Blog, Blog, Blog
And just like that, the authentication error that had prevented me from logging into my G Suite accounts after updating to Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4 has been resolved.
Seeing that fixing it didn’t require a software update, I wonder if it wasn’t Apple that broke the authentication process. Could Google be to blame?
Update: The error just “magically” went away and authentication now works.
After Apple’s “It’s Show Time” Event on Monday, March 25, the company released updated versions of macOS and iOS to launch the new Apple News+ subscription service, and I updated all my devices accordingly. The update also included some security enhancements to Safari.
At some point after updating my MacBook Pro to 10.14.4, a series of notifications appeared alerting me that my “Google Password [was] Required.” In all, three notifications appears, one for each of my three Google accounts.1
Clicking on the notifications brought me to the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences where I was prompted to re-authenticate each of my three accounts.
But as Stephen Hacket and Kirk McElhern posted in their blogs, as well as dozens of other users posted on an Apple Support Communities discussion page, the authentication process doesn’t finish and we are asked to “Enter the password for the account: user@gsuitedomain.xxxx. Google requires completing authentication in Safari” as illustrated below.
The problem only occurs on my MacBook Pro running the latest version of Mojave 10.14.4, and it has not affected an older iMac I use at work running High Sierra 10.13.6, even after I updated to Safari 12.1. The authentication scheme in the older version of macOS used a different browser window to complete authentication.
Safari 12.1 has two different build numbers: 13607.1.40.1.5 for the one running on 10.13.6, and 14607.1.40.1.4 for the one running on 10.4.4.
Users have been posting a bunch of suggestions to clear up this problem, but none of their suggestions have helped me. For the record, here’s some of the steps I have taken:
com.apple.account.Google.oauth-token.The weird thing is that I am able to authenticate to one Google account but not the other two. A few users have similarly noted that it works for one account but not for a second (or third account).
Another thing is that some users have reported having similar problems on their iOS devices after updating to iOS 12.2, but I have not encountered these issues on iOS.
At this point, I’ve resigned to using the web interfaces for Gmail and Google calendar on these accounts until releases an update to address this error.
Update: I have been using third-party apps to access my Google accounts on my Mac.
The Criterion Collection gained an almost divine status in the film world, at least to me, at the dawn of the DVD age. As DVDs were being dumped on to an insatiable DVD-buying public, the overall quality of some titles, particularly those that catered to a small audience hungry for classic, arthouse, or non-US fare, were sadly of dubious quality. Some were poor transfers. Others offered no “bonus features,” which was a bit of a waste of the multi-title DVD format. And some non-English titles displayed English-language subtitles that were burned into the image.
Criterion changed this. When you bought a Criterion disk, you knew you were getting a high-fidelity transfer, at least one bonus feature—such as filmmaker’s or a film critic’s commentary—and at least one set of removable subtitles and captions, often in multiple languages.
Criterion quickly adopted to the streaming-video age by making many of its titles available on a number of services. I seem to remember some Criterion titles available on Netflix for a while. Then for a long time, Hulu Plus became the exclusive home of Criterion Collection. And beginning in 2016, the Criterion Collection moved to the nascent FilmStruck video service. That ended last November when AT&T Warner Media abruptly shuttered the service to many cinephiles’ sorrow.
Shortly after FilmStruck’s closure, Criterion announced that it would be launching its own streaming service—The Criterion Channel—in 2019. They posted a signup page for Charter subscribers, offering them an extended free trial and a discounted membership. I entered my email and with the holidays and new year, promptly forgot about the service and hadn’t thought about it since.
Earlier this week, I received an email with a teaser. It featured a close-up shot of an envelope with a brief “Here’s your key. Bye” message written on it.
The email challenged us to identify the source of the close-up with a link to the new Criterion Channel website. The landing page allows Charter subscribers to stream this film. (The close-up image, by the way, is from Wong Kar Wai’s Chun-King Express.)
Currently, the service is in a kind-of soft-launch beta until its actual launch on April 8, 2019. Between now and then, Charter subscribers are allowed to stream one movie a week through a web browser or through some Internet-connected TVs.
I tried to stream the film from my iPad to my Apple TV and again from my iPad using a Lightning-to-HDMI adapter. It didn’t work.
However, despite this technical limitation, I was still able to watch the film on my iPad. The website promotes that the Criterion Channel will be “available anywhere” on “desktop, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS, and Android devices.”
In addition to getting early access to the Criterion Channel, Charter subscribers will also get $1 off a monthly subscription or $10 a yearly subscription for as long as their account stays active. A Charter subscriber will also get an extended 30-day trial. Presumably a trail starting after April 8 will be a shorter 7-day—or 14-day—trial.
After AT&T Warner Media shut down FilmStruck, a few thoughts came to mind. First, why didn’t Apple buy the Criterion Collection and offer that as part of its forthcoming streaming service? Second, why didn’t I get FilmStruck? Now that it’s gone, I predict that it will attain the reverence and cult-status similar to that of the Z Channel’s demise in the late 1980s. I won’t be able to share in the nostalgic melancholy of having it ripped away from me.
Although I didn’t get FilmStruck and can stream a lot of Criterion films through other venues, I love early-adopter deals like these and already signed up as a Charter subscriber. You should too.
Note: After posting this story, I was able to figure out how to stream to my Apple TV, but I think it’s a secret, and I won’t reveal it here. Yet.
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
Kevin Roose wrote in the New York Times about something that I pointed out a while ago, albeit from the perspective of the consumer. It’s a good time to take advantage of companies swimming in venture capital money to subsidize your life.
Roose notes, albeit hyperbolically, that the “entire economy” works like MoviePass. In that model, you pay a small monthly fee and get to watch a movie at a movie theater, once a day. It’s a great deal if you’re a consumer. But what seems different about MoviePass than other companies is that seemingly everybody scrutinized that business model. “How are they going to make money?,” is a question that I often get whenever I try to refer people to MoviePass. (Sign up through this link, and MoviePass gets a little more unprofitable because you’ll get a free month of movies.)
Roose correctly tells us that simple arithmetic dictates that at one time, “in order to survive, businesses had to sell goods or services above cost.” MoviePass—or any other company—can’t survive much less thrive by selling products below cost forever. But what Roose misses is that this is not unique to our era. The price-over-cost model is not, as Roose writes, “so 20th century.” We saw companies giving things away in exchange for user growth in the dot-com era. I reminisced about the dot-com era when I was writing about the online wholesale vendor Boxed.
Back in the late 1990s, there were a bunch of dot-com companies that were basically giving away the store in order to show sales growth. [Boxed] seems like one of those: a startup outfit that’s trying to rack up sales, even at a loss, to show their investors that they should keep investing.
Indeed, Roose explains why so there are so many unprofitable companies. He explains:
The rise in unprofitable companies is partly the result of growth in the technology and biotech sectors, where companies tend to lose money for years as they spend on customer acquisition and research and development, Mr. Ritter said. But it also reflects the willingness of shareholders and deep-pocketed private investors to keep fast-growing upstarts afloat long enough to conquer a potential “winner-take-all” market. You should take advantage and stock up on toilet paper before the bubble bursts.
This is like Robin Hood giving us free stuff at the expense of rich venture capital firms. We as consumers should take advantage of that, and I’m sure millions of us have. Have you sign up for a meal kit service and had cheap meals delivered to your home? And after you burned through the sign-up credit, did you sign up with another meal kit service? Great. Keep that up, and don’t forget to get one for your dog, too.
Roose sounds alarmist about the impending doom that will befall an economy that is so heavily based on future user growth. He’s right. This can’t keep up forever. As we’ve seen multiple times in our lives, after all, bubbles like these burst. And the bigger it gets, the more spectacular the crash will be.
In the meantime, it’s a party for us consumers. Even Roose scored a deal through, Beepi, the defunct used car marketplace that shut down two years ago. He revels that the company lasted long enough for him to buy “a car through the service for thousands of dollars less than its market value. Thanks, venture capitalists!” I’m with him on this one. Let the rich VC douchebags fund our movies, our meals, our pet’s meals, and our bulk toilet paper purchases. This won’t last forever so stock up and sign up for every money losing service you can.
And don’t forget to sign up through your friends’ referral links. They deserve more free stuff, too!
Update: There is of course one glaring exception to this model. That is Uber and the “ridesharing” industry. Last year, Uber lost $4.5 billion dollars subsidizing cheap rides for users, but unlike other startups here, it also depressed the wages of its drivers. For those who depend on these wages for their livelihoods, it can lead to tragic outcomes.
Over the last few months, I’ve seen several Chase ATMs sporting a Cardless NFC logo just to the right of the keypad. Today, I noticed that an ATM in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village looked a little different than it did before. The screen displayed a similar “Cardless Access” logo, suggesting that the cardless feature had gone live. Excited to avoid fishing my Chase debit card out of my wallet, I decided to try and withdraw cash from this ATM without my ATM card.
I pulled out my phone and selected my Chase debit card from the Apple Wallet. I then placed the phone a few inches above the Cardless logo on the ATM and authenticated with TouchID. And then voila, the ATM allowed me to proceed without my debit card.
Everything else works like it always does. I still had to enter my PIN, and I still had the option to receive $5 bills for my cash withdrawal. Because I didn’t have to leave my card in the card slot, I didn’t have to take the card to retrieve my cash. Instead, the machine just let me take the cash.
I have left my ATM card in more than one ATM before. Before most ATMs used the chip on the card, I got accustomed to dipping my card into the slot and then pulling it out. On at least two occasions, I used machines that kept the card until I took the cash. The dip-and-pull ATMs trained me that retrieving my cash was the last step of the transaction. But at these strange ATMs, I pulled my cash and left the ATM vestibule, leaving behind my debit card.
Having fallen victim to such carelessness at least twice, I’m glad to see this technology will spare me from doing this in the future.
One unanticipated consequence of upgrading to an Apple Watch Series 3 is that I’ve been monitoring my sleep. That’s right: I am the same data grouch who bemoaned the quantified life, and here I am, tracking the amount of time I sleep, measuring the “quality” of my sleep, and comparing my sleeping heart rate from one day to the next. What’s wrong with me?!?
Part of this new regiment started when I upgraded to a new Apple Watch. The Series 3 offers a much improved battery compared to my old Series 0. However, I also started monitoring my sleep because, a year ago, I had downloaded a sleep-tracking app called Auto Sleep. The app wasn’t useful on my Series 0 because the battery would die in the middle of the night, and ironically, the watch itself would wake me up when I would toss and turn in bed. There were several occasions where the watch strap or the chassis itself would rub against my face, interrupt my sleep.
I was also curious of whether my sleeping habits were in need of some help. Like most people, it is not unusual for me to become tired in the middle of the day. Fortunately, my working conditions allow me to often remedy that with a quick coffee nap. I think that’s the only part of owning a car I miss: lunchtime naps in the parking lot.
Although I have had the speedy Series 3 with its capacious battery for over a month, I’ve only regularly started tracking my sleep over the last few weeks. Here’s what I’ve learned:
The first thing that I noticed that I don’t get anywhere nearly as much sleep as I thought I did. I discovered that I spend about an hour in bed awake each night, oftentimes much more than that. Prior to this sleep-tracking experiment, I would reason that if I go to bed around midnight and wake up about 7:00, I got a respectable seven hours of sleep. Wrong! The Auto Sleep app reports that I get closer to five hours of sleep on such nights. This is because I wake up multiple times in the middle of night: a bathroom break here, a neighbor or roommate making a sharp noise, a pesky cat asking for a predawn snack. The time I lie awake in bed likely explains why I get drowsy in the middle of the day.
Since then, I started to budget over eight hours in bed to get a respectable amount of sleep—about seven hours—each night. I can now appreciate the wisdom of Max Richter’s Sleep album, a collection of 204 songs that together last 8 hours and 23 minutes. The notes guarantee eight hours of sleep, and clearly count on some degree of sleeplessness during that stretch. I tried it but, as I tossed and turned, I kept bumping into my iPad that I had foolishly propped on a pillow next to my head.
A second discovery I made was that my average heart rate while sleeping is noticeably affected by two factors: whether I’ve been getting enough restful sleep over the past several days and whether I drank even a moderate amount of alcohol.
Observing the first factor was a revelation. I saw my sleeping heart rate drop from as high 78 bpm at the beginning of a restful-night streak to something in the low 60s.
However, last Wednesday, March 21, during what appears to have been the final Nor’easter of March 2018, I walked to the local brewery to stave off cabin fever and to taste some new IPAs. I nursed four pints over a four-hour period, but that was enough to wreck my sleep. Auto Sleep rated that night’s sleep with a 58% recharge rating, whereas I had scored something closer to 90% over the past three days. My average heart rate on that stormy, intemperate night was 79 bpm, which is similar to my heart rate while I sit at this desk and type, whereas my heart rate was 12-13 beats slower during the previous three nights. Finally, it had a lingering effect over the next two nights: my recharge rating was closer to 80%. It wouldn’t be until two more nights that I again scored a recharge rating of at least 90%.
The effects of nursing four pints of IPA over four hours on my sleep were pretty hard and lingered for a couple of days.
A third revelation from this whole sleep-monitoring exercise is that I have to work harder to get enough sleep. That defies my own sense of logic. But working hard to sleep more is something I can get behind.
Finally, I have been noticing an overall positive effect on my energy. I haven’t needed my customary coffee nap after getting a few consecutive nights of quality sleep. I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect, but just the other day, I tried to take a quick lunchtime nap. I couldn’t do it. I was wide awake, and instead, I started composing a draft for this post.
When Apple introduced the fourth version of Apple Watch, which they called Series 3, I was excited about upgrading my first-generation Apple Watch, but I wanted to wait until either Apple began to sell certified refurbished watches or I received one as a gift.
Since late February, I have been using a Series 3 GPS (the non-LTE) model that replaced my nearly three year-old, first-generation Apple Watch, which we nerds derisively call “Series 0” because it did almost nothing. As for how I got this shiny new watch, I was able to scoop up a refurbished 42mm, Series 3 in Space Black when Apple began stocking them in late February.
The new (refurbished) watch is a significant upgrade over my first-generation Apple Watch for three key reasons:
It is much more useful. The faster processor and the dual-core architecture of the Series 3 offers much more utility over the single-core processor of the Series 0. Most of it is because of speed. I can use my Apple Watch almost like I can use my iPhone. Even Siri has become useful. Not only does it talk, when I bark the command “start a cycling workout,” it will really start a launch the Activity app and start a Cycling Workout. And it will actually start recording my bike ride before I’ve ridden at least two miles, as used to happen with my Series 0.
The battery lasts a lot longer. Nearly three years of daily charging cycles had taken its toll on my Series 0 battery. Whereas the Series 0 would get through about a day and a half between charge cycles when it was new, the aging battery had noticeably degraded. I could barely get through my waking day between charges.
The new battery on my Series 3, on the other hand (pun alert!), has gone as long as two full days between charges. And the battery also appears to charge a lot faster. The new battery allows me to wear my watch to sleep, and despite my skepticism of the quantified life, I have been enjoying monitoring my sleep.
The display is noticeably brighter and with better color. It’s funny how Apple continually ups the ante with displays, even when the previous ones were more than adequate. I didn’t think the display on my iPhone 3G was deficient, but when iPhone 4 introduced us to Retina displays in 2010, there was no going back. The same has been true for iPad Pro’s ProMotion, True Tone display over whatever display my previous iPad, the 2013 iPad Air, was sporting.
The display on the Apple Watch Series 3 is much clearer and peering at it is a significantly nicer experience. Who knew?
Overall, I’m happy to have upgraded. The Series 3 is significantly more useful than my first-generation Series 0, and the Watch has become a bigger part of my day-to-day activities. The only downside I noticed is that the Series 3 is thicker than a Series 0. MacTracker reports that indeed the newer Apple Watch is 0.45 inches thick compared to 0.41 inches thick for the older one. But it doesn’t feel any heavier so who cares?
If my cousin, who once came to this site to gauge my opinion of the then-new iPhone 7, is reading this, I say this: Apple Watch Series 3 is the Apple Watch I’ve been expecting since they were announced in 2014. It’s about time!
It’s the Ides of March (BEWARE!), and over the last week, it’s come out that Farhad Manjoo’s two-months of only getting his news from print, which I discussed last week on this site, might not have quite the digital diet he led us to believe. In his column, Manjoo indicates that he “unplugged from Twitter,” but as Dan Mitchell and Joshua Benton reported since the column’s publishing, he was very active on Twitter.
Mitchell writing in the Columbia Journalism Review more or less deems Manjoo as a Twitter addict-in-denial:
It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column. It could be that Manjoo’s column really does serve as a warning about the pernicious effects of social media. Just not in the way he meant it.
The Neiman Lab’s Joshua Benton digs into Manjoo’s activity on Twitter, using the Twitter API and with some hacky data visualization, as Benton himself admits, learns a few things:
In all, Benton concludes that “to say Manjoo ‘unplugged from Twitter’ really isn’t accurate.”
Bob Garfield, on WNYC’s On the Media, called out Manjoo’s claim that he “unplugged from Twitter.” In a special episode podcast episode released this week, Garfield says, “Farhad spent most of his 48-day diet sneaking into the fridge. In the time that he was supposedly “unplugged” from Twitter news, he had tweeted hundreds and hundreds of times. Not the crime of the century — but still, oops.”
Garfield interviews Manjoo, and it’s certainly awkward hearing Manjoo offer qualifications and exceptions to what he meant by being “unplugged.” Garfield appears unmoved, unconvinced, and even disappointed in Manjoo.
Of course, while using Twitter is not a crime and from what we know, he did really “slow jam the news” by subscribing to print newspapers and magazines, reading books, listening to podcasts and subscribing to newsletters, Manjoo undercut his credibility by continuing to use Twitter during this period. There was one line that really spoke to me and respect his noble experiment. At the end of his column, Manjoo reassures his readers that “you don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook.”
Manjoo, who is well-educated and an experienced journalist, should have heeded his own advice… for at least for a couple of months.
On March 1, 2018, Comcast customers could not reach the Germany-based encrypted email service, Tutanota, using their Comcast broadband connections. According to Zack Whittaker, writing for Zero Day at ZDNet…
Starting in the afternoon on March 1, people weren’t sure if the site was offline or if it had been attacked. Reddit threads speculated about the outage. Some said that Comcast was actively blocking the site, while others dismissed the claims altogether. Several tweets alerted the Hanover, Germany-based encrypted messaging provider to the alleged blockade, which showed a “connection timed out” message to Comcast users.
It was as if to hundreds of Comcast customers, Tutanota didn’t exist.
But as soon as users switched to another non-Comcast internet connection, the site appeared as normal
The outage is activating advocates for net neutrality because it seems like Comcast was blocking a website that it didn’t like. Or it could be a technical glitch between Comcast and Tutanota. This happened in 2015 when HBO launched HBO Now, the standalone service that does not require a multichannel video (“cable-TV”) subscription. (Comcast is the largest multichannel video provider and distributor in the United States.) The outage prompted an outrage from Comcast customers who could not access HBO Now’s website and accused Comcast of acting in bad faith. It turned out to be a technical glitch involving DNS.
That 2014 HBO Now incident and this recent Tutanota outage underscores the reasons why we need net neutrality. Without it, the Internet can’t operate as a bona fide communications network and can block whatever site they see unfit. In the United States, broadband Internet is monopolized by a small number of companies, and the broadband oligopoly creates distrust between consumers and Internet service providers. Net neutrality is not just good for the broadband customers but also the companies who run these networks.
The tech columnist at the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, spent the first two months of 2018 only getting his news from print sources. The experiment seems a bit counter intuitive to what a technology reporter should do. Why would someone surrounded by high-tech gadgets want to get his news in this low-tech, antiquated way?
The experiment seems to have yielded two conclusions. The first, which he readily acknowledges, is that it allowed him to get news at a slower rate, or “slow jam the news,” as he calls it. This allowed him to spend his time doing other things, rather than react to each news alert and post on social media. The results, he admits were quite dramatic: “I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.”
This is a common theme in the discourse of “being disconnected” from our digital devices. Disconnecting, the thinking goes, will allow us to live life at a more human (and humane?) pace, one more naturally attuned to our physiology and our psychology. Perhaps, there is a truth to that, but we humans are quite adaptable. These same arguments were made when newspapers were around: “how can anyone process so much news that fast?” Today, we make those same arguments to digital news.
The second conclusion he reaches is that he now gets higher-quality news. His new print-only news diet directed him to “looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.” He lists New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the weekly newsmagazine, The Economist as the ones he chose to subscribe to and read regularly. The result was that he felt better informed.
I don’t doubt that Manjoo is getting better news through these sources, but it’s not their print-first format that makes them so reputable: it’s the professional journalists who write for them. Being a journalist is like being a physician in that both professions train intensively and are both committed to the truth. A journalist learns methods for investigating and adheres to practices to present information in a responsible way, not unlike the physician’s long program of study prepares her to follow a proper course of treatment and adhere to a patient’s well-being.
Perhaps, it’s no coincidence that the Internet and born-digital “news” outlets have brought us so much junk news (or “fake news,” in the parlance of our times) over the years, as well as the junk science that feeds the anti-vaxxers and the anti-medicine crowd. The barriers of entry to start propagandistic and fraudulent websites are pretty low. In a way, this is why digital news is so polluted. Those who start and write for these junk news and junk science sites are usually the same know-nothings that rail against professional journalism (derisively calling it “fake news” or the “mainstream media”) and also against medicine. And don’t get me started on the anti-scientific bozos who drink “raw water,” or where Louis Pasteur meets Charles Darwin.
Social media has only amplified and expanded the reach of these junk dealers. Manjoo concludes, “you don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook.” That is because, as we have seen, social media treats all “news” the same, and that has helped spark the disinformation that we’ve seen over the last twenty years. But that is not to say that the news a print journalist reports can’t be shared responsibly online.
And vice-versa: print is not immune to disinformation. As early as the nineteenth century, we had all kinds of salacious news, hoaxes, and outright frauds printed in newspapers. It took newspaper publishers a lot of soul searching and the field of journalism to establish professional training programs to make print the gold-standard of news and information.
Update: Apparently Manjoo couldn’t lay off the Twitter, much in the same way I can’t lay off those buttery Tate’s cookies.
