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Wednesday Morning: Breaking Spring

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In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

— excerpt, Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Welcome to spring break. And by break, I mean schedules are broken around here. Nothing like waiting up until the wee hours for a young man whose fancy not-so-lightly turned to love, because spring.

~yawn~

While the teenager lies abed yet, mom here will caffeinate and scratch out a post. It may be early afternoon by the time I get over this spring-induced sleep deprivation and hit the publish button.

Apple blossoms — iPhones and iPads, that is
Not much blooming on the #AppleVsFBI front, where Apple now seeks information about the FBI’s method for breaking into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5C. The chances are slim to none that the FBI will tell Apple anything. Hackday offers a snappy postmortem about this case with an appropriate amount of skepticism.

I wonder what Apple’s disclosure will look like about this entire situation in its next mandatory filing with the SEC? Will iPhone 5C users upgrade to ditch the undisclosed vulnerability?

What if any effect will the iPhone 5C case have on other criminal cases where iPhones are involved — like the drug case Brooklyn? Apple asked for a delay in that case, to assess its position after the iPhone 5C case. We’ll have to wait until April 11 for the next move in this unfolding crypto-chess match.

In the meantime, spring also means baseball, where new business blossoms for Apple. Major League Baseball has now signed with Apple for iPads in the dugout. Did the snafu with Microsoft’s Surface tablets during the NFL’s AFC championship game persuade the MLB to go with Apple?

Volkswagen coasting
It’s downhill all the way for VW, which missed last week its court-imposed 30-day deadline to offer a technical solution on its emissions standards cheating “clean diesel” passenger vehicles. If there was such a thing as “clean diesel,” VW would have met the deadline; as I said before, there’s no such thing as “clean diesel” technology. The judge allowed a 30-day extension to April 24, but my money is on another missed deadline. Too bad there’s not a diesel engine equivalent of Cellebrite, willing to offer a quick fix to VW or the court, huh?

Of note: former FBI director Robert Mueller has been named “special master” on this case by Judge Charles Breyer; Mueller has been meeting with all the parties involved. What the heck is a “special master”? We may not have a ready answer, but at least there’s a special website set up for this case, In re: Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” MDL.

The cherry on top of this merde sundae is the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit filed yesterday against VW for false advertising promoting its “clean diesel” passenger cars.

With no bottom yet in sight, some are wondering if VW will simply exit the U.S. market.

Automotive odd lot

  • Jury says GM’s ignition switch was bad, but not at fault in a 2014 accident in New Orleans (Reuters) — Keep an eye on media representation of this case. Headline on this one focused on the switch, not the jury’s decision.
  • Car-to-car communications will be road tested soon (MIT Technology Review) — This technology might have prevented Google’s self-driving car from getting crunched by a bus recently.
  • Dude demonstrates his hack of Alexa + Raspberry Pi + OBDLink to remote start his car (Gizmodo) — What. even.

    • Did Tennyson write anything about spring spawning naps? Because I feel like I need one. Hope we’re back in the groove soon. See you in the morning.

Thursday Morning: Two Too Good

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I would post this video every week if I could get away with it. It’s a favorite in my household where three of us play string instruments. I’ve blown out speakers cranking these guys up as far as I can (shhh…don’t tell the dude in charge of speaker maintenance here).

You’ll note this post is pushed down the page as Marcy’s last two posts about #AppleVsFBI (here and here) have been picked up by several news outlets. Let’s let new readers have the rail for a bit.

NC and GA state legislatures wreaking bigoted havoc
Regressive bills allowing open practice of anti-LGBT bigotry have been working their way through states’ legislatures in the wake of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Indiana and Arizona are two examples where bills using a template based on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) have been passed. Arizona’s governor Jan Brewer made an unusually rational move and vetoed the bill. Indiana did not, and many organizations protested until an amendment was passed modifying SB 101‘s worst component.

Georgia’s legislature passed their own spin on RFRA, The Free Exercise Protection Act; the bill is now in the hands of Gov. Nathan Deal, who has until the first week of May to sign it into law. The state has an emerging film and TV production industry, home to popular shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead. Disney and its subsidiary Marvel yesterday announced they would yank production out of Georgia if Gov. Deal signed the bill. AMC followed suit and announced it too would pull out of Georgia. Other corporations with business interests in GA, like The Dow Chemical Company, are also unhappy. How many more companies will it take before Deal wises up and vetoes the bill or demands amendment?

Sadly, North Carolina’s GOP-led legislature rushed through a bill yesterday with a slightly different spin — like a proof-of-concept for the rest of the states where RFRA bills have been unable to gain traction while avoiding the potential for boycotting leveraged against the governor. Anti-transgender fear-mongering was used to force HB2-Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act through while avoiding “religious freedom” as a promotional feature. It was signed into law yesterday by NC’s jackass governor, Pat McCrory, who tweeted,

Ordinance defied common sense, allowing men to use women’s bathroom/locker room for instance. That’s why I signed bipartisan bill to stop it.

I signed bipartisan legislation to stop the breach of basic privacy and etiquette, ensure privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms.

Except that HB2 not only overturns local ordinances protecting LGBT persons, it prevents transpersons from using the facilities appropriate to their transgender, and it allows businesses to post notices they will not serve groups. Welcome back, Jim Fucking Crow.

The bill was not truly bipartisan, either. Although 14 idiotic state house Democrats voted for the bill, the entire Democratic state senate caucus walked out in protest rather than vote on the bill at all. Methinks NC Dem Party discipline needs a little work, and state house members need a little less bigotry.

Speaking of which, DNC was typically ineffectual, offering a bunch of jargon instead of straight talk about NC’s discrimination. Are there any groups at all the DNC under its current leadership will really extend any effort except for corporations?

The speed at which the bill passed through NC’s legislature during an “emergency” session — because making sure the body parts align with the identity on the bathroom door is an emergency! — may have prevented the state’s largest employers from responding appropriately. Let’s see if NC’s largest employers, including University of North Carolina, Time Warner Cable, Duke Energy, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, and the many sci-tech companies of Research Triangle, will wise up and demand an end to the ignorance and bigotry of Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.

Finished digging out here after a late season snow storm, now serving up a hot dish brunch casserole made with a mess of oddments.

  • Diebold buys German competitor Wincor Nixdorf (Bloomberg) — wonder how this industry shakes out as mobile payment systems become more popular and more widely accepted.
  • Speaking of mobile payment systems: Apple Pay expected to expand to apps and websites before Christmas shopping season (FastCompany) — expected to take a bite out of PayPal’s market share, but if transactions are conducted online, this could eat into other payment processing systems. Need the importance of encryption be pointed out yet again, too?
  • Apple’s new, smaller iPhone SE available for pre-orders today (BusinessInsider) — also iPad Pro. Already hearing strong interest from a lot of women about the smaller phone; they’ve been unhappy with the increasing size of iPhones.
  • Nielsen TV ratings data will begin tracking streaming equipment brands (FastCompany) — their data will be based on 40,000 households, though. Apparently sales of streaming equipment like Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku aren’t granular enough for firms acquiring content consumption data. Wonder how long before Nielsen itself is replaced by network sniffing?
  • Related? Funny how Iran is the focus of the first, but not mentioned in the second:
  • AI-written novel survives first round in Japanese literature contest (DigitalTrends) — and you thought it was just the news that was generated by robots.

That’s a wrap, catch you tomorrow morning!