An appeal by Apple and Ireland against a European Union ruling for the U.S. firm to pay 13 billion euros ($16 billion) in disputed taxes is likely to be heard before the end of the year, Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said on Tuesday.

Apple and Ireland both say the company paid all the taxes that were due, but I can’t see the court reversing the EU decision.

Online streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have become the recording industry’s single biggest revenue source, overtaking physical sales of CDs and digital downloads for the first time, a trade group said on Tuesday.

This, of course, comes as no big surprise. I still buy albums from iTunes for the bands I really love, but streaming on Apple Music is now the norm. What’s still unclear to me is how the musicians are doing financially with the rise of streaming services.

Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog:

Downloading watchOS software to your Apple Watch is a tremendously slow process.

It can take anywhere between half an hour to an hour or more to send a watchOS software update to your wrist. Because it’s such a sluggish experience, I try to update my watch only when I’m positive I won’t be using it for a few hours, like right before I’m about to hit the bed.

And:

I’ll let you in on a secret: sliding the Bluetooth toggle to the OFF position in Settings → Bluetooth on your iPhone will speed up watchOS software updates dramatically.

But timing matters here. Follow the link for the details. This is an interesting tip. Of course, you can just let the update happen overnight. But personally, I find the details fascinating, worth the read.

This is from 2014, but just came across it yesterday. A fascinating stroll through Apple’s advertising history. Check out the address on that first ad:

Apple Computer Company
770 Welch Road, Suite 154
Palo Alto, California 94304

Popped that address into Apple Maps and I see that it is now the Palo Alto Endoscopy Center. It’s a block away from the Stanford Apple Store on some prime Stanford real estate.

Washington Post:

On Amazon, customer comments can help a product surge in popularity. The online retail giant says that more than 99 percent of its reviews are legitimate because they are written by real shoppers who aren’t paid for them.

But a Washington Post examination found that for some popular product categories, such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers, the vast majority of reviews appear to violate Amazon’s prohibition on paid reviews. Such reviews have certain characteristics, such as repetitive wording that people probably cut and paste in.

OK, this is pretty old news. Terrible news, but fake reviews have been around for some time. But:

Many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook, where sellers seek shoppers on dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation. The practice artificially inflates the ranking of thousands of products, experts say, misleading consumers.

Amazon does periodic purges to wipe out those reviewers, but:

But the ban, sellers and experts say, merely pushed an activity that used to take place openly into dispersed and harder-to-track online communities.

There, an economy of paid reviews has flourished. Merchants pledge to drop reimbursements into a reviewer’s PayPal account within minutes of posting comments for items such as kitchen knives, rain ponchos or shower caddies, often sweetening the deal with a $5 commission or a $10 Amazon gift card. Facebook this month deleted more than a dozen of the groups where sellers and buyers matched after being contacted by The Post. Amazon kicked a five-star seller off its site after an inquiry from The Post.

And:

Suspicious or fraudulent reviews are crowding out authentic ones in some categories, The Post found using ReviewMeta data. ReviewMeta examines red flags, such as an unusually large number of reviews that spike over a short period of time or “sock puppet” reviewers who appear to have cut and pasted stock language.

For example, of the 47,846 total reviews for the first 10 products listed in an Amazon search for “bluetooth speakers,” two-thirds were problematic, based on calculations using the ReviewMeta tool. So were more than half of the 32,435 reviews for the top 10 Bluetooth headphones listed.

Nice work by the Washington Post here. Just another example of everything is broken. Sigh.

Deadline:

Apple just won an auction for world screen rights to Songwriter, the Murray Cummings-directed documentary that shows singer Ed Sheeran as he finds the handle on writing and performing his distinctive songs. Deal is low to mid-seven figures for world rights, and Apple will make it an event release that includes a theatrical component along with release on Apple’s multiple platforms. The film made its world premiere in Berlin, and tonight the docu is making its North American premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival.

I read that as $1-$5 million. Another brick on the content pile. It will be interesting to see the platform Apple is planning to turn this investment into revenue. Will this content be a draw to extend Apple Music? Will they build a separate Apple Video platform? When will the curtain be pulled back on all this investment?

Google owner Alphabet Inc reported first-quarter sales and profit Monday that topped financial analysts’ estimates due to strong ad sales and a change in accounting for investments in startups, sending its shares up about 1 percent after hours.

Overall, Alphabet posted a $9.4 billion profit on sales of $31.1 billion.

Men’s Health:

We all know the Apple Watch does a lot more than tell time. In Cole Richardson’s case, it does a lot more.

The 40-year-old IT manager from San Tan Valley, Arizona, dropped a whopping 105 pounds in 16 months, and credits much of his success to a tiny piece of tech. “I know for a fact I would not have been this successful if it wasn’t for my Apple Watch,” Richardson told MensHealth.com.

What’s even more incredible is that Richardson lost his first 90 pounds without stepping foot in the gym.

What a great story. Obviously, it is due to a lot of things but we’ve heard from many people how much the Apple Watch can help and encourage them to make significant changes in their lives.

Bloomberg:

The world lacks a great all-around red. Always has. We’ve made do with alternatives that could be toxic or plain gross. The gladiators smeared their faces with mercury-based vermilion. Titian painted with an arsenic-based mineral called realgar. The British army’s red coats were infused with crushed cochineal beetles. For decades, red Lego bricks contained cadmium, a carcinogen.

Yikes!

More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity. Red 254, aka Ferrari red, for example, is safe and popular, but it’s also carbon-based, leaving it susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat.

And:

Subramanian, more scientist than chief executive, is now hunting for a similarly safe, inorganic red derivative of YInMn—something that could put Ferrari red, which is worth an estimated $300 million annually, well in its rearview mirror.

Fantastic article. Had no idea this market was so huge.

Under the topic “My account is sending spam emails”, this from a giant, ever-growing thread in Google’s Gmail product forum:

My email account has sent out 3 spam emails in the past hour to a list of about 10 addresses that I don’t recongnize. I changed my password immediately after the first one, but then it happened again 2 more times. The subject of the emails is weight loss and growth supplements for men advertisements. I have reported them as spam. Please help, what else can I do to ensure my account isn’t compromised??

This is followed by a wave of people with similar experiences. Making my way through the thread, it appears that this is a weakness in a specific DNS implementation, a hole in the system that makes spoofing via Canadian national telecommunications company Telus open to anyone.

This from Telus’ official Twitter account:

There are currently spam emails being circulated which are disguised to appear from https://t.co/rpexKwMFiR. We can confirm they are not being generated by TELUS nor are they being sent from our server. We are working with our 3rd party vendors to resolve the issue. pic.twitter.com/LzYZMTU0ZN

— TELUS Support (@TELUSsupport) April 22, 2018

And see this Hacker News post for more of a deep dive.

Another example of how delicate our tech infrastructure can be.

The Guardian:

Google has unveiled a new messaging system, Chat, an attempt to replace SMS, unify Android’s various messaging services and beat Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s WhatsApp with the help of mobile phone operators.

Unlike traditional texting, or SMS, most modern messaging services – such as Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Apple’s iMessage – are so-called over-the-top (OTT) services, which circumvent the mobile phone operator by sending messages over the internet.

Chat is a successor to SMS:

Instead of using OTT, it is based on rich communication services (RCS), a successor to SMS (short message standard), which has been used by people all over the world since 1992 and is still the fallback for most.

And:

With Chat, Google is unifying all the disparate versions of RCS under one interoperable standard that will work across networks, smartphones and operating systems. In doing so it hopes to take the surefire nature of SMS – anyone can send anyone else with a phone a message without them requiring a specific account or app – and bring it up-to-date with all the features modern chat demands.

On the potential for Chat killing iMessage, I defer to this excellent comment from The Overspill:

if Google even looks as though it is positioning this as a way to “kill iMessage”, Apple will never support it, and if Apple doesn’t support it then operators are going to wonder why they’re letting Google screw up their golden goose, and they won’t support it after all. Google can preload it on Android phones, but that’s not “killing iMessage”; it’s “providing an alternative to iMessage”, which WhatsApp and latterly Facebook Messenger have done for years without “killing” iMessage.

And John Gruber’s take on the same topic, different article:

It is unconscionable for Google to back a new protocol that isn’t end-to-end encrypted. End-to-end encryption is table stakes for any new communication platform today. Apple should ignore this — if it’s not secure it should be a non-starter.

I agree with all of the above. I don’t see any danger to iMessage. But I do see this meshing with Google/Android’s place in the market. Chat’s penetration will likely be at the base of the pyramid, the larger, lower priced, smaller margin part of the market. Apple’s sweet spot has always been about halfway up the pyramid: smaller, but higher priced, with larger margins.

Note also that here’s another place where Amazon has no seat at the table. With no mobile phone of their own, Alexa can send a text via the Internet, but has to ride on iOS or Android infrastructure when out and about.

In a nutshell, the survey’s top 3:

• Amazon, 20%
• Google, 15%
• Apple, 11%

The survey was implemented by SurveyMonkey.

What I’d really love to see is some detail on people’s thinking on this. What is the positive impact from Amazon? Is it about getting goods so quickly and reliably? Amazon Echo and Alexa? Something else?

And is Google’s positive mostly about search?

I also wonder if Apple would have won this survey hands down 8 years ago, when the iPhone was still exploding but Android hadn’t quite taken off yet. Interesting.

USAToday:

Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.

SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy.

SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves, MacAskill said in an exclusive interview.

This news will be met with mixed feelings from a lot of photographers but there is no doubt that Yahoo has let the service languish for many years.

Open Culture:

Recently, one dedicated fan went through the first season and identified every song played on the shows, and produced this spreadsheet first mentioned on BoingBoing. That then led to somebody wishing for a Spotify playlist and of course the Internet has provided. Find the playlist and stream all 202 tracks.

WKRP is one of those TV shows I loved but will never watch again. I’m afraid it won’t be as good as I remember it. It has happened to me before – I rewatched some old “Get Smart” shows I loved as a kid and thought, as an adult, it was awful. But I’ll listen to this playlist all day long.

This whole thing started with this tweet from The Economist’s Hal Hodson:

Twitter, a mystery: I’ve been walking around New York a lot the past few days, AirPods in, tunes going, great vibes. Almost every time I cross a street, though, they cut out. Why? Crossing roads is the only time the cut. Can not figure it out

This appears to happen consistently, and to a lot of people. Here’s mystery solved, via a sequence of tweets from The Verge’s Dan Seifert.

First:

I know the exact spot when crossing 5th Ave in front of the library where every pair of Bluetooth headphones will cut out. to the step.

Experience the same in the middle of Grand Central Terminal. to the step.

And then, the answer:

I’ve asked headphones makers why this happens in past and here’s best explanation I’ve received:

BT needs surfaces to bounce off to work efficiently (walls, ceilings, etc). very different from WiFi. in the middle of the street is farthest from large flat surfaces.

Which begs the question, how come my AirPods work in the middle of a field?

You may wonder why this doesn’t happen in an open field?

Bluetooth doesn’t have any other signals to compete with out there, doesn’t need to be at peak efficiency.

Any Bluetooth experts out there want to weigh in here? This is fascinating to me.

Have some large files you’d like to send? Too big for email and don’t want to have to sign-up for a service like DropBox? Check out Plover.

Here’s how it works:

• Go to the website, plover.io
• When the page loads, note that you’ll be an animal in a location

For example, I just loaded the page and found that I am a panther in blue-foreign-spring. All I need to do is grab a link to this page and text it to a friend. When they follow the link, they’ll appear on the same page as a different animal.

To construct the link to the current page:

• Append the location to plover.io

In my case, the link to my page would be plover.io/blue-foreign-spring. There’s also a link to the room on the page you can control-click and copy. Either works.

Once you see your friend’s animal appear on the page, drag and drop a file on their animal, or click their animal and browse/choose a file.

Easy peasy. Try it yourself. You can open a second browser tab, head to plover.io, and you’ll get a second animal in the same location. Drag a file to send it from yourself to yourself. Not particularly useful, but it’ll show you how this works.

Big fan. Nicely done, Plover. Podcasters with big audio files, give this a try, let me know if this works for you.

Nice writeup by Andrew Orr for The Mac Observer. This is one of those posts that worth scanning now, while you are feet up with a cup of coffee, rather than in a state of panicked response to your phone gone missing.

One note: Ignore the link to “How to Set Your iOS Device Data to Auto-Destruct” on that page. As pointed out in the comments, it’s outdated and no longer accurate.

UPDATE: Outdated link was deleted from the Mac Observer article.

Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors:

eBay today announced a new update for its iOS and Android apps, aimed at further simplifying the item listing process. The headlining feature of the update is a new barcode scanner, allowing sellers to quickly scan the box of an item (if they still have it), select a condition, and click “list your item.”

The barcode scanner will automatically populate the listing with all of the requisite details (images, description, suggested starting price), and the process can be finished “within seconds,” according to eBay. If you don’t have the item barcode you can still search for it by typing in a description, which should populate the listing at around the same rate as the barcode scanner.

Great idea.

9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy just finished reading James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty. Politics aside, a section of the book deals with the FBI’s battle with Apple to access an iPhone used by a San Bernardino gunmen, detailed on this Wikipedia page.

Ben briefly excerpts Comey’s book, interleaving his own take with relevant passages. Short and worth the read.

The New Yorker:

Kare, who is sixty-four, will be honored for her work on April 20th, by her fellow designers, with the prestigious AIGA medal. In 1982, she was a sculptor and sometime curator when her high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld asked her to create graphics for a new computer that he was working on in California. Kare brought a Grid notebook to her job interview at Apple Computer. On its pages, she had sketched, in pink marker, a series of icons to represent the commands that Hertzfeld’s software would execute. Each square represented a pixel. A pointing finger meant “Paste.” A paintbrush symbolized “MacPaint.” Scissors said “Cut.”

Kare told me about this origin moment: “As soon as I started work, Andy Hertzfeld wrote an icon editor and font editor so I could design images and letterforms using the Mac, not paper,” she said. “But I loved the puzzle-like nature of working in sixteen-by-sixteen and thirty-two-by-thirty-twopixel icon grids, and the marriage of craft and metaphor.”

All Mac users owe Kare a debt of gratitude for her work.

IBM:

Gain insight into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. This service applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to infer attributes from a person’s unstructured text.

Based on my Twitter feed, Watson tells me I am “a bit critical and excitable. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are solemn: you are generally serious and do not joke much. And you are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes” and that I “care more about making your own path than following what others have done.”

Mostly accurate. Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link.

Tim Cook:

“We don’t believe in sort of watering down one for the other. Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two … you begin to make trade offs and compromises.

“So maybe the company would be more efficient at the end of the day. But that’s not what it’s about. You know it’s about giving people things that they can then use to help them change the world or express their passion or express their creativity. So this merger thing that some folks are fixated on, I don’t think that’s what users want.”

I have never been a fan of merging these two devices. There are always going to be compromises when you look at merging them that aren’t necessary. I’ll gladly take two devices, and two operating system over a merged device.

If a new European law restricting what companies can do with people’s online data went into effect tomorrow, almost 1.9 billion Facebook Inc users around the world would be protected by it. The online social network is making changes that ensure the number will be much smaller.

Facebook members outside the United States and Canada, whether they know it or not, are currently governed by terms of service agreed with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland.

Next month, Facebook is planning to make that the case for only European users, meaning 1.5 billion members in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America will not fall under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25.

It’s all a game.

Some wisdom from Glenn Fleishman.

Long story short, take a minute to familiarize yourself with the details on this Apple Support article on two-factor account recovery.

If you have a Mac or PC, open your browser and head over to a Wikipedia page, like this one on the Mona Lisa.

Hover over a link and you should see a brand new behavior. Instead of a tool tip (a tiny snippet of text), you should see a fairly substantial preview of the linked page. This is a huge improvement.

From Wikimedia:

This seemingly cosmetic change may seem far from revolutionary, but has been built through careful and vigorous A/B testing; scaling APIs to Wikipedia levels of traffic and a change to how we build our code (blog post to follow). Our testing shows that the feature makes it easier and more efficient for Wikipedia readers to interact with our content and get more context about a topic on Wikipedia.

And:

The goal of page previews was to decrease the cost of exploration for each blue link you come across, allowing readers to satisfy their curiosity or clarify a confusing or unknown topic without the burden of opening a new page and navigating back to the original.

More reading on this change: How we designed page previews for Wikipedia — and what could be done with them in the future.

A few stats from that last article:

• Nearly ~28 percent of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from clicking on internal blue links. a.k.a going down the rabbit hole
• Blue links account for ~230 million page views per month
• ~2 million links get hovered per minute across all Wikipedias

I love Wikipedia, I think this is a wonderful move. Note that if you don’t see the previews, check to see if you are logged in. If so, head over to Preferences > Appearance and click Enable in the Page Previews section.

Slate, from a few years ago:

The fade-out—the technique of ending a song with a slow decrease in volume over its last few seconds—became common in the 1950s and ruled for three decades. Among the year-end top 10 songs for 1985, there’s not one cold ending.

Fadeouts are gone from popular music.

Advances in technology played a big part in the rise of the fade-out. Electrical recording emerged in the 1920s, allowing studio engineers to increase or decrease amplification. And achieving the effect became even easier when magnetic tape recording became widely available in the ’40s and ’50s. Many early fade-outs were added simply because engineers were short on time: To meet the demands of radio, or the limited runtime of one side of a vinyl single, they had to make the record fade out early.

And:

Done right, the fade-out is a song’s parting gift to the attentive listener. “Thanks for staying ’til the end,” it says. “Here’s a little somethin’ for ya.”

But what caused the fade-out to, well, fade out?

Let’s shift our accusatory fingers, then, to the iPod. That’s where our itchy thumbs have been stationed since Apple introduced the device in 2001. With a mere depression of the fast-forward button to get to the next tune, why wait out those last dwindling seconds?

This is a fascinating read. Especially the examples where little easter eggs are hidden in the lower volumes of the fade.

[H/T Brother Stu]