“We’re in this bizarre position where we’re defending the civil liberties of the country against the government,” Cook says. “I mean, I never expected to be in this position. The government should always be the one defending civil liberties, and yet there’s a role reversal here. I still feel like I’m in another world, that I’m in this bad dream.”
Cook is doing his best to wake up. He says he doesn’t actually want to make this decision. What he’s pushing for is to get it out of the hands of a judge and into Congress; a commission could study the issue and presumably propose some sensible laws to clarify it. “We see that this is our moment to stand up and say, Stop and force a dialogue,” he says. “There’s been too many times that government is just so strong and so powerful and so loud that they really just limit or they don’t hear the discourse.” He stresses that whatever the outcome, when the law is handed down, Apple will follow it.
Apple employees are already discussing what they will do if ordered to help law enforcement authorities. Some say they may balk at the work, while others may even quit their high-paying jobs rather than undermine the security of the software they have already created, according to more than a half-dozen current and former Apple employees.
[...] The fear of losing a paycheck may not have much of an impact on security engineers whose skills are in high demand. Indeed, hiring them could be a badge of honor among other tech companies that share Apple’s skepticism of the government’s intentions.
This is a fight that implicates all technology users. There are already bad actors trying to defeat the security on iPhones, and an FBI-ordered backdoor will only assist their efforts. Once this has been created, malicious hackers will surely increase their attacks on the FBI and Apple, hoping to ferret out clues to this entrance route—and they may well succeed.
The precedent created by this case is disturbing: it creates a new pathway for the government to conscript private companies into building surveillance tools. If Apple can be compelled to create a master key to unlock this iPhone, then little will prevent the government from ordering any company to turn its products into tools of surveillance, compromising the safety, privacy, and security of everyone.
First, set up a couple hundred fake artists. Next, upload some auto-generated tunes—mediocre dance music is particularly easy to “produce” online—and just make sure your bots click on an array of songs both real and fake, so no one gets suspicious.
In reality, even a celestial jukebox has gaps. Or more precisely, numerous jukeboxes have come along – iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube – and each service has had gaps in its repertoire. And those gaps have been growing bigger and more complicated as artists have wielded more power in withholding their music from one outlet or another.
Great change for those who want to populate their journal entries with content from the web: Day One has launched their IFTTT channel today, which will let you create all sorts of automated recipes such as saving Instagram pictures to a journal, emailing a new entry to yourself, or logging check-ins from a third-party service.
The Tpod, about the size of a deck of cards, connects to your home’s Wi-Fi network, grabs television signals out of the air and streams them to your iPad. It also doubles as a DVR, saving programs to an onboard microSD card.
The biggest new feature of Scanner Pro 7 is text recognition. Now, users can scan a document using their iPhone and Scanner Pro can automatically convert the scan into a text document that is able to be edited, copied, and selected. This feature is huge for people who want to modify the content they scan in, such as documents, notes for school, and more.
Developers are now updating their apps to effectively check whether Game Center is broken, flinging up a dialog box accordingly, and at least allowing players access.
This state of affairs is ridiculous.
Because you can absolutely charge more for Mac apps than for iOS apps–it’s a smaller market, but one willing to spend money for better tools–the Mac is also a place where small independent developers can thrive.
This tension — between the local stations who pay the largest share of NPR’s bills and the network that sees a future beyond terrestrial radio signals — is basically everywhere you look in public radio.
Too much sitting increases heart failure risk and disability risk, and shortens life expectancy, studies have found. But according to an analysis published Wednesday of 20 of the best studies done so far, there's little evidence that workplace interventions like the sit-stand desk or even the flashier pedaling or treadmill desks will help you burn lots more calories, or prevent or reverse the harm of sitting for hours on end.
Surely, if Apple is going to introduce a smaller top-of-the-line iPhone and a smaller top-of-the-line iPad, it makes sense to also introduce a smaller top-of-the-line Macintosh too, right?
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Thanks for reading.