Where have I seen these before?

Yesterday, Jailbreak Nation highlighted a bug with iOS 6.1 that allows users to bypass a passcode lock on an iPhone to access the phone function and contacts on the device. While the bug allows only limited access to the device and can require several attempts to achieve the correct timing to exploit, it is gaining significant attention today.

Having this kind of bug in the OS is certainly not good and Apple needs to fix it ASAP. I still don’t understand how do people figure this stuff out?

Some of the biggest hedge funds that helped make Apple Inc a stock market darling lost faith and dumped their stakes in the fourth quarter, fueling the massive drop in the iPhone maker’s share price.

Noted stock pickers including Leon Cooperman and Thomas Steyer unloaded billions of dollars of Apple shares between Sept. 30 and Dec. 31, according to disclosure documents filed on Thursday.

Two and a half billion dollars.

That’s how much Morgan Stanley’s Adam Holt estimates Microsoft may be leaving on the table by not offering a full version of its Office suite (Word, Excel, etc.) on Apple’s iPads.

Even for Microsoft, that’s a lot of money to ignore.

Apple filed its formal response to the lawsuit initiated by Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn and blasted the complaint as being without merit and nothing less than an attempt to hold shareholders “hostage” by forcing Apple to acquiesce to a specific plan for the issuing of preferred shares that would primarily benefit Greenlight Capital.

This is going to be interesting.

Let me make this crystal clear, every App purchase you make on Google Play gives the developer your name, suburb and email address with no indication that this information is actually being transferred.

The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.

…

When the facts didn’t suit his opinion, he simply changed the facts. Our request of The New York Times is simple and fair: please investigate this article and determine the truth. You are a news organization where that principle is of paramount importance and what is at stake for sustainable transport is simply too important to the world to ignore.

This, from the CEO of Tesla Motors.

Background: Last Week the New York Times posted a very unflattering review of Tesla Motors’ $100,000 all-electric Model S sedan. The reviewer complained about the car’s range and said he had to get it towed after it abruptly ran out of juice during his two-day test drive.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk wasted no time in discounting the review, and claimed that the reviewer, John Broder, wasn’t being honest about what really happened – and has the car’s data logs to prove it. (As a matter of course, after a disastrous appearance on Top Gear, the company carefully logs all test drives by media).

Jim and Dan discuss recent Apple news.

Sponsored by Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), Notabli, and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME2 for 10% off).

Dave Caolo:

Imagine that Apple isn’t specifically designing a watch, but the next step in its portable devices. Something that does much of what iOS devices do today, only in a novel way, and is smaller than current devices.

Some great thoughts.

CNET:

The magic of physics can turn the mundane into something marvelous. Mark French, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, designed a supersonic air-powered ping-pong ball cannon.

A ping-pong ball reportedly blasts out of the special cannon at speeds equivalent to Mach 1.23 — nearly as fast as an F-16 fighter jet. As evidenced in the video below, the high-speed ball can put a clean hole through a plywood paddle, a VHS tape, and other objects.

How to make science cool – destroy stuff!

Nat Brown, one of the founders of the Xbox project, rails on Microsoft.

Cult of Mac put together some of Jefferies analyst Peter Misek’s predictions over the past couple of years. How does this man still have a job?

TreeHugger:

The recent death of John E Karlin of Bell Labs, the father of the push-button phone and other innovations, has sparked a lot of reminiscing about land line phones. According to the New York Times, Karlin was also “the most hated man in America” for killing the named exchanges (like Butterfield 8). However the story of how our phone numbers got to be the way they are is a much longer and more interesting one.

Fascinating story of the history of phone numbers.

The new lawsuit, filed by an investor from Pennsylvania in U.S. District Court in New York, seeks to block Apple from moving forward with a February 27 shareholder vote on two proxy proposals.

One of the proposals is the same measure Einhorn targeted that would eliminate from the company charter Apple’s ability to issue preferred stock.

I met the guy that’s building these during NAMM and I like what he’s doing. Go take a look at his ideas and support the project.

Apple is gearing up for a special media event next month related to its television initiative that may deliver the tools developers will need to prepare applications for a formal relaunch of the company’s Apple TV product, analysts for Jefferies Equity Research said Wednesday.

Nope.

Bryan Chaffin:

Apple saw almost as many visitors to its retail stores as Disney sees at its theme parks around the world.

Wow. There are some other great comparisons in the chart too.

Update: Bryan updated the article to show that Apple actually had 370 million for the year, not 120 million.

Pauline France at Fender.com:

There are tons of guitar riffs out there, but only a few have become deeply ingrained and ubiquitous in pop culture. Our Top 10 Instantly Recognizable Guitar Riffs all have something in common: They’re the ones you can’t wait to learn how to play; the ones you catch yourself humming; the ones that are revered worldwide by musicians and non-musicians alike.

There are so many riffs to chose from — Pauline picked some good ones.

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7 percent decline from 2011 sales, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphones continued to drive overall mobile phone sales, and the fourth quarter of 2012 saw record smartphone sales of 207.7 million units, up 38.3 percent from the same period last year.

Apple’s number three in overall phone sales, not just smartphone sales, according to Gartner’s figures. Samsung leads with 22.7 percent marketshare – a figure Gartner attributes to Samsung’s strong placement not only in the Android market, where it is far and away the market leader, but also with less expensive feature phones. Nokia trails in second place with 18.0 percent, the lowest it’s ever been, according to Gartner, with demand diminishing 53.6 percent year over year. Apple comes in third at 9.2 percent, with 43.5 million units sold – a 22.7 percent year over year increase.

The batteries that your mobile devices contain are miracles of engineering. They hold amounts of energy that their predecessors couldn’t come close to equaling. Properly using this potential can help your mobile batteries last longer on the road. Here are our tips for obtaining optimum battery performance.

Some good suggestions here for making sure you get the best life you can out of your mobile electronics.

Co.Exist:

San Francisco’s Bay Bridge is the dollar store version of the famed Golden Gate Bridge. Before the Bay Bridge closes down this summer for final touches on the new, safer eastern span, the bridge is getting gussied up by artist Leo Villareal, who is individually programming 25,000 white LED lights to generate an endless series of sparkling patterns across the structure.

“Bay Lights”…will be the world’s largest light sculpture upon its completion in March.

The utilitarian Bay Bridge is the ugly stepchild of San Francisco bridges, always coming up short in comparison to the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. Hopefully this project isn’t just putting lipstick on a pig.

Speaking at our D: Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday, HBO’s Eric Kessler said “effective today we will be enabling AirPlay” for HBO Go.

HBO still say they’re coming to Apple TV.

First Alicia Keys is named creative director of BlackBerry, now Justin Timberlake is the creative director for Bud Lite Platinum.

I’d be pissed if I was a real creative director.

Eric Slivka posted the transcript on MacRumors. Definitely worth reading.

While not a main talking point of the interview, [Samsung Executive Vice President David] Eun told All Things D’s Kara Swisher that he saw the seemingly endless legal struggle as “a loss” for innovation in the fast-moving tech industry.

Translation:

We are very upset that Apple is focused on the lawsuits and not releasing more amazing products that we can blatantly steal.