Lots of news from the last couple days to highlight. The week before US Thanksgiving appears to be giving us a huge news dump before what will be a very, very quiet week.
Proposed New Canadian Privacy Law
The Government of Canada has unveiled a new bill that will introduce new privacy laws for Canadians. The goal of the bill is to modernize privacy laws and rules, and impose new penalties for companies that violate it. These rules are largely aimed towards online services, which were not something previous laws were conceived around.
I’m by no means an expert on this, but I’ll be very interested to follow it. This is a difficult tightrope to walk, and laws in other jurisdictions have had some unintended consequences that do offer a negative experience for users. We will see where this goes.
Alberta’s ABTraceTogether App has Traced Just 20 cases in 6 Months, Developers Question if it Actually Works
In May, the Government of Alberta released what was at the time the first contact tracing app for COVID-19 in Canada. The province paid a firm nearly $1 million to take an open source app developed in Singapore and adapt it for Alberta. The app was plagued with issues at launch, including barely being functional on Apple iPhones.
6 months later, it has been revealed that the app has only successfully been used to identify 20 cases of COVID-19, and despite the province’s claims that the issues are resolved, at least one independent review of how the app works shows that…. It really doesn’t.
The Government claims that this app is still better than the federal app that has since been released because the Alberta App integrates directly into the contact tracing system the province has. I will point out at this time the province’s contact tracing system is overwhelmed and as of this writing 73% of all COVID cases in the province are of unknown origin because of the failure of the contact tracing system.
One twitter users who says he is a developer developed a way to test the ABTraceTogether app among 4 devices he has access to, and his report is that the app does not register devices that are close together the vast majority of the time, and on iPhone the unique identifier that is supposed to recycle every 15 minutes to keep a person/phone anonymous does not proper change most of the time. The app appears to be seriously broken, and the government is doubling down on continuing to use it, instead of the much more successful federal app that has a much greater ratio of successful notifications than the Alberta app does.
How many more people have to die before the government will admit a mistake?
https://twitter.com/mfenniak/status/1328548979676573696?s=15
Apple cuts App Store Fee for Majority of Developers
Apple has taken a significant step towards trying to quell the anger towards its blanket 30% fee on App store purchases. Now, any developer that earns less than $1 million USD per year can have their transaction fee reduced to 15%. This sounds like a great win, but let me grab my bucket of cold water. Apple is, for some reason, making this an opt in program, meaning developers don’t automatically get the reduced fee, they have to “apply” for it. This is nonsense. Apple knows how much a developer makes in a year, and this should apply automatically. Secondly, 15% is less than 30%, but still significantly more than transaction fees that other payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc charge. Apple itself says that 98% of developers will qualify for this program, and those 98% of developers represent only 5% of the App Store’s revenue. That in itself is interesting.
This is something that is designed to get good headlines and press for Apple, but only time will tell if that will sway anything in the lawsuits and judicial investigations the company is facing for anti-competitive behavior.
Apple M1 MacBook Reviews
Most days, this would have been the #1 story here. Apple made big, but vague claims about the performance of the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini powered by the new Apple M1 processor. I, like many who follow this industry, was skeptical. But the reviews for these products are universally positive, and way more so than anyone thought they would be. I have found it hard to find any reviewer who has something bad to say about the M1 powered laptops, and it is kind of stunning. I still think that Apple’s laptops are too expensive, and wish there was a more affordable option in the mid range for users, but these computers appear to be an unqualified success.
https://www.theverge.com/21570497/apple-macbook-pro-2020-m1-review
https://www.theverge.com/21569603/apple-macbook-air-m1-review-price-specs-features-arm-silicon
Google Pay Gets Huge Overhaul
Google has begun rolling out a massive update to the Google Pay app in the US and Canada. This update aims to turn Google Pay into an all in one payment app, instead of just a way to make NFC payments. Google Pay will now facilitate peer to peer money transfers, it will highlight nearby businesses that take google pay, and allows tighter integration of paying for services that support it directly from the app.
I’m looking forward to seeing this update, and if it brings any new functionality that I will actually use. I’m intrigued.
https://www.androidcentral.com/google-launches-more-powerful-google-pay-app-us-and-canada
AMD Radeon 6000 Series Reviews
Lastly, a quickie on the review of AMD’s new Radeon 6000 series video cards, to compete with nVidia’s RTX 3000 series of cards. It has been almost a decade since AMD has had a video card that could compete at the high end with nVidia, and finally, they do. The RX 6800 XT specifically is better than the RTX 3080 in every way for $50 USD less. These are great cards, and for anyone looking to spend this kind of money on a video card would be well served to consider AMD’s option, which is not something we have been able to say in a long time.
https://pcper.com/2020/11/amd-radeon-rx-6800xt-and-rx-6800-review/