This is the first in a series of articles Bryan Chaffin is doing looking at Apple’s board members and what they bring to the company.

Om Malik:

Apple is enamored with China — and rightfully so. However, in not paying attention to India, it has allowed world’s second-largest mobile market to become a mostly Android phenomenon, leaving upper end of the market to Samsung. Wrong strategy, if you ask me.

The difference between the first exploit and this one is how it can make the iPhone screen go black, allowing an attacker to plug the device into a computer via USB and access the user’s data without having their PIN or passcode credentials.

I don’t know how they find this stuff, but Apple has to get this fixed.

Although App.net has had only paid account tiers thus far, we initially conceived of App.net as a freemium service. It took some time to get to this point, but we are now ready to make this vision a reality.

I admit that the charm of App.net has passed me by; I’ve never subscribed, because I just didn’t see the point. But I know that price was holding some people back. So if you don’t mind living with the limitations (“free” users can only follow 40 users and have limits on storage and upload rates), now may be the time. Only one catch: You have to get an invite from a paid App.net user.

Speaking of Joy of Tech, this is priceless.

“This business has not been in a state of transition like it is right now since the video game crash of the ’80s,” Bleszinski said. “I really think we’re in a massive state of turmoil.”

Cliff Bleszinski is formerly the design director for Epic Games. He’s been influential in the design and development of the Unreal franchise as well as Gears of War.

CaptureNotes 2 for iPad is the full featured notetaking and audio recording application that provides users with the ability to write, type, Flag audio with markers and annotate PDFs during classes or meetings. Launching soon, CaptureAudio delivers more than a simple voice recording app, bringing the unique Flag marking feature of CaptureNotes to the iPhone. Notebooks are easily shared among team members. Likewise, recorded audio sessions can conveniently be shared between the two Apps, supporting both iPhone and iPad users!

CaptureNotes 2 & CaptureAudio are brought to you by G8R Software.

Another funny comic from The Joy of Tech.

Twitter says its users like the ad experience. Ben Brooks doesn’t agree.

I’ve been using Shazam since it first came out and love it. The company also said a new version for the iPad would be available in the coming weeks with an improved layout.

Harry Marks takes on John Siracusa and his recent comments about watching Netflix’s “House of Cards.”

Horace Dediu takes an interesting look at Apple’s retail openings as it relates to the company’s sales and growth.

LG now claims complete ownership of the webOS source code, its documentation and webOS websites. It has obtained HP licenses, as well as the patents that Palm transferred to its owner when it was acquired in 2010.

LG will use the OS for its smart TVs.

The Guardian:

The sky-high price of printer ink – measure for measure more expensive than vintage champagne – has been well documented. Less well-known is the fact that the amount of ink in the average cartridge has shrunk dramatically.

A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for about £20. Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13.

Cut open a HP inkjet cartridge and you’ll find what is going on.

This is a European report but there’s no reason to believe it’s not the same for cartridges sold here in North America.

“Thank God – no backwards compatibility. Now I can exchange all of my old games at Gamestop for a total of $25 in-store credit.”

This pretty much sums it up for me. I think it’s gonna be a long time before I bother to replace the game consoles I’m currently using.

The designer of the Daleks from the BBC’s Doctor Who has died aged 84 after a short illness, his daughter has said.

Former BBC designer Ray Cusick died of heart failure in his sleep on Thursday, Claire Heawood added.

It appears that Amazon’s warehouses are the global book distribution chain’s equivalent of modern day sweatshops. Earlier this week Amazon fired its German security firm after a documentary film crew from ARD tied it to a far right wing group. The film crew revealed that seasonal workers hired by an Amazon subcontractor in Germany, many of whom were previously unemployed, were driven around Germany in buses, housed in poor conditions and kept under constant surveillance by the aforementioned security guards.

I’m guessing the mainstream media won’t see fit to make a big deal out of this like they did with Apple and Foxconn.

[Via Harry Marks]

The Wirecutter:

Google just announced its first premium Chromebook, the Chromebook Pixel. It’s gorgeous. Unfortunately, it’s so expensive that I can’t think of a single person who should get one.

If you have the money to spend on the Pixel and you need the kind of hardware it’s packing, you have so many other better options.

This may be the future of “cloud based” laptops but in the here and now, this is an extravagant machine.

Esquire:

What happened to the America that once was? What happened to the America where kids could spend their snow-days at the local sledding hill, without cell phones in their snow-pants, laughing at their friends’ face-plants, throwing snowballs, and making the same yellow-snow jokes that their grandfathers made when they too were a bunch of rapscallions running through the slush?

That America exists no more in Paxton, Illinois. Because the Paxton Park District’s insurance provider ruled that its sledding hill is too risky. “The insurance would have skyrocketed if someone was hurt,” a parks board member told The Champaign News-Gazette.

One of the commenters said, “The park board ought to be able to erect a sign at the hill that says “Sled at your own risk.” How about NOT suing people because your kid got hurt horsing around, as kids will do? When I was a kid in Canada, I broke my leg playing on a local hill. There was never any discussion of a lawsuit.

I’d like to thank Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with BBEdit.

BBEdit 10.5 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better. Now with Retina support and many other improvements — download the demo and see for yourself!

I’ve been using the app since 1994.

Good tip. I wonder how often spammers change the number they’re calling from though.

[Via Streakmachine]

Great interview by Des Traynor.

The world’s largest software company said the security intrusion was “similar” to recent ones reported by Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL) and Facebook Inc (FB.O).

The new BootCamp hits Seattle on March 6 and hits other cities throughout the year.

After helicopters picked him up, medics inspected his injuries. They cut off his clothes and went through his pockets. There, they found his iPhone — with a bullet hole through it. “The medics would come up to me and say, ‘this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Stubleski wasn’t carrying it for calling or texting. He said he used it as a camera or for music. The doctors told him how lucky he was that the bullet didn’t hit the femoral artery. They said that the iPhone probably changed the trajectory of the bullet, making the wound shallower in his flesh. The protective cover he had on his phone made it so the glass didn’t shatter, making his wounds worse. He and his friends joked they should replace their body armor with iPads.

Great story.

A judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his court battle with Apple Inc on Friday, blocking the iPhone maker from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company’s ability to issue preferred stock.

It’s going to be an interesting shareholder meeting.

John Paczkowski at AllThingsD:

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived. Even leaving aside the ethics of asserting a patent against a feature designed to help the blind, this is unwise. It’s the PR equivalent of punching yourself in the face. Samsung has now identified itself as a company willing to accept the loss of accessibility for the vision-impaired as collateral damage in its battle with Apple. It has made a big public move to make it more difficult for the blind to use computers.

Foss Patents:

I still believe it’s the wrong thing to assert an accessibility-related patent in a dispute like this one. Samsung didn’t assert this German patent in an effort to protect its investment in accessibility. It elected to use an accessibility-related patent as a tactical weapon. Patent protection and enforcement can be justified in certain scenarios. For example, if there are two companies competing in the market for hearing aids, it’s generally legitimate for them to assert accessibility-related patents against each other. I would also support the idea of accessibility patent enforcement in cases of willful infringement, and if Samsung had only requested monetary compensation in this action, it would have made a much better choice than by trying to achieve, through the pursuit of an injunction, the deactivation or (more realistically) degradation of the voiceover functionality Apple provides to its German customers.

Maybe Samsung can find features that help people with other disabilities to attack next.