An exclusive social network

Written by

Joe Caiati:

For many, the lure of an exclusive social network and the lust for reaching the masses will keep most attached to both services; including myself. As much as I would rather just be navigating to one unified service, App.net has the potential to disrupt my social experience. A disruption that can turn out to be pleasant surprise or another failed startup.

Joe brings up some good points about App.net. It’s intriguing, but right now people are splitting their time between the two. Until it gains critical mass, we really won’t know how it will do. But the price — any price — may stop that in its tracks.

Many have asked if I supported App.net. I tried but something happened during the sign-up process. I contacted them via the support email and tried on Twitter to get a response, but never heard back. So, no I didn’t pay for the service, but I would have.

Ozzy Osbourne’s live setup

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Greg Price has been doing Ozzy’s live setup for a lot of years, so he knows what he’s talking about. He lists the mics used and the plugins he uses on each channel. He even gives you the presets to download for each plugin. I’ve known Greg for a number of years and he is an incredibly talented audio engineer.

Squatters

Written by

Bryan Larrick:

I looked on my server, and there was a whole other website squatting on my domain, selling vpn access to god knows who out of who knows where. I’d been hacked.

Wow.

Samsung says Apple ripped off email, photo and music features

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The ‘460 patent protect elements of email and photo browsing in a camera-equipped device. Specifically, it covers three different functions: sending a text-only email, sending an email with an attached photo, and stepping through different photos in a gallery mode. According to Dr. Yang’s testimony, the iPhone 4, 3G, and 3GS — along with the iPad 2 and fourth-generation iPod touch — all infringe the patent on both iOS 4 and iOS 5.

It’ll be interesting to see how Apple argues this.

Samsung designer says she didn’t copy Apple’s icons

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A Samsung Electronics designer testified on Tuesday that she didn’t copy Apple when creating the icons for the Galaxy line of products.“Not at all,” senior user experience designer Jeeyuen Wang said, through an interpreter.

Oh, okay then, let’s just cancel this trial and move on.

iBookstore is a game changer for textbooks

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After writing about how iPads and YourTeacher helped raise math scores by 49%, I decided to speak with YourTeacher CEO Charlie Hermes to find out more about his company, and what it’s like to publish textbooks on the iBookstore. […]

Dots

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An interesting look at dots and pixels as John Gruber makes his way from a Pac-Man coin-op machine to a Retina MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs’ Palo Alto home burglarized

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More than $60,000 worth of “computers and personal items” were allegedly stolen, but Flattery declined to say whether they belonged to Jobs, who died last year at the age of 56, or another family member.

RIM says it will win

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Global BlackBerry sales tumbled 43 percent last quarter as RIM’s aging lineup of devices failed to match the consumer appeal of Android phones and Apple’s iPhone. BB10 will change RIM’s fortunes, Heins said today.“We’re here to win,” he said. “We’re not here to fight for third or fourth place.”

Maybe RIM is tired of Samsung getting all the attention and says stupid things to turn things around.

Ouch

Written by

Rene Ritchie:

No one can look at Samsung’s mobile products over the last decade and not consider them anything other than a ruthless, relentless copy of everything popular that’s came before. It’s not that Samsung doesn’t continuously push the limits of hardware specifications and capabilities as much if not more than anyone else. They do. But they do so by systematically, institutionally copying what other vendors have already done first.

Rene just goes off on Samsung.

Om

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A really nice message from Om Malik to John Gruber, congratulating him the 10 year anniversary of Daring Fireball.

iNeedHelp for iPhone

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iNeedHelp sends your location via text message and email at the push of a button to your HelpList.

Seems ideal for children or senior citizens.

iPads in the classroom raise math scores 49%

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We’ve all heard how using an iPad in the classroom improves a child’s literacy scores and now a new study is showing the same is true for math students as well. […]

Samsung phone ‘was the worst gadget I’d ever endured’

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Davin O’Dwyer for the Irish Times talking about his experience with a Samsung phone:

All the time I had it, I kept wondering who at Samsung let this thing out the door? Did anybody actually use it before it was released? And if so, what kind of contempt for their user did they have?Five minutes with that phone would have the jury awarding full damages to Apple, no doubt about it.

I love the Irish.

Objective-Cologne Conference

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Objective-Cologne is an Objective-C & Cocoa community-organized conference taking place next month in Cologne Germany. Speakers include Mike Lee, Jason Harris and Ken Aspeslagh.

A great looking line-up of speakers. I wish I was going to Germany.

Insane babbling

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I love it when people are taken to task for avoiding questions they should answer.

Happy 10th anniversary Daring Fireball

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I took a minute today to call John Gruber and congratulate him on his 10th anniversary of running Daring Fireball. John has had a tremendous influence on me as a writer and on my current business model. […]

Samsung’s at it again

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Florian Mueller on Apple’s victory in excluding the President of Samsung Telecommunications America, Dale Sohn. Samsung said Sohn “may testify regarding Samsung’s innovative technology and products,” but that wasn’t their original position:

An even bigger issue is that Samsung allegedly “fought tooth-and-nail to prevent Apple from taking Mr. Sohn’s deposition”, and in doing so, Samsung argued that Apple failed to show that Mr. Sohn had any unique “first-hand material knowledge”. Samsung had even denied that he had any “personal knowledge that is relevant to this case” and any “relationship to the accused products or the patents-in-suit other than [his] place atop Samsung’s organizational hierarchy”. The court finally granted an Apple motion to compel Mr. Sohn’s testimony, but was granted only three hours, which Apple considered insufficient, and only so late in the game that Apple was deprived of the opportunity to “to conduct any follow-up discovery in connection with [Mr. Sohn’s testimony]”.

Apple encryption is so good, not even DOJ can crack it

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Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers’ content so well that in many situations it’s impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

Apple licensed iPhone, iPad patents to Microsoft

Written by

Matthew Panzarino:

The patents were apparently licensed to Microsoft with an “anti-cloning agreement” in place in order to stop Microsoft from turning out copies of the iPhone and iPad. Samsung and Apple have, notably, met several times to discuss licensing patents, but the design patents covering the ‘user experience’ of Apple’s tablets and phones were, according to Samsung, not on the table.

Nice, an anti-cloning agreement.

Stealing

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There are some people that believe that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is all about rectangles and that Apple has no right to sue based on that criteria. That’s just false and I think I’ve found a way to explain it so everyone can understand. […]