Variety:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says the service’s iconic 140-character message limit isn’t going away.

On NBC’s “Today” show Friday, Dorsey said the company has no plans to expand the 140-character limit, which dates back to Twitter’s launch in 2006. “It’s staying,” he said. “It’s a good constraint for us, and… it allows for of-the-moment for everything.”

Interesting. I can’t remember the source, but seems to me Jack Dorsey made a comment last month (about the time Twitter sent out their shareholders letter) about improving the situation that requires people to take screen shots of text to share thoughts longer than 140 characters. Was that just lip service?

UPDATE: From an op-ed piece for 9to5Mac by Zac Hall:

In the past, however, Dorsey has tweeted screenshots of text walls from Apple’s Notes app to communicate a lengthier message that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, but text shots present their own problems like lack of being found in search and being easily translated in other languages.

Dorsey’s comments today do not rule out the possibility of Twitter adding a new attachment card for passages of text, in the same way you can add polls or photo galleries to tweets today.

Yup, that was it. It’d be nice if Twitter gave us an official mechanism to make longer (but still searchable) tweet attachments.

Susan Crawford is a Harvard Law Professor and was President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

From her Backchannel post:

The FBI has been terrific at reading statutes — including CALEA — in ways that require the rest of us to do headstands to understand what the agency is up to. Their claim about CALEA in their latest brief in the Apple case is a shining example of just this kind of breathless, vertiginous, Alice-in-Wonderland assertion: CALEA, they say, limited only law enforcement’s authority to directly require companies to redesign devices and software. But once law enforcement is authorized by a court to do a search — given a search warrant, in other words — then (under the AWA) an FBI official can ask the court to do what law enforcement is prohibited from doing directly under section 1002 of CALEA.

Got it? Right, I don’t either. As the well-respected lawyer Albert Gidari carefully explains in a recent blog post, this is a weirdly circular argument that ignores the specific limitation Congress enacted to remove the government from the business of dictating the design of phones or software. No gaps; no interpretive sunlight: CALEA stops the government from doing what it wants to do to Apple.

Read the whole thing. It’s terrific.

Wil Gomez, writing for Mac360:

Apple has hundreds of millions of customers who use an array of cloud-based services. These include iCloud backups and storage, of course, but also include iTunes music and media, the various App Stores, Apple Music, and much more. Can you name another technology company with more cloud customers than Apple?

What Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and even IBM’s SoftLayer combine to provide is a rapidly scalable environment to store data and run computer services for Apple’s cloud-based requirements which are as complex and large as any other technology company in the world.

And:

Since the iPhone launched, the Mac’s customer base has nearly tripled. The iPad customer base is four times as large as that. Likewise, the iPhone now has more than 700,000,000 million users, and iOS alone has more than 1-billion accounts (iPhone and iPad). Most of that growth has come about in the past five or six years and Apple could not scale its own massive cloud infrastructure fast enough to keep up.

Good explainer to accompany yesterday’s news that Apple has signed up to use Google’s cloud services.

Some takeaways:

• Apple Watch is projected to have a 49.4% share of all smart watch sales this year.

• Android Wear will close the gap by 2020, with Apple Watch share dropping to 37.6% and Android Wear climbing from 6.1% this year to 35% in 2020.

• Apple’s projected Apple Watch shipments are 14 million for 2016 and 31 million in 2020.

These, obviously, are projections. Also, as they have done with the iPhone, Apple has established a beachhead on the higher price, higher margin side of this model, which means even at 37.6% of unit sales, Apple will bring in the lion’s share of the smart watch revenue.

To address the limited space available in the Riverside federal courthouse, as well as other logistical issues, the court has posted a set of what they call Order Setting Procedures.

Here’s the details:

• The hearing will take place at 1 PM PDT on March 22, 2016 in Courtroom 4 of the Riverside federal courthouse, located at 3470 12th Street in Riverside, California.

• Only counsel for the United States and counsel for Apple will be allowed to argue and examine witnesses at the hearing.

• Only counsel for the United States and counsel for Apple will be permitted to sit beyond the bar in Courtroom 4. In addition, given the space limitations, each side will be limited to 10 attorneys sitting in the area beyond the bar.

• Courtroom 4 can accommodate 54 individuals sitting in the gallery. [Apple gets 9, US gets 9, remainder are first come basis]

• There are 324 overflow room tickets. Want one? Line up outside the courthouse starting at 7a on March 22.

And most importantly:

• No recording of the hearing will be permitted. Counsel for the United States and Apple may use electronic devices during the hearing. All spectators in Courtroom 4 and the overflow rooms (which are also considered courtrooms for this proceeding) will be required to power down all electronic devices – including all wireless communication devices such as laptops, tablets, and smart phones – before the hearing begins.

The no recording rule might seem onerous, but there have been plenty of similar examples. Still, I would love to watch that hearing live.

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.

Among those interviewed were Apple engineers who are involved in the development of mobile products and security, as well as former security engineers and executives.

On the likelihood of a security engineer risking their livelihood to stand for this particular principal:

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.

“If someone attempts to force them to work on something that’s outside their personal values, they can expect to find a position that’s a better fit somewhere else,” said Window Snyder, the chief security officer at the start-up Fastly and a former senior product manager in Apple’s security and privacy division.

The losers here would be the FBI (not getting what they ask for) and Apple (losing skilled engineers, who’d be quickly snapped up by competitors).

And if the engineering staff refuses or quits? What’s next? Will the FBI pursue Apple’s source code?

Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to this.

Time:

Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with TIME’s Nancy Gibbs and Lev Grossman on March 10 to discuss his company’s rapidly escalating fight with the FBI over encryption. That is the subject of the magazine’s March 28 cover story, available here. What follows is a full transcript of their conversation.

I love this full court press (sorry – March Madness just started) Cook and Apple are putting on via the media. Granted, they have to but it’s still good to see Apple executives being more publicly involved in the world they live in. What they do affects many of us so it’s good to have them voicing their thoughts and opinions.

Mark Bergen, writing for re/code:

In its bid to raise its name in cloud computing services, Google nabbed a big-name customer: Apple. The iPhone-maker recently started storing portions of its iCloud and services data with Google’s cloud platform, according to sources familiar with the deal.

It’s a win for Google, which is gunning for larger companies as cloud customers. But it might be short-lived, as it looks like Apple is also simultaneously building out its own system to bring data stored on its millions of devices in house.

And:

For Apple, though, the deal might portend a move to cut costs ahead of creating its own cloud storage system. Google’s cloud team is in deal-making mode, aggressively seeking to bring in new customers to use its cloud services, and may have sweetened the deal — or been more willing than AWS and Azure to concede to Apple’s demands. (And Apple, if anything, is good at aggressive demand-making.)

Amazing to me that Apple hasn’t already solved this problem, given their goal of owning the entire stack.

Palo Alto Networks:

We’ve discovered a new family of iOS malware that successfully infected non-jailbroken devices we’ve named “AceDeceiver”. What makes AceDeceiver different from previous iOS malware is that instead of abusing enterprise certificates as some iOS malware has over the past two years, AceDeceiver manages to install itself without any enterprise certificate at all. It does so by exploiting design flaws in Apple’s DRM mechanism, and even as Apple has removed AceDeceiver from App Store, it may still spread thanks to a novel attack vector.

And (boldface mine):

Three different iOS apps in the AceDeceiver family were uploaded to the official App Store between July 2015 and February 2016, and all of them claimed to be wallpaper apps. These apps successfully bypassed Apple’s code review at least seven times (including the first time each was uploaded and then four rounds of code updates, which require an additional review by Apple for each instance) using a method similar to that used by ZergHelper, where the app tailors its behavior based on the physical geographic region in which it’s being executed. In this case, AceDeceiver only displays malicious behaviors when a user is located in China, but that would be easy for the attacker to change in any time. Apple removed these three apps from the App Store after we reported them in late February 2016. However, the attack is still viable because the FairPlay MITM attack only requires these apps to have been available in the App Store once. As long as an attacker could get a copy of authorization from Apple, the attack doesn’t require current App Store availability to spread those apps.

Looks like this attack is currently restricted to users in mainland China.

Reuters:

A German court has ruled against Apple Inc in a case over video streaming patents, handing Kudelski’s OpenTV unit a victory in its ongoing intellectual property licensing campaign against major technology companies.

OpenTV sued Apple in 2014, alleging that various products infringe its patents, including the iPhone and iPad. The ruling on Tuesday from the Dusseldorf District Court said Apple products sold in Germany must not use streaming software which infringes OpenTV’s patents.

And:

OpenTV also has pending patent litigation against Apple in the United States. It struck a licensing deal with Cisco in 2014, shortly before initiating lawsuits against Apple.

Craig Grannell:

> When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work. Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options. > > You might wave this away as a trifling problem. If so, I imagine you don’t play games. Game Center isn’t just about logging highscores — it’s also crucial for the functionality of many turn-based multiplayer titles.

Is Game Center an orphan? Hate to see this kind of neglect. Have the best gaming experience with slot gacor gampang menang.

NOTE: An ad autoplays when you click on the headline link.

Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

And:

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. The licensing has been done in-house at Dubset. Thus far the company has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

MixBank matches the recordings used in the remix or DJ mix against a database of three-second audio snippets from Gracenote, where White was CEO prior to joining Dubset. He says fingerprinting is a “brute force” tool that can provide MixBank with up to 100 possible matches for each three-second match. The more difficult final step is performed by MixScan, proprietary piece of software that pulls apart the mixes and figures out what’s inside. MixScan identifies the recording and its stop and start point in each mix, then finds the corresponding rights holders in a dataset together through multiple partnerships and direct feeds.

As a fan of mashups (songs created by mashing together snippets of songs to a guiding beat), I think this is great news. Since they can’t be sold legally because they are too difficult to properly license, mashups are strictly an underground commodity. It’d be lovely to see Apple Music add mashup playlists, a mashup radio station.

[H/T en-REE-ko]

Siyi Chen, writing for Quartz:

Women in China are obsessed with having white, flawless skin. It’s why you might catch sight of a Chinese woman hiding underneath an umbrella on a bright, sunny day—she’s avoiding getting a tan. The obsession, which has a long history, has resulted in a booming industry in skin lightening products and plastic surgery. Researchers predict the global market for skin lightening creams, gels and powders will reach $23 billion by 2020, propelled mostly by growth in the Asia Pacific region.

Now, the obsession has spilled over into the virtual world with a selfie camera that automatically perfects your face in every photo you take. The camera, made by Casio, is nicknamed zipai shenqi (which means the magical weapon for ultimate selfies) in China. It gets rid of blemishes and makes your face slimmer, skin whiter, and eyes bigger.

Find a need and fill it. Meitu, an app that does the same sort of thing, has processed more than 900 million images. This is more than a niche concept. I wonder if Apple is considering adding a mode like this to the iPhone camera app, at least in China.

Woz did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) yesterday. If you are a fan of Woz or of Apple history, this is worth a read. One answer I found both funny and emblematic of Woz’s way of thinking:

These days I’m wearing an Apple Watch. It’s the stainless steel sapphire one. I like that it’s got a magnetic band. I don’t remember where it was on the price scale… I think it’s kinda towards the low end of all those watches. But I just love this little flexible magnetic bend.

Of course, every once in awhile I’ll put my hand on a table in a restaurant, and pull my hand back, and it pulls back the fork with me, that attaches to the magnet of the watch. That’s kinda funny.

If you find yourself getting a little lost in all the threaded questions and answers, click on the blue background “TheSteveWozniak” link and you’ll go to a page filtering out everything but what Woz says.

UPDATE: Even better, here’s a link to a nicely formatted version of the Q&A from Topiama. [H/T Loop reader Jay Frantz]

Bloomberg:

All F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets come with a female voice that issues greetings and warnings, in tones ranging from stern and sharp to extremely urgent. It doesn’t matter if the pilot is wearing a Malaysian, Kuwaiti, or Australian flag on his flight suit, the airplane speaks in a Tennessee twang that sounds a lot like Loretta Lynn in the middle of a very bad day. Embark on a miscue, and the jet issues an audible correction: “Roll right! Roll right!” or “Pull up! Pull up!”

Fighter pilots refer to the voice of the Super Hornet as “Bitchin’ Betty,” while among Britain’s Royal Air Force she is known as “Nagging Nora.” But a real woman personifies the aircraft, 60-year-old Leslie Shook, and she recently retired after 35 years as an employee of Boeing Co.

I love these kinds of stories. I once talked to a guy involved in the “tech support” of the F22 fighter and he said they argued for hours over exactly the right kind of voice they needed for the plane to get the pilot’s attention in case of emergency.

There are some interesting points in this story. They are both looking for the Apple’s source code.

Chinese State Councilor Guo Shengkun met with Director of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey on Monday, pledging to strengthen law enforcement cooperation.

“Let me know if you get that iPhone master key. We have 100 million iPhones over here we’d love to get into.”

Damn Interesting:

This encounter might have been as commonplace as any other gunfight around Hell’s Half-Acre were it not for the identity of the driver. The “Sanders” who put two bullets in Matt Stewart was none other than Harland Sanders, the man who would go on to become the world-famous Colonel Sanders. He was dark-haired and clean-shaven at the time, but his future likeness would one day appear on Kentucky Fried Chicken billboards, buildings, and buckets worldwide.

In contrast to most other famous food icons, Colonel Sanders was once a living, breathing person, and his life story is considerably more tumultuous than the white-washed corporate biography suggests.

What a fascinating story of a figure we all know but generally have no idea of the history behind. Turns out, the Colonel was quite the foul-mouthed rogue who didn’t start making his chicken until much later in life. This is one of those articles that make a perfect “Read It Later” story.

Backchannel:

The problem for the president is that when it comes to the specific battle going on right now between Apple and the FBI, the law is clear: twenty years ago, Congress passed a statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that does not allow the government to tell manufacturers how to design or configure a phone or software used by that phone — including security software used by that phone.

The government can’t require companies that build phones to come to it for clearance in advance of launching a new device. Nor can the authorities ask a manufacturer to design something new — like a back door — once that device is out.

The more I read about this issue, and I’ve read a lot, the more I see that the government may have made a huge mistake with this particular case. Obviously, a judge could rule differently but every non-partisan opinion I’ve read says there’s no way the government can get a court to do what they want.

I just opened up sponsorships for April on the site. Sponsorships are exclusive–there is only one sponsor per week. If you want to get your product or service in front of the wonderful readers of The Loop, send me an email and let’s talk.

Cool to know this exists, but not sure I want to know how much of my money I’ve given them.

Walt Disney press release:

Indiana Jones will return to the big screen on July 19, 2019, for a fifth epic adventure in the blockbuster series. Steven Spielberg, who directed all four previous films, will helm the as-yet-untitled project with star Harrison Ford reprising his iconic role. Franchise veterans Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall will produce.

“Indiana Jones is one of the greatest heroes in cinematic history, and we can’t wait to bring him back to the screen in 2019,” said Alan Horn, Chairman, The Walt Disney Studios. “It’s rare to have such a perfect combination of director, producers, actor and role, and we couldn’t be more excited to embark on this adventure with Harrison and Steven.”

Please, please, please let it be good. With Kathleen Kennedy at the helm, my hopes are high.

I hope they bring on Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens. His is a steady screenwriting hand.

Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld, lays out everything you need to know to publish your own content on Apple News. Terrific post.

Bloomberg Business:

Apple Inc., facing a European Union probe into its fiscal affairs in Ireland, told a panel of EU lawmakers Tuesday it pays all taxes due in the nation and doesn’t get an unfair advantage compared with other companies there.

Cathy Kearney, a vice-president of the iPhone maker’s European operations in Cork, Ireland, said the company isn’t getting unfair state aid but will remain “committed to Ireland” whatever the outcome of the EU case.

“We feel that we’ve paid every cent of tax that is due in Ireland,” Kearney said at the European Parliament in Brussels. “We don’t feel that there has been state aid involved and I suppose we look forward to that outcome happening at the end of the day and being vindicated in that way. I would say that the Irish government also agrees with that view.”

Technically, the brief Apple filed yesterday is in support of their motion to vacate the FBI’s requested court order. It’s the latest salvo in the back and forth.

A few interesting excerpts:

The government’s assertion that “there is no reason to think that the code Apple writes in compliance with the Order will ever leave Apple’s possession” simply shows the government misunderstands the technology and the nature of the cyber-threat landscape.

This is followed by a quote from Apple Engineer Erik Neuenschwander:

I believe that Apple’s iOS platform is the most-attacked software platform in existence. Each time Apple closes one vulnerability, attackers work to find another. This is a constant and never-ending battle. Mr. Perino’s description of third-party efforts to circumvent Apple’s security demonstrates this point. And the protections that the government now asks Apple to compromise are the most security-critical software component of the iPhone—any vulnerability or back door, whether introduced intentionally or unintentionally, can represent a risk to all users of Apple devices simultaneously.

As to the government’s claim that the crippled iOS it wants Apple to build can only be used on one iPhone:

Mr. Perino’s characterization of Apple’s process . . . is inaccurate. Apple does not create hundreds of millions of operating systems each tailored to an individual device. Each time Apple releases a new operating system, that operating system is the same for every device of a given model. The operating system then gets a personalized signature specific to each device. This personalization occurs as part of the installation process after the iOS is created.

Once GovtOS is created, personalizing it to a new device becomes a simple process. If Apple were forced to create GovtOS for installation on the device at issue in this case, it would likely take only minutes for Apple, or a malicious actor with sufficient access, to perform the necessary engineering work to install it on another device of the same model.

And remember this Loop post from yesterday? Apple’s brief carries that familiar quote from Richard Clarke:

Every expert I know believes that NSA could crack this phone.

And this, on the back and forth between Representative Issa and FBI Director Comey in the Judicial Committee hearing:

Rep. Issa asking Director Comey a series of questions as to the avenues the FBI exhausted, to which the Director said he didn’t know, and Rep. Issa replying, “If you haven’t asked that question, the question is how can you come before this committee, and before a federal judge, and demand that somebody else invent something?”

There’s so much more to this (the brief is 33 pages of highlights, really). Apple’s legal team did an incredible job pulling all these different points of focus together into a compelling argument.

One last bit, from the conclusion, quoting Justice Louis Brandeis:

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Well said.