For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!

I am reminded of this quote from Art Webb:

If you make everything bold, nothing is bold.

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Impact: A person with physical access may be able to access the user’s password

Description: A logic error in the kernel’s DMA protection permitted firewire DMA at loginwindow, boot, and shutdown, although not at screen lock. This update addresses the issue by preventing firewire DMA at all states where the user is not logged in.

CVE-ID

CVE-2011-3215 : Passware, Inc.

That sounds an awful lot like it patched the previously report security vulnerability of FileVault 2.

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That’s right, Ice Cream Sandwich now occupies 1% of Android devices according to this month’s Android Platform Distribution chart.

He does note that Gingerbread is on 58.6% of Android devices. For those not familiar with the ridiculous naming system in Android, Gingerbread is versions 2.3-2.3.7 and Ice Cream Sandwich (the newest) is version 4.0-4.0.3.

In other words it is big news that software that is two versions old is now on the majority of devices and that three months in 1% of devices are using the latest version of Android.

What a mess.

I’d be pissed if I bought a new Android phone on a two year contract and was still stuck on Gingerbread.

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This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while now. Say you are a diehard Apple fan and you also love Google, just not Android phones. Google wins a patent spat against Apple and now, all of a sudden, the Apple products that you can buy are restricted. Maybe you can’t get the latest tech when you want it.

Does this kind of result make you more or less an Apple fan? Does this make you more or less willing to buy Android or Google products, knowing that they are the cause of these restrictions?

I find it interesting the damage that can come from protecting your own intellectual property.

In other news: Germans can’t use the push feature of iCloud email anymore.

Update: That was short lived.

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After they did (I am sure) copious amounts of research, the people at Teambox have decided that Lion:

[…] breaks the web with a non-standard behavior, and gives you no JS API to prevent it.

The funny thing is, does it really “break the web”? Nope, just checked and I could still use “the web”. What about the non-standard part? Well it comes standard on all new Macs this way, so I am going to go ahead and say that this is 100% a standard feature for most all Mac users.

What this article is really about is a web app that doesn’t work well with Lion’s new default behavior, thus breaking this one particular web app. What this isn’t about is “breaking the web”.

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Kessler just says that anyone with this $995 software can crack a FileVault 2 disk in no more than 40 minutes using a FireWire port. Which is a line of bullshit. The most important part is that the user must already be logged in — that gives every FileVault 2 user an easy way around the security hole: logging out.

It’s one thing to write a craptastic-linkbaiting headline, but it’s an entirely worse offense to not even give readers the full details of the story you are writing about.

Pathetic.

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Put another way, the product cannot extract encryption keys on static data or before the keys have been summoned as part of the logging-in process. As long as the login is not automatic users should be safe.

In the case of FireVault, hackers also need to get to the memory contents through a working FireWire port so remote access is not possible.

I am guessing that a locked screen will still count as “logged in”. So if traveling it might actually be a fantastic idea to actually turn your laptop off so that this software cannot be used to hack into it.

One other interesting thing is that FireWire must be used. I am assuming you could use Thunderbolt to get a FireWire port, but what about on my 2010 MacBook Air that has only USB?

Update: Thomas Brand chimed in to confirm my suspicions about Thunderbolt:

@BenjaminBrooks After looking at the FireWire FileVault 2 exploit it looks like that Thunderbolt would provide the same bus level access.

— Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand) February 3, 2012

and:

@BenjaminBrooks Thunderbolt and FireWire access data directly from the system bus allowing the exploit. USB goes through the CPU.

— Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand) February 3, 2012

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While airborne I got an email from my real estate agent saying that he needed some paperwork signed for the home my wife and I are purchasing. I used iMessage to tell my wife to sign the paperwork on her Mac and then send me the file. At this point I could have pulled out my MacBook Air and paid another Wi-Fi fee to connect it, but I had PDFPen on my iPad — why not give it a go?

I did and it worked fantastically well.

You might be thinking that there are hundreds of apps on the App Store that can do this same thing, and there likely are, but PDFPen has some really great things that made me love it.

A few of those things are:

• iCloud Sync
• Stored Signatures
• Email a “Printed” PDF

iCloud

If you have PDFPen on your Mac, then PDFPen for the iPad will sync the files between the two applications over iCloud. Unless you are a heavy PDF user this likely doesn’t seem to be all that life-changing of a feature, but it still is pretty great.

The iCloud support in iOS and Mac applications has become a fantastic Dropbox like utility, but unlike Dropbox it is something that is built-in at the system level.

You don’t have to think about it and that is key.

So when I sent out 4-5 signed PDFs from PDFPen on my iPad and a few days later was sitting at my MacBook Air with a need to resend a couple of those documents — I didn’t need to go find my iPad. All I had to do was grab those PDFs in PDFPen and resend them. They were just there.

It’s these really small moments that add up to a product that just fits in your life. More developers need to add iCloud syncing — it really is great — and I am glad PDFPen has it.

Stored Signatures

I didn’t know this when I was signing all those PDFs, but there is a fantastic feature of PDFPen that allows you to store your own signatures and other scribbles so that they can be added to any document with one tap. Here’s how you do that (from a Smile newsletter):

I love that feature and have already added not just my signature, but my initials as well. It’s a nice little touch and I can imagine there being some really great uses for this (including storing company logos).

Emailing a “Printed” PDF

One of the most annoying problems that I run into on a weekly basis is filling out a PDF, sending it to a Windows user only to get an email back saying that the document isn’t filled out. I don’t know why this is a problem on Windows, but the layered approach that Preview seems to take on the Mac is not compatible in a universal manner.

The solution has always been to fill out the PDF and then print the file to a PDF — thus flattening the document. The fine folks at Smile must have had this problem too because when sending out the PDF in PDFPen you can choose to send it as a flattened file (printed PDF) if you want.

This is fantastic.

Two Criticisms

There are two things about this app that I don’t care for:

1. The icon. I have never been a fan of the styling that Smile uses for its icons and PDFPen is no exception. I know that I pick on icons a lot, but a good icon is a good icon. A bad icon is one that I never want on my home screen — so if my home screen is your goal, you better make your icon good.
2. Highlighting PDFs is a bit awkward. I could see this being pretty good with a Cosmonaut, but with my finger I felt like I never learned how to highlight before. If some sort of tracking could be built-in so that you can make relatively straight lines then we would really have something here. Until then, if your primary use case is highlighting, you might want to look elsewhere. ¹

One Step Closer

Like I said before, I am not a PDF guru. However I am a real estate professional and PDFs are a norm in my business. There’s nothing missing from PDFPen for my needs, which takes me just one step closer to not needing my Mac at all.

In fact, I didn’t even need my MacBook Air at Macworld until I recorded a podcast — a large part of not needing the Air was because of PDFPen for iPad.

1. Also, why are you highlighting so many PDFs?

Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, will be based on the Windows 8 kernel and not on Windows CE as are current versions. This will not impact app compatibility: Microsoft expects to have over 100,000 Windows Phone 7.5-compatible apps available by the time WP8 launches, and they will all work fine on this new OS.

That’s interesting and in reading his post it sounds more and more like Windows Phone 8 will be very similar to Windows 8. That is: it will be a sibling to Windows instead of a cousin to Windows.

I am not sure if this will be good or bad, but if they can pull it off while maintaining app compatibility (even while adding more screen resolutions) it should be a win.

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It’s easy not to “be evil” when you’re ahead. But when you’re backed into a corner and your usual strategies aren’t working, it’s easy to get frustrated, scared, and angry, and throw previously held morals and standards out the window.

Be sure to also read his footnote, as it is a great summary of the interesting wording chosen for Google’s mantra.

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When they say “the iPad isn’t a PC” what they mean “there’s no way I would or could give up my PC and use an iPad instead.”

— Shawn Blanc (@shawnblanc) February 2, 2012

By creating in-house content, social Web sites can increase the amount of time that users spend on their sites, thereby increasing their value to advertisers.

Sounds an awful lot like blogging about blogging. Which sounds boring as crap.

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Best feature: exposure and focus locks that are independent of each other.

(Thanks to all on Twitter that recommended this app.)

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Spoiler: it doesn’t.

However the angle is so steep that the stand isn’t great on your desk.

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1. Sorry for the bad audio and heavy breathing I am a bit sick/congested from traveling.

First, some more follow-up:

• In the last installment I reported that I had some trouble getting the second strap on my shoulder. The tip provided from Tom Bihn was to loosen the strap that I put on last as I take the bag off. ¹ This is a cumbersome tip, but it does work. When in San Francisco I didn’t run into this issue given that I wasn’t wearing layers of clothing. So this may not be an issue for people that aren’t constantly layering clothes.
• The zippers on the bag continue to get easier and easier to close one handed — this is great news.

I’ll keep this pretty short because I don’t have much to say, but did want to talk about two things: expandability and the airport.

Conference Mode

While at Macworld|iWorld I found the Smart Alec to be outstanding. It kept my hands free the entire time and at times carried quite the load of gear. The bag went from carrying just an iPad and battery chargers to carrying the goodies purchased at the Apple Company Store and a couple of jackets that Shawn and I carried with us.

I still preferred to not carry the bag around if possible (I would feel this way about any bag), but it never once became uncomfortable to carry with me. The only hinderance I ran into was when on the expo floor due to how crowded it was in spots.

Last I will note that while moving around SF with the pack on there were more than a few times when the back of the Smart Alec became very warm — it felt like my MacBook Air had woken up and was overheating in the bag. This is likely due to how tightly the pack sits against your back and the dense material, adding that extra layer to your body. It was never uncomfortable, but it was warm enough that I noticed when I took the backpack off.

TSA, Flying, and Airports

Had I not been carrying an additional shoulder strap type carry-on, the Smart Alec would have made for the best TSA line bag I have ever had. It was fast and easy to pull out my MacBook Air and to stuff away the various items in my pockets — all in secured areas of the bag. And I mean fast.

However trying to add another shoulder strap in lock step with a backpack is cumbersome at best and downright painful most of the time. I hate wheeled luggage because you can’t carry as much in them and you are at risk for them not fitting in overhead bins, but that would be a better option than carrying my Patagonia MLC with me on this trip.

The absolute best part of the bag is how the pockets open, because it’s very easy to stand the bag up on the ground and pull out my iPad from the main compartment. I don’t have to futz about with balancing the bag and trying to get my iPad out as I have had to with most shoulder bags. Set the backpack down, unzip, and pull the iPad out — all while the bag is standing upright on its own.

I can do that one handed.

Bottom Line

This is the best bag I have ever owned. It excels when you need it to go from medium to huge. But it doesn’t do small and compact well.

It is, however, lightweight.

The best feature of this bag, and I imagine of most backpacks, is just how freeing it is to have both hands free and not having to worry about balance. I don’t feel a desire to go back to a single strap bag of any kind.

The tradeoff is size.

A small backpack looks stupid, so you have to put up with a larger sized bag, but you don’t really feel the extra weight of the bag. Having a backpack always makes it look like you are carrying more than people with fancy minimalist shoulder bags, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you actually are carrying more.

1. They have told me that they are working on a video to demonstrate what they mean.

The theft has shaken Mojra’s trust in the TSA.

“You can grope me, but you touch my iPad and it’s on.”

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Information (content) does not want to be free. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. That’s a big difference, and also the massive opportunity that should be at the center right now.

Worth a full read.

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1. It should strike you as awesome that Microsoft did this, because think back 10 years and try to imagine them being this snarky. I love this post. Not because it is helpful, just because Microsoft seems to be everything that Google didn’t want to be, but now somehow Microsoft is looking better than Google.
2. Holy crap Hotmail has “hundreds of millions” of users.

You may not want to switch from Google to Microsoft, but you have to hand it to Microsoft that this is a pretty great post. The people reading the Microsoft blog are likely the people willing to switch to Microsoft.

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With many investors (including yours truly) ready to proclaim retail and technology giant Amazon (AMZN) as the No. 1 contender to Apple (AAPL), this makes its upcoming earnings announcement on Tuesday all the more interesting.

and:

It was an instant success and was termed the “iPad killer” – much to the dismay of Apple investors.

Today, Stu Woo and John Letzing for the Wall Street Journal reports:

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant on Tuesday reported fourth-quarter revenue of $17.43 billion, up 35% from a year earlier. But profit plunged 57% to $177 million as the company continued to spend on warehouses, technology and its Kindle electronic devices. Amazon’s operating expenses rose 38% in the quarter from a year earlier, exceeding its 35% revenue increase.

Sounds like Amazon is really challenging Apple’s top spot…

But would anybody in their right mind be disappointed with $16.5 billion in quarterly cash flow instead of $17.5 billion?

Yes, Wall Street. But then again you did qualify that with “right mind”.

This is an incredibly over simplified view of the problem — paying more for manufacturing doesn’t solve the core issue. The core issue is that such poor labor standards are acceptable in China.

Giving Foxconn more money just means that Foxconn makes more money.

Apple could demand that it be passed along to the employees, but let’s be honest because that is going to require a lot of double checks.

Back to the above quote — while $16.5 billion and $17.5 billion are still huge numbers, Wall Street tends to not reward declining numbers. So yeah, there would be disappointment — especially so if Wall Street were to find out that Cook just decided he would like to make less money.

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It’s dead simple given this forum post.

Steps

1. In Launch Center tap Add New Launch…
2. Tap Launch Website/App
3. Enter a title of your choosing.
4. For the URL field type: omnifocus:///add
5. Tap done.

Works like a charm. This has moved Launch Center to my home screen.

Right now I only have three actions in it: Call wife, Flashlight, and New Tweet. Those three actions though eliminated the need for one app (flashlight) and makes two other “common” actions very easy. Right now it is a page 2 app for me, but it may just usurp Instapaper for page 1. ¹

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1. No offense Instapaper, I just don’t use you that much on my iPhone.

Over time, I found it became less valuable; a utility for procrastination. As the company sought rapid growth, the design moved away from encouraging users to create close personal networks, towards openly sharing every aspect of their lives, with everybody and often unknowingly.

True, but this bit is pretty scathing:

Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move.

Ouch. Even given how much I hate Facebook — I can’t agree with that last quote. I do however think that Lloyd is right in saying that Facebook has become rather arrogant — so too has Google, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM.

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But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Minar doesn’t think Google is disregarding their mantra, but I do. I think his above statement is actually pretty accurate because Google does seem to have ‘moved on’ and I think that while it may not be fair to say the company has been “evil” — it is fair to say they are trending towards that line.

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Boycotting Apple for better Foxconn wages and conditions is like having sex for virginity. Entirely counter-productive and exactly the wrong thing to be doing.

Sounds about right to me.

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How do we reference locations in electronic books? Historically, it’s been easy to throw out a page number, and many people were likely to have the same edition as you or at least one with the same page layout.

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Inside the iFixit Thirsty Bag you’ll find two “molecular sieve packets”. Each of these contains powerful liquid absorption material that, according to iFixit, can reduce the atmospheric humidity to 1% RH and suck up pretty much all liquid inside your device over night.

Sounds like a fantastic piece of emergency kit to keep in your house and for $6.95 it seems like you can’t go wrong. ¹

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1. I ordered 2.

Features

• Quick shot camera (allows faster picture taking)
• Image recognition integrated
• Syncs with cloud account
• Easy search (find your visual memos by keywords and tags)
• Map location (locate your visual memos on a map)
• Available on iPhone and Web

Free for up to 30 visual memos/month. Learn more at Kooaba.

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Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?

Good point and I think it applies to far more than just Facebook. It’s the same as all the auto-tweet and auto-Facebook-update junk that iOS apps love baking in. Too often these apps default to sharing with all services possible, far too often.

Look no further than someone you follow on Instagram that also automatically posts every picture to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Flickr — that’s not just tiring, it’s annoying.

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Actually, the search field just looks like it always did.

Pat just posted about how you add the very same to your site, so be sure to hit the link if you don’t want the iFrame option that I was using. You can also see some of the params he set to match link colors to the theme of this site.

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With this method (as I read it) this statement would not be correct: “I own the Steve Jobs iBook.” Instead it seems the correct statement would be: “I own the Steve Jobs book, from the iBookstore.” That’s far more clumsy in my mind.

You could, technically, leave out the “from the iBookstore” bit, but in doing so you would have no way of indicating that you purchased a digital version instead of a dead tree version.

Apparently that was odd(?) to many (judging from email and Tweets), but Tim Ricchuiti sums up the counterpoint in his blog:

But why would anyone care to go to the trouble of specifying what version they bought? No one says “I bought the new Snow Patrol album from the iTunes Music Store.” And no one who heard “I bought the new Snow Patrol album” would assume you did so from Tower Records.

In other words here’s the arguments that I have been hearing as to why defining a book as an ebook, iBook, or physical book is irrelevant:

1. Things are changing so much that it is assumed all books are digital — or so Apple wants that to be the assumption.
2. People never say: “I bought the paperback”, or “I bought the hardcover.”
3. A book is a book — there’s no difference what kind you bought, just that you bought (and presumable read) the book.

1

I think this argument is clearly what Apple wants, but also is very clearly not where we are currently at in the book market. Not enough people buy books in digital form to make the assumption that all books are digital — yet.

2

It is true that people don’t usually clarify which version of the dead-tree book they purchased. But it is equally true that a paperback is a different book than the hardcover and thus the distinction is sometimes made. 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.

These types of books are simply different.

3

I agree that reading the book is the most important part in owning a book. But as I said above there are very real differences between the books.

Perhaps the most important of which is that digital books can be (and are) updated.

The Steve Jobs biography was my example because I own the following versions:

• Hardcover
• Kindle
• iBookstore book

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).

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And so once the basic business proposition is “this company will make the most amazing Web services available and give them away for free in order to sell you to advertisers,” plummeting levels of privacy become inevitable.

Very true, he also asks the million dollar question:

The business question is that if we assume some other firm or set of firms could come up with comparable quality products to Gmail, Youtube, Google Search, etc., how many people would be willing to pay a premium for privacy-respecting ad-free versions of them and how much would they be willing to pay?

I would, but I am not the majority.

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The books available on the iBookstore are just called books.

I had no clue, but this seems more clumsy.

With this method (as I read it) this statement would not be correct: “I own the Steve Jobs iBook.” Instead it seems the correct statement would be: “I own the Steve Jobs book, from the iBookstore.” That’s far more clumsy in my mind.

You could, technically, leave out the “from the iBookstore” bit, but in doing so you would have no way of indicating that you purchased a digital version instead of a dead tree version.

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Google’s best shot to turn Android into a business with iPhone-like profits would be to create an Android-powered oil rig and get drilling. 

As Siegler states, it doesn’t seem silly to think that one day Android will make Google money, but it does seem silly to even imagine them making iOS like profits from Android. I think this is going to become a major problem for investors as they sit and watch Apple rake in the cash. Moreover it will be hard for Google to show a direct link from Android to profits — Android seems to be set up to indirectly profit Google and I think that will make it pretty hard to justify to Wall Street.

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Brought to you by: Verses.

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I noticed right from the start that I was always using the bigger one whenever there was a choice […]

He carries one work phone and one personal phone, but they are different sizes and he likes the bigger screen. Again, Bray:

Yeah, there are a few occasions where I have to wiggle the phone around in my hand to reach some part of the screen. But the huge display and the soft buttons just make the Nexus S feel dinky and stupid and clumsy.

That’s the part I find interesting because I read that as: “Yes the larger phone is more cumbersome to use, but I like that.” I get one phone dwarfing another, but is wiggling a phone around in your hand really the less clumsy option?

Bray again:

But unless I’m weird, big-screen phones are going to be appealing to lots of people.

Define “lots”…

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A new iPhone plus holiday shopping season is apparently like gasoline on a fire.

That’s why my bet is that Apple keeps this ‘new’ release schedule of a new iPhone every fall.

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Anecdotally, I’ve had about a 50% failure rate recently.

Same here and what’s more is that Siri not being ‘available’ is far more frustrating than Siri not understanding you.

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That doesn’t mean Apple owns the content of the book. You are free to sell the content of the book on Amazon or any other digital bookstore — you just can’t use Apple’s tools to build the book.

If The Beard says it is so, then I believe it.

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Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks.

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Put another way, is Google moving from being a company that organizes the world’s information to one that organizes the information of “your” world?

Yes. And I don’t think that’s good — it’s certainly not what I want.

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From left to right in the video it is: Brett Kelly, Stephen Hackett, me, and Shawn Blanc.

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