Middle of the week reads

🛫 As an American living in Europe who hasn’t been home and hasn’t had family visit since last December, the news that the E.U. may bar Americans as it reopens borders hits hard. Logically, I expected that. Emotionally, however, it still has impact.

🕵️‍♀️ A new feature in iOS 14 reports when apps open your pasteboard. As a result, we’ll all be able to see how many apps take a look at the last copied item, when they don’t really need to. I assume that the various social/adware SDKs in many apps are using this to make a hash key that can be used to track your movement across apps. Tricky.

🦾 Steven Sinofsky tweeted up a thread on Apple’s remarkable product engineering over time using a fearless multi-year strategy with clear and unified planning and execution. Someday, I’d love to see the heavily guarded room that has the whiteboards where they plan these things over years and then adjust over time.

🃏 Playing blackjack is like building a startup, says the new General Manager of Microsoft for Startups (i.e., my new boss). I still haven’t met Jeff face-to-face, and don’t expect to for a while to come, but I’ve already learned a few things from him and look forward to where he leads the group.

👩🏿‍💻 Steps Microsoft is taking to address racial injustice, including using the balance sheet to increase the spending with black-owned suppliers and requiring top 100 suppliers to disclosure of diversity profile information. I’m glad to see my employer doing this. #BlackLivesMatter