Over the past several days Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have removed most of Mr. Jones’s programming from their services in a sweeping effort to rein in those who traffic in online misinformation that draws hundreds of thousands of followers and results in harassment and threats to their targets. Stitcher, LinkedIn and Pinterest have also removed Infowars content.
.. YouTube’s termination of Mr. Jones’s channel cost him access to his 2.4 million subscribers and resulted in the removal of all his past videos. Those videos had amassed billions of views, in part because YouTube continued to recommend them to users who had shown interest in conservative topics.
.. Mr. Jones has been trying to compensate by promoting his website and mobile app. On Tuesday, after news of Mr. Jones’s bans spread, Infowars was Apple’s fourth most popular news app, outranking those from every mainstream news media organization. Before the ban, it ranked 33rd on average since July 12.
.. He suggested that it was his support for President Trump, not his spreading of falsehoods, that led to him being “de-platformed.”
“This is a war on free speech,” Mr. Jones said. “This is what the corporate media is doing in America because it’s afraid of new independent media and asking questions.”
.. Facebook removed Mr. Jones’s pages for violating its policies by “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” YouTube terminated Mr. Jones’s channel for repeatedly violating its policies, including its prohibition on hate speech. Spotify cited its own prohibition on hate speech as the reason for removing a podcast by Mr. Jones... Indeed, Infowars’ own website says in its terms of service that the company “may review and delete any content you post on the website or elsewhere utilizing our services or system if we determine, in our sole discretion, that the content violates the rights of others, is not appropriate for the website, or otherwise violates this agreement.”.. While private companies can choose what to take down from their sites, the fact that social media platforms like Facebook have become indispensable platforms for the speech of billions means that they should resist calls to censor offensive speech.. The recent decision by Facebook and YouTube to take down Alex Jones’s content may have provided a quick solution to a challenging situation, but encouraging these companies to silence individuals in this way will backfire.”.. Mr. Jones was defiant on his program Monday, saying past efforts to screen offensive broadcasts have “only made us stronger.”.. “But it has not allowed us to reach a lot of new people,” he continued. “That’s why you have to understand now that Infowars is the most censored program in the world — because we know the truth.”
.. Over two decades, Mr. Jones has built a profitable business selling diet supplements, survivalist gear, and air and water filtration equipment as he spread bizarre theories, including that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job, that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a government-backed hoax, and that various government-orchestrated plots are responsible for poisoning Americans’ water, air and food. Mr. Jones promotes himself and Infowars as near-solitary truth tellers in a news landscape dominated by left-leaning “corporatist” media — even though the popular Drudge Report website broadcast his show on Monday.
.. Now, what he calls his “de-platforming” has only increased his sense of grievance, and that of his followers — even as it shrinks his reach before the November midterm elections.
.. “I knew what the enemy was doing — I knew their battle plan, I made the conscious decision to draw their fire,” he said on his show Monday. “When you see the Alamo assaulted and myself probably destroyed, I’ve been telling you this for years,” he said, adding: “Remember Infowars. Remember free speech.”
.. So far, Mr. Trump, who praised Mr. Jones during an appearance on his radio show during the presidential campaign, has remained silent as Mr. Jones issues appeals to Trump supporters.
.. On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. posted on Twitter that Mr. Murphy was “A Democrat Senator openly admitting that Big Tech’s censorship campaign is really about purging all conservative media. How long before Big Tech and their Democrat friends move to censor and purge Breitbart News, Daily Caller and other conservatives voices from their platforms?”
The removal of his content comes as Mr. Jones faces multiple defamation lawsuits for claims he spread on Infowars, including by the families of nine Sandy Hook victims, who are pursuing three separate lawsuits against him.
.. encourage his followers to migrate to his Infowars website, where he has posted the content removed by other platforms. He is also asking followers to donate to him — and buy his merchandise.
.. “Don’t forget the financial support; that is the strongest thing you can do to make sure that we continue on and are strong in the fight,” he said. Referring listeners to his online store, he said, “Go there today and send them a strong message that you stand for the First Amendment, you stand for us and get air filtration, water filtration, optics, preparedness gear, high quality storable foods, supplements that are so good for you and your family.
“Feed your gladiator,” he urged.
Former Apple developer explains why the company’s software is struggling
As someone who used to work on iOS at Apple, what that company honestly needs is a culture not beholden to the whims of their EPMs (project managers). They used to help organize and work with engineering to schedule things across the company’s waterfall style development. However, by the time I left, they essentially took power over engineering. Radar became the driver for the entire company and instead of thinking about a holistic product, everything became a priority number. P0 meant, emergency fix immediately, P4 meant nice to have. You get the idea.
Nothing could be worked on if it wasn’t in Radar with a priority number attached and signed off by the teams’ EPM. No room for a side project or time away from your daily duties because there were always P1s to fix. If you didn’t personally have any left for the day, you’d take one from another engineer who was likely swamped with their own list of P1s.
.. P1 P1 P1, everything is always in crises mode. Also why I and everyone around me felt bad for taking any vacation. If we weren’t constantly thinking about fixing those P1s, we were some how letting our team down.
This is how you get bugs in shipping software. EPMs driven to schedule things and over manage engineers would decide on a whim that something was a P2. That was basically always shelved to a follow-up .1 release.
Ultimately, engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship. So here I see some “leak” about quality and I think, this is just PR spin for a buggy iOS 11. Unless the company is willing to take power away from the all-mighty EPM org, I just don’t see how engineering will really change.
Apple Watch Is a Bridge to the Future
Apple Watch likely outsold Amazon Echo during the holidays despite Apple Watch selling for nearly 10x more money.
.. Based on unit sales, the Apple Watch business is currently about the size of the Mac business.
.. the device has become a bridge between the present and future. By including a screen, Apple Watch retains the familiarity found with smartphones, tablets, and laptops/desktops. At the same time, Apple Watch is giving wearers a glimpse of the future by introducing new ideas around how artificial intelligence, voice, digital assistants, and smart sensors can come together to produce a new kind of experience.
.. We are witnessing nothing short of a revolution with Apple Watch. The device holds the potential to become more disruptive to the current computing paradigm than even Apple may want to acknowledge. This potential is becoming easier to see as time goes on... For companies with business models based on grabbing as much of our attention as possible, Apple Watch does not represent a preferred revolution. This is likely one reason why Android Wear has failed to amount to much for Google. There just isn’t much incentive for Google to put Android on the wrist... a segment of the iOS developer community that ranges from indies to multinational companies. This group is becoming nervous about Apple Watch because it’s not clear how the device will support the existing app ecosystem.
.. News of major companies backing away from Apple Watch support has led this community to think that Apple Watch is in trouble. In reality, this is backwards. The current app ecosystem, not Apple Watch, is in trouble.
.. Apple Watch likely won’t support the same kind of ecosystem that we are accustomed to with iPhone and iPad. Apple Watch ends up being designed more for what may come after the App Store.
.. most of my interactions with services and features on Apple Watch end up being through the Siri watch face and various cards featuring glanceable amounts of information and data chosen for me by a digital assistant. These cards are personalized for me based on the time of day and my schedule.
.. We move away from pulling data from various apps and getting pushed mostly useless notifications to being pushed a curated feed of data that is always changing and tailored
.. thinking of a product or feature that may one day serve as a legitimate iPhone alternative, there is a small but passionate group who thinks a paradigm around voice is the answer.
.. Unlike Amazon and Google, who are desperately trying to position voice as a way to leapfrog over the current smartphone/tablet and app paradigm, Apple is approaching things from a different angle. Instead of betting on a voice interface that may push some information to a stationary screen, Apple is betting on mobile screens that are home to a digital assistant. Apple is placing a bet that consumers will want the familiarity of a touch screen to transition to a future of greater AI and digital assistants.
.. Apple Watch will eventually become completely independent of iPhone.
.. Apple also has invested significantly in getting the health, fitness, and medical industries to embrace Apple Watch. Items like GymKit allow Apple Watch wearers to pair their device with fitness equipment.
.. Later this year, there will be more than 40 million people wearing an Apple Watch on a daily basis.
.. As competition for our attention moves away from smartphones and tablets, it will soon become evident that Apple holds immense power in being the largest wearables software provider in the world. This power will manifest itself in Apple’s digital assistant occupying a growing role in hundreds of millions of users’ lives.
RetroClip: Instant Replay for your Mac
I got the idea to write RetroClip after playing the game Fortnite Battle Royale and winning, and then having nothing to show for it besides a static screenshot.1 Current generation video game consoles all have a feature where you can press a button and capture the last minute or so of gameplay and I wanted this for my Mac. The key idea is that you don’t know when you want to save a video clip until after something exciting has happened, so it needs to work retroactively — it’s no good if you have to press a button to start the recording because it’s already too late.
Unlike other screen capture utilities for macOS, RetroClip does not save to an ever growing scratch file on disk as it is recording. Instead, it saves video frames to a fixed size circular buffer in main memory. The neat thing is, we don’t even need that much memory to do a good job. We can fit 30 seconds of HD video in around 40MB of memory.2 Once you see something you want to save, just press the RetroClip keyboard shortcut, and RetroClip writes the memory region with the video data out to disk, essentially instantaneously.
Anyway, you should download it and give it a try. Even if you don’t use it for games, you may find it useful for capturing those pesky bug reports where you can’t seem to reproduce it a second time. Please let us know what you think, either by email or on Twitter.