We’re on day who-the-heck-knows of the Android Stagefright security vulnerability, and there’s really no point keeping track of the days because no one’s going to fix it. The Android ecosystem can’t deal with security, and it won’t change until it’s too late.

This is shocking. (No, it’s really not).

John Gruber looking at which devices are important to us. I believe my answers would match the 2015 survey results.

Microsoft Outlook has added full Apple Watch support to its iPhone app, and it’s showing other email apps how it’s done.

Jared Newman takes Outlook for a spin and likes it. I’ve said before, Microsoft has done a great job on its iOS apps, but I’m still not a huge fan of the Mac versions.

I’ve seen a lot of tablet stands in the past few years, but this is one I’d actually buy.

Micah Singleton, writing for The Verge:

As part of the deal it struck with the major labels for Apple Music Radio, Apple has licenses for up to five additional stations like Beats 1, without having to renegotiate with the labels. That means Apple could launch a Beats 2 station headquartered in Australia or Asia, allowing it to provide live radio around the clock (Beats 1 is only live 12 hours a day). Or Apple could take a more targeted approach and produce holiday stations.

I wonder about Apple Music’s goals for the car. Right now, SiriusXM satellite radio is the dominant pay service in cars. There are few cars made that don’t come with satellite radio capability built right in.

Is Apple looking to compete in the car? As is, they are the outsider. Your car is setup to deal with satellite radio. You’ve got presets for satellite stations, and the tuning knob makes it easy to move from station to station. Many cars allow you to access those functions without taking your hands off the steering wheel.

How does Apple Music compete here? Five stations won’t be enough if they want to compete in this way. But Apple Music does have one advantage. People bring their hardware into the car with them, plus they have the ability to customize their experience in ways that satellite radio will never be able to match.

Is CarPlay the answer? Could be. Even better, what if Apple designed their own car and had the chance to create controls designed specifically for the Apple Music experience. Now that’d be interesting.

Marco della Cava, writing for USA Today:

One month after unveiling its new streaming music service, Apple has locked in 11 million trial members, company executives tell USA TODAY.

“We’re thrilled with the numbers so far,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, adding that of that sum 2 million have opted for the more lucrative family plan at $14.99 a month for up to six people.

Note that these are unpaid subscribers, folks dipping their toes in the Apple Music water. But that said, a solid start. And 2M of the 11M, or 18%, are family plan members.

Reports in Digital Music News and other outlets that monitor streaming music have indicated Apple’s intent to dominate streaming music – with a goal of 100 million subscribers, or double the total of all current services combined – despite its late entry into the field. This fall, Apple will unveil Apple Music for Android users in beta, part of CEO Tim Cook’s pledge to be platform agnostic with the service.

100 million paying subscribers? Here’s some math (please correct me if I get this wrong):

(82% * $9.99) + (18% * $14.99) = $10.89

That’s the average price per user, given 2M of 11M sign up for the Family Plan.

$10.89 x $100M = $1.09 billion per month, which is $13.07 billion in annual revenue. Not too shabby for a startup business, if they can reach that goal.

Update: Fixed a typo and the math that went along with it.

Zack Whittaker, writing for ZDNet:

The attack, which was confirmed on the HTC One Max and Samsung’s Galaxy S5, allows a hacker to stealthily acquire a fingerprint image from an affected device because device makers don’t fully lock down the sensor.

Making matters worse, the sensor on some devices is only guarded by the “system” privilege instead of root, making it easier to target. (In other words: rooting or jailbreaking your phone can leave you at a greater risk.) Once the attack is in place, the fingerprint sensor can continue to quietly collect fingerprint data on anyone who uses the sensor.

“In this attack, victims’ fingerprint data directly fall into attacker’s hand. For the rest of the victim’s life, the attacker can keep using the fingerprint data to do other malicious things,” Zhang said. And that’s a big problem. Fingerprints might be commonplace in mobile payments and unlocking devices, but they have been used more in the past five years also for identity, immigration, and for criminal records.

Sigh. If this is true, let’s hope the manufacturers are paying attention.

It’s easy enough to view a list of sites that have cookies in Safari, but if you want to actually see the cookie and parameters used by a particular site, you’ll need to dive a bit deeper into the interface.

In a nutshell:

• Navigate to a web site.
• Select Show Web Inspector from the Develop menu (follow the headline link for instructions on turning on that menu if it doesn’t appear for you).
• Click the Storage tab in the web pane that appears.
• Click the Cookies item on the left side.

Worth taking a minute to give this a try. Kind of fascinating.

Matt Taylor, via Google Plus:

Why am I a Mac user? Because it should not take 6 hours to wipe and update a computer. My daughter asked me to completely wipe this Acer laptop, running windows 8.1, and set it back to factory default, install windows 10 and set it up for her. I have forgotten how horrible the user experience is on a windows machine. I am not inept with computers, or even windows, but I could have accomplished this task on my MacBook Pro in a fraction of the time with no headaches, no failures, and it would be completely bug free. But not with this machine, oh no. Windows won’t even accept its own updates. This. This is why I switched, and this is why I will never switch back. I don’t need to tinker. I just want my machine to do what I need it to, when I need it. /rant

Yup.

Very cool.

Astrophysicist Dr. Brian May is recognized during a July 17, 2015 New Horizons science briefing at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. May spent a long birthday weekend with the science team, attending two morning science plenaries, a meeting with the Student Dust Counter group, and working on stereo images of Pluto with the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet and speak with Brian at some length during one of Queen’s European tours. He is not only smart and a fantastic guitarist, he’s also very humble.

The Washington Post:

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, the first bomb exploded over Hiroshima killing, by some estimates, 140,000 people, and destroying 90 percent of the city. But near its hypocenter only one building was left standing.

Seventy years later, the Genbaku Dome — now known as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial — is part of a very different city that’s home to 1.2 million residents and filled with skyscrapers, apartment buildings and streetcars.

Armed with archival photographs, Reuters photographer Issei Kato revisited some of the same locations destroyed 70 years ago in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On such a sombre day, it’s good to not only look back and remember what happened but also to look forward and see how the city has endured and prospered. The before and after pictures are truly heartening.

There’s been a number of these types of articles written, but this one has a couple of new tips.

I’ve been around for each version of iTunes, but strangely, I don’t remember it changing so much.

[Via MacStories]

When he got to the hospital, Robson told staff that he had been tracking his heart rate on the watch, and had two weeks of back data. “Going in with the data certainly reduced my stay by a couple of days,” he told MedCity News. It also assured that he could have the operation nearly immediately.

Because the hospital could check his Apple Watch data, Robson did not have to wear a heart monitor for a week before the medical team at Scripps Mercy could confirm the diagnosis of sick sinus syndrome.

These are the types of things that Apple Watch can do. It is truly amazing how this device has changed people’s lives.

More than 100 IBM employees occupy Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus helping build iPhone and iPad apps for IBM customers such as Citigroup Inc., Sprint Corp. and Japan Post Holdings Co.

Things are looking different inside IBM, too. Once a company of blue suits, Wintel PCs and BlackBerrys, Big Blue is on track to become the world’s largest corporate user of MacBooks. On Wednesday, the company will apply lessons it has learned to introduce a new service intended to help other companies adopt Macs.

This is an important relationship for both companies. It’s really bizarre how things change so dramatically over time though.

CNET:

Apple’s latest mobile OS is now on 85 percent of all iOS devices, according to Apple’s App Store Distribution page. That figure refers specifically to all iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches that visited Apple’s App Store on Monday, August 3.

And what about iOS rival Android? The latest flavor, namely Android Lollipop, is on just 18 percent of all devices running Google’s mobile OS, according to the latest Android Developers Dashboard.

I feel less smug about these adoption numbers than I feel sorry for the mess adoption is for Android users.

Not just any leather, but the luxury full grain leather used to craft all of Pad & Quill’s handmade goods. So we turned to Victorio, a 4th generation Italian leather tannery artisan. His tannery uses legendary soft-tumbled method to transform full grain American steer hides into a luxury leather watch band that will hug your wrist with pliable comfort, while being as rugged and durable as your active life demands.

I just love the quality of Pad & Quill products. I own a couple of their bags and they are top notch.

WIRED:

Motorcycles are not made for surfing. They do not float. They are not waterproof. All of which explains the biggest problem Robbie Maddison had when he tried to use one as a surfboard.

“We sank the motorcycle over a hundred times,” he says.

None of that stopped the Aussie stunt rider from combining his adult profession with his childhood passion to create Pipe Dream, a short video in which Maddison rides the wicked waves of Teahupo’o on a modified KTM 300 motocross machine.

First time I saw stills from the video, I thought it was pretty good photoshop work. Then I started watching the video and thought, that looks like fun. Then I saw him surf the waves of Teahupo’o and thought he was a crazy person.

See that speck in the middle of the moon? That’s the International Space Station, in shadow against the brilliant background of the moon. The photo is cool, and was taken a few days ago.

Also cool is this video from 2007 showing the ISS making a similar transit. The video is only a few seconds long and the ISS is a tiny speck that speeds across the screen about halfway through.

Three months ago, Dan Price, chief of Gravity Payments, raised the annual salary floor for his employees to $70,000. He knocked his own salary down to $70K as well.

This follow-up article takes a look at how this is working out for Price, for his employees, and for the company. A risky move, with some obvious (at least in retrospect) consequences. [Via Stu Mark]

[WARNING: Contains an autoplay video. Normally, autoplay is enough to disqualify a post, but thought this was interesting enough to make an exception]

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

Losing trust is bad for the bottom line – no economy can function well without it. When you lose the consumer’s trust, you’re condemned to a chase for the next wave of suckers. Even sites that get us to pay for access to their content play questionable advertising and tracking games.

Publishers who rise to condemn new (and still unproven) ad-blocking features on iOS and OS X ought to ask themselves one question: Who needs whom the most?

Apple’s move answers the question. No need to think it’s building ad-blocking technology to monopolize the field to the benefit of its iAd platform whose revenue can’t “move the needle” for a company where revenue and profits mostly come from hardware (see the last 10-Q report page 25). Apple’s “ulterior” motive is making everyday use of its products more pleasant, resulting in more sales: the usual ecosystem play.

It’s all about the ecosystem. Make every product better, make every product contribute to the overall experience, make the ecosystem a better place to be.

Terrific read.

Pricy, but some exquisite craftwork. The pictures are here, the Made Worn website is here.

I’ve heard of this happening with other people when they lose credit cards. Apple Pay is updated automatically—brilliant.

Releasing classic albums on reel-to-reel, duplicated from the original master tapes. You would expect these tapes to sound good of course, and you should expect they would sound better than the LP and digital sources. But you will be shocked at just how much better they do sound.

This is just outstanding. They are having an event at the California Audio Show to meet Jacqui Naylor, and listen to a full-playback of a new Tape Project release from Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

Such a great post by Jeffrey Zeldman, and one we can all relate to in one way or another.

For ten years, Macminicolo has been hosting thousands of Mac minis in a high end data center. The minis are used for all sorts of services. The Mac mini “has become Apple’s most popular server system.”

Readers of The Loop can signup for a twelve month trial for just $10/mo. Come see what a Mac mini can do. Signup here.