As the video below shows, there’s a bug in iOS 7.0.4 that allows anyone with access to your iPhone to disable Find My iPhone. Obviously, this disables the ability to track your iPhone if it is stolen.
According to the linked article, looks like Apple has a fix in the works for the next release of iOS. Bugs like this show the importance of keeping up with the latest iOS release.
PetaPixel:
In 50 seconds and one uninterrupted flowing video shot, UK directing duo US and advertising agency Grey pay tribute to six completely unique, culturally iconic images by expertly recreating one after the other.If that sentence made no sense, it’s because it’s hard to describe what you’re about to see.
Rodin, Forest Gump, Mad Men, Michelangelo, Reservoir Dogs and Daft Punk all in one shot. Make sure you watch the behind the scenes video.
The New York Times has a “firehose” of live stream photos from the Sochi 2014 Olympics. It’s cool to watch but lacks context.
Ever come across an M3U file when downloading music? From the M3U Wikipedia page:
M3U is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It is supported by many applications, including media players such as Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Audacious, foobar2000, Totem, JuK and VLC media player on Windows PC’s and Astro Player, N7Player, Cubed on Android OS devices. M3U’s can also point a media player to an online streaming audio source.
Follow the headline link and learn what’s in an M3U file, how to play it in iTunes, and how to get the songs referenced by the M3U file onto your Mac. Good stuff.
Ed Bott uses corporate quarterly reports to build pie charts that show where each company gets its revenue.
The best way to understand the differences between these three publicly traded companies is to look at the detailed reports each is required to file every quarter. I did this two years ago, but since then the landscape has shifted. Google tried to diversify into hardware with its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and Microsoft announced that its goal was to focus on “devices and services.”
How much have the three companies changed in the past two years? For the answer, I looked at the sources of revenue each one reported in their quarterly reports for the second half of 2013. Here’s the breakdown, using the segments that each company uses to define how its business is organized.
Follow the headline link for three quite easy to read pie charts that lay everything out. Google is accelerating its non-advertising revenue:
Two years ago, Google was a one-trick pony, with its revenues coming almost entirely from advertising. According to its 2011 annual report, “Advertising revenues made up 97 percent of our revenues in 2009 and 96 percent of our revenues in 2010 and 2011.” That picture changed slightly with Google’s attempt to move into hardware manufacturing via its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, as you can see in this chart. But the pending sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo will shift things back to nearly the way they were. The “Other” category, which includes digital content and non-Motorola hardware products, is still a tiny fraction of the company’s revenues. After the Lenovo transaction closes, Google’s advertising revenues will go back to being more than 90 percent of its total.
Most of the world uses an embedded chip, pin based credit card system. The US does not. That is going to change next year.
The Wall Street Journal interviewed MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany to discuss the particulars.
Interesting reading. Of particular note, on the question of why the rest of world went one way and the US another:
There’s a historical view to this. In the past, other markets migrated for two reasons. First, there were higher fraud rates in some other markets, and they wanted to make this move to combat fraud. Second, this system can operate in offline mode – the card and the terminal can authorize a transaction independent of communication with the bank’s systems. In some other markets they struggled with robust telephony networks, so this offline capacity was attractive.
Both those factors were not driving factors here in America. Fraud was more prominent in some other markets, but what has happened since then is that as other markets migrated to EMV and became more secure, fraudsters migrated their activity to markets with less security. We saw fraudsters move over to the US market – they are looking for the path of least resistance.
There were also some more specific challenges to US migration to the new system. Because the US is one of the largest and most complex markets, the business cases for the costs had to be established. And there were requirements of the Durbin amendment, mandating all us debit transactions are able to go across at least two networks, which took some time for the industry to sort out.
A few weeks ago, we posted about an iPhone doing everything in a 1991 Radio Shack ad.
Follow the headline link for a follow up, “How much would it have cost to have built an iPhone in 1991?”
In 1991, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost around $10,000, perhaps a touch less. (Today, it costs around four cents ($0.04).) Back in 1991, a gigabyte of flash memory, which is what the iPhone uses, would have cost something like $45,000, or more. (Today, it’s around 55 cents ($0.55).)
The mid-level iPhone 5S has 32 GB of flash memory. Thirty-two GB, multiplied by $45,000, equals $1.44 million.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Fascinating analysis.
Jobs and McKenna had dinner and talked about what the future of Apple could look like, and McKenna signed on. Eventually McKenna drafted an eight-page marketing plan in December 1976. Lo and behold, what was written under “Distribution Channels”? Apple stores.
With the latest purchases, Mr. Cook said Apple had bought back more than $40 billion of its shares over the past 12 months, which Mr. Cook said was a record for any company over a similar span.
“It means that we are betting on Apple. It means that we are really confident on what we are doing and what we plan to do,” said Mr. Cook, speaking in a conference room at the company’s corporate headquarters here. “We’re not just saying that. We’re showing that with our actions.”
The story also notes that Apple purchased 21 companies in the last 15 months. As usual, Apple is being very strategic with every move it makes.
It’s truly amazing how many videos and photos we take each year on our iPhones. The big difference between the two types of media, is that photos are shared quite a bit more than videos. Vivoom wants to change that.
What makes Vivoom different from other apps is its experience. The iPhone app is made by GenArts, the same company that supplies the TV and film industries with specialized visual effects. These are professional effects, made by a company with years of experience.
With Vivoom, you don’t get effects that resemble something you’ve seen in a movie, you get the real thing. The app offers 100 authentic effects featured in movies and TV shows like Iron Man, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Mad Men.
I had a chance to speak with Katherine Hays, Vivoom CEO, and the longer we talked, the more I realized that they were on an interesting road with this idea. The app goes beyond just adding effects to a video, which was an interesting part of the strategy.
Unlike any other video app, Vivoom’s patent-pending, cloud-based technology enables it to constantly deliver effects in real time tied to seasons, location, pop-culture and sports, keeping the user experience fresh and relevant and the content engaging. Videos can be shot and shared directly from the app to Facebook, Twitter, SMS and Vivoom accounts.
In other words, new effects can be delivered to the app without having to do an update. That’s especially important when you consider all of the events that videos could be tied to.
According to IDC, almost 9 billion videos are shot each year. However, only 1 billion of those are shared. People are worried that the quality will make them look bad or that their friends might not respond the same way they do for photos.
After shooting your video, you can preview the effects from Vivoom, so you know what it looks like before you share it. I tried the app and it is amazingly simple, but powerful. The effects really did look great to my eye.
From what I’ve seen, Vivoom is doing everything right to counter the most prevalent arguments that people have for not sharing their videos. This is going to be an interesting company to watch.
You can download Vivoom on the App Store.
Salon:
I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you.I died, in a way, and was reborn, with the same physical form, but not the same mind. I still to this day sit around with my family and listen to stories about the other Su.
Fascinating and terrifying story.
Great article by James Galbraith, the director of Macworld’s Lab, on what actually helps speed up your Mac and what doesn’t.
I find it interesting to see the workflow and how people start a new project. Cameron Moll shares his thoughts on starting new design projects.
Interesting look into how Jared Sinclair designed his new RSS reader for iPhone, Unread.
You had me at enhanced autocorrect. Huzzah!
As described, the method would afford a smartphone user the opportunity to write a message, press send, then review any autocorrected words before the message is actually transmitted. Compared to current techniques, which only allow users the chance to change autocorrected words prior to hitting send, the system gives a type of second chance if activated.
Gmail on my Mac has an Undo extension that delays all email sends for a configurable number of seconds. I’ve been using this for years. Wonder if the Apple patent precedes Google Undo or if there is some functional difference in the Apple patent that I’m missing (which is likely the case).
That said, enhanced autocorrect and automatic language selection for me, please.
The International Olympic Committee confirmed today that Olympic athletes are free to use any device they wish during the Opening Ceremonies, including iPhones. They are also not required to cover any logos on their devices.
Samsung must be pissed.
I am in awe of designers that can produce work like this. I think the Leica one is my favorite.
What do AC/DC, The Beatles, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Garth Brooks and The Rolling Stones have in common? Everyone, except Garth Brooks, are world class bands that have their music available for sale on iTunes.
Garth clearly hasn’t seen fit to give his fans the opportunity to purchase his music on iTunes, yet. Apparently, Brooks wants his music sold in album-format only—no single song sales are allowed. This clearly goes against everything Apple believes for how music should be sold on iTunes.
As a music fan, I have to agree with Apple on this. To be clear, I am a fan of Garth Brooks. I had a number of his CDs years ago, but unfortunately through moves and having them in the car, a couple of them broke. It happens—not a big deal.
Except I no longer buy CDs—I haven’t since iTunes opened. All of my music is purchased on iTunes, put on my iPhone and iPod and streamed in the car.
So what does my scenario mean for Garth Brooks. He sees no sales from me. None. Garth can argue all he wants about album sales, but the fact is, he’s missing out on sales every single day.
It’s so bad now that even music stars like Blake Shelton are calling out Garth Brooks on Twitter to put his music on iTunes.
Dear Garth Brooks… For the love of god and all that's holy, please get your music on iTunes. PLEASE! It's 2014!!!! #frustratedfan
— Blake Shelton (@blakeshelton) February 1, 2014Come on Garth, join the big boys, and do the right thing. It’s time to stop living in the 1990s.
This was a series of interviews Robert Cringely did with Steve back in 1995, when Steve was still CEO of NeXT and Pixar. The video is free if you are a member of Amazon Prime. The quality was solid and the interview questions thoughtful. Worth watching.
This is just puzzling. The store sells no merchandise. It seems to exist purely to harvest contact information. It’s a bit of a ghost town. Is Samsung going anywhere with this concept?
[Via BGR]
This is very cool.
Along with the ubiquitous bug fixes seen in practically every iOS app update, version 3.2.1 of Amazon’s retail app includes a feature called “Flow” which lets users quickly and easily search for products using their iOS camera.
Unlike the previous addition of a barcode scanner in October 2010, Flow lets users identify products by simply pointing their iPhone in the right direction, and then letting the image recognition tools do the rest of the work.
A video warning all Sochi Olympic visitors that their electronics will be immediately hacked as soon as they turn them on has been circulating widely. The video is below.
There is a lot to digest here. First, there’s the alarming open:
As tourists and families of athletes arrive in Sochi, if they haven’t been warned, and if they fire up their phones at baggage claim, it’s probably too late to save the integrity of their electronics and everything inside them.
Yikes. Can this possibly be true? At first blush, this sounds like an incredible overreaction. This report was filed by NBC’s Brian Williams and Richard Engel, not some novice journalist. There’s background assist from Kyle Wilhoit, a Senior Threat Researcher at Trend Micro.
Jump to about 1:13 in the video to watch Engel open a brand new MacBook Air. Made me want to cry. Doesn’t give me a lot of hope that these two know what they are doing. But I digress.
The team went to a local wifi hotspot and fired up a smart phone. Immediately, they see a downloading message. Clearly an Android phone. Wilhoit concludes that they are being hacked, that malware is being installed on the phone. Wilhoit does not say how he knows this, just that it’s malware. I’d like to know more. Could it be an update? Perhaps a file the phone needs to deal with an unknown carrier?
Next, the team heads back to the hotel, where they had left two brand new computers up and running. One of them was a brand new MacBook Air (with a horribly mangled box). As the video says, the hackers came sniffing around within minutes and within 24 hours, the hackers had taken over both computers.
Again, I’d really like to know more. Did they leave both computers in their default state? Did they enable any firewall or take any steps to protect the computers? Were the computers purposely made easy to penetrate?
You can read about Wilhoit’s techniques here (thanks to Steve Hayman for the link). While interesting, much of the background is missing. He promises more tomorrow.
If I was traveling to Sochi, I would heed the advice in this video and leave any important data at home. Assume that the contents of your smart phone and computer will be copied while you are there and only take what you can afford to have taken.
I look forward to learning more about this scenario.
UPDATE: Follow this link for a far less edited version of the video. They were purposely careless. The phone is a Samsung Android phone. They followed a URL that led to an apk file and knowingly downloaded the unknown application. True, many people would do that, but anyone with even a slight bit of tech savvy would know not to do that.
Next, they purposely opened an unknown email attachment on their computer. Yeesh. I call BS on the whole report. Disappointed in NBC.
No matter how good the intentions or the system, there will always be those that try to take advantage. Apple’s App Store is no different.
James Martin:
I’m working on an initialism for a new standard of RSS Synchronization. It’s really, really simple synchronization, so the working title is RRSRSSS.
Sometimes you need an article like James’ to wake you up and realize you don’t have to read the same news from 10 different sites to enjoy or get the most out of RSS. Plus, it was funny.
Apple and Burberry today announced that iPhone 5s is being used to capture and share beautiful photos and video before, during and after the Burberry runway show in London on Monday, September 16. Using the all-new iSight camera on iPhone 5s, Burberry is shooting high quality photos and video for runway and beauty looks, product details, and backstage moments. The collaboration is reimagining how Burberry engages consumers, paving the way for significant changes in how they capture and share their content.
Great behind-the-scenes look at how the iPhones are mounted and used.
Most people know that I’m a huge dog lover (I have two Border Collies) and that my wife recently opened Home To Stay Dog Rescue. Here is another great resource that has reviews, tips and more information for dog lovers.
In theory using photographs in your story should be simple, but it’s really not. Medium does a good job of letting users integrate photos, but as you scroll through some stories, you quickly see that some people just don’t get it, while other’s stories look great.
It’s called NameTag, and in Robocop-like fashion, the app can scan a person’s face and compare it to a records database consisting of millions of people.
If NameTag successfully finds that person, it spits back tons of information about them, including their full name, their relationship status, what school they went to, their current occupation, their interests, and more. It’ll even tell you if that person has a criminal record.
Google tells BGR that it has a ban on facial recognition apps. In other words, they haven’t found a way to make advertising dollars on that part of the creepiness yet.
I’d tell Samsung to take a flying leap off the nearest ski jump.
I agree with all of these.