Plutonic Rainbows

Apple versus the FBI

February 27, 2016

I have a feeling this FBI versus Apple thing is going to drag on for years. There is simply too much at stake on both sides.

Wired article:

At first glance, the issue seems simple: Why shouldn’t law enforcement have access to information that could help us hunt down other terrorists or even to help prevent other terrorist attacks in the future?

But this simplification overlooks the reason why companies have built their systems so securely to begin with: namely, to prevent criminals, terrorists and hackers from gaining access to our private and sensitive information. It’s a huge technological breakthrough that engineers are able to build systems so secure that even their own architects cannot break into them. And it’s why major players in the tech industry—from Facebook and Twitter to Microsoft and Google—are lining up to support Apple’s stance.

It Could Happen

February 27, 2016

People are beginning to ponder the idea that Donald Trump could actually be the next president of the United States. Historically, one wonders if the same fears surfaced when they elected a movie star to run the country.

The worst video game in history

February 22, 2016

The video game of Steven Spielberg's ET is considered to be one of the worst of all time and has even been blamed for triggering the collapse of Atari. Howard Scott Warshaw, the gifted programmer who made it, explains how it was rushed out in a matter of weeks - and how he feels about those events in California now.

"Things just started to unravel," says Warshaw. "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."

I remember hearing about the landfill story many years ago. I had no idea it was true.

Not a marketing strategy

February 22, 2016

Apple has shared a new Q&A page that explains why the company is opposing a court order to create a unique version of iOS that would bypass security protections and allow an iPhone to be unlocked by way of a brute-force attack.

Law enforcement agents around the country have already said they have hundreds of iPhones they want Apple to unlock if the FBI wins this case. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks. Of course, Apple would do our best to protect that key, but in a world where all of our data is under constant threat, it would be relentlessly attacked by hackers and cybercriminals. As recent attacks on the IRS systems and countless other data breaches have shown, no one is immune to cyberattacks.

Again, we strongly believe the only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.

Lost Sounds of Antiquity

February 21, 2016

Great piece by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic:

History is mostly silent to us now. Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.