“Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”

Look, I see why people are saying Apple might be done with desktops, but it doesn’t make sense at this point. Someday maybe, but not now.

Every Mac is vulnerable to malware. Every day that passes, Malware authors introduce new targets against OS X. And yet, many users go unprotected against these threats. There are solutions available. MacScan 3 protects your Mac by scanning for and removing malware – providing much-needed security and privacy in the face of online threats.

MacScan will find and clean malware threatening your Mac, including:

• Spyware
• Adware
• Trojan Horses
• Worms
• Scareware
• Keystroke Loggers

If you’re still in denial that your Mac is safe, we encourage you to sign up for a 30-day test drive to uncover what’s really happening.

Quartz:

By now, you may have seen the new feel-good video making the rounds on the internet featuring a polar bear “patting” a dog on its head in Churchill, Canada. The CBC called the bear a “gentle giant.” The Huffington Post praised its “cuteness factor.” A Facebook commenter said, “We are fortunate to be able to see with our own eyes how animals of all kinds are capable of love.” The dog’s owner, Brian Ladoon, said the seemingly friendly interaction was “nature’s will.”

There’s just one problem with this heartwarming narrative: That polar bear isn’t expressing love for the dog. It’s playing with its prey.

The viral video demonstrates the dangers of anthropomorphization: the projection of human personalities on animals.

When I first saw this video, I never thought for a second the bear was “playing” with the dog.

Steve Hackett, 512 Pixels, posted a link to an upcoming collectible figure, the 3D printed Macinbot Classic.

If you are into collectible figures, take a look. There’s a reasonably detailed model of the Macintosh Classic, circa 1990, along with a font briefcase and a pet mouse. All very cute.

But the story behind the actual Macintosh Classic makes fascinating reading. The Macintosh Classic came along after Steve Jobs’ ousting, with Apple trying to find their path, exploring both openness (via the Mac II) and low cost (via the Macintosh Classic).

This is all laid out pretty well on the Macintosh Classic Wikipedia page.

Jason Snell answers some questions about the Apple AirPods. Some good info there.

Khoi, Subtraction.com, on switching from the iPhone to the Pixel:

To be sure, it’s a terrific phone. It has a world class still camera that just about lives up to its hype, and to me the operating system has never felt as united with its hardware as it does in this phone.

As much as I tried though, after living with this device for several weeks I still felt that there were several stumbling blocks to jumping entirely to Android. Whether you consider it lock-in or value-add, Apple’s ecosystem is a powerful argument for sticking with the iPhone.

Interesting read, pulls no punches.

Bloomberg:

This story is based on interviews with dozens of officials from the EU, Ireland, and Apple, though most didn’t want to speak on the record discussing sensitive tax matters.

This is a fascinating read. Meet the key players in this drama, with a peek at some of the behind-the-scenes politicking.

Reuters:

Apple has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, senior executives said.

Apple’s combative stand underlines its anger with the European Commission, which said on Aug. 30 the company’s Irish tax deal was illegal state aid and ordered it to repay up to 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion) to Ireland, where Apple has its European headquarters.

This story is far from over. Two forces are pulling hard at Apple. The EU wants maximum tax revenue, and the incoming US government wants Apple manufacturing back in the US.

Reuters:

Apple poached the technical director of Porsche’s race car program earlier this year, a company source said on Friday, hiring a project manager who helped engineer the sports car company’s victorious return to the Le Mans endurance race.

And:

[Alexander] Hitzinger helped Porsche, owned by Volkswagen, return to endurance racing and to develop the 919 hybrid sports car from scratch, much in the same way Apple is now looking into building its own vehicle.

Porsche’s new race car won Le Mans and the endurance racing world championship in both 2015 and 2016 using largely unproven technology, which beat far more established rivals.

Quartz:

The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas Oppermann, has suggested a new law that would require companies like Facebook to set up an office in the country that would deal with fake news and hate speech at all hours of the day. According to English-language version of the German news site Deutsche Welle, German legislators are considering whether to institute a policy that if Facebook’s local office did not delete the news item or hate speech within 24 hours, the social network could expect a fine of €500,000 euros ($522,575) per item.

This is problematic on a number of levels. At the very least, who will judge whether a post is fake? Then there’s the sheer volume of posts. And, of course, there are privacy issues: Facebook posts have a variety of privacy levels. To check all posts, will the watchdogs require access to all posts, even the posts restricted to friends?

The idea of eliminating fake news is critical. And this approach might potentially force Facebook to implement a solution of its own. A difficult problem to solve.

The Telegraph:

Many people would love to work at Apple, considered to be one of the most forward-thinking and innovative tech companies in the world today. However, would you be able to get through an Apple job interview?

People who’ve applied for jobs with the firm – successfully and unsuccessfully – have been sharing some of the questions they were asked during their interviews on the website Glassdoor. Here’s a selection of them – how would you cope with being asked these?

I used to work at Apple but, if these are the questions they’re asking now, I couldn’t get a job there today.

Atlas Obscura:

Each day for nearly one hundred years, a group of ducks have left their penthouse at Memphis’ Peabody Hotel and waddled down a red carpet to spend the day playing in the lobby fountain.

Every morning around 11:00 AM, the ducks are led down from their rooftop penthouse to a red carpet bordered by adoring onlookers. Accompanied by a Sousa march, the five ducks trot up a small, custom stairway into the placid waters of the marble fountain where they dutifully swim until they are once again led back upstairs around 5:00 PM. The whole ceremony is preceded over by the “Duckmaster,” a position originally filled by a circus trainer that joined the hotel in the 1940’s, and which is now filled by the occasional celebrity such as Molly Ringwald or Peter Frampton.

I’ve seen this duck march and it’s a wonderfully silly Southern tradition. If you’re ever in Memphis (it happens in the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, Fl as well but it’s just not as good), you owe it to yourself to go see the ducks. Thanks to AdiKingsley-Hughes for the link to the video.

Buzzfeed:

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Google, Apple, and Uber clarified their positions on President-elect Donald Trump’s comments about a possible Muslim registry. “In relation to the hypothetical of whether we would ever help build a ‘muslim registry’ – we haven’t been asked, of course we wouldn’t do this and we are glad – from all that we’ve read – that the proposal doesn’t seem to be on the table,” a spokesperson for Google told BuzzFeed News in an email message.

BuzzFeed News asked all three companies whether they would help build or provide data for a Muslim registry. An Apple spokesperson said: “We think people should be treated the same no matter how they worship, what they look like, who they love. We haven’t been asked and we would oppose such an effort.”

Leaving aside the insanity of having to discuss the subject to begin with, the problem is, if the government wants it built, they can do it without any of these companies. Some company out there will take the government’s money.

iDownloadblog:

tvOS packs in Apple’s attractive new Aerial screen saver which plays eye-candy high-definition drone footage of various landmarks and places from around the globe in gorgeous slow motion. Apple has now added 21 new videos to the Aerial screen saver, as first discovered by our own Jim Gresham.

The latest arrivals include birds-eye imagery from Dubai, Greenland, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and United Arab Emirates. Plus, there are now three new videos of Chinese landmarks for a total of 21 new drone clips.

You can enjoy these Apple TV-exclusive screen savers on your Mac thanks to well-known jailbreak developer John Coate who developed a Mac screen saver which streams or downloads aerial footage directly from Apple’s servers.

These are gorgeous. For those of us without a capable Apple TV, Coate’s Mac screen saver is the next best thing.

The Wirecutter:

If you spend most of your day typing, a mechanical keyboard can be a worthwhile upgrade over a cheaper, less comfortable keyboard. They are more durable, responsive, and customizable than other types of keyboards. The best for you depends a lot on personal preference and what you’re using it for, but after spending months testing 31 top-rated keyboards with a four-person panel, we unanimously agree that the WASD Code 87-Key is a great place to start because of its fantastic key feel, build quality, and elegant design.

I fondly remember the old mechanical Apple Extended Keyboards and loved the sound. I used an early version of the Matias Tactile Pro and really liked the racket it made.

The Atlantic:

when people spot a bear, they call 204-675-BEAR. The 24-hour hotline reaches the staff of the Polar Bear Alert Program, who have divided the area around Churchill into three concentric zones. If the bear’s in the outer zone, the staff will try to scare it away by firing cracker shells—shotgun rounds that explode with especially loud bangs. If that doesn’t work, they resort to rubber bullets or paint balls.

If the bear is in the inner zone, where Churchill residents live and work, the staff will try to capture it.

Churchill has become a symbol of co-existence—not to mention a major tourist destination for people keen to see and photograph the bears. But conflicts are becoming increasingly common.

Churchhill is the poster child for how global warming has affected both humans and animals.

My thanks to 4K Download for sponsoring The Loop this week.

We make safe and useful apps for Mac, PC and Linux trusted by millions. Try Video Downloader, YouTube to MP3 tool & Instagram downloader, you’ll love it!

The Next Web:

There are an insane amount of lectures and talks online ripe for the downloading, many of which are free. The problem is that they’re spread across literally hundreds of disparate platforms, like university websites, YouTube, Vimeo, Coursera, and so on.

FindLectures is an effort to centralize the vast quantities of free online lectures and talks into one searchable repository of knowledge. It pulls from a number of reputable sources, including Oxford University, TalksAtGoogle, TED, the Library of Congress, and more. At the time of writing, it boasts a catalog of over 25,968 lectures.

This is a great example of what I call “accidental learning”. A huge and very random list of lectures you can just pick and choose to listen to at your leisure. Everything from “Digging up Dinosaurs” to “Waterloo: Causes, Courses and Consequences” to “Solving the First Person Shooter in VR”.

EFF:

EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing Privacy Badger 2.0 for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party trackers that would otherwise follow you around the web and spy on your browsing habits. Privacy Badger now has approximately 900,000 daily users and counting.

Third-party tracking—that is, when advertisers and websites track your browsing activity across the web without your knowledge, control, or consent—is an alarmingly widespread practice in online advertising. Privacy Badger spots and then blocks third-party domains that seem to be tracking your browsing habits (e.g. by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or by fingerprinting your browser). If the same third-party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a tracker and block future connections to it.

Privacy Badger always tells how many third-party domains it has detected and whether or not they seem to be trackers. Further, users have control over how Privacy Badger treats these domains, with options to block a domain entirely, block just cookies, or allow a domain.

Why do I get the feeling that your personal privacy is going to be a much bigger issue over the next four years?

Fast Company:

After receiving a tremendous amount of user backlash yesterday, Evernote has decided not to move forward with the revisions to its privacy policy that it planned to put into effect on January 23. They would have given the note-taking service more latitude to allow certain employees to look at the information its users stored, in the interest of improving machine-learning algorithms.

“We’re going to take a step back, and not just think about machine learning and what that means for us, but also think about how we can express our approach to privacy in the most clear way possible,” Andrew Malcolm, Evernote’s senior VP of marketing, told Fast Company. “So users can have confidence that we’re as committed to privacy as we’ve ever been, but also understand how we do that.”

Translation: “We’re going to pull our heads out of our asses and try to understand how we managed to screw the pooch so badly on this.”

Chance Miller, 9to5mac, pulled together a nice collection of AirPod review videos. I found them all worth watching, each bringing a different take.

One thing in particular I learned was the value of the long AirPod antennae (the sticks that hang from your ears). They ensure a reliable connection, even at a significant distance. As long as you have line-of-sight to your device, you can get up to 150 feet away.

I love the fact that when you take one AirPod out of your ear, your audio automatically pauses. Solid Siri integration as well.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

After the one-year warranty has expired, Apple will charge a $69 fee for out-of-warranty service repairs. Battery service for AirPods that lose battery capacity is free during the one-year warranty period or $49 out of warranty.

If you lose or damage one of the AirPods or the charging case, Apple will charge $69 for a replacement, regardless of whether or not the AirPods are still under warranty. The pricing in Apple’s support document is U.S. pricing, and will vary based on country.

Interesting that the AirPods do not need to be replaced in pairs. Great technology.

Nice tip from Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog.