Sydney Morning Herald:
One iPhone user, a Fairfax Media employee in Sydney, said she was awoken at 4am on Tuesday to a loud “lost phone” message that said “Oleg Pliss” had hacked her phone. She was instructed to send $50 to a PayPal account to have it unlocked.
Like a nagging, loose tooth, I can’t seem to stop paying attention to Steve Ballmer.
Forbes:
Corporate M&A decisions are increasingly being driven by offshore tax policy. It’s hard to argue the business logic of using offshore income to acquire foreign companies versus bringing the money back into the U.S. for a domestic acquisition.
Following the rough tax math of a foreign acquisition, Apple’s $3.2 billion bid would really be more like $2 billion if the transaction could take place in Ireland. Considering the fact that Apple currently has approximately $54 billion in cash parked offshore, the benefits of doing a foreign acquisition over repatriating that cash back into the U.S. become even more apparent.
Interesting conjecture.
Bloomberg:
Apple, which on May 2 won $120 million of the $2.2 billion it sought, identified nine devices it wants barred in a May 23 filing with U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California.
According to the industry on May 22, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics recently asked ingot and wafer makers to submit samples in an effort to adopt the sapphire cover glass. They reviewed it last year as well, but they were reluctant to use it because of high prices, but as global competitors recently announced plans to release new products with sapphire glass, they began to reconsider it in a hurry.
Sound familiar? It should.
Microsoft explains what happened when they received a National Security letter from the FBI. Fascinating read.
Newegg is notorious for standing their ground when it comes to patent trolls. Follow the link to read about their latest confrontation.
Privacy concerns (AKA, Facebook sticking their nose in all my business) is one of several reasons I walked away from the platform more than a year ago.
Facebook is worried that you will start sharing less – or maybe even move to more anonymous services – unless it helps you better manage your private information. On Thursday, the company announced that it would give a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users worldwide.
Is Facebook truly taking privacy more seriously?
This, on top of the 34,000 job cuts already announced. A great legacy in trouble.
Re/code:
The Internet is filled with tales of frustration from those who have traded in their iPhone for an Android phone only to find their text messages trapped within Apple’s cloud. The issue arises when an iPhone customer trades in his or her phone for, say, an Android device, but keeps the same phone number that Apple’s messaging system recognizes as an iPhone.
iMessage is far from perfect but has gotten much better over the past year (at least from my experience). But that said, there is a point here.
What responsibility does a tech ecosystem bear to enable customers to easily leave that ecosystem? More…
In 1972, copyright law was amended to cover sound recordings, but not retroactively. Yet there are many pre-1972 songs that are played on streaming and satellite radio, enriching the companies that play them. This issue is coming to a head.
Fantastic article, does a great job laying out the issues/players involved.
Yesterday, John Gruber linked to a brilliant post showing 7 different Android devices, each running a compass app. Things did not go well for Android.
Korea Times:
Samsung Electronics and Apple have recently agreed to begin talks to settle patent disputes out of court, according to people directly involved with the matter, Monday.
“Samsung has recently resumed working-level discussions with Apple and the key issue is how to dismiss all lawsuits,” they said, declining to be named.
They added that the recent verdict in the U.S. that admitted Apple’s infringement on some Samsung patents made things much better for the resumption of talks.
If true, an interesting development.
Reuters:
The Central Government Procurement Center issued the ban on installing Windows 8 on government computers as part of a notice on the use of energy-saving products, posted on its website last week.
The official Xinhua news agency said the ban was to ensure computer security after Microsoft ended support for its Windows XP operating system, which was widely used in China.
Not clear exactly what prompted this, but it is a big deal to Microsoft.
About a minute into Apple’s recent Powerful ad, there’s a shot of two bikers who come up to a sign, in Spanish, that reads “estrada desmoronada”. They hold up their iPhone and the sign is helpfully translated to read “road collapsed”.
That’s Word Lens at work. Google just bought ’em.
This is part of the risk of moving everything into the cloud. If your app/data is installed on a hard drive and your computer fails, you can replace the hardware, restore from backup, get back up and running. If the cloud fails or the company goes under, you lose access to your work.
There has been a lot of misinformation in the blogosphere about the implications of yesterday’s vote. The linked post made the most sense to me, did a good job of laying things out.
I found this entire episode incredibly bizarre and emblematic of the evolution of the App Store from a garage mentality to what it has become today.
If you haven’t seen this video that explains Graphene, take a look.
The linked article is about the brewing patent battle. Very interesting.
When the top European court ruled that users have a right to be forgotten by search engines, they opened the door to a disruptive wave of possibilities.
“It’s just such a mind-bogglingly impossible decision,” said Fred Cate, distinguished professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. “Courts aren’t responsible for the practical implications of rulings but this really staggers the imagination.”
The implication here is that you might order a brand name product and receive a knockoff instead. I can’t imagine that Amazon isn’t working on a fix for this.
This is a pretty astonishing trick. Here’s the the original paper.
Some thoughts on this. First, since the binaries are not converted into Android binaries, there’s a level of interpretation going on. Meaning, at run time decisions are being…
Reuters:
The case underlines the battle between advocates of free expression and supporters of privacy rights, who say people should have the “right to be forgotten” meaning that they should be able to remove their digital traces from the Internet.
More on the original Loop post.
This story was posted in February 2013. It is a fascinating read, made current by the recent rumors of Apple’s possible acquisition of Beats Electronics.
According to the story, Monster Audio (the folks behind Monster cables and the like) did the original engineering work behind the Beats headphones. They also held the patents. As the story unfolds, you learn how what could have been a lucrative deal for all parties slowly unravelled.
Read it yourself, draw your own conclusions, but wow, that is some story.
Reuters:
One of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses tech firms including Apple Inc and Google Inc of conspiring to hold down salaries has asked the court to reject a $324 million settlement negotiated by his own lawyers.
The original FCC plan allowed for “paid prioritization” (fast lanes and slow lanes on the net) and the new language specifically disallows it. Hoping this plays out as stated and doesn’t get softened by corrupt influences.
Bloomberg:
Lee was operated on early yesterday at Samsung Medical Center after being resuscitated and stabilized the previous night at Soonchunhyang University Hospital following an acute myocardial infarction, according to an e-mailed statement from Samsung Group spokeswoman Rhee So Eui.
A visual walk through the critical events in the creation of the billion dollar Beats empire. A fun read.
Oops. That’s a pretty big thing to get wrong.
Lots has been written about Apple’s potential acquisition of Beats. This is my attempt to gather some of the facts in a single place.