274: ‘Sport Mode’ With Merlin Mann
The Talk Show With John Gruber
01/18/20
•121m
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Special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show. Topics include the renewal of U.S. law enforcement officials' disingenuous campaign against iPhone encryption, the Houston Astros cheating scandal, how that cheating scandal relates to the Trump impeachment saga, and Catalyst and the art of Mac software design. But mostly we talk about finding a good pair of slippers.
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Links:
- Trump’s tweet (what else) excoriating Apple for “refus[ing] to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements”.
- Scaring people into supporting backdoors.
- Wired: “Encrypted Messaging Is Essential, But It Isn’t Magic”.
- Merlin on Back to Work, speculating on how many Apple employees today have grown up more on iOS than MacOS, and how that might be starting to shape MacOS:.
- Great video from the always-great CGP Grey: “Should all locks have keys? Phones, Castles, Encryption, and You.”.
- Mack Weldon’s One-Mile Slipper.
- Professional-Grade Crocs.
- Something pretty similar to the coffee filter cone I’ve been using for 20 years (but I only paid like $4-5 for mine).
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Previous Episode
273: ‘My Cousin Hans’ With Rene Ritchie
December 31, 2019
•119m
It’s the last show of the decade. Special guest: Rene Ritchie.
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Links:
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Next Episode
275: ‘Fake Faces’ With Glenn Fleishman
January 23, 2020
•180m
Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show. Topics include iPhone encryption, the privacy implications of widely-available reverse image search for faces, deep-learning-powered algorithmically-generated faces, and Jeopardy’s “Greatest of All Time” tournament.
Sponsored by:
- Clear: Get through security even faster. Get your first 2 months free with code talkshow.
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Links:
This is Jeopardy:
- Jeopardy’s Greatest of All Time Tournament.
- Glenn’s analysis of matches 1–3 for Motherboard.
- Glenn’s archive of articles regarding Jeopardy.
- Prisoner of Trebekistan, by Bob Harris.
- Ken Jennings’s excellent Twitter account.
iPhone encryption:
- Jack Nicas’s New York Times column on how iPhone encryption works.
- My link to Nicas’s column, with a few additional thoughts.
Algorithmically-generated faces:
- The Washington Post: “Dating Apps Need Women. Advertisers Need Diversity. AI Companies Offer a Solution: Fake People”.
- Glenn on deep fake faces, last year for Fast Company .
- Facebook removes profiles with fake pics.
Facial recognition search:
- Kashmir Hill’s stunning report for The Times on Clearview AI, a Peter-Thiel-backed company that supplies law enforcement with facial recognition search, built using a library of billions of photos uploaded to the web.
- Nelson Minar on Yandex’s reverse image search for faces, which is startlingly accurate, and available to anyone.
- Screenshot of Yandex search results for my own face.
Miscellaneous:
- Tiny Type Museum.
- Election Ride Home podcast.
- The intense concentration required by grandmaster-level chess burns thousands of calories per day.
- YubiKey 5Ci — 2FA dongle with Lightning and USB-C jacks ($70 though).
- Loyola Maramount’s 1990 high-scoring men’s basketball team.
- Have I Been Pwned? — Fantastic resource where you can search to see if you have an account that was compromised in a data breach. Spoiler: you probably do.
- Kashmir Hill, writing for Gizmodo last year: “I Cut the ‘Big Five’ Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell”.
- The New York Times: “One Nation, Tracked”.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
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