Stop Twitter’s iOS app from opening links in Reader View (maybe…)

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The Web pages people share in Twitter can look annoyingly bland and alike in Twitter’s iOS app. If so, it’s not your fault. But turning off the default setting you may have been opted into is your problem.

The issue here seems to be Twitter’s test, as reported by the Guardian in October, in having Twitter open links in Safari’s simplified if not style-starved Reader View. Sometimes, that’s great: The core content of a page snaps into view almost instantly, without the ads that wriggle into view and the junk links that pad out the page.

But in the weeks since I’ve seen this behavior return after I thought I’d opted out of it earlier, I’ve more often wished I could see the page without Apple’s abstraction. When Reader View isn’t making pages look identical, with the same boring fonts, it hides some of their content–Techmeme’s leaderboard lists, for instance, don’t even appear in Reader View.

And if you want advertising-supported sites you like to make a little money off your attention, Reader View is not your friend or theirs: Most ads don’t appear in this perspective.

I’m supposed to disable Reader View for a page by tapping the black rectangle at the left of Safari’s address bar, but too often, that only leads to the page reloading in Reader View seconds later.

You can stop this obnoxiousness, but it’s nowhere obvious. Open Twitter’s app, tap the silhouette icon at the bottom right to bring up your profile, tap the gear icon near the top right, and select “Settings and privacy.” See the heading for “Display and sound,” where you might expect to see a setting governing how pages appear? Ignore it and instead tap “Accessibility.”

Now scroll down–never mind that the disappearing scroll bars in iOS might suggest there’s nothing more to fuss with there. You should now see a slider control labeled “Open links in Reader View”; tap that to end this behavior.

Unless you can’t. After I tweeted out a version of this advice, a reader replied that he didn’t see any such option in his own copy of the app. Maybe his running a beta version of iOS 11 explains that? Or maybe he’s been opted into a more diabolical version of whatever test I got sucked into? I can’t tell you for sure, since Twitter PR has not yet answered the query I sent in Thursday morning. If you have relevant testimony, I welcome it in the comments.

Weekly output: Virgin Mobile USA Inner Circle, Microsoft on security, D.C. tech media, Sprint Flex, SMS two-step verification

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This week involved a large tech conference, but I didn’t have to go any farther than D.C. for it: Microsoft Inspire ran from Monday to Wednesday at the convention center, with the morning keynotes held at the Verizon Center. The event yielded one post, an idea for another and a sweaty evening at Nationals Park Wednesday, the location of the Carrie Underwood concert that closed out the gathering.

7/10/2017: Virgin Mobile’s iPhone-only plan: What’s the catch?, USA Today

This snakebit column required not one but two corrections. The first remedied my mistake in reading “$1” as this Sprint prepaid brand’s promotional monthly rate when it was the cost for the entire first year of service; minutes later, I saw a reader comment calling out my dumb error in writing “megabits per second” instead of “kilobits per second” when describing a streaming speed limit.

7/12/2017: Microsoft reveals two big ways to stop ransomware attacks, Yahoo Finance

Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith’s keynote Wednesday called for collective action to stop ransomware and other malware outbreaks. But getting companies and organizations to end their long-running abusive relationship with Windows XP won’t be easy; neither will persuading governments to stop hoarding vulnerabilities in favor of promptly disclosing all of them so they can be fixed.

7/12/2017: Working with Tech Media in the Washington D.C. Region, Washington Network Group

I spoke on this panel with the Washington Business Journal’s Andy Medici and FedScoop’s Tajha Chappellet-Lanier (a fellow Washingtonian Tech Titan honoree) about coverage priorities, tech trends and PR pet peeves. Once again, I implored publicists not to follow up by re-sending the original e-mail topped by nothing more than “Any interest?”

7/14/2017: Sprint doesn’t want you to buy your next phone, Yahoo Finance

Sprint gave me an advance on this, but its PR pitch for its new Flex leasing deal didn’t spell out that this move would also end Sprint’s installment-payment pricing on phones. Because I’m slow, I needed a couple of rounds of Q&A to grasp that difference. Sprint, in turn, didn’t clarify the international-unlocking policy under Flex until Friday morning, after its embargo on the news had passed but before it had posted its own press release.

7/14/2017: How a system meant to keep your money safe could put it in danger, Yahoo Finance

I expected to see everybody else jump on this story of a PayPal customer losing money after an AT&T rep let an unknown attacker move his number–the last line of defense on his PayPal account–to a new SIM, since I learned about it on Twitter a week earlier. Instead, I had time to quiz PayPal, AT&T and others; verify that a no-longer-advertised phone-free form of two-factor authentication still worked at PayPal; and have an enlightening chat with Google security product manager Stephan Somogyi about the tradeoffs of different “2FA” methods.

How to merge PDFs in Apple’s Preview–and get them to stay merged

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My Monday was some 10 minutes shorter than it should have been. That’s about the time I wasted trying to get Apple’s Preview app to function as advertised to merge two Portable Document Format files into one PDF.

In the interest of sparing you the same aggravation, here’s what you need to do that Apple fails to clarify:

• Open one PDF in Preview, then drag the other PDF from the Finder into that window. Apple’s online help is correct through this step.

• Do not try to save the combined PDF. Do not use the File menu’s “Export as PDF…” command. Both will leave you with a document consisting only of the first PDF.

• Instead, go to the File menu, select “Print…” and then click the downward-facing button next to “PDF” at the lower-left corner. Select “Save as PDF…” and you will have your combined PDF file.

Dear Apple: When I gripe about the state of software quality on the Mac these days, it’s things like this that usually set me off. Here we have a completely unintuitive process in which the correct way to do things sits three clicks deep in the app’s UI–and two clicks further in than the menu options that look like they’d do the job. And I know I’m not the only user irked by it.

Please fix this–although if you must prioritize, restore memory discipline to Safari first.

Weekly output: net neutrality, cybersecurity advice, Photobucket

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In an alternate universe, I’d be heading to New York Tuesday for CE Week, but I had a panel invitation here and none there. I also recalled how low-key last year’s conference was, so I decided to stick around here after I’d already put in for a press pass. To everybody who’s pitched me about their CE Week exhibits or events (which seem to be more numerous than last year’s): Sorry!

7/3/2017: How open-internet rules are actually helping consumers, Yahoo Finance

Yet another net-neutrality post? Yes. This one covered two angles I had not addressed adequately before. One is how Internet providers’ own deployment figures show they’ve kept on expanding their networks after the advent of open-Internet rules. The other is the poor odds of a small ISP getting the time of day from a major streaming-media service, much less inking a paid-prioritization deal that would yield enough money to finance broadband buildout.

7/3/2017: ICD Brief 47, International Cybersecurity Dialogue

This group’s newsletter quoted my critique of the cybersecurity lessons offered in a French TV report. I didn’t find it much more helpful than much of the infosec advice you’ll see in mainstream coverage.

7/7/2017: The big lesson from Photobucket’s ‘ransom images’ debacle, Yahoo Finance

It’s been years since I last uploaded any pictures to Photobucket, but only a decade ago it led the market for online image sharing. Its subsequent descent into a) becoming an ad-choked hell and b) demanding that free users who had accepted its invitation to embed their photos elsewhere switch to paying $400 a year is sad on a lot of levels.

Lawn enemy number one: the Tree of Hell

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Fourteen summers of battling the weeds in our lawn have left me with a weird, foliage-driven sense of the calendar.

If I’m twisting loose chickweed with a weeding fork, it could be February but it shouldn’t be later than April, lest I waste my efforts on plants that have already gone to seed. Pungent deadnettles come about a month later. followed by crabgrass.

And from late spring on, I can expect to see Ailanthus altissima saplings invade the front yard. “Tree of Heaven,” my ass: This invasive, quasi-viral plant grows like a weed, literally stinks, and spreads with zombie-like persistence.

Clawing out one of our worst imports from Asia requires advanced stubbornness. Plucking a shoot out of the lawn is easy but leaves a densely-coiled root that will send more growths aboveground within days.

You have to shove a trowel underneath it, elevate a clump of lawn, then feel through the dirt for that root mass and then tug it loose. Done right, you’re left with a long stretch of subterranean subversive that can no longer make a nuisance of itself.

I want to think I’ve seen results this summer, in the form of patches of lawn that haven’t sprouted new ailanthus shoots in weeks (but do show the collateral damage of bare spots that I’ll have to re-seed in the fall). It may seem like an endless task, but it can’t be as futile as trying to evict our single worst import from across the Pacific, the tiger mosquito. Right?

Weekly output: niche online video, biometric boarding passes, EC vs. Google, Petya, Canada vs. Google, Nexus bootloop, Google diet

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I made up for a few slow weeks at Yahoo with this week’s surplus of stories. That represents a lesson learned from last year, when I let some slow months of writing slide on the idea that I could compensate for that shortfall later on.

6/26/2017: Surveying the Field, FierceTelecom

I contributed to another Fierce bundle of stories with this article (e-mail signup required) at how some niche online-video sites try to market themselves to subscribers. Bonus of talking to one of them, Silver Spring-based CuriosityStream: reconnecting with a producer I worked with at ABC News Now in the previous decade, back when that now-vanished network regularly had me as a guest on its tech show “Ahead of the Curve.” Anybody remember watching that?

6/26/2017: Your fingerprints could replace your airline boarding pass, Yahoo Finance

I headed over to National Airport to see how Delta is using Clear’s biometric system to let passengers enter its SkyClub without showing a boarding pass or ID. I can confirm that it worked, and that the Thai chicken soup at that lounge was delicious. NBC Washington’s Adam Tuss also checked out this demo; you can see my face briefly in his report.

6/27/2017: Even a $2.7 billion fine can’t hurt Google, Yahoo Finance

The European Commission’s record-setting fine of Google doesn’t seem to match the actual offense–a search engine, perish the thought, selling ads against user queries. Not that Google’s influence over the industry isn’t troubling…

6/28/2017: Petya attack, Al Jazeera

I had a longer-than-usual spot talking from a windowless, almost airless studio about this new malware outbreak. This was my first appearance on AJ’s Arabic channel since Qatar’s neighbors demanded that the country shut down the news network, a novel sort of business risk for me.

6/29/2017: A ruling against Google in Canada could affect free speech around the world, Yahoo Finance

Another day, another ruling against Google. In this case, Canada’s Supreme Court ordered Google to stop pointing anybody in the world to the site of what looks like a thoroughly sleazy Canadian firm. That is not a good precedent.

7/1/2017: My Android phone crashed and it won’t finish booting up, USA Today

I turned my now-resolved smartphone snafu (yes, Google did fully refund my Nexus 5X purchase as promised) into a column.

7/1/2017: How you can cut Google out of your life … mostly, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this “how to go on a Google diet” idea in mind for a while, and the EC fine of Google gave me a reason to start writing. I don’t expect this post will get anybody to stop using Google–I certainly won’t–but if even a small fraction of users start to spend some time at alternate search services, I will have done my part for media literacy.