In a disturbingly insecure manner:
Wow. Okay. So I’ve confirmed with both the hacker and Apple how this happened. Was via a phone call to Apple tech support.
In a reply to Trevor Gilbert, he confirms that the hacker merely convinced Apple tech support that he was Mat Honan. Unbelievable.
Mat Honan’s entire setup—including his iPhone, iPad, laptop, and his web accounts—got cracked wide open last night. He’s lost a year’s worth of photos, emails, music, and other precious data. Based on the post, he was as secure as you or I are, and yet this didn’t stop the hackers. That’s brutal, and frightening.
I use a lot of different passwords for different things, but I don’t know how secure I am any more. As far as he knows, there wasn’t a particular reason or motive behind this attack. It’s probably just dicks being dicks.
Kyro Beshay:
I’m specifically talking about this new move to broadcast what pages and messages we’ve viewed, without our consent. Services like BBM have long been guilty of this, but the idea has seen increased adoption recently with services like FB Messenger and Apple’s iMessage. […]
We’re now forced into an obligation to respond to a person’s message, almost immediately.
It should be noted that iMessage requires the user to explicitly consent to delivering read receipts, and it is not turned on by default, but I see Beshay’s major point. I disagree, however, that this creates an obligation to reply. Perhaps read receipts create a sense of guilt for some, but I, for example, don’t feel pressure to reply immediately. Nor should anyone else. I’m genuinely surprised that read receipts have caused such a fuss, given that I remember using them in Outlook years ago.
The odd thing about Brutalist architecture is that there’s a fine line between the best, which looks amazing (if not beautiful), and everything else (which looks like crap). This blog is full of great examples, like Citizen’s House. Via Khoi Vinh.
Strategy Analytics on July 25:
Apple’s share of the tablet market rose from 62% to 68% in the second calendar quarter, reaching its highest level in two years. Apple reported having shipped 17 million iPads between April and June, and Strategy Analytics estimates that a total of nearly 25 million tablets were shipped globally during that timeframe.
Frank N. Magid and Associates on August 1:
According to the firm, which recently surveyed 4,734 cell phone and smartphone owners, roughly 50% of people currently own an iPad, down significantly from 72% at last count.
The firm says Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle Fire tablet made the biggest dent in Apple’s tablet share, skyrocketing to 22% since launching last winter. “That’s what made up the difference,” Tom Godfrey, executive director of mobile strategy at Magid, told The Los Angeles Times.
IDC, August 2:
For the eighth consecutive quarter, Apple has shipped more tablets than any other manufacturer. The Cupertino-based company shipped a record 17 million iPads during the quarter, an increase from 11.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012, amounting to a 68.2% market share. Samsung experienced exceptional growth, more than doubling tablet shipments to 2.4 million units and capturing 9.6% of the market. Amazon, whose Kindle Fire tablet is only available in the U.S., shipped 1.2 million units and ASUS shipped 855,454 slates.
I don’t usually cover rumours here, but a post came across my Twitter feed this morning that purportedly shows a dock adapter for the next iPhone, iPad, and iPods, which was posted to Apple’s online store before the link was pulled. I can’t verify the authenticity of anything here, but I can do a little armchair analysis of what we know so far.
A man with the website A White Dot and corresponding Twitter @awhitedot posted several screenshots from Apple’s online store that show this dock adapter to convert a new mini dock port to Apple’s current 30-pin connector. Since the website is probably intermittently down, here’s Google’s cached version. This, on its own, is pretty easy to fake. The publisher must agree, because he also uploaded a screencast showing him navigating around the online store. Interesting, and very convincing.
I haven’t seen any rumours from A White Dot previously, so there’s no way of establishing a pattern of credibility. What I do know is that the oldest tweet from that account is from May 29, and not many tweets have been posted since. He has at least one deleted tweet concerning an “iPhone 5” mockup, but not much else.
The screenshot is perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence. It’s worth noting that the Inspector in the latest version of Safari 6 has a bug that carries modifications made using it through many sessions. In other words, if one were to change the font of the paragraphs on my site to Times, and then refreshed the page, it would continue using Times, and not revert back to the original as in previous versions of Safari. One can make an array of deep changes using WebKit’s Inspector in this way — it’s a very powerful tool. But one cannot change the URL of the page, at least not easily. The URL shown in the video features a product ID (MD594ZM) that follows Apple’s usual naming conventions, but doesn’t correspond to any current SKU.
The screencast and screenshots appear to be from a Retina MacBook Pro, and true to form, the images on the online store do not have Retina assets. Loading up the Apple Store on my Retina iPad confirmed that these are 1x images, without 2x counterparts.
There’s more to it, though, because the bottom of the product page alledgedly shows that it’s compatible with a bunch of unannounced products, including a new iPhone, iPod touch, 7th-generation iPod nano, and two different sizes of iPad. Once again, there’s no way to verify the authenticity of this, but it’s true to many of the rumours floating around.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of questions. First, why does the Apple web team already have access to the design and press shots of the new products? I was under the impression that they worked with placeholder images until a very short time (a week or two) prior to the announcement of the product. Either Apple’s policies have changed recently, or I’m wrong (or, of course, this is a big fake). The other big question I have is why Apple would produce dock adapters in two different colours. It seems like an unnecessary complication.
It’s worth noting that this wouldn’t be the first time a new product has leaked on Apple’s own website. In 2003, specs were posted to the Power Mac page that, in Steve Jobs’ own words, “looked pretty remarkable“. They were pulled shortly after, but were confirmed to be legitimate at WWDC that year.
This wouldn’t be the biggest leak in the last few years, either. In 2007, someone was able to get their hands on the entire iPhone OS 1.1.3 firmware, and of course, there was the infamous iPhone 4 prototype. But this would certainly be one of the most profound leaks in terms of Apple rumours. Not only does this confirm that the iPhone is getting a new dock connector, but it would also apparently confirm the existence of an 8-inch iPad to be released later this year, along with refreshed iPods. All from a $10 adapter.
Update: Turns out that I fell for a hoax. Good one.
Dan Chung is taking photos at the Olympics using only his iPhone 4S, a pair of binoculars, and Snapseed. The photos he’s shooting are pretty great. Not “good for a smartphone”, but really damn good photos. Yet it reminds me of Marco Arment’s article on the limitations of this setup:
The Rebel photos look decent. The 5D Mark II photos look great. But photos from the iPhone 4, and even from the 4S, don’t hold up. They look fine on a 3.5-inch screen, but they look terrible on my big desktop monitor and abysmal on the Retina MacBook Pro.
Most of my favorite photos from the last two years only look good on small screens.
Dan Chung is almost certainly capturing many more photos with his Nikon, but the photos he’s shooting with the iPhone aren’t going to be broadly usable, especially with the lossy editing in Snapseed.
I love the challenge of shooting with an iPhone, and seeing surprising results. But I will always bring my DSLR with me if the photos I’ll be taking on that day need to last.
Mike Isaac, writing for All Things D:
Therein lies Twitter’s goal: A rich, consistent Twitter experience for every user. When the hammer drops and Twitter changes its guidelines, those apps that can’t deliver this consistency will no longer be able to integrate with Twitter. The most likely candidates to go first, according to multiple sources, fall into two camps: Third-party-client apps which essentially reduplicate the Twitter stream — such as Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora — and news reader apps like Flipboard, which re-renders Twitter data to create a different visual experience of a tweet entirely.
Marco Arment links to both Isaac’s post and MG Siegler’s, and explains why this consistency won’t roll out to third-party clients:
Maybe the reason promoted tweets still don’t show up in the API, and therefore still aren’t displayed by third-party clients, is that Twitter never had any intention of monetizing the timeline outside of their official clients, because there won’t be any more third-party clients soon.
It would be entirely possible for Twitter to send promoted tweets and Cards to third-party clients, and keep that revenue stream open. But, curiously, they haven’t. That’s a frightening prospect.
Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, acknowledges and explains (in microscopic detail) a privacy bug that bit the site a couple of days ago:
The heart of the problem was that it turned out to be possible to ask the Pinboard database to “give me only bookmarks where the privacy flag is set to zero'” and still get back results where the privacy flag was on. This is like accidentally baking something by putting it in your freezer. Unexpected.
Click through for the full SQL-based cause, effect, and solution.
MG Siegler:
Rarely is more better. But with Twitter, I think it’s actually detrimental. Twitter was born out of simplicity. It’s the natural extension of post cards and SMS and status messages. It’s the service that everyone in the world should have access to regardless of device.
These Twitter Cards sounds like a move in the opposite direction. Rich media, best viewed on computers and smartphones. Shiny stuff. Distractions. And ads. It just doesn’t sound like Twitter.
I know why they’re doing this — there’s no money to be made solely in 140-character blurbs. But there won’t be a company at all if Twitter doesn’t play this right. So far, it looks like they aren’t. Between shutting down API access to Instagram users, and delivering a “consistent experience” (amongst other nudges in the direction of a vertical Twitter ecosystem), it’s not looking good for those who love the Twitter experience of yore.
I’ve previously linked to Craig Hockenberry’s list of things Twitterrific did first. Just a couple of days ago, Twitter made official the $[ticker symbol] syntax implemented in a number of third party clients. These are simple, elegant improvements to the existing infrastructure. The idea of Cards is a step in favour of complexity, not simplicity. And it’s a sign of VC meddling in favour of increased revenue, instead of maintaining a happy user base.
Heather Smith, reporting for Bloomberg:
Google Inc. was asked to provide France’s data-protection authority with information gathered through its Street View service, which it should have deleted after a 2011 fine. […]
“Google apologizes for this error,” the company said today in an e-mailed statement, reiterating it “would now like to delete the remaining data.”
Privacy authorities in Great Britain had previously requested access to the same data that Google has failed to delete in the past year, and which they now would like to remove. Don’t be evil, and all that.
Remember that illustration which supposedly shows that the Samsung F700 was shown before the iPhone at Cebit 2006? Sure you do. Not only is it factually incorrect, Nilay Patel contends that it actually bolsters Apple’s credibility in the trial, not Samsung’s:
In many ways, the F700 does nothing but underline Apple’s overall contention: that there are thousands of ways to design and package a phone interface, but Samsung chose to drop its differentiated interface and instead lift elements of Apple’s style for TouchWiz.
Nobody in their right mind would confuse this with an iPhone.
Keith Plocek really doesn’t like the new Digg:
[I]t only takes a couple clicks to realize all of the archives are gone. All of them. All of the Ron Paul idolatry. All of the ASCII facepalms. All of the linkbait. Gone.
This is the worst part of the reboot. Plocek thinks so, too, but not for the same reason you or I do:
[B]y removing all of Digg’s archives and creating dead links, the company removed seven years of content. We’re talking millions and millions of words, all of which were coming up in Google searches and driving traffic to Digg.com. Without all those words and working links, Digg.com can kiss its page rank [sic] goodbye.
Yeah, Plocek is worried not about the content, but the SEO implications. That seems like the least of their concerns right now, and it’s probably for the best. I’d be willing to bet that their PageRank won’t take much of a hit, since a bunch of other high PageRank sites are linking to it, and it will rebound shortly.
The lack of an archive is really disappointing, though.
