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.

This is brilliant and a bit mesmerizing. Launch the page, zoom in on your airport of interest, and watch the flights do their thing. Click on one of the icons and detailed information about that particular flight, along with the path from its origin, will appear in a sidebar. Love this.

This Friday (September 6), NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. LADEE will be fitted with a sophisticated laser comm device that will significantly speed up communications with Earth. This is a proof-of-concept mission. The biggest hurdle to overcome is relaying the data almost 240,000 miles to ground telescopes on Earth.

“This pointing challenge is the equivalent of a golfer hitting a ‘hole-in-one’ from a distance of almost five miles… Developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory have designed a sophisticated system to cancel out the slightest spacecraft vibrations. This is in addition to dealing with other challenges of pointing and tracking the system from such a distance. We are excited about these advancements.”

Interesting stuff.

An article I wrote for Fortune on Apple’s motivation for doing the iTunes Festival.

Nice survey of start-ups in the New York Times. Some I knew, some were new to me. Interesting read.

App cloning is a problem that impacts both large and small developers. In a nutshell, a cloner decrypts an app, then sucks out the binary. Once they have the binary, they modify it and resubmit it to the App Store as their own. A difficult problem for Apple to solve. They’d either need to apply significantly more resources to screening submitted apps, or take more time per app with existing resources, which would slow the review process to a crawl.

The app had only been out three months, and already the creators of A Beautiful Mess were scrambling to deal with a big problem: clones, copycats, and rip-offs, as many as seven of them, crowding the search results in the App Store. The clones appeared to be legitimate, affiliated versions, yet as all the developers knew, they were anything but. The CEO of the company that created the original A Beautiful Mess called them “infuriating.”

And getting rid of a clone is no easy task.

A Beautiful Mess developers tried to have the clones removed. “When we reported an IP infringement through Apple’s system, [Apple] would e-mail the company we were accusing and CC us on it,” said Trey George, the business development manager for A Beautiful Mess, in an e-mail to Ars. George believed that most of the clones originated with two operations, which he believed would feign innocence when confronted in a bid to buy time.

Clones and the like have been around the App Store almost since its inception. But this scourge has now become commonplace.

Android’s lack of strong oversight can lead to an even worse problem. Clymer highlighted the recent case of the game Gentlemen!, which was purchased legitimately 144 times and pirated more than 50,000 times.

Glad to see this problem getting the exposure it needs.

Just a reminder, you can watch live streaming of the iTunes Festival starting at 4p EST today by steering your browser to itunes.com/festival. Jim is there and I am jealous!

Damn.

First up, Lady Gaga. Doors open at approximately 6pm London time (1p EST Sunday afternoon). Lady Gaga should hit the stage around 9p (4p EST) Here’s a link to the festival FAQ.

Can’t wait.

Once every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic fields reset. When this happens, it can play havoc with things like wireless communications. Researchers at Stanford have been studying the underlying process and have cracked some of the secrets behind the mechanism that makes this happen.

The mechanism, known as meridional flow, works something like a conveyor belt. Magnetic plasma migrates north to south on the sun’s surface, from the equator to the poles, and then cycles into the sun’s interior on its way back to the equator.

The rate and depth beneath the surface of the sun at which this process occurs is critical for predicting the sun’s magnetic and flare activity, but has remained largely unknown until now.

Interesting article.