Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks.

In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business.

Sad, fascinating story. Watch the two men in happier times in the short film, “Font Men”.

Instantly watch Sesame Street, Sesame Street Classics, and Pinky Dinky Doo episodes, all presented in a secure, ad-free, and child-friendly environment.

I wish this was available when my kids were young.

The user reported an error to Apple in the Maps app on April 6 and was given an option to receive a notification when the issue was resolved, with Apple sending a push notification on April 8 indicating the problem had been fixed.

That’s certainly better than having your feedback go into a black hole and never really knowing what’s going on.

It’s definitely getting there.

As you can see from the pictures below, the demolition part of the work seems to be complete. There are no buildings left standing. There is a lot of work being done by heavy construction machines throughout the field.

Great pictures.

I would not have made the connection from Uber to same day package delivery, but once you see the logic, hard to punch a hole in it. They are leveraging their existing GPS tracking infrastructure.

Instead of pushing a button and getting a ride, UberRUSH lets users push a button to summon a courier, who will ferry small packages across Manhattan by foot or bike. And according to reports, the sender and receiver will be able to track the delivery’s progress in real time, much like waiting for an Uber ride to show up. But this is hardly a new concept. Countless others are trying to build businesses using app-powered bike messengers.

The salient point here is that, with its new courier service, Uber is going after the big boys. With the logistical expertise it has built up over the past four years of perfecting its ride-sharing platform, Uber is sketching the outlines for a challenge to the Amazons, eBays, and Googles of the world, hoping to win a much larger war for same-day delivery.

Love them or hate them, Uber has become a force to be reckoned with.

I remember doing some of these things years ago when I first started using Photoshop.

We have plenty of considerations to design for when crafting web sites. Web accessibility is not a new design consideration, but is still very important, no matter the size or speed of device we’re testing on. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) tells us our content should be distinguishable and requires we “[m]ake it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.”

I’ve been reading about the Heartbleed bug, trying to understand how it does what it does, how a hacker could use the vulnerability to gain access to your data.

If you have not heard of Heartbleed, read this, which was posted last night.

Is Heartbleed bad?

In case you’ve been out of the loop, Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) is a vulnerability in OpenSSL that allows any remote user to dump some of the contents of the server’s memory. And yes, that’s really bad. The major concern is that a skilled user could craft an exploit that could dump the RSA private key that the server is using to communicate with its clients. The level of knowledge / skill required to craft this attack isn’t particularly high, but likely out of reach for the average script kiddie user.

I’m not well versed in this sort of thing, but here’s my take on how this works.

First, a script is run against a vulnerable server. The vulnerability allows a raw chunk of RAM to be retrieved from the server. The exploit is repeated until a chunk of RAM is retrieved containing a GET request. For the exploit to have value, the retrieved RAM has to also contain an authentication cookie. Different servers, different cookies.

Once a cookie is retrieved, you build a new request using that cookie and, since the cookie matches an existing session, your request is considered part of the existing session and you now have control over that session. Once you control a session, you are, in effect, logged in to the server.

If you see a hole in my explanation, please clarify in the comments for the benefit of other readers. This seems a pretty big hole to have skated through all this time.

The finding of the so-called “Heartbleed” vulnerability, by researchers with Google Inc and a small security firm Codenomicon, prompted the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security to advise businesses on Tuesday to review their servers to see if they were using vulnerable versions a type of software known as OpenSSL.

It said updates are already available to address the vulnerability in OpenSSL, which could enable remote attackers to access sensitive data including passwords and secret keys that can decode traffic as it travels across the Internet.

Sounds nasty.

Apple’s iPhone continues to grow in popularity with U.S. teenagers, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s latest semiannual teen survey, which asked 7,500 teens about their device preferences. 61 percent of teens now own an iPhone, compared to 55 percent from a survey conducted in October 2013 and 40 percent in the fall of 2012.

Get them while they’re young and they will be with you for a long time.

Apple expert John Hauser testifying on why Samsung owes Apple $2.2 billion:

Hauser surveyed hundreds of Samsung device users — 507 for phones and 459 for tablets — to measure the percent of consumers who would buy devices with certain features. He then used those results to determine how much people would pay for Apple’s patented features.

“The features that were enabled by the patents at issue in this case have a measurable impact on consumer demand for Samsung devices,” Hauser said during his testimony Tuesday.

Samsung are thieves.

Wow, these photos are stunning.

[Via Kottke]

The book features 53 pages of detailed information on how to use Lightroom mobile, including lots of tips on how to get the most out of Adobe’s new remote tool. And it costs just $8!

The book is written by Jeff Carlson, someone I’ve known for a long time, and someone that has written many books in the past.

Edit and organize images anywhere, anytime on your iPad. Enhance everything from smartphone photos to raw images from DLSRs using powerful and familiar tools. Automatically sync all your mobile edits with Lightroom 5 on your desktop. Easily share all your photos to social media sites. With Adobe Lightroom mobile, your photography is going places.

It’s free to download, but you need one of the following accounts:

• Creative Cloud complete plan
• Creative Cloud – Photoshop Photography Program
• Creative Cloud Student and Teacher Edition
• Creative Cloud for teams complete plan

I don’t have any of those, but it’s great to see Adobe bring its high-end photo app to the iPad. Where the hell is Aperture?

Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is going Hollywood with a cast including comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Green, aspiring World Cup players and eerily human robots.

All are involved in shows that Microsoft’s new Xbox television studio plans to roll out globally starting in June. Helmed by former CBS Corp. honcho Nancy Tellem, who Microsoft hired 19 months ago to build a TV powerhouse from the ground up, the studio now has six series lined up — including a science-fiction thriller called “Humans” about humanoid robot workers — and more than a dozen projects in development.

This is Microsoft’s not-so-Trojan horse into the living room, building dependence on the Xbox One for accessing web-based programming on your TV, competing with Apple TV, Fire TV, and Google’s evolving TV solution.

The Office for iPad engineering team answered questions this morning on Reddit, offering a peak at what’s to come for the app as well as what went into designing it.

Some great tidbits of info in here.

SITU is a simple food scale with a Bluetooth chip that talks to your iPad. You can place virtually any food item on SITU and view the exact nutrition information for that amount of food on the companion SITU app.

This looks great. I bet they could sell a lot of these.

Jim and Dan are joined by Zak Holder, 5by5 engineer and so much more to discuss the Amazon Fire, the Heartbleed security flaw, WWDC lottery, and delve in again to the world of emulated amplifiers.

Sponsored by MailChimp, HostGator (use code DANSENTME for 50% off VPS, and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME4 for 10% off your first purchase).

PCalc 4 is a brand new version of PCalc for OS X. Based on the iOS version, it has been completely rewritten as a modern 64-bit Cocoa app. It has every feature from iOS, and some brand new ones too.

Interesting that the Mac app is based on the iOS version. Times are changing.

36days A project about series of 36 days where we invite people to share their view on alphabet symbols.

[Via Coudal]

Marco Arment on Microsoft ending support for Windows XP:

People just don’t care to upgrade. Windows XP still “works” for them, and the upgrades are different, which is bad.

Agreed.

Benoit Dupin, Vice President of Amazon A9′s Search Technology group, has left the high-profile search technology firm to take up a job with Apple. Dupin’s profile from Amazon A9′s executive management website disappeared this week, and his LinkedIn profile has been updated to reflect that he began his position as a director at Apple this month.

Sounds like a great person for Apple.

I watched the video and listened to the amp samples—this sounds really good and you can’t beat the price.

The newspaper is sticking to its story.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is expected to report its second straight quarter of profit decline as its high-end smartphone business loses steam, a trend likely to sharpen the firm’s focus on costs and the cheaper phone market.

Must be the strength of those smartwatches.

Since Android is so infested with Malware, users feel the need to protect themselves. It makes sense that the No. 1 paid app is Virus Shield, except:

Unfortunately for the buyers, Android Police has discovered that all the app does is change a red “X” graphic to a red “check” graphic. Literally. The 859kb app doesn’t protect, secure, or scan anything.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

This app costs $3.99, has been on the Play Store for just under two weeks and has already had 10,000 downloads with a 4.5 star review from 1,700 people. 2,607 people hit the Google “recommend” button.

Priceless.

According to documents obtained exclusively by The Verge, Google is about to launch a renewed assault on your television set called Android TV. Major video app providers are building for the platform right now. Android TV may sound like a semantic difference — after all, Google TV was based on Android — but it’s something very different. Android TV is no longer a crazy attempt to turn your TV into a bigger, more powerful smartphone. “Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform,” writes Google. “It’s all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction.” It will be “cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast.”