Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Apple is working to bolster its encryption so that it won’t be able to decode user information stored in iCloud, according to people familiar with the matter.

But Apple executives are wrestling with how to strengthen iCloud encryption without inconveniencing users.

And:

If a user forgets a password, for example, and Apple doesn’t have the keys, the user might lose access to photos and other important data. If Apple keeps a copy of the key, the copy be “can be compromised or the service can be compelled to turn it over,” said Window Snyder, a former Apple security and privacy manager who is now chief security officer at Fastly, a content-delivery network.

And:

An Apple spokeswoman pointed to comments by Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software engineering, in a March 6 opinion piece in the Washington Post. “Security is an endless race–one that you can lead but never decisively win,” Mr. Federighi wrote. “Yesterday’s best defenses cannot fend off the attacks of today or tomorrow.”

Security vs convenience. Why is that middle ground an issue when it comes to iCloud but not to iPhone?

Is it that Apple is moving towards a similar uncompromising commitment to privacy in iCloud, but they just haven’t gotten there yet? Or is there a difference between the approaches required for iPhone and iCloud?

From the Department of Justice web site:

A Pennsylvania man was charged today with felony computer hacking related to a phishing scheme that gave him illegal access to over 100 Apple and Google e-mail accounts, including those belonging to members of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles.

Ryan Collins, 36, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has signed a plea agreement and agreed to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In the plea agreement also filed today, Collins agreed to plead guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information.

Although Collins has been charged in Los Angeles, the parties have agreed to transfer the case to Harrisburg in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, near Collins’ home, for the entry of his guilty plea and sentencing. Once he enters the guilty plea, Collins will face a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. The parties have agreed to recommend a prison term of 18 months, but that recommendation will not be binding on the sentencing judge.

Now we know the cost. 18 months in prison if you hack into a bunch of people’s accounts and publish their most intimate details on line.

Daniel Eran Dilger:

You can contact the Obama White House online to comment on strong encryption.

You can contact your state Senators and Representatives via the contact information supplied by ContactingTheCongress.org.

You can specifically contact Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to express concerns about their bill intended to force companies to weaken or work around encryption under court orders.

I was going to write a similar story, but Daniel summed up my thoughts in his piece. You can make a difference in this debate, but you have to stand up and be heard. Do it.

From the description:

One of the most important figures working in music today is a man named Zane Lowe. The award-winning journalist and DJ is originally from New Zealand, but made his name working at MTV and BBC Radio 1 until he joined Apple last year to help launch Apple Music’s Beats 1. Noisey met Zane in Los Angeles where he told us his story and what it’s like to continually be recognized as “the old guy who interviewed Kanye.”

I wish all Apple interviews were done like this.

In this two part series (part one is here), Adam Engst and Josh Centers take you through a masters class in using your Mac’s built-in Preview program to work with images and PDFs.

Handoff giving you trouble? Here’s a checklist walkthrough of all the settings to make sure you’ve got everything enabled properly.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

It all started when I left my house without my wallet. I had ventured out to grab some lunch with no cash or cards to pay for it, only my iPhone or Apple Watch. I’ve used Apple Pay on my iPhone and Watch before, but this was the first time it was actually useful. I paid for a sandwich at my local store with my Watch, and thought nothing more of it.

Unlike the US, Britain has widely adopted contactless payments, and most bank cards have the technology enabled by default. Big retailers accept payments up to £30 ($42) by simply placing your card on a reader. There’s no need for a signature or PIN code, you just touch and you’re done. Here in London, we can even use contactless cards or Apple Pay to travel on buses and trains. My brief lack of wallet got me thinking, could I rely on an Apple Watch to replace my cash and cards?

A very interesting read, rang true for me. It’s still early days for Apple Pay and Apple Watch, but the concept has been proven well enough. Unlike Google Glass, which constantly fought acceptance, Apple Pay and Apple Watch both have a pretty reasonable acceptance rate. There’s little negative energy there, and plenty of positives. A good early sign.

My brackets are all filled out, I’ve got some great sleeper picks (which you should immediately bet against), and my Apple TV all set to go. March Madness!!!

From NPR’s David Greene interview with counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke:

GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?

CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They’re not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

GREENE: Wow, that sounds like quite a charge. You’re suggesting they could have just gone to the NSA to crack this iPhone but they’re presenting this case because they want to set a precedent to be able to do it in the future?

CLARKE: Every expert I know believes that NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that the government can compel a computer device manufacturer to allow the government in.

Though Clarke hasn’t worked for the government since 2003, he is widely respected and, I suspect, maintains enough ties within the intelligence community that he knows of what he speaks.

One side point: There’s been a lot of discussion about the possibility of the FBI compelling Apple to turn over their source code. My gut tells me, that move is coming.

Kif Leswing, writing for Business Insider:

The new ad format would clearly label branded content in the app, as well as give publishers a new way to sell and promote sponsored posts, although it would come at a cost: Apple keeps 30% of the revenue it produces through iAd, a mobile-advertising platform.

Apple’s last three ad moves: Block ads in Safari (using content blockers), shut down the iAd platform, enable ad sales in Apple News.

If you are interested, here’s a link to the official Apple developer spec that lays all this out.

This is a really well written ad, touching on a fan’s love for soccer as well as the importance of friendship, all played out on a grand scale, live at a UEFA Champions League match.

[H/T John Kordyback]

L. Adam Rothman, writing for Investopedia, digs into Apple’s geographic business units, showing which areas of the world make how much money for Apple.

Interesting.

Pauli Olavi Ojala, writing for Medium:

The Mac operating system holds the dubious honor of being the most frequently mispronounced tech brand. It looks like “Oh Ess Ex”, but the X is actually a roman numeral, so you’re supposed to say “Oh Ess Ten”.

And:

All of Apple’s other operating systems are branded with a lowercase prefix and a simple version number. Meanwhile OS X has a total of three numbers in the name: there’s the roman “X”, then the same number as the major version number, then the actual version number which is currently eleven.

There’s a simple solution: bring back the “Mac” and drop the confusing non-version-numbers.

At the very least, there’s a lack of branding cohesion here. The Mac has a long tradition with Roman numerals, starting with the Mac II and shifting to the OS when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and used the seeds of NeXTSTEP to create OS X.

This is not what you expect.

Matthew Garrett:

I’m in London for Kubecon right now, and the hotel I’m staying at has decided that light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets.

One was embedded in the wall, but the two next to the bed had convenient looking ethernet cables plugged into the wall. So.

I managed to borrow a couple of USB ethernet adapters, set up a transparent bridge (brctl addbr br0; brctl addif br0 enp0s20f0u1; brctl addif br0 enp0s20f0u2; ifconfig br0 up) and then stuck my laptop between the tablet and the wall. tcpdump -i br0 showed traffic, and wireshark revealed that it was Modbus over TCP. Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and notably has no authentication whatsoever. tcpdump showed that traffic was being sent to 172.16.207.14, and pymodbus let me start controlling my lights, turning the TV on and off and even making my curtains open and close. What fun!

And then I noticed something. My room number is 714. The IP address I was communicating with was 172.16.207.14. They wouldn’t, would they?

I mean yes obviously they would.

Internet of Things. What could go wrong?

Allyson Kazmucha, writing for App Factor:

Action and share extensions have immensely changed how I use iOS over the last two years or so. Things that used to take me 3 apps and several minutes to accomplish can now be done in mere seconds and just a few taps.

If you aren’t familiar with share and action extensions already, there’s never been a better time to start using them. To get you started, here’s a list of some of my favorites and how I use them.

Solid list. Please add your own in the Loop comments. As a reminder, to get to a Loop post’s comments, click the infinity sign to the right of the headline. Note that comments work on the Mac and iPad, but not the iPhone.

Mac Kung Fu:

Open a Terminal window, which you’ll find in the Utilities folder within the Applications list, and paste in the following, typing your login password when prompted:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

This command prevents Time Machine’s backup process assuming a low CPU priority, allowing backups to complete insanely quickly.

In my opinion, this should be an exposed setting. Meaning, you should be able to flip a switch in the Time Machine preference pane that says, “Go ahead and run Time Machine in high priority mode so it gets done faster. I understand that my other stuff may suffer a bit performance-wise, run a bit slower.”

Read the whole post to learn how to make this command more permanent (otherwise you have to type it in again after each reboot).

Bookmark this and pass it along.

The New York Times:

Despite the fears about terrorism, the public’s concern about digital privacy is nearly universal. A Pew Research poll in 2014 found more than 90 percent of those surveyed felt that consumers had lost control over how their personal information was collected and used by companies.

The Apple case already seems to have garnered more public attention than the Snowden revelations about “metadata collection” and programs with code names like Prism and XKeyscore.

And:

Now, people are beginning to understand that their smartphones are just the beginning. Smart televisions, Google cars, Nest thermostats and web-enabled Barbie dolls are next. The resolution of the legal fight between Apple and the government may help decide whether the information in those devices is really private, or whether the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. are entering a golden age of surveillance in which they have far more data available than they could have imagined 20 years ago.

“It’s an in-your-face proposition for lots more Americans than the Snowden revelation was,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet, science and technology research at Pew Research Center.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “Everyone gets at a really visceral level that you have a lot of really personal stuff on this device and if it gets stolen it’s really bad. They know that the same forces that work at trying to get access to sensitive stuff in the cloud are also at work attacking the phones.”

Terrific piece. This is a rare policy story that is emerging as national water cooler conversation.

Kirk McElhearn:

Since Apple has been selling audiobooks, which are provided by Audible, they have not allowed re-downloads of these books. I have long recommended to users to not purchase audiobooks from the iTunes Store for this reason. One hard disk problem, one iOS device crash, and you lose all your expensive content. Audible, on the other hand, has always allowed you to re-download your books from your library on their website.

This has now changed. As of March 3, according to an Apple support document, you can re-download audiobooks. Unfortunately, the procedure isn’t simple.

If you are an audiobook fan, read on for the details. This should have happened a long time ago.

Steven Levy:

The Feds originally argued that their Apple motion is a one-time demand for this one phone, by this one really, really bad person. But it turns out that other prosecutors have their own encrypted phones with potential evidence in a variety of other cases. So think of this demand as a bespoke Clipper Chip, created by private-sector engineers who must produce it against their will. By demanding that Apple change its operating system to get access to a single iPhone — and then another, and another, and another — we are in the thick of Crypto Wars Redux.

Or as Diffie told me last week, at a small lunch celebrating the honor he shared with his collaborator, “This is the future we’re fighting about.”

Again.

We’re fighting the wars again because, like most rights and freedoms, they have to be constantly protected from those who would want to restrict them.

Sponsored, in part, by: gdzie kupic akcje

Wired:

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty.

“It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.” It’s a word he keeps repeating. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

The move in question was the 37th in the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by researchers at Google. Inside the towering Four Seasons hotel in downtown Seoul, the game was approaching the end of its first hour when AlphaGo instructed its human assistant to place a black stone in a largely open area on the right-hand side of the 19-by-19 grid that defines this ancient game. And just about everyone was shocked.

I’ve been reading these stories and their different angles with fascination. There’s the “Game of Go” stories (a game I tried to learn in college but literally could never figure out), the AI story angles and the “Man vs Machine” stories.

Techinsider:

Speaking at the South By Southwest conference in Austin Friday, Obama gave his view in general terms about where he stands on phone encryption and the right to privacy since he can’t comment on the Apple/FBI case specifically. But his stance can easily be applied to the FBI’s demand that Apple create a new version of iOS to unlock the iPhone that belonged to one of the suspected shooters in the San Bernardino killings.

In short, Obama thinks tech companies should create a way for law enforcement agencies to access locked devices, assuming they have probable cause for such access.

Well, at least now we know that the government’s stance comes from the top.

CBC:

Tonight, we want our Canadians friends to feel at home. So this is not a dinner, it’s supper. We thought of serving up some poutine. I was going to bring a two-four. And then we’d finish off the night with a double-double. But I had to draw the line at getting milk out of a bag — this, we Americans do not understand. We do, however, have a little Canadian whisky. That, we do understand.

The text of the toasts given by President Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau are actually quite funny.

Ten One Design:

Blockhead snaps on to your existing Apple charger, allowing it to sit flat against the wall. Now it can fit in more places than ever. Blockhead directs your cord downward along the wall at a more natural angle. It looks great and protects against cord stress. By turning your adapter sideways, Blockhead brings its center of mass closer to the wall. This means less tension on the plug and a lot less falling out.

I’ve always been a fan of Ten One Design’s aesthetic and functionality. I think this is a brilliant idea and one I’d (sadly) expect Apple to “borrow” soon. The only downside is I wish the Blockhead’s prongs folded inside itself, similar to some of Apple’s chargers. That would make it perfect.

Petapixel:

This week, Flickr announced that they are taking away one of the key “free” functions: the ability to auto upload photos from your computer directly to Flickr. Now you need to sign up for a “pro” account for access to the same function.

Now, we don’t have much to complain about: they still give you a free terabyte of “free” storage, and the new interface is slick. But when I heard the news, it made me realize: do not trust or put all your eggs in these “free” online services.

Why?

First of all, any of these companies have the power (and right) to change any of their terms and conditions at any time. If tomorrow Yahoo announced that they are shutting down Flickr, there is nothing we can do about it.

I highly recommend Flickr to all my photography students but, as the article says, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And, if you are looking for a Flickr batch uploader without having to pay for a Flickr Pro account, I’ve used F-Stop for years.

The New York Times:

The state dinner, the first for a Canadian prime minister in nearly two decades and most likely one of President Obama’s last, had the air of a belated family reunion between two countries sharing the world’s longest international border, not to mention professional sports, celebrities, cuisine and culture. Many of the luminaries in attendance had ties to Canada and offered praise for its young leader.

Mr. Trudeau, for his part, thanked Mr. Obama for his leadership in addressing climate change. The prime minister offered a tribute to the Obamas’ daughters, who attended their first state dinner, and joked about the president’s graying hair, saying he hoped his own would “come in at a slower rate.”

The relationship between Canada and the US may be one of the most important in the world and it’s crucial the two countries work together on many things. That starts at the top and it’s good to see that it seems Trudeau and Obama have a close personal relationship.

But that was a cheap shot about the Stanely Cup, Obama.

Forbes:

A recent survey of senior women tech executives revealed 60% have been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual advances in the workplace. Of these women, 65% reported having received such advances from a superior.

72% of women respondents working at Apple reported being treated fairly. Coming second and third on the list: Google and Microsoft, with 59% and 58% respectively.

Apple may top the list but they and so many other companies have a long way to go in order for women to feel like they are being treated fairly across of the board.

Technewsworld:

There are more reasons for using an ad blocker than faster page loading, noted Ben Williams, communications and operations manager for Eyeo, maker of AdBlock Plus.

“People use ad blockers because they are concerned about their privacy and their security,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“There are lots of reasons for using ad blockers, but the message to the online ad industry is you need to do something better,” said Williams. “If ads didn’t take so much time to load, if they weren’t so intrusive, if they were more upfront about the tracking that’s going on, then maybe people wouldn’t feel the need to download an ad blocker on every device that they have.”

This is obviously a market share grab that will likely only be moderately successful but it’s another battle line in the war between users and advertisers. Most of us don’t mind advertising in general. But most of us hate the direction the advertising industry has chosen with pop-ups, auto-playing commercials and slow page load times.