Super Vancouver:

Taking your $3,000 Canon 5D camera, mounting it on a tripod and waiting until 10:00 pm to film the Celebration of Lights fireworks now seems rather basic compared to the effort put into this clip.

The team behind the Youtube video titled “Sparks: A Honda Celebration of Light Story” took the time to create a story, shoot at multiple Metro Vancouver locations and artfully edit together the video perfectly.

I have lived in Vancouver for many years and have seen a lot of videos – Vancouver is the most beautiful city in North America and gets filmed a lot – and this is, without a doubt, one of the top 5 best I’ve ever seen.

Macworld:

Good backups are essential for every Mac user. Tools such as Apple’s Time Machine, included as part of OS X, make it easy to store multiple versions of every file from your computer on an external drive or an AirPort Time Capsule. And if you want the security of off-site backups without having to physically move drives around, an online backup provider such as CrashPlan is a good option.

But while both these forms of backup serve important purposes, I also recommend maintaining a clone (also known as a bootable duplicate)—a complete, identical copy of your startup volume, stored on an external drive in such a way that you can boot your Mac from it if necessary.

I’ve always recommended multiple backups. Using these apps will make the process relatively easy.

Corey funded the band’s first album through Indiegogo and it turned out great. Here’s a chance to help with the second one and support indie musicians.

I’m not usually impressed by this type of thing, but this is cool.

The Verge:

There are countless tablets available for purchase today, and we’ve surveyed all of the models you might come across in your local electronics store or on Amazon’s virtual shelves. It’s almost a tie for first place, but not quite.

Obviously, this doesn’t surprise anyone at The Loop but take a look at The Verge’s third choice. Their description of the Asus Nexus 7 doesn’t seem to warrant its score.

Chicago Sun-Times:

This past week my husband and I took the Live the Wage challenge in solidarity with hard-working families who are trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage salary. Our allotment was $77 each for the week to cover all food, transportation and other expenses excluding housing, insurance, and support for dependent children (which I don’t have). It didn’t take us long to realize that $7.25 an hour is not enough to live on. We didn’t quite make it.

To anyone who thinks this challenge is just a gimmick, I say “Try it.”

As someone who has lived at this level his entire life, I can vouch for the fact that it ain’t easy.

Gizmodo:

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times.

A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming with chaos and glowing with capitalism. But how exactly does all that work? The shops and restaurants are one thing, but what exactly makes Times Square such a functional, perpetual spectacle?

The amount of technology, both digital and analog, involved in putting on the “show” that is Times Square is mind boggling. Even more so in Tokyo’s Ginza District.

NFL:

NFL Now delivers a personalized video stream of your favorite NFL teams, players and coaches right to your iPad or iPhone. Get exclusive interviews and stories about your team, breaking news on your fantasy players, and unlimited access to your favorites in the NFL Films Archives.

The unlimited access to the NFL Films Archives would be pretty cool but what made me sign up instantly was “Live stream of NFL RedZone on Sunday afternoon”. You’re not a true football junkie until you’ve sat in front of your TV for nine hours straight watching the NFL RedZone non-stop.

Macworld:

When you look at an Apple ad, it makes an effort to include women. Apple and its employees talk to us like human beings, and not girls who know nothing about technology. It’s important to me, and it’s why Apple has my business and (I suspect) the business of countless other women.

But it’s very hard for me to reconcile this consumer-facing Apple with the development company that put no women on stage this year for either the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote or the more-technical State of the Union. It’s difficult to connect this Apple I know and trust with the endless sea of white, male faces I saw at Yerba Buena Gardens during this year’s WWDC Bash. Women buy Apple products. We develop on Apple hardware. But we’re still not yet well-represented in Apple’s developer community.

It’s a shame this issue keeps coming up but there’s a reason why it does. Outside of “The Usual Suspects”, other groups, races, genders, etc., simply aren’t well represented in Tech. Some will be annoyed by this piece but it serves as a reminder that we still have a long way to go.

TUAW:

Who was not a happy camper when Foursquare suddenly decided to take their self-named app, rip the fun part — check-ins — out of the app, and put it into a new app named Swarm? Me, that’s who.

It really torqued me off that an app that I had enjoyed for years was suddenly breaking into two apps. Hell, that’s almost as bad as what Facebook did, forcing users to load another app (Facebook Messenger) to do something they’d always been able to do from within the iOS Facebook app. Well, the new Foursquare app, AKA version 8.0, arrived today, so I decided to take a hit for the team and install it.

I’ve never been a Foursquare user (I have no friends I want to track and vice versa) so, while I’ve heard a lot written about this subject, I have no personal experience. How about you? Has Foursquare made things better or worse for you?

A three-day, 500+ developer hackathon, iOS DevCamp is the largest iOS event outside of Apple’s own Worldwide Developer Conference.

It takes place August 22-24 in San Jose, California.

This comes amid reports that Google is trying to buy Twitch, Justin.tv’s parent, for $1 billion.

Great looking update if you’re a Dish satellite subscriber.

Vox:

Slater had traveled to Indonesia to do a wildlife shoot. While he was there, he left one of his cameras unattended, and a crested black macaque monkey began playing with it. She took dozens of photos, most of which were blurry shots of the ground or the sky. But the photos included this crystal-clear selfie.

Slater says he owns the copyright to the photograph and asked Wikimedia to take it down. In its first-ever transparency report, the Wikimedia Foundation says it refused because it doesn’t believe Slater owns the copyright.

On one level, this is a funny story but, as a photographer, it’s very interesting to me. We’ve usually said that whoever actually took the photo owns the copyright. But what if the “photographer” isn’t human?

Sam Sung:

I came across one of my old business cards the other day when it fell out of a book.

So, with a view to raising money for a very deserving charity, I’m auctioning the only “Apple Sam Sung” business card I have left and I’m going to donate ALL of the proceeds [minus eBay fees] to Children’s Wish, BC & Yukon – a not-for-profit that grants wishes to sick children.

You may remember the funny story a while back of the Apple employee named “Sam Sung”. He no longer works at Apple Retail but is auctioning off some of his Apple employee gear for a (local to me) good charity.

Quartz:

Consider this thought experiment: you are traveling along a single-lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is fast approaching a narrow tunnel. Just before entering the tunnel a child attempts to run across the road but trips in the centre of the lane, effectively blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The car has but two options: hit and kill the child, or swerve into the wall on either side of the tunnel, thus killing you.

This might seem a pointless exercise, but as the field of robotics matures and artificial intelligence design takes on the burdens of critical decision making, this ethical dilemma will force itself on software designers.

Bloomberg:

Ten Apple products — including the iPad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro — were omitted from a final government procurement list distributed in July, according to officials who read it and asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The models were on a June version of the list drafted by the National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance, the officials said.

Apple is the latest U.S. technology company to be excluded from Chinese government purchases amid escalating tensions between the countries over claims of hacking and cyberspying. China’s procurement agency told departments to stop buying antivirus software from Symantec Corp. (SYMC) and Kaspersky Lab, while Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was shut out of a government purchase of energy-efficient computers.

Why is this happening? This quote says it all:

“When the government stops the procurement of products, it sends a signal to corporates and semi-government bodies,” said Mark Po, an analyst with UOB Kay Hian Ltd. in Hong Kong. “The Chinese government wants to make sure that overseas companies shouldn’t have too much influence in China.”

Oh, what times we live in.

A Hong Kong court has ruled that a local tycoon can sue Google Inc for defamation because searches for his name on Google suggest adding the word ‘triad’, Hong Kong’s notorious organized crime groups.

Searches in both English and Chinese for Albert Yeung Sau-shing, the founder and chairman of Hong Kong-based conglomerate Emperor Group, will automatically suggest phrases related to organized crime using Google’s ‘autocomplete’ function.

On Tuesday, the High Court of Hong Kong dismissed Google’s argument that it was not responsible for the autocomplete suggestions related to Yeung and that the court did not have personal jurisdiction over the U.S. search giant.

Fascinating.

There’s a new report out from Vision Mobile:

Apple’s iOS operating system forms the basis 497,000 jobs in Europe – around half of all ‘app economy’ jobs on the continent – according to a new report by Vision Mobile.

Although more developers overall use Google’s Android operating system, iOS is the preferred platform for professional developers (as opposed to hobbyists and explorers), prioritised by 43 per cent of professional developers, compared to 35 per cent for Android.

Interesting economics. 497,000 jobs in Europe alone, based on an OS that was released about 7 years ago.

Overall, the app economy (including development, production, marketing products and sales of apps) directly accounts for 670,000 jobs in Europe in 2014, representing an increase of 26 per cent compared to 2013. Out of these, 406,000 jobs are developer jobs.

However, the app economy also has a wider impact on employment, for example creating new jobs in industries that use app-related products and services, such as health care, automotive, entertainment and education. Vision Mobile therefore estimates that the app economy supports one million direct and indirect jobs in the EU in 2014, based on a multiplication factor of 1.5.

Astonishing numbers.

New York Times:

A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.

The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites. Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks, including the theft last year of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems.

This is a massive password cache. To get a sense of the scale:

There is worry among some in the security community that keeping personal information out of the hands of thieves is increasingly a losing battle. In December, 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers and additional pieces of personal information were stolen from the retail giant Target by hackers in Eastern Europe.

And in October, federal prosecutors said an identity theft service in Vietnam managed to obtain as many as 200 million personal records, including Social Security numbers, credit card data and bank account information from Court Ventures, a company now owned by the data brokerage firm Experian.

But the discovery by Hold Security dwarfs those incidents, and the size of the latest discovery has prompted security experts to call for improved identity protection on the web.

At what point is the toothpaste out of the tube, credentials so violated that it is impossible to repair them? At what point are the various national IDs, like the US Social Security number, so widely lifted that the system itself is just broken?

About the gang:

They began as amateur spammers in 2011, buying stolen databases of personal information on the black market. But in April, the group accelerated its activity. Mr. Holden surmised they partnered with another entity, whom he has not identified, that may have shared hacking techniques and tools.

Since then, the Russian hackers have been able to capture credentials on a mass scale using botnets — networks of zombie computers that have been infected with a computer virus — to do their bidding. Any time an infected user visits a website, criminals command the botnet to test that website to see if it is vulnerable to a well-known hacking technique known as an SQL injection, in which a hacker enters commands that cause a database to produce its contents. If the website proves vulnerable, criminals flag the site and return later to extract the full contents of the database.

Horrifyingly fascinating.

CNET:

Apple and Samsung announced late Tuesday that they have agreed to settle all lawsuits filed against each other outside the United States but said patent lawsuits filed in the US would be unaffected by the deal.

“Samsung and Apple have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States. This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts,” the companies said in a statement.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be future lawsuits.

Re/code:

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs loved to walk around his neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. And after his pride and joy, the iPhone, was born, he naturally took it along with him on walks. The first iPhone had a lousy, sluggish, cellular-data network, but it also had a much faster data option: Wi-Fi. It even had a feature (still present, but much less touted) that popped up a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks on the screen, so you could always find one in range.

But, he once told me, there was a big problem with that technique, one that he wanted to fix: Most of the Wi-Fi networks that popped up on his screen couldn’t be used, because they were secured with passwords. Jobs said he understood the need for security, but he was determined to figure out a way to make free, safe, Wi-Fi sharing from homes and small local businesses not only possible, but common.

Interesting idea. Would you open your home WiFi if it could be configured easily and in the way described in this article?

Last week, a Houston TV station reported on the arrest of a man on charges of child pornography, purely based on a tip from Google.

Washington Post:

Most users know that Google routinely uses software to scan the contents of e-mails, including images, to feed its advertising and to identify malware. But many may not have been aware that the company is also scanning users’ accounts looking for illegal activity — namely, matching images in e-mails against its known database of illegal and pornographic images of children.

That bit of Google policy came to light last week, when a Houston man was arrested on charges of having and promoting child pornography after Google told the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that he had the images in his Gmail account. The tipoff, according to a report from Houston television channel KHOU, led to the man’s arrest.

There’s been a lot of discussion since then on Google’s role in this case. Google is walking a fine line between respecting privacy and using its role as a guardian of your email to ensure that you are not trading in child pornography.

A recent Supreme Court case in Canada centered on a man who was found to be downloading child pornography and addressed whether Internet service providers should give up the identifying Internet protocol numbers to law enforcement without a warrant. In that case, the court ruled against providing the information, drawing praise from privacy advocates and criticism from law enforcement agencies, who called the decision a setback, because of the additional time it will take for them to get warrants.

The Texas case is triggering a similar debate in the United States over what role the companies — companies with whom we share our most private thoughts — should play in law enforcement.

Should Google, Microsoft, Apple and others be reading your email?

UPDATE – From Phys.org:

“Each child sexual abuse image is given a unique digital fingerprint which enables our systems to identify those pictures, including in Gmail,” added the spokesperson, who did not disclose technical details about the process. “It is important to remember that we only use this technology to identify child sexual abuse imagery—not other email content that could be associated with criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary).”

The Next Web:

Android is available in two different flavors. There’s the Google-endorsed Android, which is used by companies that agree to the terms and conditions of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). Essentially, OHA members include the Google services that are baked into Android, and agree to limitations on how they can customize the software on their devices.

The other side is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), a far-freer version that lets device makers tinker with all manner of elements of the software. Often that means ripping out Google services, and customizing the handset to run other software and services. Google apps are still accessible, but are not central to the experience as they are in OHA Android devices.

Amazon’s Kindles run AOSP, replacing Google’s services with their own. The AOSP market is growing quickly.

Even though developing markets will likely be the main focus for AOSP device makers, more sophisticated ones like Xiaomi are opening non-Google Android to a new tier of more-affluent customers.

Google’s response? Android One, a low end OS with interface and Google services baked in, but tweakable to accommodate the needs and skins of the low end OEMs.

After a short hiatus this summer, The Loop Magazine returns today with a double issue. I want to apologize to all the subscribers of the magazine for the unscheduled break in publishing, but we’ve put together a great issue for its return. To make up for the missing issues, I’ll publish another large issue shortly, giving you lots of great stories to read.

We have nine stories in this issue, including “State of Mind,” written by software developer, James Thomson. In his piece, James talks about how he feels when surrounded by some of the brightest developers in the world when he attends conferences. This is a free story that anyone can read by just downloading The Loop Magazine app.

Kirk McElhearn talks about the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting.” Matt Gemmell takes us into the world of fan fiction where people write works of fiction, long and short, set in the established universes of novels, TV shows, cartoons, movies, video games, and more.

Billy Sangster takes us through the feelings of getting back up on stage with his band and Rian van der Merwe explores the deeply spiritual experience of coffee. With so many devices to choose from to use on a plane, Darren Murph explores “The Unintended Death of the In-Flight Magazine.”

Arsenal FC is one of the most popular football clubs in the world—Stan Sulkowski helps run a site dedicated to the club and talks about his experience. Chris Domico’s body attacks itself, putting him in pain and hell without much warning. He talks about his struggles dealing with disease.

Finally, Mark Crump takes us through his guitar setup to play music on an iPad. He’s been playing guitar for 30 years, so he has some experience in getting the best sound from his instrument.

I really hope you enjoy the latest issue of The Loop Magazine. You can download the app free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Jim

The Daily Dot:

The government is planning to issue a proposal that could ban people on flights from either sending or receiving voice calls on their mobile devices—using those devices for non-voice activities, such as playing online games or tweeting about the crying baby in the back row, would likely still be allowed.

To answer the question posed in the headline: Hell yes.

Flying is already a horrible process. Let’s not make it worse by being forced to listen to one side of a conversation for hours on end while trapped in an uncomfortable seat inside a metal tube.

Jalopnik:

You never really get a good night’s sleep in jail. In the middle of my second night inside, I woke up on the uncomfortable plastic mat in my cell, my neck and back aching. I looked down at my orange jail scrubs and up at the buzzing fluorescent light and thought, “I am here because I drove too fast in a Camaro ZL1.”

Three days in jail for speeding? Yikes. That’s harsh. I’ve driven my motorcycle on some of the Shenandoah Valley roads the writer describes and I know I was speeding for at least some of the time (OK…most of the time). I guess I got lucky but warning issued – don’t speed in Virginia.

IN1 is a multi-tool utility case for your iPhone 5/5s. Like a built-in swiss army knife for your phone. Choose from 8 colors. Get yours for $44.95, ships in 24 – 48 hrs.

Dreams is the latest ad in the “You’re more powerful than you think” series. The song in the ad is When I Grow Up by Jennifer O’Connor.

As is now the norm, all the apps featured in the ad are highlighted on Apple’s web site.