Linked List: August 30, 2012

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Twitter Certified Products Program ★

Marco Arment:

The language in this is so businessy that I barely even understand what they’re saying.

Samsung Series 5 and 7 Slates Ring a Bell ★

Serious question for The Verge: how do you run an article about these things without even mentioning that the industrial design is a blatant rip-off of the MacBook Air?

Who has less integrity: Samsung for “designing” this, or The Verge for pretending it’s legitimate?

Amazon’s Fuzzy Math ★

Curt Woodward:

Calling bull on Amazon is the right approach. But honestly, at some point we should all link arms and decide to just stop shoveling the company’s weird brand of number-crunching into people’s news feeds altogether, because maybe it would stop them.

Amazon wants to have it both ways: they won’t release any actual numbers in the interests of competitive secrecy, but they still want to brag.

App Store Rejection of the Week: Drones ★

Christina Bonnington and Spencer Ackerman, writing for Wired’s Danger Room:

It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.