Twitter Terrorism

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Matt Brian:

It is widely known that law enforcement agencies are turning to social networks to monitor citizens but one UK Twitter user saw a joke tweet land him in hot water, as he was detained by Homeland Security in Los Angeles, interrogated and barred from the US, The Sun reveals.

I'm sure that Terrorists are advertising their plans on Twitter - you know, cause they want to get caught and be unsuccessful. I wonder how many other "dangerous" tourists the TSA and DHS have stopped...

(via TheNextWeb)

HTC's Next Play

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Some interesting additions to HTC Sense 4.0...

  • Improved Typography (Great)
  • Tab positioning based on device orientation (Good)
  • Button functions will now be displayed (Seriously?)

Matt at The Next Web:

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments is the addition of a Guest Mode, which allows HTC smartphone owners to specify what can be accessed if someone else is browsing their device. We all know how annoying it is when people pick up your phone and start going through it, so this would be a great way to block data access.

This sounds like a solid idea to me. I don't know about implementation on a phone, but I know I would like to have this on my iPad. iPad is more like a computer and so different profiles for different users would be awesome. I'm hoping this is part of iOS 6.x.

Additionally:

[T]he addition of deeper integration with Dropbox — which is said to come with 50GB of space for free...

This is surely an attempt to compete with iCloud, and while I wouldn't mind 50GB of online storage (I'm sure at least some of that is for Photos and Music), I find it amusing that HTC is paying customers $10/month to use their phones.

(via TheNextWeb)

Siri Reliability

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Marco Arment:

Anecdotally, I’ve had about a 50% failure rate recently.

Ben Brooks:

Same here...

This hasn't been my experience at all. Maybe because I'm in Canada, I'm not sure. But I've only found Siri to be getting better and better. I has begun to understand nicknames and recognizes people better than ever. Still, curious.

Mobile Adversiting

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Shawn Schauer, CEO of Moolah Media:

We’re a small team, so we have to focus on where see the highest response rates, and right now that’s Android, Apple has been clamping down on the user ID tracking, and they’re kind of spooking a lot of people about that. That’s really hurt advertising on the iPhone.

That's fine with me. I'd rather pay for an app than have some advertiser sell me to someone else.

(via TechCrunch)

The Stall is Coming

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Thomas Kee:

[G]rowth like what we have been witness to will not continue at the same rate. This stall is coming, it is closer than most people think, and what we were just witness to is likely the peak in this growth cycle.

Apple's been peaking for a long time now. I don't fully understand why people take so much joy in predicting Apple's downfall.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Those Who Don't Learn From the Past...

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Matt Drance:

[P]irated movies remain free of charge, free of non-skippable ads, free of five-minute load times, and are now nearly three months ahead of the competition.
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iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing.
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Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson.

I was talking about this with my wife last night and I couldn't agree more.

(via The Brooks Review)

Have Cash? Must Spend!

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Poornima Gupta for Reuters:

[T]o paraphrase rapper P. Diddy, with more money comes more problems. Apple's runaway success presents Cook with his first real public test as chief executive officer - figuring out what to do with the money.

There's two things wrong with this. Firstly Peter Oppenheimer said during Apple Q1 earnings call:

We are actively discussing uses of our cash balance and don't have anything specific to announce today. In the meantime, we continue to be very disciplined with the cash and are not letting it burn a hole in our pockets.

So… that doesn't sound like a problem to me. And secondly (and perhaps more importantly) P.Diddy (at the time Puff Daddy) was not the rapper who said 'more money more problems (in fact, NO rapper said that – it was Mo' Money Mo' Problems), it was the Notorious B.I.G.

Inside Apple Factual Error #1

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Thomas Q. Brady on Adam Lashinsky's new book, 'Inside Apple':

You may now accuse me of picking a nit, but in the history of Apple, the coining of the “i-nomenclature” marks several turning points all in one: the beginning of Jobs’s tour de force second term at Apple, the spinning up of one of the most powerful ad campaigns in history, the start of a revolution in the PC industry and the product roadmap that got us where we are today — one of the things the I stood for was the integration of the Internet as a core feature.

Seems like an important detail to get right. This book is off to a bad start for me.

Symantec Hacked

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Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica:

Symantec confirmed the theft of source code from the 2006 versions of several Norton security products and the pcAnywhere remote access tool, and that Symantec is advising customers to disable pcAnywhere until a permanent fix is issued.

Were I to purchase internet security software for my Mac (I won't) it wouldn't be from Symantec.