One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account—a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set.

What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammers actually contacted Apple Support themselves, pretending to be me, and opened a real case claiming I’d lost my phone and needed to update my number. That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers. These were legitimate; no filter on earth could have caught them.

Then “Alexander from Apple Support” called. He was calm, knowledgeable, and careful. His first moves were solid security advice: check your account, verify nothing’s changed, consider updating your password. He was so good that I actually thanked him for being excellent at his job.

That, of course, was when he moved into the next phase of the attack.

He texted me a link to review and cancel the “pending request.” The site, audit-apple.com, was a pixel-perfect Apple replica, and displayed the exact case ID from the real emails I’d just received. There was even a fake chat transcript of the scammers’ actual conversation with Apple, presented back to me as evidence of the attack against my account. At the bottom of the page was a Sign in with Apple button that he told me to use.

I started poking at the page and noticed I could enter any case ID and get the same result. Nothing was being validated. It was all theater.

“This is really good,” I told Alexander. “This is obviously phishing. So tell me about the scam.”

Silence. *Click*.

Once I’d suspected what was happening, I’d started recording the call, so I was able to save a good chunk of it, which Jamie Marsland used to make a video about the encounter. You can hear for yourself exactly how convincing “Alexander” was.

So let my almost-disaster help you avoid your own. Remember these rules.

• Don’t approve any password-reset prompts—those are the first part of the attack. Do not pass Go, just head directly to your Apple ID settings. 
• Apple will never call you first. 
• When you get an email from Apple—or, really, anyone telling you to complete a digital security measure—check the URL they’re trying to send you to. Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else.

After all, the best protection is knowing what this looks like before it happens.

Thank you to Peter Rubin and Jamie Marsland for putting this all together.

America is home to 1m taxi and bus drivers, as well as over 3m truck drivers—adding up to 3% of the working population. Other potential losers are less obvious. Without car accidents there will, for instance, be less demand for personal-injury lawyers. If people stop buying cars, dealers and used-car salesmen will go. 

It’s fascinating to think a few chess moves down the line, for example, fewer personal-injury lawyers funding politicians might lead to some form of Tort Reform, an area of society that, like gun control, has centrist changes most Americans would agree with, but has been captured by special interests.

They ship such cool products regularly, across an entire ecosystem that spans cameras to access control, it’s hard to describe everything they can cover, and they’ll even have random stuff that integrates into their system like EV charging or digital signage. I get as excited when they ship a new generation of hardware as I do for an iPhone launch.

But what’s exciting is that they just launched 5G bridging, with some fun devices that connect everything. I imagine someday I’ll have a Unifi puck hooked up to Starlink, providing amazing routing and connectivity anywhere in the world, powered by some PoE battery.

Second, I give to you the Sol E-reader, $399, basically glasses with a Kindle built-in, and a remote you hold in your hand for turning pages. The website is slick, even the packaging and design was nice, but the product is not. Do not buy this. It’s really not pleasant to use. The resolution was so low and the typography so bad it felt like reading on a TI-89 calculator.

Third, I’ve been really enjoying the DC-1 Daylight Computer, $729, which is like if a Kindle mixed with an iPad in the best possible way. This feels like an actually new platform, in that I find myself imagining new ways and places (like outdoors) I’d want to spend time with it. It runs Android, so you can have any app on it, even code on it. This video gives a good sense of the device and its founder Anjan Katta:

I could see Daylight being fantastic for kids as well; it just feels less “toxic” than the hyper-display world in which smartphones have us trapped. Audrey invested back in 2022 and it’s awesome to see how this turned out, it’s so rare that hardware makes it to this stage. I’ve shifted a lot of my nighttime consumption and play over to the Daylight; it’s so fun to play chess or read an article. It has surpassed the Kindle as my favorite reading device. And it looks good everywhere:

I used the Daylight a lot on the recent Sydney to Hamilton Island ~1,000 mile transport I did with the Drumfire crew and my friend Herman/John, which was part of my “learning to sail” goal for this year.

This year as I surveyed my life there was one thing I kept coming back to as being completely dependent on: my smartphone(s). It’s only been a few years since the iPhone came out, but it’s inconceivable to imagine my life today without my calendar, email, Foursquare, Path, Chrome, Tripit, Simplenote, WordPress, Tweetbot, Sonos, Uber, Spotify and my iTunes library, and most importantly Google Maps. (On my second screen: SmartThings, Nest, Lociktron, Lutron, 1Password, Calm, Authy, NextDraft, Withings, Circa…) These apps and everything they represent weave into every aspect of my life, I’m sure I’m one of those people who looks at their phone at least 150 times a day. My smartphone is my camera, my flashlight, my connection to the world, and my crutch.

And now it’s what I’m giving up for Lent in 2014, from March 5th until April 17th. (Yes, that includes SxSW.) For safety and business reasons I’m going to have a makes-phone-calls-only phone, and might hop in a friend’s Uber, but the idea is there will not be a device on me 24/7 that I’m tethered to, constantly looking at, and lost and hopeless without. You obviously can’t turn back the clock on progress, so I don’t expect this to be a permanent thing, but I’m curious what I miss the most, how it affects my ability to focus throughout the day, and how it changes my relationships with other people, especially the lack of messaging.

I am in the market for a cool feature phone though, maybe a small one like Zoolander had or a slidey one like in the Matrix. Any suggestions?

I’ll leave you with the “I forgot my phone” video from last year:

The East Bay Express, with a permalink I’m sure won’t work a decade from now, brings us The Bacon-Wrapped Economy:

The arts economy, already unstable, has been forced to contend with the twin challenges of changing tastes and new funding models. Entire industries that didn’t exist ten years ago are either thriving on venture capital, or thriving on companies that are thriving on it. It is now possible to find a $6 bottle of Miller High Life, a $48 plate of fried chicken, or a $20 BLT in parts of the city that used to be known for their dive bars and taco stands. If, after all, money has always been a means of effecting the world we want to bring about, when a region is flooded with uncommonly rich and uncommonly young people, that world begins to look very different. And we’re all living in it, whether we like it or not.

SFGate has The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley’s big talk on innovation:

“[I]nnovation” is something of a magic word around here, shape-shifting to fit the speaker’s immediate needs. So long as semiconductors and coding are involved, people will staple it to anything from flying cars to the iFart app.

Other times it’s just code for “jobs,” used to justify asking for government favors one day and scolding them for meddling in the free market the next.

“Lower our payroll taxes because … innovation.”
“Drop that antitrust inquiry because … innovation.”

But for all the funding announcements, product launches, media attention and wealth creation, most of Silicon Valley doesn’t concern itself with aiming “almost ridiculously high.” It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.

The final comes from Rebecca Solnit, who I’ve quoted before, writes a diary for the London Review of Books.

I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path.

Why did I switch? If I remember correctly, I was surfing around the website of columnist John Dvorak and on some page he mentioned the Dvorak keyboard layout and linked to a site about it. Several web searches later, I had read all about the layout I could find on the web and I was ready to switch. Some of my motivation was that I wanted to be as fast as humanly possible, but it was mostly that I spend a tremendous amount of time typing and I often got pains in my hands and wrists. Switching did not seem like a big obstacle simply because it seemed very similar to learning to play a new instrument, something that as a musician I could relate to and didn’t seem too challenging.

I know now that some of my reasons for switching may have been hype on the part of the websites I read, I can offer what I have found in my personal experience to be true.

Switching is not as hard as people make it out to be. Even if you are already quite proficient at QWERTY, it’s not too hard to switch. You don’t need to buy a new keyboard, in every operating system there is a mechanism for switching what’s called the “keymap” or the mapping between the physical keys on your keyboard and what the operating system prints out. So if you switch your keymap to dvorak you can immediately begin typing dvorak in all your applications. However it can be confusing to press the button labeled T and get a Y, so it is generally better, at least while learning, to give yourself some visual aids. What I did was print out letters on a piece of paper and then stick them to the keys using double-sided tape. Of course I was 14 or 15 and had a lot more time on my hands. For some people it might be enough just to have a printout of the layout by their monitor or keyboard, but there is something to be said for being able to look at the key and seeing what you’re going to type. What I do now, if I want to physically switch a keyboard over, is actually pop off the keys and put them back in the Dvorak positions.

This is much easier than it sounds, and probably takes about ten minutes. Of course be careful because sometimes the keys literally pop right off and might jump behind a desk or something, speaking from personal experience. The main disadvantage to doing this in that your home keys no longer have ridges on them and because of the bizarre way that keyboards are manufactured, on every keyboard I’ve done this two the hook on back of the guide keys (usually F and J on your keyboard) is sideways to every other hook for every other key which means that to put those keys someplace else you’d have to put them sideways, and whatever key you put in that position will also have to be sideways. This isn’t as bad as it sounds because it actually serves as a new guide mechanism, but it looks a little funky. I can’t think of a way to do this with a natural keyboard. You can buy keyboards designed for Dvorak, but for me it has never been worth the bother. I don’t want to have to special-order my keyboard, I just want to pick up whatever is the coolest at the computer store.

My writing speed did not increase significantly. Although I could type faster than ever, the limiting factor in my writing speed is and was the way I formulate sentences in my mind, often thinking of several different ways to say something. However in situations where I can type without thinking too much, for example taking notes in class or at a conference, it has been a huge benefit and often I can keep up almost in real time with what’s being said. Of course if I stop to consider something or participate in class discussion I get behind but I think the advantage of actively participating in the class or conference outweighs whatever benefits I would get from having a transcription of it.

The big thing for me is comfort. I can now type for long periods of time with no fatigue at all, and that isn’t even an issue I think of anymore. I can’t point to anything scientific that says for every person Dvorak will be more comfortable, I just know it’s been a major improvement for me.

One advantage I don’t think I have seen mentioned before is the security aspect. On my laptop in particular there is now a device with all of my personal information on it that might be in the hands of anyone. Lets say that you knew my password, if you picked up my laptop you still would have trouble getting in simply because you wouldn’t know how to type the password in Dvorak. In the grander scheme of things this might only be a minor deterrent, but it’s enough. In situations where I want other people to use my laptop I can configure a keyboard shortcut to switch between the two layouts transparently, but more often I don’t even have the QWERTY keymap installed, simply because I don’t want to switch back and forth accidentally.

It would be overly biased of me not to mention some of the disadvantages though. Nearly every problem I’ve run into isn’t so much a problem with the layout itself, but rather being a Dvorak user in a QWERTY world. Non-configurable keyboard shortcuts are often designed to be convenient on QWERTY and so when you’re under Dvorak they can be awkward. The most notable is X, C, and V, which in most applications becomes cut, copy, and paste when used with CTRL, are no longer right next to each other and are instead all over the keyboard. I’ve found it to be not that big a deal. Though I am still alright with typing QWERTY, I am often self-conscious while at other people’s computers, because as someone who is supposed to be computer savvy it must look bad to have to hunt and peck. Of course I may just be blowing it out of proportion. If I use QWERTY for anything more than a minute or two it comes back to me and I can at least partially touch-type again, but usually my exposure to it is much shorter than that. There might be something else that has slipped my mind, but those are the only two drawbacks I can think of.

I suppose it might be significant that I am the only person I know that uses Dvorak. At some point or another, I know that many of my friends and family have given Dvorak a try, but none have stuck with it. There are hundreds of possible reasons why, but I suspect with most is they didn’t feel like investing the time. For my it was a no-brainer because I knew that however long it took me to learn it would be incrementally paid for by the increased productivity and comfort in the future. Part of it may have been incentive though, and to make things interesting I’m willing to spring for a prize.

I will buy a Logitech Elite Keyboard for the first person who switches from QWERTY to Dvorak (and sticks with it!) as a result of this post.

The judging is completely subjective, but using Dvorak exclusively for more than a couple of weeks is good enough for me.

Funnily enough, this whole thing started out as a simple link/commentary post that was supposed to be about twenty words. Getting to that, there’s an article at Kuro5shin called An Argument for Dvorak that makes some good points. The comments, on par, are mostly useless or misinformed so I wouldn’t weigh them too seriously.

I couldn’t make this stuff up

This presents an interesting conundrum for the DOC-ICANN MoU, notwithstanding the pesky issue of who gets to determin what content is “kids-safe”–and how.

Consider:
* ICANN rejected four .KIDs applications in its new TLD process
* New Net launched a .KIDS in its first round of alternative TLDs
* A .KIDS TLD already exists in the parallel root server system http://root-dns.org/VueDig/VueDig_tld.php?record=NS&tld=kids&submit=Submit

All hail “Internet stability”.

if (5 == $id)
{
do stuff
}

Think about it; it’s very logical and if it even saves you a single bug in your code it’s worth it.

Mark Alexander
The American Antitrust Institute
Association for Competitive Technology (ACT)
AOL Time Warner
Joseph L. Bast
John A. Carroll
Catavault
Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism
Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA)
Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA)
Consumer Federation of America, et al.
Consumers for Computing Choice and Open Platform Working Group
Nicholas S. Economides
Einer Elhauge
John Giannandrea
Jonathan Gifford
Jeffrey E. Harris
Rebecca Henderson
Paul Johnson
KDE League, Inc.
Dan Kegel
The Honorable Herb Kohl, U.S. Senator
Robert E. Litan, Roger D. Noll, and William D. Nordhaus
Litigating States (California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Utah, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia)
Daniel Maddux
Eben Moglen
Ralph Nader and James Love
NetAction and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
The New York Times
Novell, Inc.
Palm, Inc.
Ramon G. Pantin
The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Project to Promote Competition & Innovation in the Digital Age (ProCOMP)
RealNetworks, Inc.
Red Hat, Inc.
Relpromax Antitrust Inc.
SBC Communications Inc.
Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA)
Sony Corporation
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
The Telecommunications Research and Action Center, National Black Chamber of Commerce, and National Native Americans Chamber of Commerce
Mason Thomas
The Honorable John V. Tunney, former U.S. Senator
U.S. Senate
Steven Waldman
Washington Legal Foundation