Category: Technology

Via Daring Fireball, a well done review. But what a fanboy line:

Disneyland is the Apple of theme parks

Dude, Disney was picking up trash the second it was dropped before the original Mac existed. A guy named Walt drove this, not a guy named Steve. For attention to detail, feel free to say that iPhone is the Disney of smart phones.

Not the other way around.

It’s a longish read, but Gruber has the most thoughtful piece on the Apple Watch I’ve read.

First point is that this isn’t really a tech item, it’s a luxury/fashion item. You’ll note that Apple never calls it a smart watch.

Second point is that it will be expensive by tech standards. Gruber’s estimates:

• Apple Watch Sport (aluminum/glass): $349 (not a guess)
• Apple Watch (stainless steel/sapphire): $999
• Apple Watch Edition (18-karat gold/sapphire): $4,999

In short: hundreds for Sport, a thousand for stainless steel, thousands for gold.

Most people think I’m joking when I say the gold ones are going to start at $5,000. I couldn’t be more serious.

Gruber knows his stuff. This is speculation, but pretty well reasoned speculation.

I’ve been laying off Apple over the nude photo hack because the facts weren’t in. Yes, they had an issue (recently fixed) where you could guess passwords forever without being locked out (really bad). They had an issue where you could detect if an email was a legit iCloud account (fairly bad).

But this is ridiculous.

For $400 I could steal iCloud data from everyone in my office

The article lists 5 good things Apple needs to do:

• 1) Encrypt iCloud backups.
• 2) Stop storing iCloud Authentication Tokens in plaintext.
• 3) Make two-factor authentication actually protect something more than just payment methods.
• 4) Make two-factor verification easier to set-up.
• 5) Be more transparent about how secure iCloud backups are and how easy it is for others to access that data.

Otherwise tell people not to use iCloud…

Sometimes we forget to take a step back and appreciate some of the amazing technology that is going on. Ten years ago the European Space Agency launched a spacecraft, Rosetta, to intercept a comet.

Ten years ago.

To meet up with the comet, Rosetta needed to loop around the sun four times, getting gravity assist from multiple planets (Mars once and Earth three times).

I can’t embed this video, but check it out.

Think of the complexity involved in getting this right. Yet here we are, ten years later, and Rosetta just completed maneuvers to place it in orbit around the comet.

That is just flat out amazing.

I wasn’t aware this practice had a name, but I was already concerned how this was just as bad, or worse, than the anti-net neutrality fast lanes. This refers to when a mobile carrier says “we won’t count data to this app against your plan”.

Fred Wilson, typically, is already thinking about it:

But what all of this zero rating activity is setting up is a mobile internet that looks a lot more like cable TV than our wide open Internet. Soon a startup will have to negotiate a zero rating plan before launching because mobile app customers will be trained to only use apps that are zero rated on their network.

I strongly encourage policy makers, policy wonks, internet activists, and anyone who cares about protecting an open internet for all to take a hard look at zero rating. Like all the best scourges, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing