International Business Times:

HBO is in talks with Apple to make Apple TV one of the launch partners for its highly anticipated streaming service when it debuts next month. HBO and streaming partner Major League Baseball Advanced Media are working to have the standalone service, called “HBO Now,” ready to launch in April in conjunction with the premiere of the fifth season of “Game of Thrones,” according to sources familiar with their plans.

When it launches, consumers will be able to subscribe to HBO Now directly from HBO for the first time, rather than through a cable, satellite or telco TV distributor such as Comcast or Verizon. The retail price is expected to be $15 a month when purchased directly from HBO, or about what consumers pay when they order HBO through their cable, satellite or telco provider.

An important part of net neutrality: The cable companies can’t slow down HBO Now packets in an attempt to steer you to their own HBO packaged service.

Samsung lawyer Kathleen Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP said the South Korean company had all but stopped using the patents, so no injunction was needed.

Wait, I thought Samsung said it didn’t infringe on Apple’s patents. Now they’re saying they did infringe, but they sort of stopped. This company is crazypants crazy.

The seven-track demo (Metallica’s second overall) dropped during the summer of 1982, when the band members themselves (which then included Dave Mustaine on guitar in the pre-Kirk Hammett days) sent the copies out to friends and the underground metal cognoscenti.

Yeah, I’ll be picking this one up.

Jim, Shawn and Dave talk about the Apple Watch, healthier lifestyles and guitar amp software!

Sponsored by lynda.com. (Start learning something new in 2015 by visiting the link to get a 10-day free trial and access their 2400+ courses)

A newly-discovered flaw in some implementations of cryptographic protocols SSL and TLS — including those used by Apple’s Safari and Google’s Android AOSP browsers — could allow an attacker to force clients to use older, weaker encryption that would make it significantly easier to intercept secure communications.

Apple has promised to distribute a client-side patch for the issue on both iOS and OS X by next week, while the researchers who discovered the flaw — from INRIA, IMDEA, and Microsoft Research — have been working to notify hosts who still serve export ciphers.

“These products are the result of a simple philosophy,” Samsung CEO J.K. Shin said. “It comes to two words: Relentless innovation.”

Here are two more accurate words: Copying Apple.

Here’s some news from the Zeppelin camp: A film offering a bevy of Led Zeppelin live footage is coming to a movie theater near you. The movie, appropriately called Led Zeppelin, will feature Zeppelin performing several concerts that happened throughout their career and play in more than 300 U.S. cinemas March 30.

This is going to be a must-see film. I hope they make it available on iTunes because I’ll be buying it.

This piece by Federico Viticci is moving. It is equal parts a cancer survival story, full of harrowing detail and heroic triumphs, and, at the same time, a detailed look at the HealthKit ecosystem. But the best part for me is the denouement, the upshot of his journey:

The iPhone is an object that we buy. It’s made by Apple, which is a company that wants to make money. But that’s not how I look at this. Call me naive and romantic, but I dropped cynicism a long time ago. Think about it this way: there are people who found a way to make a tiny computer that’s always with us. Then, there are other people – indie developers and big companies – who make software that can help us work and live better. We get the chance to experience all this and tweak our lifestyles with the aid of apps. And even if some of these people are driven by greed or questionable motives, the end result is that today we can use a phone to be healthier.

And:

I believe that Apple’s interest in health is genuine. With the iPhone, the App Store, and the upcoming Apple Watch, they have created an ecosystem of hardware and software that, beyond productivity and games, can help people live healthier lives. I ran this experiment on myself, and I know this because I’m seeing the results. I’ve almost reached my ideal weight, my physical therapist is happy with my muscle tone, and my MRIs show clear improvement in the area where my femur was reconstructed. I’ve never felt healthier or stronger. I honestly believe that I wouldn’t have been able to find the motivation and tools to reimagine my lifestyle if I didn’t trust my iPhone.

Here’s to a long and healthy life, Federico. Thank you for the inspiration.

From the International Forum web site:

Apple Watch features revolutionary new technologies, a pioneering interface, and a design that honors the rich tradition of watchmaking. Apple Watch’s design and interface were created specifically for a smaller device. The Digital Crown is an innovative way to navigate, the display features Force Touch, which senses the difference between a tap and a press, and the Taptic Engine enables a new vocabulary of notifications you can both hear and feel. The beautifully designed and durable Apple Watch enclosures are crafted from custom alloys of polished or space black stainless steel, space gray or silver anodized aluminum, and 18-karat gold.

Pretty good, for a product still in preview.

[Via MacRumors]

Have you ever had the need to come up with a new domain name? When I’m wearing my startup hat, this need strikes often. And though it might seem frivolous, the Impossibility domain name generator is a real boon to creativity.

Impossibility has you provide the core word you want in your new domain name, then give it a focus by specifying it as either an adjective, verb, noun, or wild card. It then spits out a series of available domains, providing links to Go Daddy, Namecheap, and Company Name as registrars, though you can, of course, just take the name to your registrar of choice.

The key here is the word “available”. Impossibility does prune the tree of possibility, limiting you to a set of algorithmic choices, but all of its suggestions are available, which will save you the time of coming up with a list of candidates, looking them up, only to find that they are already taken.

Definitely worth a look.

Samsung ditched almost all of its hardware differentiation to go all in on iPhone 6-style design — though layering in, iPhone 4-like, with glass on both sides.

Does this company have no shame? Can they not come up with anything on their own? Pathetic.

I’ve been waiting for this version since I saw it at NAMM in January. The new software includes Apollo Expanded featuring Console 2.0 Software; Sound Machine Wood Works Plug-In; Distortion Essentials Plug-In Bundle; Friedman Amplifiers Plug-In Collection; and (Mac) Support for OS X Yosemite. This is a great update.

Kanye talking to Oxford students:

“I love Steve Jobs, he’s my favourite person, but there’s one thing that disappoints me. When Steve passed he didn’t give the ideas up. That’s kinda selfish. You know that Elon’s like ‘yeah, take these ideas’. Maybe there are companies outside of Apple that could work on them and push humanity forward. Maybe the stock brokers won’t like that, the stock holders wouldn’t like that idea, but ideas are free and you can’t be selfish with them.”

What a moron.

This is a really nice looking app. I just downloaded the trial and it works great too—if there’s one thing I would add, it would be access to custom fields in WordPress. Otherwise, I really like it.

Steve was wicked smart. I was always amazed at how sharp he was and how quickly he could focus on what was important. I don’t know ANYONE that even comes close to how good he was at being able to do that.

Don’t just read the story, read the comments too. I miss Steve.

I don’t know why I found this so cool, but I did. Working CSS Clocks.

Sports Illustrated:

Eleven-year-old Jordyn Leopold misses her dad. NHL defenseman Jordan Leopold started the season with the Blues and was traded to the Blue Jackets in November. Jordyn and the rest of her family have been living in Minnesota, so she wrote a letter to the Wild asking them to trade for her dad.

Such a sweet story. And the daughter’s letter shows she knows more than a little bit about hockey.

Petapixel:

A photographer and birdwatcher in London has captured a strange and rare photo that has the Internet abuzz: an image showing a weasel riding on the back of a woodpecker as it flies through the air.

Perfect example of what I teach in my photography class – always be ready to shoot.

Remember Crystal Quest? It was one of the first color Mac games, one of the first games ever with a user modding tool and a level editor. And that sound it made. If you ever played the game, you know what I mean.

Now there’s a Kickstarter in the works to bring Crystal Quest back to life for Mac, PC, and Linux. I’m definitely in.

Now where did I put my old copy of Lode Runner?

[H/T to Rudy Richter]

The Guardian:

Criminals in the US are using the new Apple Pay mobile payment system to buy high-value goods – often from Apple Stores – with stolen identities and credit card details.

Banks have been caught by surprise by the level of fraud, and the Guardian understands that some are scrambling to ensure that better verification and checking systems are put in place to prevent the problem running out of control, with around two million Americans already using the system.

The crooks have not broken the secure encryption around Apple Pay’s fingerprint-activated wireless payment mechanism. Instead, they are setting up new iPhones with stolen personal information, and then calling banks to “provision” the victim’s card on the phone to use it to buy goods.

Bottom line, this is not a flaw in Apple Pay, this is a flaw in bank card verification. I suspect the banking industry will react quickly to this.

Apple’s reaction:

“Apple Pay is designed to be extremely secure and protect a user’s personal information,” the spokesman said. “During setup Apple Pay requires banks to verify each and every card and the bank then determines and approves whether a card can be added to Apple Pay. Banks are always reviewing and improving their approval process, which varies by bank.”

Why this won’t be a problem as Apple Pay moves beyond US shores:

Dave Birch, a UK-based mobile payments expert, told the Guardian: “in the UK there probably won’t be a ‘green path’” – meaning that people would have to call their bank to add any card to Apple Pay once it is introduced here.

The US lags behind much of the world in its adoption of secure retail payment systems and mobile payments. “Chip and Pin” systems, used throughout Europe for years, will only become compulsory in the US later this year. As retailers replace old magnetic stripe systems, which were vulnerable to widespread fraud, with new ones, they are also adding NFC capabilities, already used in the UK for Oyster cards and in many shops.

Just in time for the rollout of Samsung’s mag-strip dependent LoopPay. Hope they didn’t pay too much for that.

Interesting reactions from around the auto industry. From Volkswagen:

“If these two companies intend to solely produce electric vehicles, it could go fast,” Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said at the Geneva International Motor Show. “We are also very interested in the technologies of Google and Apple, and I think that we, as the Volkswagen company, can bring together the digital and mobile world.”

From Germany’s Center for Automotive Management:

“The competition certainly needs to be taken seriously,” said Stefan Bratzel, director of the Center of Automotive Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. “The closer we get to autonomous driving, the weaker the connection becomes between the customer and the car. And Google and Apple aren’t burdened with old technology but can start fresh.”

From BMW:

“We never underestimate any competition,” said Ian Robertson, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG’s sales chief. “The entry barriers, which were in the past maybe more substantial, are now slightly lower. But at the same time, the complexities of the car industry are still there as well.”

From Jaguar Land Rover:

“The traditional thinking in the automotive industry isn’t suited to exploit the opportunities in the Internet community,” Wolfgang Ziebart, Jaguar Land Rover’s head of engineering, said in an interview. “If you need committees and so on to make decisions, then you’ve lost before you started.”

From Toyota:

“The key element is to make sure that when we’re working with them — and we’re totally open to work with any of them — it’s a real win-win,” said Didier Leroy, Toyota Motor Corp.’s European chief. “The carmakers don’t want just to become a kind of commodity, where somebody will only deliver an empty box and somebody will put in the box something which will be the real added value.”

The common elements to all of these? Respect, with a tinge of fear.

This is a fantastic idea. Apple started by scrounging the internet, looking for candidates for its Shot on iPhone 6 campaign. Some incredibly beautiful shots there. Great composition, crisp colors, wonderful lighting, all do a great job showing off the iPhone 6 camera.

Next up, take some of the best of the best and hang them on the sides of buildings. And not just any buildings, but big buildings, some of them giant skyscrapers. Follow this link to see this for yourself. Pretty cool.

Buzzfeed:

Apple’s latest ad campaign, Shot on iPhone 6, is crowdsourced using iPhone photography from around the world. It is taking photos found online, typically seen in a browser window, and plastering them up in massive sizes out in the real world.

Apple found them by scouring online communities for photos that were tagged as having been taken with its newest iPhones.

Looks like keywording paid off for these folks.

It is absolutely priceless where loser.com goes.

The Workflow Video Field Guide starts with a few, easy workflows and builds upon them over the course of an hour to turn you into a Workflow pro. By the time you get to the end, you’ll be able to roll your own workflows and change the way you work on your iPhone and iPad.

I always like David Sparks’ work.

People take incredible photos and videos on iPhone 6 every day. And here are some of our favorites. Explore the gallery, learn a few tips, and see what’s possible with the world’s most popular camera.

A new page from Apple highlighting some great shots taken with the iPhone 6. These are quite impressive.

A note from John Gruber on Vesper device support and pricing.

This is a new project from the very talented Khoi Vinh. I think this is such a great idea and will make things much easier for a lot of people. You can get a deal after the 30-day trial by using code LOOP.

A new book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli that John Gruber had the opportunity to read and he likes it.