With working conditions and security policy down Apple's supply chain under serious fire, an Apple insider reached out to us. Apple's blasé attitude toward its manufacturers' labor practices, he says, is old news.
Our tipster was a member of the Newton team when Steve Jobs made his return to Apple in 1996, with mixed memories of the homecoming:
In an effort to bring the Newton group into the fold, we had a meeting at which Steve laid out his vision for the future of Apple.
"Apple will be the Nike of consumer electronics" was his mantra.
The Nike of consumer electronics. I mean sure, aspiring for Nike's level of name recognition and synonymity with their industry is forgivable. But in 1996-1997, Nike's name wasn't just synonymous with shoes and sportwear; it was synonymous with shady work practices, after an extensive Life Magazine article about labor conditions in Pakistan led with a photo of a small boy surrounded by Nike merchandise. To aspire to be Nike that year was to aspire to be successful at all costs. :
I stood and asked if that included employing disadvantaged 'slave' labor in Asia? A well known problem for Nike at the time.
My question was ignored.
Regardless of the actual v.s. relative working conditions, a company cannot grow and produce margins like Apples without someone paying the price. That someone is always the one with least leverage.
Unfortunately, extreme secrecy can also protect bad practices as much as any legitimate trade secret.
This anecdote clearly comes from someone who's got some serious issues with Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, whom he calls "one of the most vindictive people I have ever met." But if true, the implications are disturbing: It paints Apple, from the top, as a company—that's been plagued with documented labor issues as of late—that isn't just blissfully unaware of how companies down its supply chain meet their absurd demands for secrecy, including known labor problems, but as a company that ignored these concerns from the start. [Thanks, tipster!—Pic via LostInAFog]
The guys at 9to5Mac have put together a profile you can install on your iPhone using a corporate development kit that gives you an alphanumeric passcode lock—versus the standard 4-digit PIN-style lock.
The settings profile's easily removed if you don't like it, but make sure you don't lock yourself out of your phone by forgetting the passcode. Also, it's entirely at your own risk, you know, in case it does blow up your phone forever. [9to5Mac]
Investigators at the NSA have tracked the huge online attacks that Google used as their reason for leaving the Chinese market to two universities, one with ties to the Chinese military.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
So this could mean a couple of things. The Chinese government could be using this school as a front for its attacks. Or it could be the work of "patriotic hackers" in the school, one of the best computer programs in the world. Or the schools could have been used as a proxy by another country looking to put the blame on China.
But one thing is sure: the attacks took place through a newly-discovered Internet Explorer vulnerability.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies' servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique - called man-in-the-mailbox - to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
This is why you should not be running IE 6.0, you lazy companies. [NY Times]
Thinksound's Rain and slightly bassier Thunder earphones are made out of wood. That's their thing, but it's not the best thing about them. The best thing about them is that they're damn nice earbuds, for a reasonable price.
Though their MSRPs are significantly higher, at $100 and $75, respectively, you can find the Rains for $60 on Amazon, and the Thunders for about $45. In these photos, the Rains have the darker finish and black tips, while the Thunders have a cherry finish and white tips.
To be honest, the only apparent difference between these two earbuds, aside from their slightly different shapes, is sound balance: The Rains are tuned for all-around listening, and the Thunders for heavier bass.
The first thing you'll notice about the Thinksounds is that, yes, they are made out of wood, and yes, that makes them beautiful. There's nothing about the design or shape that's particularly striking—if these were molded from shiny plastic, they could even look tacky—but the finish, either in Black Chocolate or Red Cherry stain, looks and feels great. A headphone body is one of the only reasonable applications for wood in the gadget world, and to both your eyes and your fingers, the Thinksound are a treat. But who cares what they think; what about your ear holes?
Not knowing that they used to be made from the living flesh of a tree, the Rains have a rich sound, if not a spectacular one. The low end is healthy to the point that I'd hesitate to recommend the even bassier Thunders, and the midrange is well represented and clear even at high volumes. The highest notes, which are crucial to conveying strong presence in music, can sound a bit soft at times, but unless you've just been listening to a set of high-end Etymotics, you're not likely to notice. Which brings me to the core issue here: wood. How about that wood!
I could hazard a guess that wood is the reason the Thinksounds' sound soft at the high end, or that all the way down the equalizer, they sound warm, a favorite, and largely meaningless, word among audiophiles. I can credit wood with the near-total lack of cable noise (when the cord is jostled), and blame it for the earphones' sound isolation, which is only OK. I can posit that funneling sound from the 9mm (and in the case of the Thunder, 10mm) drivers through wood instead of plastic would cause sound to reverberate differently. I could buy into Thinksound's claims that building headphones out of renewable natural materials is better for the environment than building them out of something else.
But since I can't actually test a plastic or metal version of the Rain or Thunder, and since I have absolutely no background in ecology or material science, I won't. I'll just say that, for the price, the Thinksound Rains hold their own against any other earphone, up to an including the Shure SE115s, and that for any price, you're not going to find a set of earphones more attractive, or immediately distinctive.
So: should you wood? Sure you should. [Thinksound]
They're even prettier in real life than they look above
Balanced, clean, powerful sound, especially for the (street) price.
They're good for the environment, despite the fact that they're explicitly made from something that used to be alive, and now isn't. This is a plus if you want it to be, and causes no compromise.
The Thunders are a bit too bassy, so unless you like your music thumpier than most, stick with the slightly more expensive Rains.
Looks like our hunches about what's inside the next MacBook Pros are panning out: AppleInsider hears that Apple's got new MacBook Pros running that can switch between integrated and discrete graphics automagically, which exactly describes Nvidia's Optimus dual graphics tech.
If you remember, the unibody MacBooks from Oct. 2008 were the first to use Nvidia's GeForce 9400M, a combination chipset/integrated GPU that ridiculously outperformed Intel's own integrated graphics, and the Pro models at the time could switch between power-saving integrated and beefier discrete graphics, though it requires a logout.
Nvidia got cockblocked from making chipsets for Intel's latest-gen chips (read: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7), ruling out using Nvidia's better integrated graphics; Nvidia canned their chipset business entirely. So! Nvidia's Optimus tech works with Intel's crappier integrated graphics that are built onto the same die as the newer Core processors, but even more seamlessly than before—the computer automatically switches between Intel's power-sipping integrated and Nvidia's monster discrete graphics, depending on what you're doing. No logouts required.
In the demo we saw on a Windows machine, the automatic part of the tech has some drawbacks—namely, it's entirely dependent on software to tell your computer which graphics card to run. But Apple's obviously worked pretty closely with Nvidia on graphics before, so it seems logical they're doing so here, too. Though I don't expect we'll know until the new MacBooks finally arrive, whenever that happens (hopefully, soon). [AppleInsider]
Ok ok ok, rewind a few weeks. Before WinPho 7 trundled into the daylight, the strongest evidence we had for a new product from Microsoft actually centered around something else: The long-rumored, utterly mysterious Project Pink. So, err, what happened?
With Windows Phone 7 Series as the star of the show, Mobile World Congress came and went without a single mention of Pink. Which is strange! Because leading up to the conference, most of the material, non-rumor evidence we had about Microsoft's mobile plans centered around that very product, whatever it is. We had Twitter chatter from within Microsoft, from a client called "Danger." We had FCC filings, the most tantalizing pieces of which are being withheld until just days after the CTIA conference in late March. We had recent reports that the Pink phones would have Nvidia's Tegra, and run a Silverlight-based interface over a Windows CE6 base. And of course, we had the original Pink leak.
So, with Windows Phone 7 unveiled and described, where does that leave us? It leaves us with outstanding documentation, unexplained, not-insubstantial leaks, and perhaps most revealingly, the same "Danger"-sourced Twitter traffic from within Microsoft. See above, captured today.
Despite Windows Phone 7's emphasis on social networking integration, it debuted with a glaringly obvious lack of Twitter support. In other words, all these tweets from inside Microsoft? They're not coming from Windows Phone 7. Add to that the "Danger" branding (the Pink Project was rumored to be a followup to Danger's Sidekick as far back as September, and you start to get the sense the Windows Phone 7 is only half the story. Pink is probably still coming, and probably not running Windows Phone 7, leaving one massive question: What the hell does it run? And will it be the only one?
It's an exciting question, if just for how completely and utterly unanswered it is. So whatever you do, don't take your eyes off Microsoft—I don't think they're done yet. [Twitter]
The celebrant wore a black turtleneck and read vows from an iPod. The ring was brought in on a first-generation iPhone. And the bride and groom both said iDo. What more could you hope for from an Apple store wedding?
Josh and Ting first met at an Apple store, and could think of no place better to affirm their eternal devotion than between rows of MacBook. Apple didn't sanction the event, which took place at the flagship Fifth Avenue location in New York, so they took the good ol' fashioned flash mob route. As Josh said to Entertainment Weekly:
"I used to joke that the Apple Store is my church because I am not religious, and I loved everything Apple... Ting then came up with the idea of having the wedding there."
Let's hope their love has a better warranty than my iPhone. [EW via Cult of Mac]
MediaMemo's Peter Kafka hears that Hulu and its three owners want to be on the iPad, but if it happens—which won't be soon—it'll mostly likely be as part of a paid subscription package to get Hulu everywhere.
Technical challenge of switching from Flash to an iPad-friendly format aside (which isn't a huge one), here's the bigger question: Would Apple allow it on the iPad as an app, since it would compete with iTunes? (Especially if Apple's pushing for their own TV subscription plan, why would they somebody else's TV subscription app on their device?) More likely, Hulu'd have to able to run completely in the browser, where there's not much Apple could do to block it. But that's ultimately trivial.
Still, the bigger hurdle is that Hulu hasn't quite decided how it's going to move to a paid service yet—they want to keep the main site free, Kafka hears, while charging for the extras, which will most likely come in the form of some package that lets you watch Hulu on multiple screens (computer, TV, mobile). Also, they need mobile rights to shows from content producers. Not work that can be done overnight, or at least in time for the March launch.
But if there's a video service out there people will pay for besides Netflix, it's Hulu. At least, if some of the restrictions on back episodes are lifted. I want the full run of Buffy at my fingertips, dammit. [MediaMemo]
You may have forgotten about it, but Microsoft got in to a bit of trouble with the European Commission for anti-competitive practices (including force-feeding customers IE). Microsoft's plea bargain was to add other browser options alongside its own.
The new screen, seen here, will pop up for any European Windows (XP/Vista/7) user who has IE set as their default browser, starting around March 1st.
It randomizes new choices for web browsers in an impartial manner, offering direct links to download. It's like Microsoft is saying, "Hey, it's cool, you can take Firefox to the dance. I mean, I handle all of your day to day tasks, like boring spreadsheets, plus I'm awake 24/7 keeping things running for you, keeping you safe. Oh, and remember that time we played Call of Duty all weekend? And we saved the world together? And you cried? I'd never felt as close to you as I did that moment. I thought that meant something. I thought that I meant something, to you."
Actually, Microsoft really should add that message after users make their selections, just so the European Commission is forced to label guilt as an anti-competitive practice. [Microsoft on the Issues via TheRegister]
A leaked roadmap had previously indicated that Sprint would be launching a 4G WiMax handset sometime in 2010, and now the company has confirmed that we'll be seeing the technology within the next few months. But is the network ready?
Well, sort of. Sprint's been working with Clearwire on building up a 4G WiMax network since 2007, and while it's taken longer than they thought, they do have it up and running in 27 markets that serve 30 million people. But! Those markets currently don't include biggies like New York, San Fransisco, and DC, and 4G. WiMax hasn't been put to the test by a wide audience.
Still, they've got to do it sometime, and sooner is better than never for those who can use it. There's speculation that the handset in question will be the HTC Supersonic, an Android WiMax phone that leaked just last month. [Forbes via Electronista]
Both pirating (and legal streaming) offer a seamless viewing experience. DVDs and Blu-rays take the liberty of making you watch extra/unrelated crap. Oh, and like an airline safety briefing, one FBI warning is enough to cover me for life. [TheNextWeb via Lifehacker]
It may not be a CGI apology (bet his wife would've loved that!) but Tiger Woods will be making his first public apology live on YouTube today.
YouTube is live-streaming the press conference from Florida at 11am EST / 8am PST today to the Citizen Tube area of the site. Tune in if seeing a grown man grovelling is your idea of fun—I'll be brushing up on my sext messages. [YouTube Citizen Tube via YouTube Blog via Electricpig]
UPDATE: Video below:
Intel is moving from conifers to deciduous trees as inspiration for its next Atom Z-series platform, if PC Watch is correct. The Z-series is residing in netbooks and ultra-portables such as the Vaio P from Sony, but with Moorestown not compatible with Windows it makes sense Intel would need a new processor.
Enter Oak Trail, which PC Watch admits is an unconfirmed rumor—but supposedly will be more energy efficient and perhaps even based on Moorestown, yet capable of running Windows. It's certainly not a replacement for Pine Trail, which only launched in December, as they're too large and use too much energy. [PC Watch via Pocketables]
Sony. Working on a PlayStation controller that can also be used with Xbox 360s. And Nintendo consoles. Has hell iced over? Did the last 30 years never happen? Has Linus Torvalds replaced Kazuo Hirai at SCEI?
I know Sony's been working through its propriety issues of late, using the ePub format for ereaders and—heaven forbid!—launching its first range of SD cards. But opening the PlayStation up so the controller can be used with rival game consoles? Well I never.
GoRumors has dug up a patent suggesting Sony's working on a controller with a touchscreen LCD panel that would display commands for other consoles or players that have been set up to work with it.
The patent spells it out:
"A game console controller includes a hand-holdable housing and a touch sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) on the housing. The LCD is caused to present, depending on what type of game console a user has selected, a controller key layout for a first type of game console or a controller key layout for a second type of game console. A key layout includes plural keys selectable by a user to input commands to a game console."
By the looks of the diagram, the controller wouldn't just be a remote control that would let you turn on the different consoles—it would be an actual gaming peripheral, with the X/Y A/B buttons displayed on the LCD. It certainly wouldn't replace the use of an Xbox 360 or Wii controller, as I can't imagine mashing my thumbs on a touchscreen display for too long, but could be handy when you've got extra friends around and not enough pads to go around. Or as I mentioned before, turning the consoles on to access media.
I'm just in a state of shock that Sony of all companies is proposing this idea. I need to go lie down for a while. [GoRumors - Thanks Anand!]
Those scientist types have been very active of late, between making ethanol fuel from orange peel and now tree-derived sugar being used to make plastic. Who'll be first to make trees from fuel?
The latter project is being worked on at the Imperial College of London, and unlike plastic made from corn it's looking like these tree and grass-derived molecules actually biodegrade faster and are better for the environment.
In the next five years we should be seeing plastic made from sugar on the market—whether it's the work of this particular project or someone else, it'll still benefit everyone. You'd be right in having doubts over how much more expensive it would be to produce, but at least it'd use less energy, and hopefully over time become cheaper the more it's adopted. [Telegraph]
Moore's Law dictates that memory gets larger and cheaper as the years go by (roughly speaking), but how can this SD card store the equivalent of 256MB of photos and cost $16?
When the 60 photos are printed out and stuck in the album sleeves, naturally. On sale in April, it's available as a pre-order for $9.99. [Spinninghat via Technabob]
It was threatened, and thus now available. Hit up the BlackBerry App World to download the free Kindle app now—but only if you live in the US. And are happy paying up to a tenner to read a book on a 2.44" screen. [THINQ]
Windows Phone 7 is only three days old, but leaked documents from Microsoft supposedly showing developer requirements have turned up thanks to XDA-Developers, suggesting WP7 will use both Silverlight and XNA—which makes sense, given the Xbox 360 integration.
In the "development tools" document, it states that "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Express Blend are the primary tools for developing applications for Windows phones."
The "partner application development policy" claims:
"partner applications will have access to an extended set of managed APIs and a limited set of native APIs. The extended managed APIs are meant to support extending the phone experience with functionality that is specific to a phone or network. This set of APIs supports functionality such as camera mode extensibility."
"If the managed APIs in the application platform are not sufficient to support critical partner needs, then partners can request access to native APIs (provided support is available in the operating system). If Microsoft approves the request to enable an application scenario, then the specific native APISs supported will be explicitly documented."
The three documents are included for chewing over, but so far, not too many surprises. This is Microsoft, after all. [XDA-Developers via WMPowerUser via Engadget]
While these actual, real, strap-'em-to-your-hands-and-navigate-ski-slopes gloves are, you know, real, I much preferred the GPS gloves concept from two years ago. Give me a bionic hand over insulated glove any day of the week.
Still, there's something to be said for GPS gloves you can actually wear, and while Zanier hasn't confirmed the price of their Xplore.XGX ski gloves, they'll be going on sale sometime this year. Sure, you can just download a ski app on your iPhone which can help steer you down the slopes, but unless you've got an ultra-padded compartment for it I wouldn't risk taking one skiing. But then you're probably far less clumsy than I.
It'd be much easier just glancing down at the monochrome display on the thumb of the glove to see basic stats on how fast you're traveling, the distance you've covered, duration and altitude. Plus, that all important question of where the hell am I?
The gloves can also be connected by USB to your computer so you can collate data on your various skiing trips, and as they're made using Gore-Tex your fingers should be toasty warm. Unless the GPS happens to navigate you hand-first into an avalanche. [Ispo via Gadget Crave]
