Apple added an iPhone tips page to their site. Created and named for the iPhone 5s, the page’s tips seem useful for all iOS 7 users.

Tesla founder Elon Musk knows from success. Musk started and sold Zip2, a web software company, pulling $22 million out of that sale. He rolled that into the company that ultimately brought PayPal to market, got about $175 million in stock when eBay bought PayPal. He used that nest egg to create Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 and to fund Tesla Motors in 2004. Nothing but hits.

A lot has been written over the past few days about a fire in one of Tesla’s cars. A video of a burning Tesla S went viral, creating a large PR problem for the company.

Elon Musk took the wheel on this, so to speak. He wrote a calm narrative that laid out the facts, as he saw them. If you have any interest in electric cars, take a minute to read Musk’s blog post. Here’s how the accident happened:

Earlier this week, a Model S traveling at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle. A curved section that fell off a semi-trailer was recovered from the roadway near where the accident occurred and, according to the road crew that was on the scene, appears to be the culprit. The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.

Clearly, this accident was no fault of the car design.

The Model S owner was nonetheless able to exit the highway as instructed by the onboard alert system, bring the car to a stop and depart the vehicle without injury. A fire caused by the impact began in the front battery module – the battery pack has a total of 16 modules – but was contained to the front section of the car by internal firewalls within the pack. Vents built into the battery pack directed the flames down towards the road and away from the vehicle.

Read the rest of the post. The car is designed with safety in mind. Certainly no more dangerous than any of its gasoline-filled brethren.

So how does the market react? From the linked article:

Tesla’s stock had been on a tear after the company announced its first quarterly net profit and began expanding into Asia and Europe this year. But share prices declined 6.2 percent, to 180.95, the day the video was released, and kept falling the next day. (It closed Friday at $180.98.)

To be fair, if you read the article, there were a number of factors that influenced the market reaction. But I think the timing of that stock plummet rests largely on the release of the video showing the burning Tesla S. The market reacts quickly to news, slowly to reason.

Apple shares a common fate with Tesla in this regard. Some of the news that impacts Apple’s stock price appears made up of whole cloth, based purely on an analyst’s misunderstanding of market forces. That is unfortunate. Personally, I want people like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi to worry less about analysts and spend their time making great products.

I agree with Rene Ritchie. What passes for tech reporting these days is often no more than misinformed drivel designed to get pageviews. What’s worse, it can cause harm to unsuspecting users.

When you are at or near the top of a market, you become a target. Microsoft lived that life for many years. Now, the emergence of the mobile market has shifted the spotlight, as well as the security risk, over to iOS and Android. Though the rigor of Apple’s app inspection and certification process does keep the iOS app ecosystem significantly safer than Android, iOS devices are just as highly valued a target for hackers.

The point is, these attacks are going to keep coming. Apple’s job is to keep tweaking their processes to keep the bad guys at bay. So far, Apple has done their job well.

This new attack takes advantage of a flaw in the “Find my iPhone” process. The video below does an excellent job laying out the scenario. In a nutshell, the thief steals an iPhone and immediately turns on airplane mode to prevent the iPhone from being remotely wiped. This gives the thief enough time to break into your phone and use your credentials to reset your Apple ID password, take control of your phone, Apple account, and other accounts.

The video also offers 5 suggestions for fixing this problem:

1. Apple should make Airplane Mode inaccessible from the lock screen by default and require a passcode – not just a fingerprint – any time Airplane Mode was activated or the SIM card was removed

2. During Apple ID creation, Apple should warn users not to store credentials to password-reset accounts on their registered devices

3. On Find My iPhone, Apple should differentiate between likely-temporary and likely-permanent loss scenarios, and in the latter, should advise users to immediately revoke the devices’s access to all accounts it has credentials for, e.g. email-, social media-, and telephony accounts

4. The iOS lock screen should not display whether the phone is protected by a simple 4-digit PIN or a more complex passcode, and on devices with Touch ID, it should not display whether fingerprint authentication is being used

5. Upon reconnecting to the Internet, iOS should not allow email retrieval before the device’s wipe- or don’t-wipe status can be retrieved

As with every other legitimate problem of this nature that Apple has faced, the problem has a fix. No doubt, Apple will do their analysis, find the best possible fix, and roll it out quickly so we can all sleep safely again.

The news just continues to get worse for Blackberry. Shareholder Marvin Pearlstein filed this lawsuit in Manhattan federal court:

Pearlstein is seeking to represent a class of “thousands” of shareholders who bought stock between September 27, 2012, when the company touted its strong financial position, and September 20 of this year, when it revealed it would have to write down between $930 million and $960 million related to unsold BlackBerry 10 devices, according to the lawsuit.

Definitely worth a read.

It still bothers me. One day I’ll be able to read the book.

Note that the iPhone 5c is close behind.

Excitement for Twitter’s coming IPO is running pretty high – so much so that some investors on Friday mistook the nearly worthless stock of long-dead electronics retailer Tweeter for the “tweeting” site, sending shares up more than 1,000 percent.

Fuck people are stupid.

Thoughtful read. Important issue.

Direct remake. In Colombia. Wild.

The explosive success of Breaking Bad was bound to generate some copycats shows, but Spanish language media company Univision took it a step further, decided to cut out all those pesky middlemen (I think they’re called “writers”), and do a direct Spanish language remake. The Univision version will be set in Colombia and called Metástasis, the term for the spread of cancer- I assume “breaking bad” doesn’t really translate. The project seems intent on keeping every iconographic piece of the show they can, down to “Walter Blanco” (yes, really) in his famous white briefs. They even named his wife “Cielo Blanco”- “Cielo” being Spanish for “sky.”

Long time fan of Digital Photography Review. It’s my first stop before I buy any new piece of photography gear. Agree with them or not, there is always something to learn from their reviews.

Their final word:

The iPhone 5s, running Apple’s fresh iOS 7, is an excellent phone with a very good camera. Image quality under most conditions is among the top of the class of “conventional” smartphone camera units: you have to look to the Nokia Lumia 1020 to find something that’s hands-down better across the board, though in good light the best 13-megapixel sensors do capture more detail.

The camera app is supremely easy to use, and the 5s’ powerful processing makes for class-leading burst speed and excellent responsiveness. Users looking to upgrade from older iPhones shouldn’t be disappointed. That said, there’s nothing in the 5s that changes the fundamental balance of power in the mobile photography world: users committed to other OSes won’t necessarily see a reason to switch.

About what you’d expect, I think. To really get a sense of the iPhone 5s camera, take a look at the gallery of 78 images at the end of the review. To see a particular image at full size, download the original (click the link at the bottom right of the image). In my opinion, some of these shots are stunning.

Won’t be long now until we see the actual Mavericks release. My hope is that this signifies the imminent announcement of a new retina MacBook Pro alongside the already pre-announced Mac Pro.

I use this app every day.

Apple has informed Mac developers that it is preparing to launch the ability for educational institutions and developers to purchase apps from the Mac App Store in volume for a discount.

This is a big deal.

Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders.

Scroll down to see the list.

[Via DF]

I’d like to thank eleMount for sponsoring The Loops RSS feed this week.

eleMount – This universal mount raises the bar, allowing gadgets (smartphone and tablets) to be placed on a premium pedestal that matches their beautiful design and quality. One of the most user friendly mounts ever designed, eleMount sticks to any flat surface and doesn’t care if you prefer Apple or Android or like to keep your case on. eleMount works just as you’d expect. No suction cups, no locks, no instruction manual. You only need one hand to mount your device. This premium, high quality mount is CNC machined, carved from the finest solid aluminum and complements a sleek, minimalistic style. After all, shouldn’t your spectacularly designed device rest on an equally eye-catching pedestal?

The result is a collection of more than 150,000 photos, some 3,500 of which Mr. Zufi displays on a website and more than 650 of which he has curated into a new 326-page coffee-table-sized book. “Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation,” is self-published and available at www.iconicbook.com.

I’m very proud to say that along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, I also contributed a foreword for this book. It is truly an amazing publication. You can also watch a video interview with Zufi on WSJ.

From Florian Mueller’s patent blog:

Three months ago I saw a filing by Nokia that related to some discussions with Samsung considered so secretive that it wanted even the very title of a document to be sealed. It was clear that Nokia and Samsung were talking about something that also related somehow to the 2011 Nokia-Apple settlement, about the terms of which nothing was known except that Apple described it, at a very high level, as “merely a ‘provisional license’ for a limited ‘standstill’ period”. One could figure that Nokia and Samsung wouldn’t talk about some other patent agreement without talking about some sort of patent deal between them — a license or an outright purchase.

On Wednesday evening local time, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, whose writing style is well-liked by various patent litigation watchers including me, entered an order that finally sheds light on this. The order came down after a hearing held yesterday on a request by Apple (and possibly also one by Nokia) for sanctions against Samsung (and/or its outside counsel) for violation of a protective order, i.e., for illegal disclosure of (in this case, extremely) confidential business information.

I must say that I’m shocked.

The big question here is this:

So how did Samsung’s executives get access to contracts that were meant to be used only by its outside counsel (marked as “Highly Confidential — Attorneys’ Eyes Only”) for the purposes of litigation with Apple and absolutely positively not for the pupose of gaining unfair advantages in licensing negotiations with anyone (not with Apple, and much less with third parties like Nokia), when such disclosure would constitute an unbelievably serious violation of court rules?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. These are pretty serious accusations.

Apple is even hand-selecting oak trees to plant. That’s detail oriented.

31x Limited has announced the release of Transport Tycoon, the first mobile version of the classic PC game. The game’s been completely redesigned for the mobile experience, though it retains many of the classic elements that made Transport Tycoon such a beloved hit.

Good news for iOS gaming.

You may have noticed that the .com button is missing from the iOS 7 keyboard. Kirk McElhearn found out that it’s still there.

Fraser Speirs offers a voice of reason about kids supposedly “hacking” their iPads in Los Angeles.

Sonoma Wire Works is holding its annual RiffRumble competition and are giving away thousands of dollars in prizes. This time the RiffRumble theme is Metal and I will be judging the top five songs, after public voting has been completed.

Big days of change are clearly ahead for Microsoft. The Board of Directors has some big decisions to make as the largest activist investors are applying pressure to see their particular agenda enacted.

The main issue is that Ballmer himself is leaving Microsoft in the next 12 months — he offered a tearful goodbye to employees at last week’s annual companywide meeting — and finding a new CEO to execute such a dramatic shift in the company’s strategy while maintaining its existing 16 billion-dollar businesses will be no easy task.

That task has been made substantially more difficult in recent days by activist investors — reports surfaced last week that a group made up of “three of the top 20 investors” was pushing for Ford CEO Alan Mulally to take over the top spot, and yesterday news leaked that Microsoft’s board was seriously considering him. At the same time, “three of the top 20 investors” were also credited yesterday with pushing to remove Bill Gates from the Microsoft board, which he currently chairs. That would include his removal from the CEO search committee, which is presumably moving forward on the Mulally recommendation at the same time. None of that feels particularly suited to a smooth transition.

Every time I hear someone complaining about Apple’s lack of innovation or pending doom or the crime of having too much cash, I just think about Microsoft, Dell, and Blackberry and thank heavens for Tim Cook and the rest of the team.

Apple added a setting for iOS 7 to display short names (Lynn) or full names (Lynn Fullerton) at the top of your Messages window. This change to a short name default can be an issue, especially if you’ve got more than one Lynn in your life. Good tip.