Tracker blocking

iPad, iPhone

Stopping evil.

Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Apple France, writes a weekly column on his Monday Note blog which is always interesting. A few weeks back he wrote this interesting piece addressing the growing use of tracking software which allows the not-so-nice people at Google, and its runt offshoot Facebook, to Do Evil. Meaning that these crooks steal your tracking history for sale to the highest bidder, their customer, also known as an advertiser. You are not Google’s customer. You are Google’s merchandise, your behavior unwittingly sold every second of the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you agreed to their carefully obfuscated terms of service – I need no lessons in the law, thank you. I know theft when I see it.

One of Gassée’s points is that with the wimpier processors found in portable devices, especially iPhones and iPads, this invisible but very intrusive software has a significant effect on the speed with which content loads while all those nasty trawlers lodge inside your CPU and memory. With iOS9 being released by Apple today, I got off my duff, loaded it up on the iPhone and sundry iPads and immediately installed Marco Arment’s aptly named ‘Peace’ app which permits trackers to be blocked. Arment is a long time Apple developer, is a person with a great track record and I have been a happy user of his apps for years. Sure, there are free variants out there, but why not go with a known quantity? All of $2.99. The effect was immediately noticeable. One of the worst offenders is the New York Times and pages now load far faster on my iPhone and iPad – no measurements needed. It’s obvious.

Then the other shoe dropped and I realized I had to install tracker blocking in Safari (I already use AdBlock to stop intrusive advertising) on my desktops and laptop, so I zipped over to Ghostery and downloaded and installed a conceptually similar app for OS X browsers. Marco Arment’s ‘Peace’ uses the same Ghostery back-end on iOS. Once installed, Ghostery places a small ghost icon to the left of your URL bar and when trackers are in effect a red numbered flag tells you how many you are blocking – this is what you see when you click the icon:


The liberals at the NYT aren’t past making a silent buck off your reading.

No surprise that Google Analytics and Facebook feature in just about every tracking err… tracking, and I’m not even a member of that great 21st century time sink for those with IQs in double digits and below known as Facebook users (they are more accurately described as ‘used’ than ‘users’).

So there are two benefits of using tracking blockers. First everything in your browser loads noticeably faster, meaning less time lost and less battery drain. Second, you get the smug satisfaction of thwarting those who Do Evil. Given that this is an existential threat to Google’s revenues, you can bet they have large teams working overtime on working around this. Until then, I have a smile as large as a Cheshire Cat on my mug.

Apple is to be congratulated on making tracker blocking available in iOS (you need recent versions of the iPhone or iPad for this to work – an excellent excuse to upgrade). And JL-G is to be congratulated on bringing this issue so eloquently to the fore.

I checked this blog to see if some trackers had somehow insinuated themselves and found but one – Google Translate. If you use the translate option (scroll to the bottom of this page) Google will know all about it. If you read English, nothing about your coming here is known to anyone – except you. Google’s translation is mostly awful anyway, but there for those preferring not to use the Queen’s English.


The one tracker in effect – turned off here – on this site.


Update not 24 hours later:

I take everything I said about Arment back. This just sent to me by a Guardian reader:

“The maker of Peace, a bestselling ad blocker for iPhones, has pulled the app just days after its launch saying the app’s success “just doesn’t feel good”.

Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and creator of the Instapaper reading app, launched Peace on 16 September. The $2.99 app became the bestselling app in Apple’s iTunes store almost overnight.

Peace takes advantage of iOS 9, Apple’s newly updated mobile software, to filter out mobile ads and tracking on other apps and websites. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing sector of the ad business and seen by most publishers as vital to their future finances.”

Well, I got mine ….

One of the basic facts of life is that those with bleeding hearts  generally have zero grasp of economics. Just buy someone else’s product because he has just helped them get rich.

Now the fellow has rebated the money rather than giving it to a good cause like education:

Update October 1, 2015:

Now that Apple has refunded me my $2.99 for Peace, why not just stick with it, free as it is? because there will be no updates fromn the fool who passes as developer.

Go to this excellent New York Times piece (talk of biting the hand which feeds you!) and download Purify from the App Store for $1.99. It works just like the article says and you should get support going forward.

Art Wolfe

Photographers

No competition.

Your chances of taking wild animal pictures as good as those made by Art Wolfe are precisely zero.


Using the latest technologies. Click the image for the video.

Whether it’s remote dollies, drones, aircraft, you name it, Wolfe has been at it 40 years and no piker on ‘safari’ has a remote chance of equalling his 40 years of applied skill in the business.

In the brief video – click the image – he asks whether it has all been done before? From the amateur, weekend snapper’s perspective the answer to that question is the same as it was 50 years ago. A resounding ‘Yes’. A few specialists like Wolfe change the landscape and the amateur is far better off buying their images and videos than wasting money on a trip to some godforsaken hole without antibiotics or clean drinking water. Best enjoyed from your sofa at home.

Universal Studios

Photographs

A fun time.

Universal Studios, near unlovely Anaheim, Los Angeles, combines two kinds of entertainment. There are rides and there is the back lot tour.

I took my son there for the rides and myself for the tour. Having tried a couple of the rides and finding I had left my organs plastered to the tunnel of one, courtesy of 4G forces, I passed on the remainder, letting Winston have at it.

We had booked the guided tour and our guide – incongruously yet accurately named ‘Happy’ – proved to be a fount of information and a real movie enthusiast. In his spare time he acts in repertory theater so showmanship is very much in his makeup. While the guided tour is not cheap it comes with three benefits – valet parking, no lines and a fine catered lunch. You can live without the latter but the first two are lifesavers, quite literally. With seemingly some 20 million people visiting daily valet parking is a non-trivial benefit and as for no lines …. well, it comes down to what your time is worth, I suppose.

In touring the back lot during the afternoon you begin to realize just how large the lot is. Over 50 acres with some six dozen lots, this is a real working movie studio and while one or two lots were out of bounds – movies were being made – the whole thing was an absolute blast. During the tour you are treated to (subjected to?) some special effects, but there are no G forces in sight. This is a good thing after a decent lunch.

In the event, for he is as big a movie buff as his dad, Winnie enjoyed the afternoon tour immensely and by the time it ended, well past 6pm, we were on our last legs. It’s a very full day.

Town Hall, familiar to ‘Back to the Future’ fans. It’s used so often that Universal has to change the façade to disguise it.

The Bates Motel, beloved of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ fans. Built undersize to emphasize the claustrophobic aspect. Some fool actually made a remake of the movie, which has to be the dumbest idea yet in Hollywood history.

While we waited for our tour bus, a group of thirty Chinese disembarked, spotted this mural, and proceeded to dutifully pose identically, one by one, as each of the twenty-nine others snapped his picture. A nation of true individualists, those orientals.

Downtown Latin America. Nearly all the buildings are comprised solely of false fronts.

‘The War of the Worlds’ set. Even Steven Spielberg makes the occasional clunker, for the movie is awful, but the set was tremendous. Having paid $60,000 for this first generation Boeing 747, he proceeded to incur another $175,000 to transport it to the lot then have it cut up and generally destroyed. It’s in the movie all of 60 seconds ….

On the ‘WoTW’ set. Our guide told us to look out for the ashtrays in the arm rests of the seats, identifying this as a very early jumbo jet.

The prop warehouse and area were terrific. Here’s Winnie getting ready to do some ‘Supersize Me’ shopping.

The prop building has tens of thousands of props, including hundreds of furniture sets from all eras, statuary, gadgets, you name it. All pieces are bar coded for ease of retrieval. This is a 1930’s era switchboard which Universal had to build as no originals remained. First seen in the Paul Newman/Robert Redford vehicle ‘The Sting’ it has been used in many movies since, and is so popular that Universal often rents it to other studios.

All snaps by Winston on his Panny LX100 except for the penultimate one which dad took.

Harry Gruyaert

Photographers

Surreal master.

Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert has been with Magnum forever and worked there during HC-B’s time. I rather fancy that had HC-B ever understood color, this is the sort of work the French master would have been producing during his greatest period, the surreal one pre WWII.


Click the image for the New York Times article.

Blow Up

Movies

Polish poster genius.

Other than a history of dying heroically on horseback in the face of better equipped enemies, there really is not much to be said about Polish culture. Neither the greatness of Russia or the brute efficiency of Germany, which Poland has the misfortune to call its neighbors, distinguishes the nation’s meagre accomplishments. OK, Chopin excepted, but you might argue he really was French.

Indeed it is with some gratitude that I look at my parents’ history, first with their Polish lands occupied by the brute Germans whose first act was to shoot our two Great Danes. That was probably logical given that the Danes have as much love for the Hun as do the Poles. The dachshunds survived, needless to add. The Wehrmacht was replaced in 1945 by Ivan, and these serial invaders saw to it that commonsense finally prevailed as my folks hightailed it in 1947 via Sweden and Ireland to London, where I grew up. Sadly they did not think of crossing the Atlantic which would have given me the opportunity of graduating at the top of my Harvard class rather than from University College, London, which is OK I suppose, but my son will make up for that.

However, now and then something special comes from the land of potato vodka and herrings in cream and in this case it is an absolutely stunningly original poster for Michelangelo Antonioni’s mythical movie Blow Up. That’s PowiÄ™kszenie to you. Blow Up is a good test of any photographers level of interest in his craft. The next time you encounter a snapper ask what he thinks of the movie. If met with a blank stare walk away for you are speaking to yet another mindless equipment fetishist, from whom you will learn nothing.

In this poster, Waldemar Åšwierzy (OK, so his mother slept around a bit cross-culturally speaking; I mean, the Germans always had schnapps and chocolate, no?) has avoided the common western depiction of the priapic David Hemmings straddling a supplicant and writhing Veruschka, going instead for a neo-Seurat pointillism which at first glance is meaningless. Leave it on your computer screen and step back a dozen feet …. stunning. It captures the very mystery which the movie is all about. Did you see the body or did you not?

For the finest writing on this greatest of movies, click here.