A magistrate judge in Brooklyn last week ruled that the Justice Department could not compel the tech giant to unlock the phone. The government on Monday resubmitted its arguments to a higher judge overseeing the matter.

Not a surprise that they would try.

The Eclectic Light Company:

The UK government, ignoring almost all the expert technical and legal advice put to it, is pressing ahead with its draconian Investigatory Powers Bill, due to undergo its second reading in the House of Commons in a week’s time. Let us suppose that this Bill, as currently before Parliament, were to come into force as it stands, becoming the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA).

And:

Under this, the law enforcement agencies will request the Secretary of State to serve a ‘technical capability notice’ on Apple under section 217, or (less likely) a ‘national security notice’ under section 216. The former would impose a legal obligation on Apple to provide the agencies with a backdoor to unlock locked iPhones, or to provide the agencies with a service to unlock locked iPhones.

Sound familiar?

Neither Apple nor any of its employees would be able to reveal “the existence or contents of the notice”, “except with the permission of the Secretary of State.”

And, finally:

Once Apple has been compelled in complete secrecy to provide a means to unlock iPhones in the UK, the UK security agencies would of course be happy to provide information of that to their US equivalents, who would then use that as a lever against Apple to force it to provide the same facilities in the US. Apple’s staunch defence would be shattered, and Pandora’s Box blown open.

This is an issue that affects all of us. Vigilance required.

One person’s dynamic imagining of the frustration of dyslexia.

A fernid who has dleisxya diecesbrd to me how she eexpicneers raendig. She can raed, but it tkaes a lot of certinoonactn, and the leterts smees to “jmup aurond”.

Follow the link and see if you can make your way through the page. The letters reorder themselves on the fly. Much harder than you might think.

Kirk McElhearn walks you through the process of searching through the sea of settings to find one in particular. Search within Settings has been available since the original release of iOS 9, but it’s easy to overlook/forget about. Take a quick read through Kirk’s post, pass this one along.

This is an impressive list. It’d be interesting to compare this to a list of folks officially opposing Apple in this fight.

If you’ve ever seriously considered cutting the cord on cable TV, this is a good read. David Gewirtz writes about his experience cutting the cord. He saved money but, ultimately, he called and had his cable reinstalled. Very interesting, with all the numbers so you can truly follow his logic.

There are definitely some strange bedfellows here, brought together to discuss two topics near and dear to everyone’s heart: Donald Trump and encryption.

Here’s a partial list of attendees:

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”

Along with Ryan, the House was represented by Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton (Mich.), Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas) and almost-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), sources said, along with leadership figure Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.), Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) and Diane Black (Tenn.).

Philip Anschutz, the billionaire GOP donor whose company owns a stake in Sea Island, was also there, along with Democratic Rep. John Delaney, who represents Maryland. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was there, too, a Times spokeswoman confirmed.

Amazing list. Tim Cook and Karl Rove, in the same room and, at least for a brief shining moment, on the same side of an issue.

At one point, Cotton and Apple’s Cook fiercely debated cell phone encryption, a source familiar with the exchange told HuffPost. “Cotton was pretty harsh on Cook,” the source said, and “everyone was a little uncomfortable about how hostile Cotton was.”

I suspect only one of the two truly understood the ramifications of this battle.

Apple shared some magnificent pictures of the new spaceship campus. My favorite is a shot of a crane carefully lowering the new roof on top of the campus theater.

Think about that. This massive roof is already assembled, being lowered onto the theater like a specialized lego piece. Great stuff.

Digital Trends, on why smart watch sales have slowed to a crawl:

The tech brands don’t know how to design attractive products; the Swiss watch makers don’t have the tech chops to jump in with two feet; and the smaller brands don’t have the R&D budgets to make super high-tech hardware. And all of them seem to quivering in the shadow of an even bigger threat: the Apple Watch 2.

Are all smart watch sales suffering?

Smartwatches are selling … but mostly Apple’s. After only eight months on sale in 2015, the Apple Watch stole two-thirds of the total amount of smartwatches sold over the entire year. That’s despite it being one of the most expensive models you can buy, only one of several watches compatible with the iPhone, and being technically more complex to operate than watches from Pebble or other non-Android Wear brands.

Details. Get the details right, design with your customer in mind. Apple is exceedingly good at this approach, and why I am looking forward to seeing what they do with a car.

Investors.com:

Apple Pay is the most-requested mobile digital payment service among retailers, according to a recent survey of companies that supply point-of-sale terminals to stores.

Piper Jaffray surveyed 507 vendors of merchant-processing systems. The survey found that 44% of their customers are using or have asked about implementing mobile digital payment systems.

Of those merchants, 67% desired Apple’s Apple Pay. Alphabet’s Android Pay and Google Wallet were second with 18%, followed by PayPal (8%) and Samsung Pay (7%).

That is a huge chasm between first and second place.

OS X Daily:

Adjusting saturation is a common photo editing technique to both enhance or decrease the vividness of a pictures color, and for the purposes here we will show you how to increase (or lower) the color saturation of any image in Mac OS X using the built in Preview app.

Preview is a surprisingly good “quickie” photo editor a lot of people overlook. This post is a good primer on how to use its editing capabilities.

AV Club:When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing stories and novels about his brilliant, drug-addled super sleuth Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he intentionally gave the character a geographically impossible home base. At the time, the street numbers on Baker Street didn’t even reach 200.Imagining Holmes to be real, fans sent him letters, ranging from simple fan mail to genuine pleas for help, but their letters could not be delivered. Then, in the 1930s, London rejiggered its street numbers, a move that affected Baker Street. Suddenly, there really was a 221 on the famous thoroughfare, and it belonged to a bank. In a twist as surprising as discovering a top instant casino right where one least expects, the financial institution didn’t just dispose of Holmes’ mail. Instead, they hired someone to act as the detective’s “personal secretary.” Through customized letters, this ombudsman would gently explain to fans that Holmes had given up his detective gig to go raise bees in the country.

I didn’t know there hadn’t always been a 221B Baker St.

What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?

You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.

Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.

Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.

There’s a survey for developers, takes 7 minutes to fill out, it’ll be up ’til April 3rd.

Here’s the link.

Know a developer? Am a developer? Please help spread the word. And there are prizes.

Serenity Caldwell outdid herself this time. The entire review is drawn with her Apple Pencil. Brilliant work.

Mac Kung Fu:

Although yesterday’s OSX.KeRanger.A malware was blocked by Apple before it had a chance to strike, this inaugural ransomware outbreak on the Mac serves as a clanging wake-up call. If you want to be ready for the NEXT time this happens, just in case Apple doesn’t catch it in time, follow these basic steps.

Terrific post, definitely worth reading.

This is extraordinarily exciting for me. Of course, as a long, long time Apple user, I’m thrilled for the chance to play some old and deeply loved games from my past.

But coolness of all coolness, at least one of these is a game I helped write. It’s got my name on it and everything. Interestingly, I still have the original, box, floppy and all.

I have not yet dug into how to get one of these games running in a browser window, but I will work that through. If anyone is interested, I can write a follow-on post with a walkthrough on getting started.

Color me cautiously optimistic. Quicken was a “Mac last” outcast under Intuit.

Some big names in law and computer science got together to file a “friend of the court” brief explaining the danger in forcing Apple to comply with the FBI-driven court order.

From the amicus brief:

in commanding Apple to create forensic software that would bypass iPhone security features, the Order endangers public safety. Amici, independent experts in iPhone security and encryption with backgrounds in government, industry, and academia, write to inform the Court of these real dangers. As experts, it is amici’s opinion that the dangers of forcing companies to denigrate the security of their products and of allowing law enforcement to commandeer consumer devices for surveillance purposes are too great.

For practical reasons, the security bypass this Court would order Apple to create almost certainly will be used on other iPhones in the future. This spread increases the risk that the forensic software will escape Apple’s control either through theft, embezzlement, or order of another court, including a foreign government. If that happens, the custom code could be used by criminals and governments to extract sensitive personal and business data from seized, lost, or stolen iPhones, or it could be reverse engineered, giving attackers a stepping stone on the path towards their goal of defeating Apple’s passcode security.

And:

Further, the Court here threatens to set a legal precedent that law enforcement will use to force companies to craft other security bypasses for forensic purposes.

Further, if the FBI succeeds in forcing a backdoor into Apple’s software, the bad guys will just use other encryption solutions to communicate. The FBI will have gained nothing long term, and we’ll all have given up our privacy.

There are 12 apps/applications that can boast of having a billion users. Can you name them?

Here’s a hint: They are owned by only three companies, none of them Apple.

And that said, Apple does not yet have a billion iPhone users. Though Apple has sold just about a billion iPhones since inception (I remember when selling 10 million iPhones seemed an amazingly unreachable achievement), that’s not the same thing as having a billion users.

Palo Alto Networks:

On March 4, we detected that the Transmission BitTorrent ailient installer for OS X was infected with ransomware, just a few hours after installers were initially posted. We have named this Ransomware “KeRanger.” The only previous ransomware for OS X we are aware of is FileCoder, discovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2014. As FileCoder was incomplete at the time of its discovery, we believe KeRanger is the first fully functional ransomware seen on the OS X platform.

Attackers infected two installers of Transmission version 2.90 with KeRanger on the morning of March 4. When we identified the issue, the infected DMG files were still available for downloading from the Transmission site. Transmission is an open source project. It’s possible that Transmission’s official website was compromised and the files were replaced by re-compiled malicious versions, but we can’t confirm how this infection occurred.

More importantly:

The KeRanger application was signed with a valid Mac app development certificate; therefore, it was able to bypass Apple’s Gatekeeper protection. If a user installs the infected apps, an embedded executable file is run on the system. KeRanger then waits for for three days before connecting with command and control (C2) servers over the Tor anonymizer network. The malware then begins encrypting certain types of document and data files on the system. After completing the encryption process, KeRanger demands that victims pay one bitcoin (about $400) to a specific address to retrieve their files. Additionally, KeRanger appears to still be under active development and it seems the malware is also attempting to encrypt Time Machine backup files to prevent victims from recovering their back-up data.

Apple has your back here:

Since Apple has revoked the abused certificate and has updated XProtect signatures, if a user tries to open a known infected version of Transmission, a warning dialog will be shown that states “Transmission.app will damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash.” Or “Transmission can’t be opened. You should eject the disk image.” In any case if you see these warnings, we suggest to follow Apple’s instruction to avoid being affected.

If you use Transmission, it’d be worth your time to read the How To Protect Yourself section of the linked article.

New York Times, on the death of Reverend Robert Palladino:

Mr. Jobs briefly attended Reed in 1972 before dropping out for economic reasons, but hung around campus for more than a year afterward; during that time, he audited Father Palladino’s class. After helping to found Apple in 1976, he often credited the company’s elegant onscreen fonts — and his larger interest in the design of computers as physical objects — to what he had been taught there.

And this quote from Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 Stanford commencement address:

“Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

A teacher who helped kindle a great flame of passion.

[H/T The intangibly metonymical Not Jony Ive]

Washington Post:

As the head of software engineering at Apple, I think nothing is more important than the safety of all of our customers. Even as we strive to deliver delightful experiences to users of iPhones, iPads and Macs, our team must work tirelessly to stay one step ahead of criminal attackers who seek to pry into personal information and even co-opt devices to commit broader assaults that endanger us all. Sadly, these threats only grow more serious and sophisticated over time.

That’s why my team works so hard to stay ahead.

Yet another salvo in the court of public opinion, this time from Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering.

Ars Technica:

A security research firm announced Sunday its discovery of what is believed to be the world’s first ransomware that specifically goes after OS X machines.

“This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom,” Ryan Olson, of Palo Alto Networks, told Reuters.

The KeRanger malware, which imposes a 72-hour lockout window unless the victim pays 1 bitcoin ($410 as of this writing), appears to have been first discovered via a rogue version of Transmission, a popular BitTorrent client.

If you have version 2.90 of Transmission, upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

Fortune:

Want an Apple Watch for just $25? All you have to do is get in shape.

That’s the deal several companies are offering their employees, as part of a wellness-incentive program offered through the health-services firm Vitality Group, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

There’s a catch, however: You have to use the watch to help meet monthly fitness goals or pay the full price.

Depending on how reachable those monthly fitness goals are, this sounds like a great idea. The only concern I have is, who is collecting the data and how? How do you prove you’re reaching the monthly goals? Is the data automatically downloaded by the company? If so, what safeguards are there in place for the security of that data?

TidBITS:

While I like listening to music in Spotify, there are times when I just want some background sounds that won’t distract me from what I’m writing. Spotify and competing services like Apple Music have plenty of tracks of thunderstorms, waves, and birds, but finding something appropriate is a serious rabbit hole.

Enter Noizio, a free Mac and iOS app that I stumbled across recently. It offers 15 different ambient sounds that play in seamless loops: October Rain, Coffee House, Thunderstorm, Campfire, Winter Wind, Sea Waves, River Stream, Summer Night, Sunny Day, Deep Space, Sailing Yacht, Inside Train, On The Farm, Wind Chimes, and Blue Whales.

I’d never used noise generators until recently. My new neighbor snores like a congested elephant and it was driving me nuts. I now use this app to drown him out with a combination of October Rain and the very comforting Blue Whales. Works great.

Atlas Obscura:

When George Wyman crossed the Nevada desert in 1903, on a 1 ¼ horsepower motorcycle, he mostly rode on railroad tracks. It was a bumpy ride, but the sand that surrounded him was too soft too ride his bike over. Once, there had been wagon tracks here, but often the railroad ties lay right on top of them. This was the shortest and clearest route across the west.

Wyman left San Francisco from Lotta’s Fountain on May 16, 1903, with a promise from Motorcycle Magazine to publish an account of his journey. Fifty days later, he rolled into New York City. His bike was so busted that he had to pedal the last 150 miles, but he had made it: he was the first person to motor across the country.

I know how challenging this trip would be on a modern bike like my FJR 1300. It’s inconceivable how difficult it must have been in 1903.

Ars Technica:

The San Bernardino District Attorney told a federal judge late Thursday that Apple must assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people in a killing rampage in December. The phone, which was a county work phone issued to Farook as part of his Health Department duties, may have been the trigger to unleash a “cyber pathogen,” county prosecutors said in a brief court filing.

Jonathan Zdziarski, a prominent iPhone forensics expert, said in a telephone interview that the district attorney is suggesting that a “magical unicorn might exist on this phone.”

But if there’s even a slight chance to find a magical unicorn (which is redundant, by the way), shouldn’t law enforcement do everything in its power to discover such a creature? What is Apple trying to hide here? Why won’t they help the FBI discover this creature? Is it discrimination against mythical horses? Did a unicorn hurt Tim Cook as a child? Enquiring minds want to know.

And the The San Bernardino District Attorney is an idiot.