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The Literal-Extreme Edition Saturday, March 17, 2018

Apple Shares Fun ‘Unlock’ iPhone X Ad Showcasing The Convenience Of Face ID, by Peter Cao, 9to5Mac

Apple’s Face ID unlocking feature on the iPhone X is a joy to use. It almost feels like there’s no passcode to your phone as it’s such a seamless experience. A new ad released by the company takes this to a literal extreme.

The Face ID Attention-based Notification Preview Feature Is Great..., by Benjamin Mayo, Twitter

... but the transition needs some finessing.

iOS 11 Bugs Are So Common They Now Appear In Apple Ads, by Tom Warren, The Verge

If you blink during Apple’s latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. It’s right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble it’s supposed to stay inside.

Stuff

Hands On: Do More, Faster On Your iPad Or iPhone With Launch Center Pro 2.9, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

Automation tool Launch Center Pro starts easy and gets complicated very quickly. For hardcore users, the app is great.

Google Lens Is Now Available On iOS, by Thuy Ong, The Verge

Google is officially rolling out its Lens feature to Apple iOS devices over the next few weeks. Lens is an on-demand object recognition tool, accessible through the Google Photos app. When users take a photo of a book or painting, for example, Lens recognizes it and spits out information telling you more details about the object.

Notes

'They'll Squash You Like A Bug': How Silicon Valley Keeps A Lid On Leakers, by Olivia Solon, The Guardian

“It’s horrifying how much they know,” he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity. “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.”

The public image of Silicon Valley’s tech giants is all colourful bicycles, ping-pong tables, beanbags and free food, but behind the cartoonish facade is a ruthless code of secrecy. They rely on a combination of Kool-aid, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft and other criminal activity. However, those same tools are also used to catch employees and contractors who talk publicly, even if it’s about their working conditions, misconduct or cultural challenges within the company.

Why Wikipedia Works, by Brian Feldman, New York Magazine

But the fact that YouTube sees Wikipedia as a reliable source is also, in a sense, a total validation of Wikipedia’s mission. A encyclopedia, open to edits from anyone, could easily have been misused and abused. Instead, it’s become the default place to find facts online. Even Google knows this: When you search for certain things, Google will pull information “snippets” about those terms from Wikipedia. And Wikipedia makes its content free for people to license and reproduce wherever they see fit — including the world’s most powerful search engine. [...]

It’s worth examining, then, how Wikipedia has managed to maintain its role as a reliable database without thousands of paid moderators and editors, while major, well-funded platforms like Facebook and YouTube have become the subjects of frenzied debate about misinformation.