Yearly Archives: 2015

The Washington Post:

PayPal users, this is for you.

The payments company is rolling out an update to its user agreement that threatens to bombard you with “autodialed or prerecorded calls and text messages” — and worse, by agreeing to the updated terms, you’re immediately opted in.

PayPal can even reach you at phone numbers that you didn’t provide. Through undisclosed means, PayPal says it has the right to contact you on numbers “we have otherwise obtained.”

I don’t get how these companies continue to add clauses like this. There are far too many geeks out there reading the EULAs and taking them apart word for word for companies like PayPal to get away with such egregious abuses of the information they gather on us.

Ars Technica:

Macs older than a year are vulnerable to exploits that remotely overwrite the firmware that boots up the machine, a feat that allows attackers to control vulnerable devices from the very first instruction.

The attack, according to a blog post published Friday by well-known OS X security researcher Pedro Vilaca, affects Macs shipped prior to the middle of 2014.

The new attack doesn’t require even brief physical access as Thunderstrike did. That means attackers half-way around the world may remotely exploit it. While the attack isn’t likely to be exploited on a mass scale, it’s also not hard for people with above-average skill to carry it out.

I’ve been chatting with my favorite security expert on Twitter about this and he says, “It looks pretty serious. Not panic level, but I hope Apple patches quickly. It makes a root exploit permanent but you still need the initial exploit. Nearly impossible to remove once exploited.”

Showtime:

You will be able to watch wherever and whenever you want through the SHOWTIME app on your Apple TV®, iPad® and iPhone®, plus on your computer.

You’ll be able to stream current and classic SHOWTIME Original Series, hit movies, live sports, exclusive documentaries and comedy specials. Watch when they first premiere or catch up on old favorites – always commercial free!

All of these services are great news for cord cutters but they are going to add up to spending real money real quick.

New York Times:

Last fall, however, Koeslag set off on a very different, decidedly 21st-century project: a smartwatch. In response to Apple’s plans to introduce a high-tech watch this year, the chief executive of Frédérique Constant, Peter Stas, decided the company would produce its own. It would not be a minicomputer with a screen, like Apple’s. Instead, it would combine the functions of a Fitbit, a device that tracks physical activity, with a traditional Swiss timepiece, a $1,200 entry-level Frédérique Constant watch. A Silicon Valley company would produce the tiny sensors that count steps and measure sleep cycles, and this information would be transmitted to a phone through a Bluetooth connection. The phone would also control the watch — resetting its hands in different time zones, for example. From the outside, the watch wouldn’t look “smart” at all, but it would be packed with electronics. Koeslag’s job was to bring to life this chimera of Swiss engineering and Silicon Valley wizardry.

Koeslag faced a significant problem, though: He had never worked with chips and sensors before. He didn’t even own a soldering iron. Swiss watchmakers don’t need them; their devices are put together with screws and screwdrivers.

This proposed watch sounds very interesting. I think the Swiss watchmakers, after a period of consolidation when the big makers swallow up a few smaller ones, will be fine. People will always want high end, exquisitely made watches.

Product Hunt:

Useful Mac apps you probably aren’t using (but should).

I get the Product Hunt newsletter every day and they often have some really interesting bits. Today’s list of Mac apps are of some I use – Duet, Bartender, Spectacle – but several I’d never heard of but installed immediately because they sound so cool/useful.

Apple:

Apple has determined that, in rare cases, the battery in the Beats Pill XL Speaker may overheat and pose a fire safety risk. This product has been sold worldwide since January 2014 by Beats, Apple, and other retailers.

Product returns will only be processed via the web for this program.

I blame Dr Dre.

Techcrunch:

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Cook went on to state, as he has before when talking about products like Apple Pay, that Apple ‘doesn’t want your data.’

“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices,” Cook went on, getting even more explicit when talking about user privacy.

I love that Cook continues to bang this drum.

I can’t imagine how much data Heineken is pushing through the cloud.

Macworld:

FireWire is emblematic of everything that’s great about Apple as well as everything that’s not, and of a particular mindset among some Apple users.

It was technically hugely sophisticated, removing much of the burden for the data interchange from the main CPU; unlike USB, which required a host computer, FireWire was essentially a peer-to-peer networking technology, and it could transfer at full speed in both directions simultaneously, unlike USB.

But it was also, ultimately, expensive to implement, and although variants were supported by other companies (notably Sony), it struggled to get traction outside of the Apple ecosystem.

I have a soft spot for FireWire (I took delivery of the very first FireWire Drive in Canada). For those of us who remember not only the days of slow USB 1 but also back to ADB and (shudder) SCSI, it was a great way to move lots of data extremely quickly. I still have a bunch of FireWire cables I don’t have the heart to throw out.

I almost had a goddamn seizure.

Seasonality Pro offers meteorologists and advanced weather enthusiasts a powerful way to explore current weather model data on iOS. View weather forecast model data at full resolution quickly while on the go.

That’s some detailed weather.

Just in case you were wondering.

Huffington Post:

In a series of trials, the Department of Homeland Security was able to smuggle fake explosives, weapons and other contraband past airport screeners in major cities across the country, according to ABC News. Officials briefed on the Homeland Security Inspector General’s investigation told the station that the TSA failed 67 out of 70 tests conducted by the department’s Red Teams — undercover passengers tasked with identifying weaknesses in the screening process, NJ.com reports.

During the tests, DHS agents each tried to bring a banned item past TSA screeners. They succeeded 95 percent of the time.

In yet another example of the “security theater” that is the TSA, this latest in a long line of embarrassments should cause the related departments to seriously look at whether or not the TSA is even worth the effort, money and resources it takes to keep such a sad sack organization propped up.

Techcrunch:

Apple’s HomeKit is finally starting to roll out to actual consumers, via the first crop of HomeKit-enabled accessories from third-party manufacturers. This means you’ll soon be able to get your hands on a range of products for the connected home that work with Siri on your iOS device, and that you’ll be able to do so as soon as today, since some of the new HomeKit accessories start shipping now.

The accessories in question range from sensors, to lights, to thermostats, to smart outlets, and come from a group of accessory-makers with a trusted reputation in the connected home industry. HomeKit may have taken a while to arrive, but it’s doing so in grand fashion, with a practical lineup to get your home connected to your iOS ecosystem in an essential way.

I bet we’ll see more announced and demoed at WWDC next week. It will be interesting to see the early adopters’ reaction to these and how they work right out of the box. The tech is far too new for me to invest in just yet but it is definitely the future and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers come out with.

Re/code:

To create each of the seven spots, the Apple team engaged in a little bit of benign online creepery. For instance, one of the featured videographers, Cielo de la Paz, had posted photos to Flickr, “and I hadn’t tagged them or anything. They must have been doing a search for photos shot on the iPhone, because they found me out of pure luck and asked if they could use my photo” for their iPhone 6 World Gallery campaign, which launched at the beginning of March.

For the TV spots, “they were like, ‘you have good photos — do you have good videos?” and I was like “um, maybe?”

Simple, effective, minimal…typically Apple.

Jim and Merlin cover all of the exciting news from this year’s Google IO conference.

Deal with it.

Wall Street Journal:

More than a decade after it revolutionized music ownership with digital downloads through iTunes, Apple Inc. is again trying to change how consumers listen to their favorite songs with a new subscription streaming service and a renewed push into Internet radio.

At its developers’ conference next week, Apple is expected to announce a new set of music services, putting the company in competition with Spotify, the world’s leading streaming service, as well as Internet-radio player Pandora and even traditional broadcast stations.

These stories are leaking now ahead of next week’s WWDC. While the fine details may be wrong, it’s pretty common knowledge that Apple will announce their Beats (or whatever it will be called) streaming service next week. The biggest question is what will that service entail feature-wise. This WSJ article might have some of that information correct.

The Irish Examiner:

Here, deep within the walls of not only the world’s largest company but one of its most secretive too, we’re discussing the start-up spirit of a business recently valued at $1trn (€900bn) with a guy responsible for the logistics of more than a hundred international Apple retail stores in one of the few European countries in which there are none.

Not an extensive piece but still interesting to see Apple continue to open up a bit more to the press and letting us see behind the curtain more and more.