Kara Swisher, writing for the Times, on Trump’s Twitter dependency:

It also makes one wonder exactly what Mr. Trump would do without Twitter, which has become his best and only true way to communicate. He can certainly go on television and he does; he can make a live speech and he does; he can stand out on the White House lawn and he does. But it’s not the same. The lightning-fast, easy-hit addiction of Twitter has Mr. Trump hooked like none other.

And there are zero alternatives online. Facebook is too bloated and slow; Snapchat is too small and hard to use for the olds; Reddit is a hot mess. There is no other digital harbor for Mr. Trump’s carnival barker show, no place where both the left and right can react and where all the media gathers.

So what would happen to the president who governs by tweet if he finally did or said something that forced Twitter to throw him off the platform? Could he do his job at all?

That last question is a scary one but also completely valid.

‘Fresh Prince’ star Alfonso Ribeiro sues Fortnite over use of dance his character Carlton popularized:

Actor Alfonso Ribeiro is suing to stop two video game developers from selling a dance popularized by his “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” character.

In two lawsuits filed Monday, Ribeiro said the companies have “unfairly profited” from using his likeness and from exploiting his “protected creative expression.” The suits name Fortnite developer Epic Games Inc., and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., creator of the NBA 2K series, and several of its subsidiaries.

Epic Games and Take-Two subsidiary 2K Games did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The lawsuits ask a California federal court to bar the game developers from using, selling or displaying the dance. The suits state that Ribeiro is in the process of copyrighting the dance.

Wouldn’t NBC own the rights to the dance (aka the ‘Carlton’) Ribeiro did on “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”?

What a weird world we live in.

Rare and unseen photos of Led Zeppelin

Facebook exposed up to 6.8 million users’ private photos to developers in latest leak:

Facebook exposed private photos from up to 6.8 million users to apps that weren’t supposed to see them, the company said today. These apps were authorized to see a limited set of users’ photos, but a bug allowed them to see pictures they weren’t granted access to. These included photos from people’s stories as well as photos that people uploaded but never posted (because Facebook saved a copy anyway).

Who is (still) posting “private” photos to Facebook?

At this point I don’t have any sympathy for anyone on Facebook and anything that might happen to them. If you’re on Facebook and think your data is private you’re being willfully ignorant.

Full disclosure: Last year I deleted my Facebook account and then reactivated earlier this year in order to convert one of my Instagram accounts to a business account (Facebook requires you have a Business page connected to your Instagram business account). The personal data I’ve put on Facebook is the bare minimum and contains nothing sensitive or private. In short, I know what I’m getting into and I accept the risks.

“A new trend in logo design is rapidly emerging. Brands today are simplifying their identities with toned-down logos designed to better appeal to digital consumers around the world. While a few have already succumbed, more are considering redesigns every day.“

—Branding agency Salt explores blanding.

David Leonhardt writing for The New York Times on American capitalism and Elizabeth Warren’s proposed bill in the Senate:

In the years that followed, corporate America largely followed this prescription. Not every executive did, of course, and management and labor still had bitter disputes. But most executives behaved as if they cared about their workers and communities. C.E.O.s accepted pay packages that today look like a pittance. Middle-class incomes rose faster in the 1950s and 1960s than incomes at the top. Imagine that: declining income inequality.

And the economy — and American business — boomed during this period, just as Benton and his fellow chieftains had predicted.

Things began to change in the 1970s. Facing more global competition and higher energy prices, and with Great Depression memories fading, executives became more aggressive. They decided that their sole mission was maximizing shareholder value. They fought for deregulation, reduced taxes, union-free workplaces, lower wages and much, much higher pay for themselves. They justified it all with promises of a wonderful new economic boom. That boom never arrived.

Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worth than the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

Income inequality is too real.

Free market capitalism sounds great to some, and so does not having speed limits for automobiles, but the truth is we need regulations. They exist for a reason and they serve a real purpose.

Jon Gruber doesn’t think iOS has gotten ‘Undo’ right yet on iOS:

Undo has been in the same position in the same menu with the same keyboard shortcut since 1984. Undo and Redo are powerful, essential commands, and the ways to invoke them on the Mac have been universal conventions for almost 35 years. (Redo came a few years later, if I recall correctly.)

iOS does in fact have a standard convention for Undo, but it’s both awful and indiscoverable: Shake to Undo, which I wrote about a few months ago. As I mentioned in that piece, iOS does have support for the ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z shortcuts when a hardware keyboard is connected, and the iPad’s on-screen keyboard has an Undo/Redo button. So for text editing, on the iPad, Undo/Redo is available through good system-wide conventions.

The shake gesture was fun and novel in the early days of iOS but it’s silly, inefficient, and cumbersome in 2018.

Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, conducted a blind smartphone camera test and the results were very surprising.

Spoiler: Neither the iPhone XS nor the Pixel 3 won. This shocked me (and most of Brownlee’s friends), but once he break down why it makes more sense.