Irby Pace:

The photographs in “Unintended Consequences” come from camera equipped devices in Apple Computer [sic] stores. On a daily basis people are leaving their portraits behind on iPhones, iPads and iPods. Customers are disregarding their own discretion and abandoning these photographs. Since these images are anonymous the participants can represent themselves however they chose to without scrutiny.

Great interpretation of these found images. Pace’s exhibition runs February 6-10 at the Cora Stafford Gallery in Denton, Texas.

Élyse Betters:

The new agreement explained that Apple never planned to confine the distribution of non-.iBooks content, and the EULA clarified users are allowed to distribute .iBooks formatted documents elsewhere—they just cannot charge elsewhere.

This is in line with what was expected all along. Still, it’s good that they clarified the license agreement. As for the update, however…

The updated license agreement is a free 140 MB download through the App Store.

They really need to sort that out. Ridiculous.

John Paczkowski:

In a statement given to AllThingsD, Apple confirmed that the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G/UMTS-based iPads should be returning to the shelves of its German online store in a matter of hours.

“All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple’s online store in Germany shortly,” an Apple spokeswoman told AllThingsD. “Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

Following the fall launch of its wildly popular iPhone 4S last year, Apple reportedly plans to return to its summer launch schedule and unveil the next-generation iPhone 5 during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June. DigiTimes relayed the claim, which cited a Daiwa Securities analyst when it first appeared in Chinese-language newspaper Commercial Times on Thursday.

To paraphrase Dana Gould, it’s like a photo of a drawing of a hologram—three layers of nothing.

Good news for Android users.

Sharif Sakr:

There’s an old saying that eternal love lasts for two years. Apparently, that also applies to Peek’s bare bones email and Twitter devices, which launched in 2008 and 2009 respectively. We’ve received emails from users anxious that their handsets — all running on T-Mo’s network — stopped working on January 30th, despite them having paid up to $299 for “lifelong service.”

The devices were clearly not going to be a success, and there’s simply no way that they could have provided lifelong service. Despite this, the few customers that Peek did have are now left with a totally useless device, instead of a mostly useless one.

Looks like a hell of a machine this year.

Shawn King:

Again, Blue’s attempt at redefinition of the term notwithstanding, the term “Booth Babe” has always been used to refer to scantily clad women used to lure people into a trade show booth. I’ve never heard anyone ever claim anything different. Until now.

While King doesn’t quote the revision Violet Blue added to her crass article on ZDNet, it shows a clearly idiotic attempt at back-pedalling:

“Booth babe” is a job description. Some people (none of whom are booth babes) seem to think the term indicates a gendered insult.

It isn’t an insult—it’s just a pejorative, demeaning description of what many consider to be a blatant attempt at sexualised marketing where it isn’t even relevant. It’s an Apple-related trade show, not AVN.

I have no problem with booth babes and women that want to be sexy in tech […]

She’s a developer, not a “booth babe”. Why is this so difficult?

[…] – unless they don’t know anything about their products or are unapproachable. The problem I have is with booth babe culture is the way men treat them, and the way men see and define booth babes.

You saw, defined and treated a non-booth babe in the way that you claim to despise.

This article is impressionistic, and not review or investigative.

As King put it in his article, someone on Twitter who wasn’t even at Macworld was able to find out who she is.

As it happens, the woman described in the beginning of this article was one many thought was a hired model in a sea of hired models.

Many? Again, as King points out, you were the only one.

She was, in fact, the unhappiest looking female company rep at Macworld. After that, how you view booth babes is up to you.

She isn’t a booth babe.

Matthew Panzarino:

Almost every overall mobile phone maker lost marker share in the final quarter of 2011, according to the latest Comscore numbers. Almost every one except Apple, that is, who grew its market share among all US mobile subscribers 2.2% to a 12.4% share of the market.

Overall, Android grew as a platform, but not one of the manufacturers grew market share. Apple had a scarcely-believable quarter.

Jim Dalrymple:

It was like the perfect storm of circumstances. If the employee had of simply toggled the iMessage on and off, or if the customer had of put in a different SIM card, none of this would have happened.

“This was an extremely rare situation that occurred when a retail employee did not follow the correct service procedure and used their personal SIM to help a customer who did not have a working SIM,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison told The Loop.

PocketNow obtained a copy of a Windows Phone 8 video only intended for partners, and the list of new features is long. Some of the features sound fantastic:

Similar to Windows 8, seamless SkyDrive integration will also play a big role with cloud syncing.

[…]

However, the biggest app details revealed are related to Skype integration. It is said to be fully integrated at the OS level.

OS-level VOIP is huge. If I recall correctly, there was a dedicated Skype cellphone released a number of years ago, and it was a spectacular marketplace failure. The difference here is that Microsoft’s platform is on phones that are shipping in volume. Not enormous volume, mind you, but they are selling.

On the other hand, a few of the features seem painful. For example:

Not only will Windows Phone 8 share the same Metro style user interface as Windows 8 for tablets and PCs, but developers can reuse the same code for both operating systems.

I assume this is related to the ARM processor compatibility in Windows 8, but it seems like a recipe for horrible ports. It’s worth keeping in mind that Microsoft sees the tablet and PC as more similar, therefore the OS can be shared between the two. This is in direct contrast to Apple and Google, both of which see the tablet and phone as more alike, as made evident by the use of iOS and Android on both platforms.

Sheena Rossiter for Monocle:

Brazil’s Superior Labour Court is looking to take up a new law this month that will allow employees who check emails or answer phone calls after work to apply for overtime.

The article makes a number of good points, but the facet I’m most interested in relates to Foxconn’s new factories in Brazil. If the government there is this stringent about overtime, perhaps the working conditions at those factories will be dramatically improved over those in China.

Apple has lept to third place in terms of total phones shipped. That’s not smartphones shipped, just phones. First-placed Nokia and second-place Samsung both ship enormous quantities of basic cellphones; Apple only ships smartphones. Also, take a look at the third chart, where you can see both Motorola and Sony Ericsson—the two grandfathers of the cellphone market—both getting squashed out.

John Gruber linked to this Wall Street Journal post by Ben Rooney, who writes:

It would be safe to say that eyebrows were raised at news that Apple is hiring John Browett, the chief executive of British technology retailer Dixons, to head Apple Inc.’s global retail division.

[…]

Apple stores are the epitome of tasteful design, with no visible cash registers, highly trained staff and an exacting attention to visual appeal; think gleaming white counters, bleached wood floors, minimal and tasteful signage.

Currys and PC World (Dixon’s face of retail in the U.K.) are more in the “stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” end of retail, with all of the associated aesthetic appeal of that school of selling: garish purples, violent yellows, stacks of products, cluttered, aggressive, frenetic.

Someone, and I can’t remember who, commented that Dixons was like the worst of Best Buy and Radio Shack combined. This is certainly the vibe I get from British relatives and friends. Gruber astutely commented:

I’m not implying that Browett was hired to or intends to Dixons-ify the Apple Store experience — just pointing out that it’s a curious hire, also given how rarely Apple hires executives from outside the company.

It certainly is baffling. Browett was the CEO of Dixons, a very shitty retailer, and left to persue an SVP position at Apple, arguably one of the best consumer retail experiences anywhere.

Cute video to announce this edition of notebooks.

Cabel Sasser:

“Hey guys! In 10.7.3 let’s move the Safari [bookmark folder] arrow up 1 pixel and, like, 3 pixels over, for some reason.”

“See me, right? I want a jammy dodger, like a fuckin’ jam sandwich.”

Remember 2004? Mark Zuckerberg must remember this article in The Crimson:

While Zuckerberg promised that thefacebook.com would boast new features by the end of the week, he said that he did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue.

“I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address,” he said.

Via Matt Lynley, who quipped:

Hey guys, have you heard of this Facebook thing? Hundreds of users. Dunno if it’ll go anywhere.

Today, Alexia Tsotsis:

However sundry reports were all over the map for 2011 revenue (it was actually $3.7 billion), but hit the $1 billion in net income right on the head.

A billion dollars for what is, at its core, advertising.

Update

A bright chap on Hacker News named “teej” posted this great analysis:

Facebook’s engagement is shifting to mobile. Their entire business model relies on web. Their app ecosystem has been crashing as a result, and display advertising is likely to follow.

Jacqui Cheng:

It seems as if the employee in question, who Gizmodo is referring to as Wiz, put his own SIM into the customer’s son’s iPhone to activate it before putting the SIM back into his own phone. (If this is indeed what happened, then we must say we’re surprised an Apple employee had not heard about this bug before doing so.) Now, the customer’s son is seeing all the messages sent between Wiz and his friends, which apparently include some borderline “sexts,” photos that are inappropriate to publish in full, and other personal details. In one exchange, it appears as if Wiz is attempting to hook up with his coworker at the Apple Store. (Don’t do that, Wiz! You’ll regret it!)

This is a pretty serious bug, and one that because of Apple’s policies, nobody knows how close a patch is to shipping.

Update

Carter Allen points out that it’s also Gizmodo being a gigantic dick, as usual:

@nickheer More serious than the bug is the fact that Gizmodo is using it to spy on someone. That’s insane.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kate Heartfield:

Why would the people who control the release of this show make pirating it so attractive for people in much of the world?

Heartfield gives two examples of things she tried to watch recently only to find that they aren’t available: the BBC series Sherlock, to which this quote pertains, and the Disney classic Cinderella. The former is restricted by geography, and the latter is unavailable due to the dickish “Disney Vault”.

But one can replace “this show” with “media” and the above quote would still be true. The difference in legal content that’s available online in the US versus Canada is enormous, despite much of it available in other forms here. For instance, Discovery streams nearly all of their shows via their web player, but not Mythbusters. It is, however, available on iTunes, but if you just want to catch up on an odd episode, purchasing it is not an attractive option.