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This comes amid reports that Google is trying to buy Twitch, Justin.tv’s parent, for $1 billion.

Great looking update if you’re a Dish satellite subscriber.

Vox:

Slater had traveled to Indonesia to do a wildlife shoot. While he was there, he left one of his cameras unattended, and a crested black macaque monkey began playing with it. She took dozens of photos, most of which were blurry shots of the ground or the sky. But the photos included this crystal-clear selfie.

Slater says he owns the copyright to the photograph and asked Wikimedia to take it down. In its first-ever transparency report, the Wikimedia Foundation says it refused because it doesn’t believe Slater owns the copyright.

On one level, this is a funny story but, as a photographer, it’s very interesting to me. We’ve usually said that whoever actually took the photo owns the copyright. But what if the “photographer” isn’t human?

Sam Sung:

I came across one of my old business cards the other day when it fell out of a book.

So, with a view to raising money for a very deserving charity, I’m auctioning the only “Apple Sam Sung” business card I have left and I’m going to donate ALL of the proceeds [minus eBay fees] to Children’s Wish, BC & Yukon – a not-for-profit that grants wishes to sick children.

You may remember the funny story a while back of the Apple employee named “Sam Sung”. He no longer works at Apple Retail but is auctioning off some of his Apple employee gear for a (local to me) good charity.

CNET:

Apple and Samsung announced late Tuesday that they have agreed to settle all lawsuits filed against each other outside the United States but said patent lawsuits filed in the US would be unaffected by the deal.

“Samsung and Apple have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States. This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts,” the companies said in a statement.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be future lawsuits.

Re/code:

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs loved to walk around his neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. And after his pride and joy, the iPhone, was born, he naturally took it along with him on walks. The first iPhone had a lousy, sluggish, cellular-data network, but it also had a much faster data option: Wi-Fi. It even had a feature (still present, but much less touted) that popped up a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks on the screen, so you could always find one in range.

But, he once told me, there was a big problem with that technique, one that he wanted to fix: Most of the Wi-Fi networks that popped up on his screen couldn’t be used, because they were secured with passwords. Jobs said he understood the need for security, but he was determined to figure out a way to make free, safe, Wi-Fi sharing from homes and small local businesses not only possible, but common.

Interesting idea. Would you open your home WiFi if it could be configured easily and in the way described in this article?

After a short hiatus this summer, The Loop Magazine returns today with a double issue. I want to apologize to all the subscribers of the magazine for the unscheduled break in publishing, but we’ve put together a great issue for its return. To make up for the missing issues, I’ll publish another large issue shortly, giving you lots of great stories to read.

We have nine stories in this issue, including “State of Mind,” written by software developer, James Thomson. In his piece, James talks about how he feels when surrounded by some of the brightest developers in the world when he attends conferences. This is a free story that anyone can read by just downloading The Loop Magazine app.

Kirk McElhearn talks about the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting.” Matt Gemmell takes us into the world of fan fiction where people write works of fiction, long and short, set in the established universes of novels, TV shows, cartoons, movies, video games, and more.

Billy Sangster takes us through the feelings of getting back up on stage with his band and Rian van der Merwe explores the deeply spiritual experience of coffee. With so many devices to choose from to use on a plane, Darren Murph explores “The Unintended Death of the In-Flight Magazine.”

Arsenal FC is one of the most popular football clubs in the world—Stan Sulkowski helps run a site dedicated to the club and talks about his experience. Chris Domico’s body attacks itself, putting him in pain and hell without much warning. He talks about his struggles dealing with disease.

Finally, Mark Crump takes us through his guitar setup to play music on an iPad. He’s been playing guitar for 30 years, so he has some experience in getting the best sound from his instrument.

I really hope you enjoy the latest issue of The Loop Magazine. You can download it free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Jim

The Daily Dot:

The government is planning to issue a proposal that could ban people on flights from either sending or receiving voice calls on their mobile devices—using those devices for non-voice activities, such as playing online games or tweeting about the crying baby in the back row, would likely still be allowed.

To answer the question posed in the headline: Hell yes.

Flying is already a horrible process. Let’s not make it worse by being forced to listen to one side of a conversation for hours on end while trapped in an uncomfortable seat inside a metal tube.

Jalopnik:

You never really get a good night’s sleep in jail. In the middle of my second night inside, I woke up on the uncomfortable plastic mat in my cell, my neck and back aching. I looked down at my orange jail scrubs and up at the buzzing fluorescent light and thought, “I am here because I drove too fast in a Camaro ZL1.”

Three days in jail for speeding? Yikes. That’s harsh. I’ve driven my motorcycle on some of the Shenandoah Valley roads the writer describes and I know I was speeding for at least some of the time (OK…most of the time). I guess I got lucky but warning issued – don’t speed in Virginia.

IN1 is a multi-tool utility case for your iPhone 5/5s. Like a built-in swiss army knife for your phone. Choose from 8 colors. Get yours for $44.95, ships in 24 – 48 hrs.

Monday Note:

When Apple announced its 64-bit A7 processor, I dismissed the speculation that this could lead to a switch away from Intel chips for the Macintosh line for a homegrown “desktop-class” chip. I might have been wrong.

I don’t know enough about this end of the industry but it’s hard to argue with Gassee’s line of “Secondly, the Mac line is suspended, literally, by the late delivery of Intel’s Broadwell x86 processors.” The “end of MacIntel” is certainly a possibility to be on the look out for.

Metropolis:

Farmer N’Da Alphonse grows cacao and has never seen the finished product.

“To be honest I do not know what they make of my beans,” says farmer N’Da Alphonse. “I’ve heard they’re used as flavoring in cooking, but I’ve never seen it. I do not even know if it’s true.”

We take chocolate for granted and most of us probably can’t remember our first taste of it. Imagine being one of these cacao farmers and tasting it for the very first time.

Engadget:

Hitchbot, the yellow glove- and Wellies-wearing robot, has started bumming rides across Canada, and by the looks of it, its hosts are having a blast ferrying it to its next drop-off point.

The machine with a perpetual LED smile began its journey in Halifax, and it’ll travel 4,000 miles until it reaches Victoria, British Columbia. People who pick up Hitchbot are pointed to a website where they can find instructions on how to handle it and where to drop it off. On the way, Hitchbot chats with its host, thanks to its speech recognition capability, or chatters away on its own in case its tablet-and-Arduino brain can’t parse what its companion’s saying. It also takes pictures every 30 minutes or so to send back to headquarters and upload to its social media accounts.

What a wonderfully odd experiment. I’m definitely following @hitchBOT on Twitter.

The New York Times:

A vaguely defined ecosystem seems to exist within the community, with subspecies divided by costume type: The Disney, Pixar and “Sesame Street” characters gravitate toward one another, and the superheroes hang out with other superheroes.

The cartoons, superheroes and other assorted characters are a bizarre, fascinating yet annoying as hell part of what Times Square has become.

FiveThirtyEight:

I analyzed the data to find out exactly what Ross, who died in 1995, painted for more than a decade on TV. The top-line results are to be expected — wouldn’t you know, he did paint a bunch of mountains, trees and lakes! — but then I put some numbers to Ross’s classic figures of speech. He didn’t paint oaks or spruces, he painted “happy trees.” He favored “almighty mountains” to peaks. Once he’d painted one tree, he didn’t paint another — he painted a “friend.”

I can’t paint a straight line with a ruler but watching Ross was absolutely mesmerizing. This analysis is interesting from a numbers point of view but it doesn’t capture or explain the wonderful presentation style Ross had.

[VIDEO] The origins of the “oner”, one scene, one shot and how Spielberg made that technique his own. This is riveting, from first scene to last.

Elia Freedman:

Let’s say that together now: the dearth of many viable iOS indie dev businesses is not Apple’s problem.

It’s ours.

Whether we like it or not, the game has changed. Trials are out. They’ve been out for six years now and we have no idea if they are ever coming back. Upgrades are out, too. Again, we have no idea if they will ever come back. Ask yourself, do you really want to sit here and wait another 10 months to find out if we will get trials and upgrades, and then wait another three months after that to see it available? Hell, no. I need to make a living now.

It’s time for us to adapt.

We’ve seen quite a bit of writing regarding this issue over the past week. I’m just a user so I have no idea of the issues involved but it is good to hear from another side of the equation.

The Roosevelts:

It is being reported that Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx has agreed to portray Mike Tyson in an upcoming biopic that is written by Hollywood bad-ass Terence Winter.

There is no way a paring of Terence Winter and the fascinating story of Mike Tyson couldn’t be good so enjoy the following super cut compilation to show how vicious Mike Tyson really was in his prime.

I was a boxing fan during Tyson’s prime and for all of his failings, he was an absolute beast in the boxing ring. The sport is justifiably vilified now but this super cut might help to explain why seemingly rational, mostly non-violent people like myself loved to watch him turn people’s brains off.

Colossal:

To commemorate the centennial of Britain’s involvement in the First World War, ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper conceived of a staggering installation of ceramic poppies planted in the famous dry moat around the Tower of London. Titled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” the final work will consist of 888,246 red ceramic flowers—each representing a British or Colonial military fatality—that flow through grounds around the tower.

Volunteers began placing the poppies several weeks ago and the process will continue through the summer until a final flower is symbolically planted on November 11th.

The poppy flower is very symbolic to me as a Canadian and the proud son of a Canadian Navy veteran. I’d love to be able to see this installation in London.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. won preliminary approval of a settlement in which it could pay $450 million to resolve claims by U.S. states and consumers that it led a conspiracy to fix prices on electronic books.U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan said today that there’s “probable cause to find that the proposed settlement agreement is within the range of those that may be approved as fair and reasonable.”

I wonder if Amazon is rubbing their hands in glee?

The game begins with 16 triangles of primary colors. You combine them to make regular polygons with more sides. Squares, pentagons, hexagons, etc.

This could be another one of those additive games.

Charvel guitars are so nice to play.

Pretty cool project by Svein Sund.

Apple:

Today we are excited to officially welcome Beats Music and Beats Electronics to the Apple family. Music has always held a special place in our hearts, and we’re thrilled to join forces with a group of people who love it as much as we do. Beats cofounders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have created beautiful products that have helped millions of people deepen their connection to music. We’re delighted to be working with the team to elevate that experience even further.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes.

Priceonomics:

The rarity and temporality of truffles have made them — at €4,400 to €11,000 per pound for Italy’s prized white truffles — the most expensive food in the world. In 2007, a Macau casino owner set a record by paying $330,000 for a 3.3 pound truffle unearthed in Tuscany.

The combination of these two trends — the desire for a convenient, ever-ready supply of an ingredient and a hunger for the traditional, the rare, and “real food” — led to what would seem to be a remarkably successful scam on foodie culture: truffle oil.

While in Italy, I had truffle very sparingly sprinkled over pasta. Sublime.

FiveThirtyEight:

In the long and varied history of sports heroes — from Pheidippides to Johnny Football — none has signed his name more often, nor more energetically and whimsically, than Pete Rose. Signing for dollars has been at the core of Rose’s livelihood, and lifeblood, since he was banned from baseball 25 years ago.

For years now he has appeared four days a week, in five-hour shifts, at a memorabilia shop in a Las Vegas mall. The crowds don’t swarm, but they do come, steadily. An autographed ball costs $99, a bat $200, a jersey $40. Items are also bundled and sold in packages. It’s not unusual for Rose to move more than $10,000 worth of merchandise in a day.

Regardless of your feelings about Rose, his story, in particular the last 25 years, has been a fascinating one.

That’s the takeaway from findings security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell plan to present next week, demonstrating a collection of proof-of-concept malicious software that highlights how the security of USB devices has long been fundamentally broken. The malware they created, called BadUSB, can be installed on a USB device to completely take over a PC, invisibly alter files installed from the memory stick, or even redirect the user’s internet traffic. Because BadUSB resides not in the flash memory storage of USB devices, but in the firmware that controls their basic functions, the attack code can remain hidden long after the contents of the device’s memory would appear to the average user to be deleted. And the two researchers say there’s no easy fix: The kind of compromise they’re demonstrating is nearly impossible to counter without banning the sharing of USB devices or filling your port with superglue.

Frightening.

Publishers Adam and Tonya Engst have put out another great ebook written by Joe Kissell called “Take Control of FileVault.” This should answer any question you have about using Apple’s FileVault feature.

Very cool.

MTV:

In honor of the almost 15th anniversary of the movie (it was released in December, 1999), MTV News checked back in with the entire cast and creators of “Galaxy Quest”: Tim Allen as the obnoxious Captain; Alan Rickman as the humiliated thespian relegated to rubber makeup; Sigourney Weaver, an actress given nothing to do but show her cleavage; Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, the former child star. Tony Shalhoub, playing a stoner who is supposed to be the sharp chief engineer; Sam Rockwell as some guy named Guy; and many, many more. What we came away with is, in the cast and crew’s own words, the story of how the crew of the Protector came together – and how things changed as the movie grew to be the phenomenon it is today.

Not a “great” movie but it is a lot of fun. Thanks to Tom Negrino for the link.