Immersion, a company that develops and licenses haptic touch feedback technology, today filed a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T accusing the two companies of patent infringement. Citing technologies like 3D Touch, Force Touch, the Apple Watch Taptic Engine, and vibration patterns for ringtones and notifications, Immersion says multiple Apple devices use its intellectual property.

Another interesting case.

Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, declining to 78.1 million in the third quarter.

Pandora has the best algorithmic stations around. I’m surprised they’re shopping themselves around after taking over the Rdio assets last year, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

CNN:

It pops up in the news from time to time: the death-by-selfie. Earlier this month, for example, a teenager in India was struck and killed while trying to take a picture of himself in front of an oncoming train. Now the economics site Priceonomics has attempted to gather the existing statistics about the people who’ve lost their lives while taking selfies, combing through three years of news reports indicating a death was “precipitated by a selfie,” or that a person had died while attempting to take a photo of themselves.

And:

The most dangerous places to take a self-portrait seem to be high places or in water: 16 people died from falling off a cliff or a tall building, while 14 drowned. Posing next to an oncoming train is responsible for eight deaths, coming in at third place. The other reasons are violent: gunshot (four), grenade (two), plane crash (two), car crash (two), and animal (one).

Darwin award candidates, all.

From Amazon’s AWS terms of service, paragraph 57.10:

Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

Good to know.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon:

Similar to the dynamic that exists between rivaling siblings, having the iPhone become the single-most successful consumer technology product in history has produced an environment in which every subsequent Apple product decision has failed to meet the expectations set by iPhone. As a consequence, questions and doubts surrounding new Apple products and services have emerged even though there are tangible signs of success and progress being made. The iPhone has produced a new type of reality distortion field around Apple.

And:

Even though the Apple Watch has been compared to the iPhone for most of its short life, the true extent of this juxtaposition has been underestimated. In reality, pretty much every single aspect of Apple Watch has been judged through an iPhone filter. From the moment the Watch was introduced in September 2014, the device has been compared to the iPhone all the way down to management’s keynote slides being judged as less clear than those found in the iPhone keynote introduction seven years earlier.

To be fair, at least up to now, without an iPhone, you have no use for an Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is designed as a satellite device. Over time, this will likely change, as the Apple Watch gains more and more capabilities that can reflect to the cloud instead of to the iPhone to which it is tethered.

A better comparison would be the Apple TV and it’s associated ecosystem. Apple TV sales are not pinned to the ups and downs of the iPhone.

It is difficult to argue the iPhone shouldn’t change the definition of success for Apple. If management’s singular goal is to remain relevant, then a natural extension of that goal is for Apple to build off of the iPhone’s success. Some may call this a burden. Others will say it is a gift. However, the dilemma that has formed over the years is that the iPhone’s sheer success has altered the way we perceive success and the path needed to achieve greater success. People want Apple to introduce new products just as successful as the iPhone only without the multi-year timeline and version reiterations that the iPhone went through.

Absolutely. The iPhone is one of the most successful products in history. Hard not to judge the rest of Apple’s products, from now through forever, through that lens.

Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld:

If you live in India why shouldn’t you be able to watch US television? If you live in the US, why can’t you watch TV from Delhi? There isn’t really a good reason, and that’s why you should expect more services like YuppTV.

South Asia’s largest OTT TV provider, YuppTV’s recently released Apple TV app offers live and catch-up television, thousands of on-demand Bollywood movies and local sports. That’s a significant contrast to the way things worked until relatively recently, when such access required expensive satellite connections.

The obvious answer to the question of why TV programming doesn’t always cross international boundaries is legacy licensing agreements. It will take time for content licensing models to evolve to reflect the modern global reach of services like Apple TV, Netflix, and the like, but that day seems to be coming.

Fascinating read.

Joe Rossignol, writing for Mac Rumors:

Apple has fixed an issue that prevented shortened “t.co” links on Twitter from loading in Safari on the third beta version of OS X 10.11.4, seeded to developers for testing on Monday, according to developer Dieter Komendera.

Here’s the referenced tweet:

Apple just sent back my radar about http://t.co urls not working in Safari, saying it’s fixed in latest 10.11.4 beta. #finally

Glad to see this fixed. It’s been an annoyance for far too long.

From the Twitter Shareholder Letter released yesterday:

First, Twitter is an iconic service and a globally recognized brand. We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away. We’re going to improve the timeline to make sure you see the best Tweets, while preserving the timelines we are known for. The timeline improvement we announced just this morning has grown usage across the board (including Tweeting and Retweeting). We’re going to improve onboarding flows to make sure you easily find both your contacts and your interests. We’re going to make Tweeting faster while making Tweets more expressive with both text and visual media. We’re going to help people come together around a particular topic, such as our @NBA timelines experiences. Relentlessly refining Twitter will enable more people to get more out of Twitter faster.

Second, we have amazing technology for live streaming video. Periscope lets anyone on the planet broadcast and watch video live with others. We recently added the ability to broadcast from a GoPro camera, and to watch any broadcast live from a Tweet. Pairing Periscope with Twitter gives broadcasters greater distribution (anywhere a Tweet can be displayed, a Periscope can too) and the ability to hook into our revenue products. We believe live streaming video is a strong complement to the live nature of Twitter, and it helps instantly explain the value of our service. We’re going to invest heavily in these first-screen, connected audience experiences. Being able to instantly broadcast and watch a live stream with others is extremely powerful and entertaining.

Third, Twitter is by far the fastest way to talk with the world. And because of that, we have the most creative and influential people and organizations in the world actively Tweeting. Whether it’s musicians releasing albums or polling people to help name their albums, journalists Tweeting their stories and getting feedback, artists, activists, athletes, and politicians, established or emerging – these are the people who shape and influence culture, and they bring the audience that follows through Twitter. And we love them! Vine and Niche have proven their ability to create new talent and match them with marketers to make a living from their passion. We will focus on helping these creators build and connect with their fans and audience through Twitter by giving them better tools. And we’re going to enable more people and media partners to create and share Moments, which is proving to be a great medium for storytelling through Tweets.

Fourth, we will continue to invest more resources in making our platform safer. We stand for freedom of expression, and people must feel safe in order to speak freely. Online harassment and abuse is a difficult challenge. This year we will implement technology to help us detect the use of repeat abusive accounts, make it much simpler to report multiple abusive Tweets or accounts, and give people simpler tools to curate and control their experience on Twitter. But it’s not just about creating better tools and technology; we will also be smart and adaptive about our policies in this area and invest in faster response times. Finally, we’re going to emphasize educating people about our safety tools and features as we roll them out.

Fifth, we’re going to continue to invest in developers. We want developers to be able to build their businesses with Twitter. We are investing in mobile with Fabric, our platform that helps developers build, grow, and make money with their apps. Fabric has grown from 0 to 1.6 billion active mobile devices in just 18 months. We believe there’s huge strategic value in building a platform for developers that helps us grow our reach. We are investing in making it easy for developers to discover, curate, and seamlessly publish great, live stories with Twitter content using TweetDeck, Curator, and embedded Tweets. More than one billion visitors to our developers’ sites and apps already see these embedded Tweets every month. We believe that these sites and apps are incredibly important amplifiers that show the huge reach and importance of Tweets. Finally, we will continue to invest in helping developers make their businesses more productive by understanding their customers and markets with Twitter data.

These are Twitter’s priorities for the coming year. Interesting that one of the five pillars is to “continue to invest in developers”. While I’m not a Twitter developer, I do recognize that Twitter does not make it easy on developers of Twitter apps. My sense (from the outside) is that major features are added to the official Twitter app (like Moments) without giving 3rd party apps fair notice so they have enough time to build these features into their own apps.

It’d be nice to see Twitter embrace the makers of 3rd party apps, to help them keep up with the changes in the official Twitter app. As is, it feel like Twitter’s official app is leaving 3rd party apps behind.

Short version:

• Open Messages on your iPhone or iPad, scroll to a picture/video you want to delete.
• Touch the picture/video (don’t press, just lightly touch) until a menu appears.
• Select More… from the menu
• Be sure your image has a check box to the left of it.
• Tap the trash can icon in the lower left to delete the image.

If you have some videos in your Messages timeline, this is a nice way to free up space. Remember, these deletes are permanent, so back up your phone before you go on a deleting rampage.

UPDATE: Even better way (H/T Mike Goril), open Messages, tap Details button in upper right corner, scroll down to ATTACHMENTS area, touch and hold individual images, tap Delete from the menu that appears.

The idea that Apple was going to manufacture their own brand of television harkens back to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Even Apple-branded-television champion Gene Munster abandoned that idea sometime last year.

Robert X. Cringely rightly points out that TVs have long been commoditized. Instead of TVs themselves:

The technical area I think Apple wants to dominate is High Dynamic Range (HDR) video — technology for making displays of all types brighter and display more colors. Right now there are two major video advances entering the market — 4K and HDR — and tests show HDR is a much more obvious improvement than 4K for viewers.

And:

Apple could be preparing its own 4K HDR OLED TV for sale but I don’t think so. A better move for Apple would be to take command of the whole HDR video wave by acquiring a dominant position in HDR intellectual property. That way every new TV from any manufacturer would have to license IP from Apple in order to be attractive to buyers.

And:

By controlling HDR Apple could come to control the entire video ecosystem. And the best way for Apple to control HDR would be by acquiring Dolby Labs.

Cringely’s article walks you through the technology behind (perhaps) the next wave of consumer TV purchases. There’s both futurism and history, lot’s of interesting bits to chew on. Definitely interesting, all the way through.

Samsung already warned it was going to be a rough year—news like this is going to hurt them even more.

The ENCRYPT Act, sponsored by Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and Republican Blake Farenthold, would prevent any state or locality from mandating that a “manufacturer, developer, seller, or provider” design or alter the security of a product so it can be decrypted or surveilled by authorities, according to bill text viewed by Reuters.

Very smart, I hope this passes. Governments have to understand that any weakness will be exploited—there is no backdoor just for law enforcement.

I am suspicious of any for-profit company arguing its good intentions and its free gifts. Nothing — and I do mean nothing — in this life is free. You always pay a price.

Om Malik makes some valid points here.

Macstories:

I just returned from a two week vacation in which I used my iPhone 6s to take hundreds of photos and videos, find places to eat, and get public transit directions to and from various places in unfamiliar cities. It was also the first time I had no concerns about my iPhone battery running out of juice before I returned to my accommodation at night, and it is all thanks to Low Power Mode.

I use LPM whenever I’m out riding my motorcycle. I don’t want to take a chance of running out of juice but also don’t want to carry around a backup battery. I really like the tip of how to quickly turn LPM on and off.

Observer:

Think about it: Every driver makes hundreds of daily driving decisions that, strictly speaking, break driving laws (for example, crossing the yellow line to pull around a double-parked vehicle). It all works out fine because of something called “human judgment.” But what company is going to program its driverless cars to break the law? And what regulators will approve that product, knowing that it has been programmed to break the law?

Will insurance policies for driverless cars cover the car itself? Or will they cover the owner of the vehicle? Or perhaps the technology company that controls the car’s routes? Who will be responsible if there is an accident? The individual owner or the vehicle manufacturer? Or the company that designed the navigation system? This website answers who is responsible for accident in personal car on company time. To cut through this conundrum, some have proposed the creation of the legal fiction of “virtual drivers” who will purchase “virtual insurance.” But this gobbledygook is just vaporware for the fact that nobody knows how to move through this morass.

I disagree that driverless cars won’t happen but the writer brings forward several points that are glossed over by driverless car advocates. The legal, ethical and even employment related issues are massive and aren’t being discussed nearly enough.

Macworld:

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, there’s a good chance that you have, by now, become aware of how tragically easy it can be for your online credentials to be stolen. From picking weak combinations of characters that can be easily guessed—it’s somewhat sad that, in 2016, “password” is still the most common passphrase—to reusing the same password across multiple websites, it doesn’t take much to make a mistake that could very well turn out to be fatal.

While there is no bulletproof solution to this problem, the easiest way to alleviate it is to engage the services of a password manager—an app designed to provide an encrypted digital vault in which all your different logins are stored. This way, you can use completely different (and highly secure) credentials for each website while only having to remember the one “master password” that unlocks your vault.

AgileBits’ 1Password is perhaps one of the most venerable members of this family of programs, and one that, with its newest version 6.0 release, aims to retain its position as the leader of the pack.

I don’t need or use the new enterprise features but I can’t recommend 1Password enough. It (and apps like it) are invaluable in keeping my passwords long, complicated and secure.

Fast Company:

Twitter is rolling out a revised version of the timeline that indeed shuffles around some tweets into an order that isn’t purely reverse-chronological—but it doesn’t blow away the old format in the manner that had some users writing obituaries for the service.

I spoke with Michelle Haq, a Twitter product manager in charge of the timeline, about what’s new. Without further ado, some questions and answers.

Reading this, you can understand better how and why Twitter is making this relatively minor change. The good news is that is opt-in – if you’re like me and don’t want Twitter to “curate” your tweets, you won’t see any difference.

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

Camtasia, uTorrent, and a large number of other Mac apps are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks that install malicious code, thanks to a vulnerability in Sparkle, the third-party software framework the apps use to receive updates.

The vulnerability is the result of apps that use a vulnerable version of Sparkle along with an unencrypted HTTP channel to receive data from update servers. It involves the way Sparkle interacts with functions built into the WebKit rendering engine to allow JavaScript execution. As a result, attackers with the ability to manipulate the traffic passing between the end user and the server—say, an adversary on the same Wi-Fi network—can inject malicious code into the communication. A security engineer who goes by the name Radek said that the attack is viable on both the current El Capitan Mac platform and its predecessor Yosemite.

Note that Camtasia is in the official Mac App Store. This isn’t simply a problem confined to apps sold in the wild. I struggle to wrap my head around the specifics, but the articles I’ve read give the sense that this is an issue with using HTTP, that the problem would be solved if HTTPS was required.

As to Sparkle, it sounds like they’ve fixed the problem on their end, but developers need to rebuild, resubmit their apps to get that fix in the App Store. And there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to tell if the apps on your machine are vulnerable. Hopefully, Apple will address this quickly.

If you’ve got a Sonos smart speaker system in your house, starting today your system has Apple Music compatibility.

If that’s you, you’ll want to take a few minutes to read through Federico Viticci’s Sonos/Apple Music review. Not all love and roses, but it’s a first release.

Reuters:

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

And:

“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” NHTSA’s letter said.

“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”

And:

Karl Brauer, senior analyst for the Kelley Blue Book automotive research firm, said there were still significant legal questions surrounding autonomous vehicles.

But if “NHTSA is prepared to name artificial intelligence as a viable alternative to human-controlled vehicles, it could substantially streamline the process of putting autonomous vehicles on the road,” he said.

Just another domino falling. Our robotic overlord drivers are coming.

Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica:

On Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) introduced a new bill in Congress that attempts to halt state-level efforts that would weaken encryption.

The federal bill comes just weeks after two nearly identical state bills in New York state and California proposed to ban the sale of modern smartphones equipped with strong crypto that cannot be unlocked by the manufacturer. If the state bills are signed into law, current iPhone and Android phones would need to be substantially redesigned for those two states.

From Congressman Lieu’s Wikipedia page:

Lieu graduated from Stanford University in 1991 with a B.S. in Computer Science and an A.B. in Political Science and graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1994, where he was Editor in Chief of the Georgetown Law Journal and received four American Jurisprudence awards.

That’s a Computer Science degree from Stanford and a Law degree from Georgetown. Nice to see this sort of expertise involved in this issue at such a high level.

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

Norwegian police will force a 27-year-old man accused of drug possession to unlock his iPhone with Touch ID, according to local website Bergensavisen [Google Translate]. The police believe the confiscated smartphone may contain evidence about where he obtained the illegal substance.

And:

It remains unclear if Norwegian police are aware that Touch ID requires a passcode as supplemental verification after 48 hours of disuse, a restart, or three failed fingerprint entry attempts. The accused was arrested on January 25, so it may be impossible for authorities to unlock his iPhone with Touch ID without taking additional measures.

In the U.S., a Virginia court ruled that fingerprints, unlike passwords and passcodes, are not protected by the Fifth Amendment. In his ruling, Judge Steven C. Frucci opined that “giving police a fingerprint is akin to providing a DNA or handwriting sample or an actual key,” which is permitted under federal law.

Interesting all the way around. Even if the Norwegian courts were too slow to be effective in this case, they’ve now established a precedent.

More interesting is the issue of police in the US being able to force you to use your finger to unlock your phone.

[H/T David Sobsey]

Downloaded Firewatch yesterday, the new game from Campo Santo and Panic. I’ve long been a fan of Panic, thought I’d check it out, just take a quick look.

Lost a day. Played it straight through to the end, pretty much non-stop. I don’t usually do that. This is a game that draws you in, immersing you in a steadily evolving storyline, with game mechanics that quickly become second nature. And the game somehow manages to grab you emotionally, too. You care about these characters. They seem very real.

This is not a first person shooter. In fact, there is no shooting at all. There’s cursing, but no more than you’d find at my house when I’m trying to fix something. Instead, this is like a gentle puzzler, with a heavy dose of map reading. It’s really all about the storyline, even more about the relationship between the two main characters.

If you are interested in the story behind the development of the game, learning how Panic and Campo Santo got together, here’s the Panic perspective, and the Campo Santo perspective. Both are interesting reads.

Note that Firewatch is available for the Mac, via Steam, and as a PlayStation 4 download. Worth every penny, in my opinion.

Ken Segall:

In honor of the Super Bowl I’m setting the time machine back to 1985, when Apple ran its notoriously awful Lemmings commercial on that year’s Super Bowl.

Just twelve months earlier, Apple had stunned the technology and advertising worlds with its famous 1984 commercial, and Lemmings was meant to carry on the blockbuster tradition.

Instead, it was a dud of extraordinary proportions.

But what exactly is the origin of Lemmings? It’s a story that’s never been told publicly, and it’s definitely not what you think. Join me now on this journey down memory lane…

Segall is one of those guys who was deeply involved with Apple (he came up with the name “iMac”) and I love his stories of the behind the scenes goings on at Apple during his time working with the company.

Engadget:

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a knack for space-themed travel posters. A little over a year ago, its “Exoplanet Travel Bureau” series made its debut with an homage to the iconic WPA prints of the 1930s. This year, the JPL commissioned Seattle-based design firm Invisible Creature to be part of a project/gift for staff. Invisible Creature designed three “travel posters” to be included in the “Visions Of The Future” 2016 calendar. Among the collection are visuals for a multi-planet tour, a stop at Mars and exploring Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon.

For those of you wanting to remain on Earth, the JPL will make the artwork available as downloadable posters soon, but for now, you can purchase high-quality prints from the source.

The look and feel of these posters is spectacular. Very art deco.

The Verge:

Well you did it, mean-spirited internet humans. Tim Cook has deleted the Super Bowl picture that sent Twitter into a tizzy on Sunday night. As the Denver Broncos celebrated their Super Bowl 50 victory, Apple’s CEO made his way onto the field and took a photo of all the excitement (and confetti). He uploaded it to Twitter with a message congratulating the Super Bowl champs.

Now, either Cook didn’t take much time to review his shot or he just didn’t care, but it was a very blurry snapshot of what must’ve been a thrilling moment. Although he took a second, far better shot minutes later, the damage was already done — and the mockery and ridicule came flying. There were too many “Shot with iPhone” jokes to count.

There are several lessons here: Always check your photos before posting. The internet never forgets. Anyone can take good shots with the iPhone but anyone can take bad shots with it as well. And, if you’re the CEO of a company that makes cameras, make sure your shots are really good before you post them.

This is a fascinating story. Academics do the research for free, but they have to buy back their papers through expensive subscriptions from publishers. Enter the dark web.