Linked List: January 29, 2015

Thursday, 29 January 2015

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorship Openings ★

The next few weeks on the DF RSS feed sponsorship schedule are open. If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball readers, get in touch.

And if you’re on the fence, may I humbly direct your attention to this piece by recent two-time sponsor John Saddington: “Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Actually Work?”

50 Years of James Bond in Black Tie ★

Matt Spaiser, writing for his excellent site, The Suits of James Bond:

I’ve created an infographic that breaks down James Bond’s 28 black tie outfits by every part of the outfit. All illustrations are based on examples from the James Bond films.

As he quotes Vesper Lynd, “There are dinner jackets and dinner jackets; this is the latter.”

The Matte Paintings of the Original Star Wars Trilogy and Their Creators ★

It feels weird linking to a Jesus Diaz post with nothing but joy in my heart.

Comcast Apologizes for Changing Name of Customer to ‘Asshole’ ★

The Daily What:

A man in Spokane, Washington was surprised to find out that Comcast had changed his name from Ricardo Brown to “Asshole” Brown on his most recent bill.

He and his wife Lisa had been trying to cancel their cable subscription with the company, which should have been a very simple process.

‘Now We’re Cooking With Gas. Stupid, Stinky Gas.’ ★

The Macalope, on how Apple’s purchase of Authentec for $350 million back in 2012 turned into this Gizmodo headline: “Your Nexus 6’s Lack of Fingerprint Sensor Is Apple’s Fault”.

No, the Prediction Was Crazy ★

Devindra Hardawar, writing for VentureBeat back in April 2011:

Imagine a world where Windows Phone is more popular than Apple’s iPhone.

That may just sound like Steve Ballmer’s fantasy, but a recent Gartner report claims that it may very well happen by 2015, thanks to a boost from Nokia as Microsoft’s mobile partner.

The prediction is far from crazy: I’ve argued in the past that Microsoft will doggedly fight to reclaim its mobile relevance, and it could very well achieve that with Nokia being the premiere Windows Phone 7 device maker.

China Clamps Down Still Harder on Internet Access ★

Andrew Jacobs, reporting from Beijing for the NYT:

Jing Yuechen, the founder of an Internet start-up here in the Chinese capital, has no interest in overthrowing the Communist Party. But these days she finds herself cursing the nation’s smothering cyberpolice as she tries — and fails — to browse photo-sharing websites like Flickr and struggles to stay in touch with the Facebook friends she has made during trips to France, India and Singapore.

Gmail has become almost impossible to use here, and in recent weeks the authorities have gummed up Astrill, the software Ms. Jing and countless others depended on to circumvent the Internet restrictions that Western security analysts refer to as the Great Firewall.

I can’t help but wonder if this clampdown is related to the DNS shenanigans that Craig Hockenberry has been documenting.

‘Finally’ of the Day ★

CMS systems should raise a flag every time an editor or writer tries to use finally in a headline.

In this particular case — “Apple Might Finally Be Beating Samsung in Smartphone Sales”, from Time — the finally seems out of place because I’m not sure anyone expected this to happen until recently. Apple bears saw (and continue to see) Apple as doomed; Apple bulls generally understand that Apple doesn’t pursue market share in and of itself. iPhone sales last quarter were surprisingly good, and Samsung’s decline in unit sales has been surprisingly bad.

iTunes Connect Bug Logs Developers in to Other Developers’ Accounts at Random ★

Andrew Cunningham, reporting for Ars Technica:

This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers — it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random.

As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem.

Looks like iTunes Connect is back up now. If you’re a developer, I suggest logging in and making sure nobody monkeyed around with your apps while this was going on.