LinkedIn is being sued by customers claiming:

the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.

That’s a pretty serious charge. Given the process by which LinkedIn grows their user base (an expanding tree of referrals), you might be tempted to see this as true. I’m skeptical. Seems so easy to detect. A foolish move, if the charge is true. I hope this is not the case. We shall see.

Here’s LinkedIn’s public response to the suit.

Samsung sent out a film crew to film the excitement and anticipation of the crowds waiting for their new iPhones. The most telling part of the article was this quote:

“Other companies release new phones, but there’s not as much passion and heat [from buyers],” a Korea-based producer from Samsung Broadcasting Center/Cheil Worldwide, who asked not to be named, told CNET at the iPhone launch. “It’s only Apple. Why? We’re curious.”

Ask us, we’ll tell you.

I find this sort of thing fascinating.

Healthy Choice was having a promotion on their frozen entrées section. The offer was as follows: for every 10 bar codes of their product a person sent in, they’d be awarded 500 Air Miles. However, the company had an early bird stipulation that people who redeemed the offer within the first month of the competition would receive double that, meaning a person could potentially receive 1000 Air Miles for buying just 10 of their entrées.

Upon catching wind of the deal, David scoured his local supermarkets to see which, if any products offered the best potential return. After some legwork, he found what he was looking for- a discount grocery chain that was selling individual chocolate pudding cups for 25 cents each. This meant that for a measly $2.50, he could get 1000 Air Miles.

He spent $3,000 on pudding, donated all the pudding, then turned in the bar codes and got more than a million air miles (about $150K in value). Loophole!

This article has some excellent suggestions for steps you can take to improve your battery life under iOS 7. I’ve played around with these for a few days and can tell you that these have made a huge difference in my battery usage.

The two changes I think made the most difference for me (your mileage may vary) were setting my brightness to 50% (still plenty bright) and reducing the motion of the user interface.

With the latter, I do lose the parallax effect, which I do miss, so I’m going to turn that setting off so I get parallax back, see how that affects my battery life. Note that this is the same setting that addressed Shawn’s motion effects post from yesterday.

There’s a new rule in hockey that mandates a two minute penalty if a player takes off his own helmet prior to engaging in a fight. And then this happened.

Two players, Krys Barch and Brett Gallant, were about to get into a bit of a scrape-up, when they very purposely took each others helmets off. Really happened. I love hockey.

BlackBerry has halted the planned rollout of their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) app for iPhone and Android, and pulled it from those regional App Stores that already launched it, like New Zealand.

There are just no words.

Many thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. If you need to do anything with PDFs, you need PDFpen. You can add a signature, make changes, correct typos–and that’s only the beginning.

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How to start up a Boeing 737:

Not nearly as easy as strapping in and turning the key!

Curtis Rush at the Toronto Star has done a fabulous job of doing absolutely nothing worthwhile. As John Gruber puts it, this article is “Mind-bogglingly misinformed.”

Quartz:

…if you’ve downloaded Apple’s iOS 7 you could be using Multi-path TCP already.

Multi-path TCP allows your phone to send data by whatever way it’s connected to the internet, whether that’s Wi-Fi, 3G or ethernet. This is the first time that this new means of connecting to the internet has appeared in a commercial product.

Stuff:

A major change in Apple’s iOS 7 update was its sleek, minimal aesthetic; however, the amount of motion now found within is anything but minimal.

The net result: “It feels to me like the whole screen is moving, and it generates a sort of motion sickness. I feel dizzy and can feel the very beginnings of nausea kicking in.”

It’s not as bad as full on motion sickness for me but I do find the animations to be annoying eye candy I wish I could toggle off.

There have been a number of posts with excerpts from this interview, but this is a more complete Q&A. Thoughtful responses, nice long interview.

One billion dollars in 3 days. Wow. For comparison, it took Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 16 days to hit $1B, back in January 2012. Then Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 hit $1B in 15 days this past December. 3 days is astonishing.

Grand Theft Auto has been keeping Take-Two afloat during the down times, as the series has an extremely long tail (the volume of sales over time following release). Not only does a new release spike revenues, but it also incentivizes gamers to investigate the back catalog (sometimes spurring purchases of already owned games on new platforms). GTA V will be even more significant should the title see staggered releases on PC and next-generation platforms (as I suspect it will). At this point, Call of Duty is going to have a nearly impossible time beating GTA’s sales this year, ending a four-year streak.

With numbers like these, it is no wonder that Apple has added support for game controllers into iOS 7. Will game controller support be the force that erodes the chasm between iOS devices and traditional consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation? Time will tell.

An annual gathering of technologists passionate about creating great things.

I’ll be speaking at this conference next week in Chicago. Join me and a lot of other great speakers—tickets are on sale until midnight tonight Pacific time.

I love that Tim Cook did this. What a great surprise for folks queueing up to buy the iPhone 5s. Phil Schiller and Eddie Cue also made the rounds of the Palo Alto area stores. Fantastic.

This week, Jim is joined by Back to Work’s Merlin Mann to talk about hands-on experiences with Apple’s new iPhone 5s and 5c and iOS 7.

Including a deep dive on Touch ID; how easier security measures could boost iTunes sales; Jim’s new-found photo skills with the 5s camera; what Jim looks for in the wiring under his wood; and more.

Time is running out for BlackBerry. The company announced on Friday that it is cutting 4,500 jobs and that it will report a net operating loss of roughly $1 billion in its next quarterly earnings report.

I certainly feel bad for the people that lost their jobs, but we all knew this was coming.

Seriously, everyone wants an iPhone.

This is cool. It shows you one word at a time, so you can increase your speed over time.

Back in June, at WWDC, Apple first announced iOS 7, detailing a host of new technologies. Hidden among them, with the barest of mentions, was the iBeacon.

Think of an iBeacon as a tiny radio you can put almost anywhere. When your iPhone or other iOS device gets within range (a few dozen feet or so), it detects the iBeacon and can estimate how far away it is. Each iBeacon has its own identifier, too, so if your iPhone is within range of more than one iBeacon, it can tell them apart.

One company that is hard at work making their own brand of iBeacon sensor is estimote. From their web site:

Simply stick our tiny sensors in any physical place — such as your retail store — and your app users will benefit from personalized micro-location based notifications and actions when they walk in to your venue or interact with your products.

Roximity is another company that makes iBeacons. From their website:

Manage your beacons and triggers from a simple yet powerful web based dashboard. View detailed analytics about your campaigns, in store foot traffic, busiest times of day, and much much more!

I think this technology has incredible potential.

Daniel Rachel just released the book Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters.

Inspired by Paul Zollo’s seminal Songwriters on Songwriting, Rachel has managed to bring together a truly impressive ensemble of British tunesmiths, including Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, Mick Jones, Robin Gibb (why the hell not!) and Johnny Marr, among others. The results are hugely enjoyable, and the mind veritably boggles imagining the kind of cajoling and legwork Rachel must have put in to coax this rich and eclectic ensemble out of their country piles—not least the notoriously taciturn, the notoriously notorious Jimmy Page…

I love interviews where musicians talk about their craft (as opposed to their personal lives). Really looking forward to getting my copy. Follow the link above to get to an excerpt of the Jimmy Page interview.

Here’s a tasty bit of Page playing Chopin. The audio is a little out of sync (I think they captured the echo), but yum, nonetheless.

Go get ’em.

I had a lot of fun joining John Gruber on The Talk Show this week where we discussed the iPhone 5s and 5c, among other things.

Dow Jones & Co. won’t renew its partnership with AllThingsD, the technology news website that rose to prominence covering the players of the high-tech industry and reviewing their products.

As part of the separation, announced Thursday by Dow Jones editor-in-chief and Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker, longtime Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg will leave the paper.

Wow.