The Daring Fireball Linked List

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Best Moment of Today’s Senate Hearing ★

John McCain: “Why the hell do I have to keep updating the apps on my iPhone all the time?”

Steve Jobs E-Book Email to James Murdoch ★

I missed this last week, but John Paczkowski has the entire email from Jobs with the “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99” line singled out by the DOJ:

Now, this is but one piece of evidence in a much larger case. And the DOJ does claim to have other evidence that reflects poorly on Apple, specifically testimony that suggests it used its prowess in the apps market to push reticent partners into signing its e-books deal. But in this particular case, it does seem to have cherry-picked a quote for maximum effect.

Wikipedia Corruption ★

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

Wired: First Look at the Xbox One ★

Peter Rubin:

At this point, fewer than 2 million Surface tablets have been sold. Windows Phone has a 3.2 percent share of the smartphone market. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has sold 77 million units and has been the bestselling game console in the US for 28 straight months. Not to take anything away from Microsoft’s other consumer products, but there’s no longer any question which side the company’s bread is buttered on. And if the Interactive Entertainment Business division gets this right, the Xbox One is going to be a very, very big piece of bread.

Xbox is Microsoft’s foothold in the post-PC world.

NYT Live Coverage of Senate Hearing on Apple and Corporate Taxes ★

Senator Rand Paul:

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, has taken the floor with a very different tone. He says he is “offended” by the hearings. Who, he said, doesn’t try to minimize their own taxes?

“Tell me what Apple has done that’s illegal,” he said.

And on Twitter:

If there is anyone to blame here it is not Apple, it is Congress and the tax code it created.

Monday, 20 May 2013

The Talk Show, Live ★

Speaking of The Talk Show, we’re doing another live audience episode in San Francisco on Tuesday 11 June, the second day of WWDC. Last year’s show was great, this year’s should be even better.

Update: Sold out, but stay tuned. We might have a few more tickets available closer to the event.

All New Flickr Design ★

Big week for Yahoo.

‘See You on Larry’s Island’ ★

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, with special guest Merlin Mann. We cover important, serious issues, such as whether Larry Page more resembles a Bond villain or Magneto. In other words, the usual.

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Apple’s Prepared Testimony Before U.S. Senate ★

An interesting read, including this:

Apple does not use tax gimmicks. Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US in order to avoid US tax; it does not use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations; it does not hold money on a Caribbean island; and it does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Apple has substantial foreign cash because it sells the majority of its products outside the US. International operations accounted for 61% of Apple’s revenue last year and two-thirds of its revenue last quarter. These foreign earnings are taxed in the jurisdiction where they are earned (“foreign, post-tax income”).

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

The One-Person Product ★

Marco Arment on the Yahoo/Tumblr deal. Great perspective from the inside.

Two Takes on Google Glass at I/O ★

Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company: “Even Google’s Own Developers Won’t Be Seen Wearing Google Glass”:

Those of us who believe in the future of Glass technology can identify other culprits: We can blame price. We can blame availability. We can blame battery. We can blame the silly aesthetic. We can even blame it on the rain! But imagine if Apple announced their new iPhone, yet almost no one at Cupertino felt the need to carry one. Or imagine if Ford announced a new car, but their execs insisted on biking to work.

If Google’s own cohort doesn’t feel compelled to wear Glass in spite of its perfectly predictable shortcomings, why would they ever expect that the rest of us will?

But then here’s Pete Pachal, writing for Mashable: “Google Glass Stole the Show at Google I/O 2013”:

The glaring omission didn’t stop Glass from stealing the show for the rest of the conference, though. Day 2 of I/O was packed with sessions on Glass, including one where official Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr apps made their debut. The sessions themselves garnered the kind of lineups usually reserved Lady Gaga tickets. Many developers were walking around wearing Glass, but it was the looks of jealousy from the Glass-less that underscored just how much interest there is in Google’s head-mounted gadget.

One of these guys is wrong.

Samsung’s Share of Android Hardware Profit ★

Andy Boxall, writing for Digital Trends:

Analysts broke it down like this: Globally, it’s estimated the Android industry made $5.3 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, while the profit estimates for Android phones shipped by Samsung comes in at $5.1 billion for the same period. The exact figure quoted is 94.7 percent profit share, and that’s not including tablets either.

According to Strategy Analytics’ chart, in a (very) distant second place is LG, with 2.5 percent profit share, while all the other Android phone manufacturers — think about it, that’s everyone from Sony and HTC to Huawei, Acer and ZTE — are lumped into an Others category, which totals 2.7 percent.

Rather remarkable.

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr ★

Marissa Mayer, on her Tumblr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. […]

I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Humanely written. Love the “We promise not to screw it up”, because it’s a direct acknowledgement of every Tumblr user’s primary concern. That’s a weird sentence to put in a billion-dollar deal announcement, but I like it.

Sunday, 19 May 2013

All Things D: Yahoo Board Approves $1.1 Billion Acquisition of Tumblr ★

Kara Swisher:

As part of the deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who got a windfall of cash from the deal — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain much control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure.

If they treat Tumblr the way Facebook has (so far) treated Instagram, I think this will work out well.

Saturday, 18 May 2013

EA Sports Developer Calls Wii U ‘Crap’ and Nintendo ‘Walking Dead’ ★: Owen Good, Kotaku:

At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn’t developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports’ Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as “crap” and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether.
Bloomberg’s Lazy Apple Bias ★: Starting to get silly at this point.

Friday, 17 May 2013

‘Blinking or Winking, as They Relieved Themselves’ ★: Nick Bilton on the pervasiveness of Google Glass at I/O.
Everything Apple Needs to Introduce at WWDC to Appease the Internet ★: Justin Williams:

With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it’d be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent “State of the Union” addresses in order to appease the Internet. Failure to introduce each and every one of these features and updates will result in another stock price plummet, calls for Tim Cook’s ouster and an infinite amount of comments on tech blogs decrying that Android is superior to Apple’s iOS.
Google Hangouts Drops Support for XMPP ★: Open always wins.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Jeffrey Zablotny on Apple’s ‘Photos Every Day’ TV Spot ★

Jeffrey Zablotny:

This is a spot by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Apple, called ‘Photos Every Day’. The craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.

The more I see it, the more I like this commercial.

Google Plus Still Looks Like Facebook ★

James Russell:

As I posted a couple of days ago: Everything Is a Remix — so I have absolutely no problem with these two platforms sharing ideas and inspiration… but let’s not pretend one has struck off in a bold new direction.

(Via Om Malik, who sees non-cosmetic differences.)

Tim Cook Doing Interviews in Advance of Congressional Hearing ★

Tim Cook, in an interview with Politico:

He also defended his company’s conduct. “I can tell you unequivocally Apple does not funnel its domestic profits overseas. We don’t do that. We pay taxes on all the products we sell in the U.S., and we pay every dollar that we owe. And so I’d like to be really clear on that,” Cook said.

And to The Washington Post:

“If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” Cook said in an interview Thursday. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.”

Google Sends Microsoft Cease-and-Desist for Windows Phone YouTube App ★

Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica:

Though the app included account support, playlists, commenting, and most other aspects of YouTube, there’s one thing it was missing — advertising. It also had two features it shouldn’t have had — the ability to download videos and the ability to play videos that the creators have blocked from mobile devices.

As a result, Google sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist demand ordering the company to stop distributing the application by May 22nd.

Microsoft’s response:

We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.

Peter Kafka posits that Google played right into Microsoft’s hands on this.

The Three Types of Specialist Necessary for Any Revolution ★

Kottke, quoting Vonnegut.

‘My Gut Told Me to Say Yes’ ★

Outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini tells The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal that Intel passed on a chance to produce CPUs for the iPhone:

“The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini’s voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. “The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,” he said. “My gut told me to say yes.”

Curious whether that was an ARM chip — and if not, what was it?

Update: Ben Thompson says it must have been XScale, which was ARM-based.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Howard Johnsons Children’s Menu ★

Great find by John Sisson. Chock full of spoilers, though.

Mariano Rivera Breaking Bats ★

Drew Sheppard, writing for FanGraphs:

Enjoy him while you can.

‘Nothing But Lando’ ★

J.J. Abrams takes suggestions for the upcoming new Star Wars movie from The Jimmy Kimmel Show audience. (See also: Harrison Ford a few weeks ago.)

DeadDrop ★

Kevin Poulsen on the story behind DeadDrop, the new open source anonymous inbox for journalists he created with Aaron Swartz. Now in use at The New Yorker.

Google to Sell Its Own Nexus Version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 ★

Brian Chen, reporting for the NYT Bits blog:

Google on Wednesday said it would sell a version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 running its own “stock” version of Android, not Samsung’s modified version. The device will go on sale in Google’s online store, called Play, on June 26, according to Hugo Barra, vice president of product management for Android. The phone will cost $650 and will come unlocked.

DF reader Jim Lipsey asks:

Why doesn’t Google buy up a mobile device company and offer their own phone rather than resell a Samsung handset?

Great question. Why doesn’t Google do that?

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Passages From Isaacson Book Part of DOJ Case Against Apple in Ebook Price-Fixing Case ★

Reuters:

Apple disputes this in a second filing, also made on April 26 and released on Tuesday. It says that e-book demand “exploded” with Apple’s iPad launch, and the average retail price of an e-book dropped to $7.34 from $7.97.

In a filing released on Tuesday, the Justice Department said that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time, “conceded the price-fixing conspiracy” when he told his biographer that Apple had “told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’”

If anyone else at Apple had revealed this to a writer, they’d have been fired (by Jobs) immediately. I question Jobs’s judgment in picking Isaacson to write the book in the first place, but no matter who he’d chosen to write the book, he should have held himself to the same standards he held his employees to when it came to keeping the company’s internal workings private.

NYT: ‘U.S. Now Paints Apple as “Ringmaster” in Its Lawsuit on Ebook Price-Fixing’ ★

Edward Wyatt and Nick Wingfield, reporting for the NYT:

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

Eddy Cue, hardball player.

David Trainer: The Man Who Figures Apple Is Worth $240 a Share ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

I watched Trainer’s CNBC appearance (best line: “Steve Jobs was the Bo Jackson of CEOs”). I read his blog post. I looked up ROIC in Investopedia. I studied his Apple model.

I couldn’t make any sense of it. Maybe you can.

Nope, me neither. (Keep in mind, at the end of last quarter, Apple held $153 worth of cash and investments per share. Just cash. Trainer is saying Apple’s entire future is worth about $90 per share, about $85 billion total.)

Update: Ethan Jewett on Trainer’s weird math and wrong numbers.

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Square Stand ★

Turns an iPad into a point of sale register. Given how many small businesses I already see using Square, I think this is going to sell well.

Update: Square says, “Square Stand works with iPad 2 and 3 (30-pin connector) and costs $299. iPad not included.” Only working with 30-pin connector iPads seems pretty short-sighted, no? Those things are probably going the way of the Dodo bird. And why does it cost $299 if it’s just a stand, a power adapter, and an integrated Square reader? (They send you the dongle readers for free when you sign up.)

As of Today, Every Major Mobile Competitor Also Makes Apps for iOS ★

Rene Ritchie, on BlackBerry’s announcement that they’re bringing BBM to iOS:

Apple, by contrast, makes precisely nothing for Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry. Not even iTunes.

There’s a reason Apple made iTunes for Windows a decade ago and iTunes for nothing but iOS today.

Larry Page on His Vocal Cord Problems ★

Larry Page:

About 14 years ago, I got a bad cold, and my voice became hoarse. At the time I didn’t think much about it. But my voice never fully recovered. So I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with left vocal cord paralysis. This is a nerve problem that causes your left vocal cord to not move properly. Despite extensive examination, the doctors never identified a cause — though there was speculation of virus-based damage from my cold. It is quite common in cases like these that a definitive cause is not found. […]

Fast forward to last summer, when the same pattern repeated itself — a cold followed by a hoarse voice. Once again things didn’t fully improve, so I went in for a check-up and was told that my second vocal cord now had limited movement as well. Again, after a thorough examination, the doctors weren’t able to identify a cause.

‘A Look at Mail in Cyberdog’ ★

This week’s episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with special guest Dan Frommer. Topics including Windows 8’s “have it all” design leading to it failing both as a tablet and PC OS; the loyalty (or perhaps lack thereof) of new Apple customers; Netflix’s commanding and growing lead as a provider of streaming video; and some utterly un-researched speculation about overseas roaming leading to poor iPhone battery life.

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Aluminum-Framed Lumia 925 ★

Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service:

Nokia’s new Lumia 925 phone has an aluminium frame that functions as an antenna, and is lighter and thinner than the Lumia 920, but otherwise offers similar performance to its predecessor.

A metal frame that functions as an antenna. This, from the company that bragged during Antennagate that they were the “pioneer in internal antennas”.

Declan McCullagh: ‘Apple Deluged by Police Demands to Decrypt iPhones’ ★

Declan McCullagh, reporting for CNet:

The ATF’s Maynard said in an affidavit for the Kentucky case that Apple “has the capabilities to bypass the security software” and “download the contents of the phone to an external memory device.” Chang, the Apple legal specialist, told him that “once the Apple analyst bypasses the passcode, the data will be downloaded onto a USB external drive” and delivered to the ATF.

It’s not clear whether that means Apple has created a backdoor for police — which has been the topic of speculation in the past — whether the company has custom hardware that’s faster at decryption, or whether it simply is more skilled at using the same procedures available to the government. Apple declined to discuss its law enforcement policies when contacted this week by CNET.

I saw this report the other day and it confused me. My understanding is that the entire contents of an iPhone with a passcode (or pass phrase) are encrypted. If Apple can somehow decrypt the contents, then there’s a backdoor, and the possibility exists that someone else will discover the backdoor. (Let alone the problem of Apple being able to do it.)

Charlie Miller, who knows way more about this stuff than I do (and probably as much as anyone outside Apple), is also confused. His theory:

Apple probably uses a signed ramdisk and then brute forces from there.

In which case it’s not really a backdoor, it’s that Apple can more efficiently run through all possible passcodes than law enforcement agencies can. But I take it this means Apple can circumvent the setting that deletes the encryption keys after 10 failed passcode attempts, because they’re not doing the passcode attempts on the device itself.

Update: Quinn Mahoney tweets:

No, a signed ramdisk means the brute force is done on-device. The 10 attempt limit is enforced by iOS, ramdisk bypasses that.

Monday, 13 May 2013

Phishing With Forged Links ★

Brad Choate is thinking the same thing I’m thinking:

Sophisticated phishing attacks can be hard to detect for most. As software developers, we need to build better detection, prevention, and countermeasures into apps and services that relay and present these messages so users will be less likely to fall victim to them.

How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion ★

Phishing. (Wonder if it would have helped identify scammy URLs if the emails were in plain text, so that the phishers couldn’t put a URL in the message that was actually linked to an entirely different URL?)

‘We Already Have Money, It’s Called “Money”’ ★

Garrett Murray on Amazon’s new “Amazon Coins” virtual currency thing. Sure hope Apple never goes this route; it’s slimy.

Lego Casino Royale ★

“Yes. Considerably.”

Visualizing the Internet ★

Adam Clark Estes, writing for Motherboard:

An anonymous researcher with a lot of time on his hands apparently shares the sentiment. In a newly published research paper, this unnamed data junkie explains how he used some stupid simple hacking techniques to build a 420,000-node botnet that helped him draw the most detailed map of the Internet known to man. Not only does it show where people are logging in, it also shows changes in traffic patterns over time with an impressive amount of precision. This is all possible, of course, because the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could ping each one, charting the resulting paths in order to make such a complex and detailed map. Along those lines, the project has as much to do with hacking as it does with mapping.

More on Facebook Home Looking Like a Flop ★

Steve Kovach, reporting for Business Insider:

After we reported the news about the First’s price drop, one source familiar with Facebook employees’ thinking on Home said our headline, “HTC’s Facebook Phone Is Clearly a Flop,” was “sadly, very right.” Another source with knowledge of the HTC First sales wouldn’t provide numbers, but did hint they weren’t exactly flying off the shelves at AT&T stores.

Is this Facebook’s Rokr?

Update: Myriam Joire argues that Facebook already had its Rokr — the HTC Status back in 2011.

Friday, 10 May 2013

NYT on Bloomberg Data Terminal Privacy Breach ★

Amy Chozick and Ben Protess, reporting for the NYT:

The news gathering technique appears more widespread than the Goldman incident, which was first reported by The New York Post. A preliminary analysis at Bloomberg revealed that “several hundred” reporters had used the technique, a person briefed on the analysis said. (Bloomberg employs more than 2,400 journalists worldwide. A spokesman declined to comment on the analysis and said no reporters had been fired.)

There are also fears that the monitoring may have gone beyond Wall Street. Banking regulators at the Federal Reserve are examining whether their own employees were subject to tracking by Bloomberg reporters, according to people briefed on the matter. A spokeswoman for the Fed declined to comment.

This is a serious scandal.

Not All Wine Experts Are Full of Shit ★

Pretty amazing. (Thanks to Tom Lane.)

Facebook Home Is Looking Like a Flop ★

The HTC First (with Facebook Home pre-installed) has already been dropped from $99 to $0.99, and the app is sinking in popularity in the Google Play store rankings.

It’s a well-designed implementation of an idea no one wants.

Squarespace ★

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It’s almost ridiculous how easy Squarespace has made it to have a fully-customizable website that looks great across all devices. Try Squarespace for free at squarespace.com.

Not Sure Why Anyone Would Spend So Much Time and Effort on an iOS 7 ‘Concept’ Redesign, But Here You Go ★

There are a lot of clever ideas and nice designs in this iOS 7 “concept” by Philip Joyce of design firm Simply Zesty. But they’re only clever and nice in the abstract, as possible designs for a touchscreen phone interface. Nice and clever though they are, this would be a disaster as a new design for the actual iPhone. A new look is one thing (and we’re going to get it), but when you’re well established and have a large user base, as iOS does, you need to maintain familiarity. If users are asking “What is this? Where am I? Where’s all the stuff I’m used to?” it’s going to be a disaster. (Mac OS X 10.0 was just such a radical do-over, and it was successful in the long term. But the first few years were a slow and painful transition for existing Mac users. iOS doesn’t need that sort of jolt.)

And certain of Joyce’s details are oddly tone-deaf branding-wise. The shape of app icons is not going to change from round-cornered squares to sharp-cornered ones (or any other shape for that matter). Apple owns this shape; this shape says “iOS app” in everyone’s mind. It’s even printed right on the hardware home button of every iOS device. In fact it’s the only thing printed on the front face of every iOS device. And just look at the WWDC 2013 logo. (I’ve long thought we won’t see apps and an App Store for Apple TV until some future hardware revision of the product with a much-better remote control; it occurs to me now that that remote will surely have a home button with the universal empty app icon on it.) And his font choices — yikes. Frutiger (or whatever Frutiger-like typeface he’s using) makes the whole thing look more like a Windows Phone 9 concept than an iOS one. It’s like iOS re-imagined by someone who doesn’t like iOS. Hard for me to see how this is getting praised like this.

His animations and transitions do show how going “flatter” doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating playfulness, though.