hand, if you just do the 28 character code, then you're trusting yourself

01:15:41 ◼   ► with that slip of paper and if you lose that, you can't go whining to anybody and say,

01:15:46 ◼   ► "But isn't there some kind of recovery procedure where I can show who I am and this person

01:15:50 ◼   ► will vouch for me?"

01:15:51 ◼   ► And they'll be like, "No, you took the 28-character code.

01:15:53 ◼   ► You don't have that piece of paper.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Tough luck."

01:15:56 ◼   ► And that's not a place where I want to be.

01:15:58 ◼   ► So I've already designated the backup content.

01:16:01 ◼   ► I think I picked my wife or something, but that seems much safer for me, again, for normal

01:16:05 ◼   ► people.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Those features that exist for the 28-character code and the message verification, that's

01:16:11 ◼   ► for heads of state, journalists, celebrities, probably not you.

01:16:15 ◼   ► Indeed. All right. And then the other bomb that was dropped, which I don't think was

01:16:21 ◼   ► any like official announcement anywhere, but, um, Oh no, I'm sorry. There was an official

01:16:26 ◼   ► announcement. That's right. Uh, so Apple has a statement, uh, after extensive consultation

01:16:31 ◼   ► with experts to gather feedback on child protection initiatives we proposed last year, we are

01:16:34 ◼   ► deepening our investment in the communication safety feature that we first made available

01:16:38 ◼   ► in December 2021. We have further decided not to move forward with our previously proposed CSAM

01:16:43 ◼   ► detection tool for iCloud Photos. Children can be protected without companies combing through

01:16:48 ◼   ► personal data and we will continue to working with governments, child advocates, and other companies

01:16:52 ◼   ► to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place

01:16:56 ◼   ► for children and for us all." So in summary, Apple now says it stopped the development of

01:17:03 ◼   ► their CSAM system, following criticism, blah, blah, blah. Federighi said that Apple's focus

01:17:08 ◼   ► is related to protecting children, their focus related to protecting children has been on areas

01:17:13 ◼   ► such as communication, giving parents tools to protect children, and iMessage. There's a quote,

01:17:17 ◼   ► "child sexual abuse can be headed off before it occurs," he said. That's where we're putting our

01:17:22 ◼   ► energy going forward. Additionally, Wired had a different article where they wrote,

01:17:29 ◼   ► Apple has told Wired that while it is not ready to announce a specific timeline for

01:17:34 ◼   ► expanding its communication safety features, the company is working on adding the ability

01:17:39 ◼   ► to detect nudity in video sensory messages when the protection is enabled. The company

01:17:43 ◼   ► also plans to expand the offering beyond messages to its other communication applications.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Ultimately, the goal is to make it possible for third-party developers to incorporate

01:17:50 ◼   ► the communication safety tools into their own applications.

01:17:53 ◼   ► So this is a big retreat from the idea that Apple is going to scan the photos on your

01:17:58 ◼   ► your device looking for a child sexual abuse material,

01:18:02 ◼   ► changing to a very different posture,

01:18:06 ◼   ► which is the whole heading it off beyond what happens,

01:18:07 ◼   ► basically saying, as data is sent from

01:18:10 ◼   ► or perhaps received by your device,

01:18:13 ◼   ► we will look at it at that moment and try to,

01:18:16 ◼   ► like the feature that they told Wire,

01:18:18 ◼   ► like, oh, well, maybe you'll eventually have

01:18:19 ◼   ► a third-party framework where you can detect nudity,

01:18:22 ◼   ► like detecting nudity and child sexual abuse material,

01:18:25 ◼   ► two very different things, right?

01:18:27 ◼   ► 'cause you could be sending a picture of yourself naked

01:18:30 ◼   ► to your significant other,

01:18:32 ◼   ► and that is not child sexual abuse material,

01:18:34 ◼   ► but it would trip off the nudity filter.

01:18:35 ◼   ► So I'm not sure what they're trying to say there

01:18:38 ◼   ► other than, hey, here's a cool machine learning tool

01:18:40 ◼   ► that will package up that you could use

01:18:41 ◼   ► in your application if you wanted.

01:18:43 ◼   ► But end-to-end encryption combined with a retreat

01:18:48 ◼   ► from scanning on device kind of puts them back

01:18:52 ◼   ► to where they were before,

01:18:53 ◼   ► where, well, they said they weren't scanning it

01:18:56 ◼   ► on the server.

01:18:57 ◼   ► Now they won't be able to scan it on the server

01:18:59 ◼   ► if you enable advanced data protection.

01:19:01 ◼   ► And also, they're not gonna scan it on your device.

01:19:04 ◼   ► All, what they are gonna do is the features they described

01:19:06 ◼   ► with like, hey, if a miner tries to send a picture

01:19:09 ◼   ► of themselves naked through messages,

01:19:11 ◼   ► it will pop up a little thing and say,

01:19:13 ◼   ► you sure you wanna do this and try to educate them

01:19:15 ◼   ► and head them off at the pass.

01:19:16 ◼   ► And I'm not sure where they stand

01:19:17 ◼   ► on the whole parental notification feature,

01:19:19 ◼   ► was like, if they're young, we'll send a message

01:19:21 ◼   ► to their parent and tell them they're doing it,

01:19:22 ◼   ► but I think they retreated from that as well.

01:19:24 ◼   ► This message where they said there,

01:19:26 ◼   ► quote unquote, deepening our investment

01:19:29 ◼   ► in the communication safety features

01:19:30 ◼   ► that we first made available.

01:19:32 ◼   ► If by deepening our investment,

01:19:33 ◼   ► you mean totally changing what you plan to do

01:19:35 ◼   ► because people yelled at you?

01:19:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I guess you're deepening something.

01:19:40 ◼   ► We talked a lot about this when it was announced,

01:19:43 ◼   ► but they've changed their position

01:19:46 ◼   ► based on essentially criticism and consultation

01:19:48 ◼   ► from lots of people, from security researchers,

01:19:51 ◼   ► from privacy advocates, from lots of people who had

01:19:55 ◼   ► scenarios where this feature could be abused by governments

01:19:58 ◼   ► for nefarious purposes or used by hackers.

01:20:01 ◼   ► So what they're basically doing is for now,

01:20:04 ◼   ► playing it safe, which is we're not doing any of those

01:20:06 ◼   ► things that we thought might be risky.

01:20:09 ◼   ► We are doing end-to-end encryption,

01:20:10 ◼   ► which everybody wants and is good,

01:20:12 ◼   ► but of course that same feature can be used

01:20:14 ◼   ► for nefarious actors to hide their activities, right?

01:20:16 ◼   ► That's the nature of security.

01:20:18 ◼   ► If you do security right, it helps the good guys and the bad guys equally.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Despite what everybody in Congress and our country wants, there's no way to magically

01:20:29 ◼   ► protect all the good people's data but not the bad people's.

01:20:32 ◼   ► We'll just add a backdoor that only the good people know, but that's not how security works.

01:20:35 ◼   ► If you add a backdoor, it's a backdoor for everybody, and there's no way to have a backdoor

01:20:39 ◼   ► and also have security.

01:20:41 ◼   ► So Apple has opted to have security, and then the on-device scanning was a way to get around

01:20:45 ◼   ► that.

01:20:46 ◼   ► It was like, "Well, Apple won't have the keys.

01:20:48 ◼   ► can't get the keys. It'll just be scanned on your device which will try to make a secure

01:20:52 ◼   ► hardware thing." And then people were not up for that. They said, "No, we don't want

01:20:55 ◼   ► that to happen." So Apple said, "Okay, that won't happen. But here's your Ndend encryption."

01:20:59 ◼   ► So I guess this is a pretty good outcome in terms of Apple proposed something. There was

01:21:05 ◼   ► a lot of public feedback that it wasn't a good idea, but they continued to pursue the

01:21:10 ◼   ► Ndend encryption despite the fact that that seemed almost tied to the CSAM stuff. They

01:21:14 ◼   ► separated it and said end-to-end encryption, good, everyone's going to get it, here you go.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And then the CSAM stuff, we're still trying to figure that out.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Anything else on all this? I am excited, I'm pleased that it's happening. Of course,

01:21:28 ◼   ► I wish it happened yesterday, but the next best time is now. And I do, I'd have to look at it

01:21:34 ◼   ► more, but sitting here now, I do plan to turn it on once it's out of beta and once it's available

01:21:39 ◼   ► to everyone. And I will probably advise Aaron to do the same thing. I know, Marco, what is your,

01:21:44 ◼   ► sitting here knowing what you know today,

01:21:46 ◼   ► would you turn this on?

01:21:47 ◼   ► - Probably, but not yet.

01:21:50 ◼   ► I wanna wait until, you know,

01:21:52 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure they've been very careful and everything,

01:21:54 ◼   ► but the stakes are so high if things go wrong here

01:21:58 ◼   ► that I'm not gonna jump on it like, you know, on day one.

01:22:01 ◼   ► I might wait, you know, I'm not even on Venturi yet,

01:22:03 ◼   ► like, you know, I'm waiting.

01:22:05 ◼   ► - Why don't you get Venturi, it's fine.

01:22:07 ◼   ► - You know, the point one is about to come out,

01:22:09 ◼   ► I'll probably jump on that when they do that, but.

01:22:11 ◼   ► - You'd need the point one to do this anyway.

01:22:13 ◼   ► - That's true, that's true.

01:22:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, so for people who don't know

01:22:16 ◼   ► how to think about this,

01:22:18 ◼   ► all this data that we just talked about,

01:22:19 ◼   ► it's already encrypted.

01:22:20 ◼   ► So if you're wondering,

01:22:21 ◼   ► I want Apple to have an unencrypted version of my photos.

01:22:23 ◼   ► They don't, they have an encrypted version.

01:22:25 ◼   ► Everything they have is encrypted.

01:22:26 ◼   ► The difference is that they also have the key.

01:22:29 ◼   ► So this is not like,

01:22:30 ◼   ► oh, this is gonna scramble all my data.

01:22:31 ◼   ► Your data is already scrambled on Apple servers.

01:22:33 ◼   ► It's already nonsense.

01:22:34 ◼   ► Like if you were to break into Apple servers

01:22:36 ◼   ► and just grab your photos,

01:22:37 ◼   ► you'd have a bunch of binary garbage.

01:22:39 ◼   ► You need the key.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Apple also currently has the key.

01:22:42 ◼   ► All this feature is not all this feature is doing

01:22:44 ◼   ► to minimize what they're doing, but like logically speaking,

01:22:47 ◼   ► they're just taking the key away from Apple.

01:22:48 ◼   ► They're really making a new key and you only you have.

01:22:50 ◼   ► But anyway, Apple will not have the key

01:22:52 ◼   ► and you will have it.

01:22:53 ◼   ► Right now you both have the key,

01:22:54 ◼   ► but it doesn't change the nature of your data.

01:22:56 ◼   ► So there's not gonna be some long process that goes through

01:22:58 ◼   ► and re-encrypts all your data or whatever.

01:22:59 ◼   ► It's already encrypted in all places, right?

01:23:02 ◼   ► The only difference is who has the key.

01:23:04 ◼   ► And this move is changing it from you have the key

01:23:06 ◼   ► and Apple has the key to just you

01:23:09 ◼   ► and all your trusted devices and so on and so forth.

01:23:11 ◼   ► And Marker was right that any change like this is a risk

01:23:14 ◼   ► because if they have a bug or something and it screws up,

01:23:16 ◼   ► now your key is in one fewer place, right?

01:23:19 ◼   ► Apple used to have your key and now they don't.

01:23:21 ◼   ► So if they screw something up such that you lose all your

01:23:24 ◼   ► keys or something and their backup solution doesn't work,

01:23:26 ◼   ► Apple doesn't have one more copy of the key.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I think that's highly unlikely to happen,

01:23:30 ◼   ► but if you're listening to this and you're worried like,

01:23:32 ◼   ► I don't want to do this because I don't want my data

01:23:33 ◼   ► to be encrypted, it's already encrypted everywhere.

01:23:36 ◼   ► It is encrypted at rest as they say,

01:23:37 ◼   ► it's just a question of who has the keys,

01:23:39 ◼   ► how many copies of the key are there and who has them.

01:23:42 ◼   ► - So this is good news, I'm excited for it.

01:23:45 ◼   ► I am sure China and other similar governments

01:23:49 ◼   ► are going to be equally enthusiastic about it.

01:23:51 ◼   ► And to be honest, I'm not so confident

01:23:53 ◼   ► that American government will be

01:23:54 ◼   ► particularly enthusiastic about it, but we shall see.

01:23:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, American governments,

01:23:58 ◼   ► I mean, they're, whatever, they're always making noise.

01:24:00 ◼   ► But Apple is not the first company to do this.

01:24:02 ◼   ► Like, and then encrypted backups,

01:24:03 ◼   ► like, Android's had it for years and years.

01:24:04 ◼   ► Like, it is a common feature of all sorts.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Like, Keychain, your health data,

01:24:08 ◼   ► like, this is not a new thing.

01:24:09 ◼   ► They're just extending it to more data.

01:24:11 ◼   ► So it was overdue.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Like Apple was behind the times.

01:24:14 ◼   ► They had done it for a bunch of important data,

01:24:16 ◼   ► and your Memoji, but they hadn't done it

01:24:19 ◼   ► for your photos and your backups,

01:24:21 ◼   ► and now they finally have.

01:24:21 ◼   ► Those are the two biggies that we really care about.

01:24:24 ◼   ► - All right, additionally, Apple has added

01:24:26 ◼   ► 700 new price points to the App Store.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Cool. - No, this is good.

01:24:31 ◼   ► Look, okay. - I don't know.

01:24:32 ◼   ► - First of all, this is a small deal, not a big deal.

01:24:36 ◼   ► - Right, I think they had to start

01:24:38 ◼   ► by letting people know that there are price points

01:24:40 ◼   ► on the App Store, 'cause I think a lot of people think

01:24:42 ◼   ► if you haven't ever sold an app,

01:24:43 ◼   ► that when you sell an app, you decide what the price

01:24:46 ◼   ► is gonna be and you type it into a text field

01:24:48 ◼   ► and that's not how it works.

01:24:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, so the way App Store pricing has worked to date,

01:24:53 ◼   ► there's a few exceptions around subscriptions,

01:24:56 ◼   ► stuff like that, but for the most part,

01:24:57 ◼   ► the way it has worked to date is when you post your app

01:25:00 ◼   ► to the App Store, you select a quote price tier

01:25:03 ◼   ► and that's what it is everywhere.

01:25:04 ◼   ► and the price tier is basically like every dollar

01:25:08 ◼   ► in the US dollar with 99 at the end.

01:25:11 ◼   ► So that's why 99 cents was the base price

01:25:13 ◼   ► and that's tier one.

01:25:15 ◼   ► Or like tier zero is like free, right?

01:25:17 ◼   ► So then anyway, you can do tier two, all right,

01:25:20 ◼   ► then that's 199 or whatever.

01:25:23 ◼   ► And there's been limited to no ability so far

01:25:28 ◼   ► to customize prices by region.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Although, again, the subscription pricing

01:25:36 ◼   ► has been a little bit different in that regard.

01:25:37 ◼   ► They've had a few more options

01:25:38 ◼   ► than straight up in-app purchases.

01:25:40 ◼   ► - But Apple does that for you, like for the pricing.

01:25:42 ◼   ► - Yes. - When you say,

01:25:43 ◼   ► I want tier one, whatever that is, $1.99,

01:25:46 ◼   ► Apple tells you, okay, here's what tier one is in euros.

01:25:49 ◼   ► Here's what tier one is in this country.

01:25:51 ◼   ► Here's what tier one is in, like Apple decides that.

01:25:53 ◼   ► You don't get to pick that.

01:25:54 ◼   ► So not only do you not get to pick the exact price,

01:25:56 ◼   ► I want my thing to be $1.23.

01:25:58 ◼   ► Nope, sorry, you can't do that.

01:26:00 ◼   ► But then after you pick the price tier,

01:26:01 ◼   ► Apple says, okay, for that tier, here's how much it is

01:26:04 ◼   ► in all these currencies in other countries.

01:26:06 ◼   ► And they adjust that from time to time.

01:26:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:26:09 ◼   ► There's a number of reasons why this is actually

01:26:11 ◼   ► very convenient for people like me who don't know

01:26:15 ◼   ► how things should be priced in the entire world.

01:26:17 ◼   ► I know my own market and I can hear from a few people

01:26:21 ◼   ► here and there about some of the other big markets,

01:26:23 ◼   ► but for the most part, like, hey, I want my annual

01:26:26 ◼   ► Overcast Premium purchase, which is my current,

01:26:29 ◼   ► I think currently my only in-app purchase

01:26:30 ◼   ► I offer in the App Store, it's just 10 bucks a month

01:26:34 ◼   ► in the US and roughly that same thing everywhere else,

01:26:38 ◼   ► like whatever the equivalents are.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And I don't have to think about that for the most part.

01:26:41 ◼   ► Like I just let it go and I let Apple figure out

01:26:43 ◼   ► what that means in each currency and they deal with

01:26:47 ◼   ► tax and everything and that's it.

01:26:48 ◼   ► Sorry, a year.

01:26:49 ◼   ► Sorry, $10 a year.

01:26:50 ◼   ► - Don't want you to be scared away, it's not $10 a month.

01:26:53 ◼   ► - No, it's $10 a year and in fact,

01:26:54 ◼   ► I think I actually am undercharging.

01:26:58 ◼   ► This is just an unrelated side note.

01:27:00 ◼   ► But if you look around like, oh God,

01:27:01 ◼   ► again, more app store stuff, the other day,

01:27:04 ◼   ► Adam asked if he can get an app for his iPad

01:27:07 ◼   ► that all of his friends are using,

01:27:09 ◼   ► a quote, meme generator app.

01:27:11 ◼   ► And what this means is an app that basically

01:27:14 ◼   ► searches public databases of like, you know,

01:27:16 ◼   ► Giphy and stuff for images,

01:27:18 ◼   ► unless you type impact text over them.

01:27:19 ◼   ► Like that's basically, it's the most simple app in the world.

01:27:22 ◼   ► $5 a month.

01:27:26 ◼   ► - What?

01:27:27 ◼   ► At least it's not per week.

01:27:28 ◼   ► probably was in the past before they stopped

01:27:30 ◼   ► letting you do that.

01:27:30 ◼   ► - I believe there was a weekly option,

01:27:32 ◼   ► but the cheapest option was $5 a month.

01:27:35 ◼   ► And not just one app, like every app that was popular

01:27:39 ◼   ► that showed up in search results that did this

01:27:41 ◼   ► is some kind of monthly, at least, subscription

01:27:45 ◼   ► of about that magnitude.

01:27:47 ◼   ► - Well, they're trying to find apps that kids wanna use

01:27:48 ◼   ► and they'll just ask their parents to do it

01:27:50 ◼   ► and the parents will say yes and then not notice

01:27:52 ◼   ► another $5 a month is coming out,

01:27:53 ◼   ► so they can literally type text over an image.

01:27:56 ◼   ► - That's it.

01:27:57 ◼   ► I just, it makes me so mad.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And I try not to show it too much,

01:28:04 ◼   ► 'cause I don't wanna discourage him

01:28:05 ◼   ► from using stuff on his iPad and stuff,

01:28:06 ◼   ► so I try to hide my anger.

01:28:08 ◼   ► But the fact that this stuff exists in iOS

01:28:11 ◼   ► and that it is doing so well,

01:28:13 ◼   ► 'cause, and these are apps that had

01:28:15 ◼   ► tens of thousands of ratings.

01:28:16 ◼   ► - I'm sure they're all legit.

01:28:19 ◼   ► - I know, right, but I bet some of them are.

01:28:21 ◼   ► I mean, they're high ranking,

01:28:22 ◼   ► and it's like, if you look at what the app store

01:28:26 ◼   ► has generated, in order to rank highly on the app store

01:28:31 ◼   ► these days, you have to be able to put a lot of money

01:28:34 ◼   ► into buying search ads, buying installs on Facebook

01:28:38 ◼   ► and stuff, and paying people to review it probably.

01:28:43 ◼   ► You have to put a lot of money into getting a higher

01:28:46 ◼   ► ranking, and so what ends up getting the highest ranking

01:28:49 ◼   ► is the stuff that has the most in-app purchase income

01:28:53 ◼   ► from it and so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy

01:28:56 ◼   ► and so the prices of everything just goes up and up and up

01:29:00 ◼   ► for common needs for everything that's actually

01:29:02 ◼   ► ranking well because it's full of all these scams

01:29:06 ◼   ► and they keep outranking everything else

01:29:07 ◼   ► because they can afford to.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And then the result is everything just costs more

01:29:12 ◼   ► and sucks more for users but Apple just makes more money

01:29:15 ◼   ► and so it's gonna stay that way.

01:29:17 ◼   ► Anyway, so going back to the subject.

01:29:21 ◼   ► So when you're designing that purchase,

01:29:23 ◼   ► oh anyway, and I think Overcast is underpriced

01:29:25 ◼   ► for what it is, because even if you look around

01:29:27 ◼   ► other podcast apps that have In-App Purchase stuff,

01:29:30 ◼   ► I'm cheaper than all of them, and maybe I shouldn't be,

01:29:33 ◼   ► but I don't know, I probably shouldn't change it.

01:29:35 ◼   ► But anyway, but yeah, it makes me so mad,

01:29:39 ◼   ► wow, I can type text over an image for $5 a month,

01:29:44 ◼   ► or I can pay, if somebody can pay 80 cents a month

01:29:47 ◼   ► or whatever for my podcast app, like, hmm.

01:29:50 ◼   ► Anyway, so yeah, so there's been limited control

01:29:55 ◼   ► by developers over what these price points are

01:29:57 ◼   ► and how they are targeted in different markets, et cetera.

01:30:02 ◼   ► And so, and there's been weird awkwardness too,

01:30:04 ◼   ► like because all the prices were forced to end in '99

01:30:08 ◼   ► in the US and whatever the equivalents are

01:30:09 ◼   ► in a lot of other places,

01:30:11 ◼   ► certain pricing didn't make sense,

01:30:13 ◼   ► especially when you look at like bundles

01:30:15 ◼   ► or you'd have like, oh, you know,

01:30:17 ◼   ► buy two months for the price of two or three or whatever.

01:30:21 ◼   ► Like sometimes the math would work out in such a way

01:30:23 ◼   ► that it didn't really make sense for like,

01:30:25 ◼   ► oh you're actually paying like 10 cents more

01:30:27 ◼   ► if you buy it this way 'cause of the stupid 99 pricing

01:30:30 ◼   ► that should have been like 98 or 90 or something

01:30:33 ◼   ► depending on how the rounding would work out.

01:30:34 ◼   ► So anyway, what they're doing is adding

01:30:38 ◼   ► a whole bunch more price tiers.

01:30:40 ◼   ► Now, we're not gonna notice much of this

01:30:44 ◼   ► in the US market and in like the, you know,

01:30:47 ◼   ► kind of North America, Europe,

01:30:49 ◼   ► most of the stuff is not gonna affect us that much

01:30:51 ◼   ► because people are gonna keep charging

01:30:52 ◼   ► what they've been charging because it makes sense

01:30:54 ◼   ► and it makes the most sales.

01:30:55 ◼   ► However, there are a few little tricks,

01:30:58 ◼   ► one of which is that the lowest price point,

01:31:01 ◼   ► instead of being 99 cents in the US,

01:31:03 ◼   ► is now gonna be 29 cents in the US.

01:31:07 ◼   ► That we're gonna notice.

01:31:09 ◼   ► That's gonna become a thing.

01:31:11 ◼   ► I don't know to what degree.

01:31:12 ◼   ► I mean, the idea of the rush to the bottom

01:31:17 ◼   ► with pricing everything going to 99 cents in the app store

01:31:20 ◼   ► was mainly a problem or rather an effect

01:31:24 ◼   ► of paid up front apps.

01:31:25 ◼   ► And we don't really live in that world anymore.

01:31:27 ◼   ► Very few apps are paid up front anymore.

01:31:30 ◼   ► And although I did just buy one the other day

01:31:32 ◼   ► for a stupid camera remote.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Long story short, Jon, you were right.

01:31:35 ◼   ► I should have upgraded the firmware on my Sony camera.

01:31:38 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:31:39 ◼   ► - It was 1.00. (laughs)

01:31:44 ◼   ► - Not a reassuring number.

01:31:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is now like three point something.

01:31:48 ◼   ► Yeah, it turns out the wifi didn't work before.

01:31:49 ◼   ► - And it does, and now it does animal eye detection.

01:31:52 ◼   ► You can take good Hops pictures.

01:31:53 ◼   ► - Oh good, yeah.

01:31:55 ◼   ► I'll look at that now, 'cause the autofocus performance

01:31:57 ◼   ► really is not very good.

01:31:58 ◼   ► Anyway, so I think what,

01:32:02 ◼   ► one interesting thing about this is that,

01:32:03 ◼   ► you know, yeah, people who wanna really fine grain

01:32:06 ◼   ► control their pricing will now have more options to do that.

01:32:09 ◼   ► I think the 29 cent thing could be more interesting

01:32:13 ◼   ► in the sense that it's almost a micropayment level now

01:32:17 ◼   ► where you can now have in-app purchase of that price.

01:32:22 ◼   ► So again, I'm not thinking there's gonna be

01:32:25 ◼   ► a whole bunch of 29 cent apps.

01:32:26 ◼   ► I think apps that are gonna succeed the most

01:32:28 ◼   ► are gonna still have to be free up front,

01:32:30 ◼   ► just like they have been for a long time.

01:32:32 ◼   ► However, 29 cents for in-app purchase,

01:32:36 ◼   ► I think I think that that could actually really affect things. I don't think for the worse,

01:32:42 ◼   ► I think it's probably just going to be additive in the world. Like I'm not I'm not thinking

01:32:46 ◼   ► of any reason why this is a bad thing. To have more options, you know, it's up to developers

01:32:51 ◼   ► how they use them. There's already rampant abuse of in app purchase everywhere all over

01:32:57 ◼   ► the App Store. There's already tons of scams and frauds and, and tricks and exploits that

01:33:02 ◼   ► that people do with psychology and the App Store rules

01:33:06 ◼   ► a little bit to do sleazy crap in the App Store.

01:33:09 ◼   ► So this isn't going to change any of that.

01:33:11 ◼   ► I think whatever potential for sleaziness in the App Store

01:33:15 ◼   ► this will enable has already been enabled for years

01:33:19 ◼   ► and is being let flourish by Apple,

01:33:22 ◼   ► either by neglect or act of encouraging.

01:33:24 ◼   ► So I don't think this is anything bad here.

01:33:28 ◼   ► I think it's only good.

01:33:29 ◼   ► The reason they're doing it are multifaceted.

01:33:33 ◼   ► Part of the reason they're doing it is

01:33:35 ◼   ► they wanna make the App Store better.

01:33:37 ◼   ► Part of the reason they're doing it

01:33:38 ◼   ► is they keep getting sued.

01:33:39 ◼   ► And I believe this was actually part of a settlement

01:33:42 ◼   ► to add more price tiers that they had to do

01:33:44 ◼   ► as part of some suit.

01:33:46 ◼   ► So the reality is the in-app purchase system

01:33:50 ◼   ► is still very limited in its capabilities.

01:33:54 ◼   ► It is still fairly overpriced in the market

01:33:58 ◼   ► in terms of its commission of what we have to pay them

01:34:00 ◼   ► to use it, and it is still competing by fiat

01:34:04 ◼   ► instead of by actual merit in most ways

01:34:07 ◼   ► because we aren't allowed to use anything else

01:34:09 ◼   ► on the iPhone.

01:34:10 ◼   ► And so this is a sign of Apple making their system better,

01:34:15 ◼   ► and that's good.

01:34:17 ◼   ► It shouldn't have taken this long to do this,

01:34:19 ◼   ► and their system is still not as good as it should be,

01:34:23 ◼   ► but I'm glad they're making progress,

01:34:25 ◼   ► And I wish that they were more forced to compete on merit

01:34:30 ◼   ► rather than gracing us with occasional enhancements

01:34:34 ◼   ► just out of the goodness of their heart slash lawsuits.

01:34:38 ◼   ► I wish they were actually being forced to compete on merit

01:34:40 ◼   ► because what they're doing here is really trying to get

01:34:44 ◼   ► the bare minimum functionality that they can get away with

01:34:47 ◼   ► while if they had to actually compete on merit,

01:34:50 ◼   ► look at all their competitors out there,

01:34:53 ◼   ► all the different payment processors

01:34:54 ◼   ► and payment platforms and everything.

01:34:55 ◼   ► And this is a drop in the bucket compared to what they offer.

01:34:58 ◼   ► - They did increase the top price to up to 10,000.

01:35:00 ◼   ► What was it before?

01:35:01 ◼   ► What was the top before?

01:35:02 ◼   ► - I believe 1000 before.

01:35:04 ◼   ► I could be wrong.

01:35:05 ◼   ► - And it's 10,000 upon request.

01:35:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I mean, 10,000 is so weird

01:35:09 ◼   ► because like enterprise software costs more than that,

01:35:11 ◼   ► but regular software costs less.

01:35:12 ◼   ► So what the hell is 10,000?

01:35:13 ◼   ► That's just like in the middle of nowhere kind of,

01:35:15 ◼   ► anyway, whatever.

01:35:16 ◼   ► - It's a lot of gems and loot boxes and candy crush.

01:35:19 ◼   ► - Speaking of doing things better and having competition,

01:35:22 ◼   ► This is relevant to the discussion Jason and I had

01:35:26 ◼   ► on the upgrade that I guess that I'm recently,

01:35:28 ◼   ► that we will link in the show notes.

01:35:30 ◼   ► When I was using the, I tried out that Lenza app

01:35:33 ◼   ► that everyone's trying now with the AI image processing,

01:35:36 ◼   ► and you can hear me get very angry about that app on upgrade,

01:35:39 ◼   ► but not for this particular reason.

01:35:41 ◼   ► One of the things that I was angry about,

01:35:43 ◼   ► not the main one, but one of them

01:35:44 ◼   ► when I was playing with this,

01:35:46 ◼   ► was it has an app purchase for everything,

01:35:50 ◼   ► And it's fairly expensive, pay $6 so they can illegally

01:35:55 ◼   ► exploit the work of others to give you

01:35:56 ◼   ► a bunch of avatar images.

01:35:57 ◼   ► But I did one and I double tapped the side button

01:36:03 ◼   ► and face ID and in-app purchase went through, right?

01:36:07 ◼   ► And I saw on my Apple card the charge come up,

01:36:10 ◼   ► but nothing ever happened in the app.

01:36:11 ◼   ► It had no history of me doing that.

01:36:13 ◼   ► It's like, oh, you paid for a thing

01:36:14 ◼   ► and it should appear on the screen, but it's not there.

01:36:17 ◼   ► And so you go to their little help in the app

01:36:19 ◼   ► and it's like one of the FAQ items is like payment problem,

01:36:22 ◼   ► whatever, like, oh, you know, I paid for a thing

01:36:23 ◼   ► and I don't see it.

01:36:24 ◼   ► And they basically say, you know,

01:36:26 ◼   ► we can't give you a refund, which is true.

01:36:28 ◼   ► You should know from listening to ATP

01:36:30 ◼   ► that developers cannot give you a refund.

01:36:32 ◼   ► - That's not entirely true now.

01:36:35 ◼   ► With StoreKit 2, you can.

01:36:36 ◼   ► - Wait, what?

01:36:37 ◼   ► - You know, with StoreKit 2, there's an in-app refund flow.

01:36:41 ◼   ► - I thought it was just like a request a refund kind of,

01:36:44 ◼   ► like you could kick them to a certain screen, right?

01:36:46 ◼   ► Or is it--

01:36:47 ◼   ► - Maybe.

01:36:48 ◼   ► It's been a while since I've looked at this,

01:36:49 ◼   ► but with StoreKit 2, which is the new

01:36:52 ◼   ► like async/await powered StoreKit stuff,

01:36:54 ◼   ► there's absolutely a way,

01:36:56 ◼   ► I think it kicks to an Apple provided screen,

01:37:00 ◼   ► which is I think what you just said.

01:37:01 ◼   ► I forget, I'd have to look at it again,

01:37:03 ◼   ► but there is absolutely a new way that you can tell Apple,

01:37:07 ◼   ► hey, this user wants a refund,

01:37:09 ◼   ► and I forget exactly how it's processed from there.

01:37:11 ◼   ► - Right, well, the point is the request goes to Apple.

01:37:13 ◼   ► The request, I mean, the developer can facilitate the flow,

01:37:16 ◼   ► but in the end, Apple, and to most of the part,

01:37:18 ◼   ► Apple will fulfill that request.

01:37:21 ◼   ► They will give you the refund.

01:37:22 ◼   ► But the cost of it, the $6 charge that I got

01:37:26 ◼   ► that I got nothing for, right,

01:37:28 ◼   ► probably because of a bug in their program

01:37:29 ◼   ► or their servers are overwhelmed

01:37:30 ◼   ► or who knows what the problem was, right,

01:37:32 ◼   ► I made the calculation that it would be more annoying

01:37:35 ◼   ► than the $6 that I would get back

01:37:37 ◼   ► to try to go through the process.

01:37:38 ◼   ► 'Cause now I have to go to,

01:37:40 ◼   ► they didn't have that flow facilitated,

01:37:41 ◼   ► so maybe if they had done that with Storch or two,

01:37:43 ◼   ► I would have tried it,

01:37:44 ◼   ► Like I have to go through a sort of the out of, you know,

01:37:47 ◼   ► out of band, go to this form, fill it out and say,

01:37:50 ◼   ► "Hey, I made an in-app purchase in this thing.

01:37:53 ◼   ► It was for this amount.

01:37:54 ◼   ► I made it roughly around this time

01:37:56 ◼   ► and I didn't get the thing before it gave me a refund."

01:37:58 ◼   ► Well, I made a bunch of $6 purchases

01:38:01 ◼   ► 'cause I was playing with the program.

01:38:02 ◼   ► Which one of them didn't work?

01:38:04 ◼   ► I don't have even a way to identify it to say

01:38:07 ◼   ► like the fifth one for this amount made on this day

01:38:11 ◼   ► was the one I didn't get.

01:38:12 ◼   ► and it's just like, I just, it just seemed like such a headache.

01:38:15 ◼   ► I'm like, well, you win this time, you get my $6 and you didn't get anything from

01:38:18 ◼   ► because of how annoying it is in a competitive market.

01:38:22 ◼   ► Every purchase that you make through an in-app purchase system, you'd be able

01:38:25 ◼   ► to go to a webpage and see a history of all your transactions and each line

01:38:28 ◼   ► item would have a refund button at the end request refund, right?

01:38:31 ◼   ► Like how hard is it to return something to Amazon?

01:38:34 ◼   ► How hard is it to request a refund?

01:38:36 ◼   ► Like basic e-commerce functionality from the nineties is I can see a list of all

01:38:41 ◼   ► my transactions and I can do stuff to them right there.

01:38:45 ◼   ► I can look at the details of the order,

01:38:46 ◼   ► I can go link back to the pages of things,

01:38:48 ◼   ► and if I want to get a refund,

01:38:49 ◼   ► I don't have to go to someplace else

01:38:50 ◼   ► and dig something out right there.

01:38:52 ◼   ► It should say, do you want a refund in this order?

01:38:54 ◼   ► Do you want to initiate a return?

01:38:55 ◼   ► That's what the web is for, but in the world of Apple,

01:38:58 ◼   ► it's like, oh, go to a form on an Apple webpage

01:39:00 ◼   ► and now I guess in store kit too,

01:39:02 ◼   ► we'll try to facilitate that flow.

01:39:03 ◼   ► Forget about involving the developer

01:39:05 ◼   ► and allowing you to do a refund

01:39:06 ◼   ► or to do a refund programmatically or whatever,

01:39:08 ◼   ► just give the user enough knowledge.

01:39:09 ◼   ► Like all I had literally to know that this even happened

01:39:12 ◼   ► is I can go to transactions on my Apple card

01:39:14 ◼   ► and see a charge.

01:39:15 ◼   ► But beyond that, there's no record

01:39:17 ◼   ► that this thing ever happened anywhere else

01:39:18 ◼   ► and no way for me to identify it.

01:39:20 ◼   ► There's not even like an order number

01:39:21 ◼   ► or a transaction ID that's visible to me.

01:39:23 ◼   ► So frustrating.

01:39:24 ◼   ► Definitely not.

01:39:25 ◼   ► And this is like up to the standards of like,

01:39:28 ◼   ► maybe not 90s, but like early 2000s era e-commerce platforms

01:39:31 ◼   ► and the App Store does not meet that line.

01:39:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

01:39:36 ◼   ► And it's no good.

01:39:38 ◼   ► What are you gonna do?

01:39:39 ◼   ► But yeah, so apparently you can define all new,

01:39:43 ◼   ► or you can't define new price points,

01:39:45 ◼   ► but you can use a bunch of new price points.

01:39:47 ◼   ► They can end in various ending decimals,

01:39:51 ◼   ► so like something 95, something 99.

01:39:55 ◼   ► - Zero zero, finally.

01:39:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you can do zero zero,

01:39:58 ◼   ► like all sorts of different stuff.

01:40:00 ◼   ► And that's kind of exciting, I guess.

01:40:02 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't know.

01:40:04 ◼   ► This is nice, but it is far from revolutionary,

01:40:07 ◼   ► which I guess I shouldn't complain.

01:40:09 ◼   ► It's still better than nothing.

01:40:11 ◼   ► And then finally, very briefly,

01:40:12 ◼   ► Apple introduced Apple Music Sing,

01:40:15 ◼   ► which I don't think, yeah, it's available later this month.

01:40:18 ◼   ► But anyways, Apple Music Sing is an exciting new feature

01:40:20 ◼   ► that allows users to sing along with their favorite songs

01:40:22 ◼   ► with adjustable vocals and real-time lyrics.

01:40:25 ◼   ► Apple Music Sing offers multiple lyric views

01:40:27 ◼   ► to help fans take the lead, perform duets,

01:40:28 ◼   ► sing backup, and more,

01:40:29 ◼   ► all integrated within Apple Music's

01:40:31 ◼   ► unparalleled lyrics experience.

01:40:33 ◼   ► Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog

01:40:35 ◼   ► that features tens of millions

01:40:36 ◼   ► of the world's most singable songs,

01:40:38 ◼   ► Apple Music Sing makes it fun and easy for anyone to participate however and wherever they choose.

01:40:41 ◼   ► Available later this month to Apple Music subscribers worldwide. You can do it on iPhone,

01:40:46 ◼   ► iPad, and Apple TV. Vitici has, I think, taken a spin with this or has at least posted some

01:40:54 ◼   ► screenshots of it one way or another. We'll put a link to a tweet of his in the show notes. I don't

01:40:59 ◼   ► personally care for karaoke because I cannot carry a tune to save my life, but I think that's kind of

01:41:05 ◼   ► - Cool, I think it could be a fun party game.

01:41:07 ◼   ► We actually, I think I might have mentioned

01:41:08 ◼   ► we recently dug out our Wii and our rock band equipment

01:41:12 ◼   ► in order to play that with the kids from time to time,

01:41:15 ◼   ► and that's been quite fun, although,

01:41:17 ◼   ► as always with rock band, you never really find

01:41:20 ◼   ► anyone volunteering to be the singer.

01:41:22 ◼   ► What are you gonna do?

01:41:23 ◼   ► - I mean, that's a high-risk move.

01:41:24 ◼   ► - What, being the singer?

01:41:26 ◼   ► Yeah, it's terrible.

01:41:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, you know, everyone else is having fun.

01:41:29 ◼   ► You're the singer, like,

01:41:30 ◼   ► you're gonna be under some scrutiny.

01:41:31 ◼   ► - Yep, no, I couldn't agree more.

01:41:33 ◼   ► - But there are musical families,

01:41:34 ◼   ► like the Von Trapps or whatever,

01:41:36 ◼   ► where everyone wants to be the singer

01:41:37 ◼   ► 'cause they can all carry a tune, must be nice.

01:41:40 ◼   ► - Must be friggin' nice.

01:41:41 ◼   ► Anyway, this is cool, I don't personally have a lot

01:41:43 ◼   ► to say about it, but I think it's neat,

01:41:45 ◼   ► and I'll definitely at least check it out,

01:41:47 ◼   ► and I'm curious what the user interaction

01:41:49 ◼   ► looks like for this.

01:41:50 ◼   ► Obviously, again, we've seen some screenshots,

01:41:52 ◼   ► but I think this is one of those things

01:41:53 ◼   ► you're gonna have to use it to really see how it feels.

01:41:55 ◼   ► But hey, that's kinda cool.

01:41:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's really cool.

01:41:58 ◼   ► - When I saw this feature, my first thought was,

01:42:02 ◼   ► Are they extracting the vocals using machine learning?

01:42:06 ◼   ► The answer seems to be no.

01:42:07 ◼   ► They're just using the fact that they have multitrack versions of these songs for their

01:42:11 ◼   ► Dolby Atmos versions.

01:42:12 ◼   ► They already have isolated vocals.

01:42:14 ◼   ► That's why they can just...

01:42:16 ◼   ► They're not extracting the vocals.

01:42:18 ◼   ► Vocals are already extracted.

01:42:19 ◼   ► That's why I think it's not going to be on every song in their catalog, but only however

01:42:23 ◼   ► many million they have these Dolby Atmos multitrack things for.

01:42:27 ◼   ► There are lots of really cool machine learning things that can extract vocals from songs.

01:42:32 ◼   ► You don't need a machine learning.

01:42:33 ◼   ► Machine learning is such a term,

01:42:34 ◼   ► and you gotta put it on everything now

01:42:35 ◼   ► to get VC funding or whatever.

01:42:36 ◼   ► But you can extract vocals from songs

01:42:39 ◼   ► by subtracting from the left channel from the right channel

01:42:41 ◼   ► if the vocals right in the middle or whatever.

01:42:42 ◼   ► There's very dumb digital signal processing things

01:42:44 ◼   ► you can do to try to get the vocals out.

01:42:47 ◼   ► But machine learning things can do a really scary good job

01:42:51 ◼   ► of doing it even if you just have a mixed thing.

01:42:53 ◼   ► But Apple doesn't have to worry about any of that

01:42:55 ◼   ► 'cause they've got the individual tracks.

01:42:57 ◼   ► And yeah, this stuff looks fun.

01:42:58 ◼   ► And Apple's lyrics thing are actually pretty good.

01:43:00 ◼   ► I don't know if you ever accidentally tapped

01:43:01 ◼   ► that little double quote mark in a speech bubble in the bottom of Apple Music on your

01:43:06 ◼   ► phone and see the words come up.

01:43:08 ◼   ► But they do a good job of scrolling them.

01:43:10 ◼   ► They almost always look like a karaoke thing because they would scroll the lyrics and highlight

01:43:13 ◼   ► the ones as they're saying them.

01:43:15 ◼   ► The timings are really good.

01:43:17 ◼   ► The lyrics are usually pretty good.

01:43:19 ◼   ► The screenshot Petitche put in there, he put in "I've Had the Time of My Life" from Dirty

01:43:22 ◼   ► Dancing, which is like a duet, and it shows one person's vocals on the left side and the

01:43:26 ◼   ► other person's vocals on the right side so two people can sing at the same time.

01:43:30 ◼   ► again, not advanced technology, but a fun feature that they basically had all the pieces

01:43:34 ◼   ► of in Apple Music and now they have the final one. So I give this a thumbs up for all those

01:43:38 ◼   ► people out there who can actually carry a tune.

01:43:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think if the catalog is actually broad enough that you can find stuff in there

01:43:47 ◼   ► that you want to sing where they actually do have the vocals isolated out, that's really

01:43:50 ◼   ► cool. And I don't know if Spotify has the same feature. I don't really pay attention

01:43:55 ◼   ► to the karaoke world, but that's a cool thing to do when you have the position they

01:44:00 ◼   ► they have in the music business where they can actually get all these mixes with the

01:44:03 ◼   ► vocals isolated out. That's a really cool thing to offer. And now anybody who has an

01:44:09 ◼   ► iPhone can anywhere do a karaoke party or whatever. That's a pretty cool thing.

01:44:15 ◼   ► And I like the fact that you can control the vocal volume because if you're not confident

01:44:20 ◼   ► enough in your singing, you can have the real vocals like 50% and it'll be a little bit

01:44:24 ◼   ► more like you're singing in the shower and it's a mercy that you can't even hear yourself

01:44:28 ◼   ► over the sound of the actual vocals.

01:44:31 ◼   ► - I mean, just think about how much parents

01:44:32 ◼   ► can torture their kids in the car with this.

01:44:35 ◼   ► - Oh my.

01:44:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, some people are pointing out in the chat,

01:44:38 ◼   ► like you read the thing before

01:44:39 ◼   ► that's available on Apple TV 4K.

01:44:41 ◼   ► Is it not available on the previous Apple TV 4Ks

01:44:45 ◼   ► and on the pre-4K Apple TVs?

01:44:48 ◼   ► - I don't know, that's a good question.

01:44:49 ◼   ► - And of course the Mac, no one cares about the Mac,

01:44:51 ◼   ► but the Mac was not mentioned.

01:44:52 ◼   ► I guess you can't do this on your Mac.

01:44:54 ◼   ► can only do it on iPhone, iPad, and the new Apple TV 4K.

01:44:58 ◼   ► That Apple TV 4K thing seems suspect to me,

01:45:01 ◼   ► but the lack of Mac seems very clear.

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01:46:52 ◼   ► [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:46:55 ◼   ► All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:46:57 ◼   ► And Daryl Thornton writes, "Now that he

01:46:59 ◼   ► has had a Mac Studio running under his desk for some time,

01:47:01 ◼   ► can Jon give us an update of how it compares to his ideal

01:47:04 ◼   ► computer, the Mac Pro, and what things a new Mac Pro should

01:47:07 ◼   ► have that the Studio does not, above and beyond a separate

01:47:10 ◼   ► video card, of course?"

01:47:11 ◼   ► I mean, the new Mac Pro doesn't need a separate video card,

01:47:13 ◼   ► but it needs more of everything.

01:47:16 ◼   ► What does the MacStudio not have that I want?

01:47:19 ◼   ► More GPU.

01:47:21 ◼   ► It can be built in, but it just needs more of it,

01:47:23 ◼   ► a lot more of it, and it's gonna have a lot more of it.

01:47:25 ◼   ► And then also things, boring things, more RAM.

01:47:27 ◼   ► The MacStudio maxes out at what, 64?

01:47:30 ◼   ► I've got more than that in my Mac Pro.

01:47:31 ◼   ► You can't get more than that in a MacStudio.

01:47:33 ◼   ► The Mac Pro--

01:47:34 ◼   ► - I thought the studio could do 128.

01:47:35 ◼   ► - With the Ultra maybe?

01:47:38 ◼   ► - I think that's right.

01:47:39 ◼   ► - The Mac Pro can go up to like 1.5 terabytes,

01:47:41 ◼   ► so it's in a different league there.

01:47:42 ◼   ► Now the new Mac Pro probably won't go that high,

01:47:45 ◼   ► but what does it need over the Mac Studio?

01:47:46 ◼   ► More than that.

01:47:47 ◼   ► Maybe even simple things like more storage.

01:47:49 ◼   ► It might max out at the same size,

01:47:51 ◼   ► 'cause it's not like SSDs take up that much room,

01:47:53 ◼   ► and I think the Studio maxes out at eight terabytes maybe?

01:47:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, eight terabytes, and it is 128 by the way.

01:47:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, all right, anyway.

01:48:01 ◼   ► The Mac Pro could go higher than that.

01:48:03 ◼   ► And then obviously there's expansion.

01:48:05 ◼   ► We don't know where they're gonna go in that direction,

01:48:07 ◼   ► but the Mac Studio kinda doesn't have much of any,

01:48:09 ◼   ► it's really small.

01:48:10 ◼   ► the Mac Pro could have expansion to add even more stuff.

01:48:14 ◼   ► But even setting aside expansion,

01:48:16 ◼   ► just ignore expansion entirely.

01:48:17 ◼   ► It should just have the capacity for more stuff,

01:48:20 ◼   ► more CPU cores, more RAM, more GPU cores, more power.

01:48:25 ◼   ► So there you go, that's the Mac Pro.

01:48:27 ◼   ► - Mark Romerman writes,

01:48:29 ◼   ► "How are you backing up the shared photo library

01:48:30 ◼   ► from your Mac?

01:48:31 ◼   ► Does it create another accessible photo library on the Mac

01:48:34 ◼   ► or is it hidden away in a library directory somewhere?"

01:48:38 ◼   ► For me, I don't do that much to the library.

01:48:43 ◼   ► Like, I don't--

01:48:44 ◼   ► I favorite some stuff.

01:48:45 ◼   ► I don't really make many albums.

01:48:47 ◼   ► So I don't really--

01:48:49 ◼   ► I don't actively--

01:48:51 ◼   ► I don't do anything specific to back this stuff up.

01:48:53 ◼   ► I have backblaze.

01:48:54 ◼   ► I have Time Machine.

01:48:55 ◼   ► But I don't do anything explicit or specific to back

01:48:58 ◼   ► this stuff up, in part because I consider the one true copy

01:49:01 ◼   ► of my photos, the files, on the file system on my Synology.

01:49:04 ◼   ► But I suspect that, John, you have some sort of opinion and/or

01:49:07 ◼   ► strategy about this? Yeah, I think that what this is asking is like, all right, so say I'm participating in a shared library. When I back up my photo library, like if I go to where my photo library is, you know, whatever dot i photo library file or whatever, are the shared library photos in there? Or are they only in the cloud? Right? 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. As far as I can tell, on my computer, I have the shared library,

01:49:37 ◼   ► you know, being, participating in the shared library

01:49:42 ◼   ► on my wife's account on my computer

01:49:44 ◼   ► set to download originals and the iCloud,

01:49:48 ◼   ► the iPhoto library package thing

01:49:50 ◼   ► is the size I would expect it to be

01:49:52 ◼   ► if all the photos were in there.

01:49:53 ◼   ► Because when you go to like view my wife's personal library

01:49:56 ◼   ► on her account and her thing, there's nothing in it.

01:49:58 ◼   ► And yet the library thing is like over a terabyte, right?

01:50:01 ◼   ► So I think when you do that,

01:50:03 ◼   ► it doesn't make a separate library somewhere

01:50:05 ◼   ► in your existing iPhoto library package thingy,

01:50:09 ◼   ► that's where it will download all of the photos

01:50:12 ◼   ► from the shared photo library into that package.

01:50:15 ◼   ► And then it'll be backed up

01:50:17 ◼   ► just like it has been in the past.

01:50:19 ◼   ► I'm not 100% certain of that.

01:50:21 ◼   ► If anyone can get an official answer from Apple,

01:50:23 ◼   ► that would be great, but as far as I can tell,

01:50:25 ◼   ► that's how it works.

01:50:26 ◼   ► So whatever your backup procedure was,

01:50:27 ◼   ► like you were saying Casey,

01:50:28 ◼   ► oh, I back it up with Time Machine,

01:50:29 ◼   ► I back it up with Backblaze,

01:50:31 ◼   ► it's the same rules as before.

01:50:33 ◼   ► If you set it to download originals

01:50:34 ◼   ► and you use any backup software on that package,

01:50:37 ◼   ► you'll have backups of everything.

01:50:39 ◼   ► - And finally, Guillermo Alias writes,

01:50:41 ◼   ► "I've been a Mac user for about 10 years.

01:50:43 ◼   ► "One thing that I've never understood about the Mac

01:50:45 ◼   ► "is why I can't properly close the Finder app.

01:50:47 ◼   ► "Is it the only, it is the only app I can think of

01:50:49 ◼   ► "that just refuses to accept a command Q command,

01:50:52 ◼   ► "and I can't figure out why,

01:50:54 ◼   ► "since it is quote unquote just a file manager.

01:50:56 ◼   ► "Why is Finder so stubborn, John?"

01:50:58 ◼   ► - I remember one of the very early things I did with ResEdit

01:51:02 ◼   ► on the classic Mac OS was added command-q quit menu item

01:51:06 ◼   ► to the Finder.

01:51:07 ◼   ► And then you could just hit command-q in the Finder

01:51:09 ◼   ► and it would quit.

01:51:10 ◼   ► I mean, there is a interface reason why it's always running

01:51:14 ◼   ► because back in the original Mac,

01:51:15 ◼   ► the Finder was kind of that was your computer,

01:51:17 ◼   ► kind of when you turned it on, there it was.

01:51:20 ◼   ► And it didn't make sense for it to go away

01:51:22 ◼   ► because of what would be in its place.

01:51:23 ◼   ► In the modern era, the dock has taken over a lot of this,

01:51:27 ◼   ► but still a lot of things in the system

01:51:31 ◼   ► expect the finder to be running and they expect to be able to send messages to the finder through Apple events and

01:51:37 ◼   ► Have things work

01:51:38 ◼   ► so there are Mac applications that you may use probably older ones at this point that may just

01:51:42 ◼   ► expect to be able to fire off an Apple event to the finder and

01:51:46 ◼   ► Expect it to already be running as be able to process that I believe the finder will launch in response to that if it's not

01:51:51 ◼   ► Running but it's just what the rest of the system expects so you can quit the finder

01:51:56 ◼   ► It will relaunch automatically, but there are ways to sort of make it stay dead

01:52:00 ◼   ► but you don't want to do that because every other part of the system expects

01:52:05 ◼   ► it to already be running and will ask it to do things as if it's running and will

01:52:09 ◼   ► relaunch it if it's not running and it's there because that's sort of like that's

01:52:14 ◼   ► what's on the computer when you aren't running any applications that's just the

01:52:17 ◼   ► way the Mac works it's not just a file manager again the doc has taken over a

01:52:20 ◼   ► lot of stuff like the doc runs I think doc runs mission control the doc does

01:52:24 ◼   ► all sorts of things that you wouldn't expect it to do but the finder also does

01:52:27 ◼   ► lots of important jobs.

01:52:29 ◼   ► In particular, I think a lot of things

01:52:31 ◼   ► that launch services do may not require the Finder

01:52:35 ◼   ► to be running, but expect it to be running,

01:52:37 ◼   ► and that may also trigger it to launch when it's not running.

01:52:40 ◼   ► But yeah, it's mostly historical,

01:52:42 ◼   ► and the historical stuff has ramifications in your life,

01:52:45 ◼   ► so don't try to quit it and kill it.

01:52:47 ◼   ► Hopefully Finder is not using all your RAM

01:52:49 ◼   ► or grinding your disk.

01:52:50 ◼   ► Just let it be there in the background.

01:52:51 ◼   ► I think, what runs a desktop background?

01:52:53 ◼   ► Is that the Finder?

01:52:54 ◼   ► That's probably also the Dock.

01:52:55 ◼   ► The Dock has really taken over a lot of stuff

01:52:57 ◼   ► from the Finder.

01:52:58 ◼   ► You kinda can't quit the dock either.

01:52:59 ◼   ► I mean you can but it pops right back up.

01:53:01 ◼   ► So don't quit either one of those things.

01:53:03 ◼   ► Just let 'em run.

01:53:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, I kinda consider Finder to be the shell.

01:53:07 ◼   ► Even though I know kind of like the dock process kind of is

01:53:09 ◼   ► but like to be like Finder is like the shell process

01:53:12 ◼   ► of Mac OS, like it's always there.

01:53:16 ◼   ► - It really, login window is the shell process.

01:53:18 ◼   ► Don't kill login window.

01:53:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:53:20 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:53:21 ◼   ► All right, thank you to our sponsors this week.

01:53:24 ◼   ► Trade Coffee, Collide, and Backblaze.

01:53:26 ◼   ► And thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:53:28 ◼   ► You can join atp.fm/join,

01:53:31 ◼   ► and we'll talk to you next week.

01:53:33 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:53:36 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:53:38 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:53:41 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:53:43 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:53:46 ◼   ► ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:53:48 ◼   ► ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:53:51 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:53:54 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:54:01 ◼   ► them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:54:13 ◼   ► Anti Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:54:21 ◼   ► ♪ Nicely recused, it's accidental ♪

01:54:26 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean too accidental ♪

01:54:31 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:54:34 ◼   ► - I killed a mouse.

01:54:37 ◼   ► Like not the, you know, running aroundy kind.

01:54:40 ◼   ► - The harpoony belly kind?

01:54:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've never like worn out a magic mouse before, but--

01:54:47 ◼   ► - What part of it wears out, the button?

01:54:49 ◼   ► No, the button is actually totally fine.

01:54:51 ◼   ► I've worn out all the crappy Razer gaming mice.

01:54:56 ◼   ► No, it started tracking badly.

01:54:58 ◼   ► The vertical tracking was okay,

01:55:01 ◼   ► but the horizontal tracking, for some reason,

01:55:03 ◼   ► it kept juttering and everything.

01:55:04 ◼   ► At first I thought interference, low battery, whatever.

01:55:07 ◼   ► I tried it on different Macs in different rooms.

01:55:10 ◼   ► I tried obviously charging it, turning it off, turning it on.

01:55:12 ◼   ► It just is breaking.

01:55:14 ◼   ► - That sounds like what happened to my two Microsoft mice.

01:55:17 ◼   ► It was the same thing.

01:55:18 ◼   ► The tracking started getting all wonky,

01:55:19 ◼   ► and I thought it was all sorts of other things

01:55:20 ◼   ► and eventually realized this is what it was.

01:55:22 ◼   ► I wonder what causes that.

01:55:23 ◼   ► I mean, it could be like you have to clean

01:55:24 ◼   ► the plastic lens or whatever,

01:55:26 ◼   ► but I think it seems like some kind of hardware failure

01:55:28 ◼   ► inside the thing.

01:55:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, I tried obviously blowing out the sensor,

01:55:33 ◼   ► nothing appears to be in there.

01:55:34 ◼   ► I mean, this is the mouse that came with my iMac Pro,

01:55:38 ◼   ► which is what, 2017?

01:55:40 ◼   ► And I've used it heavily as my main desktop mouse

01:55:44 ◼   ► for that entire time.

01:55:45 ◼   ► So I've used the crap out of this mouse.

01:55:47 ◼   ► So if something is going to wear out over time,

01:55:50 ◼   ► that's a fairly reasonable thing to wear out

01:55:53 ◼   ► after whatever it's been, five, six years.

01:55:56 ◼   ► - But it's weird, isn't it weird that the electronics

01:55:58 ◼   ► and the optical sensing parts of things

01:56:00 ◼   ► with no moving parts would be the things to wear out?

01:56:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, for real.

01:56:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's why it was very surprising to me

01:56:06 ◼   ► that it died in that way.

01:56:08 ◼   ► Anyway, I feel like I've achieved something.

01:56:10 ◼   ► I don't think I've ever killed an Apple mouse before.

01:56:12 ◼   ► - We can hang it up on the wall.

01:56:13 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughs)

01:56:14 ◼   ► - It's your trophy.

01:56:15 ◼   ► Actually you could just hang it on a nail, because if I remember right, I haven't used

01:56:19 ◼   ► one in a while, but the little...

01:56:20 ◼   ► Hang it on the lightning port.

01:56:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:56:22 ◼   ► No, well that's true.

01:56:23 ◼   ► No, I meant the optical sensor.

01:56:25 ◼   ► You could just stick the nail, or the optical sensor, that little circle, that hole right

01:56:28 ◼   ► on the nail, and it's perfect.

01:56:29 ◼   ► [BEEPING]