NBC News' Fear-mongering Regarding Leaked Apple Device UDIDs

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I always enjoy when non-tech reporters write about tech stories and get just enough of the details wrong to make it seem to the average user that the story is true while the story actually perpetuates falsehoods. Keyy Sanders and Bob Sullivan, at NBC News:

The UDID -- which stands for Unique Device Identifier -- is present on Apple iPads, iPods and iPhones, and is similar to a serial number. During the past year, researchers have found that many app developers have used the UDID to help keep track of their users, storing the data in various databases and often associating it with other personal information. When matched with other information, the UDID can be used to track users' app usage, social media usage or location. It could also be used to "push" potentially dangerous applications onto users' Apple gadgets. The way this paragraph is written, it would lead the average reader to believe that any of the leaked 12 million UDIDs could be used to push malware onto the respective iOS devices they belong to. This is a blatant lie. In order for something like this to happen, the culprit would have to register 120,000 Apple Developer accounts, paying $99 each for them which would cost a total of $11,880,000. Then someone would have to manually enter each UDID into Apple's Developer portal. Then and only then would someone have to make some sort of iOS app (that Apple could kill easily by deactivating the offending developer account) and add that app to each of the 120,000 developer accounts they've made in order to be able to generate a link or share a file that users would have to drag into their iTunes or use a service like Testflight to receive over the air (most if not all Testflight users are developers themselves.) As you can see, this is a near-impossible scenario. Yet if you read the quoted paragraph, NBC would like the reader to believe that they are possibly in grave danger of having malware "pushed" to their devices. ::eyeroll:: The question is - did these two reporters not understand how this works or did they intentionally attempt to mislead their readers to make the story juicier?

What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What Bill Clinton Said

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Dashiell Bennett, at The Atlantic Wire:

If you were following any journalists on Twitter last night, one of the most remarked upon aspects of Bill Clinton's nomination speech was how liberally he deviated from the prepared text. What was handed out to the media was four pages of single-spaced, small font text, but — as an exasperated TelePrompTer operator found out —that was really just a guideline to what Clinton actually wanted to say during his 49-minute address. We decided to compare the two versions to see how one of the great speechmakers of his era goes about his business. You really have to take a look at their transcript which clearly shows which was removed, added or left the same from the text vs what he said. Amazing speaker.

The Best Interface Is No Interface

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Golden Krishna, at Cooper writes:> As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.”

It’s time for us to move beyond screen-based thinking. Because when we think in screens, we design based upon a model that is inherently unnatural, inhumane, and has diminishing returns. It requires a great deal of talent, money and time to make these systems somewhat usable, and after all that effort, the software can sadly, only truly improve with a major overhaul. The entire article is an excellent look at typical pedestrian interfaces that are seen these days versus interfaces that take great pains to anticipate the normal user behavior of a task and tries to solve it in the same way using a well designed interface.

Melting glacier reveals World War I ammunition

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MSNBC:

Some of the more than 200 pieces of World War I ammunition which emerged from a melting glacier on a Trentino mountain peak are seen, Aug. 31. Each piece weighs between 7-10 kilos, and the 85-100 mm caliber explosive devices were found at an altitude of 3,200 meters, when a once-perennial glacier on the Ago de Nardis peak partially melted due to a recent heat wave that reached into Italy's highest peaks. The Finance Police Alpine rescue unit, operating in the area between Pinzolo and Madonna di Campiglio, saw brownish metal points emerging from the ice, got a fix on them via GPS, and then extricated the ordnance. The pieces were spread over a 100-square-meter area during series of battles fought between the armies of Austria-Hungary and Italy in northern Italy between 1915 and 1918. Disposal specialists returned to dispose of the munitions.

STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW!

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Get out your iPhone or iPad and load this link in Safari. Welcome to Mars. A huge thank you to @DrewMarlowe for tweeting this and @JenSimmons for retweeting him. Update: Several folks have noted that Mount Sharp is missing from the photo and others were wondering how the photo itself was taken. It seems that Talking Points Memo has the answers to your questions, having interviewed the photographer who constructed the 360 degree view. Also, he is waiting on more imagery from NASA in order to clean up the image so as to make it more accurate and include some of the missing landscape features.