Excursions

I wonder what has caused a sudden surge of Bluetooth earbuds being made available in the market. I see almost every player - big and small - launching one of its own. Sure, Airpod’s a success. But it wasn’t the first one. Is it the lack of 3.5mm jack? And so was Apple right?

I am on a journey to consciously reclaim focus from the shambles of the distracting digital world. As part of the process, I have started actively following one more routine - I log out of every social media service once I have used it.

I have, since long, not had any social media apps on my mobile device. This has helped me reduce the subconscious pick-ups of the device. At the same time, it was really easy to access the service in a browser. Especially because it is just one tap away in my favourites. That’s as good as having an app on my device.

To deter these, I now log out of every service from my browser once I have used it. So, every time I am tempted to access any of these services, an additional step of logging in is needed. There’s also an added barrier of two-factor authentications for the services that support it. Cal Newport aptly captures this sentiment of mine.

By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life.

All and all, this one step alone of logging in every time is enough to fool my lazy mind to stay away from these “crutches”. And hence not subconsciously spend any time on the services.

Update: I have already gotten rid of every social media platform I do not need (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat). I am active only on Twitter and Micro.blog. To reiterate, my logout routine is applicable to every site that serves feed of some kind. Including email, feed readers, instant messaging platforms etc.

Besides, I have started accessing these social services only at my desktop browser in Private mode (the Incognito mode in Firefox). So even if I forget to logout, it does not matter. Once the window is closed, all my session information is lost.

I believe this change should also help me from a privacy perspective. The belief is the cookies from these data-hungry social media services would not follow me as I browse around the Internet.

Can’t they? Won’t they? That’s a whole different discussion. But overall am spending a lot less time absentmindedly scrolling these stupid feeds. I feel a lot less burdened thanks to that.

By now, the privacy threats posed by Amazon Alexa and Google Home are common knowledge. Workers for both companies routinely listen to audio of users—recordings of which can be kept forever—and the sounds the devices capture can be used in criminal trials.

Now, there’s a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn’t just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany’s Security Research Labs developed eight apps—four Alexa “skills” and four Google Home “actions”—that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these “smart spies,” as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords.

These horror stories of privacy violations on smart speakers are unending. There are just a few options here.

1. Don’t have anything, that has a mic or camera and is connected to the internet, around you.
2. If that’s too much for you, don’t have any smart speakers in your home. Use your smartphone to connect to a good old Bluetooth speaker.
3. If you do want a smart speaker around, learn you to use it cautiously. Switch it off when not needed. Use the mute option. Do not, do not install any third-party skill on the device. Let only Google and Amazon track you. At the very least, they can be held accountable.

Infinite scrolling sucks. I hate that more and more websites are implementing this terrible feature. It fails user-experience wise. I am at your website to read a particular article — don’t try to entice me with another totally unrelated one.

If you do decide to support this feature, don’t plaster it over your existing website design. That footer you have at the end? Yeah, that’s not accessible. Contact information, copyright notices, nothing can be reached. (Update: This article by Adrian Roselli details more such points).

The only publication that I feel has done this well is TechCrunch. They have thought the experience through and designed the interfaces around that.

I understand why publications want this to succeed. It leads to more page views, and hence possibly to more advertising revenue. But I was pretty surprised to see that even Dave Winer felt the need to support it on his simple blog. Completely unnecessary.

Update: Another aspect I did not think of initially was around accessibility. It must be an extreme nightmare. I think it is an issue even bandwidth wise. Especially on mobile devices. So in short, just don’t implement this solution.

It’s so ironic that Google names one of the colours on pixel 4 as “Oh So Orange” and make it not orange at all. They could very well have named it as “Not Orange”. Plus what’s the recent craze of silly names? The “cute” colour names for the devices do not lead to more sales.

📚 Finished reading Sourcery. I usually enjoy the fantastical narration that Terry Pratchett weaves. But with this one, it was a tad bit incoherent. Some characters just weren’t fun, enjoyable. And they all combined failed to work well together. Rincewind to go on pause.

Early morning drive through the nature with a steady drizzle around is always rejuvenating. Especially with the windows rolled down!

John Gruber wonders what’s holding Instagram back from launching a Instagram for iPad. Especially when they adjusted their app for Galaxy Fold.

Instagram is willing to update their Android app to adjust to the extraordinarily niche Galaxy Fold, but still hasn’t updated their iOS app to adjust to the extraordinarily popular and much-used iPad?

I feel there are a couple points here that might help understand this.

1. Instagram still believes it is a creative photo sharing application first. This is what the first line on their homepage reads - “a simple, fun & creative way to capture, edit & share photos, videos & messages”. They possibly want more creators on their platforms than passive consumers of the stream of photos. For them then, iPad is not a good device for taking pictures.
2. According to them, Galaxy Fold is still a smartphone first with a first rate camera system. So, it deserves providing the first rate experience of using Instagram.

Of course, how true this assumption is, is debatable.

Apparently, Google’s face unlock on Pixel 4 can allow access to a user even if he has his eyes closed. This comes around the same time when a critical bug was detected in the fingerprint unlock on Samsung’s Galaxy S10 devices.

Both the companies put out a completely tone-deaf first response. Samsung, naively, suggested using their “authorised” accessories. Google, on the other hand, reiterated that theirs is a “strong biometric” solution.

I am really surprised by this callous attitude towards the user’s security on the devices.

Google preferred to focus on the gimmicks in Project Soli rather than strengthening the face unlock first. They felt a need to differentiate their face unlock feature from iPhone’s. Samsung felt the need to go with a different mechanism of the ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint reader. All others use optical ones.

This need to differentiate for the sake of differentiation is laughable.

A tweet from Rene Ritchie sums it nicely.

If we’ve learned anything over the last couple of days it’s that good biometrics take a lot of consideration.

Smartphones have become critical for many in their day-to-day use-cases, from identity to banking. And the inbuilt biometric solutions are increasingly being depended on to validate that identity. So the OEMs can’t afford a misstep with these solutions.

I hope the smartphone makers realize they can’t deal indifferently with the security of the devices.

I did not watch the Google event yesterday. And almost everyone is saying the actual event was a bit messy, boring. I guess it was good that I did not spend 2 hours then. I think recent events from all the companies have received similar criticisms — must be a trend.