Interesting

The unofficial Apple store in Afghanistan. By Leo Mirani

Where do people in Kabul go when they want to buy an iPhone? The same place as everybody else: an Apple Store. But one thing separates the Apple Store in, say, New York, from the one in Kabul: Apple either doesn’t know it exists, or doesn’t care.

There is nothing new about unofficial Apple stores. Chinese authorities found 22 of them last year, right down to staff uniforms. The shop in Kabul is not nearly as ambitious. A small space in Afghanistan’s largest mall, in the posh Share-e-Naw district, it doesn’t look very much like Apple Stores in the rest of the world. (The picture above was posted by photographer Massoud Hossaini on his Instagram feed.)

Nor does it enjoy the margins enjoyed by the company whose name it bears. Mohammed Nasery, the store’s sales manager, told Quartz he sells the 16GB iPhone 5 for $700, about $50 more than its price in America. The merchandise comes from Dubai, where the 16GB iPhone 5 retails for 2599 dirhams (about $710). With discounts for buying in bulk, he estimates that margins vary from $10 to $50 across products.

Still, sales are brisk. The store sells five or six iPhones and one or two laptops every day, mostly to young locals who work for private companies, says Nasery. There is plenty of demand, he said, but availability of products is slim.

That is borne out by Esmatullah Rahimi, a former Apple Store Afghanistan employee. “It’s very trendy to own an iPhone or an iPad. These young Afghans work around foreigners who have iPods and Macs and iPads, and they want them too,” Rahimi told students from USC Annenberg in an interview last year. “If you see a woman using an iPhone, even if she’s wearing the hijab you know she’s got money and that she wants people to notice her. You don’t really look twice if she’s on a Nokia, you know?”

Opened in August 2010, the store is doing well enough for its owners to consider expansion. A repair centre is coming up, a website is under construction and Nasery says they are considering a second outlet in another Kabul location.

Afghanistan is not unique in its fascination for Apple. The company enjoys great cachet in the emerging world, from Moscow’s bars to Mumbai’s malls. Yet Apple is only belatedly waking up to developing markets. After years of neglecting India, for instance, sales surged when the company changed its distribution and introduced financing schemes.

Afghanistan illustrates that similar pent-up demand exists across the world—Apple only has to take advantage of it. For now though, Kabul must make do with its knock-off Apple Store. Nasery says he took some pictures of the store when it opened and mailed them to Apple. He never heard back.

Screwing Up Could Be Your Best Career Move—If You Do It Right. By Shawn Parr

A screwup doesn’t have to ruin your life, assuming you respond in smart and creative ways. Tips for turning your fumbles into successful turning points.

I’ve admired Southwest Airlines for many years, and I’ve cited them as a company with a clear focus, a vibrant soul, and a culture you can see in all areas of their business and reflected in their business performance. And as a ridiculously frequent business traveler, I made them my preferred domestic airline many years ago. Given this and my professional respect for them, it was a real honor to be invited to speak at one of their recent management conferences. I appreciated their genuine hospitality (I was hugged quite a lot), their pride in and love for their company, and I was impressed by the investment they make in people.

At the same time, I had the pleasure of getting to know the other main speaker at the event, Jay Heinrichs. He’s an author, persuasion consultant, and raconteur, and his energy and presence was intriguing and unique. Southwest curated the content for their team and choose two key subjects (and speakers) that were diametrically opposed in almost every way. I spoke on “Designing Random Acts of Kindness” and Jay spoke on “How to Screw Up.” He believes there’s much to be learned from mistakes, mishaps, and screwing up, and given we live in a world where people and companies are doing all they can to paint a picture of perfection, I was intrigued by Jay’s perspective on “screwing up” as a business discipline.

After talking with Jay, it’s clear he’s uniquely qualified, both as an expert on rhetoric, master in the art of persuasion, and by his own self-admission, as a lifelong bungler. He admits lacking any sense of direction whatsoever, and suffers with an extreme case of permanent absent-mindedness, which according to Jay made for a pretty awkward dating life. He thanks rhetoric for helping him overcome those handicaps and despite himself has been married to a good woman for life.

His first significant encounter with screwing up professionally happened when he accidentally misplaced a volcano. Just out of college Jay was working at a conservation magazine, when Mount St. Helens started smoking. He wrote an article about how this previously inactive volcano in Oregon had suddenly become active. It was one of the first things he ever got published. Jay didn’t realize his error until an envelope with the official Washington State seal arrived on his desk. Inside was a letter from Governor Dixy Lee Ray, asking for her volcano back. Jay had screwed up and put the mountain in the wrong state, a humiliating error for a budding journalist. Frantically coming up with a solution, he walked into his boss’s office a few minutes later. Jay told him what had happened, showed him the letter, and shared his plan. “How about buying a volcano—plastic, bronze, whatever—and presenting it to her?” Jay offered. “No,” the editor in chief said. “A mistake does not earn you a trip to the West Coast. But go ahead and find a volcano. Then just mail it.” So Jay mailed it. And some weeks later, he received a photo of the governor posing with the volcano in one hand and his magazine in the other. They printed that with a correction in the next issue. Jay’s boss was so happy about the outcome that, when St. Helens exploded sometime later, he sent Jay to write a cover story. And that’s when he realized that a screwup doesn’t have to ruin your life. In fact, if you respond in a smart way, you can learn from the mistake and often turn a negative into a positive.

If you ask Jay who is his favorite screwup story, he’d tell you it’s Bill Clinton. He thinks the man made a historic ass of himself. But in the spirit of “How to Screw Up,” Bill Clinton has been a master. Look at how during his challenges, he continually shifted the focus to the future and moved on. Today, Bill Clinton has newfound respect as he puts his exceptional intellect and statesmanship to work helping to solve some of the world’s most significant issues. If you ask Jay who and what inspired his thinking on screwing up, he’d tell you in a New York minute, Aristotle. Jay is an expert on all things surrounding his rhetoric and logic.

What does Aristotle have to do with screwing up?

Aristotle wrote the original book on persuasion: “Rhetoric.” All persuasion books that have been written in the 2,600 years since descend from Aristotle’s ideas. He offers two important tools that apply to recovering from screwups.

First, Aristotle said that the most important tool of persuasion—even more important than logic—is “ethos,” which has to do with getting an audience to like and trust you. The ideal ethos, or projected image of yourself, displays craft (authority with the subject at hand, and an ability to apply that knowledge to specific situations); caring (whether you’re interested only in your audience’s benefit), and cause (whether you stand for something larger than yourself). In a screwup, you need to present a workable plan to show your craft. Emphasize that you’re putting all hands on deck, doing whatever it takes, staying up all night to fix the problem. That’s the caring part. As for cause? Point out that you have high standards and that you plan to live up to them.

Second tool: tense. Aristotle said that there are three types of persuasion, each having to do with a different tense. The past is about crime and punishment, about screwups that happened—where else?—in the past. The present has to do with values, with right and wrong, who’s good and who’s bad. Then there’s the future, where you talk about the expected outcomes of decisions and choices. Want to get someone to make a decision? Focus on the future.

Jay got all that from Aristotle—who, by the way, tutored a young lad named Alexander. Little Alexander took these same tools of persuasion, created a volunteer army, and conquered the known world. He earned himself the title Alexander the Great. If it worked for him, it’s likely that it’ll work for your screwups.

Apply it to Tim Cook and Bank of America.

Arguably the Apple maps debacle was a significant test in how the post-Jobs Apple would behave in a pinch. From Heinrichs’ perspective, Tim Cook handled the Apple Maps disappointment badly because he apologized. People think they might want an apology from Apple, but that’s not really what they want. The iPhone 5 hit the market and the sheen or invincibility of Apple was washed away by the negative press about the new Apple Maps. Cook apologized for the lousy new application and instantly fired Eric Forstall, the guy in charge of the maps, allegedly because he refused to sign an apology. Apple’s stock took an immediate beating. Had Cook applied Heinrichs rules and emphasized Apple’s high standards, mentioned that the company had temporarily failed to live up to them, and then focused on how the Maps would soon be even cooler than people imagined, the fallout would have been different. Cook should have said that Apple is putting all hands on deck, the most talented people in the world, to get it done. And he should have hinted at what to expect. No apology needed. Shift to the future, emphasize craft, caring, and cause, and watch the results change. If only Cook had been as experienced at screwing up as Jay Heinrichs.

A couple years ago, Bank of America outsourced 100 tech-support jobs to India—and told the fired workers they had to train their replacements in order to get severance checks. The bank got well-deserved terrible publicity for this. How should the managers have handled the screwup? First, they should have recognized their mistake and reported it to the press as quickly as possible, explaining the outsourcing and giving the fired workers their checks immediately. Second, they should have shifted the focus to the future, promising improved efficiency and better service to customers. And while the workers themselves deserved an apology, it should have been done in private. A public apology only makes a company look smaller. Fix the problem and focus on a better future.

Rules for a proper screwup.

As I got to know Jay Heinrichs I couldn’t help but think of how similar his name was to Henry Jay Heimlich, the American physician who invented abdominal thrusts more commonly known as the Heimlich Maneuver. This infamous technique has proven to be a highly effective protocol when dealing with large lumps caught in the throat or abdomen, saving the lives of many a grateful victim. I wonder if Heinrichs’ Rules for a Screw Up will become as helpful, and ultimately as famous for helping companies manage significant mistakes and lumps caught in their system.

Here are the rules:

1. Be first with the news if you can.
You get much better control of the matter if the bad news comes straight from you. Plus, right after delivering the news, you can show that you…

2. Have a plan.
People get over the shock of your screwup pretty quickly if you show you have a way to fix it. But don’t wait to give the plan. You need to present it immediately after giving the news. Why? Because that way you…

3. Shift to the future.
Focus on what happens next. That’s what Clinton did.

4. Don’t apologize.
This is the most controversial advice I give. Apologies come with several problems. First, they focus on the past, on the screwup, reminding people of what you did. Second, apologies rarely satisfy people. They almost always seem inadequate. That’s because apologies are “self-belittling”—they shrink you down to the size of the victim or smaller. People often demand an apology more as vengeance than as any way to improve matters. Instead, you need to be in a position of strength so that you can solve the problem and get past the screwup.

Heinrichs is the author of Thank You for Arguing and Word Hero. You can follow him on jayheinrichs.com.

—Shawn Parr is the Guvner & CEO of Bulldog Drummond, an innovation and design consultancy headquartered in San Diego whose clients and partners have included Starbucks, Diageo, Jack in the Box, Adidas, MTV, Nestle, Pinkberry, American Eagle Outfitters, Ideo, Virgin, Disney, Nike, Mattel, Heineken, Annie’s Homegrown, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, CleanWell, The Honest Kitchen, and World Vision. Follow the conversation at @BULLDOGDRUMMOND.

[Image: Flickr user Thorbjorn Sigberg]

$Photo: B.K. Yoon, head of consumer electronics at Samsung, calmly presenting his plans for world domination AP Photo / Julie Jacobson The one mobile device taking over the world. By Christopher Mims One category of mobile device will blow away all others in the pace of its growth, expanding 70% in each of the next three years and yielding a $135 billion market by the end of 2015. Vendors will move 142 million units of this device in 2013 and up to 402 million by 2015, project analysts at Barclays. That’s more than three times the number of iPhones sold in 2012. And, oh yeah, Apple doesn’t make one of these. It’s called a phablet. As in, an extra-large phone that’s almost as big as a tablet, combining aspects of both. Phablet is the terrible name granted to this class of 5-inch and larger phones by a derisive press corps, which mocked one of the earliest and most visible examples of this trend, Samsung’s 5.3-inch Galaxy Note. Then, surprising everyone but Samsung, the Note turned out to be a hit, selling 10 million units as of last summer. An explosion of phablets Samsung recently rolled out the Galaxy Note II, which is a hair larger than the Galaxy Note and looks to be an even bigger hit, selling 5 million units in just the first three months since launch. Subsequently, dozens of phone makers have announced their own phablets, including the consumer electronics giants of mainland China, ZTE and Huawei; Taiwan’s HTC and Lenovo; Sony; American manufacturer Vizio; South Korea’s LG; and even one Shenzhen, China, manufacturer called Zopo that is making phablets its primary focus. Not to mention a stream of cheap knock-offs from vendors with no brand at all. So what’s going on here? When analysts declare that “we expect 2013 to be the Year of the Phablet,” have they lost their minds? Are phablets the netbooks of 2013, doomed to be produced in mass quantities but yielding a user experience so unsatisfying that the category eventually dies? Quite the opposite, I’d argue. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Phablets are going to be the PCs of this decade. They will become the default computing device of most of the developing world, and a surprising proportion of those who live in rich countries will eventually sign on, as well. The reasons are pretty simple. In emerging markets, consumers need a single device that can do absolutely everything We thought that device would be the phone, but given the popularity of tablets, it turns out that bigger really is better. For example phablets are taking over in India. “Earlier I was using a smartphone and also had a tablet but later realised that a phablet was better as you can make calls and use it as a tablet as well,” one student told the Times of India. That pretty much sums it up: If your budget is limited, why deal with two different upgrade cycles and two different devices, when you can put all of your money into a single device? And now that device, which is probably your primary computer, has wireless data connectivity wherever you go. Low-end phablets are going for as little as 6,000 rupees ($110) in India. Consumers in rich countries don’t need phones anymore, and they’re demanding bigger screens US journalists love to hold phablets up to their heads in order to prove how ridiculous they are as phones, but that misses the point: the fraction of time we spend using these devices for phone conversations continues to shrink. In surveys, time spent on calls comes in fourth after web browsing, social media, music and gaming, and on average may represent as little as 10% of the two hours a day we spend on our “phones.” The latest phablets exemplify this trend. Sharp has created a ridiculously high-resolution touchscreen with a 5-inch diagonal that has the same resolution as high-end HD televisions with 64 times as much surface area. For reference, these have a resolution of 440 pixels per inch, compared to the much-ballyhooed “retina” display in the iPhone 5, which has 326 pixels per inch. That’s a resolution so high that the average user probably can’t even tell the difference. And yet these screens have made it into so many of the latest high-end phablets that Sharp can barely keep up with demand. High-end phablets are starting to include processors and storage capacity that put them on par with low-end laptops. They can be full media centers capable of driving giant televisions and high-end sound systems. There is also some indication that screen size has become aspirational, as users seek to differentiate their devices from the endless litany of regular smartphones. Having a single connected device is a good way to reduce the cost of bandwidth Users do not require any more convincing that tablets are great; in 2013, they’re going to buy more of them than laptop computers. The problem is that the carrier-centric nature of much wireless connectivity in rich countries locks users into high monthly fees for the privilege of accessing the cell network. That’s probably one reason why phablets are taking off in Asia and other emerging markets, where pay-as-you-go plans and devices that accommodate multiple sim cards (to allow users to use more than one carrier) are more common. In either case, wireless bandwidth is still relatively expensive, so using a single device for most lightweight computing and connectivity makes sense. The idea that a phablet is less portable is a red herring Sure, many phablets are so large that they can’t fit in your pocket, but that’s a very male tech writer view of smartphones. Stashed in a purse or a bag, a phablet is no less portable than an e-reader or a small tablet, and users don’t seem to have a problem toting those just about everywhere. Clearly, for millions of people, a phablet that eliminates the need for owning and carrying two separate devices—a phone and a tablet—is a better solution. Apple could be forced to follow suit At least one analyst, Topeka Capital Markets’s Brian White, insists that Apple could come out with an iPhone with a bigger screen by this summer. That would fit the pattern set by the iPad Mini, in which other manufacturers produced what looked like a viable product category—the 7-inch tablet—and Apple decided it was a market opportunity worth pursuing. Unlike netbooks, a faddish category which Apple famously ignored, phablets tend to be high-end devices that fit with Apple’s pattern of making best in class hardware that allows the company to maintain its high margins. Apple’s strength has always been taking others’ good ideas and improving on them, anyway. It may sound absurd, but there’s one way Apple could instantly dominate the market by creating the biggest phablet ever: upgrade the cellular radio in the iPad Mini LTE so that it can make calls.$

Photo: B.K. Yoon, head of consumer electronics at Samsung, calmly presenting his plans for world domination AP Photo / Julie Jacobson

The one mobile device taking over the world. By Christopher Mims

One category of mobile device will blow away all others in the pace of its growth, expanding 70% in each of the next three years and yielding a $135 billion market by the end of 2015. Vendors will move 142 million units of this device in 2013 and up to 402 million by 2015, project analysts at Barclays. That’s more than three times the number of iPhones sold in 2012.

And, oh yeah, Apple doesn’t make one of these.

It’s called a phablet. As in, an extra-large phone that’s almost as big as a tablet, combining aspects of both.

Phablet is the terrible name granted to this class of 5-inch and larger phones by a derisive press corps, which mocked one of the earliest and most visible examples of this trend, Samsung’s 5.3-inch Galaxy Note. Then, surprising everyone but Samsung, the Note turned out to be a hit, selling 10 million units as of last summer.

An explosion of phablets

Samsung recently rolled out the Galaxy Note II, which is a hair larger than the Galaxy Note and looks to be an even bigger hit, selling 5 million units in just the first three months since launch. Subsequently, dozens of phone makers have announced their own phablets, including the consumer electronics giants of mainland China, ZTE and Huawei; Taiwan’s HTC and Lenovo; Sony; American manufacturer Vizio; South Korea’s LG; and even one Shenzhen, China, manufacturer called Zopo that is making phablets its primary focus. Not to mention a stream of cheap knock-offs from vendors with no brand at all.

So what’s going on here? When analysts declare that “we expect 2013 to be the Year of the Phablet,” have they lost their minds? Are phablets the netbooks of 2013, doomed to be produced in mass quantities but yielding a user experience so unsatisfying that the category eventually dies?

Quite the opposite, I’d argue. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Phablets are going to be the PCs of this decade. They will become the default computing device of most of the developing world, and a surprising proportion of those who live in rich countries will eventually sign on, as well. The reasons are pretty simple.

In emerging markets, consumers need a single device that can do absolutely everything

We thought that device would be the phone, but given the popularity of tablets, it turns out that bigger really is better. For example phablets are taking over in India. “Earlier I was using a smartphone and also had a tablet but later realised that a phablet was better as you can make calls and use it as a tablet as well,” one student told the Times of India.

That pretty much sums it up: If your budget is limited, why deal with two different upgrade cycles and two different devices, when you can put all of your money into a single device? And now that device, which is probably your primary computer, has wireless data connectivity wherever you go. Low-end phablets are going for as little as 6,000 rupees ($110) in India.

Consumers in rich countries don’t need phones anymore, and they’re demanding bigger screens

US journalists love to hold phablets up to their heads in order to prove how ridiculous they are as phones, but that misses the point: the fraction of time we spend using these devices for phone conversations continues to shrink. In surveys, time spent on calls comes in fourth after web browsing, social media, music and gaming, and on average may represent as little as 10% of the two hours a day we spend on our “phones.”

The latest phablets exemplify this trend. Sharp has created a ridiculously high-resolution touchscreen with a 5-inch diagonal that has the same resolution as high-end HD televisions with 64 times as much surface area. For reference, these have a resolution of 440 pixels per inch, compared to the much-ballyhooed “retina” display in the iPhone 5, which has 326 pixels per inch. That’s a resolution so high that the average user probably can’t even tell the difference. And yet these screens have made it into so many of the latest high-end phablets that Sharp can barely keep up with demand.

High-end phablets are starting to include processors and storage capacity that put them on par with low-end laptops. They can be full media centers capable of driving giant televisions and high-end sound systems. There is also some indication that screen size has become aspirational, as users seek to differentiate their devices from the endless litany of regular smartphones.

Having a single connected device is a good way to reduce the cost of bandwidth

Users do not require any more convincing that tablets are great; in 2013, they’re going to buy more of them than laptop computers. The problem is that the carrier-centric nature of much wireless connectivity in rich countries locks users into high monthly fees for the privilege of accessing the cell network. That’s probably one reason why phablets are taking off in Asia and other emerging markets, where pay-as-you-go plans and devices that accommodate multiple sim cards (to allow users to use more than one carrier) are more common. In either case, wireless bandwidth is still relatively expensive, so using a single device for most lightweight computing and connectivity makes sense.

The idea that a phablet is less portable is a red herring

Sure, many phablets are so large that they can’t fit in your pocket, but that’s a very male tech writer view of smartphones. Stashed in a purse or a bag, a phablet is no less portable than an e-reader or a small tablet, and users don’t seem to have a problem toting those just about everywhere. Clearly, for millions of people, a phablet that eliminates the need for owning and carrying two separate devices—a phone and a tablet—is a better solution.

Apple could be forced to follow suit

At least one analyst, Topeka Capital Markets’s Brian White, insists that Apple could come out with an iPhone with a bigger screen by this summer. That would fit the pattern set by the iPad Mini, in which other manufacturers produced what looked like a viable product category—the 7-inch tablet—and Apple decided it was a market opportunity worth pursuing. Unlike netbooks, a faddish category which Apple famously ignored, phablets tend to be high-end devices that fit with Apple’s pattern of making best in class hardware that allows the company to maintain its high margins.

Apple’s strength has always been taking others’ good ideas and improving on them, anyway. It may sound absurd, but there’s one way Apple could instantly dominate the market by creating the biggest phablet ever: upgrade the cellular radio in the iPad Mini LTE so that it can make calls.

Guns, unlike almost every other technology, are unique in that the more they improve, the less safe they become…The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.

“

—	Christopher Mims on how guns became gadgets

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore. By Mat Honan

“This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour,” says Wired senior writer Mat Honan.

You have a secret that can ruin your life.

It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.

Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker—or someone who takes you for one.

No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.

Look around. Leaks and dumps—hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists of usernames and passwords on the open web—are now regular occurrences. The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with devastating results. Thanks to an explosion of personal information being stored in the cloud, tricking customer service agents into resetting passwords has never been easier. All a hacker has to do is use personal information that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.

This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.

The age of the password is over. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying. Our digital lives are simply too easy to crack. Imagine that I want to get into your email. Let’s say you’re on AOL. All I need to do is go to the website and supply your name plus maybe the city you were born in, info that’s easy to find in the age of Google. With that, AOL gives me a password reset, and I can log in as you.

First thing I do? Search for the word “bank” to figure out where you do your online banking. I go there and click on the Forgot Password? link. I get the password reset and log in to your account, which I control. Now I own your checking account as well as your email.

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth

This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.

The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.

Passwords are as old as civilization. And for as long as they’ve existed, people have been breaking them.

In 413 BC, at the height of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Demosthenes landed in Sicily with 5,000 soldiers to assist in the attack on Syracusae. Things were looking good for the Greeks. Syracusae, a key ally of Sparta, seemed sure to fall.

But during a chaotic nighttime battle at Epipole, Demosthenes’ forces were scattered, and while attempting to regroup they began calling out their watchword, a prearranged term that would identify soldiers as friendly. The Syracusans picked up on the code and passed it quietly through their ranks. At times when the Greeks looked too formidable, the watchword allowed their opponents to pose as allies. Employing this ruse, the undermatched Syracusans decimated the invaders, and when the sun rose, their cavalry mopped up the rest. It was a turning point in the war.

The first computers to use passwords were likely those in MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, developed in 1961. To limit the time any one user could spend on the system, CTSS used a login to ration access. It only took until 1962 when a PhD student named Allan Scherr, wanting more than his four-hour allotment, defeated the login with a simple hack: He located the file containing the passwords and printed out all of them. After that, he got as much time as he wanted.

During the formative years of the web, as we all went online, passwords worked pretty well. This was due largely to how little data they actually needed to protect. Our passwords were limited to a handful of applications: an ISP for email and maybe an ecommerce site or two. Because almost no personal information was in the cloud—the cloud was barely a wisp at that point—there was little payoff for breaking into an individual’s accounts; the serious hackers were still going after big corporate systems.

So we were lulled into complacency. Email addresses morphed into a sort of universal login, serving as our username just about everywhere. This practice persisted even as the number of accounts—the number of failure points—grew exponentially. Web-based email was the gateway to a new slate of cloud apps. We began banking in the cloud, tracking our finances in the cloud, and doing our taxes in the cloud. We stashed our photos, our documents, our data in the cloud.

Read on …

Media Sh*tstorm: This is the story of Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist who did a study on brain signals for projected images. When the study was published, he made a video, at one point suggesting the applications in the future, like dream recording.

And suddenly, the media went nuts. “Dream Recording” was the number one headline, and Cerf was powerless to stop it — even getting calls from Apple and Christopher Nolan.

The entire story is fascinating, but you can jump to around 3:50 to go right into the madness.

[death + taxes]

5 Things That Keep App Developers Up At Night. By Seth Porges

A hit mobile app can mean a big payday for a developer. But so much about what makes or breaks a product is completely outside of their control. And that means one thing: omnipresent anxiety.

Each of the world’s 410 million devices running iOS produces approximately $18.50 in App Store sales, according to Apple—of which $13 goes straight to developers. In other words: A hit mobile app can mean a big payday. But so much about what makes or breaks a product is completely outside of a developer’s control, from getting it surfaced in the marketplace to negative reviews and slow download times. And that means one thing: Omnipresent anxiety.

We spoke to app developers to find out what app-related fears cause them to lose sleep.

1. A TECH TITAN MOVES IN

Foursquare must have been a bit freaked when Facebook launched its Places check-in service in 2010, a direct competitor. But while both services seem to be surviving, many developers live in constant fear that a tech titan such as Apple, Google, or Facebook will move into their space and take it over. Some developers even view this as an inevitability.

“I completely expect that Apple’s native weather app will basically do what ours does sooner than later,” says Eric Stralow, creator of the rain-prediction app Raindropping.

It’s not just the tech titans that startups need to worry about, of course. There is always the possibility that while a developer is perfecting their product, a better-funded and more nimble competitor will move to market first.

“I worry that while we’re spending time perfecting things, a lower-quality product with a similar value proposition will come along with more marketing spend and get more share of voice,” says Eric Tarn, the technical cofounder of the Onepager app.

What To Do About It

Big companies have big problems, and their entry into a smaller developer’s space can legitimize the market—and even serve as a rising tide that brings attention to the original players.

“Focus on making your product different and really good at solving the unique problem you’re trying to fix,” says Pablo Quinteros, an independent iOS developer and co-host of The Big Apple App Guys podcast. “If you do this, then rarely will a competitor entering your market make you completely obsolete.”

“Take solace in the fact that you can move faster and be more creative than a giant corporation. Focus on what you can do that they can’t,” Tarn says.

2. BUGGY UPDATES

Even an incremental update to an app is an opportunity for new bugs to sneak into software, no matter how much testing gets done before a release. The heavily fragmented mobile marketplace makes it particularly difficult for mobile developers to clear away all the bugs beforehand.

“One of the biggest fears we consistently hear from developers is that on some combination of phone platform, firmware revision, and device their app will crash and cause new users to issue the deadly one-star rating,” says Rob Spectre, head of developer evangelism for Twilio. “Development tools on both iOS and Android still aren’t robust enough for developers to easily test their code on the thousands of combinations that exist in their users’ pockets. Will my video stutter on iOS 4 for everyone with an iPhone 3GS? Will my UI look pixelated on a large, low density screen for Android Gingerbread? Will my login button work on the new Nexus tablet?”

Compounding the stress: The ever-present possibility that a bug will be detected by a journalist, potential investor, or a celebrity with a large Twitter following.

“With each new release, no matter how well tested, you always worry that some VIP will encounter some bug you didn’t catch and that will forever taint their perception of your product,” Tarn says.

What To Do About It

First step is to minimize bugs in the first place.

“During the development process, using debugging and performance analysis tools, beta testing, as well as unit testing can help discover critical bugs before submitting for review,” Quinteros says. “Once an app is live, using crash reporters like Crittercism or Test Flight can help gauge the severity of bugs that made it in the public build. Bug-tracking software can help developers prioritize bug fixes.”

LITTLE DID WE KNOW, APPLE HAD COMPLETELY CHANGED HOW IT BUFFERED AUDIO AND THE ENGINE THAT WAS WORKING PERFECTLY ONE WEEK EARLIER NEEDED TO BE REWRITTEN FROM THE GROUND UP.

From there, bug damage can be minimized if users feel like they have a developer’s ear.

“Take the beta label off your product and keep an open, honest, and humble channel of communication with your customers,” Tarn says. “If you are a small company, use it to your advantage. Put your phone number on your page and ask customers to call you for a personal apology.”

3. API ANXIETY

Countless apps rely on the data supplied to them by other companies’ APIs (application programming interface), such as Twitter. While these services give smaller developers access to data and development tools that would otherwise be outside their reach, it also creates a dangerous dependency.

“We rely heavily on the Google Maps API, and if Google decides one day that we have to use the Enterprise editions, that’ll cost us tens of thousands of dollars,” Tarn says.

In some cases the API provider itself is shut down or acquired. Developers that relied on data supplied by the facial recognition company Face.com recently found themselves in the lurch after Facebook purchased it. But it can just as easily occur when a company decides that its third-party clients are now competitors. Twitter, in particular, has been ramping up restrictions on how developers can access its data. The scariest part for developers: Such changes can come at any time and with no warning.

“Making an app can be an exercise in anxiety when it relies on third-party APIs,” says Quinteros. “We’re dependent on so many factors outside our control. Fear that app performance will be impacted by sudden changes to external APIs is always on the back of my mind.”

What To Do About It

If a developer suspects an API may change its terms, they can minimize potential damage by moving API interactions to an outside server.

“This way, developers can handle unexpected API changes more gracefully and quickly than if they have to resubmit and wait for an update to get approved, says Quinteros. “Of course, it’s also more work.”

Developers should also have a back-up plan in mind, just in case a vital API is completely cut off.

“If you’re relying on an API for a specific piece of functionality, make sure you have an understanding about how it works and create a plan to bring that functionality in-house if needed,” Tarn says.

4. PLATFORM SHIFTS

In the mobile playground, the OS is king, and even subtle changes in how the basic tools of a smartphone functions can leave apps inoperable or filled with unexpected bugs.

“We had just released our location-aware album for Central Park when Apple released their last major overhaul of their iOS,” says Ryan Holladay, whose band Bluebrain recently released a series of experimental app-based albums. “Little did we know, Apple had completely changed how it buffered audio and the engine that was working perfectly one week earlier needed to be rewritten from the ground up.”

But while Bluebrain’s developers were able to fix this problem and issue an update, under-the-hood changes to platforms have the potential to completely sink an app.

“Platform changes can cripple the way your app works—like when Facebook changes how apps publish or promote to users,” says Jon Lazar, an independent mobile and web developer.

What To Do About It

This one is simple, but can be a strain for small staffs: Developers should download and test against OS updates as soon as you can.

“Fortunately, Apple and Google in particular have committed to a fairly transparent release process for big platform updates,” Spectre says. “The best thing you can do is install beta versions of their OS updates early and often and always develop against them. Often you get months to see how your app will perform with a new update.”

5. TRACKING THE NUMBERS

Once an app has been released, tracking daily downloads and user reviews can be an anxious addiction. Many developers told us that the first thing they do when they wake up is to check on the previous day’s downloads.

“You worry about the numbers,” Stralow says. “Every day. How many people downloaded the app yesterday? How many people visited the site? How many good reviews did we get? How many not-so-good reviews did we get? How many articles were written about the app? How many support tickets did we get?”

“It gives me heart palpitations when we release new content,” says Geoff Warren-Boulton, creator of the iOS humor apps Oldify and Stache-ify. “Making any kind of change takes a week or more to actually go live and even if a tiny percent of people don’t like something, it has a dramatic and immediate impact on our reviews.”

What To Do About It

For iOS developers, numbers-related anxiety is often exasperated by a simple fact: Despite the fact that Apple is known for designing some of the best user interfaces in the world, the web-based dashboard they use to give developers their download stats is notoriously difficult to dig through. To help developers, a cottage industry of analytics tools (examples include AppViz 2 and App Annie) has popped up to parse download data.

From there, all developers can do is sit back and avoid obsessing over daily numbers.

“There will always be rises and dips, but the idea is to just take a more general view and see how the overall product is being received and seeing how a longer term, more general rise can be achieved,” Lazar says.

Seth Porges is a New York-based writer and editor. As the co-creator of the iOS fashion app Cloth, he knows how much anxiety apps can cause. You can follow him onTwitter or Facebook.

[image: Flickr user Matthew C. Wright]

Google’s Data Advantage Over Apple’s Siri. By Quentin Hardy

Correction Appended

Google has been gathering data on the way people speak for five years.

When Eric Schmidt was still chief executive of Google, I asked him what the company owned that would make it particularly hard for any emerging search contender to wipe Google out. Spell check, he said. Google had observed the spelling mistakes and corrections typed into billions of queries, and had a vast understanding of what people really meant when they typed like thsi. Google was able to use this knowledge to offer a “did you mean” function in search, eventually completing queries before people were finished typing.

Voice recognition technology is critically important, not just for mobile phones, but potentially for control of lots of other devices, particularly televisions. It is still early days, but if you’re thinking about which side will win in the battle between Apple’s Siri and Google Voice Search, consider the lesson of spell check.

Other companies would not be able to get that learning, he said, since people had come to expect search engines to fix their spelling. The customers would stay with Google, where that problem was solved. Microsoft Bing has proved Mr. Schmidt was not entirely correct in Google owning spell check, but it does take a company of Microsoft’s size to come at the problem.

It is common around the world to use Google to check one’s spelling now, and it’s common inside Google to use that same ancillary learning on new products.

That is probably why Google Voice Search, in its Siri-like manifestation in the new Jelly Bean version of the Android operating system, appears to be winning the heart of my colleague Nick Bilton. Nick says Google Voice Search appears to have better understanding of what he’s talking about, and can answer questions better. There are also numerous videos on the Web showing its prowess.

If Google is better, it is most likely because it has roots in a product Google introduced in 2007, called Google-411, or Google Local Voice Search. Ostensibly a product that provided free directory assistance, Google was mostly interested in capturing the way different people pronounced words.

While the Jelly Bean version of Voice Search is new, Google’s linguists have five years of data on billions of pronunciations. A year ago, just for the English language, Google had a database of 230 billion word strings, and had worked on 23 other languages, based largely on 411 and related voice-based search products, including an earlier version of Voice Search. It’s another spell check.

Apple never worked on that kind of feature, which is one reason Siri is one of the few products Apple officially released in beta form. It is building up its database of speech during Siri’s early life. Some of the cute ways Siri talks when it does not understand a question, such as repeating back what you have said, may in fact be efforts to see if you will correct its understanding, somewhat in the way Google learned spell check. Google Voice Search on Jelly Bean is starting late, but its quality advantage from all that learning beforehand is what makes it better in the early days.

That is not the only area where Google develops one product for the sake of another. The Google Goggles application on Android, which uses computer-driven image recognition to help identify an object the customer photographs, is also a product for use in connection with Google Maps. You can take a picture of a street in Goggles, and if Google Maps has taken a picture of that place with its Street View cars, it can tell you where you are.

Correction: July 19, 2012

This article has been corrected from an earlier version to note that while the Siri-like Voice Search on Jelly Bean is new, there have been earlier versions of Voice Search.

You have to hold your iPhone so people can see the apple, otherwise they might think it’s a Samsung.

“

—	@Aspersioncast

Steve Jobs Almost Named The iMac The MacMan, Until This Guy Stopped Him. By Ken Segall

KEN SEGALL, THE MAN BEHIND APPLE’S LEGENDARY “THINK DIFFERENT” CAMPAIGN, RECALLS HOW HE WRANGLED ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT CLIENTS OF ALL TIME.

The following is an excerpt from Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall (Penguin Portfolio).

The lump on the table was truly mysterious and held everyone’s rapt attention. Hidden under a gray sheet it was impossible to discern any detail from it. We were going to have to wait for the big reveal when the meeting was called to order. This would definitely not be our typical product briefing. Beneath that sheet was the home computer that was going to save Apple.

Not to get overly dramatic about it, but that’s exactly how it was billed by Steve himself. This was the product that Steve had alluded to back when we had first started on the Think Different campaign. He had told us that the first product out the door was going to be a rethinking of the home computer. He had given his engineers and designers the challenge to do something great, and now at long last we were going to see it.

There would be no saving Apple by churning out more beige boxes that failed to distinguish themselves, by looks or function, from the hundreds of PC models out there. Steve wanted this first product to open people’s eyes and serve notice that Apple was back.

IF STEVE REALLY WAS BETTING THE COMPANY ON THIS COMPUTER, IT HAD TO BE BRILLIANT.

It was the spring of 1998, and we’d been summoned up to Cupertino for our first viewing of this new computer, code-named C1. The “C” stood for “consumer.” Apple didn’t use a lot of creative firepower on code names back then. By this time we felt like we were already well along a journey, having developed the Think Different campaign and placed it strategically on TV, billboards, and magazine back covers around the world. That was the brand-building part, and this was the real thing—a product that would prove that our brand campaign wasn’t just a lot of advertising fluff.

Now we were sitting just a few feet from C1, anxious to see the results of all this reimagining. If Steve really was betting the company on this computer, it had to be brilliant. Apple was out of time, and this was the one shot it had to turn things around. The agency delegation numbered five or six, consisting of creative people and account managers. There were two Apple product managers there to guide us. After some introductions and opening remarks, it was time to get down to business.

One product manager reached for the sheet and revealed C1.

There it was—the computer you’d come to know as iMac—looking like it came right out of The Jetsons. The group let out a collective “holy cow” and simply tried to absorb and appreciate what we were seeing—because it shattered every idea of what computers were supposed to look like. It was a colorful one-piece computer that showed off its inner circuitry through a semitransparent shell.

I’d like to believe we were all so smart that within seconds we were convinced that we were witnessing the start of a miracle resurgence. But it wasn’t quite like that. Later, when the agency team was alone and able to share the thoughts we felt at that moment of reveal, we found that we all had pretty much the same feeling. It was part shock, part excitement, and part hope that Steve Jobs really knew what he was doing—because there was a real chance that this revolutionary computer might just be too shocking for its own good.

More…

Listen: Steve Jobs On The Payoff Of A Great Employee. By Adam Barenblat

Steve Jobs reveals “the secret to my success.”

A Conversation With Steve Jobs

Read highlights from The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes. Or check here all week for new audio snippets from our May cover story. Download our iPad app to hear excerpts from “The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes,” along with a special podcast with never-before-heard audio.

Journalist Brent Schlender drew from dozens of conversations with Steve Jobs from over a quarter century of reporting to make the case that Jobs’ so-called “wilderness years,” his time between Apple stints, were some of his most formative.

For the first time, we’re offering some of those snippets online. In this clip, from June 1995, Jobs says the difference between using good hardware can be a 2:1 difference for a company. But the difference between a company with superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1, he says, adding, “That’s probably … certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.”

Mozilla comes out against CISPA

By DJ Pangburn

Mozilla, creators of the Firefox browser, and opponents of SOPA/PIPA, have now come out against CISPA.

CISPA, or Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, would create an information-sharing apparatus between private entities and the NSA. The worry is that in the name of national and corporate security, Internet users’ privacy would be sacrificed.

Late Tuesday, Mozilla’s Privacy and Public Policy sent a letter to Forbes’ Andy Greenberg, which reads:

While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security. The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse. We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation.

CISPA enjoys wide support in the tech and telecommunications industry, with Facebook, Apple and Microsoft and others in favor of the legislation. With the bill having recently passed through the House and on its way to the Senate, perhaps Mozilla’s position will lead the way in a larger opposition effort.

Should the BDS Movement boycott Google?

Today is Israel’s 64th Independence Day. In Hebrew its called Yom HaAzmaut (יום העצמאות). Although independence was declared on May 14, 1948 (see the Israeli Declaration of Independence), the day is today (April 26, 2012) because in 1948, the day fell out in the Jewish calendar on the 5th day of the month of Iyar. That said today isn’t even the 5th of Iyar, it’s actually the 4th. The reason is because if the holiday was celebrated tomorrow, on the 5th, it would be Friday and celebrations might run into Shabbat (Sabbath) which begins at sundown on Friday.

In addition, the day before Yom HaAzmaut is always Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) where Israel honors soldiers who died in action, as well as Israeli victims of terror attacks. It is a fairly intense transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day (might be interesting if the US moved Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day to July 3). If Yom HaAzmut would fall out on Sunday or Monday, then the date is also shifted because that would put Yom HaZikaron on either Saturday (Sabbath) or have it begin right after Shabbat (all Jewish holidays start at sundown the night before) and there was concern that people would have to prepare for the memorial services on Yom HaZikaron on Shabbat (which for religious Jews is forbidden). Therefore Yom HaAzmaut can only be on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

So what does this have to do with the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Google?

Google has, for more than a decade, modified their logo to commemorate various holidays and birthdays. Google calls these modified logos ‘doodles’ and if you’re interested they’ve published a history of them, and you can see and search through all of them. Some doodles are shown all over the world, and some are shown only in specific countries. For example, for doodles that commemorate famous individuals known mainly in Arab countries, they are shown only in Arab countries (like a doodle of Egyptian Poet Ahmad Shawqi which was shown in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Oman, Lebanon, Qatar, Morocco, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and the Palestinian Territories).

Today Google changed its homepage in Israel (google.co.il) to the following to commemorate Yom HaAzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day:

This isn’t the first time they’ve put out a doodle for Yom HaAzmaut – they did so in 2011, 2010 and 2008 as well. At other times they commemorated other events and individuals in Israel, including the Israel Book Fair in 2011, the 112th Birthday of Israeli artist Nachum Guttman in 2010, Election Day in 2009, the Jewish holiday of Purim in 2007, and Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) in 2006.

As you may have noticed above, Google has a separate geographic designation for the Palestinian Territories. Part of that includes having a home page specifically for the Palestinian Territories, located at google.ps. As mentioned, they do show doodles on google.ps, but so far they’ve only shown doodles on google.ps that were shown across the Arab world.

Why have there been so many doodles on google.co.il? My only guess is it’s due to Google having a major R&D presence in Israel, with facilities in both Haifa and Tel Aviv. We haven’t checked out all the doodles online, but presumably there are more doodles in countries that have dedicated Google facilities.

In any event, how does the BDS Movement stand Israel’s Independence Day being celebrated on Google? Obviously they need to boycott Google immediately – stop searching using Google, delete their gmail accounts, stop using YouTube, stop blogging on Blogger, stop using Google Reader, stop using Google Translate, stop using the Chrome browser, and stop using Android phones.

For search they can switch to Bing. Wait, no, Microsoft built their first overseas research center in Israel more than two decades ago. Scratch Bing. BDSers should also stop using Windows, Windows Phone, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Skype (bought by Microsoft last year), Hotmail and all other Microsoft products.

Maybe for search they can use Yahoo? Not if they mind that Yahoo has an R&D office in Haifa. That means also dropping Yahoo Mail, Flickr (Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005), Yahoo Messenger and all other Yahoo products.

Are there other major search engines? We’re not sure. However, there are a few other IT products BDSer should also boycott. PHP, probably the most popular web scripting language used worldwide, is developed in Israel. There are many BDSers who write blogs. We already determined they can’t use Google’s Blogger service (all blogs on blogger.com and blogspot.com), but WordPress is written using PHP, so BDSers will need to drop WordPress as well. The Moveable Type blogging platform uses a combination of Perl and PHP, so that’s out too.

Of course, they can’t write those blogs using Windows computers anyways, so what computer can they use? They can’t use Apple computers, due to Apple’s recent major purchase of a company in Israel, and the subsequent setting up of their first overseas R&D facility. Interesting that both Microsoft and Apple both opened their first overseas R&D facilities in Israel. That also means no more iPhones, iPods, iPads, Macbook Pros (a BDSer favorite), etc.

Perhaps they can use Linux, the open-source operating system (sure many contributors to Linux live in Israel, but we’ll leave that out). Possibly, but they can’t run Linux on any computer that utilizes an Intel processor, since Intel also opened their first overseas R&D facility in Israel in 1974. They also manufacturer processors at a multi-billion dollar foundry in Kiryat Gat. A huge number of Internet servers also use Intel processors, so BDSers should make sure to check with their hosting companies and make sure their web sites are not running on Intel-based machines.

If not Intel, maybe AMD. That was an option until AMD bought a company in Israel in 2010 and opened an R&D center in Israel last year. AMD processors also run almost all the other servers that host web sites around the world, so BDSers will need to search hard to find places to run their web sites. Getting back to what computer BDSers can use themselves, if they can’t use Intel processors and they can’t use AMD processors, what’s left? There are some computers that run on ARM-based processors. ARM is a processor core developed by ARM Holdings in the UK. Most cell phones, tablets and some low-end computers use ARM-based processors. Wait, no, ARM Holdings has an R&D facility in Kfar Saba. Scratch all ARM-based products.

There is the graphics-processor company NVIDIA. They also have a line of processors that can power devices like cell phones and tabets which they call Tegra. Tegra processors power a number of cell phones and tablets, although we’re not sure if any of them are running operating systems other than Android or Windows Phone. NVIDIA did invest in an Israeli company a couple of years back, but they don’t own any companies or have facilities in Israel as far as we know. Perhaps then, if BDSers can overlook the minor connection to Israel, they can buy NVIDIA-based tablets and work hard to make a version of Linux with no contributions from Israelis to run on it. Palblets? Hopefully NVIDIA won’t start an R&D center in Israel before the work is done.

Sure, BDSers won’t be able to run Angry Birds on their device, but at least they’ll be able to access the Internet. We won’t tell them that Cisco, which builds many of the switches and routers that make up the Internet infrastructure has a major presence in Israel, including the recent purchase for $5 Billion of NDS which secures cable and satellite set-top boxes (including those operated by DIRECTV, Comcast, Cox, Charter and Cablevision in the US). Of course they also own Scientific Atlanta which manufactures the set-top boxes for many other companies. Maybe they can get more done if they stop using the Internet and stop watching TV?

Happy Yom HaAzmaut.

Princess Bride in Silicon Valley: When G-Male — the imagined Google version of the perfect boyfriend — meets Siri — the imagined Apple version of the perfect girlfriend — data flies.

[thanks, andrea! comediva]

What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found. By David Pogue

A screenshot from ABC’s segment on Foxconn.

I wrote about the Apple/China/Foxconn controversy in this space a couple of weeks ago, but there have been some developments, some progress and some new revelations.

Apple responded by vowing to take Chinese worker safety and welfare even more seriously, and it hired the Fair Labor Association to survey 35,000 Foxconn employees about their working conditions. The results of the audit will be made public next month.

The story so far: Last month, The New York Times published a front-page article highlighting working conditions at a factory in China owned by Foxconn Technology, where Apple’s products are built. The problems included fatal accidents and employees injured while using a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage. (Although Apple is the poster child for Foxconn, just about all of our electronics are made in the same Chinese factories, as the Times article noted. Foxconn also builds products for Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, I.B.M., Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Netgear, Nintendo, Nokia and Vizio. The Xbox, the PlayStation and the Amazon Kindle are made here.) The article set off a firestorm of protest, petitions and demonstrations.

For its part, Foxconn responded by raising factory workers’ salaries as much as 25 percent.

Anyway, for me, two new sources of light were trained on the Foxconn situation: a TV broadcast and an e-mail. ABC’s “Nightline” was invited to visit Apple’s production lines at Foxconn. Its correspondent, Bill Weir, was allowed to interview any worker, on camera or off, in the factory or outside.

On Tuesday night, ABC broadcast its report. You can watch it online.

To me, the salient paragraph in his script was this:

We looked hard for the kind of underage and maimed workers we’ve read so much about, but we mostly found people who face their days through soul-crushing boredom and deep fatigue. Some complained of being overworked, others complained of being underworked and almost all said they were underpaid. And when I asked, “What would you change?,” we heard the kind of complaints you might hear in any factory anywhere.

It didn’t look like a sweatshop, frankly. The assembly-line work was certainly mind-numbingly repetitive — one woman files the burrs off the iPad’s Apple-logo hole 6,000 times a day — but that’s the nature of assembly-line work. Meanwhile, this factory was clean and modern.

More tellingly, the broadcast showed 3,000 young Chinese workers lining up at the gates for Foxconn’s Monday morning recruiting session.

Now, these workers know about the 2010 Foxconn suicides. They know that the starting salary is $2 an hour (plus benefits, and no payroll taxes). They know they’ll have 12-hour shifts, with two hourlong breaks. They know that workers sleep in a tiny dorm (six or eight to a room) for $17 a month.

And yet here they are, lining up to work! Apparently, even those conditions, so abhorrent to us, are actually better than these workers’ alternatives: backbreaking rural farm work that doesn’t prepare them to move up the work force food chain.

Many observers are shocked at the child labor reported at Foxconn. Not only do these Chinese factories employ a lot of young people — the legal working age is 16 — but from what we saw on the ABC broadcast, all of these employees are young.

That’s also what a former Apple executive told me this week: that Foxconn is not a career. You don’t see 30- and 40-year-old heads of households on the assembly lines. The young Chinese see it as “something like a first summer job,” he told me — a way to make some bucks for a few months before heading home, or to get some work experience before moving up.

The second enlightening twist, for me, was a note sent to me from a young man, born in China and now attending an American university.

My aunt worked several years in what Americans call “sweat shops.” It was hard work. Long hours, “small” wage, “poor” working conditions. Do you know what my aunt did before she worked in one of these factories? She was a prostitute.

Circumstances of birth are unfortunately random, and she was born in a very rural region. Most jobs were agricultural and family owned, and most of the jobs were held by men. Women and young girls, because of lack of educational and economic opportunities, had to find other “employment.”

The idea of working in a “sweat shop” compared to that old lifestyle is an improvement, in my opinion. I know that my aunt would rather be “exploited” by an evil capitalist boss for a couple of dollars than have her body be exploited by several men for pennies.

That is why I am upset by many Americans’ thinking. We do not have the same opportunities as the West. Our governmental infrastructure is different. The country is different.

Yes, factory is hard labor. Could it be better? Yes, but only when you compare such to American jobs.

If Americans truly care about Asian welfare, they would know that shutting down “sweat shops” would force many of us to return to rural regions and return to truly despicable “jobs.” And I fear that forcing factories to pay higher wages would mean they hire FEWER workers, not more.

Anyway, now my aunt has been living in New York for one year after saving up money for a plane ticket and visa, and she is wonderfully happy to have escaped Asia and reunited with our family. None of this would be possible if it wasn’t for that “sweat shop.”

Of course, not all Chinese feel that way. The Times had its article translated into Chinese and published on a Chinese news site. Many comments from Chinese citizens posted to that article were critical of the dangerous working conditions at Foxconn factories. Some said that Apple was ultimately responsible and should be held accountable, the position that labor rights groups take.

Plenty of Westerners remain unconvinced, too, even by ABC’s report and Apple’s investigation. “Nightline,” for example, is a production of ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company; its chief executive serves on the Apple board, and the Steve Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest shareholder. (To its credit, ABC mentioned that potential conflict of interest in the broadcast.)

Similarly, Apple is paying the Fair Labor Association six figures to conduct the audit. If the company being exonerated is also writing the checks, you have to be suspicious.

And as the ABC broadcast also pointed out, Foxconn knew in advance that the Fair Labor Association’s inspectors were coming, and it had plenty of opportunity to put on a good show for them (and for ABC’s cameras).

But the program also included interviews with the workers’ impoverished families in rural villages, who spoke of the improvements Foxconn’s presence had brought to their lives. And it’s hard to forget those 3,000 people lining up for Foxconn jobs every Monday.

In other words, the lessons of this controversy have more to do with China than with Apple. This is only marginally a technology story — I imagine we could find low-wage, tiring jobs at every factory in China, making everything that China makes. Every toy, every houseware, every garment. You could do a year’s worth of exposés.

Still, we should be happy that in this corner of the Chinese landscape, things are getting better. On ABC’s show, a Fair Labor Association inspector, Ines Kaempfer, called the last month a “Nike moment” for Apple. In the 1990s, Nike’s sweatshops weren’t the worst in the business, but they’re the ones that got the negative publicity. In response, it cleaned up its act, and thereby lifted the bar for the entire industry.

Clearly, the recent spotlight on conditions at Foxconn has performed a similar service for the electronics industry. Better wages are good. More careful monitoring is good. Transparency — like letting TV cameras into your assembly lines — is good.