Wired:
Apple on Tuesday ordered its support staff to immediately stop processing AppleID password changes requested over the phone, following the identity hacking of Wired reporter Mat Honan over the weekend, according to Apple employees.
Apple is reacting to the hack with a temporary solution (stopping password changes requested over the phone), but it hasn’t changed its internal policies yet, unlike Amazon.
Wired:
On Tuesday, Amazon handed down to its customer service department a policy change that no longer allows people to call in and change account settings, such as credit cards or email addresses associated with its user accounts. […] We discovered Amazon’s policy change on Tuesday after we failed to replicate the exploits used on Honan this weekend. Amazon declined comment on the security hole on Monday, and has since failed to return repeated phone calls from Wired about the vulnerability.
It seems to be in practice already. A good thing the hack happened on a known journalist, not sure this would have had the same impact.
Nick Bilton for the NY Times about the attempt to stop piracy and in particular to block the Pirate Bay:
Although the recording industries might believe they’re winning the fight, the Pirate Bay and others are continually one step ahead. In March, a Pirate Bay collaborator, who goes by the online name Mr. Spock, announced in a blog post that the team hoped to build drones that would float in the air and allow people to download movies and music through wireless radio transmitters. “This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” Mr. Spock posted on the site. “A real act of war.” Some BitTorrent sites have also discussed storing servers in secure bank vaults. Message boards on the Web devoted to piracy have in the past raised the idea that the Pirate Bay has Web servers stored underwater.
Hopefully the industry will change when a new generation starts to reach the top positions. It will take another couple of years unfortunately.
Mat Honan:
So maybe you saw my Twitter going nuts tonight. Or you saw Gizmodo’s Twitter account blow up. Or you saw this in AllThingsD. Or this in the DailyDot. Although embarrassing, Twitter was the least of it. In short, someone gained entry to my iCloud account, used it to remote wipe all of my devices, and get entry into other accounts too.
His story freaked me out. At a lower scale, it made me realize how scary it is to know that you can’t access your accounts while someone with mean intentions can.
Update: Mat added several updates to his post, in particular this interesting one:
Update Three: I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions. Apple has my Macbook and is trying to recover the data. I’m back in all my accounts that I know I was locked out of. Still trying to figure out where else they were.
Hopefully, Apple will look into it and change its policy.
Flume is a young Sydney-based artist and I like every single track from this guy, which is rare. I recommend you to check his other tracks out, in particular his remixes of ‘Orna - The Anthem’ and ‘Hermitude - HyperParadise’.
Good luck to him.
I love that kind of post. Rick Ross makes a good case. He sure likes his food.
It’s worth skimming through the list, but I selected my favourite ones for you.
First, for its wisdom:
* Chocolate milk (“I’m Only Human”: He never knew chocolate milk make you fart real bad)
Second, for the originality and the rhyme.
* Tea (“On Top of the World”: I watch ‘em snort a powder all while I’m chillin’ sippin tea/ Lemons and honey, millions and money)
Jeff Blagdon for The Verge:
Scientists at CERN say they've found a new particle consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson with 5-sigma certainty — a false positive probability of about 1 in 9 trillion. [...] CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela explains, "this is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found." [...] The Higgs mechanism explains how particles come to acquire mass, and the Higgs Boson's discovery would confirm that the mechanism is at work.
The CERN has not actually found the Higgs Boson, but it found a new particle. It needs to carry out further studies to determine if this particle is the boson theorised by Higgs and his colleagues. We’ll know more in the coming years, but it is exciting since it could explain what gives weight to anything, if I understand well.
Rick Falkvinge for TorrentFreak:
Today at 12:56 CET, the European Parliament decided whether ACTA would be ultimately rejected or whether it would drag on into uncertainty. In a 478 to 39 vote, the Parliament decided to reject ACTA once and for all. This means that the deceptive treaty is now dead globally. This is a day of celebration. This is the day when citizens of Europe and the world won over unelected bureaucrats who were being wooed and lobbied by the richest corporations of the planet.
Beautiful.
Mike Isaac for AllThingsD about the recent update to the partnership, which adds Path support to the Nike FuelBand:
However small an update, it’s also an indicator of Path’s API partnership strategy as a whole. When Path first spoke of its API, the plan wasn’t to open it up to the masses — it was, and remains, a private API, with partners selected in terms of which ones make sense for the company to work with, and which ones make for a better user experience.
This is the kind of features I had in mind in my previous post about Twitter. Twitter would become much more powerful with this kind of partnerships. I am note sure if the advertising path could lead to the same kind of power.
Last week, Facebook made the email addresses listed on your profile invisible and instead made the @facebook.com address the only visible address. They hid the change behind privacy concerns explaining that it was a way for people to actually choose which address to show and in the meantime to use Facebook’s, which is based on your profile URL so public by default. To me, it sounds more like “now use our Facebook email service so you can spend more time on Facebook so we can show you more ads so we can make more money”. Of course, Facebook did not notify its users.
However, Android, Blackberry and recently the iOS6 beta users benefit from an integration enabling them to tie their address book with Facebook. You can have your friends’ birthday date added to your address book or have their home address updated whenever your friend does on Facebook. It solves the problem of keep your contacts information up-to-date. This works for email too and that’s where Facebook decided to become creepy. But, hey, who’s surprised?
Last week’s change then pushed to people’s smartphones the @facebook.com email address and replaced the previous ones used before, without notifying them. This creates a mess. Emails are sent to addresses people don’t check often. Emails are sent to the wrong address and there is a high potential for missed work/friend/family emails. Many complained as a result.
But this is not the worse, the service is actually flawed. Violet Blue from CNet.com:
An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail. Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.
This a terrible terrible move from Facebook and a hit to users’ trust.
The Telegraph:
Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld, who has died aged 88, escaped from Occupied France to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE); parachuted back on sabotage missions, he twice faced execution, only to escape on both occasions, once dressed as a Nazi guard.
Thrilling obituaries for an impressive man.
Dalton Caldwell on his blog about the path Twitter has chosen to take: the advertising and media business.
Perhaps you think that Twitter today is a really cool and powerful company. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been much, much more. I believe an API-centric Twitter could have enabled an ecosystem far more powerful than what Facebook is today. Perhaps you think that the API-centric model would have never worked, and that if the ad guys wouldn’t have won, Twitter would not be alive today. Maybe. But is the service we think of as Twitter today really the Twitter from a few years ago living up to its full potential? Did all of the man-hours of brilliant engineers, product people and designers, and hundreds of millions of VC dollars really turn into, well, this?
It looks very tough to start monetizing a business like Twitter and I can see how taking the advertising path is attractive. It is a dominant business model on the web. It proved to be successful for Google and to some extent for Facebook too. However, I’m not sure this is the best path for users. I don’t look at ads. I never clicked on an ad on Facebook and I never did on Twitter either. I think people are getting accustomed to ads and learn to avoid them. Moreover, I tend to value less the services pushing ads to me. All this to say, that when I use Twitter I’m not excited to see ads, but I would be excited to see other services or companies adding more features to Twitter, combining their products with Twitter, etc. Businesses could be charged to use special APIs. This is unlikely the most profitable short-term solution, but I’m convinced it can help grow Twitter even more and increase its influence.
Google has a lot of improvements to do. The Q falls short on many aspects. There is no TV interface, you can only control the Q with Android devices. Audio quality seems good, but video playback seems laggy. The Q lacks many features compared with the Apple TV. At $199 compared to $299 for the Q, the Apple TV would be my pick.
My biggest disappointment concerns the collaborative playlisting. Unfortunately, it has not been thought through:
While tapping on the options for a given song allows you to add it to the current song queue, selecting that same song directly will immediately begin playback, bypassing what's already in the queue. Even worse, if you're viewing a list of tunes in playlist, album, or artist sort, selecting one song will add it plus all subsequent songs to the queue. Testing the feature out with a friend quickly pivoted from a fun musical collaboration into a frustrating game of accidental playlist-jacking. To be fair, this implementation problem could be resolved with a software update — but this is the marquee feature of the Q. It's so important that the device's name is a cute play on "queue." If there's one feature the Nexus Q should nail from the end user's perspective, it's this one — and it falls short.
BusinessInsider:
Business Insider has learned that Serlet has spent much of the time since his departure from Apple working with at least two other former Apple employees to launch a cloud computing startup in downtown Palo Alto called Upthere.
[…]
Based on the job postings we've seen, it's clear the startup is looking to rethink the way people store files in the cloud, though just how this service will compare to options like Dropbox or Apple's own iCloud feature remains unclear. At the moment, the only trace of the startup's efforts is a static webpage with the company's logo.
Nick Bilton from the NY Times was present at the Google I/O conference. The company announced that the Google Glasses were available for pre-orders for software developers for $1,500. He explains:
Mr. Brin then began one of the most elaborate product announcements I’ve ever seen. He connected to a group of skydivers flying above San Francisco, who jumped out of the plane, wearing Google glasses and streaming their view as they plummeted to earth at 135 miles per hour. The skydivers landed successfully, thankfully, on the roof of the Moscone Center, where the Google I/O event is being held. Like any good James Bond movie, it didn’t stop there. Stunt bicycles flipped in the air and people rappelled off the side of the building — all while wearing Google glasses.
How cool is that?
Derek Webb, American musician, explains why giving music away for free may be better than selling through iTunes and Spotify:
On Twitter, I recently said, “I make more money giving records away on @NoiseTrade (in exchange for info) than selling those same records on iTunes (let alone Spotify),” which resulted in some pretty interesting discussions. I said that in response to questions I received after criticizing streaming services like Spotify, which claim to offer a viable alternative to “piracy,” when in reality they offer artists almost no meaningful revenue or fan connection. And while iTunes is certainly a better financial model and more equitable for artists, it does almost nothing to connect the fans to the artists in a way that yields any long-term benefit.
His point is very interesting. It’s well worth reading the rest of the article.
I think the big players in the music business are reluctant to switch to his approach, because it would mean the end of how they are used to do business and potentially less money to be made. Profits have already dropped anyway so taking another route should be their priority.
Very impressive 2D drawings with a good 3D feel.
The Other World Computing blog ran an experiment with the new Retina Macbook Pro:
Including the built-in Retina display, the new 2012 MacBook Pro 15″ can run four displays at their native resolution.Moving images and media didn’t create any lag and we were able to play video on all four displays simultaneously.
- Retina on laptop @ “best for Retina”
- iMac used as a display @ 2560 x 1440 via Thunderbolt
- iMac used as a display @ 2560 x 1440 via Thunderbolt/DisplayPort
- LG monitor @ 1920 x 1200 via HDMI
Impressive.
Tom Warren from The Verge has a summary of the announcements. There is a lot of improvements under the hood especially to make developers’ job easier. This is Microsoft’s attempt to attract them and increase the number of good apps available, something iOS is ahead on.
From a user standpoint, the update to the Start Screen looks pretty neat:
The main Windows Phone 8 user interface change that Microsoft is showing right now is its improved Start Screen. "We're going to have three sizes of live tiles, small, medium, and large," says Sullivan, pointing out that the existing ones in Windows Phone 7 are medium and large versions. "The small tiles will enable us to fit more on the start screen, and to have things that don't require a lot of real estate to convey information." Inline with this change, Microsoft is also expanding the screen real-estate that you’re going to be able to place live tiles on. The trough along the right hand side of the Start Screen will now be filled with tiles. "It's going to fill up the whole screen," explains Sullivan. Users will also get the ability to customize the size of every tile, so each one can now be small, medium, or large.
People will be able to decide what app is more important on the start screen and reduce the size of less important apps. Very useful.
Watch the video if you want to have a better idea.
Christina Chaey for FastCompany reports:
First update:
The most interesting Pay With Square update is a new loyalties program featuring in-app punchcards that let consumers keep track of which rewards they've earned with different merchants.
Second update:
Pay With Square is also introducing a parallel feature that allows merchants to offer specials to first-time customers. Square's most recent update to the app, back in March, placed a heightened focus on merchant discovery, and the new first-time specials feature is an extension of that. Now, when a Pay With Square user searches for "pizza" or "coffee," merchants offering these deals will be highlighted in search results. "We're making the experience of discovery fun and delightful, as opposed to a chore," Rabois says.
Third smaller update:
Saving a merchant to your Favorites is similar to adding a card of static information to a catalog. But when you store a merchant's info in "Your Cards," that automatically tells Pay With Square those stores are good to open tabs for you.