Erica Werner and Jeff Stein, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

Point me in the direction of a single public health expert who says we need less testing. I’ll wait.

Of course we don’t need less testing, we need far more testing, and we need more accurate tests. I’ve been saying this for months, as has anybody with a brain. The fact that Trump thinks we need less testing indicates at best a wholly political approach to addressing the pandemic, and at worst a complete misunderstanding of object permanence.

One of the best ways to safely get the economy back up and running would be to let people who we suspect have immunity (those with COVID-19 antibodies) go out and keep businesses afloat while those who haven’t yet been exposed continue to stay home. The crazy thing is that if everyone played along, we could put this whole thing behind us in a matter of weeks. Blocking funding for testing would be idiotic, selfish, and cruel (nothing new for the Trump administration), but it’s also a huge miss from a political perspective: Americans love an opportunity to rally behind their president to achieve a common goal or defeat a common enemy. Why would the Trump administration pass up such an opportunity during an election year? It’s remarkable hubris and short-sightedness.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 22

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

A few of my most despised senators have teamed up again, but this time, they’re not trying to destroy strong encryption so that the government can spy on us, they’re just peddling some xenophobic bullshit clearly designed to pander to their base.

Senators Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, and Tom Cotton (all from my despised senator list) have joined forces again, this time with Senators Martha McSally and Josh Hawley to introduce legislation that provides an avenue for U.S. citizens to sue the Chinese government for the loss of life and financial hardships they’ve endured as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Not only do they blame China for the pandemic’s disastrous (yet preventable) effects on the U.S., but the press release on Tillis’s website goes so far as to compare the COVID-19 pandemic to 9/11, as if it was somehow an instance of state sponsored terrorism (which won’t help to tamp down preposterous, idiotic, completely unproven conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was designed as a weapon in a Chinese lab). They purport that their bill “is closely modeled after the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), that gave more legal remedies to victims of terrorism, particularly those of 9/11 victims”. Again, obvious pandering, this time packaged with a pathetically weak comparison.

These senators have a remarkable ability to talk out of both sides of their mouth. They’re simultaneously downplaying the severity of the pandemic to make the Trump administration’s inadequate response seem acceptable (god forbid they piss off the Trump klan), and hyping up the death toll and financial costs to rile up their base against a common (and more or less manufactured) enemy. 

The bill doesn’t provide any directive or course of action for citizens seeking to hold the United States government responsible for the ongoing, reckless negligence that they’ve branded as a “response” to the disease.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 21

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

John Gruber, everybody:

Trump’s problem with Bush isn’t partisan. It’s about adherence to foundational American ideals such as the rule of law, and the idea that the President of the United States is the leader of all Americans, not just those who support him. Say what you want about Bush’s presidency, when the nation faced a true crisis on 9/11, he brought the nation together. 

When faced with this crisis, Donald Trump, mind-bogglingly, drove the country further apart. His remaining supporters are with him not despite this, but because of it, like pigs wallowing in mud.

Zachary Cohen, Luke McGee, and Alex Marquardt, reporting for CNN:

Russian cyber actors are targeting organizations involved in coronavirus vaccine development, according to a new warning by US, UK and Canadian security officials on Thursday that details activity by a Russian hacking group called APT29, which also goes by the name “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear.” […]

Cozy Bear is one of two hacking groups linked to Russian intelligence that is believed to have accessed the Democratic National Committee's internal systems in the lead-up to the 2016 US election, but Thursday's announcement is the first time this group has been named in connection to cyberattacks related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The NCSC, which is the UK's lead technical authority on cyber security and part of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), assessed that APT29 "almost certainly operate as part of Russian Intelligence Services". […] This assessment is also supported by partners at the Canadian Communication Security Establishment (CSE), the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NCSC said. […] "APT29's campaign of malicious activity is ongoing, predominantly against government, diplomatic, think tank, healthcare and energy targets to steal valuable intellectual property," according to a press release.

Russia? Conduct a cyber attack against the United States!? They would never!

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🇨🇦 Canada: 0

🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 0

🇷🇺 Russia: 1

🦠 COVID-19: 20

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Natural selection at work in the case of Mr. Richard Rose, reported by Fox News:

“Let [me] make this clear,” Rose wrote. “I’m not buying a f—ing mask. I’ve made it this far by not buying into that damn hype.”

Karma’s a bitch.*

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 19

*I may sound like a bitch too — let me elaborate a bit. Yes it’s a tragedy that someone died, but this man’s death was completely preventable, and it was brought on by his own ignorance and pride. A larger tragedy will be if anyone he came in contact with also dies as a result of his selfishness. Still more tragic is the fact that so many people in our nation are willfully blind to reason because they apparently value the ugly principles of their orange demagogue more than they value their lives.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Today, the United States surpassed three million cases of COVID-19. This is an astonishing number already, but it represents just one percent of the country’s population. The scariest part is that this pandemic could — and likely will — get much worse. If the northeast was to blame for the first two million cases, then the south is certainly to blame for this million (and the next two or three, at this rate).

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m ready for this nightmarish campaign of sickness, death, and governmental negligence to come to its end and be placed definitively in the trash can of history. But some shortsighted people can’t reckon with the fact that the easiest way for us to truly and safely end the lockdowns and get the economy back on its feet (and restart sports, and educate our kids, and take the masks off, reopen businesses, and...) is to decisively beat the virus so that people will feel safe when we’re able to do those things, so we seem to be stuck in this hellscape indefinitely. Beating the virus means wearing masks, avoiding crowds, washing your hands; you know the drill. At this point, if you aren’t doing all you can to help our country move past this embarrassing chapter of our history, then you’re a selfish, irresponsible asshole.

And again, it’s important to ask ourselves why our country has done such a remarkably poor job of dealing with this compared to the countries we usually like to be compared to. Could it have anything to do with our incompetent Commander in Cheeto? You decide.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 18

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Everyone with an iPhone has used FaceTime to make a video call, but few people know much about FaceTime’s little brother, FaceTime Audio. While it doesn’t sound like anything special, it actually has some pretty significant benefits that you should take advantage of every time you can.

FaceTime Audio is essentially an alternative to the traditional phone call. It’s voice only, (no video) so a lot of people assume it’s no different than calling someone using their phone number, but that’s not true at all. FaceTime Audio has a couple big perks over traditional phone calls.

One benefit is that FaceTime Audio calls are made over the internet, rather than using the standard, old school technology that cell phone carriers use when you make a traditional call. Because they use VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), if you have a strong internet connection (whether via wifi or your carrier’s LTE towers), your calls will likely sound clearer than if you’d make a traditional call. It also means that you don’t need a cell phone plan to make a FaceTime Audio call if you have wifi.

Another big benefit is that nobody can listen in on calls you make using FaceTime Audio. When you make a standard phone call, your carrier and the government has tools that allows them to eavesdrop on your call (thanks to the Patriot Act). Fortunately for us, Apple decided to protect FaceTime Audio using end-to-end encryption, which means that there’s no way for someone who isn’t directly included on the call to decrypt its contents. When we say no one, we mean no one — not your carrier, not the government, not Anonymous, not even Apple. It’s as secure as it gets.

To make a phone call using FaceTime Audio, you have a few options. You can initiate the call by just asking Siri to “make a FaceTime Audio call to [person you want to call]”, or you can start it via either the Contacts, Phone, or Messages apps by tapping and holding on the phone button by a person’s name to see a list of call options, and then choosing “FaceTime Audio”. And that’s it. Pretty simple.

Voila! Go forth, and insist that all your friends use FaceTime Audio so as to never have to talk to you on an unprotected, fuzzy sounding, old school phone call ever again.

I live in the south, and though many people here don’t realize it yet, we’re about to get slammed with a wave of COVID-19 infections. In conversations with family members, friends, and coworkers, a frustrating trend has popped up where, even after being presented with valid data or charts showing the increases in COVID-19 cases in the south, they still seem largely unbothered. When you ask why this is, you typically get one of two responses.

The first retort that comes up from people here in the south who aren’t taking the pandemic seriously is that they think hospitals are greatly exaggerating the number of cases they have in an effort to acquire three to four times more money from insurance companies. This piece from USA Today explains some of the details behind that. While it would be possible for a hospital to exaggerate their numbers and receive more money, the amount of the increase in funding is far less significant than fearmongers would have you believe. Additionally, the piece seems to indicate that only Medicare is subject to these possible manipulations, not private insurers. Regardless of these finer details, allow me to pose two questions.

1. Many people claim to know nurses and other hospital staff who provide them with “insider knowledge” of this alleged insurance fraud. But how could one trust the word of such a source, if that source is a person who regularly sees such fraudulent and immoral activities transpiring and doesn’t have the integrity to speak out publicly or report them?

2. If the rise in COVID-19 cases is primarily attributable to dishonest hospital staff, why are states in the sun belt experiencing such an explosion of cases while other areas of the country are not? Do the people who live there suffer from a lack of morals that allows them to be comfortable with their complicity (a lack of morals which, if based on areas with more reported COVID-19 cases, doesn’t seem to affect the northeast or the west coast)? Or is it more likely that the demonstrably less defensive responses of the states with the most severe increases (Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, etc.) simply led to an increase in new infections in the region?

Another rebuttal they’ll offer to support their dismissal of the gravity of the pandemic is the high number of people who experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It’s true that many people who have COVID-19 won’t know it. However, we may not be looking for symptoms in the right places: from the start, we’ve compared sickness caused by the coronavirus to the flu. We looked for respiratory symptoms, but we didn’t necesarily spend a lot of time looking at what other dots we could connect. It’s possible that we missed some things, and new evidence suggets as much. Just this week, we learned that in addition to the serious respiratory symptoms many COVID-19 patients are experiencing, they’re also experiencing serious neurological symptoms. From an opinion piece in The New York Times by Melinda Wenner Moyer:

Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.

According to Dr. Mady Hornig, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the possibility that neurological issues “will persist and create disability, or difficulties, for individuals downstream is really looking more and more likely.”

Note that the French President is a very liberal man, and it wouldn’t make any sense for the “fake news media” (which presumably exists in France) would drum up false conspiracies about COVID-19 to make their President look worse.

If you’re in the south and you still don’t believe this is a big deal, you may not be thinking rationally. Maybe you’re stuck under the spell of Trump’s demagoguery, forced to deny the validity of anything that could cast him in a negative light. Or, maybe you have COVID-19, and it’s affecting your cognitive abilities. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to take a hard look at the data that supports your arguments and question its legitimacy (assuming you have any data to point to).

If you’re in the south and you’re capable of rational thought, check out these charts. They’re frightening but they’re informative, and it’s important for everyone to understand the weight of the threat we face. This is not a left versus right issue. Like it or not, how you react to this will affect others, and how others react will affect you.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

From the opinion of the court in the case of LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR SAINTS PETER AND PAUL HOME v. PENNSYLVANIA ET AL.:

For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother.

Mmmmmm, I bet they have.

“[T]hey commit to constantly living out a witness that proclaims the unique, inviolable dignity of every person, particularly those whom others regard as weak or worthless.” […] But for the past seven years, they—like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision—have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.

The oppression of Christians is unending. Listen, The Little Sisters of The Poor Saints Peter and Paul just really believe in raw dogging it while taking absolutely no precautions and having no backup plan, alright? And they want their employees to enjoy the benefits of bareback gut beating that doesn’t account for its consequences, too. What’s so wrong with that?

In all seriousness, devout conservative Christians, riddle me this: is it worse for someone to have premarital sex with a condom/birth control, or is it worse for someone to have premarital sex without a condom/birth control and subsequently get an abortion? You can’t be pro-life and anti-contraceptive (at least, not if you have even the most basic understanding of cause and effect and human biology). Just because you decided to give up a fulfilling sex life doesn’t mean you have the right to strip others of the same privilege. Sex is a natural part of the human experience, not something to repress or shame; it’s puritanical and archaic that Christian institutions still get off on trying to deny that basic fact and prevent others from expressing their sexuality healthily in the year of our lord 2020.

UPDATED: 7/10/20, 10:09

These charts are startling. The south is heading into a peak similar to the one New York experienced, and we are woefully unprepared for it.

Those charts are interactive over on 91-DIVOC.com, so if you head to their site, you can touch any point to see the specific data behind it. The data itself is from Johns Hopkins University and the WHO, so you can trust it (unless you’re a complete COVID denier or someone who thinks it’s caused by 5G towers/was started in a lab/etc.).

While it’s true that COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as we first thought, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still extremely bad for a ton of people. While a lot of people who get the virus will be asymptomatic, they can still spread it to others. There’s no way to know whether you’ll be someone who experiences the symptoms of not, and it’s selfish to decide that “it’s worth the risk”. People who do experience symptoms get seriously sick, and are appearing to suffering long term problems ranging from difficulty breathing because of scar tissue in their lungs to permanent loss of smell. And that’s not to mention the fact that people are dying. Nearly 130,000 Americans have died: that’s more than the number of American soldiers and civilians who died in World War One.

If you’re in the south, please, do all you can to keep yourself and those around you safe. Here is a list of some of the most important things we all need to do in order to keep this from really getting out of hand.

• Make a concerted effort to stay home more and avoid crowds.

• If you need to go somewhere, try to use a drive-thrus or use curbside pickup at stores. Also, remember to sanitize items you bring into your home. Spritzing groceries with hydrogen peroxide is a great way to get germs, including coronavirus, off of your items (which plenty of other people likely touched).

• If you must go into a public place where you’ll be around people you don’t know, please wear a mask. It isn’t difficult, and it’s not that uncomfortable. Find a cool mask and get excited about wearing it; they don’t have to be boring and ugly to be effective.

• Use lots of hand sanitizer and wash your hands with soap frequently.

• Don’t hoard toilet paper. Or anything else, for that matter.

• Reach out to your representatives and let them know that you expect them to do what’s necessary to keep us safe, from enforcing social distancing and implementing mask requirements, to ensuring that the pandemic unemployment benefits (which end this month) get extended so that people employed in nonessential industries can stay out of work without living in poverty.

Finally, to those who say that this pandemic presents us with a choice between letting a bunch of people get sick and saving our economy, listen up. That line of thinking is being fed to you. It is a false choice. There’s no reason we can’t do both, and in fact, stopping the pandemic definitively will be the best way to get the economy back up and running like normal. Doing a half assed job like we did the past few months is only going to prolong the pain from a belly up economy with 11% unemployment (a number which is about to jump back up). Even if businesses are open, they aren’t going to be successful if people don’t go to them because they’re scared of contracting a deadly virus. It isn’t hard to understand.

Also, Donald Trump still thinks the pandemic is going to “disappear”, so make of that what you will. Plenty of other countries have figured this out, why hasn’t ours?

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 17

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:09

If you’d asked me a few days ago to produce a list of my ten most despised senators, it would’ve included the likes of Richard Burr, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz (’ll freely acknowledge the pattern here: they’re all members of the same group, senators who make bad faith arguments to defend the status quo).

Yesterday, three of them teamed up to give me yet another reason to hate them, and this time, it wasn’t over their support for racist, homophobic, xenophobic policies, but rather a technology issue.

A little bit of important context: the FBI and Apple got into a big showdown several years ago. The FBI asked Apple to unlock an iPhone that had belonged to the San Bernardino mass shooter, and Apple refused. They said no because iPhones use such a strong form of encryption that the only way technically possible for Apple to have unlocked it would have required them to write an altered version of iOS that they could put on this phone to bypass the passcode. Because that altered version of iOS could then be installed on any iPhone, it would have effectively created a backdoor into EVERY iPhone (Apple CEO Tim Cook described this hypothetical, altered version of iOS as “the software equivalent of cancer”). Apple was right to refuse the FBI’s request to create that altered version of iOS, and after several months, the FBI backed down.

Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham proposed legislation that would outlaw what’s know as “end-to-end” encryption. End-to-end encryption is used by Apple to encrypt iMessages, FaceTime calls, and other important data, but it’s also used by just about every other company and industry on planet earth. It’s used to protect sensitive financial information, patient health records, government documents; basically, everything that needs to stay truly private and secure is protected by the type of encryption these senators are seeking to outlaw. The reason for that is because data that is end-to-end encrypted can only be accessed by the individuals on either end of a line of communication, and no companies or governments have backdoors to access your information. Not everything needs that strong level of encryption, but a lot of things do. These senators want to take away your ability to truly protect your digital data and keep your information and communications private. If an altered version of iOS is the software equivalent of cancer, banning end-to-end encryption is the digital equivalent of demanding that people leave their front doors ajar 24/7.

Two talking points in particular come up every time this conversation gets started, and it’s important to address them head on. One of those issues is child pornography. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t prosecute people who abuse children; that isn’t what this is about. The other issue I’d terrorism. They say that by allowing people to encrypt their data in a way that is completely secure, you’re enabling terrorists a safe haven to plot attacks against America. Frankly, these are both tired tropes. They’re bad faith arguments peddled by people who favor less privacy and more invasive government surveillance capabilities, because while “we need to do this to stop terrorists and child abusers” sounds great on its face and will quickly garner public support, it doesn’t do as well when you explain to people what the real trade off is and how it significantly weakens their own privacy and safety. It’s unreasonable and unfair to suggest that because a small number of criminals could find ways to use end-to-end encryption to facilitate illegal activities, that the rest of us shouldn’t have access to it as a means to protect our most sensitive data from bad actors and prying government eyes. We will all be subject to a lot more abuse and attacks if we fling open the gates that protect our most sensitive data.

Also of note: the three senators pushing this legislation are all Republicans, but if there’s a political angle here, I’m missing it. I don’t see how this is a Republican issue at all; conservatives are usually the ones fighting for more restricted government, not a complete shredding of civil liberty. The only thing I can think is that maybe the republicans think this will help them with their base by showing that they’re trying to expand the capabilities of police to prosecute crime. As I mentioned before, that doesn’t really add up because if we allow end-to-end encryption to be allowed, the detrimental effects to law abiding citizens would far outweigh any positive impact on law enforcement’s ability to stop crime.

If this bill becomes law, it will be much worse than the Patriot Act. We’ll find ourselves a lot like the Chinese, living in a surveillance state where the government has unchecked ability to spy on its citizens. Contact your representatives and voice your opposition to this proposal.

As of today, many apps that are submitted for approval to be distributed through Apple’s App Store are required to support a new feature called Sign In With Apple. This is great news for you!

If you’re not familiar, Sign In With Apple is an excellent, user focused feature designed to make it easier to sign in to apps while protecting your privacy. Put simply, it’s a button that will allow you to quickly sign up for/sign in to apps with just a few taps, without having to remember a password or fill out long forms. It gives the application a very limited amount of information about you, including only a name (which you can change if you like) and an email address (which you can opt to disguise in case might later want to be able to easily revoke the app’s ability to email you).

As mentioned above, starting today, all apps that support other third party log in buttons — like the Facebook and Google sign in buttons — are now required to support Sign In With Apple as well, guaranteeing that users have a more private and secure alternative that affords them the same level of convenience. As it stands, Facebook and Google’s buttons are harmful because they set up a link between the tech giants and the app or website you’re using them to sign in to, creating a tunnel for an unfettered flow of your personal information between those entities and the apps, which can be used for targeted advertising and other user hostile practices.

If you have an Apple product*, I would strongly encourage you to start using Sign In With Apple. Not only is it safer and more private than the other third party sign in buttons, but it’s faster too, because you authenticate with Touch ID or Face ID rather than having to type in your Facebook or Google password with their respective sign in buttons.

If you ever need to manage the apps that you let use Sign In With Apple, you can do so on an iPhone or iPad by going to Settings → (Your Name) → Password & Security. You can also do this on a Mac under System Preferences → Apple ID → Password & Security, or on the Apple ID website.

*Note: if you haven’t already, you must first enable two-factor authentication to use Sign In With Apple. To do so on a iPhone or iPad, go to Settings → (Your Name) → Password & Security.

Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Michael Schwirtz, reporting for The New York Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops […]

Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step

We don’t need to make this about Obama, but can you imagine what would Republicans would (rightfully) be saying if they found out he’d known for months that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill American troops and did nothing to stop it? Where is the outrage?

There is no way to justify this. It is treason. It warrants impeachment, removal from office, and prosecution.

We’ve known that Trump doesn’t actually care about our servicemen and women (hail President Bone Spurs), but this is the most shocking and confronting example yet. He’s already been losing a ton of support within the military (if you know a service member, ask them what they think of Trump right now), and it could be a real turning point for many civilians in Trump’s base who genuinely care about supporting our troops.

Anyone who still supports Donald Trump doesn’t support our troops, they spit on their graves. After this, “Trump supporter” and “patriot” are mutually exclusive categories. Anyone still making excuses for this treasonous president should be ashamed of themselves, but they won’t be, because they’ve convinced themselves that maintaining the status quo of a white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic America led by an orange man with thirty or so rape accusations is of greater importance than the lives of those sworn to defend our nation and our constitution.

As we did last year, we’ll cover this up by platform/topic:

tvOS:

• They didn’t really say much about tvOS itself., but they did show off some cool new home features that work with Apple TV.

watchOS:

• The sleep tracking features look pretty nice (thought a bit overdue). You have to manually enable sleep mode every night, so that’s a bummer. Hopefully it’ll gain the ability to detect when you’re sleeping even if you forget.

• The new chronograph face is slick.

• For some reason, they removed Force Touch.

iOS:

•  The new home screen widgets and app library are all that I’d hoped for. I’m very excited for these changed, and they’ve breathed new life into my iPhone.

• The translate app is really neat, I just wish it supported more languages. I’m curious how well it could possibly work, given the shitty state of dictation and Siri.

• The Back Tap Accessibility feature is great.

• I’m very happy that the Siri UI is now less obtrusive. It makes using Siri feel better, even if she hasn’t improved in regards to speech recognition or intelligence.

• Incoming calls no longer hijack the entire screen. 🙌🏼

• The updates for the Messages app will be very nice once everyone’s upgraded. The ability to pin conversations is great, and the new controls and features within group messages will be great (name tagging and in line message threads!).

• We did get some good privacy features. The privacy cards in the App Store will be great, if people actually look at them (I know I will). It’s also really cool that you can now share a general location with an app rather than your precise location. I’m glad you can now restrict which specific photos in your photo library you give apps access to, rather than all or nothing.

• The Music app did get a refresh, but I’m not actually sure that it’s better. The library screen is unchanged.

• The Weather app now incorporates features from Dark Sky, a third party weather app that Apple acquired months ago. They’re using Dark Sky’s minute by minute precipitation predictions, and I’m hoping they incorporate precipitation notifications as well.

• No lockable photo album.

• No improvements to Siri’s speech recognition or intelligence.

• No updated Cash card.

iPadOS:

• The handwriting recognition is cool, and in my experience so far, it works very well.

• The lack of widget options on the iPad home screen is surprising and a little disappointing.

macOS:

• It’s nice that a lot of the iOS messages features are making their way to the Mac after several years.

• I’m glad control center is finally making an appearance.

• Is it just me, or do the redesigned buttons and apps look a lot more finger-friendly? It’s also interesting that most of the screenshots on the macOS Big Sur preview site lack cursors, except for two: in one of those it’s a standard arrow pointer, in the other, it’s a large translucent circle similar to the new iPadOS cursor. I’m not suggesting that they’re merging the platforms, but Apple recently realized that adding cursor support for the iPad didn’t take away from its standing as a touch-first device. I think they’re realizing that the opposite is true for the Mac: adding touch support doesn’t change the device’s nature, it just adds a bit of usability that’s really nice for some use cases.

  Apple Silicon:

• Apple announced that they’re going to start building their own processors for the Mac rather than using Intel processors. Apple’s A12Z chip used in the new iPad Pro (which is nearly identical to the two year old A12X) was able to run macOS and do some really heavy duty lifting without breaking a sweat. Just imagine what a custom Apple chip designed to run macOS will be able to do.

Privacy

• Safari tracking reports are very handy. The number of trackers that Safari has been able to identify and block in the two days I’ve been using iOS 14/iPadOS 14/macOS Big Sur are staggering. I hope people will look at these reports and question the long list of companies who are trying to follow them around the internet. (A quick example from my report: Safari blocked 44 trackers from Olive Garden’s website.)

• When an app wants to access your Local Network to find out what other devices are around you, a permission request will now pop up. Apps can use that information to learn the IP addresses of the devices (other phones, computers, TVs, routers, etc.) that belong to you and others you interact with so that they can send frighteningly specific targeted ads to those devices. There’s almost no reason to grant this permission: unless the app asking for it is an app that facilitates setup of other internet connected devices (like smart light bulbs, for example), you should say no. Amazon? No. Instagram? Nope. YouTube? Definitely not. Facebook? Hell no. Get in the habit of smashing that “don’t allow” button.

• Now, when an app accesses your clipboard, a little message pops up at the top to let you know. At first this seemed unnecessary to me, but the feature quickly outed TikTok for snooping on users (we’ve known that TikTok is a Chinese surveillance instrument — even the Navy and Army have banned the use of TikTok — I don’t know why anyone trusts them) by constantly checking to see what they had in their clipboard, regardless of whether they copied it from the TikTok app or not. They claimed it was to prevent spam (haha), and immediately disabled that function.

• Small dots now show up at the top of the screen to indicate when the microphone (orange dot) and camera (green dot) are being accessed. In time, I’m sure this will out a few apps, as well.

I’m very excited after this WWDC. I know I said I wasn’t particularly hyped up, but man, Apple didn’t disappoint this year. I can’t wait for more people to get their hands on the updates they announced; I’m having a ball with them.

Today, Verizon joined the credit card game by launching their Verizon Visa card.

Seriously, who the hell asked for this? It’s an obvious rip off of Apple Card (which was already a bad move, in my opinion), but from a company who is infinitely worse at customer service. And the APR starts at 21.74%. No thank you.

I’m not the first to point this out, but with watchOS 7, Apple decided to remove Force Touch from the Apple Watch. I’ve been using watchOS 7 for a little more than 24 hours, and I already miss Force Touch a lot.

The Apple Watch was the first device to feature a pressure sensitive touch option, and it made a lot of sense. The display is so tiny that Force Touch was able to solve a lot of problems by effectively doubling the screen real estate for on screen controls. I used it all the time: editing my watch faces, clearing notifications quickly, accessing controls in apps like messages and calendar; the list goes on. I don’t know why on earth they would remove support for it on devices that have hardware dedicated to it, but it’s safe to assume that future models wont have it (I’m really not okay with this, but maybe I’ll be able to make peace with it if it allows them to make the watch noticeably thinner or markedly improve battery life).

Some people have suggested that Force Touch wasn’t widely used on the Apple Watch, but I disagree. I think nearly everyone used it: it was the only way to change your watch face from the watch or clear all your notifications at once. People who say otherwise are likely associating Force Touch too closely with 3D Touch (basically the same thing, they just called it something different for the iPhone). The argument is that not enough people used them because they were difficult to discover, but there’s a diction between 3D Touch and Force Touch and I think that distinction matters: 3D Touch enabled neat shortcuts and features but was ultimately superfluous and unnecessary for navigating the iPhone, but Force Touch enabled some very important functions that couldn’t be accessed otherwise and was nearly essential for navigating the Apple Watch.

On Saturday, Donald Trump had his first campaign rally since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Before it even began, it was shrouded in controversy for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it’s pretty fucking stupid to plan a rally with tens of thousands of people in close proximity in the middle of a highly infectious global pandemic in a state where new cases are rising. Of course, the Trump administration’s response the COVID-19 has mostly been to ignore it, so this isn’t surprising. Secondly, they planned the administration on June 19th, a holiday that has been largely ignored, but which celebrates freedom by commemorating the day when slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation. They also planned the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you don’t know anything about Tulsa, start here:

In the early 20th century, Tulsa was home to the "Black Wall Street", one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States at the time. Located in the Greenwood neighborhood, it was the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre; it has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history", in which mobs of white Tulsans killed black Tulsans, looted and robbed the black community, and burned down homes and businesses. Sixteen hours of rioting on May 31 and June 1, 1921, was ended only when National Guardsmen were brought in by the Governor. An official report later claimed that 23 Black and 16 white citizens were killed, but other estimates suggest as many as 300 people died, most of them Black. Over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, and an estimated 10,000 Black people were left homeless as 35 city blocks, composed of 1,256 residences, were destroyed by fire. Property damage was estimated at $1.8 million. Efforts to obtain reparations for survivors of the violence have been unsuccessful, but the events were re-examined by the city and state in the early 21st century, acknowledging the terrible actions that had taken place.

As per usual, Trump’s campaign is engaging is cruel, race baiting division tactics by holding a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. Oklahoma is a state Trump won by 36 points: there was absolutely no legitimate political reason for him to hold a rally here, this was done entirely out of malice, and his campaign clearly thought they could pass it off as a coincidence. They did eventually conceded to reschedule the rally for June 20th after being criticized for the decision.

On Twitter, the Trump campaign bragged about having given out over a million tickets, and many users pointed out that if that many Trump fans showed up, roughly 980,000 ticket holders we be stuck outside during the event because the venue, the Bank of Oklahoma Center arena, only seats about 20,000 people.

The time for the rally came, 1,000,000 fans however, did not. Not only did a million people not show up, they didn’t even get close to 20,000, with nearly the entire upper bowl of the BOK arena center completely vacant. As reported by The Hill, the Tulsa Fire Department has announced that roughly 6,000 people (supporters, event staff, paid actors, security, etc.) attended the event in total. Not a huge number when you consider how much Trump hyped the event up. It’s also been hilariously pointed out that even The Wiggles managed to sell out this venue, while Trump could hardly reach 33% capacity giving away free tickets.

Trump tweeted photos of the event that were taken from angles clearly intended to highlight the crowd, but even in his own photos, you can see the empty seats in the upper bowl.

Here’s a more honest view:

The Trump campaign said recently that over one million tickets were requested for the Tulsa rally, the first rally in months due to covid-19.

Trump proclaimed that there wouldn’t be an empty seat.

I’ll let this video inside the rally speak for itself. pic.twitter.com/se6er6j49m

— Elizabeth Thomas (@lizzkatherine_) June 20, 2020

I’m sure Brad Parscale and Tucker Carlson will come up with all sorts of crazy reasons why the event’s attendance was so low. They’re already blaming it on the coronavirus and liberal protestors blocking the entrances, but let’s consider that for a second. A bunch of Trump supporters don’t even believe in the coronavirus, and the ones who do have made it well known that they aren’t very worried about it. Also, there probably would’ve been crowds outside if these mythical protesters were preventing people from entering the BOK Center, but there weren’t. In fact, there were so few people outside that they canceled the address Trump had planned to give for all the fans who wouldn’t be able to get in once the venue reached capacity.

Trump claims to have a silent majority, but a more more accurate phrase may be “invisible majority“.

We’re adding a point to our COVID-19 scoreboard based on the fact that our president was stupid and arrogant enough to have a rally during a pandemic.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 16

UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:07

Apple’s WWDC kicks off on Monday, so it’s time for our annual wish list and predictions! This is always a fun time for the Apple nerds out there, and a much bigger deal for most regular people than they realize. Here are my thoughts about this year’s keynote, which is set for Monday, June 22nd, at 10AM (pacific time).

Wish List:

• Fix the atrocious Apple Music app. Get rid of the useless Browse, For You, and Radio tabs at the bottom, and replace them with Playlists, Artists, and Albums. Work in better sorting. Streamline the search feature. [recycled from last year’s list]

• It is HIGH TIME for some Siri improvements. We have been waiting and watching for years, every year expecting this to be the keynote where Apple rolls out a badass new Siri. They’ve teased us a few times with things like Siri suggestions and other minor voice improvements, but at the end of the day, I don’t give a shit about having Siri tell me hockey scores.  I’m talking Iron Man-style, JARVIS-level intelligence. I know that Apple is behind the curve on this as a result of their focus on privacy, but they’ve gotta figure out a way to at least get Siri up to speed with the Google Assistant. [recycled from last year’s list]

  Please. Please, please. Puhleeeaaaazeee. PLEASE. PLEASE make this the year that Siri gets a major boost. I would honestly be completely content, nay, happy, if this were the only change they announce this year. It’s so overdue. Siri was the first voice assistant on the scene, and now she’s in last place for speed, accuracy, and general capabilities. There’s so much potential here to make a truly intelligent voice assistant that would really set the iPhone apart from its competitors.

• I doubt Apple will ever implement this because it would be de facto acknowledging the fact that people use their iPhones to take nudes, but a locked photo album is also overdue.

• New privacy features are always welcome. They didn’t disappoint last year, but a VPN or a social network would still be great.

• iPadOS 14 has the potential to send my MacBook packing, if it’s upgraded as it deserves to be. The iPad Pro Magic Keyboard already has me reaching for my iPad more than I reach for my Mac, but there are some relatively basic everyday workflows (word processing, desktop class browsing, etc.) that are still just easier on the Mac. If they can use iPadOS 14 to make some of those processes even marginally easier, it will make the iPad a much more powerful platform and a truly viable option for people in the market for a new laptop.

• In my opinion, macOS just deserves some bug fixes and attention to detail.

• As I mentioned in my Apple Card review, I would really like for them to expand the capability of the Cash card to function more like a typical checking account.

• I would really like for them to revamp the Apple Watch UI in a meaningful way, and finally give the side button a distinct, useful role in controlling the device. [recycled from last year’s list]

Predictions

• Some people are speculating that we’ll see some new hardware at this year’s keynote. It wouldn’t surprise me to see an upgraded iMac, but I’m not holding my breath for anything brand new like the rumored, tile-like tracking devices (supposedly to be named “AirTags”).

• I predict that Apple will, once again, disappoint me by leaving the Music app practically untouched. [recycled from last year’s list]

• It seems like this may be the year that iOS finally allows for some basic widgets to be permanently affixed on the home screen, and a moderate rethinking of how the home screen functions.

• I feel sure that we’ll see the Apple Watch move more into the category of health/fitness device. Sleep tracking, finally?

• This isn’t an original prediction by any means, but it seems clear that Apple will announce that they’re moving on from using Intel processors in the Mac and begin the transition to their own, Apple designed ARM chips.

I said this last year as well, but this WWDC doesn’t feel particularly exciting. Maybe it’s because so much else is going on in the world, or maybe it’s because Apple’s most exciting platforms are reaching maturity and are now only getting incremental software updates. In any case, lower expectations going in means that there’s a higher likelihood of them surprising us with cool new stuff.

Ashley Cullins, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

Tucker Carlson doesn't have an obligation to investigate the truth of statements before making them on his show, and his audience doesn't expect him to report facts, a lawyer for Fox News told a New York federal judge on Wednesday. […]

Fox News' attorney Erin Murphy argued that […] a reasonable viewer would know [Carlson’s] show offers "provocative things that will help [them] think harder," as opposed to straight news.

"What we’re talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times," said Murphy. “It’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a commentary show.”

It’s always fun to see lawyers forced into corners where the safest legal route is to acknowledge the ugly truths about the companies they work for.

Sounds like Trump is gonna have to make a hard pivot to OANN, now that his longtime favorite network has more or less admitted to serving up fake news.

The final episode of “Defending Jacob”, one of the latest TV+ shows, was released a few weeks ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, Apple describes it as follows:

[The] series unfolds around a shocking crime that rocks a small Massachusetts town and one family in particular, forcing an assistant district attorney to choose between his sworn duty to uphold justice and his unconditional love for his son.

I really enjoyed the show. I found it very engaging, and each week I found myself looking forward to the next episode being released. The story itself was well written, and the show was very well produced.

The cast was terrific. There’s absolutely nothing not to love about Chris Evans. I thought Jaeden Martell’s performance was particularly strong, and he really nailed portraying a likable but reserved character with depth and conviction (poor choice of words). Michelle Dockery’s character felt a little too scripted in the first episode, but her performance soon felt every bit as genuine as her co-stars. And Cherry Jones was brilliant, as usual.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would definitely recommend you check it out.

Spoiler Warning ⚠️

I’m not a huge fan of ambiguous endings, but speculation can be fun. There are two characters who can be reasonably suspected of being the murderer. Jacob sort of confessed but he was clearly scared and arguably under duress, so who’s to say if he was telling the truth? Leonard Patz absolutely confessed, but he was absolutely under duress, so again, who’s to say he was telling the truth?

There’s plenty incriminating evidence to suggest that Jacob is guilty, most of all the story he posted on “The Cut Up Room”. But as Joanna points out, the story he wrote didn’t have any details that weren’t already public knowledge: you wouldn’t have to have been the murderer to write the story, just a bit twisted in the head, maybe as a result of having been bullied by the kid who was killed. I didn’t find the whole knife debacle incriminating — plenty of teenage boys have knives, in the south at least — but Jacob’s fingerprint on Ben’s sweater was a different story. It isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it certainly doesn’t look good. There’s not too much left to discuss in Jacob’s case, because they devoted eight episodes to it.

However, there’s a lot of room for further speculation in the case of Leonard Patz. There is evidence to suggest that he killed Ben, and the fact that he himself was murdered doesn’t exculpate him. There’s no explanation of why he had photos of Ben on his phone. His proximity to the scene of the crime on the morning of Ben’s murder is also difficult to write off. Not to mention that there’s a record of Patz being attracted to adolescent guys who fit the same physical profile as Ben Rifkin. Of course, it could’ve been a coincidence that Ben was killed in the park where Leonard walks in the mornings, and there’s no record of Leonard being aggressive or dangerous towards Matt McGrath (Leonard’s only “victim”*). It’s also worth pointing out that the photos Leonard had of Ben weren’t crime scene photos — as with the story Jacob wrote, while it doesn’t look good, you wouldn’t have to have been the murderer to have those photos — they easily could’ve been images Ben had posted on social media. In all honesty, I felt bad for Leonard pretty much the entire time because I truly don’t think he killed Ben, and if that’s the case, then he was harassed, scapegoated, defamed, and brutally murdered because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, his only crime having been copping a feel of a consenting fifteen year old’s package through his shorts.

All in all, the story was certainly thought provoking. I don’t really see how there could be a second season, unless they want to pull Jacob out of his coma (yes, it literally ends with him in a coma; very soap opera-y) and do the whole thing again with a different murder victim (which they very nearly repeated in this season).

*I use quotes around the word “victim” in this sentence not because I question the legitimacy of Matt McGrath’s accusation against Leonard Patz, but because I don’t consider him a victim, and I don’t think he considers himself a victim, either. Matt was clearly sexually active and knew what was going on, and he solicited a transaction with Leonard. That doesn’t make it legal — the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16 and Matt was 15 at the time — but still, it’s hard for me to see Matt as a victim when he had the agency to make Leonard an offer in the first place.