According to Christie, who joined the secret "purple" iPhone project after an invitation from Scott Forstall, his team was responsible for many key iPhone elements, such as sliding to unlock, placing calls from the address book, and more. He and his team spent countless hours perfecting details like the speed of scrolling, and the feel of bouncing back at the end of a list.
He said his team "banged their head against the wall" over how to change text messages from a chronological list of individual messages to a series of separate ongoing conversations similar to instant messaging on a computer.Christie gave two progress reports to Jobs each month, in a small, windowless meeting room at the company's Cupertino headquarters. Few people had access to the room and even cleaning people were not allowed to enter. The secrecy surrounding the original iPhone's design was incredible, with Jobs even requiring employees to encrypt images of the device.
He also said the team was "shockingly small." Apple declined to specify the number of members.
Jobs was initially unhappy with Christie's progress on the device, and gave his team two weeks to improve.
"Steve had pretty much had it," said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple's user-interface team. "He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts."Christie's team was able to impress Jobs within the deadline, later giving presentations to Apple's design chief Jony Ive and Apple director Bill Cambell, who said the iPhone "would be better than the original Mac." All three approved the 2005 design, kicking off a "2 and a half year marathon" where the iPhone was designed from the ground up with Jobs clearing every minor detail, as has been noted in several previous reports of the iPhone's development.
Christie's details on the creation of the original iPhone come just ahead of a second major patent infringement lawsuit, set to begin tomorrow. Apple initially accused Samsung of grossly infringing on both its patents and its designs in 2011, a lawsuit that resulted in a $890 million penalty for the South Korean company in the United States.
While the first lawsuit covered older devices, the second U.S. patent lawsuit between the two companies covers more recent products like the Galaxy Note II, the Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5, and the iPad 4.
The full interview on The Wall Street Journal, which is well worth reading, also includes additional tidbits on the secrecy behind the development of the iPhone, major last minute changes, and details on the original iPhone's unveiling.
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With April 15 looming, plenty of bitcoin barons have been wondering how to treat their newfound crypto-fortunes. Does it count as capital gains? Is it taxed like a currency? Is it taxed at all? Well, on Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced definitively that Bitcoin is property, and will be taxed as such.
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday issued an emergency security warning saying that hackers have found a way to booby-trap certain common Word files with the .rtf extension.
Microsoft says it's aware of attacks going on now, but there's no fix yet to stop the hackers. It's working on a way to stop the bug.
The only way to be sure your computer won't get infected is not to open a document with the .rtf file extension until Microsoft says it's fine to do so.
This is the worst kind of attack. A hacker who manages to get you to open a booby-trapped file can gain control of your computer. From there, the hacker can do all kinds of things. For instance, the hacker can turn your computer into a so-called zombie by putting it on an illegal botnet. That means hackers can use your computer as part of a bigger network of computers to do all kinds of illegal things — like send spam, spread viruses, and commit fraud.
Even scarier is that the hack could work in preview mode. That's where you don't actually open the file but view it in an email instead. Outlook, for instance, lets you preview attachments.
Microsoft is recommending that you block all .rtf documents from your computer. It released a free tool that will set that up for you.
While .rtf files are not the default for Microsoft Word — the default is .docx or .doc — this is not a strange or unusual type of document. RTF stands for rich text format. For example, it's the default file format used by TextEdit, the free word-processing app that comes with Macs.
If people tend to email you a lot of Word documents, and you don't want to block all .rtf documents, another good choice is to set up your email to be in text mode, recommends security blogger Paul Ducklin via the Sophos security blog. The downside: This can make formatted emails, like newsletters, more difficult to read.
In a time when a company's brand is seemingly more important than its products, there's emerged an ugly trend where advertisers slap together a stock footage highlight reel designed to emotionally connect consumers to a giant corporation. It feels kind of icky, and this wonderful parody by stock footage company Dissolve perfectly illustrates why.
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Microsoft's recent lawsuit against a former employee accused of leaking trade secrets teaches us an important lesson: Your data is not your data.
The Redmond-based software giant admitted in court documents to accessing the Hotmail and messaging accounts of a French blogger in order to determine who was sending him prerelease screenshots of Windows programs and other proprietary corporate information. Federal prosecutors have charged the sender, a former senior software architect who worked for Microsoft in Lebanon and Russia, with theft of trade secrets.
Microsoft's power play should be a wake-up call to journalists and bloggers — particularly technology journalists like yours truly. Let's just say I'll think twice about the next time I want to use my Gmail account to report on an article about Google.
Experts say it was perfectly legal for Microsoft to access — without a court order — a user account on the email and messaging services it owns. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act permits companies to access its users' accounts under a broad array of circumstances.
While U.S. technology giants such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have taken pains to distance themselves from government spy efforts brought to light by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, this recent lawsuit is a reminder of the power these companies have to infringe on our privacy in the very same way.
To its credit, even Microsoft seems to realize it shouldn't have been able to do what it did. A top lawyer for the company promised that from now on, it will only search user accounts if it can satisfy the same criteria that would be required by a court order. John Frank, the company's vice president and deputy general counsel, released a statement saying that in the future, if it wants to access its user accounts to investigate a suspected crime against Microsoft, it will submit the evidence to an outside legal expert who will determine whether a search is just.
“The privacy of our customers is incredibly important to us,” Frank's statement reads. “And while we believe our actions in this particular case were appropriate given the specific circumstances, we want to be clear about how we will handle similar situations going forward.”
Even with these policy changes, users of Internet services should remember that tech giants that hold the key to our personal communication vaults operate on the honor system. The fact is that courts aren't going to start issuing orders for companies to search themselves.
Your Hotmail and Outlook accounts belong to Microsoft. Your Facebook messages belong to Facebook, and your Gmail exchanges to Google. We're all so focused on government spying that it's easy to forget the data they're sifting through isn't really ours to begin with.
Large web sites like Facebook are constantly under attack from hackers and groups trying to spread malware, which means sites like Facebook gather a lot of data about what attacks look like and where they're coming from. In order to help standardize its methods for collecting and analyzing all this data, Facebook built a new framework called ThreatData, which it detailed in a blog post on Tuesday afternoon.
Essentially, though, ThreatData is composed of systems for ingesting and transforming data feeds from many different sources, storing and analyzing that data for historical and real-time trends (using the Hadoop-based Hive for the former and Scuba for the latter), and then reacting to threats in real time. Blog post author Mark Hammell, a threat researcher at Facebook, explained how ThreatData has been used for everything from detecting a campaign to spread smartphone malware via spam messages to creating a “super anti-virus” program that's much more thorough than any commercial software.
The image below shows a graph Facebook developed using ThreatData to map malicious and victimized IP addresses, with the pie chart breaking that data down by ISP in the United States.
Things like ThreatData might be common among Facebook's peers at the high end of the web, but companies in other fields might want to take note and try to build this type of framework themselves or find software vendors that can help put one in place. The key, at least according to Hammell, is building something that understands that data sources and formats will change, and that flexibility is key in both analyzing and acting upon that data.
There is a boatload of companies presently trying to employ big data and machine learning techniques to security. Maybe — hopefully – those approaches combined with a framework like ThreatData can actually help companies get a handle on the persistent cyber threats they're facing.
Watching large enterprises like Target and Microsoft get pwned at massive scale, one loses confidence very quickly.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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- How data can create security in the modern enterprise
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God bless RightScale. It did the math to calculate how Google's new price cuts compare with current Amazon Web Services pricing so I didn't have to.
And here are the results first comparing new Google pricing to one-year AWS Reserved Instances (RIs).
And here's the how Google stacks up against the even cheaper AWS three-year RIs.
RightScale, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has to stay on top of this stuff because it offers tools and consoles that help companies monitor and manage multicloud deployments and to forecast costs. More details are available on the Rightscale blog.
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