2018

Yesterday, this clip from BBC News popped up on Twitter, in which a small child appears to materialize in the background of a woman-on-the-street interview.

WTF… does anyone else see the child teleport? pic.twitter.com/P0ju9J9cby

— @realTewkesburyBC (@TewkesburyLeak) December 12, 2018

If you watch the woman’s face at the same time the boy appears, you can see her expression morph into a smile.

This technique is known as a Morph Cut, a feature added to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2015, intended to smooth transitions in interview footage, removing unwanted pauses, stutters, and filler words (“like,” “um,” and “uh”) without hard splices and cuts.

The results, when used appropriately in interview footage without a changing background, can be nearly seamless.

It’s likely that BBC News used a morph cut in the clip above to tighten up the interview without changing its meaning. But it’s also ripe for abuse and fully capable of altering the meaning of an interview, and in many cases, undetectable.

I’ve known radio interviews were edited like this for years, but the BBC News clip is the first time I’ve seen the technique used in a video interview… or is it?

How many times have you watched footage that was subtly modified using off-the-shelf software, and never knew? Would you ever notice? Would you care?

Winnipeg-based artist and designer Rocky Bergen makes detailed papercraft of vintage computers, game systems, and electronics that you can print out, cut, and fold for yourself.

The most elaborate are his Commodore 64 models — complete with 1701 monitor, 1541 disk drive, VicModem, MPS 801 Printer. Upgrade it with some flashy cracktro screens and a couple bootleg floppies.

Not a Commodore fan? Rocky also recreated the Apple II, Amstrad CPC 464, GameCube, and Conion C-100F boombox.

With very slight alterations, these would make some pretty great Christmas ornaments. Print ’em out and get folding!

You can subscribe to Rocky’s blog, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram. Thanks, Rocky!

On my last day at Fuzzco, in the first week of January, I played a little prank that I completely forgot about, and it took an entire year to pay off.

Before walking out the door, I set the office Sonos on repeat, playing one song endlessly overnight, Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” And because I’d already disconnected my Spotify account, I used someone else’s, the Spotify account of my friend, Eric R. Mortensen, the talented designer behind 10×18.

Cut to 11 months later.

Today, Spotify released Wrapped 2018, their annual look back at your top songs and artists over the past year. I completely forgot about the prank, but my Fuzzco friend Kate reminded me, so I checked in with Eric.

Then he emailed me this screenshot. “I thought Shrek hacked my Spotify.”

Only shooting stars break the mold.

There’s nothing unusual at all about Pro Office Calculator.

It’s just a normal calculator that does normal calculator things. You should just try it.

Need help using Pro Office Calculator? Read on.

Yesterday, Quora announced that 100 million user accounts were compromised, including private activity like downvotes and direct messages, by a “malicious third party.”

Data breaches are a frustrating part of the lifecycle of every online service — as they grow in popularity, they become a bigger and bigger target. Nearly every major online service has had a security breach: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr, Uber, Evernote, eBay, Adobe, Target, and Sony all extensively leaked user data in the last few years.

Security breaches like these are a strong argument for using a password manager, but not a compelling reason to avoid a service you love, unless you plan to quit the internet entirely.

But this does seem like a good time to remind you of all the other reasons why you should never, ever use Quora.

Hoarding Knowledge

Four years ago, Eric Mill wrote about Quora’s tendency to hoard knowledge, and nothing’s changed since.

According to their About page, “Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge.” With 300 million monthly users, and nearly 40 million questions asked so far, they’re doing a good job of growing the world’s knowledge, but a terrible job of sharing it.

All of Quora’s value is derived from the answers provided by its users, and they go to great lengths to make a well-designed platform for finding and replying to questions.

But they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get those contributions back out.

Quora has:

• No public API.
• No backup or export tools.
• Restricted access to answers without an account.
• Blocked scrapers and unofficial APIs, and deleted questions related to scraping on their site.

Contrast that with Q&A competitors Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, which offers an API, a wealth of user-made tools and support community for it, a powerful Data Explorer for querying and exporting data, a liberal crawling policy, and doesn’t attempt to hide questions and answers behind authentication. They even proactively upload anonymized data dumps of all user-contributed content to the Internet Archive for posterity under a Creative Commons license.

Hell, even Ask MetaFilter lets you export your history, and that was mostly built by one person.

Blocking Preservation

If you want to be generous, you could argue that it’s not a priority for them to build features like an API or export tools, especially as they’re still struggling to make money.

But for years, Quora has also explicitly forbidden the Internet Archive from indexing their site. This is what you’ll see if you try to find any Quora page in the Wayback Machine’s index.

Quora could do literally nothing, and the Internet Archive would actively preserve the work of their millions of users for the future, but they’ve chosen to exclude their site from being archived.

In their robots.txt file, they elaborate on why they block the Wayback Machine, claiming they do it to protect their writers.

People share a lot of sensitive material on Quora – controversial political views, workplace gossip and compensation, and negative opinions held of companies. Over many years, as they change jobs or change their views, it is important that they can delete or anonymize their previously-written answers.

We opt out of the wayback machine because inclusion would allow people to discover the identity of authors who had written sensitive answers publicly and later had made them anonymous, and because it would prevent authors from being able to remove their content from the internet if they change their mind about publishing it. As far as we can tell, there is no way for sites to selectively programmatically remove content from the archive and so this is the only way for us to protect writers. If they open up an API where we can remove content from the archive when authors remove it from Quora, but leave the rest of the content archived, we would be happy to opt back in.

The Internet Archive is a historical archive of the public internet, and Quora asking for the ability to selectively modify their archives is absurd. An API like they’re suggesting would be ripe for abuse.

The Internet Archive inadvertently acts as a contingency for every startup’s short-sighted business plan, disastrous pivots, or acquisitions gone awry. When you run a social platform with content generated by the community, you have a larger responsibility not to burn their collective work to the ground. Part of that responsibility is participating in the web, and giving back what you take from it.

From the Wayback Machine’s FAQ:

Why is the Internet Archive collecting sites from the Internet? What makes the information useful?

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

Quora’s closure isn’t a remote, distant possibility, and as a collection of uniquely personal stories and knowledge, there’s a strong argument for preserving it. Most VC-funded social platforms eventually shutter, and in many cases, the only remnants left are what was saved by volunteer archivists and the Internet Archive.

All of Quora’s efforts to lock up its community’s contributions make it incredibly difficult to preserve when they go away, which they someday will. If you choose to contribute to Quora, they’re actively fighting to limit future access to your own work.

Burning It Down

Nearly ten years after its founding, Quora’s long-term prospects are still uncertain. They’ve raised over $225 million in four rounds of funding, most recently an $85 million Series D in April 2017 at a $1.7 billion valuation.

Their self-serve ad platform launched last year, but have yet to report earnings. This is the first time in its nine-year history it’s made any money at all, which is better than nothing, but the sustainability of its model is still a question mark.

At some point, the investors who dumped a quarter billion dollars into it will want a return on that investment. Last year, founder Adam D’Angelo indicated they expect to eventually IPO. But market conditions, combined with the results of their ad platform, may force them in different directions — a pivot, merger, or acquisition are always a possibility.

When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.

Back in 2012, Adam D’Angelo wrote, “We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria.”

As long as Quora keeps boarding up the exits, we may see it end the same way.