On January 14, David W. Boles wrote a post wherein he describes a little hiccup he had when trying to transfer the warranty from his dead Apple display to his replacement one. He notes his difficulties with AppleCare with quotes from the email exchange. There’s no identifying information attached.

Today, he received a curious email ostensibly from Apple:

I am one of the policy representatives here at Apple. It came to our concern that our policy was broken. It is illegal to transmit information from voicemails, e-mails, transactions, etc, into public or private blogs and forums, vlogs, as well as documentation onto the internet, except for the proper authorities.

It goes on to demand a takedown within 24 hours.

This email is curious for a number of reasons. First, it contains a number of basic grammatical errors and does not contain the standard email footer that is the very subject of the exchange.

Of even greater curiosity is “why?”. People have posted contents of emails from AppleCare, Apple Developer — heck, even emails from Steve Jobs. Nobody, to my knowledge, has received one of these emails before. Of course there have been prior legal threats: blogs have received takedown notices for images, and ThinkSecret got sued out of existence because of inside information that they published. But none of these cases are for posted email exchanges. Very, very curious.

— January 31, 2012

Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest Internet retailer, missed analysts’ fourth-quarter revenue estimates and reported a 57 percent decline in profit, dragged down by…

Wait, let me guess.

Alright, got my prediction. Carry on.

…shipping costs and the money-losing Kindle Fire.

I was going to go with Bezos makin’ it rain.

— January 31, 2012

Chris Ziegler:

Counterclank isn’t malware, per se, it’s just an “aggressive” ad SDK designed to help apps (usually free ones) monetize. It has some capabilities that most users would find unpleasant (sending ads as push notifications, for instance), but it simply doesn’t meet the typical benchmark for malware — it doesn’t exist with the goal of trying to steal users’ data, and it’s not trying to compromise devices in an illegal or fraudulent way.

It doesn’t steal your data, it just pushes ads in an obnoxious extension of its function.

— January 30, 2012

Nice new AirPort Utility. There’s a strange mixture of Helvetica and Lucida Grande that Apple is employing throughout OS X. I think it’s only a matter of time before they switch the whole OS over to Helvetica (Neue).

— January 30, 2012

Ben Brooks wrote an interesting counterpoint to the rising argument that the medium of purchase is irrelevant, specifically that of eBooks vs. dead tree books:

I can tell you from first hand experience that the reading experience is very different on each of the different mediums and that’s why the distinction matters to me. I don’t care which version you bought because it changes what you read, but I do care because it may not be the same as the book I read (sometimes in the minor content differences, but always in experience and layout).

Curiously, Brooks implies that he cares what version others buy, which I overreaching. But the main point he is trying to communicate is that books are not books in all forms; some forms are superior to others. Brooks also thinks it’s extremely important to note which version of the book one purchased:

Perhaps the content isn’t different, but saying “there’s a great quote on page 51″ will yield very different results depending on the version you buy.

That’s why the differentiation is important. An iBook versus paper or Kindle book is a very different thing than the others. They will visually look different and that’s why it isn’t fair to lump the different types of book all into one category.

While that’s true, one has never said (or should never say) the page a quote is on in these general terms. If one is citing it, it becomes important to note exactly which version of the book it is. But if you’re referring to it in general conversation, there’s simply no need.

Marco Arment rebuts thusly:

Whether I’ve bought a book made of dead trees or encrypted bits doesn’t really matter, and I don’t think my experience suffers when I choose the bits.

Since I don’t think the distinction matters, I rarely need to say “I bought the Steve Jobs book in iBooks,” or “I bought the Steve Jobs book on my Kindle.”

I just say, “I bought the Steve Jobs book.”

The format is irrelevant in informal contexts. It’s what you’re reading, not what tool you’re using to do so.

— January 30, 2012

Jennifer Granick, writing for the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School, regarding the allegations against Megaupload:

But from a criminal law perspective, the important question is did Defendants believe they were covered by the [DMCA] Safe Harbor? This is because criminal infringement requires a showing of willfulness. The view of the majority of Federal Courts is that “willfulness” means a desire to violate a known legal duty, not merely the will to make copies.

An interesting perspective from a legal standpoint. This comes in the wake of a report that the case against Megaupload might not be successful for the prosecution, and will therefore set a precedent for similar sites.

— January 30, 2012

Insanely great British band The Heavy on their Facebook page:

“If you heard How You Like Me Now being used by Republican, Newt Gingrich, in his campaign, we’d like you to know it had fuck all to do with us and we are trying to stop it being used. Twats.”

Newt doesn’t deserve the majesty of this song.

— January 28, 2012

Sara Yin, for PC Magazine:

The Trojan ‘Android.Counterclank’ was packaged in at least 13 free games published by three different publishers, making it harder to trace. Symantec notified Google on Thursday and at press time, 9 of the apps were still available in Google’s official app store.

[…]

According to Symantec researcher Irfan Asrar, ‘Counterclank’ can carry out commands from a remote control center on your mobile device. According to Symantec’s virus definition, it steals information and can potentially display ads on your device.

The knee-jerk response to these alerts is that you only get malware when you download sketchy files, but this trojan was discovered in a number of very popular titles. Creating a greater problem is the decrease in people’s inhibitions about downloading apps due to the proliferation of these stores.

It’s utterly ridiculous that Google doesn’t have measures in place to prevent this, leaving it up to the user to figure out when it’s too late. It’s equally absurd that the first recommended thing to do after buying an Android phone is to install antivirus software.

— January 27, 2012

Businessweek:

The message was different when, under shareholder pressure, the board of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion finally replaced co-Chief Executive Officers Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with COO Thorsten Heins on Jan. 22. “I don’t think that there is some drastic change needed,” said Heins, a former Siemens executive, in his first conference call as RIM’s new boss.

At least it will be a quick death.

— January 27, 2012

Sascha Segan, on the reheated iPhone 5 rumours:

Hey, did you hear the iPhone 5 is coming? And according to the latest rumors from 9to5Mac, it has a 4-inch screen and a new body design!

Repeat after me: Nothing to see here.

Good point. These rumours are almost exactly what we’ve been hearing since the middle of last year, which could mean a few things. On the one hand, you could argue that because these rumours are relatively constant, it’s been the iPhone 5 design all along. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, right?

On the other hand, though, these rumours are often lazy and lukewarm. Segan points out that the latest rumours also suggest that there isn’t a final design at this point, and that Apple is testing a number of contenders. Furthermore, he argues that all these hardware rumours really miss the point:

The success of the iPhone 4S also shows that Apple’s secret sauce isn’t hardware as much as software. […] What drew consumers to the 4S – and what will draw them to the iPhone 5 – is iOS, Apple’s apps, Apple’s cloud services and the spectacular third-party developer community that Apple has nurtured through the industry’s best app store.

That’s a great argument. Of course, software isn’t the entire story. Apple’s success in hardware has been about balancing available technology with their priorities and values. As long as they continue the balance and the precedent they have set, the iPhone 5 will have excellent hardware with an amazing software stack on top.

— January 26, 2012