This morning, I was shaken to learn Heather B. Hamilton (formerly Heather Armstrong) aka Dooce is no longer with us. I learned the news from a post to her Instagram, confirmed by several friends after and then the Associated Press, announcing the tragic news that she died yesterday at the age of 47.

I’m shaken and sad, and my heart goes out to all her family and friends feeling her loss right now, but especially her two children.

We weren’t close friends, but as part of the same old-school blogging cohort, we hung out over the years at conferences and meetups, getting together whenever she was in town.

Heather was the consummate poster, sharp and hilarious, famously sharing her personal life on her blog, finding early fame getting fired (“dooced”) for writing about her coworkers, and later writing extensively about motherhood while raising her two children. She was a well-documented pioneer in how to make a living writing independently online.

Her writing brought her an enormous audience of fans who loved her and her writing, which eventually expanded into three memoirs and mainstream attention. Along the way, her success also attracted a small army of haters who criticized her every move in dedicated forums and blogs. The pressures of living online took a toll on her emotional well-being, and she quit writing several times.

But the last few years were clearly much harder on her. She’d publicly struggled with alcohol addiction and depression for years, eventually leading to an experimental, risky treatment for chronic depression, a series of chemically-induced comas to repeatedly approximate brain death, which she wrote about in her last book.

I last saw Heather on that book tour in May 2019. We talked a bit after the event, and I left feeling unsettled. She kept talking about how much better she felt, but she didn’t seem well.

Then, last August, she posted a bizarre rambling screed that talked about her addiction and a suicide attempt, ending in an upsetting transphobic rant, seemingly in response to her child coming out as non-binary to her. It was pretty awful, alienating many of her friends and fans, myself included. She eventually deleted it all.

I don’t know if she changed her mind about any of it before she died. I hope she did, because that rant seemed out of character from the person I thought I knew. I was hoping to someday read about her successful recovery, a change of heart, an evolution of thinking, a thoughtful apology. Maybe a new book, or maybe just another beautifully-written blog post, one of so many she penned over her 22 years on the web.

Maybe it’s appropriate that she leaves a complicated legacy. Life is hard and messy, sad and angry, dark and beautiful, miserable and hopeful, all at once.

I’ll remember her as the person we invited to open up XOXO 2015. Big-hearted, funny, thoughtful, provocative. She gave me a minor panic attack when she showed me her opening slide, and then I laughed and cried, along with everyone else in Revolution Hall. I’m going to miss her.

Red Team Blues, the latest novel from my old friend Cory Doctorow, is out today, the first in his new series of near-future techno-thrillers. The protagonist, Martin Hench, is a 67-year-old forensic accountant on the verge of retirement, doing one last big job for an old friend.

Hench spent his career on the red team, in the cybersecurity meaning of the word, identifying vulnerabilities and exploiting weaknesses to track down crooks and cheats hiding and laundering their money. But when the job goes sideways, he’s forced to switch to the blue team, going on the defense and thinking like his attackers to stay alive.

I just finished the advance copy Cory sent me this morning and it’s a wild ride. It reminds me of some of my favorite detective noir, from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, but in a near-future setting grounded in real technology.

The plot centers around a critical piece of digital information: the signing keys for the secure enclaves on mobile devices, which are used in the book to verify transactions on a fictional cryptocurrency ledger. This approach to trustless computing is a risky idea for reasons that quickly become clear, and explained well in cryptographer Matthew Green’s book review.

Cory’s syndicated the first chapter in five parts on Pluralistic, and you can buy it today. (It’s also available in audiobook form read by Wil Wheaton, crowdfunded without DRM, naturally.)

If you’re in the Portland area, Cory and I will be talking about the book at Powell’s at Cedar Hills on Tuesday, May 2. If you’re not in Portland, his book tour kicks off today in San Diego, with dates across the U.S. and Canada. Hope to see you there!

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier. Update: As confirmed by 9to5Mac, it was removed in macOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3.

See for Yourself

If you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview.

(If you’re not comfortable with Terminal, open Finder and click on Macintosh HD, then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Control-click on VirtualScanner.app and Show Package Contents, open the Contents→Resources folder inside, then open simpledoc.pdf.)

In the Image Capture utility, the Bitcoin whitepaper is used as a sample document for a device called “Virtual Scanner II,” which is either hidden or not installed for everyone by default. It’s not clear why it’s hidden for some or what exactly it’s used for, but Reid Beels suggested it may power the “Import from iPhone” feature.

In Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper.

But Why

Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it’s only 184 KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.

There’s virtually nothing about this online. As of this moment, there are only a couple references to “Virtual Driver II” or the whitepaper file in Google results. Namely, this Twitter thread from designer Joshua Dickens in November 2020, who also spotted the whitepaper PDF, inspiring this Apple Community post in April 2021. And that’s it!

Here's a mystery: why do I have an Image Capture device called Virtual Scanner II on my Mac? It shows a preview of a painted sign that for some reason closely resembles a photo by @thomashawk on 'clustershot'? But not exactly — the scanned version looks more weathered. pic.twitter.com/jPb5kx3NyS

— Josh D (@schwa23) November 28, 2020

One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG photo of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the file, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008.

If you know anything more — about how or why the Bitcoin paper ended up in macOS or what Virtual Scanner II is for — get in touch or leave a comment. (Anonymity guaranteed!)

Update: A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.

Update (April 26): As confirmed by 9to5Mac, it was removed in macOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3.

Yesterday, I saw a tweet that seemed so obviously wrong, it made me wonder if it was just clickbait.

During a 1992 MTV event, Bill Clinton was famously asked if he wore "boxers or briefs". It was a touchstone moment in American politics.

But I can't find any actual video of it. It's been completely scrubbed from existence. Which is crazy to me, in this age.

— Adam Spragg (@AdamSpragg) January 22, 2023

But after digging through Google, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, C-SPAN, and the Twitter archives myself, it seemed to be true: an iconic moment of ’90s political pop culture appeared to be completely missing from the internet.

Boxers or Briefs

If you were alive in the early ’90s, there’s a good chance you remember this moment.

During MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign coverage in the early ’90s, Bill Clinton promised to return to MTV if elected by the channel’s young voters. As promised, a little over a year into his first term, he appeared on MTV’s Enough is Enough on April 19, 1994, a town hall-style forum with 200 16- to 20-year-olds focused on violence in America, and particularly the 1994 crime bill being debated at the time.

Toward the end of the 90 minute broadcast, during a series of rapid-fire audience questions, 17-year-old Tisha Thompson asked a question that seemed to surprise and embarrass Clinton:

Q. Mr. President, the world’s dying to know, is it boxers or briefs? [Laughter] [Applause]

Clinton: Usually briefs. [Laughter] I can’t believe she did that.

That question got a ridiculously outsized amount of attention at the time. The Washington Post called him the “Commander In Briefs.” It was covered in the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, and countless others. It was the subject of late-night talk show monologues, and Clinton himself joked about it at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner later that week.

Over the following years, the “boxers or briefs” question became the “Free Bird” of the campaign trail, posed to Newt Gingrich (“that is a very stupid question, and it’s stupid for you to ask that question”), Bernie Sanders (“briefs”), and then-candidate Barack Obama: “I don’t answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in ’em!”

Nearly 30 years later, the original clip is shockingly hard to find online. Someone on Reddit linked to a version of the video on YouTube, but the account was terminated. C-SPAN has a different clip from the show, as well as a searchable transcript, but not the clip itself.

As of right now, before I publish this post, it’s extremely hard to find online — but not impossible, because I found it, and here it is.

How I Found It

Among its voluminous archives of web pages, books, and other media, the Internet Archive stores a huge number of U.S. TV news videos, clips from over 2,470,000 shows since 2009. You can search the closed captions, and view short video clips from the results.

Their search engine is a little quirky, but more than good enough to find several news talk shows who rebroadcast the clip over the last few years, typically to poke fun at Bill Clinton. I searched for the exact quoted phrases from the original interview, and found 14 clips that mentioned it from shows like Hardball with Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

Only one of the clips included the full question and answer, and didn’t overlay any graphics on the video, from an episode of Up w/Steve Kornicki on March 15, 2014.

The Internet Archive will let you stream the short clips, but there’s no option to download the video itself, and unfortunately, it frequently won’t show the exactly the moment you’re searching for. (This is probably an issue with alignment of closed captions and source videos.)

That said, you can edit the timestamp in the video URL. Every video result page has a URL with something like “/start/2190/end/2250” in the URL. This is the start and end timestamp in seconds, which you can adjust manually. (There appears to be a three-minute limit to clip length, so if you get an error, make sure you’re not requesting longer than that.)

Once you’ve found what you like, you can download it using Chrome Dev Tools:

1. First, start and then pause the video.
2. In Chrome, use Option-Command-C to open the element inspector in Chrome Dev Tools.
3. Highlight and click on the paused video.
4. In the Chrome Dev Tools window, right-click on the <video> tag and choose Open In New Tab.
5. The video will now be in a dedicated tab. Hit Ctrl-S (Command-S on Mac) to save the video, or select “Save Page As…” from the File menu.

Or in Firefox, it’s much easier: just hold shift and right-click to “Save Video.”

After that, I just cropped the clip and uploaded it to my site, and YouTube for good measure. If you have a better quality version, please send it to me.

That’s it! The Internet Archive is an amazing and under-utilized resource, poorly indexed in Google, but absolutely filled with incredible things.

Updates

On May 9, 2023, Paramount announced it was shutting down MTV News permanently, 36 years after it was started. This led to a bunch of tributes and retrospectives, and many of them link to this blog post or the copy of the video I put up on YouTube.

The Hollywood Reporter’s oral history of MTV News talked to Doug Herzog, who was MTV’s first News Director and went on to become president of Viacom Music and Entertainment Group, overseeing all of MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central, among others. He casually dropped this bomb, which I don’t think has ever been reported anywhere:

HERZOG: It’s Choose or Lose — which won a Peabody in 1992 — that ultimately led to, you know, Bill Clinton coming on MTV and talking about “boxers or briefs.” That question was planted by MTV, by the way.

The young woman who asked the question, Tisha Thompson, worked at MTV News, so that tracks! I asked her if she was already an intern or employee at MTV News when she asked the question, which seems likely. I’ll update this post if I get a response.

RIP MTV News. You were good to me. pic.twitter.com/2q4ChDfepQ

— Tisha Thompson (@TishaESPN) May 10, 2023