Weekend Reads (Apr 6): Gmail Turns 20, Lunar Time, Paste Magazine, Trump’s Contempt
Recommended weekend reading for April 6, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Gmail, which totally revolutionized how we use email. And although our communication is increasingly dominated by texting, DMs, and tools like Slack, good ol’ Gmail still has its place.
Sometimes, I wake up to 100 newsletters and marketing emails and get the urge to burn it all down — to start fresh with a calm, anonymous inbox. But the reality is, there’s too much to lose. I’ve moved four times in 10 years, but my email has stayed the same. Every day, I have a friend who nukes their account on social media, but no one ever stands up to announce they’re quitting email. (Will Slack and TikTok even be here in 20 years?) I imagine the headache it’d be to set up a new email, to let everyone know, and the people who would fall through the cracks. It’s no question Gmail will endure; what I’m less certain of is what my relationship with it will be.
Call me a luddite, but I much prefer email over texting, Slack, etc. (Also, give me plaintext over HTML email any day of the week.) And though I’ve looked into other email service providers, including Fastmail, Hey, and Proton, I keep returning to Gmail. Even with all of its warts and issues, I just have too much history with it. At this point, I fear a total switch just wouldn’t be worth the time and effort. That said, if you’ve successfully switched from Gmail to another email service, let me know; I’d love to hear what you picked and how the transition went for you.
Related: To celebrate its 10th anniversary back in 2014, Time shared the inside story of how Gmail came together in the first place.
Although Gmail has obviously been very successful, Google’s history is littered with beloved products that were ultimately abandoned.
The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real.
Via Manton Reece. It’s been over a decade and I still miss Google Reader.
Sorry, but just one more Google-related story this week, this time focused on the so-called “Incognito” mode in the Chrome browser. Which, as it turns out, isn’t nearly as private as Google might’ve wanted you to think.
The first details emerged Monday from Google’s settlement of a class-action lawsuit over Chrome’s tracking of Incognito users. Filed in 2020, the suit could have required the company to pay $5 billion in damages. Instead, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will destroy “billions of data points” it improperly collected, update its data collection disclosures and maintain a setting that blocks Chrome’s third-party cookies by default for the next five years.
The lawsuit accused Google of misleading Chrome users about how private Incognito browsing truly is. It claimed the company told customers their info was private — even as it monitored their activity. Google defended its practices by claiming it warned Chrome users that Incognito mode “does not mean ‘invisible’” and that sites could still see their activity. The settlement was first reported in December.
Given that Google makes their money from tracking people (for advertising), one should never have assumed that “Incognito” mode was truly private, regardless of Google’s marketing. There are valid uses for “Incognito” mode — I often use it while testing websites — but private browsing is not one of them.
A lone developer may have singlehandedly prevented one of the worst cyberattacks in recent history.
In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.
Via NextDraft.
Related: A primer on the xz Utils backdoor, which was years in the making. “In a nutshell, it allows someone with the right private key to hijack sshd, the executable file responsible for making SSH connections, and from there to execute malicious commands.” In other words, this would’ve been a very bad thing had it not been caught.
The White House has given NASA a new mission: creating a time zone for the Moon. Which sounds simple enough, but actually has some unique complications.
Prabhakar acknowledged that there are “important implications” that rise from creating a standard time for the moon, since time moves differently on the moon. Because it has less gravity than Earth, time moves 58.7 microseconds quicker there.
“Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity,” Prabhakar wrote in the letter.
Via The Dispatch.
Every year, fans of Dungeons & Dragons travel to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to celebrate the game and the man credited with creating it.
The Gygax family decided the best way to remember Gary’s legacy was to do what he loved best. After his funeral, they assembled at an American Legion Hall in Lake Geneva (TSR had hosted several early Gen Cons there) to play games. This led to Luke envisioning an annual event, Gary Con, that would not only honor his father but other talented TSR game makers.
Via 1440.
The nominees for the 82nd Hugo Awards have been announced. The nominees include Shannon Chakraborty (my wife loved The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi), Ann Leckie (Translation State), John Scalzi (Starter Villain), and Adrian Tchaikovsky (for his excellent Final Architecture series).
The award winners will be announced on August 11, 2024. Hopefully, the 2024 Hugo Awards can avoid the sort of controversy that plagued last year’s awards.
Earlier this year, I wrote about an AI-generated special that used the likeness of comedian George Carlin. Carlin’s estate sued the special’s creators and won, which Matt Zoller Seitz celebrates as a “victory for copyright protection (and basic decency).”
Recent legal decisions in copyright suits against AI software-makers have already begun to chip away at tech’s insistence (which is laughable on its face) that there is no substantive difference between an aspiring art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings in order to paint in the style of Rembrandt and a soulless digital machine imbibing and digesting millions of works of living artists and vomiting out a zombiefied visual slushy in response to keyboard prompts while the tech’s creators claim that the artists used in the training process aren’t owed anything. The more we find out about how the Gen AI sausage is made, the better the chance that this stuff will be properly regulated. I am even starting to think that perhaps that if things keep going this way, the living persons and companies that produced the creative work that AI is being trained on will be able to demand license fees or other payment, as retroactive partial compensation for their stolen labor.
In light of the surprise announcement that Paste has acquired the AV Club, Phil Christman reflects on his time with the publication and all that’s changed since then.
Tracks magazine is not even remembered, Spin barely exists, Magnet seems to be online-only. Record companies, in fact, as we knew them, barely exist. Books barely exist. (You’ve published two and are writing a third and wonder if that’s it.) George W. Bush goes about the country inadvertently half-acknowledging that he should not have invaded Iraq. All is mist. Only Paste, of all things, survives. When Fear has passed, only Paste will remain.
Donald Trump’s latest grift — endorsing a Bible that contains, among other things, the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”— is just more evidence of the contempt that he has for American evangelicals who really ought to know better by now.
A man who lies like he breathes somehow can’t get motivated to lie persuasively about being pious, even as a gesture of minimal respect for his own fans. That’s remarkable. And insofar as most evangelicals have shrugged it off and rolled over for him anyway, my sympathies lie more with him. He’s been sending them the political equivalent of “Nigerian prince” emails for nine years; if they haven’t wised up yet, that’s a problem with them more so than with Trump.
How can it be that they haven’t wised up, though?
I always assumed that if the American right were to embrace an authoritarian spouting Christian platitudes, that figure would labor to feign authenticity. He would teach himself to quote scripture by chapter and verse and provide all the right answers to questions about his relationship with God when asked. Evangelicals would be able to sniff out a phony, and would righteously despise him for his cynicism in trying to exploit their faith. So he’d need to present a convincing portrait of a follower of Jesus to earn their trust.
That assumption was naive.
Will Rinehart highlights how online trolls can create the illusion of a majority-held opinion.
It only takes one individual to sour the digital experience for many. Indeed, just 1 percent of Reddit accounts are responsible for three-fourths of the platform’s confrontational interactions. Research from the Anti-Defamation League tracked antisemitic tweets in 2015 and found that two out of three came from just 1,600 accounts. Similarly, one report suggested that most vaccine misinformation was being spread by only 12 people.
The widely accepted interpretation has it all wrong. The internet doesn’t make people monsters. Rather, a minority of online miscreants degrade the experience for the broader community. Penn professor Ethan Mollick summarized it nicely when he said, “Political discussions are hostile because the people who like to engage in political discussion are largely hostile people. You just didn’t see it until we were all online.”
From the Blog
Last month, Amazon released a remake of the 1989 film Road House, which famously starred Patrick Swayze. The remake is disappointing on several levels, and I suspect much of that’s due to the modern entertainment landscape which views films less as art and more as IP investments.
Make no mistake, the original Road House is more enjoyable than Amazon’s remake, especially when it embraces its “B” movie nature. Both films, however, struggle when it comes to depicting the ramifications of their protagonists’ actions, and more importantly, their guilt and anger. The original Road House is a bit better — you actually see and believe Swayze’s inner struggle while Gyllenhaal hides it behind smirks and goofy smiles — but neither film ends well. Amazon’s Road House actually had an opportunity to improve upon the original in this particular regard, until it chickened out to leave the door open for a possible sequel.
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