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I have been following this story for some days now, and I can’t figure out why US companies and brands are standing up for freedom of speech. The worst offender in this, in my opinion, is Apple, the so-called champion of privacy and human rights in the tech industry.

From Ars Technica:

“The app has been used to target and ambush police” in Hong Kong, Apple claims.

Source: In flip-flop, Apple bans app used by Hong Kong protestors

From Charles Mok’s Twitter:

Today I wrote to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to tell him his company’s decision to remove HKmap live app from Appstore will cause problems for normal Hong Kong’s citizens trying to avoid police presence while they are under constant fear ofpolice brutality. Values over profits, pls!

Source: https://twitter.com/charlesmok/status/1182336160611201024

I understand that no decision is easy. That there are many consequences to decisions from either angle. I also understand that this does not comport with Apple’s marketing and until now, what I thought to be a core philosophy.

From Nick Start writing for The Verge:

Apple capitulating to the Chinese government is nothing new. The company’s deep business interests in China, which include a majority of its consumer electronics supply chain, mean that in almost all cases, it abides by the country’s censorship policies and its sensitive reactions to any and all criticism of the Chinese government.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20907228/apple-quartz-app-store-china-removal-hong-kong-protests-censorship

Apple must be scrambling for time. I can’t imagine they would want to continue to rely on Chinese manufacturers to assemble iPhones and other devices for them. While it is certain that this isn’t a decision one can do overnight, even with the power a company like Apple has, it also must be done in as little time as possible.

How long could that take? 1 year? 3 years? 10?

My guess is this is closer to 10 than 1.

The article is supposed to be about the 50 states PR move around the, then new, artist Sufjan Stevens. It is about that, but this is the piece that kills me:

The tipping point came in late July. Pitchfork, the increasingly influential arbiter of indie (full disclosure: I am a contributor there), had given the album a lukewarm review—“a 7.5,” Gill claims, “and it wasn’t Best New Music.” Except the site’s top editor, Ryan Schreiber, had not actually heard it. “We were bugging him to actually listen to it. And then he listened to it and he freaked out and he was like, ‘I can’t believe we gave this album a 7.5,’” Gill says.

Pitchfork is such a waste of space. They were/are so influential, yet clearly are fine with making up scores and standing behind articles written about albums that hadn’t listened to.

Source: Sufjan Stevens and the Curious Case of the Missing 48 States

I find this disgusting. Yes, the brand violated Wikipedia’s Terms of Use, but more importantly, they promoted a company by violating the integrity of one of the few remaining ideals of the Internet.

The brand and agency took pictures of athletes wearing the brand while trekking to famous locations around the world, including Brazil’s Guarita State Park and Farol do Mampimptuba, Cuillin in Scotland and Peru’s Huayna Picchu. They then updated the Wikipedia images in the articles for those locations so that now, the brand would appear in the top of Google image search results when consumers researched any of those locations

Source: The North Face used Wikipedia to climb to the top of Google search results | AdAge

Amazing account of hiking through Chernobyl. Some of the details they recount are incredible, for instance, the levels of radiation at the same building being drastically different based on assumed conditions at the time of the explosion.

Exhausted, we picked an apartment building at random and went in. Our initial thought was to camp on the roof, but the radiation on the roof’s surface was over 50 μSv/hr, so we moved to apartment #23 instead. The radiation there was only 0.08 μSv/hr (actually lower than our apartment in California). The former occupants must have had their windows closed when the explosion occurred. We collapsed and slept for most of the day.

Source: Moxie Marlinspike >> Stories >> Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

The FCC details a common phone scam strategy, the one-ring scam.

One-ring calls may appear to be from phone numbers somewhere in the United States, including three initial digits that resemble U.S. area codes. But savvy scammers often use international numbers from regions that also begin with three-digit codes – for example, “649” goes to the Turks and Caicos and “809” goes to the Dominican Republic.

If you call any such number, you risk being connected to a phone number outside the U.S. As a result, you may wind up being charged a fee for connecting, along with significant per-minute fees for as long as they can keep you on the phone. These charges may show up on your bill as premium services.

The current administration is fine with this being the best you hear about one-ring scams. In fact, I’m surprised the FCC (which still has many people who do good work, and want to help people, but have been hampered from doing so) has released this much information on the scam and how to avoid it.

Long story short – in this age of VOIP services and cell phones, if you don’t recognize a number, don’t answer it. If they don’t leave a voicemail, don’t call them back. If you do, you may want to disable international calling on your service.

As long as phone service providers make money, they have little incentive stop these scams without government intervention and regulation.

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Af Klint’s lush, cryptic paintings have been almost universally praised by critics as a breath of fresh air. And, at a time when personal narrative is more important than ever in terms of how audiences engage with art, she also has a compelling biography (though the timeline of her life is, in truth, still filled with enigmas). Born in 1862, af Klint turned to spiritualism after the loss of her sister. Working with a group of women called the Five, she committed herself in near-secret to an epic cycle of mediumistically inspired abstract paintings—only to be nearly forgotten and then discovered by a new generation.

Source: Here’s How the Hilma af Klint Show Played Perfectly Into the Current Zeitgeist to Become the Guggenheim’s Most-Visited Exhibition Ever | artnet News

Loved by museumgoers and critics alike, the popular exhibition has drawn 600,000 to the Guggenheim since it opened on October 12. More than 30,000 catalogues for the exhibition were sold, surpassing the last record set by a Kandinsky catalogue in 2009

Source: Hilma af Klint Breaks Records at the Guggenheim Museum

Those were the words of profession art writers and critics, here are my own:

The reason this exhibit is so well visited is simple: It is phenomenal work, so far ahead of its time unseen and unknown by most until this year. I had the pleasure of visiting the museum earlier this year, and if you are in New York and have the means to do so, I highly encourage you to brave the crowds and see these works.

All of the images are my own.

The show’s official photographer runs us through 11 of her favorite shots.

Source: How the SNL Portrait Became Its Own Art Form

The person even allowed a fellow customer to get in front of the line at the store to make a Mega Millions lottery ticket purchase, according to a commission statement. “A simple act of kindness led to an amazing outcome.”

by David K. Li

That’s not how this works. If the person didn’t get in front of them, it isn’t like the person behind them would have received their number. pseudorandom number generators don’t work like that. In fact, even if all of this took place, but the attendant hit the button to generate a new ticket a second later it probably wouldn’t come up with the same number.

The article is associating kindness with winning a lottery. That isn’t how kindness works, and it certainly isn’t how lotteries work.