Thord D. Hedengren

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  • So I sold a company

    So I sold a company

    I started the Odd Alice web agency in 2010, as a spin-off to another company. The idea was to not say no to so many gigs, because it turns out that writing books about WordPress is a great way to get work. Malin joined as a founder, and we ran and owned the company up until August 1st this year, when the deal reached the point of merging offices.

    Odd Alice has joined 24HR, and a new chapter begins.

    Personally, I’ve stepped in as interim boss person at the Stockholm office. There you’ll also find most of the team, alongside the fine folks already at the 24HR Stockholm office. I’m also involved in the overarching scheme of things, which means that I’m looking forward to figure out what we can do with 24HR and its two offices (Malmö and Stockholm). I’m sure it’ll be an interesting ride. There are plenty of things to do.

    I’d like to thank my fellow co-workers at Odd Alice for getting us this far. This was never a solo show, it’s been a team effort all along.

    Alexander, David, Mikael, Rickard, Jesper, and Maria, you’re all bloody great, it’s been awesome having you on this trip for a little while.

    Mark, Mattias, Anders, and Marco, I’m delighted to get to keep working and hanging out with you guys. Together we’ll make it even further, climb even higher, and drink even better whisky.

    And finally, Malin. This wouldn’t have happened without you. The odd little Alice-being has grown up to something new. That’s a good thing we did, isn’t it?

    It’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s not over yet. Onwards!

  • It starts on the phone

    It starts on the phone

    It starts on the phone, always. Proximity is key, because it didn’t use to be like this, but today the phone is always there, and it’s an amazing piece of hardware that invites interaction. It also invites distraction, but that’s something you and I must handle ourselves. The phone can’t do it for us, it can only enable whatever it is you want enabled.

    Ideas comes at any time, they follow no pattern. They come, because we force them to or by themselves due to something going on in the back of our heads. Processing, stand by please – all done, here’s your lightbulb! You write them down, because ideas are precious. It used to be that you scrambled for pen and paper, or something resembling the two, but no more. Or if you do, it’s because you made a conscious decision to do so, to rely on those particular tools. I get that, it’s understandable because the pen and the paper are wonderful things, borderline mythical in today’s society. We buy our pens and notebooks, we might even subscribe to them, because they are precious to us. A relic of a notion of a concept of yore.

    The phone is always there, waiting for you. If you’re organized and structured, then the same might be universally true for your pen and notebook, but I doubt it. Most of us wouldn’t leave the phone out of reach. It’s always there. The notebook can be forgotten. Not so the phone.

    Ideas come when they come. Forced, as in invited through focused thinking, meditation, or with a blank mind, it matters little. They come, and you don’t want them to slip away. Write them down, process them by formulating the words, refine and save. The idea is safe, you haven’t lost it which is fortunate, because it might be a good one. You never know, not really, at that point in time. Like words, ideas must stew to validate themselves.

    Keeping an idea in your head for a longer period of time might not be the best way to get distance to it, to enable you to look at the idea from a different point of view. It’s not just time that changes between an idea’s inception and its final judgment. All ideas must be judged, or validated if you prefer, and then it’s up to you to decide what you’ll do with it. Give it away, exploit it, set it free – your call. But judge it you must, how else will you figure out if it’s a good idea, or a bad one? The criteria will be different for different ideas, but the stewing won’t be. You’ll give the idea time, but you – as in, you – will also change from the idea’s inception, to its judgment. Your life will change your disposition, large or small, things will have happened. A good dinner, having a headache, reading something profound, all these things are part of the stewing. Likewise, big things in your life will matter too, horrible things and good things. Happiness, depression, hurt and heartache, all matter come judgment day.

    You look at the idea. Is it still a good one? Has it changed, evolved, since you wrote it down? Only you will know. Maybe you’ll revise it again, and let it stew for a little while longer. Maybe circumstances have made it obsolete, or crucial, or boring, or whatever else might be. Things tend to happen, to change.

    You’ll have more ideas, better and newer ones. They come from nowhere or somewhere, and when they do you need to write them down. You reach for your phone, it’s sitting there on the table beside the coffee cup, or on the desk, or by your bedside, or waiting in your pocket. You pick it up and write down your idea, revise it. It’s started again, it’s there, ready to stew and be judged.

  • Five Things, August 2017

    Five Things, August 2017

    It’s mid-August and I have things to share, in no particular order or even with a greater purpose other than to get it out there. So here goes, a (perhaps long overdue) five things enjoyed post for mid-August 2017.

    1. I updated my setup page, mostly because of the 10.5” iPad Pro, which has replaced the 12.9” model. It’s a wonderful device, especially when paired with a keyboard (the Smart Keyboard or Magic Keyboard) or the Apple Pencil. Mine lives in the new leather sleeve which is exquisite but expensive. That’s the major news in my setup, alongside the Libratone Q Adapt noise cancellation headphones. They’re not great but they sure make travel a lot less stressful.
    2. Started reading The Wicked + The Divine and was pleasantly surprised. I’m glad, because Archangel by none other than William Gibson was a disappointment. And yes, those are all graphic novels, or rather, collections of issues bundled as such in my case. I prefer finished stories.
    3. Saw Alice Cooper do an interview at the (official, no less) release party for his new album, Paranormal. It’s a nice album, I’m enjoying it a lot, and not only because of the fan service he’s doing over the songs. Alice loves to namedrop songs and phrases from his discography, it’s always fun to find these. Also, there are quite a few homages hidden on Paranormal. Do check it out if you like old school hard rock with a twist.
    4. I don’t watch that much TV, but I did enjoy the first season of Castlevania on Netflix, written by Warren Ellis (who’s also in the Haunted Futures anthology). Looking forward to the second season.
    5. I enjoyed John Wick Chapter 2. No horrible intro-killings of the non-human kind in this one. I hope they’ll close the story properly in the third movie, this one lost some of the charm of the first one, if you can believe it.

    This might become a regular occurrence, or maybe my newsletter will claim small tidbits like this. We’ll see.

  • On the app subscription model

    On the app subscription model

    1Password, Day One, and now Ulysses, turn to the subscription model. I don’t think this is a good thing.

    1Password started to push for their server sync feature, with personal and family accounts. Subscribe ($36 for personal, $60 for family), get your passwords in the cloud, that sort of thing. It works well enough, we use it at my agency, but I don’t particularly like it. The main reason is that it is a potentially faulty chain in my security. 1Password is well know, hell, I’ve praised it so many times anyone looking for my stuff illicitly would start there! So now my passwords are as safe as 1Password can make them on their servers, with the added layer of complexity of their very own service. If they screw up something in their server architecture, I’m at risk. If they happen to be caught up in the next Heartbleed, if there’s a government backdoor in their server OS, my passwords are at risk. Encrypted, but still at risk.

    Now, all cloud services screw up from time to time. Nothing is ever 100% safe. Dropbox has had security breaches, why wouldn’t 1Password? I’ll go one step further: With Dropbox, you don’t know what you’ll find should you get in. With 1Password, you know you’ll find passwords.

    I don’t like it.

    Which brings me to journaling app and service Day One. They forced their own sync service on their users, keeping their Classic version available for legacy users. Who wants an abandoned version that won’t get proper updates? No one, that’s who – Classic is more of a PR move than anything else. So they forced us to move our journals to their own sync engine. It works well enough, but to begin with traffic wasn’t encrypted. That’s scary, your words are traveling from your device to their servers in plain fucking text. Better not write something too personal in your journal, eh?

    It got worse when they moved to the premium subscription model ($35/year as an introductory price, $25/year for current users), with chaos around current customers (that all get some sort of account) and paying ones. It’s still somewhat unclear what it’ll mean for those of us who’ve bought the apps (plural) over the years, and got our accounts upgraded. We’ll get a basic experience, but obviously premium subscribers will get a better one, right? The verdict is out on this one, and Day One support has been stellar trying to solve weird things that especially seems to happen to Apple family accounts. Still, it’s a journaling app that wants me to subscribe to a service that, let’s face it, is less secure than iCloud. That’s a weak pitch to a faulty business model in my opinion.

    Then there’s Ulysses. I’m supposed to subscribe to this writing app ($40/year) now. Current users get 50% off, which is applauded all over the Apple-centric blogosphere.

    Why should I subscribe to a text editor again?

    “It’s because the developers need to make money, stupid!”

    I don’t begrudge anyone making money, especially not when it’s quality software like Ulysses (or Day One, or 1Password – they’re all in my setup as I’m writing this). But why should I pay to be able to edit files I authored, in an app I paid for? That’s what happens if I decide not to subscribe, my app turns read only. I’ll have to export my content and move elsewhere.

    Am I going to subscribe to my web browser next? To my email client? Is everything turning into a subscription because the marketplace has dumped its prices on itself? Will anything that isn’t open source just plain implode?

    That’s not going to work. Three apps all want me to pay money, a total of $111 per year (assuming only personal accounts, discounts will bring that down a bit). They all get daily use from me, no brainer to pay up, right?

    Well, no. Again, I don’t begrudge the developers making money, and I sure won’t say that any of these apps aren’t worth their asking price. I will say that they’re not acting in the best interest of the customer, however.

    • 1Password pushes a service that will make my passwords more vulnerable to attack, and add very little if anything to my experience as a user.
    • Day One pushes a service that offer no immediate benefit to the user over the original iCloud sync, unless you want to publish your journal entries on their dayone.me thing which they could charge for (but nobody’d pay).
    • Ulysses locks all my documents and charges me to use their app with no benefit over the current version whatsoever.

    Yeah, that’s all about the user experience and satisfaction, isn’t it?

    I get it though. People buy an app and then they use it for years. If that app was $3 then that’s not a lot of money per user, especially if you decided to build and host an infrastructure. That costs money. I get it. Ulysses developer Max Seelemann explains why they decided on going down the subscription route. Subscription income brings stability and room to grow, no doubt about it. But how many apps and services can we afford to subscribe to? The three mentioned here – 1Password, Day One, and Ulysses – are all popular choices. You could argue that Ulysses is a ”pro” app, and thus it can (and maybe should) cost more, but the same can be said about the other two. Add a subscription to a todo app, a project management app, and maybe an office app, and you’ll be well over $200/year. God forbid you have further needs than that…

    I don’t think forcing people to sign up for a subscription is the solution. 1Password is great, and still usable through Dropbox sync, but it won’t be in the long run, no matter what they say. At least not if you want all the bells and whistles. Day One still works for current customers, but sooner or later you’ll have to pay to not get a lesser experience (and I’m still not sure if my data is encrypted or not). Ulysses just makes your content read only, which clearly is the biggest dick move of them all. I love their app, but they’re trying to bully me into paying a monthly fee.

    Why are you applauding this? What is the upside?

    Is it that app developers get paid? Short term, sure. Long term, hundreds of competing developers will see an opening and burst in with apps, clones perhaps, but without subscriptions. These apps might not be as good, but if they’re good enough then that’s it. We’ll get worse apps for no reason other than that we’ve enabled broken business models.

    We all need to pay rent and mortgages, buy food and all that goes with life. Developers and users alike, we’re all entitled to a good life, or at least I like to think so. That means that we’ll have to pay for what we use. If a developer charges $3 or $5 for an app once, then never again, then that’s a bad deal as soon as support, maintenance, and new features overtake the steady flow of new customers. No doubt about it. $15 once? $30? When does it become a good deal? That’ll depend. As Max Seelemann points out in his aforelinked post, the spikes of releases makes it tricky to make ends meet. The app stores are skewed.

    If you charge $40 per year to use your app, you better have a damn good argument. Because you’re just a place I store my passwords, a collection of journal entries, or a bunch of organized text files. I can replace any of you right now, for a nominal cost, and if I can then so can everyone else. Because $40/year is a lot for an app, and it’s a huge step away from our idea of what an app should cost and how it should be paid for. You better damn well bring something new to the table, not limit what I already bought.

    None of these much loved apps succeed at this. They’re forcing their new business models onto their users. It might be necessary for them to survive, but it is disrespectful. I don’t think the users will stand for it in the long run, and we’ll be short some amazing apps.

  • Believability

    Believability

    There was an interesting discussion about realism in fantasy the other day (thread here). Lots of good points were made by my friends Tim and Gábor (whom you should follow, obviously).

    Personally, I think the term “realism” is flawed when used to describe fantasy. It’s not a matter of if something is real or not, it’s a fantasy, a story even, so realism, to me, is the wrong term.

    I like believability instead. How much do you believe that something is true to the world? It’s not how real it is, it’s how believable it is in both the story and the setting.

    Sticking to fantasy, imagine a traditional sword and sorcery setting, with swords and barbarians. Magic exists but it’s rare, sorcerers are uncommon and true ones even more so. A puppet-master magician controlling the king might be believable, magic gives an upper hand and opens doors to the practitioner that are closed to everyone else. However, two groups of magicians duking it out in the street, throwing fireballs and invoking the elements, that chafes with the rarity of magic. It’s not believable. It’s sure as hell isn’t realistic, no matter how you cut it, but that’s beside the point. With the story and setting as the backdrop, it’s not believable because that’s not how we’ve been told magic works in this particular world.

    Staying true to the reader, the story, and the world is what makes something as outrageous as magic believable. It’ll never be realistic, no, but believable in the context.

  • Twitter DMs are dead

    Twitter DMs are dead

    It’s no secret that I prefer Twitter (say hi to @tdh if you like) out of the social media offerings available. The short form format is something special, in my opinion. I don’t belong to the crowd that thinks adding more characters per tweet is necessarily a good idea. 140 characters might be a bit arbitrary, a relic from texting days, but there are other issues with the platform that are more pressing.

    Like direct messages, or DMs. From being all but ignored by the product leads, to trying to take on proper messaging apps, DMs are the forgotten stepchild of whatever sort of dysfunctional family this is supposed to be. Don’t get me wrong, I actually preferred Twitter DMs to other messaging options for a long time, and while the character limit can be a good thing for public tweets, lifting said limit for private talk made DMs brilliant to use.

    Side note: Twitter is much like Facebook in their DM strategy. From keeping everything public and making it hard to do anything in private, to trying to enable private conversation on the platform with group DMs and the lifted character limit. This is the same as Facebook moving from “post everything public” to “start private groups” to build your local communities. It all boils down to us, the users, not wanting to be entirely as open as these social media behemoths initially thought, or perhaps hoped. Privacy is a thing, so they need to lure you into feeling that you are indeed in control of your content and persona on social media.

    Back to DMs and how they’re dead. It wasn’t Twitter’s changes that killed them for me, it’s all those bloody auto-DMs. For some reason, social media professionals and the services they want you to use all recommend you to set up an auto DM when someone follows you. And you know what, why not do follow-ups on that to make sure that your new follower absolutely retweets your pinned tweet or buys your book.

    Hi!

    Thanks for following me. I know your time is precious so let me just get right to the point and tell you about myself. I’m an author from somewhere who’s got a brand new book out, called XYZ OR WHATEVER. I worked so hard on it! You can read more about it and buy it on Amazon.

    Amazon link: YEP THAT GOES HERE

    Please visit my homepage for more about myself.

    Home page: URL THAT’S ALREADY IN THE BIO

    Oh and could you do me a favor? Please retweet my pinned tweet. I’d love to return the favor if you do that. Just let me know.

    Have a great day! Looking forward to the convesation.

    Sent with UnfollowspyCrowdfireWhatever. (Want this? Sign up for UnfollowspyCrowdfireWhatever for free!)

    Yeah, I’m not going to do any of that. While the above is an adapted version of several auto DMs, because I’m not going to point any fingers here, they’re all about the same. It looks like a parody of social media marketing, doesn’t it?

    There are so many things wrong with these auto DMs.

    1. Why are you introducing yourself with something that’s probably already on your Twitter bio?
    2. Speaking of the bio, I bet your URL is there. I don’t need that in my DMs.
    3. I just followed you and you want me to retweet your pinned tweet, just like that? And you’ll return the favor, will you? What if I believe in space monkeys hiding in plain sight as the rulers of the world? Oh and they’re nazi clowns and hungry hippos too. Wait, that sort of makes sense, but you get my drift. I bet you won’t retweet that just because I pinned it.
    4. So you wrote a book or created a product, and you want me to buy it? I get that, but maybe not just throw a clumsy ad my way first thing.

    There was a time when I just plain unfollowed anyone who sent me an auto DM, but that just doesn’t work anymore. It’s too common, and it didn’t really change anything in terms of the DM inbox.

    The big problem with auto DMs is that they bury the real DMs. I’ve missed a ton of those the past year, people who actually want to converse, not bots and scripts trying to trick me into doing things.

    So yeah, good job social media professionals. Way to go killing DMs for the rest of us.

  • Welcome to TDH Thirteen

    Welcome to TDH Thirteen

    This is, according to my limited mathematical skills, the thirteenth iteration of my site. That’s obviously not entirely true, I am a liar by trade after all, but it serves my purpose for this piece.

    The previous version of my site, by which I mean TDH.me (I’ll get to that) was the twelfth. I never liked it. It looked all right but it didn’t fit my plans for my content. Wait, let me rephrase that: It didn’t fit my plans for my content that I could and would actually produce. You see, I designed and built that particular iteration with an idea in mind, a certain frequency to my updates and quote and commentary. Alas, reality intervened and thus all my ideas and schemes were for naught.

    Well, it really wasn’t that dramatic, but I did feel as if I took a wrong turn somewhere.

    Enter TDH the Thirteenth.

    Let’s tell a story

    I like to say that I write for a living. This is true, I do – fiction and columns mostly – but it’s not the whole truth. Running Odd Alice certainly takes its time, as do my duties at BlankPage, Tech Troopers, Cylinder Labs, Pale Publishing and Monograph Books, not to mention the soon to be released Damn Fine Novels. They’re all parts of my (professional) life.

    You don’t know much about those, do you? I’ve never really told you.

    Telling a story is what I do. I try to do it even when I write technical literature, something that I’ll get back to soon, now that I’ve reacquired the rights to the Smashing WordPress books (and Tackling Tumblr, I believe, but who cares?). Writing those books about WordPress were all about teaching the basics and inspiring the reader to build something. I see it as a sort of storytelling, albeit without dragons or lasers.

    Looking at the site I had, I wanted some of that, in an overarching manner. So the new front page is a brief introduction to who I am and what I do, with links digging deeper. Said links will take you to some of the major topics I tend to cover, like tech or writing, as well as the books I’ve written, the latest posts on this very site, or just more about yours truly. This, told in a conversational manner, felt more natural than a set of links, at least to me.

    I intend to take the same manner of speaking, or introducing, as it were, to other parts of the site. If you visit the tools category you’ll get an introduction as to why I write about these things. It needs work, they all do, because I’m new at this and have a lot of content to look over, but it’s a start. I want visitors popping over to know what they read, and why I wrote it.

    This was the design principle I worked from when building the new site. The words and sentences serving as an introduction to the visitor, that was the idea and concept, so to speak. Moving on from that was pretty easy.

    The design

    I’m sure you’ve all seen how much I love typography and abhor unnecessary imagery. Well, that’s what you got this time around as well. I wanted the site to read well on all screens, because the primary content is text, plain and simple. Imagery is important but only when I deem it necessary to use it, so while I did want the site to look nice, all types of graphics came in second. In no way could any images or embeds infer with the written content. That further underlined my need to keep things simple.

    One column, almost all across the board, was obviously the way to go. Text flow better if you don’t have a side column posing as a menu or – gasp! – drawer of widgety things. None of that here, just one column and the occasional area where content gets split in two. Settling on that style made it easy to design for mobile first, something I do even for more complicated projects, but here it was essential. My readership has been mostly mobile-based for years, which also counts tablets and the odd sizes in-between. I read a lot on my iPhone, and I want you to be able to do the same while reading this. Hell, I want you to prefer this to your instapaper’d or pocket’d version of this page. Not all of you will, but it’s a nice point to start from, as a designer and developer.

    Now, with typography in place, and focus on text-based content primarily, makes the rest of the design sort of fall in place on its own. In this case it was particularly easy, because the previous two iterations were fairly close to the same paradigms. Even if we go back three iterations we’ll find a text heavy site, albeit not necessarily with mobile screens as a priority, although it did obviously work for them too. I’ve been designing responsibly for years, with responsive, or often fluid, designs. You’ll have to go further back than that to find something that wouldn’t look good on an iPhone today.

    A few words about emojis might be in order. You’ll see emojis here and there on the site, the imagery made popular by smartphones all around. I mostly use pointing fingers and magnifying glasses, but there are more hidden away. Emojis have extended our way of communicating, indeed, they have extended our alphabets, so I see no reason to not use them in my very limited imagery.

    All in all, I’m pretty happy with the new design. There are things to do, features that I want to add, and not to mention tweaks that’ll no doubt be made after some weeks of live usage, but that’s always the case. I hope you’ll like this iteration, and that you’ll tweet me any bugs you might find.

    What about TDH.se then?

    Recurring readers of TDH.me – note the .me – will no doubt wonder why they ended up on TDH.se. Likewise, people used to reading TDH.se are probably confused about the current turn of events.

    Let me explain. I used to roll my English language site on TDH.me, and its Swedish equivalent (which was by no means a translated version) on TDH.se. Now everything is on TDH.se and that’s the end of it.

    Dual domains, one for English and one for Swedish, worked well enough for a time. I started having issues with it a couple of years ago, when the updates to the Swedish site became far in-between. The ones I did post weren’t direct translations of posts from the English sites, no, they were rewrites or quote and comment pieces. While that might’ve served some purpose, it felt crummy and cheap compared to the 1,500 odd posts preceding these. I knew something was seriously wrong when all I did post on the Swedish site was promotional things – “this book is out now”, that sort of posts. Not wrong nor irrelevant, but not enough to warrant a site either.

    Meanwhile, the English site thrived. I worked with it, updated it, and so forth. The one thing I didn’t like about it was the domain name, the .me part. I’ve been trying to buy tdh.com for years, to no avail. I know that’s silly nonsense, soon to be obsolete with how the internet is evolving, but it stuck to my mind.

    Also, I’m Swedish, I’m not from Montenegro. A .com domain is global, but while it may sound like something personal, .me is a national domain, much like .io and .nu, all popular and all made big business by domain registrars across the world. I obviously already owned the .se domain and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to run two parallel TDH sites, one in Swedish and one in English, that was the way to go.

    So what happened? Well, I set up a new WordPress install and imported all the content from TDH.se. Then I imported all the content from TDH.me, added a 301 redirect to the .htaccess file on TDH.me, pointing all URLs to their equivalent on this very domain, and that’s that. If you go to http://tdh.me/book/ashen-sky/ you’ll be redirected to https://legacy.tdh.se/book/ashen-sky/ instead, which goes for search engines as well.

    As for the Swedish content (which is in Swedish), you can still find it here, URLs unchanged. If you want to browse it, there’s a specific category for it now – ?? Svenska – and all new content carries the Swedish flag emoji so you shouldn’t miss it. Or miss to skip it, if that’s your thing.

    Oh, and TDH.se is all https, which means that traffic is encrypted and you can feel more secure.

    From here on out

    I’m really happy to only have one TDH site to worry about. If you’ve read everything on the front page you probably understand why. Running two sites in tandem, the primary thing differentiating them being the language, was an unnecessary burden. There was, perhaps, technical solutions to the problem, such as multilingual variants that would let me roll one site but translate parts of it, but that never appealed to me. No, I wanted one home, one message to the world, and this is it.

    Speaking of which, I firmly believe that we need to take care of our online homes. You might spend a lot of time on Facebook or Twitter, and I do too, but they’re not your online homes. They’re places you visit, and they let you do so to turn a tidy profit. Your words posted on social media is money to these companies, because the more you write, the more they get to know about you, the more ads they may serve with your content, and the more they track you with targeted advertisements across the web. Not to mention all the people who come to said social media sites to read your words.

    I don’t like that.

    My home is free from tracking and spying on people. It’s as simple as I can make it without making it unnecessary hard to maintain. I use open source software when I can, and outside services need to play nice with whatever they might be doing. In my case, currently, that’s limited to Automattic’s Jetpack service, which is connected to WordPress.com, and it should be quite safe.

    I may tweet and facebook and instagram, but this is where I live online. If anything or anyone says otherwise, at some other place, then either I royally fucked up and lost this very place (fucking squatters!), or they’re lying.

    Welcome to my online home.

  • Author Chuck Wendig shares some business advice

    Chuck Wendig is a successful author with lots of experience. When he writes about the, err, writing business, you should listen. Or read, as it were. There’s just too much to quote on this one so I’ll just point you to the blog post, if you’re a fellow wordsmith. If you’re not, well, have a nice day, I guess?

  • Dropping the tech giants

    Dropping the tech giants

    No, I’m not doing that. I stopped using Google once, but they ensnared me again. I’m weak, I know. Anyway, this semi-interactive column at the New York Times has been making the rounds, and I find it interesting. It asks the question which of the tech giants you’d stop using first.

    Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are not just the largest technology companies in the world. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my column, they are also becoming the most powerful companies of any kind, essentially inescapable for any consumer or business that wants to participate in the modern world. But which of the Frightful Five is most unavoidable?

    I’d drop them in the following order.

    First, Microsoft. There’s not much they make that I can’t live without, but gaming would be difficult since I have a pretty extensive Steam library and the SteamOS is far from ready for prime time. I’d shed a tear and move on though, that’s what the Switch is for after all.

    Second, Facebook. It’s no secret I find this to be an abhorrent company with questionable motives. That said, I find myself struggling to drop Instagram, and a lot of communication is happening on Facebook itself, and through Messenger. Still, all of that is replaceable to me. Still not panicking.

    Third, Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. This one would mean I’d have to go back to Fastmail for email as well as cut all the other Google Apps services. But you know what? While that would be a pain, the alternatives are getting there. Outside of email, I think all of Google’s services can be replaced with equally useful tools. In fact, had I done my Fastmail experiment today I probably would’ve been happy without Google still. They do quality services, but the ever watchful eye is as frightening as Facebook’s. And DuckDuckGo is a proper search engine too.

    Fourth, Amazon. Prime isn’t really a thing in Sweden so this one might hurt more for some of you. I’d miss Kindle, my Oasis is my primary reading device, but there are plenty of alternatives. I’d also miss Comixology, where I read graphic novels. Much like the column I’m viewing this as a consumer, so Amazon Web Services (and Microsoft’s Azure, for that matter) are still free to use through the companies that rely on them. Quitting Amazon would hurt.

    Finally, Apple. It’s not just that I’m invested in their ecosystem or that they make the best phones and tablets, no, it’s trust. Apple is the only one of the big five tech companies that appear to be fighting for me, and my privacy. Now if that would change things might be different, but hopefully they’ll continue to stand for the little guy.

  • Was WannaCry the NSA's fault?

    Wired reporting on the Windows ransomware that’s wreaking havoc at the moment:

    One reason WannaCry has proven so vicious? It seems to leverage a Windows vulnerability known as EternalBlue that allegedly originated with the NSA. The exploit was dumped into the wild last month in a trove of alleged NSA tools by the Shadow Brokers hacking group. Microsoft released a patch for the exploit, known as MS17-010, in March, but clearly many organizations haven’t caught up.

    Even if this doesn’t originate from the NSA, it’s ample proof that no one should have backdoors.

  • Longreads is thriving

    Longreads is thriving under Automattic. It’ll be interesting to see where this ends. They’re using a member funded model to pay for original stories, with a bonus attached:

    Longreads has raised about $250,000 from “thousands of members” since it added memberships in 2012. The suggested monthly amount is now $5 a month or $50 a year, though readers can choose to donate any amount, and Armstrong said that the company’s gotten some thousand-dollar donations. All of that money now goes to pay authors, and WordPress.com matches every $1 from a reader with an additional $3, which clearly makes it a lot easier for Longreads to do what it wants to do.

  • SMS is not a secure protocol

    This was bound to happen:

    O2-Telefonica in Germany has confirmed to Süddeutsche Zeitung that some of its customers have had their bank accounts drained using a two-stage attack that exploits SS7.

    In other words, thieves exploited SS7 to intercept two-factor authentication codes sent to online banking customers, allowing them to empty their accounts. The thefts occurred over the past few months, according to multiple sources.

    SMS (aka text message) is not a secure means of communication, and that isn’t anything new either. Keep that in mind when you send details, and use two-factor authentication that doesn’t rely on other means of verification too.

  • Fake ID, present and past

    Fascinating story about fake IDs, present and past:

    The fake ID racket wasn’t always so easy. In 1994, one of my 10th-grade classmates in boarding school purchased a fake ID kit from a graduating senior for $700. Even at 15, Phil had a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit and naturally gravitated toward the prospect of cornering the fake ID market at our New England prep school. “Once I got out of the red,” he remembers thinking, “I’d be minting money.”

  • The Nesticle story

    Motherboard tells the story about the NES emulator Nesticle, an interesting read for those of us who used it back in the day:

    NESticle, nonetheless, did something amazing: It allowed people to play old Nintendo games on cheap computers made by Packard Bell and other firms, and did so while introducing a number of fundamental new ways to appreciate those games. Divorced from Nintendo’s famously draconian licensing strategy, it introduced new ways of thinking about well-tread video games.

    Would we have the retro-friendly gaming culture that we do today without its existence? Maybe, but it’s possible it might not be quite so vibrant.

  • Moore's Law's days are numbered

    From a Moore’s Law obsessed piece on computer improvement:

    As Moore’s law runs into the sand, then, the definition of “better” will change. Besides the avenues outlined above, many other possible paths look promising. Much effort is going into improving the energy efficiency of computers, for instance. This matters for several reasons: consumers want their smartphones to have longer battery life; the IoT will require computers to be deployed in places where mains power is not available; and the sheer amount of computing going on is already consuming something like 2% of the world’s electricity generation.