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Prior art here would be relive.cc which pretty much built their whole business on this concept applied to the cycling market

Definitely reminded me of the classic Mickens usenix login;logout columns! Just overall a very engaging communication style for adding some entertainment value to what might otherwise be pretty dry to read in one sitting.

While it's not particularly surprising that the location of a piece of radio hardware that broadcasts a static identifier is trackable, it is pretty interesting how the location awareness and ubiquity of modern smartphones are effectively creating a massive distributed sensing network. The focus on this piece is mostly on how apple (by designing their api in a way that avoids apple computing your exact location on their servers, presumably in an attempt to _preserve_ user privacy) inadvertently gave public access to that sensing network. I'd love to read a piece that also games out what exactly a red team or attacker could do with _privileged_ access. I.e. "if somebody was able to compromise the location services servers, but not iOS, what exactly would they be able to do with that"...

> renew it and cancel it immediately

This is the way I use most subscription products. There are a lot of pieces of software that I think do actually make sense to charge a subscription for rather than a one-time payment; almost all the software I use daily in 2023 has some kind of server-side component or ongoing maintenance/development costs and I don't mind paying for that. It's the auto-renewal aspect and all the dark patterns associated with cancellation that I really despise.

One thing that I do now is try to use iOS to initiate subscriptions as much as possible, since the Apple-mandated subscription mechanism there lets me easily and immediately cancel auto-renewals for a new subscription as soon as I sign up for it.

I don't love that the walled garden approach seems to be the only way to restore sanity here and would love to see something standards-track and cross platform emerge for signing up for, listing, and cancelling software subscriptions in one place as part of the functionality provided by your OS. Basically, "passkeys for subscriptions". Maybe someday!

I’m also curious to see some examples – I used to work at a well known software company in the outdoor recreation / fitness space that made a really big deal about social justice both internally and externally. You would think they’d also be strong on the environment given the market they operated in but the minute you brought up conservation or environmental justice in an all-hands q&a they would immediately shut the line of discussion down hard.

I’m guessing it’s a much more significant hit to the bottom line to take a hard stance on environmental stuff vs DEI/social justice etc, which kind of surprised me but I can’t think of another explanation. It’s not like they were afraid of alienating market segments due to political alignment, since their (good imho!) stance on antiracisim was definitely just as politically charged as taking a strong stance on sustainability would have been…

I’m curious what their best-case outcome is here. It’s fully transparent at this point that Apple has no appetite for a third party iMessage client on any platform and will take whatever technical steps needed to prevent this from happening.

I’d wager heavily that even if Beeper plays cat-and-mouse to the point where they’ve exhausted Apple’s budget for blocking them and somehow managed to avoid Apple’s legal team putting a stop to things via other channels (very unlikely), Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.

It’s easy to read this as a pure publicity stunt on Beeper’s behalf, but that’s not what I’m getting from the tone and content of these announcements. And I also don’t think the market for a paid all-in-one chat app is large enough to justify the expenditure that this iMessage for Android project represents, if the endgame is ultimately a PR stunt.

They seem too smart to realistically think that Apple is going to just shrug and let them continue unbothered after a few rounds of back-and-forth, so what are they playing at?

Early versions of Trianglify supported noise addition using feTurbulence but I ultimately removed it because of some of the rendering inconsistencies mentioned in this thread, alongside performance issues on certain platforms (you would think that generating 2d monochrome noise would be pretty cheap in this day and age, but it must be part of the SVG stack that never saw much optimization because it would absolutely lock up rendering for several hundred milliseconds when applied to even moderately sized viewports).

Of course, this was all back in ~2015 so the landscape has definitely improved, but not quite to the point where I would consider adding support back in.