Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.

“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”

Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.

He had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from the horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real change. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging service, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively about Twitter. He was not a fan.

Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddamn good at identifying the somethings.

Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”

He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):

If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much you consumed each month while there. Azdoufal says celebrities are in the database, too, and visitors from all over the world, including 30,000 from the United States. “They have famous people,” says Azdoufal. “People who don’t want everyone to know they smoke weed.”

But when Azdoufal decompiled that PuffPal app, he explains in his report, he discovered that Nefos had no meaningful level of security. He discovered a secret key for the Stripe payments platform sitting inside the app in plain text. He discovered he could pull up any member’s profile just by changing one number. If those profiles included their phone number, home address, passport, and weed preferences, he now had access to them too.

And then, he discovered that those passports, drivers licenses, and photo IDs were stored at public URLs as simple as this: https://ccsnubev2.com/v8/images/_{club}/ID/{user_id}-front.jpg

Those clubs were uploading 5,000 new photo IDs with these insecure URLs every day, Azdoufal tells me.

Azdoufal’s full report on the leak, including the ease with which he discovered it, is worth reading.

Bruce Schneier:

Note what happened. A high-value credential — a passport — was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.

Access to cannabis clubs has to be age verified. The security ought not be shit, but age verification is part of the industry. But now think about the legislation being proposed and passed around the world requiring age verification for just doing anything online. This sort of identity leaks is the inevitable result. And for a lot of these use cases for age verification, the security expertise is going to be even lower.

Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same argument as Trump’s. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking.

From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):

Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout quarterly earnings, touting gross profit margins that topped 80%. Shares jumped 16% after the close and appeared likely to power a Thursday rally among semiconductor stocks. [...]

In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.

“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”

I overlooked this segment when I read (and linked to) Winkler’s report Thursday. It really does seem clear that Sadana is blaming Apple for not cutting Micron any slack when the supply/demand curve for RAM had a different look in 2023. I’m sure Micron’s current 80 percent margins are here to stay this time, so getting a few jabs in at Apple will never come back to bite Micron and Sadana.

From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia):

We write to convey our extreme concern about the possibility that Apple Inc. will soon procure 3D NAND memory chips from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-owned manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). Such a decision would introduce significant privacy and security vulnerabilities to the global digital supply chain that Apple helps shape given YMTC’s extensive, but often opaque, ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and concerning PRC-backed entities. In addition, we write to convey that any decision to partner with YMTC, no matter the intended market of the product offerings developed by such a partnership, would affirm and reward the PRC’s distortive and unfair trade practices, which undermine U.S. companies globally by creating significant advantages to Chinese firms at the expense of foreign competitors. Last year, the Biden Administration described YMTC as China’s “national champion memory chip producer,” which supports the CCP’s efforts to counter U.S. innovation and leadership in this space.

The “no matter the intended market of the product offerings” bit was a reference to Apple’s plan only to use Chinese RAM chips for iPhones sold in the Chinese market. I wouldn’t want Chinese RAM in my iPhone any more than I’d want to buy a “Chinese DSLR” as my camera.

Anyway, Apple’s 2022 attempt to get an OK for this went over like a lead balloon, meeting sharp bipartisan opposition. Rubio is today the most influential man in the Trump administration in foreign affairs.