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A new book from Federico Viticci.

Back in 2010 the NSA published “Hardening Tips for Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’” (PDF), a terse, two-page pamphlet recommending a series of security precautions. The agency hasn’t updated that pamphlet for more recent versions of OS X—so I thought I’d do so in the agency’s stead.

Some security tips and explanations.

More iOS music goodness from IK Multimedia.

This product announcement really has me excited. The do-not-call registry caused the telemarketing industry to shift their gears and develop a new strategy, the robocall. When a human being calls you, you can ask them to take you off their list and, legally, they have to comply or face stiff penalties. Their response? Robocalls. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of telemarketing calls I’ve received have been recordings, with no way for me to relay my do-not-call request.

Enter Nomorobo, a free service that screens your calls in real time. If it determines that the call is a robocall, it intercepts the call with a warning message heard only by the caller, and your phone doesn’t even ring.

Of course, not every robocall is evil.

Doesn’t block school closings, appointment reminders, weather advisories and other legal robocalls.

Nomorobo launches on September 30th. My hopes are high that this will work.

A federal jury yesterday rendered a verdict that makes Google (Motorola) a convicted patent troll. It has been found to have breached the duty of good faith and fair dealing flowing from Motorola’s FRAND licensing pledges to standard-setting organizations. None of the companies typically described as trolls have actually been convicted of similarly unlawful conduct.

Ouch.

Neil Young has long been working on an alternative to CDs and digitally encoded music formats. His Pono Music project is an attempt to significantly raise the bar on music fidelity.

The key difference between Pono and industry leaders such as iTunes or Spotify is Young’s focus on audio fidelity. An avowed enemy of the CD, Young now wants to “save listeners” from the MP3. “The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio,” Young wrote. “Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theatre on a sun-filled day.”

Perhaps he is tilting at windmills, but he is persistent and getting a fair amount of attention, especially from professional musicians. Time will tell.

I bet these sound incredible.

Some nice looking guitars and basses here including a Rosewood Telecaster, a Geddy Lee 1972 Jazz Bass and a Gold Top Dusty Hill Precision Bass.

Ever hear of Marty Glickman? He was on the Olympic team that represented the US in Berlin in 1936, alongside Jesse Owens. The documentary, Glickman, tells the story of Marty’s youth as a runner, his trip to the Berlin games (great story, don’t want to spoil it here), and then his rise to become one of the most influential sportscasters in history. Just as most musicians are influenced by the Beatles, most sportscasters have been influenced by Marty Glickman.

Glickman is available on HBO, HBO on-demand, and HBO Go. Terrific documentary.

Mick Jagger’s letter to Andy Warhol, asking him to design the infamous Sticky Fingers album cover.

In my short sweet experience, the more complicated the format of the album, e.g. more complex than just pages or fold-out, the more fucked-up the reproduction and agonising the delays. But, having said that, I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want………..and please write back saying how much money you would like.

One of my favorite Stones’ albums. Great letter.

Sony announced a new series of lens cameras, designed specifically as smartphone attachments. Each QX lens has no screen and no body. The camera smarts are inside the lens housing, communicating with the smartphone via WiFi. There’s an attachment that connects the lens to your phone, though that is not strictly necessary. The QX app converts your smartphone screen into a realtime viewfinder. When you press the shutter release on the lens, a compressed version of the image is sent to your phone’s image library. The full-size images are stored in a memory card on the lens.

I really like this idea, though it is hard to imagine mounting the lens on my phone every time I want to take a picture. Something you might get used to, I suspect, and worth it if the images are significantly better than any I can capture with my phone’s built-in camera.

One aspect that I find most intriguing is the fact that the app can control the lens remotely, with the ability to release the shutter, start/stop movie recordings, and adjust common photographic settings like shooting mode, zoom, Auto Focus area and more. This means I can mount the lens on a tripod, move to a comfortable position, make all my adjustments, then take my shot, all remotely. In addition, this lets me take my shot without touching the lens, avoiding vibrations that might affect focus.

Meanwhile when you’re looking for photo clipping path services to take care of all your photo editing needs, here is a good company similar to Zenith Clipping, a clipping path service provider in Bangladesh that offers the best quality clipping paths. They are also a well-reputed top-ranked image editing company serving since 2010.

It seems unimaginative to me. I don’t know, I just expected more.

Stupid lawsuits.

An article I wrote for Fortune on how important the iTunes Festival is for the bands that participate.

If you’ve spent any time with a pair of headphones and Pink Floyd’s seminal work, Dark Side of the Moon, the phrases “cruisin for a bruisin” and “I certainly was in the right” will bring back some memories. Not to mention, “There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”

Someone at WFMU got hold of all the individual mix tracks from the album and posted them. Nice.

This is an interesting business model. RocketSpace rents space to tech startups, a common enough practice. But instead of offices, or even cubicles, RocketSpace uses long tables, shared within a single company, or between multiple companies. Tight quarters, noisy, with some nice perks.

What RocketSpace, the office rental company he started in San Francisco in a building on its last legs in late 2010, does provide is lots of high-speed Internet access, proximity to well-regarded young companies, amenities like free beer and occasional chats with the likes of Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft, Dick Costolo of Twitter and the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

And RocketSpace is succeeding. By packing tenants into tight quarters, they achieve a 20% rent increase per-square-foot over traditional office space.

Companies that have passed through RocketSpace, either as local start-ups or initial satellite offices, include such tech darlings as Zappos, Uber, Spotify and Kabam, an online gaming company.

I suspect we’ll see this model quickly make its way into other tech markets.

This infographic shows households by type, 1970-2012. The most notable trend is the number of married couples with children, which dropped from 40.3% to 19.6%. Interesting.

A 21-year-old communications engineer and self-professed security enthusiast named Arul Kumar, from India, is about to get his second bounty from Facebook for pointing out a flaw in the system. This one was pretty interesting.

Basically, the hacker uses the support dashboard to request the removal of a photo from someone’s account. During the request process, the hacker has access to the photo owner’s Profile_id. Change the Profile_id to the hacker’s own id and the request is sent to the hacker instead of the owner. The hacker approves the request and the photo is deleted.

This movie is from Arul’s blog post. Facebook has fixed this hole, thanks to Arul’s detective work. Good job, Arul.

Delete any Photo from Facebook by Exploiting Support Dashboard from Arul Kumar.V on Vimeo.

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I found several things interesting about this story.

First, 25 million downloads is a huge number, but given the incredible popularity of Plants vs. Zombies, and the fact that the franchise was purchased by Electronic Arts, that number is not that surprising. What is surprising to me is the fact that that number reflects pure iOS downloads. The game has not yet been released on Android. The original Plants vs Zombies was released on iOS in February 2010, and on Android more than a year later, in May 2011.

I also found the tone of this article amusing.

Without the help of Android, the number one mobile OS in the world with millions of devices activated daily, the extremely popular Plants vs Zombies 2 is still doing great. While we all know these numbers would be substantially higher with a simultaneous release, the developers from PopCap games are already celebrating nearly 25 million downloads.

This is an Android blog, fair enough. But is an article pointing out that one of the biggest mobile games of all time is not yet released on your platform the appropriate place to hammer home the phrase “the number one mobile OS in the world”?

Om Malik:

Microsoft’s legacy as a PC monopoly holder made it incapable of handling the fast changing, rapidly shifting post-mobile world. And now for the next year Microsoft will be distracted by integrating the two companies — all at a time when Samsung will be releasing a barrage of new phones, Google will be improving on Moto X and Android and, lest anyone forget, Apple will have a trick or two up its sleeve. Oh, by the way, there is that other Seattle-based company: Amazon has been quietly working on its own phones and has plans to take on the current smartphone establishment. And they don’t even care about making a profit — they just want marketshare.

That’s probably just how the next year will play out.

It’s a big deal, but I don’t think it will come as much of a surprise to most people.