The FBI informed Apple Inc of a vulnerability in its iPhone and Mac software on April 14, the first time it had told the company about a flaw in Apple products under a controversial White House process for sharing such information, the company told Reuters on Tuesday.

And

Though he declined to provide technical details, the executive said the problem had been fixed by the company nine months ago, with the release of iOS9 for phones and Mac OS C El Capitan.

Apple doesn’t plan to release an update for older operating systems.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday began investigating a body found at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

Damn.

Bloomberg:

Time Warner Inc.’s Turner division will introduce its first online-only channel, allowing film buffs to watch classic movies without a traditional TV subscription.

The service, called FilmStruck, will be developed and managed by Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection, which owns more than 1,000 arthouse films, according to a company statement Tuesday. Criterion’s movies, available now on Hulu Plus, will be exclusive to FilmStruck when Turner’s streaming service begins this fall.

FilmStruck will feature a library of arthouse, indie, foreign and cult films, including Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” Robert Altman’s “The Player” and the Beatles film “A Hard Days Night.” The price of the service, which will be commercial-free, is still being determined, a Turner spokeswoman said.

It’ll be interesting to see if the FilmStruck business plan calls for an Apple TV app right out of the gate.

If you make your way through iFixit’s Retina MacBook 2016 teardown, you’ll see some tamper evident screws holding the hinge to the aluminum body.

Tamper evident screws are treated with a compound, after assembly, that makes it obvious if anyone applies force to the screw.

Why do this?

From this ZDNet post:

My best guess is that these fasteners take a fair load from the hinge, but at the same time are only screwed down into soft aluminum. That leads me to believe that they need to be tightened down – or more accurately, torqued down – with a specific force that’s enough to hold them in place but not enough to strip the threads. As such, if a third-party messes with them, and the hinge later becomes loose because the threads have stripped because of improper torquing (which I’ve come across a lot over the years), Apple will know about it.

Interesting.

Update: A little birdie told me that the compound is Loctite, not an attempt to detect user tampering.

Anton Shilov, writing for AnandTech:

Audio receptacles on PCs and mobile equipment are virtually the last remaining analog interfaces of modern devices, requiring certain techniques to maintain a high audio quality and remove interference. Intel proposes to replace things like 3.5 mm mini-jack with USB Type-C which will help to add features to headsets and will simplify connections of multi-channel audio equipment to various gadgets.

And:

As phones and devices get thinner, or even to simplify some of the internal design, it gets harder to install multiple ports for various purposes. If there were to be a universal connector that does it all, including audio, Intel and some other players want USB Type-C to be that universal connector.

And:

Usage of digital audio means that headsets should gain their own amplifiers, DACs and various other logic, which is currently located inside smartphones.

People already have headphones and devices with 3.5mm headphone jacks. There will be a natural resistance to buy a new device that forces them to replace what already works. But this has happened several times already. Apple’s move to the iPhone lightning interface raised a fair amount of resistance but, ultimately, everyone moved over, bought all new stuff.

As Anton points out, the TV industry went through similar upheaval in the move from RCA and coax interfaces to HDMI. Now HDMI is ubiquitous.

One problem I see is for very small devices where the only output is the headphone jack. For those devices, the move to a USB Type-C would actually make them larger. Perhaps a mini-USB Type-C?

Fascinating article, full of technical detail.

From Nintendo’s press release:

Nintendo announced that its next two mobile apps would be based on the familiar and beloved Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing franchises. Nintendo plans to release both of these applications this fall.

And:

Nintendo confirmed that NX is scheduled to launch in March 2017. NX will not make an appearance at the upcoming E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles in June and will be unveiled later this year.

And:

The latest installment in this classic franchise is scheduled to launch simultaneously for both Wii U and NX, and both versions of the game have been in development in tandem. Because developers need more time to polish the game, it will launch in 2017, but it will be the focus of Nintendo’s presence at E3.

Finally, Nintendo of America tweeted this early this morning:

More #Nintendo apps are coming to smart devices, including Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing!

Can’t wait. Fingers crossed that in-app purchases don’t ruin some treasured game franchises.

Jason Snell digs into the transcript of yesterday’s earnings call:

If I had to describe Tim Cook’s attitude during the call, it would be “optimistic.” But only because he referred to his optimism eight different times over the span of an hour. (Maestri added another three on his own.) Then again, when your company just broke a 13-year streak of year-over-year revenue growth, expressing your optimism about the future is probably a smart move.

And:

With that in mind, file all of this away for three months from now: Apple says it won’t grow next quarter, either. When you look at the data, it’s clear that 2015 was a record-breaker for Apple, and a severe outlier. The release of the iPhone 6 seems to have supercharged Apple’s sales just when they were starting to slow down, but a year later those numbers are proving impossible to match.

This means that for the rest of this year, Apple will be putting up numbers that are lower than the ones it put up in 2015–and people who look to the company for growth will be unhappy, even as the company posts quarters with $10 billion in profit and adds to its $200 billion in cash.

The problem is that investors want growth (the “G” word), want a reason to be optimistic that growth is still possible. Growth, on a percentage basis is much, much easier when you are small. Doubling $100 is easy. Doubling $1 million, much harder. Doubling $1 billion requires a much more complex business mechanism that needs to be firing on all cylinders. And once you reach Apple’s size, continued growth is almost impossible.

But the market continues to require growth, especially when you’ve delivered impossibly steady growth for such a long time.

Rene Ritchie and Jason Snell put together a transcript of Apple’s earnings call today.

FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that his agency was still assessing whether a vulnerability used to unlock an iPhone linked to one of the San Bernardino killers would go through a government review to determine if it should be disclosed to Apple or the public.

I’d be shocked if they disclosed the flaw to Apple or the public. If this is the only way they have to get into these phones, they have no reason to disclose the flaw.

M.G. Siegler:

Last year, Rolex did $4.5 billion in sales. A solid year for the premium watchmaker. Of course, it was no Apple Watch. That business did roughly $6 billion in sales, if industry estimates are accurate.

The point here isn’t to compare the two devices — an Apple Watch is just about as comparable to a watch as an iPhone is to a phone. But it does provide an interesting context for Apple’s fledgling business — a new product category which has come under a lot of scrutiny since its launch a year ago. Many have called it a “flop,” which, again, is interesting in context.

Leaving aside the “…if industry estimates are accurate…” (they’re not), the media in general and the tech media is particular always seem to need to see everything in absolute terms. The Apple Watch is most certainly not a flop – nothing that sells millions of copies at $500+ a pop can be called that.

From the Dropbox blog:

With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve. The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity. While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals’ laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team’s data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best.

Project Infinite will enable users to seamlessly and securely access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space they have available on their hard drives. Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it’s stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it’s synced locally, you’ll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon.

The announcement very specifically mentions laptops and your desktop. No mention of iOS, but perhaps there’s just no sensible path there. Will be interesting to see how that plays out. As currently announced, Project Infinite is for OS X and Windows.

Take a look at the video below to see this concept in action. Note the OS X slight (at about 1:47), as the narrator focuses on Windows, then says, “Ah but graphic design, they’re still on…they always use OS Ten…It works on OS Ten too.”

Clearly a Windows bias there. I’d be surprised if the company didn’t update this video to add a more OS X and iOS spin on things. As is, Apple is merely an afterthought.

Still to this day, the pummeling grooves of John Bonham, Ian Paice, Keith Moon and Bill Ward continue to inspire writers and underline the fact that in classic rock, the drums are – and should be – loud, obnoxious and play as much of a leading part as anything else in a song.

I have quite a few of these drum groove libraries from Toontrack. They do a great job with them and I’ll be adding this one to my collection.

I interviewed former Apple CEO John Sculley on April 11th, an insightful and enjoyable experience. While the interview was ostensibly centered around his 2014 book Moonshot! (on Amazon and iBooks), Mr. Sculley also shared anecdotes about his time at Apple experiences with the late Steve Jobs, some of which I hadn’t previously heard.

Great interview. You can read it or listen to the audio.

Matthew Schofield, writing for the Miami Herald:

Even 30 years later – 25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist – the full damage of that day is still argued.

Death toll estimates run from hundreds to millions. The area near the reactor is both a teeming wildlife refuge and an irradiated ghost-scape. Much of eastern and central Europe continues to deal with fallout aftermath. The infamous Reactor Number 4 remains a problem that is neither solved nor solvable.

Riveting account of the Chernobyl disaster, with a first person accounting from one of the very few people who was there and lived to tell the tale.

Shawn Knight, writing for TechSpot:

During a recent conversation with a close friend of mine, I mentioned the fact that I’ve gone over my 300GB broadband data cap a handful of times since switching from AT&T U-Verse to Comcast for my home Internet needs last September. He was flabbergasted and questioned how I could possibly be using that much data each month.

While I do work from home and am actively online for several hours during weekdays, I don’t game online or download torrents. I am, however, a cord-cutter so all of our television watching comes from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Sling TV.

And:

I never ran into overage issues when I had U-Verse. At the time, AT&T didn’t offer a way for customers to check their monthly data consumption (I asked multiple times) nor did they ever communicate that I was even subject to a data cap.

That changed recently, however, as AT&T announced it was increasing monthly data caps for U-Verse customers and would even do away with the cap entirely so long as you also subscribe to its cable television service.

Makes sense. This is a battle, business hardball. If cord cutting becomes mainstream (seems inevitable), the cable business will lose the lion’s share of their revenue from a typical monthly cable bill.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

All cars manufactured after September 2014 must include an Event Data Recorder (EDR), as mandated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The NHTSA also mandates that 15 streams of data — speed, throttle input, braking effort and so forth — must be recorded, and has created standards for 30 more “voluntary” data types. In the event of a crash the NHTSA requires that the EDR data be made publicly available. This is for the good: The NHTSA simply wants the data to be available for study as an aid in improving safety. But…

“…perhaps the most significant feature of the Part 563 rule is that manufacturers must now relinquish their proprietary control over the equipment, software, and data decoding algorithms, thus lowering the barriers to data access.”

Beyond crash data, not much is said about who exactly has explicit or implicit permission to access the EDR’s content. Anyone with physical access to the car’s On Board Diagnostics (ODB) connector (your local car mechanic) can look into your dirty driving habits and can also install software updates, benevolent or otherwise. How are normal users to know if their car has been compromised, and for what purposes? Now add wireless connectivity and even more hacking fun can be had…

That last bit is key. How can you know if your car’s security has been compromised? I have access and control over my computer. I can run any virus scanning software I choose, customize my firewall, add hardware barriers as well. But my car’s security is strictly in the hands of my dealer.

Emma Boyle, writing for Gadgette:

Lionsgate, the movie studio responsible for major franchises such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, recently announced plans to add over 100 feature films to Steam with more to come in the future.

And:

For many people, myself included, Steam isn’t exactly the first place I would think to go to watch a film or associate with the cutting edge of online content delivery, as reliable as it is. That said, the films will be viewable on any platform that Steam operates on, meaning you could watch the latest Hunger Games instalment on PC, Linux, Mac, SteamOS and even via a headset on Steam VR.

Interesting to watch the commoditization of the original Netflix model. The key differentiator is custom content, such as Netflix’s House of Cards, or Amazon Video’s Mozart in the Jungle. Steam has gaming, but it’ll be interesting to see if they try to bring some exclusive content to their side.

VentureBeat:

Apple has been cutting all of its contract recruiters in the past few weeks, VentureBeat has learned.

The hardware and software giant is additionally beginning to let go of some full-time recruiters as well, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat. In all, more than 100 people could be affected by the moves, the source said. The company currently has no public job postings for recruiters.

Essentially, the recruiting engine inside Apple has slowed down, and the company is reevaluating its activities in that area, the source said.

Is this a course correction? A basic change of strategy? We’ll likely learn more this afternoon.

The quarterly earnings call was originally scheduled for yesterday afternoon, but:

Apple’s second quarter earnings announcement has been rescheduled to Tuesday, April 26, at 2:00 p.m. PT/5:00 p.m. ET out of respect for the friends and family of Bill Campbell, whose memorial service will be held Monday. Apple executives and employees will be attending the service to remember Bill and his many years of friendship and service to the Apple community.

The call is now on for this afternoon at 2p PT, 5p ET. You can listen to the audio webcast here.

Screens is a beautiful, yet powerful Screen Sharing and VNC client that lets you connect back to your Mac, Windows or Linux PC from the comfort of your living room, the corner coffee shop or anywhere in the world.

I do love this app.

Bid now on this opportunity to have lunch with Apple CEO Tim Cook on campus in Cupertino, California, and to be his guest at an Apple keynote event!

Tim, we should really do lunch sometime soon.

Appleton announced that she was leaving Box in a Medium post last week. Today she said on Facebook that she had joined Apple, but didn’t elaborate on the nature of the job. “Officially an Apple employee. Excited for this adventure!” she wrote.

Good move.

I thought this was a cool trick to get your kick drum and bass together in the mix. I’m going to try this out.