A Yahoo Inc media executive fired from the internet company last year has filed a lawsuit claiming a job review process implemented by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer was used to cut men from executive ranks and lay them off illegally, court papers showed.

It’s not often you hear about this type of lawsuit.

After five years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in the bitter patent dispute between the world’s two top smartphone manufacturers over the amount Samsung should pay Apple for copying the iPhone’s distinctive look.

There is absolutely no doubt that Samsung stole everything it could from the iPhone. They should pay up and stop stealing.

The New York Times:

In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration approved Mars’s petition to use the microscopic algae spirulina to make the first natural blue dye approved for use in the United States. As a result, any food manufacturer in the country can legally use spirulina as a colorant. Mars spent years researching spirulina’s safety; in order to overhaul 1,700 or so recipes and update its global manufacturing capabilities, the company desperately needs a substitute for synthetic Blue No. 1, as does the rest of the industry. But right now, there isn’t nearly enough spirulina dye to go around — and in any case, sometimes it doesn’t yield just the right blue, or the color degrades and comes out blotchy, or it tastes odd. So researchers are still looking everywhere for other natural blue pigments.

Really interesting article about the industry’s search for natural alternatives for the colors found in many of our favorite foods.

AnandTech:

Overall, I think that if there’s any phone that is worth 650-750 USD at its base, it’s the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. If you’re upgrading from the iPhone 6s Plus you probably won’t find a ton of differences, but it’s still a significant step up in display, camera, speaker quality, battery life, and system performance.

The iPhone might not excite like smartphones once did, but the amount of attention to detail and execution in the hardware is unparalleled and a cut above anything else in the industry.

This is the typical long, technical and very well done review from the folks at AnandTech. Settle in for a while to read more detail on the new phones than any other publication can manage.

The Telegraph:

Ministers have been barred from wearing Apple Watches during Cabinet meetings amid concerns that they could be hacked by Russian spies, The Telegraph has learned. Under David Cameron, several cabinet ministers wore the smart watches, including Michael Gove, the former Justice Secretary.

However, under Theresa May ministers have been barred from wearing them amid concerns that they could be used by hackers as listening devices. Mobile phones have already been barred from the Cabinet because of similar concerns.

It’s unclear how much of this can be put down to general (possibly misguided) fear of what might happen versus there being an actual threat or possibility.

CNBC:

Samsung Electronics has suspended production of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones following reports of fires in replacement devices, South Korean media said on Monday, a further setback for the tech giant trying to manage its worst ever phone recall crisis.

Samsung’s decision to temporarily halt Note 7 production was done in cooperation with authorities in China and the United States, as two U.S. carriers have stopped exchanging or selling new Note 7 phones, Yonhap News Agency cited an unnamed source at a Samsung partner firm as saying.

Certainly the death knell of the Galaxy Note 7. The next question is, how will it affect Samsung’s brand and sales going forward?

Collectors Weekly:

The rise of cassettes and CDs shrunk the dimensions of the artwork on album covers from 12-inches square to just five, or even less. A few decades later, beautiful and intricate album-cover art was being crammed onto the tiny thumbnails that accompanied digital music played on handheld devices.

In fact, the art of the record jacket never went away, as the current vinyl revival so clearly shows. For more than 50 years, one of the best album-art printers has been Stoughton Printing Company, which opened for business in 1964 in Los Angeles.

I miss album cover art more than I miss the sound of vinyl.

Addictive Tips:

Malicious websites and apps can gain access to your webcam and microphone. A lot of people might consider this to be an urban legend but there is truth to it. Unfortunately, a website or an app that does this isn’t going to be easy to detect by the average user. Tech savvy users might be able to tell if their webcam or mic is being accessed but for the ordinary user, and Mark Zuckerberg, you likely have to tape a bit of paper over your webcam to be safe. Oversight is a free macOS app that makes this much easier. It monitors all connected webcams and microphones and alerts you when they are accessed. It’s a very simple app that monitors current processes and can identify which app started a process to access these two devices.

This may be unnecessarily paranoid but sometimes it’s better to be safe than sorry. Or at least in the case of this app, aware of what’s going on.

MIC:

We’re nearing Apple’s 10-year anniversary of the iPhone, and the device still refuses to recognize common curse words. (Steve Jobs memorably insisted on keeping the iPhone PG-rated.) Damn! But one genius posted a workaround on Twitter that let’s you drop expletives with ease.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor problem but it is an incredible annoyance to those of us with foul mouths.

The court said that there was substantial evidence for the jury verdict related to Samsung’s infringement of Apple patents on its slide-to-unlock and autocorrect features, as well as quick links, which automatically turn information like addresses and phone numbers into links.

It’s obvious that Samsung blatantly stole this from Apple. Time to pay up for your thieving behavior, Samsung.

Check out Samsung’s crossed fingers emoji.

[H/T The roundedly rectangular Not Jony Ive]

DPReview is one of the go-to sites for deeply technical camera reviews. Note that that this is an iPhone 7 gallery. Here’s a link to the DPReview iPhone 7 Plus gallery.

Tap one of the images to get started.

Check out the post, even if only to appreciate the gorgeous hi-res Xray imagery.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld, on finding your listening history in iOS 10:

There’s no way to do that in the iOS 10 Music app. In the Apple Music For You section, you can see your Recently Played music, but it only lists albums and playlists, not the songs in the order you heard them. And that’s only for Apple Music, not for your music.

But there is a path:

Interestingly, there is one way you can find this, and you have to enter Apple’s new Byzantine Messages app. Create a new message to yourself or to a friend. Tap the gray arrow to the left of the text field, then tap the App Store icon. Tap the grid icon at the bottom left (the one with the four ovals), then tap Music. When you do this, Messages displays a list of your 30 most recently played tracks.

The fact that this info was available made me dig a bit further. In the Music app, as Kirk suggested, I tapped the Library tab, then tapped Playlists. Down a bit was a playlist labeled Recently Played that, sure enough, had a nice long list of my recently played music, complete with a Shuffle All option at the top of the list.

My Recently Played list was indeed a list of songs and artists, in order. Not sure what Kirk experienced, but seems like there must be a setting somewhere that customizes the look of that list. I’ll ping Kirk on this, see what he thinks.

Most interesting to me is the TERRIBLE selfie iOS chose as the icon for that list. Really curious about the logic that led to that choice. But it did make me laugh.

UPDATE: Spoke with Kirk, his take is that my Recently Played playlist was inherited from my Mac via a past iTunes sync. Has to be this, since you can’t make smart playlists in iOS. Interesting.

Rene Ritchie has lived with his new Series 2 Apple Watch for three weeks. His review is realistic and well worth the time if you are thinking about buying one.

One quote on performance:

watchOS 3, unsurprisingly, runs great, as well. Scratch that. On the original Apple Watch, it runs great. On Series 2, it flies.

That’s thanks to the new S2 system-in-package (SIP), which now includes a dual-core central processor and an amped up graphics processor. A fresh app launch is still count-the-spinner-wheel-seconds slow, but way better than before. And given how recent and favorite apps are now kept in memory, it’s also rarer than before.

The S2 also includes GPS. It is assisted GPS in the most assisted sense of the word — it only fires when you’re tracking an workout route and your iPhone isn’t around to piggy-back on. As a result, power drain is minimal.

Combined with the new, bigger battery and more efficient processor, it’s so minimal that I’ve done two workouts in a day and still been well over 50% by sundown.

The difference between the original and the Series 2 is ridiculous.

Read the whole review.

There are some big regrets here. Bessemer Venture Partners seem to have passed up on every good idea that ever came along in the history of tech.

This is a great piece from Om that focuses on photography, but also looks at Instagram and Snapchat.

At a hearing in San Francisco federal court on Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Donato said he was “concerned” with Airbnb’s position because the San Francisco statute targets only bookings processed by Airbnb, not what the company publishes on its website.

Basically, the law would require Airbnb to verify that the person renting the property was registered with the city. Airbnb is saying that it is the responsibility of the person to follow the law and they are providing a publishing service.

Twitter shares plunged on Thursday, a day after technology website Recode reported that Alphabet’s Google and Disney would not bid for the social network and Apple was unlikely to be a suitor.

The stock fell 19% on the news. Twitter is in a tough spot—they have a ton of users and everyone recognizes the brand, but they can’t make a profit.

Jordan Golson, writing for The Verge:

Federal regulators are moving quickly to investigate the replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that caught fire on a Southwest Airlines flight today, with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission “moving expeditiously” to find out what happened.

And this, from yesterday’s post when the story first broke:

Green said that he had powered down the phone as requested by the flight crew and put it in his pocket when it began smoking. He dropped it on the floor of the plane and a “thick grey-green angry smoke” was pouring out of the device. Green’s colleague went back onto the plane to retrieve some personal belongings and said that the phone had burned through the carpet and scorched the subfloor of the plane.

That last bit is terrifying.

From Apple Insider:

In a note to investors obtained by AppleInsider, Daryanani notes Dialog pre-announced positive September quarter results on the back of mobile systems revenue, suggesting strong component orders from Apple. Dialog raised revenue expectations for the past quarter to about $345 million, up 13 percent from previous estimates between $290 million to $320 million.

OK, so far so good. Strong component orders indicate strong sales. Easy peasy.

Here’s the kicker:

Though Dialog failed to delve into specifics, it did say the revenue bump is in part the result of mobile systems orders being pulled forward into the third quarter to accommodate China’s National Day holiday on Oct. 1. Apple, which accounts for 75 to 80 percent of Dialog’s mobile systems revenue, traditionally builds iPhone approximately 60 days out, meaning the pulled-in orders are likely related to the December quarter, Daryanani writes.

The way I read it, this says that the builds for the holiday season were done early to accommodate China’s National Day holiday, which gave an early indicator of the unusual size of holiday orders. I found that kind of interesting.

By the way, according to this Wikipedia article, China’s National Day occurs every October 10th, not October 1. Not sure which is right.

When I asked Siri:

When is China’s national day holiday?

She replied:

National Day is on Tuesday, July 4, 2017.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Thanks for the tweets and emails. turns out the holiday referred to above is the mainland Chinese holiday, not Taiwanese holiday.

Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple recently started offering developers the opportunity to buy search ads in the App Store, allowing their apps to be shown when users search for particular keywords. Those ads have now started showing up for U.S. users.

The theory is that it allows deserving apps from smaller developers to be seen by more people, giving them a better shot at competing with the big boys. Early examples, though, are not encouraging.

For example, search for Pokémon Go, and you get an ad for Catch ’em, an app which appears to be just copying the idea rather than bringing anything new to the party (below). Other examples posted similarly seem to show ads that are just hijacking popular search terms with me-too apps.

Is there a balance here? Are there stories out there of developers of legitimate apps (as opposed to copycat/land-grab apps) who have benefited from these ads?

Too early to truly draw any conclusions. I would hate to see the app store turn into a steady, muddied stream of ads. That would, indeed, suck.

Dash is an off-line documentation browser, popular with developers. This morning, it was gone.

From the Dash for macOS blog:

Earlier today, Apple cancelled my developer account and has removed Dash from the App Store.

What Happened? I don’t know.

Read the post for details. But in a nutshell, Apple pulled the app and canceled the Dash developer account, sending an email saying “the account was terminated due to fraudulent conduct”.

This is a story with two major paths: Either the developer did something to deserve the rug being pulled out from under, something worthy of their developer credentials being cancelled. Or there’s a colossal misunderstanding here. I suspect there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Either way, don’t think this is the way this should have played out.

Google’s self-driving vehicles are mastering complex situations on public roads, from cars going the wrong way to bicycles darting in front of traffic, as the technology company strives to win the high-profile race to achieve full vehicle automation, executives said on Wednesday.

These are the types of situations that worry me the most about self-driving cars—normal everyday traffic accidents. Good to see Google is focusing on what may appear to be mundane incidents.

Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday it is acquiring U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) platform developer Viv Labs Inc, a firm run by a co-creator of Apple Inc’s Siri voice assistant program.

Samsung said in a statement it plans to integrate the San Jose-based company’s AI platform, called Viv, into the Galaxy smartphones and expand voice-assistant services to home appliances and wearable technology devices.

Viv looks to be a pretty robust system. Impressive move.

Southwest Airlines flight 994 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge.

More worryingly, the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung.

People, get rid of this shit now and keep the rest of us safe.