I thought this was interesting, in part because of the politics of the Beats deal and the obvious connections with Samsung and Apple.

But I also find it interesting that Samsung finds it necessary to buy the likes of Jay-Z and Lebron James to build a connection to opinion makers. I can’t think of an instance where Apple has paid an opinion-maker to show themselves with an iPhone or iPad. Perhaps there are exceptions to this, but none spring to mind.

An agency sent Michael Arrington an email praising his “aesthetic and blogging style” and offering him the chance to spread the word on the new Internet Explore in a “cool visual way” with compensation clearly implied.

First off, really? You sent that to the founder of Tech Crunch?

Second, this happened already. You’d think they’d be better at stealthing this effort.

TripAdvisor:

For the second year in a row, Vancouver’s Stanley Park was named the World’s Best Park in the TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice poll. It’s North America’s third-largest park and gets eight million visitors per year.

Similar to Central Park in the sense that it is an oasis (big enough to get lost in) in the middle of a major city, Stanley Park offers much more and in a wider variety than any city park I’ve ever been in.

I have two Slingbox devices that I use everyday. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

When I first started reading this article, I though it was about using large type in the body of a website. As I read more, I realized it was about grabbing attention by using expressive type in different ways to direct users where you want them to go. A bit less interesting, but still a fascinating topic. As I looked at the examples, I realized that I don’t like the use of expressive type like this. Somehow I feel like it’s overkill and that the content should speak for itself. Obviously, it works and not all websites can be the same, but there’s something about the examples that rub me the wrong way.

Toronto Star:

The ocean’s apex predator does kill people, but we are much more devastating to sharks than they are to us. And now, conservation-minded scientists are learning more about what makes sharks tick.

I’ve swum with sharks in the Caribbean. An amazing experience.

American Journalism Review:

Brian Krebs, 41, of KrebsOnSecurity.com, sits at his Northern Virginia home office, showing me his daily routine. A shotgun in a case leans against the corner of the room. On his desk sit four busy computer monitors and two laptops. One of the monitors has video feeds from security cameras around his house; the others show a range of underground forums and websites that sell stolen personal information and credit cards.

It’s the home of a man who understands that a malicious intruder could come from anywhere.

Except for war zone journalists, Krebs may be the bravest journalist working today.

Ars Technica:

How long, exactly, do SSDs last?

It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. TechReport…has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives’ service life.

The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing.

The long term viability of SSDs has always been a concern so it’s good to see reports like this coming out that may put some of those to rest. The speed improvements of SSDs are definitely worth it.

Independent artists could disappear from YouTube “in a matter of days” after the Google video service confirmed it was dropping content from independent labels that have not signed up for its upcoming subscription music service.

Holy sweet shit.

Wired:

One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

But it’s also possible to go a step closer toward true privacy online. Mere encryption hides the content of messages, but not who’s communicating. Use cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity, on the other hand, and network eavesdroppers may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them. “Hide in the network,” security guru Bruce Schneier made his first tip for evading the NSA. “The less obvious you are, the safer you are.”

I’m not nearly paranoid or worried enough to go through a lot of this effort but it’s still an interesting idea – what if you needed to be completely anonymous?

Another great article from Ben Thompson.

If it’s good, Facebook could take a significant share of this market. Many consumers will use this type of service simply because they use Facebook all the time, making it the default service.

This particular part of the bill would give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the ability to enforce a set of rules for navigation apps on smartphones, which many drivers find more convenient and less expensive than built-in navigation systems. These rules would be subject to change, and apps would have to comply as regulators see fit.

I’m not opposed to regulation and safety, but I’d really like to see something done about people texting while driving, instead of listening to turn-by-turn directions from a smartphone.

Farhad Manjoo:

For the better part of a month, I’ve been trying to replace the laptop that I use for my daily work, an Apple MacBook Pro, with Microsoft’s new tablet computer, the Surface Pro 3. I say “trying” because that’s what it has felt like; this is a machine that I’ve had to put a lot of work into adjusting to, in the hope that, at some point, I’d get used to it and see some kind of payoff.

Microsoft had an interesting idea with the Surface tablet, but I believe they failed to adequately build the infrastructure necessary to make the tablet successful. I have maintained from the beginning that desktop apps are not a good fit for a touchscreen device. I still believe that to be true.

Ever wondered how Amazon really works? The linked article gives you an insider’s look at all the moving pieces that work together to let you buy practically anything you’d ever want.

Shoppers take for granted that Amazon will have what they want. The only time they notice is when Amazon doesn’t. “The biggest failure you can have is not to have what they’re looking for,” says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which makes cloud-based software for third-party sellers to analyze their sales and marketing campaigns on Amazon, eBay, Google, and elsewhere.

Starting in 2006, the rate of Amazon’s sales growth took off, an upswing Wingo credits to the launch of unlimited 2-day shipping through Amazon Prime the previous year alongside the rise of the company’s third-party marketplaces. The arrival of third-party sellers fueled an “explosion in selection,” Wingo says, that also gave Amazon a powerful way to hedge the risk of stocking products too far out along the long tail of marginal popularity. Instead of sinking its own money into inventory that might sit for 60 days, Amazon could let someone else fill in that gap.

Lest you think this is merely a puff piece:

Such power and speed can come at a grave price. Amazon is facing a federal investigation into the death of a worker at a Pennsylvania fulfillment center who was reportedly struck and pinned by a pallet jack she was operating. Much has also been written about how the unrelenting nature of Amazon’s fulfillment system can foster exploitive, sometimes hazardous working conditions that have become the target of at least one set of class-action lawsuits.

On the heels of Sunday’s passive aggressive Tim Cook profile (my take here, Jim’s take here), The Times posted a brief interview they did with Jony Ive that served as background material.

Jony Ive has the heart of a sculptor. He works with a variety of material, immersing himself, learning the various properties, then brings out the design hidden in the material.

Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing and making. Form and the material and process – they are beautifully intertwined – completely connected. Unless we understand a certain material — metal or resin and plastic — understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example – we can never develop and define form that’s appropriate.

There’s a strong sense of legacy, of values deeply entrenched in the Apple culture.

Steve established a set of values, and he established preoccupations and tones that are completely enduring – and he established those principles with a small team of people. I’ve been ridiculously lucky to be part of it. But Tim was very much part of that team – for that last 15 or 20 years.

Steve Jobs was the driving force that created this culture, but Tim and Jony, Craig and Phil, and the myriad talented folks who work with them, they carry this culture in their DNA, they bring these products to life, carry that legacy forward.

I find it terrifically interesting that the same player can kick two different balls in exactly the same way and have the two balls curve in different directions.

“The details of the flow of air around the ball are complicated, and in particular they depend on how rough the ball is,” says John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and the author of a recently published article about the aerodynamics of soccer balls. “If the ball is perfectly smooth, it bends the wrong way.”

By the “wrong way,” Bush means that two otherwise similar balls struck precisely the same way, by the same player, can actually curve in opposite directions, depending on the surface of those balls. Sound surprising?

It’s all about the Magnus Effect.

This phenomenon was first described by Isaac Newton, who noticed that in tennis, topspin causes a ball to dip, while backspin flattens out its trajectory. A curveball in baseball is another example from sports: A pitcher throws the ball with especially tight topspin, or sidespin rotation, and the ball curves in the direction of the spin.

But it gets more complicated than that.

“The fact is that the Magnus Effect can change sign,” Bush says. “People don’t generally appreciate that fact.” Given an absolutely smooth ball, the direction of the curve may reverse: The same kicking motion will not produce a shot or pass curving in a right-to-left direction, but in a left-to-right direction.

Fascinating article.

Reuters:

Apple Inc reached an out-of-court settlement with U.S. states and other complainants in an e-book price-fixing class action lawsuit on Monday, effectively avoiding a trial in which the iPad maker faced more than $800 million in claims.

Apple is currently awaiting the results of its appeal of last July’s finding that Apple was liable for colluding with publishers. Yesterday’s settlement proposal has to be approved by the judge and is contingent on the outcome of the appeal.

You can choose how much you would like to pay for the digital edition of this book.

Beacons installed inside retail stores like Saks or grocery outlets can send proximity-based alerts to shoppers at the precise moment — and location — that they’re enabled to make a decision on a purchase. This is the holy grail of retail advertising, which normally takes a scattershot approach to ‘pre-advertising’ shoppers or tries to guesstimate when they’re in the vicinity of a product.

I’m not convinced this is something I want when I go shopping. Admittedly, when I do shop, I tend to know exactly what I want and where it is, so maybe I’m not the target market.

But the district and Dell, its partner in the project, have failed to develop a customized platform that could serve students and teachers “directly enough or quickly enough,” Silva said. That work has been halted — with Dell agreeing to refund the $665,000 it has been paid in the form of future technology upgrades.

This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’m just getting caught up. Just horrible for Dell. Hopefully other school districts will learn a lesson from this.

The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University on an exclusive program that could send thousands of its baristas, store managers, and other employees to ASU Online for their undergraduate degrees, with the coffee company picking up about three-quarters of the tuition tab.

The unusual program, the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, will be available to more than 100,000 of its employees. The partnership, which could cost Starbucks hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is likely to add luster to the company’s reputation for corporate social responsibility.

While it’s not the “Starbucks pays for college!” story some media outlets portray it to be, it’s still a great perk of working for the company and a way for employees to get or complete a degree.

Daniel Eran Dilger:

A new profile of Apple’s chief executive, titled “Tim Cook, Making Apple his own” actually says little about Cook and virtually nothing noteworthy about how he is leading Apple. Instead, the New York Times simply recounts more predictions of doom for the company in a piece filled with fictions and fallacy.

Another Apple hit-piece from the New York Times, but without anything to really say. Tim Cook and Apple are coming off one of the most successful WWDCs in its history, but the Times has decided to make shit up because Tim wouldn’t give them an interview. Apple is fighting to change entire industries, while the New York Times fights for relevancy—Apple is doing the better job.

Even though Facebook forbids the buying and selling of Facebook pages, there is a thriving black market with a “likes” cartel. There’s a dark side to this, with DDoS attacks part of the cost of doing business. Like so:

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they’re young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others’ sites.

Fascinating read.

This is a good high-level overview of Apple’s newly announced Metal framework and shader language. Apple’s goal is to replace use of the general purpose OpenGL ES with the far more precisely targeted Metal.

The linked article is a good read, even if you are not a developer.

One announcement from WWDC that didn’t get much fanfare was a rule change concerning virtual currencies. From the App Store review guidelines:

Apps may facilitate transmission of approved virtual currencies provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions

This rule change opened the door to the return of bitcoin to the App Store in the form of the Coin Pocket app. From coindesk.com:

Apple is making good on its recent bitcoin policy shift, with a new bitcoin wallet app appearing for download in the iOS App Store.

The ‘Coinpocket’ app is described by its developer as a wrapper for a previously available open source HTML5 version, this time with full access to the camera hardware for QR code scanning.

Credit Citation: https://criptoeconomia.com.br/trading/trading-app/

ScreenCrush:

In 1984, music videos were still a fairly new phenomena and on the day of the soundstage shoot all the pieces were in place. The song was finished. Actress Cindy Harrell would play the female lead opposite Parker. But, the video didn’t really have a proper director.

“It was a fairly new thing then, people using music videos as promotions for movies. It’s hard for Ivan to sit around and watch someone else direct something,” says Medjuck, who also has a small role in the video. “Ivan just sort of took over, as he is wont to do.”

When Ray Parker Jr. arrived on the set, Reitman told him, “Ray, you’re going to have a famous video because you’re going to have Ivan Reitman direct your video and I’ve never done a video before or after. There won’t be another one. This is it.”

30 years ago. Still a great movie. But I’ve always hated that video.