How Gmail lets spammers grab your attention with emoji ← Terence Eden’s Blog

So, what’s going on here? How have they got an animated image into the subject line?

Here’s the raw text of the message’s subject line:

1	Subject:=?UTF–8?B?876tqQ==?==?utf–8?q?__=79=6f=75=27=76=65=20=62=65=65=6e=20=63=68=6f=73=65=6e=20=66=6f=72=20=33=30=20=66=72=65=65=20=73=70=69=6e=73_?==?UTF–8?B?876tqQ==?=

Let’s take a look at the code sequence at the start and end of the subject: =?UTF-8?B?876tqQ=

As all good geeks know, characters outside the ASCII range are encoded as Base64 in emails.

The resultant character is U+FEB69 – a “Private Use” character which has no defined representation in Unicode.

For most of us, the character “󾭩” doesn’t display as any meaningful symbol – but on the web version of Gmail, it shows up as: , a flashing star.

WTF?

Ok, here’s what’s going on…

Way back in the midsts of time (well, about 2009) there was no standard for Emoji. Each company made use of Unicode’s private use characters in a different way. If you had a phone from Google and sent a message using the “Glowing Star Emoji” to a phone made by another manufacturer – the symbol would either not display properly, or show up as a completely different character!

Obviously, in an interconnected world, such a situation is untenable – so Google and several other companies set up the Emoji4Unicode project.

Google uses Private Use mappings to represent Emoji (“picture character”) symbols in Unicode text. These characters are commonly used by Japanese cell phone carriers. This project makes these mappings available.

Google and other members of the Unicode consortium are also developing a proposal for the addition of standardized Emoji symbol characters to Unicode.

The Unicode consortium banged some heads together (in a friendly way) and everyone agreed on a new standardised set of characters.

The new Unicode standard has “Glowing Star” set as U+1F31F and looks like this: 🌟.
(If your computer doesn’t support Unicode 6.0 you can take a look at the official reference chart.)

But the old version lives on! The animated GIF lives at https://mail.google.com/mail/e/B69where it is used for the web version of Gmail. (You can alter that end number to get all manner of odd characters.)

Modern Android phones still recognise this relic – although, in Google’s typically slapdash fashion, Android’s Gmail app won’t display the animation in the subject line, only in the body:

Gmail Flashing

The same happens with the iOS version of Gmail. Animated in the body, not in the subject line,

Try it yourself by sending an email with the subject and body “Star 🌟 vs Animated 󾭩”.

It doesn’t seem to work in Google Hangouts – or any other Google apps, just mail.

Interestingly, when sending this characters from the web or Android version of Gmail, it adds an “X-Goomoji-Subject” header and automatically converts the characters to GIFs. The Unicode is completely stripped away from the message.

So there we have it. An ancient form of Emoji, probably all but forgotten, has been resurrected by spammers in the hope that you’ll notice their wares.

What a load of 󾓴!

Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions – Think with Google

Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions – Think with Google

In a crowded market, how does an app attract new customers, gain loyalty, and deliver value? With great design for a delightful app experience.

Here, Google’s UX Research Lead Jenny Gove will take you through 25 principles to build an app that helps users achieve what they’re looking to do.

The Pmarca Blog Archive Is Back… as an Ebook – Andreessen Horowitz

The Pmarca Blog Archive Is Back… as an Ebook – Andreessen Horowitz

Somewhere along the way Marc Andreessen went from being pmarca to @pmarca. He took down his popular blog, and years later took up tweetstorming. Which means you can keep up with his current thoughts on Twitter — and also catch up on them (in the form of tweets, podcasts, and op-eds) here.

But by popular request, you can now also download many of his older blog posts — The Pmarca Blog Archives — as an ebook, below. [And yes, we do get the irony of doing this!]

That said, here are some of our edit notes*: We removed all links (and text) that referenced resources that no longer exist or were otherwise outdated out of a live web context. We kept the original formatting (except to turn some subheads into headers) and did not do significant editing. And finally, while it pained us to not include other popular posts (like “Three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet” or his views on Hollywood and movies and more), you can catch up on some of those posts as archived here, here, and here…

To download the free ebook — available in multiple formats for most e-readers — we’d appreciate your filling out the optional form.

ebook download

pick your format and then click ‘download’:.EPUB (for Nook, iBooks, Kobo etc.): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookepub
.MOBI (for Kindle): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookmobi
.PDF (for printing): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookpdf

On Permission, by Craig Mod · The Manual

I wonder about the waterfall of tweets. I wonder about the @ replies. I wonder how much mail is sitting in my inbox—something I haven’t checked since I went to sleep the night before. I wonder what news has been plastered on Techmeme, how AAPL and AMZN and TSLA have done today. I wonder what’s happened on Facebook, what new photographs are waiting, what new trending tidbits chosen by the algorithm are sitting atop my newsfeed.

And then I think about the algorithm itself. I wonder if it’s sad. If she is sad. It’s been nearly twenty hours since she last saw me. Since my last visit. Suddenly, with my new rules, I wonder if her feelings have been hurt, even though I know this algorithm has no feelings, or certainly none for me.

🙁

Investigating the algorithms that govern our lives – Columbia Journalism Review

Investigating the algorithms that govern our lives – Columbia Journalism Review

TO GET STARTED:

“How big data is unfair”: A layperson’s guide to why big data and algorithms are inherently biased.
“Algorithmic accountability reporting: On the investigation of black boxes”: The primer on reporting on algorithms, by Nick Diakopoulos, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively on the intersection of journalism and algorithmic accountability. A must-read.
“Certifying and removing disparate impact”: The computer scientist’s guide to locating and and fixing bias in algorithms computationally, by Suresh Venkatasubramanian and colleagues. Some math is involved, but you can skip it.
The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Jonathan Stray’s gentle guide to thinking about data as communication, much of which applies to reporting on algorithms as well.

About — Graphic Means

About — Graphic Means

“It’s been roughly 30 years since the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry works. For decades before that, it was the hands of industrious workers, and various ingenious machines and tools that brought type and image together on meticulously prepared paste-up boards, before they were sent to the printer.

The documentary, Graphic Means, which is now in production, will explore graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s—from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to PDF. Support the production of this independent film, by pre-ordering your copy here.

…

PS: Major props go to Doug Wilson and his team, the makers of Linotype: In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World. Watching that film clarified so much of what I’d missed in the previous decades of typesetting. And it charmed, and entertained while doing so. If you haven’t watched the film yet—go do that ASAP!
…

Interviews

Paul Brainerd: Co-founder of Aldus (producers of Pagemaker)

Colin Brignall + Dave Farey: Letraset typeface designers

Lou Brooks: illustrator, curator of The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies

James Craig: author and educator

Steven Heller: writer, educator, designer

Cece Cutsforth: designer, educator

Tobias Frere-Jones: typeface designer

Ellen Lupton: designer, author, educator

Carolina de Bartolo: designer, writer, educator

Gene Gable: designer, writer, consultant

Ken Garland: designer, author, educator

Malcolm Garrett: designer, educator

Walter Graham: author, paste-up expert

Dan Rhatigan: typeface designer

Frank Romano: design historian, author, educator

Adrian Shaughnessy: designer, writer, publisher

Ian Swift: designer

Joe Erceg: designer

…

After the Fact – The New Yorker

After the Fact – The New Yorker

Most of what is written about truth is the work of philosophers, who explain their ideas by telling little stories about experiments they conduct in their heads, like the time Descartes tried to convince himself that he didn’t exist, and found that he couldn’t, thereby proving that he did.

Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment:

“Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.”

As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”)

Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason.

Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know.

I Google, therefore I am not.