Jason Snell and Stephen Hackett take a fun look back at all the products Apple released at events held at Town Hall on its Cupertino Campus. I was there for every one of them. Tomorrow’s event will also be held at Town Hall.

Even though the Fitbit is made for Fitness, I prefer the Apple Watch because it can do more things. The ecosystem is obviously a huge advantage for Apple too.

CBC:

A Heart and Stroke Foundation survey found 86 per cent of Canadians said they would do CPR if the need arose, but only 30 per cent of cardiac arrest sufferers actually receive bystander CPR. Parker said this is often because people feel reluctant to perform CPR due to lack of training and knowledge or fear of making the situation worse.

The app is an attempt to close that gap by providing users with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the technique, as well as the all-important reminder to call 911.

This is one of those apps that you won’t need or use every day but you can download, go over, try the exercises and hope you never have to use them. It does not replace an accredited CPR program which, if one is available to you, you should definitely take.

The FBI has requested an evidentiary hearing, which means the court will hear testimony from witnesses on both sides.

Those witnesses will include Eric Neuenschwander, Apple’s head of product security and privacy, who can speak to the company’s security measures and the feasibility of the government’s proposed system. Neuenschwander filed a declaration to the court on Tuesday, which argued the government’s order would potentially endanger the Trusted Platform Module system used throughout the industry, including specific systems built by Tesla and Microsoft.

I was on the call today with Apple and they remained steadfast in their view that weakening encryption would be a bad thing. The fact the government requested an evidentiary hearing speaks volumes—I don’t think they feel they can rely on the law alone to win this case.

Remember, you have a voice in this fight too. There are things you can do.

NPR:

Too much sitting increases heart failure risk and disability risk, and shortens life expectancy, studies have found. But according to an analysis published Wednesday of 20 of the best studies done so far, there’s little evidence that workplace interventions like the sit-stand desk or even the flashier pedaling or treadmill desks will help you burn lots more calories, or prevent or reverse the harm of sitting for hours on end.

“What we actually found is that most of it is, very much, just fashionable and not proven good for your health,” says Dr. Jos Verbeek, a health researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health.

Standing desks are very trendy right now (I have one from Oristand I’m testing for review) but always seemed to me to be one of those “too good to be true” things. Turns out, I may be right. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t stand, or at least, not sit for 10 hours a day but it seems the health benefits have been overblown.

Open Culture:

These paintings reside at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), along with many thousands more that show us the development and interrelationship of modern art in Europe and America. And you can see close to half of them, whether they’re on display or not, at the MoMA’s digital collection.

One of the greatest advantages of the internet is the dispersion of knowledge into places that would never have received it otherwise. Imagine being a kid in Iowa who may never be able to visit the MoMA in New York City. That’s sad but, with online collections like this, at least that kid can see a version of some of the most important works of art of the 20th century.

“The FBI and NHTSA are warning the general public and manufacturers – of vehicles, vehicle components, and aftermarket devices – to maintain awareness of potential issues and cybersecurity threats related to connected vehicle technologies in modern vehicles,” the agencies said in the bulletin.

Here’s an idea: Let’s weaken the security of the iPhone, so the FBI can issue a warning about the risks of hacking of those devices too.

Variety:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says the service’s iconic 140-character message limit isn’t going away.

On NBC’s “Today” show Friday, Dorsey said the company has no plans to expand the 140-character limit, which dates back to Twitter’s launch in 2006. “It’s staying,” he said. “It’s a good constraint for us, and… it allows for of-the-moment for everything.”

Interesting. I can’t remember the source, but seems to me Jack Dorsey made a comment last month (about the time Twitter sent out their shareholders letter) about improving the situation that requires people to take screen shots of text to share thoughts longer than 140 characters. Was that just lip service?

UPDATE: From an op-ed piece for 9to5Mac by Zac Hall:

In the past, however, Dorsey has tweeted screenshots of text walls from Apple’s Notes app to communicate a lengthier message that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, but text shots present their own problems like lack of being found in search and being easily translated in other languages.

Dorsey’s comments today do not rule out the possibility of Twitter adding a new attachment card for passages of text, in the same way you can add polls or photo galleries to tweets today.

Yup, that was it. It’d be nice if Twitter gave us an official mechanism to make longer (but still searchable) tweet attachments.

Susan Crawford is a Harvard Law Professor and was President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

From her Backchannel post:

The FBI has been terrific at reading statutes — including CALEA — in ways that require the rest of us to do headstands to understand what the agency is up to. Their claim about CALEA in their latest brief in the Apple case is a shining example of just this kind of breathless, vertiginous, Alice-in-Wonderland assertion: CALEA, they say, limited only law enforcement’s authority to directly require companies to redesign devices and software. But once law enforcement is authorized by a court to do a search — given a search warrant, in other words — then (under the AWA) an FBI official can ask the court to do what law enforcement is prohibited from doing directly under section 1002 of CALEA.

Got it? Right, I don’t either. As the well-respected lawyer Albert Gidari carefully explains in a recent blog post, this is a weirdly circular argument that ignores the specific limitation Congress enacted to remove the government from the business of dictating the design of phones or software. No gaps; no interpretive sunlight: CALEA stops the government from doing what it wants to do to Apple.

Read the whole thing. It’s terrific.

Wil Gomez, writing for Mac360:

Apple has hundreds of millions of customers who use an array of cloud-based services. These include iCloud backups and storage, of course, but also include iTunes music and media, the various App Stores, Apple Music, and much more. Can you name another technology company with more cloud customers than Apple?

What Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and even IBM’s SoftLayer combine to provide is a rapidly scalable environment to store data and run computer services for Apple’s cloud-based requirements which are as complex and large as any other technology company in the world.

And:

Since the iPhone launched, the Mac’s customer base has nearly tripled. The iPad customer base is four times as large as that. Likewise, the iPhone now has more than 700,000,000 million users, and iOS alone has more than 1-billion accounts (iPhone and iPad). Most of that growth has come about in the past five or six years and Apple could not scale its own massive cloud infrastructure fast enough to keep up.

Good explainer to accompany yesterday’s news that Apple has signed up to use Google’s cloud services.

Some takeaways:

• Apple Watch is projected to have a 49.4% share of all smart watch sales this year.

• Android Wear will close the gap by 2020, with Apple Watch share dropping to 37.6% and Android Wear climbing from 6.1% this year to 35% in 2020.

• Apple’s projected Apple Watch shipments are 14 million for 2016 and 31 million in 2020.

These, obviously, are projections. Also, as they have done with the iPhone, Apple has established a beachhead on the higher price, higher margin side of this model, which means even at 37.6% of unit sales, Apple will bring in the lion’s share of the smart watch revenue.

To address the limited space available in the Riverside federal courthouse, as well as other logistical issues, the court has posted a set of what they call Order Setting Procedures.

Here’s the details:

• The hearing will take place at 1 PM PDT on March 22, 2016 in Courtroom 4 of the Riverside federal courthouse, located at 3470 12th Street in Riverside, California.

• Only counsel for the United States and counsel for Apple will be allowed to argue and examine witnesses at the hearing.

• Only counsel for the United States and counsel for Apple will be permitted to sit beyond the bar in Courtroom 4. In addition, given the space limitations, each side will be limited to 10 attorneys sitting in the area beyond the bar.

• Courtroom 4 can accommodate 54 individuals sitting in the gallery. [Apple gets 9, US gets 9, remainder are first come basis]

• There are 324 overflow room tickets. Want one? Line up outside the courthouse starting at 7a on March 22.

And most importantly:

• No recording of the hearing will be permitted. Counsel for the United States and Apple may use electronic devices during the hearing. All spectators in Courtroom 4 and the overflow rooms (which are also considered courtrooms for this proceeding) will be required to power down all electronic devices – including all wireless communication devices such as laptops, tablets, and smart phones – before the hearing begins.

The no recording rule might seem onerous, but there have been plenty of similar examples. Still, I would love to watch that hearing live.

Apple employees are already discussing what they will do if ordered to help law enforcement authorities. Some say they may balk at the work, while others may even quit their high-paying jobs rather than undermine the security of the software they have already created, according to more than a half-dozen current and former Apple employees.

Among those interviewed were Apple engineers who are involved in the development of mobile products and security, as well as former security engineers and executives.

On the likelihood of a security engineer risking their livelihood to stand for this particular principal:

The fear of losing a paycheck may not have much of an impact on security engineers whose skills are in high demand. Indeed, hiring them could be a badge of honor among other tech companies that share Apple’s skepticism of the government’s intentions.

“If someone attempts to force them to work on something that’s outside their personal values, they can expect to find a position that’s a better fit somewhere else,” said Window Snyder, the chief security officer at the start-up Fastly and a former senior product manager in Apple’s security and privacy division.

The losers here would be the FBI (not getting what they ask for) and Apple (losing skilled engineers, who’d be quickly snapped up by competitors).

And if the engineering staff refuses or quits? What’s next? Will the FBI pursue Apple’s source code?

Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to this.

Time:

Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with TIME’s Nancy Gibbs and Lev Grossman on March 10 to discuss his company’s rapidly escalating fight with the FBI over encryption. That is the subject of the magazine’s March 28 cover story, available here. What follows is a full transcript of their conversation.

I love this full court press (sorry – March Madness just started) Cook and Apple are putting on via the media. Granted, they have to but it’s still good to see Apple executives being more publicly involved in the world they live in. What they do affects many of us so it’s good to have them voicing their thoughts and opinions.

Mark Bergen, writing for re/code:

In its bid to raise its name in cloud computing services, Google nabbed a big-name customer: Apple. The iPhone-maker recently started storing portions of its iCloud and services data with Google’s cloud platform, according to sources familiar with the deal.

It’s a win for Google, which is gunning for larger companies as cloud customers. But it might be short-lived, as it looks like Apple is also simultaneously building out its own system to bring data stored on its millions of devices in house.

And:

For Apple, though, the deal might portend a move to cut costs ahead of creating its own cloud storage system. Google’s cloud team is in deal-making mode, aggressively seeking to bring in new customers to use its cloud services, and may have sweetened the deal — or been more willing than AWS and Azure to concede to Apple’s demands. (And Apple, if anything, is good at aggressive demand-making.)

Amazing to me that Apple hasn’t already solved this problem, given their goal of owning the entire stack.

Palo Alto Networks:

We’ve discovered a new family of iOS malware that successfully infected non-jailbroken devices we’ve named “AceDeceiver”. What makes AceDeceiver different from previous iOS malware is that instead of abusing enterprise certificates as some iOS malware has over the past two years, AceDeceiver manages to install itself without any enterprise certificate at all. It does so by exploiting design flaws in Apple’s DRM mechanism, and even as Apple has removed AceDeceiver from App Store, it may still spread thanks to a novel attack vector.

And (boldface mine):

Three different iOS apps in the AceDeceiver family were uploaded to the official App Store between July 2015 and February 2016, and all of them claimed to be wallpaper apps. These apps successfully bypassed Apple’s code review at least seven times (including the first time each was uploaded and then four rounds of code updates, which require an additional review by Apple for each instance) using a method similar to that used by ZergHelper, where the app tailors its behavior based on the physical geographic region in which it’s being executed. In this case, AceDeceiver only displays malicious behaviors when a user is located in China, but that would be easy for the attacker to change in any time. Apple removed these three apps from the App Store after we reported them in late February 2016. However, the attack is still viable because the FairPlay MITM attack only requires these apps to have been available in the App Store once. As long as an attacker could get a copy of authorization from Apple, the attack doesn’t require current App Store availability to spread those apps.

Looks like this attack is currently restricted to users in mainland China.

Reuters:

A German court has ruled against Apple Inc in a case over video streaming patents, handing Kudelski’s OpenTV unit a victory in its ongoing intellectual property licensing campaign against major technology companies.

OpenTV sued Apple in 2014, alleging that various products infringe its patents, including the iPhone and iPad. The ruling on Tuesday from the Dusseldorf District Court said Apple products sold in Germany must not use streaming software which infringes OpenTV’s patents.

And:

OpenTV also has pending patent litigation against Apple in the United States. It struck a licensing deal with Cisco in 2014, shortly before initiating lawsuits against Apple.

Craig Grannell:

> When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work. Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options. > > You might wave this away as a trifling problem. If so, I imagine you don’t play games. Game Center isn’t just about logging highscores — it’s also crucial for the functionality of many turn-based multiplayer titles.

Is Game Center an orphan? Hate to see this kind of neglect. Have the best gaming experience with slot gacor gampang menang.

NOTE: An ad autoplays when you click on the headline link.

Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

And:

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. The licensing has been done in-house at Dubset. Thus far the company has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

MixBank matches the recordings used in the remix or DJ mix against a database of three-second audio snippets from Gracenote, where White was CEO prior to joining Dubset. He says fingerprinting is a “brute force” tool that can provide MixBank with up to 100 possible matches for each three-second match. The more difficult final step is performed by MixScan, proprietary piece of software that pulls apart the mixes and figures out what’s inside. MixScan identifies the recording and its stop and start point in each mix, then finds the corresponding rights holders in a dataset together through multiple partnerships and direct feeds.

As a fan of mashups (songs created by mashing together snippets of songs to a guiding beat), I think this is great news. Since they can’t be sold legally because they are too difficult to properly license, mashups are strictly an underground commodity. It’d be lovely to see Apple Music add mashup playlists, a mashup radio station.

[H/T en-REE-ko]

Siyi Chen, writing for Quartz:

Women in China are obsessed with having white, flawless skin. It’s why you might catch sight of a Chinese woman hiding underneath an umbrella on a bright, sunny day—she’s avoiding getting a tan. The obsession, which has a long history, has resulted in a booming industry in skin lightening products and plastic surgery. Researchers predict the global market for skin lightening creams, gels and powders will reach $23 billion by 2020, propelled mostly by growth in the Asia Pacific region.

Now, the obsession has spilled over into the virtual world with a selfie camera that automatically perfects your face in every photo you take. The camera, made by Casio, is nicknamed zipai shenqi (which means the magical weapon for ultimate selfies) in China. It gets rid of blemishes and makes your face slimmer, skin whiter, and eyes bigger.

Find a need and fill it. Meitu, an app that does the same sort of thing, has processed more than 900 million images. This is more than a niche concept. I wonder if Apple is considering adding a mode like this to the iPhone camera app, at least in China.

Woz did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) yesterday. If you are a fan of Woz or of Apple history, this is worth a read. One answer I found both funny and emblematic of Woz’s way of thinking:

These days I’m wearing an Apple Watch. It’s the stainless steel sapphire one. I like that it’s got a magnetic band. I don’t remember where it was on the price scale… I think it’s kinda towards the low end of all those watches. But I just love this little flexible magnetic bend.

Of course, every once in awhile I’ll put my hand on a table in a restaurant, and pull my hand back, and it pulls back the fork with me, that attaches to the magnet of the watch. That’s kinda funny.

If you find yourself getting a little lost in all the threaded questions and answers, click on the blue background “TheSteveWozniak” link and you’ll go to a page filtering out everything but what Woz says.

UPDATE: Even better, here’s a link to a nicely formatted version of the Q&A from Topiama. [H/T Loop reader Jay Frantz]

Bloomberg:

All F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets come with a female voice that issues greetings and warnings, in tones ranging from stern and sharp to extremely urgent. It doesn’t matter if the pilot is wearing a Malaysian, Kuwaiti, or Australian flag on his flight suit, the airplane speaks in a Tennessee twang that sounds a lot like Loretta Lynn in the middle of a very bad day. Embark on a miscue, and the jet issues an audible correction: “Roll right! Roll right!” or “Pull up! Pull up!”

Fighter pilots refer to the voice of the Super Hornet as “Bitchin’ Betty,” while among Britain’s Royal Air Force she is known as “Nagging Nora.” But a real woman personifies the aircraft, 60-year-old Leslie Shook, and she recently retired after 35 years as an employee of Boeing Co.

I love these kinds of stories. I once talked to a guy involved in the “tech support” of the F22 fighter and he said they argued for hours over exactly the right kind of voice they needed for the plane to get the pilot’s attention in case of emergency.

There are some interesting points in this story. They are both looking for the Apple’s source code.

Chinese State Councilor Guo Shengkun met with Director of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey on Monday, pledging to strengthen law enforcement cooperation.

“Let me know if you get that iPhone master key. We have 100 million iPhones over here we’d love to get into.”

Damn Interesting:

This encounter might have been as commonplace as any other gunfight around Hell’s Half-Acre were it not for the identity of the driver. The “Sanders” who put two bullets in Matt Stewart was none other than Harland Sanders, the man who would go on to become the world-famous Colonel Sanders. He was dark-haired and clean-shaven at the time, but his future likeness would one day appear on Kentucky Fried Chicken billboards, buildings, and buckets worldwide.

In contrast to most other famous food icons, Colonel Sanders was once a living, breathing person, and his life story is considerably more tumultuous than the white-washed corporate biography suggests.

What a fascinating story of a figure we all know but generally have no idea of the history behind. Turns out, the Colonel was quite the foul-mouthed rogue who didn’t start making his chicken until much later in life. This is one of those articles that make a perfect “Read It Later” story.