How do you keep track of all the digital detritus in your life? I’ve got an encrypted file containing all my critical info, including account numbers, passwords, and lists of various things, like the location of my car title. My kids all know the location of this file and the password to decrypt the file.

Reading this article, I’m wondering if that’s enough.

Tech Crunch:

Amazon is refusing to comply with a request from the Federal Trade Commission to implement stricter controls that would prevent children from making in-app purchases.

The FTC is demanding Amazon implement a “consent” model similar to the one Apple conceded to earlier this year, according to a letter Amazon to the FTC Tuesday. Amazon believes it already has implemented effective parental controls consistent with the model the FTC settled on with Apple, and it says it refunded customers who complained of children making in-app purchases without their permission.

From Amazon’s letter to the FTC:

The main claim in the draft complaint is that we failed to get customers’ informed consent to in-app charges made by children and did not address that problem quickly or effectively enough in response to customer complaints. We have continuously improved our experience since launch, but even at launch, when customers told us their kids had made purchases they didn’t want we refunded those purchases.

A precedent has been set, by Apple, building a consistent, reasonable approach to controlling in-app purchases. The sense here is that Amazon does not want to take on the infrastructure associated with those controls.

If Amazon is basing their claim on refunding in-app purchases, no questions asked, they should make that a policy, as opposed to something they did at launch. If they don’t want to do that, then perhaps they should consider disallowing in-app purchases altogether. Or just go with the Apple thing.

US District Court Judge Lucy Koh oversees a case pitting Apple against GPNE. GPNE is suing Apple for infringing on one of its patents.

The case itself is important, in that GPNE is demanding payment for every iPhone sold. To my untrained eye, the claim seems laughable, were it not for the fact that much money is being spent to defend this case.

Judge Koh issued this order:

In an unusual order, a federal judge last week told Apple that it may not call a Hawaii-based company names like “patent troll” or “privateer” or “bandit,” nor tell a jury that the company is engaged in a “shakedown” or “playing the lawsuit lottery.”

Interesting to me that Judge Lucy Koh’s name continues to be tightly linked to Apple. There are 15 judges in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (Apple’s district), yet Koh seems to be the pick for every high profile case involving Apple. Presumably, there’s a reason for this. Perhaps the selection is based on expertise, familiarity with Apple. I’ve got no problem with that, just musing.

Reuters:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc said a contractor emailed confidential client data to a stranger’s Gmail account by mistake, and the bank has asked a U.S. judge to order Google Inc to delete the email to avert a “needless and massive” breach of privacy.

This raises some questions. Who owns a specific piece of email? Who has the right to delete it? Is it owned by the sender? The recipient? Google?

SlashFilm:

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull recently published a book called Creativity Inc., bout how creativity and business can work hand in hand. The book is filled with stories from Catmull’s journey at Pixar, some details of which have never been told publicly before. One of the stories is about how a business deal came within seven days from changing history as we know it. Not only would Toy Story never have been made, it is very likely the computer animation revolution would have happened entirely differently or maybe not even at all.

The world would be a less joyous place if this had happened.

Ars Technica:

You know the 2013 Mac Pro, that computer you can spend as much as $9,599 on if you really try? Apple has just released a $49 new lock accessory for the computer that will keep people from unplugging everything, picking it up, and walking out the door with it.

This is one of those things you’d think Apple would have had available day of launch.

I’ve seen some others, but this one requires no JavaScript.

It truly is frightening how far this is going.

She’s got a tough and important job:

Harvey was the 25th employee at Twitter, where her official title is vice president of trust and safety, but she’s more like Silicon Valley’s chief sanitation officer, dealing with the dirtiest stuff on Twitter: spam, harassment, child exploitation, threats of rape and murder.

Fascinating read.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office said it would look into the Facebook experiment. That’s one problem for Facebook. Another is a potential class-action suit:

Critics of Facebook’s study have raised the specter that the company could face a class-action lawsuit over the study. According to a report in Forbes, the company added mention of research to its terms of service months after the study was conducted.

Julia Horwitz, a consumer protections counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said however that other portions of the user agreement could protect Facebook from legal action.

Horwitz, however, said she believes the study may have violated Facebook’s agreement with the FTC, which called for better transparency in how user information was being used.

Troubles for the little f.

CNET:

Amazon said Szabadi, who left the company in May after nearly six years, can’t solicit business from any of his former customers for 18 months after his departure. He joined Google as a lead for the reseller ecosystem team in May.

In response, Szabadi’s lawyer told Amazon that Szabadi has also signed an agreement with Google, vowing not to do business with any AWS clients that he remembers having “material direct contact” with, or that he knows “confidential information” about, according to the court document. The agreement is in effect for six months.

Google is not backing down and is planning a strong defense for the suit. said a person familiar with the company’s strategy.

Will be interesting to see how this works out. Non-compete clauses are controversial and not all states allow them. California, for example, invalidates non-competes for non-stakeholders, meaning they are not allowed for regular employees. And states that allow them hold them to a high standard, only allowing them if the terms are reasonable.

Google completed its long rumored acquisition of Songza for a reported US$39 million. Songza is a music curation service that lets you select playlists based on elements like genre, mood, and decade. It runs on iOS, Android, ChromeCast, and the web.

From Google:

Exciting news today — we’re thrilled to welcome +Songza to Google. They’ve built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users. Over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music. We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products. In the meantime, check out their service on #Android (http://goo.gl/urYGx6) or iOS (http://goo.gl/c0egja) to find a playlist for any mood you’re in — whether you’re feeling a little mellow or a lot funky.

From Songza:

You know why we love building Songza? Because you trust us to make every moment of your day better — and that’s a pretty huge honor. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re becoming part of Google. We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.

Curation is playing an increasing role in recent acquisitions, making it easier for users to find music they like or just making an enjoyable listening experience easier to come by. Curation was said to be an important motive for Apple’s acquisition of Beats earlier this year.

Tim Cook on the Beats deal:

We get a subscription music service that we believe is the first subscription service that really got it right. They had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough — that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce.

LIghtroom Killer Tips:

If you’re an Aperture user, it’s time to find something else to manage/edit your photos. So if you’ve been waiting to make the jump to Lightroom, now’s your chance. Especially with the $9.99/month Creative Cloud Photography plan becoming permanent.

You’ll notice there’s many similarities between Lightroom and Aperture. So rather than start from scratch and teach you every feature in Lightroom, I wanted to just list the top 10 things I think are most important if you decide to switch. Things that you may be familiar with in Aperture, and what the counterparts are in Lightroom. Here goes!

I’ve used both apps but have favoured Lightroom for many years. Aperture users are going to need to find alternatives and Lightroom is the logical choice for many.

Vox:

Canada serves two predominant roles in modern American discourse. It is the place where Americans threaten to move when things aren’t going well at home. It is also the butt of endless jokes, generally involving Canada being America’s hat or Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor or Robin Sparkles.

Today is Canada Day, when our northern neighbors celebrate their country’s birth in 1867. And its a good as time as any to thoroughly explore the question: How great, exactly, is Canada? Should we be pining to move there, or mock it viciously?

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

Wired:

It happens every time: You reach into your bag to pull out your headphones. But no matter how neatly you wrapped them up beforehand, the cords have become a giant Gordian knot of frustration. But until we invent a good way of wirelessly beaming power through the air to our beloved electronic devices, it seems like we’re stuck with this problem.

Or maybe we can fight back with science. In recent years, physicists and mathematicians have pondered why our cords are such jerks all the time.

The science behind one of life’s little frustrations is fascinating. I saw a Youtube video years ago explaining how to wrap up earphone cords with a twisting motion that prevented tangles. But I can’t find it any more. Anyone know the video I’m referring to?

I had one of the cassette models when I was a kid.

Winclone is a great way to make a complete backup of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore back to Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides an easy way to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs. Works great for both individuals and dual boot labs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, re-installing Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete copy of the Boot Camp partition, and restores it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions between Macs, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive to free up space, and more. It works great for mass deployment. Boot Camp can be deployed as an OS X installer package and you can also use it with existing Windows tools such as SCCM and Sys Prep for easy mass deployment.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. You decide which OS by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. It works great in labs. Administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows for important system and virus updates. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and both have full phone and online support options.

A new company called Virtual is claiming that it can imitate nearly any Android or iOS device almost perfectly in software, on any platform, with nearly ‘native quality’ performance. It does this with a combination of virtualization and emulation technology and it could change the way that developers test apps.

Apple’s CarPlay is really catching on manufacturers. On Tuesday, nine new car-makers, including Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Audi, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Mazda and Ram, signed on to provide CarPlay in future models of its cars. This is going to be a must-have feature for me in my next car.

My iPhone is a bit of a mess. My front page contains the apps I use the most, but the rest of my pages are in a random order that slightly resembles the order in which I purchased the apps, shuffled in my attempts to move apps to my front page. Sound familiar?

The linked article talks you through the relatively simple process of sorting all your apps in alphabetical order. This might not work for all people, but it does make it much easier to home in on an app when you have 9 pages of apps. Searching helps you launch an app, but it does not help you locate the app’s icon, in case you want to move or delete the app.

One thing I’d add to the discussion is the evolution of iTunes’ ability to organize your iOS device. If you haven’t plugged your iPhone or iPad into your Mac for a while, take a few minutes to plug in and see what you can currently do with iTunes. You can easily create new pages and drag pages and apps around. You can even use iTunes to transfer files between your iOS device and computer.

As the blog suggested, I would take a snapshot of my home screen, then put my apps in alphabetical order. I would then use iTunes to create a new blank home screen (click the plus sign on the Apps page, drag the new page to be first) and repopulate the new empty page with my favorites.

Any other suggestions or favorite technique? Leave a comment.

James Kendrick writes for ZDNet. He is currently using an Android phone and writes about the logic behind his decision to by pass the Windows Phone, which he was considering, and move to whatever phone Apple releases next.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. In a nutshell, Apple replaced last year’s winner, Berkshire Hathaway. Apple won the award two years ago as well.

Barron’s covers financial markets and is pretty well respected. It’s owned by Dow Jones and Company, who also publish the Wall Street Journal. Down Jones is owned by News Corp.

What a beautiful guitar.

Much respect Tim and the rest of the folks at Apple.

This past Friday, this article appeared on AVClub.com and caused quite a stir.

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

My guess is, the folks at Facebook who authored this study were surprised by the outpouring of criticism. Yesterday, one of those people, Adam Kramer, posted his response to this criticism.

The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.

Note that if you follow the headline link to read Adam’s response in full, you’ll be taken to a Facebook page, with all that that entails.