Bottle Cap Blues

Check out this great video. Chris Sumers writes:

This is a short film that I was a part of for Adam Young's solo Art Show at Common House Gallery entitled: Songs of the Early Riser. Adam had a concept for a video installation. I took his concept and put it into a video. We originally had 4 different edits looping at the show in his installation, but this edit is a compilation of my favorite clips from the three day shoot. This has been the most fun project I have been a part of to date. Sitting around with your friends killing a couple of six packs of beer trying to think of different means to open your next drink is pretty fun. I encourage you to try it.

Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth

Mat Honan, at Wired's Gadget Lab:

“I called Netflix and it was so easy,” he chuckles. “They said, ‘What’s your name?’ and I said, ‘Todd [Redacted],’ gave them his e-mail, and they said, ‘Alright your password is 12345,’ and I was signed in. I saw the last four digits of his credit card. That’s when I filled out the Windows Live password-reset form, which just required the first name and last name of the credit card holder, the last four digits, and the expiration date.” After Mat fell victim to similar social engineering miscreants weeks ago, he has begun investigating how widespread this issue is. What he has found, through a goldmine source, is that this sort of thing is prevalent within the industry. This is a must read article. I applaud Mat for exposing these security issues and hope the MANY companies mentioned in this article will take action to close these vulnerabilities within their systems.

JP Morgan Estimates That New iPhone Could Boost GDP By 0.5 Percent

Call me skeptical given that it comes from JP Morgan (I distrust any mainstream Wall St. analysts given their track record) but if this is true, that would be crazy. Tim Reid, at Reuters:

Feroli laid out his math. J.P. Morgan's analysts expect Apple to sell around 8 million iPhone 5s in the fourth quarter. They expect the sales price to be about $600. With about $200 in discounted import component costs, the government can factor in $400 per phone into its measure of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter. Feroli said the estimate of between a quarter to a half point of annualized GDP "seems fairly large, and for that reason should be treated skeptically." But, he added, "we think the recent evidence is consistent with this projection." Again, that's crazy - but cool if true.

NBC News' Fear-mongering Regarding Leaked Apple Device UDIDs

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?

Jon Stewart On Bill Clinton's Speech

Bill Clinton's Speech from the DNC

If you haven't seen it yet, watch it.

What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What Bill Clinton Said

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

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.