apple-list October 2014

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FYI: WSJ: Cheaptickets, Orbitz, others charging more per night for some users

by Wayne Billing

...from: http://online.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-de… Why You Can’t Trust You’re Getting the Best Deal Online A Study Finds Discriminatory Pricing on E-Commerce Sites Is More Widespread Than Thought By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN Oct. 23, 2014 12:01 a.m. ET The Web is full of personalized content, whether it’s a Netflix <http://quotes.wsj.com/NFLX> recommendation or the results of a Google <http://quotes.wsj.com/GOOGL> search. But consumers have protested when e-commerce companies have extended their behind-the-scenes personalization to prices, charging different sums for the same goods, or pushing some people toward higher-priced offers. A new study of top e-commerce websites found these practices—called discriminatory pricing or price steering—are much more widespread than was previously understood. The study, by a team of computer scientists at Northeastern University, tracked searches on 16 popular e-commerce sites. Six of those sites used the pricing techniques; none of the sites alerted consumers to that fact. Among the study’s findings: Travel-booking sites Cheaptickets and Orbitz charged some users searching hotel rates an average $12 more per night if they weren’t logged into the sites, and Travelocity charged users of Apple <http://quotes.wsj.com/AAPL> Inc. ’s iOS mobile operating system $15 less for hotels than other users. Home Depot <http://quotes.wsj.com/HD> Inc. shows mobile-device users products that are roughly $100 more expensive than those offered to desktop-computer users. And Expedia <http://quotes.wsj.com/EXPE> and Hotels.com<http://Hotels.com> steer users at random to pricier products, the study said. “In the real world, there are coupons and loyalty cards, and people are fine with that,” said Christo Wilson, an assistant professor at Northeastern who led the research team. “Here, there’s a transparency problem. The algorithms change regularly, so you don’t know if other people are getting the same results.” Travelocity, a unit of Sabre <http://quotes.wsj.com/SABR> Corp. , didn’t respond to a request for comment. Home Depot didn’t dispute the accuracy of the findings, but the home-improvement retailer wasn’t “intentionally steering search results,” said company spokesman Stephen Holmes. [cid:FA861B28-A0EB-4290-BAB6-B101D0C1164E]ENLARGE Many factors could influence what a customer sees on the company’s sites, Mr. Holmes said, including prior browsing and purchase history, the location of the store, and whether the customer is on mobile or not. Home Depot didn’t charge users different prices for identical products but showed more-expensive products to people who shopped using a smartphone, the researchers found. Chris Chiames, vice president of corporate affairs at Orbitz Worldwide <http://quotes.wsj.com/OWW> Inc., said in an email that the company clearly advertises its loyalty programs and other deals. He said the discounts some members see on the site apply to just a small proportion of hotels—fewer than 5%. So, it wouldn’t make sense, and might even be misleading, to advertise lower prices to all members, he said. “The Northeastern study states that ‘overall, most of the experiments do not reveal evidence of steering or discrimination,’ and so we are curious as to why a handful of exceptions to searches on thousands of hotels is the basis of this paper’s conclusions, or even worthy of a story,” Mr. Chiames added. “Would you be as interested in a Kmart ‘blue light special’ deal that was made available to shoppers who happen to be in a certain store at a certain time?” Moreover, some deals are priced by Orbitz’s hotel partners, he added. “The hotel might have limited inventory of that price, and so they choose to display the rate on a more-limited basis, akin to the flash sale,” he said. On Orbitz and Cheaptickets, also owned by Orbitz Worldwide, consumers who registered through the websites’ free log-in were shown a tab labeled “members only” that offered lower hotel prices. The company didn’t advertise that users could receive discounts for logging in. Orbitz has been accused of price discrimination in the past. A 2012 Wall Street Journal investigation found the company charged Mac users as much as 30% more than PC users for a night’s lodging. The company discontinued the practice, which it characterized as a month-long experiment. The Northeastern researchers confirmed the company no longer discriminates between Mac and PC users. Expedia and Hotels.com<http://Hotels.com>, both units of Expedia Inc., don’t show different prices because of users’ differing characteristics but because the company constantly refines its pricing strategies using a method called A/B testing, the researchers said. Shoppers are randomly placed in a group that highlights either less or more costly hotels. “Either way, the user has no idea what bucket they’ve been placed in,” said Northeastern’s Mr. Wilson. WSJ.D WSJ.D<http://online.wsj.com/news/technology> is the Journal’s home for tech news, analysis and product reviews. * Why You Can’t Trust You’re Getting the Best Deal Online<http://online.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-trust-youre-getting-the-best-de…> * Facebook’s Zuckerberg Holds Q&A Session in Chinese<http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/23/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-holds-qa-s…> * Foxconn in Talks for China Display Plant<http://online.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-in-talks-for-china-plant-investment-…> * Nokia’s Bullish Outlook Is Evidence That Pain Is in the Past<http://online.wsj.com/articles/nokia-gives-bullish-outlook-as-it-swings-bac…> One group of users, for example, were shown an average hotel listing price of $187 a night. The other group saw prices that were $17, or roughly 10%, less. “Presenting different booking paths and options to different customers allows us to determine which features customers appreciate most” said Expedia spokesman Dave McNamee, in an email. “Pricing is not manipulated by Expedia.com<http://Expedia.com>.” Consumers have long protested price discrimination. In 2000, Amazon.com <http://quotes.wsj.com/AMZN> Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos <http://topics.wsj.com/person/B/Jeff-Bezos/698> apologized for an internal research program in which consumers were shown different prices for identical products. He called the experiment a “mistake.” (Amazon and eBay Inc. weren’t included in the Northeastern study because those companies’ services have little power over the prices they charge, the researchers said.) Staples <http://quotes.wsj.com/SPLS> Inc. varied its online prices based on users’ locations, according to a 2012 article in The Wall Street Journal. The researchers didn’t examine Staples but pointed out that retailers might vary prices by region because the cost of procuring a given product can differ in different parts of the country. They didn’t study geographic variations for that reason. In their study, the Northeastern researchers devised a statistical method to weed out what they called “noise,” or legitimate factors that might cause prices to vary—a technique they hope will be used in future studies of online personalization. The research team recruited 300 beta users, who allowed the researchers to track their experience on different sites. The team also developed hundreds of fake accounts to see whether historical purchase patterns and clicks through the sites had an impact on price personalization. They didn’t examine the impact of consumers’ overall Web-browsing behavior on pricing because they would have no way to know how e-commerce sites tracked participants across the Web. Write to Elizabeth Dwoskin at elizabeth.dwoskin(a)wsj.com<mailto:elizabeth.dwoskin@wsj.com>

9 years, 5 months

FYI: Microsoft Office for Mac patches: "fix critical issues"; "improve security"

by Wayne Billing

...from: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44329 [Office] Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.4.5 Update Select Language: Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch English Finnish French German Italian Japanese Norwegian (Bokmål) Polish Russian Spanish Swedish Download<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=44329> Close<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44329&6B49FDFB-8E5B…> This update fixes critical issues and also helps to improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. * Details<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44329&751be11f-ede8…> Version: 14.4.5 File Name: Office2011-1445Update_EN-US.dmg Date Published: 10/14/2014 File Size: 113.6 MB This update fixes critical issues and also helps to improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, please visit the Microsoft Web site<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=511102>. Applies to: Office 2011, Office 2011 Home and Business Edition, Word 2011, Excel 2011, PowerPoint 2011, Outlook 2011, Office for Mac Standard 2011 Edition, Microsoft Office for Mac Home & Student 2011, and Microsoft Office for Mac Academic 2011 Known issues for installation of Office 2011<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=255462> * System Requirements<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44329&e6b34bbe-475b…> Supported Operating System Apple Macintosh, Mac OS X * Operating System Versions: Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or a later version of Mac OS Note To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac. * Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 1 (14.1.0): You can download this update for free from the Microsoft Web Site<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=218211>. Note To verify that you have installed this update, you can open any Microsoft Office 2011 application to check the version number. For example, open Word, and then on the Word menu, click About Word. In the dialog box, compare the version number next to Latest Installed Update.

9 years, 6 months

FYI: Apple Begins Reminding About App-Specific Passwords

by Wayne Billing

...from: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/08/apple-reminds-app-specific/ Apple Begins Reminding Two-Factor Authentication Users About App-Specific Passwords Wednesday October 8, 2014 8:38 pm PDT by Husain Sumra Apple has begun emailing iCloud users who have enabled two-factor authentication on their Apple IDs, reminding them that application specific passwords will be required when trying to access iCloud data on third party apps starting tomorrow. [Screen Shot 2014-10-08 at 8.13.42 PM] In addition to the email reminders, Apple last week published a new support document<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6186>educating users on how to use app-specific passwords. While the feature was originally intended to require the feature on October 1, it's unclear why two-factor authentication users are being reminded of it a week later. App-specific passwords are a new feature Apple introduced in mid-September<http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/16/apple-app-specific-passwords/>, following the launch of two-factor authentication<http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/16/icloud-two-factor-authentication/> for accessing iCloud.com<http://iCloud.com>. The changes arrived after a hacking incident that saw the iCloud accounts of several celebrities compromised due to weak passwords. CEO Tim Cook has promised<http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/04/cook-security-alerts-icloud/> to improve iCloud security by increasing awareness around Apple's security features like two-factor authentication as well as a sending out email notifications<http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/08/icloud-alert-emails-web/> whenever a device is restored, an account is accessed or a password change is attempted.

9 years, 6 months

INTEREST: Interview with Apple's Jony Ive

by Wayne Billing

...from: http://www.vogue.com/1415025/apple-design-genius-jonathan-ive A Rare Look at Design Genius Jony Ive: The Man Behind the Apple Watch OCTOBER 1, 2014 8:00 AMby ROBERT SULLIVAN<http://www.vogue.com/contributor/robert-sullivan/>|photographed by DAVID SIMS<http://www.vogue.com/tag/photographer/david-sims/> * 0<https://plus.google.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vogue.com%2F1415025%2Fap…> * 0<http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vogue.com%…> * EMAIL<mailto:?body=http://www.vogue.com/1415025/apple-design-genius-jonathan-ive/…> * <http://www.vogue.com/1415025/apple-design-genius-jonathan-ive#> [Jonathan Ive] EXPAND Photographed by David Sims, Vogue, October 2014 How Apple’s under-the-radar design genius, Jonathan Ive, has found the way to our hearts. I first catch sight of Jony Ive across the Apple campus, in a plain Dodger-blue T-shirt and white painter’s pants, in conversation, nodding. The head Apple designer, who brought you the iMac and the iPad and now, the Apple Watch, has a nearly shaved head and a tightly trimmed beard. He’s not tall, not small, and looks as if he might be a formidable rugby opponent—though even from a distance he comes across as open and amenable, less likely to tackle you than to do what he is doing with a colleague at this very moment, which is listening. Ive has a calming presence, like the Apple campus itself, whose very address, Infinite Loop, lulls you into a sense of Zen-ness. In the courtyard, trays of beautiful food—grass-fed steaks and fresh-made curries and California-born hot sauces—lead Apple employees out toward the open-air seating, away from the white cafeteria that might be described as a luxurious spa for the terminally nerdy. White is the color of choice at Apple HQ as in the Apple product line. It is through this white, with its clarity, its dust-hiding lack of distraction, that you have already met Jonathan Ive. To the south of the cafeteria is a tiny amphitheater, an emotional site in Apple’s history: At the company’s 2011 memorial for Steve Jobs, Coldplay took the stage, as did Jony Ive. Ive is notoriously reluctant to give interviews, not to mention speak in public. But on that day he spoke for the man whom he called his dearest friend. For his part, Jobs, when he was alive, referred to Ive as his “spiritual partner.” “I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful,” Ive told the assembled mourners, “they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts.” Another thing Jobs understood way back in 1997, the year he returned to the company that had kicked him out a decade earlier, was that Ive—then still in his 20s—was a designer with the background and the psychological tools not just to create the latest, hottest devices but also to orchestrate a team. Like cutting-edge steel, Ive is strong and persistent but flexible, and most crucial (most Jobs-ian, in fact), he is passionate about things, as in things, literally. “So much of my background is about making, physically doing it myself,” he says. In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep their design talents backstage where they can do the most good. “There’s an odd irony here,” he observes. “I think our goal is that you would have a sense that it wasn’t design.” RELATED STORIES * [cid:E4F8D607-893C-4E35-BD2C-2AED5313E12E] The Small Miracle of the Apple Watch<http://www.vogue.com/2088983/apple-watch-october-2014-issue/> * The Apple Watch Has Landed: Will You Pick Up the Next Big Thing in Wearable Tech?<http://www.vogue.com/1342841/apple-watch-first-look/> When you sit down with Ive, he is eager to chat—too eager, maybe, for the Apple time-minders who are always looking around for him—and will take a while to respond to a question, smiling as he says, “This is going to be a kind of oblique answer. . . .” We are talking in a white room, distracted only by a black non-Apple television—itself a signpost to the question, When will Apple make TVs or whatever will replace them? Noticeably, his phone neither rings nor vibrates; he has designed the moment for concentration. He nurses a white mug of tea, and the only thing in the room besides an iPhone is the pair of reading glasses designed by his friend Marc Newson and tucked into the front of his T-shirt: simple, delicate, but clear and strong. “I wish I could articulate this more effectively,” he continues, addressing his ambitions as a designer. “But it is to have that sense that you know there couldn’t possibly be a sane or rational alternative.” Ive is obsessed over in design blogs, the sites that cover Apple as if it were the Vatican, following leaks and rumors and passing along hijacked photos of components or screens—pitching best guesses as to what Apple is working on next. One blog imagines what it would be like if Jony Ive designed—well, everything: “Jony Ive redesigns . . . freeway signage . . . Coke . . . the solar system.” You might spot the occasional photo of him out in the world—at the White House for a design award; in London being knighted, as he was two years ago, by Princess Anne; at a pizza dinner in San Francisco, sitting with Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and various Silicon Valley execs. But one of the very natural settings for the real Jony Ive is a workshop at Apple HQ. It may be easier to sneak into a North Korean cabinet meeting than into the Apple design studio, the place where a small group of people have all the tools and materials and machinery necessary to develop things that are not yet things. Reportedly Ive’s wife, Heather Pegg, has never been—he doesn’t even tell her what he’s working on—and his twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not allowed in either. Work is conducted behind tinted windows, serenaded by the team’s beloved techno music, a must for the boss. “I find that when I write I need things to be quiet, but when I design, I can’t bear it if it’s quiet,” he says. Indeed, the design team is said to have followed an unwritten rule to move away from their work whenever the famously brusque Jobs entered the studio and turn up the volume so as to make his criticisms less audible, less likely to throw them off course. In 1985, the year Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive was in design school in England, struggling with computers, blaming himself. “Isn’t that curious?” he says now. “Because if you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.” Despite that initial obstacle, Ive seems to have been born to understand industrial design. He grew up in Chingford, on the outskirts of London near Epping Forest, a good place for a city kid who liked to play in the trees. His father, Michael Ive, is a silversmith, and his grandfather was an engineer. When Ive was a boy, his father worked with the British government to develop and set the standards for design education. When he made things with his son—a toboggan, say—he would demand that Jony sketch his design before commencing construction. As for the tree house Ive designed back then, guess what? Today he is critical. “I’d do it differently.” His eyes light up as he says it, and you fully believe, in that moment, that he would happily drop everything to walk outside and work on it now. In high school, Ive studied sculpture and chemistry, and in 1985 he enrolled in the design program at Newcastle Polytechnic, where he became known as passionately detail-oriented, creating dozens of models of a hearing aid to be used by deaf children and their teachers. By the time he was out of school and working for a small design consultancy (called, coincidentally, Tangerine), a project he took on for Apple impressed the Cupertino company. They recruited him in 1992. Five years later, a disenchanted Ive was about to leave when Jobs returned to reboot the then-floundering Apple, which happened, by most analyses, when Jobs enabled Ive. By Ive’s account, the two hit it off immediately. “It was literally the meeting showing him what we’d worked on,” Ive says, “and we just clicked.” Ive talks about feeling a little apart, like Jobs. “When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely”—big laugh here—“and I think that we both perceived the world in the same way.” Design critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design, when manufacturers began to understand that consumers would pay more for craftsmanship. Together Jobs and Ive centered their work on the notion that computers did not have to look as if they belonged in a room at NASA. The candy-colored iMac—their first smash hit—felt to consumers like a charming friend, revolutionary but approachable, and appealed to both men and women. “I think what we sincerely try to do is create objects and products and ideas that are new and innovative,” says Ive, “but at the same time there is a slightly peculiar familiarity to them.” The iMac was followed by laptops in cool brushed titanium, then white laptops. Apple was treating computers and media devices as tools, as more than just wires and RAM shoved in a box; they were not so much minimal devices as devices that coordinate functions. And then came the iPod and the iPhone, an invention like a divining rod, tapping into invisible streams of information. Throughout, Ive has refined Apple’s design process, which, he argues, is almost abstract in its devotion to pure idea: Good design creates the market; ideas are king. And here’s the next irony that defines Ive’s career: In the clutter of contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on increasing currency. “I think now more than ever it’s important to be clear, to be singular,” he says, “and to have a perspective, one you didn’t generate as the result of doing a lot of focus groups.” Developing concepts and creating prototypes leads to “fascinating conversations” with his team, says Ive. “It’s a process I’ve been practicing for decades, but I still have the same wonder.” For someone whose influence on our lives is so huge, responsible not just for shifting whole economies but for changing the way we interact, Ive is extraordinarily low-profile. “He’s a virtually unknown British character who became a central person in the explosion of the Internet,” says his friend the Hong Kong–born businessman David Tang. “It’s amazing that he’s not more widely talked about.” On the Silicon Valley social circuit, he’s an anomaly. “The technology industry tends to feature people with big personalities who like to talk about their achievements,” says Trevor Traina, a fifth-generation San Franciscan entrepreneur who is a friend and neighbor of the Ives. “Jony is humble and private, and he doesn’t wear his achievements on his sleeve.” Ive lives in the Pacific Heights neighborhood with his wife and sons. “Heather is a writer,” he says. “She’s a creative too. We met at high school. I got married when I was 21, and I’m 47. Married a long time. Isn’t it cool?” Their house, bought two years ago for $17 million, is by the storied architectural firm Polk & Co.—Willis Polk oversaw the design of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, which opened in 1915. Like his own father, Ive seems adamant about intention at home. “My boys are ten, and I like spending time with them doing stuff that I did, which is drawing and making things—real things, not virtual things,” he says. Easygoing Ive morphs into Serious Ive on this point: He sees design schools failing their students by moving away from a foundation in traditional skills. “I think it’s important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly,” he says, “to understand the properties you’re working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.” Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own hands that keeps Ive grounded. “He’s not distracted by any veneer of glamour,” says Tang, who remarks on his friend’s thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two finely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved, Ive-designed ashtrays—Tang loves cigars—constructed from the next-generation iPhone material. “It was like getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Tang says. Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously inventive ways to use the technology at his fingertips. When a presenter from Blue Peter—Britain’s longest-running children’s TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft utilitarian designs from household objects—came to present him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peterbadge depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In repayment, he fired up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer-controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum like an origami flower, and in a mere ten hours created a Blue Peterbadge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant cousin of the MacBook Air. His attention to detail is famous among his friends. Traina likes to joke with him that he couldn’t imagine being Ive’s contractor, since nothing would escape his notice. “One time I showed him a 1920s Cartier crystal, platinum, and diamond pocket watch that had been my father’s,” Traina recalls. “He took a quick look and later referred to the way the crystal was beveled, something I didn’t even remember.” Ive’s personal design tastes include the Castiglionis’ Snoopy lamp and “another Castiglioni that’s a parabolic glass that sits quite low.” He likes his suits custom-made by British tailor Thomas Mahon, and might show up in one on the charity circuit—at the Mid-Winter Gala, for instance, at a table with Marissa Mayer and Alexis and Trevor Traina; the Ives also cochaired the benefit for Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty group in San Francisco. Ive commutes what used to be 45 minutes and can now be an hour and a half, no matter whether he is driving an Aston Martin or a Bentley or a Land Rover, a fleet of cars that the British press watches like Apple’s stock price. He takes a vacation once in a while, often in London, setting up in a suite at Claridge’s while his family visits with the family of Marc Newson, the Australian designer who has remade everything from cars to furniture to restaurants to first-class lounges for Qantas. When he and Newson relax, they do so by attempting to switch work off—tough to do when you design the world—though designers out for a drink will inevitably allow the poorly designed world to seep in. “Shit we hate,” says Newson, includes American cars. “It’s as if a giant stuck his straw in the exhaust pipe and inflated them,” he adds, “when you look at the beautiful proportions in other cars that have been lost.” The two also relax working, as they did recently on behalf of their mutual friend Bono, whose recent auction of Ive- and Newson-curated goods raised $13 million for (Red), Bono’s charity to stop AIDS. The list included Ettore Sottsass’s Olivetti typewriter; a Dieter Rams hi-fi (Rams himself showed up at New York’s Sotheby’s that Saturday night last fall); an Airstream trailer; and a Leica that Newson and Ive lovingly tweaked together. “We didn’t even have to vocalize our pet hates, we were so in tune,” Newson says. “We only have to look at the object and look at each other and our eyes roll.” It’s a collaboration that is now a lock, apparently, since Apple recently announced that Newson would join Ive’s design team to work on special projects. “They’re a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth,” jokes Bono. They finish each other’s sentences. “They finish each other’s food,” adds Bono. “The kind of emotional and physical attraction people develop with Apple products shouldn’t really be possible, but take a look around you.” Friends marvel as Ive shifts from the guy cracking jokes to the solemn Sir Jonathan Ive. “Jony is deadly serious,” says Bono, who first met Ive when Jobs dispatched him to an Irish pub to salvage a U2–Apple iPod promotion. “He is also serious fun to be around. When you go out for a pint with Jony, it’s kind of like going for a pint with the future, which is cool except you know he’s not telling you what they’ve really got planned.” Feels nice, doesn’t it?” On my second visit to Cupertino, Ive has finally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is more watch than the computer geeks would ever have imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex wearer’s wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to me—weeks before the product’s exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO Tim Cook—in a situation room that has us surrounded by guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say, the weight of it, he nods. “Because it’s real materials,” he says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but solid snap, which he just loves as an interaction with design, a pure, tactile idea. “Isn’t that fantastic?” At the beginning of our sitdown, he is slightly flustered at the attempt to condense all that went into the device into a single conversation. “It’s strange when you’ve been working on something for three years . . .” he says, shaking his head. He describes the trajectory of clocks to watches: from a public clock in a Bavarian square to timepieces owned by royalty, to military chronometers, to the watch’s arrival, only at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the wrist. “It’s fascinating how people struggled with wearing this incredibly powerful technology personally.” The cell phone, of course, killed the watch to some extent. Now he wants to reset the balance. The Apple Watch is designed in three collections, with myriad variations, from elegantly luxurious to a brightly colored sporty version. On the back, LEDs emit light through sapphire-crystal windows, and photodiodes convert that light into a signal that algorithms use to calculate your heart rate. Got that? All of this syncs with your iPhone, making the watch the wrist-bound control tower of your life in tech. Monitor your heart rate or your movement in general. Tap to have Siri take a message, or send a voice reply. Pay for drinks with your wrist (Apple Pay will be, yes, Apple Watch–compatible). With this product, Apple is moving from your desk and your pocket onto your person, your pulse point. The watch underscores the fact that Ive is first and foremost a masterly product designer; technology almost comes second. It’s a beautiful object, a device you might like even if you don’t like devices. “Everything we’ve been trying to do,” he says, “it’s that pursuit of the very pure and very simple.” Aside from all the ways the watch connects to your phone, Ive is very interested in how the watch can connect to another human. “You know how very often technology tends to inhibit rather than enable more nuanced, subtle communication?” he asks. This is the question that haunts the son of a craftsman: Is he making tools that improve the world or shut people down? “We spent a lot of time working on this special mechanism inside, combined with the built-in speaker” —he demonstrates on his wrist. You can select a chosen person, also wearing the watch, and transmit your pulse to them. “You feel this very gentle tap,” he says, “and you can feel my heartbeat. This is a very big deal, I think. It’s being able to communicate in a very gentle way.” Whether it is ultimately judged to be a big deal or another distraction remains to be seen. Either way, Ive eventually leaves the guarded room with his secrets intact for a few more weeks, passing through the bright white corridors decorated with long views of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a poster-like portrait of Steve Jobs holding up a Mac during one of his famous hard sells—the trademark bold product introduction, the late CEO’s big loud pitch. As you watch Ive walk off, politely thanking people, you recall that he closed up his private presentation by asking you to listen closely to a watchband as it is pulled off and then reconnected. “You just press this button and it slides off, and that is just gorgeous,” he was saying. He encouraged you to pause. “But listen as it closes,” he said. “It makes this fantastic k-chit.” He was nearly whispering. And when he said the word fantastic, he said it softly and slowly—“fan-tas-tic!”—as if he never wanted it to end. This is perhaps Ive’s greatest achievement: not that we can get our email more readily, but that we can stop to notice a small, quiet connection.

9 years, 6 months

INTEREST: JPMorgan hack exposed data of 83 million, among biggest breaches in history

by Wayne Billing

"Six months [before the attack, Target] began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye (FEYE), whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon. Target had a team of security specialists in Bangalore to monitor its computers around the clock. If Bangalore noticed anything suspicious, Target’s security operations center in Minneapolis would be notified. On Saturday, Nov. 30, the hackers had set their traps and had just one thing to do before starting the attack: plan the data’s escape route. As they uploaded exfiltration malware to move stolen credit card numbers—first to staging points spread around the U.S. to cover their tracks, then into their computers in Russia—FireEye spotted them. Bangalore got an alert and flagged the security team in Minneapolis. And then … Nothing happened. For some reason, Minneapolis didn’t react to the sirens. Target employees familiar with the company’s data security operation, as well as eight people with specific knowledge of the hack and its aftermath, including former employees, security researchers, and law enforcement officials. The story they tell is of an alert system, installed to protect the bond between retailer and customer, that worked beautifully. But then, Target stood by as 40 million credit card numbers—and 70 million addresses, phone numbers, and other pieces of personal information—gushed out of its mainframes." - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed-alarms-in-epi… Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed-alarms-in-epi… Home Depot security hack: What to do if your cards are breached http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/home-depot-security-hack-what-to-do-if-your… JPMorgan hack exposed data of 83 million, among biggest breaches in history http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/02/us-jpmorgan-cybersecurity-idUSKCN… JPMorgan hack exposed data of 83 million, among biggest breaches in history Thu Oct 2, 2014 7:15pm EDT (Reuters) - Names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the holders of some 83 million households and small business accounts were exposed when computer systems at JPMorgan Chase & Co<http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=JPM&lc=int_mb_1001> (JPM.N<http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=JPM.N>) were recently compromised by hackers, making it one of the biggest data breaches in history. The bank revealed the scope of the previously disclosed breach on Thursday, saying that there was no evidence that account numbers, passwords, user IDs, birth dates or Social Security numbers had been stolen. It added that it has not seen "unusual customer fraud" related to the attack which exposed contact information for 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. The people affected are mostly account holders, but may also include former account holders and others who entered their contact information at the bank’s online and mobile sites, according to a bank spokeswoman. Security experts outside of the bank warned that the breach could result in an increase in crime as scammers will likely attempt to use the stolen information to engage in various types of fraud. The bank's customers should be on heightened alert for fraud, said Mark Rasch, a former federal cyber crimes prosecutor. "All of this data is useful to hackers and identity thieves," he said. "The kind of information that was stolen is not sensitive itself, but is frequently used to validate people's identities." Tal Klein, vice president with the cybersecurity firm Adallom, said that the breach could undermine confidence in the security of banks and other companies that people assume are well protected from hackers. "Criminals could literally take on the identities of these 83 million businesses and people. That's the biggest concern," he said. "Until now the assumption has been that the companies that get breached are the ones that have poor security practices, but we know that JPMorgan had a good security program and that they invest heavily in this area," he said. "So what we are waking up to is that the fundamental nature of security is broken." Still, JPMorgan advised customers on its website that it does not believe they need to change their passwords or account information. Company spokeswoman Patricia Wexler said that the bank is not offering credit monitoring to its customers because no financial information, account data or personally identifiable information was compromised. At the end of August, JPMorgan said it was working with U.S. law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible cyber attack. As with home break-ins, it can take victims of data attacks months to discover what, if anything, is missing. (Reporting by Tanya Agrawal in Bangalore, David Henry in New York and Jim Finkle<http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journalist.php?edition=us&n=jim.finkle&> in Boston.; Editing by Ted Kerr<http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journalist.php?edition=us&n=ted.kerr&> and Bernard Orr<http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journalist.php?edition=us&n=bernard.orr&>)

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apple-list October 2014