The Daily Parker

Security is hard. Everyone who works in IT knows (or should know) this. We have well-documented security practices covering every part of software applications, from the user interface down to the hardware. Add in actual regulations like Europe's GDPR and California's privacy laws, you have a good blueprint for protecting user data.

Of course, if you actively resist expertise and hate being told what to do by beanie-wearing nerds, you might find yourself reading on Gizmodo how a lone hacker exfiltrated 99% of your data and handed it to the FBI:

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence.

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this tranche of data, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed the raw video includes GPS coordinates, which point to the locations of users when the videos were filmed.

Meanwhile, dozens of companies that have donated to the STBXPOTUS and other Republican causes over the past five years have suddenly started singing a different tune:

Sony-made GPS chipsets failed all over the world this weekend when a GPS cheat-sheet of sorts expired:

In general, the pattern of your route is correct, but it may be displaced to one side or the other. However, in many cases by the completion of the workout, it sorts itself out. In other words, it’s mostly a one-time issue.

The issue has to do with the ephemeris data file, also called the EPO file (Extended Prediction Orbit) or Connected Predictive Ephemeris (CPE). Or simply the satellite pre-cache file. That’s the file that’s delivered to your device on a frequent basis (usually every few days). This file is what makes your watch near-instantly find GPS satellites when you go outside. It’s basically a cheat-sheet of where the satellites are for the next few days, or up to a week or so.

I experienced this failure as well. I recorded two walks on my Garmin Venu, one Friday and one yesterday. In both cases, the recorded GPS tracks appeared about 400 m to the west of where I actually walked.

Because the issue started between 22:30 UTC on December 31st and 15:00 UTC on January 1st, I (and others) suspect this may have been bad date handling. Last year not only had 366 days, but also 53 weeks, depending on how the engineers configured the calendar. So what probably happened is that an automatic CPE update failed or appeared to expire because the calendar handling was off.

Dates are hard.

Earlier this year, the Nielsen Norman Group repeated a study they first did in 1996 on the usability of PDF documents. As they've now found three times, making PDFs instead of actual web pages yields a horrible experience for users:

Jakob Nielsen first wrote about how PDF files should never be read online in 1996 — only three years after PDFs were invented. Over 20 years later, our research continues to prove that PDFs are just as problematic for users. Despite the evidence, they’re still used far too often to present content online.

PDFs are typically large masses of text and images. The format is intended and optimized for print. It’s inherently inaccessible, unpleasant to read, and cumbersome to navigate online. Neither time nor changes in user behavior have softened our evidence-based stance on this subject. Even 20 years later, PDFs are still unfit for human consumption in the digital space. Do not use PDFs to present digital content that could and should otherwise be a web page.

PDF files are typically converted from documents that were planned for print or created in print-focused software platforms. When creating PDFs in these tools, it’s unlikely that authors will follow proper guidelines for web writing or accessibility. If they knew these, they’d probably just create a web page in the first-place, not a PDF. As a result, users get stuck with a long, noninclusive mass of text and images that takes up many screens, is unusable for finding a quick answer, and boring to read. There’s more work involved in creating a well-written, accessible PDF than simply exporting it straight from a word processing or presentation platform. Factors such as the use of color, contrast, document structure, tags, and much more must be intentionally addressed.

Yah, so, don't use them.

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House.

More odd things of note:

• Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets.
• Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch.
• Canada joined several European countries in blockading the United Kingdom after a new strain of coronavirus emerged in England.
• On this day in 1910, Montgomery Ward won a landmark case in the Illinois Supreme Court that led to the creation of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.
• Calculated Risk has a rundown of 7 key high-frequency indicators showing just how dire things are across several industries.
• Writing for Smithsonian, Beth Daniels reminisces about how Bullwinkle taught her political satire at a young age.
• New evidence suggests early humans survived cold winters by hibernating.
• Nielsen Norman Group has a list of their top-10 UX articles from 2020.

Finally, it's very likely you've made out with a drowning victim from the 19th century.

Every morning I get an email from The History Channel with "this day in history" bullet points. A couple stood out today:

• Two hundred years ago today, the American whaler Essex lost a fight with an 80-ton sperm whale. Only five of the twenty crew survived.
• On this day in 1945, 75 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began.
• In 1985, 35 years ago, Microsoft Windows came out.

And now, the sanity. Via author John Scalzi, (conservative) attorney T. Greg Doucette explains why the president will leave office on January 20th no matter what chicanery he tries to steal the election:

While I wait for my frozen pizza to cook, I've got these stories to keep me company:

• Jakob Nielsen has updated his classic article "10 usability heuristics for UI design."
• Steve Coll tries to figure out what the president gets out of contesting Biden's win.
• Paul Krugman looks at the way half the country ignores the science in ending the pandemic and despairs at how we can forestall climate change.
• Patrick Smith reminds us that we've gone more than 19 years since the last major US air carrier crash, which shows us how far aviation safety has come in the last 50 years.

Going to check my pizza now.

Also known as: read all error messages carefully.

I've just spent about 90 minutes debugging an Azure DevOps pipeline after upgrading from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 RC2. Everything compiled OK, all tests ran locally, but the Test step of my pipeline failed with this error message:

##[error]Unable to find D:\a\1\s\ProjectName.Tests\bin\Debug\net5.0\ref\ProjectName.Tests.deps.json.
Make sure test project has a nuget reference of package "Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk".

The test step had this Test Files configuration:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\**\*Tests.dll
!**\*TestAdapter.dll
!**\obj\**

I'll save you all the steps I went through to determine that the .NET 5 build step only copied .dlls into the ref folder, without copying anything else (like the dependencies definition file). The solution turned out to be adding one line to the configuration:

**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)\**\*Tests.dll
!**\ref\**
!**\*TestAdapter.dll
!**\obj\**

Excluding the ref folder fixed it. And I hope this post saves someone else 90 minutes of debugging.

Tom Scott explains why Denmark's cell phones do not display the legal time in the country:

In an earlier video, he explains the hell of writing time zone software. (I've already done this, and it works pretty well.)

I dropped off my completed ballot this afternoon, so if Joe Biden turns out to be the devil made flesh, I can't change my vote.

Tonight, the president and Joe Biden will have competing, concurrent town halls instead of debating each other, mainly because the president is an infant. The Daily Parker will not live-blog either one. Instead, I'll whip up a stir-fry and read something.

In other news:

• Chris Christie continues the tradition of Republican politicians not understanding something until it happens to them directly by imploring people to wear masks now that he's out of a week-long stint in the ICU.
• Former White House Counsel Bob Bauer and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith suggest six ways to protect the rule of law once the president leaves office. Separately, University of Chicago law professor Ryan Doerfler explains how to "make the Supreme Court safe for democracy."
• TNR's David Daley takes us through the "Republican plot for permanent minority rule."
• Illinois hit a record number (4,015) of confirmed Covid-19 cases today.
• We don't actually have to have a surge of Covid-19 cases; we can stop it.
• Google explains how their popular times and live busyness information feature works.
• Metra has sued Union Pacific for lost ticket revenue as their contract lurches toward an end.

Finally, a pie-wedge-shaped house in Deerfield, Ill., is now on Airbnb for $113 a night. Enjoy.

From Andrew Marantz at The New Yorker:

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In [former UK Liberal Democratic Party leader Nick] Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

“It’s an open secret,” Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist for the company, recently wrote, “that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.” Zhang left Facebook in September. Before she did, she posted a scathing memo on Workplace. In the memo, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, she alleged that she had witnessed “multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales”; in some cases, however, “we simply didn’t care enough to stop them.” She suggested that this was because the abuses were occurring in countries that American news outlets were unlikely to cover.

Nothing surprising in the article, but Marantz adds a lot more detail than most people have realized.