Apple Inc is stepping up aid to the thousands of migrants that are streaming into Europe from war-torn countries, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told employees in an internal message on Friday.

Thanks to Low for sponsoring The Loop this week. Low is live video texting you can do from anywhere without being overheard. More fun than plain texting. Less awkward than video chat.

If you bought Peace, it’ll keep working, but will never see an update.

If you want your money back, here’s a writeup by Rene Ritchie on how to do that.

Here’s the link to Marco’s explanation.

I’m no physicist but, if I read this correctly, it is possible under certain circumstances to FREEZE TIME.

Holy crikey. The mind reels.

John Gruber lays out a nice chain of logic that explains why Safari (and through it, Apple) does not control the web. Instead, it has the same veto power as the other web standard bearers:

The web today is nothing like that. No single browser (or rendering engine) has an overwhelmingly dominant position. Four browsers/rendering engines share the world: Microsoft’s IE/Trident (and now the modernized Windows 10 browser, Edge), Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s Safari/WebKit, and Google’s Chrome/Blink. In a world where one rendering engine does not rule the entire web, conflicts between the various popular engines are inevitable.

Apple can stand in the way of a web standard that acts against its interests (that’s a veto). But Apple cannot force a standard on the other players. And that’s a critical difference.

Head over to Daring Fireball and read this for yourself.

Mark Harris, writing for The Guardian:

According to documents obtained by the Guardian, Mike Maletic, a senior legal counsel at Apple, had an hour-long meeting on 17 August with the department’s self-driving car experts Bernard Soriano, DMV deputy director, and Stephanie Dougherty, chief of strategic planning, who are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project, and Brian Soublet, the department’s deputy director and chief counsel.

And:

The department would not comment on what was discussed at the August meeting, beyond saying that “the Apple meeting was to review [the] DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations.”

Really looking forward to watching this (still alleged) project unfold.

Here’s the bet: Autonomous cars making up the majority of traffic in at least one major city within twenty years? Any takers?

If you’ve never dug into the details of sharing your location, this writeup by Chris Hoffman for How-To Geek is worth reading, bookmarking, and passing along. Two different approaches to location sharing. Good stuff.

This first appeared back (I believe) in early 2012, but seems so much more appropriate now.

Here’s a link to the image (this one is via Reddit). Take a look at it first.

Here’s the words embedded in the Coke bottle:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

And here’s Banksy’s Wikipedia page.

Members of Google’s Project Zero vulnerability research team have challenged a key talking point surrounding the security of Google’s Android mobile operating system. To wit, a key exploit mitigation known as address space layout randomization does much less than the company’s overworked public relations people say in blocking attacks targeting critical weaknesses in Android’s stagefright media library.

Jesus, this company is so fucked up. Good luck Android people. If you ever doubted that Google is lying to you, this should put it to rest.

Some real history here. Fascinating.

Joe Caiati, writing for The Sweet Setup, takes you through a detailed walkthrough of his favorite flight tracking app. If you fly a reasonable bit, this is absolutely worth reading.

Nice review, Joe.

This is a flaw with Lollipop, the latest version of Android.

From the locked screen, open the phone’s “Emergency Call” feature. Type a few characters, then copy-and-paste the text repeatedly. The character “string” grows exponentially, so it quickly becomes close to 40,960 characters long.

Then open the phone’s camera app and prompt the phone to request a password. Paste the super long character string a few times until the system crashes. (Based on Gordon’s video, it looks like 163,840 total characters.)

Wait maybe five minutes, and the phone goes straight to the unlocked home screen.

And:

Google has acknowledged the flaw, saying that the hack lets someone who grabs your phone “view contact data, phone logs, SMS messages, and other data that is normally protected.”

Most importantly:

The patch is already available for Google’s own line of phones — the various Nexus models. But there’s no telling when it’ll reach Android devices made by Samsung, LG and others. Blame the Android’s fractured updating system, which is slowed down by phone manufacturers and cellphone network carriers.

That last is the fly in the ointment.

For a startup, the search for a domain name can be grueling. If you are extremely lucky (or clever), you’ll find that the natural domain name for your company is unclaimed. But more often than not, you’ll find that natural name in the hands of a cybersquatter or a domainer.

Read this post to learn the difference between those two and for some sage advice on the best way to bring a coveted domain name home.

The whole thing is a solid read, but two things worth quoting:

You may find sites that don’t load correctly with a content blocker in action. If so, you can reload any site without it. In Safari, all you need to do is tap and hold the reload button in the toolbar. When you do so, a menu displays asking if you want to request the desktop site, instead of the mobile site, or if you want to reload that site worth content blockers.

Good to know. And:

It’s a shame we had to get to this point. I make my living from writing, much of which is published on ad-supported websites. And I have ads on this site. So I would rather that the sleazy ad networks hadn’t killed the web, but they have.

Not sure they’ve killed the web, but they’ve certainly created the market for content blockers. And, I suspect, that will definitely change the web, at least the web’s advertising model.

Washington Post:

Amazon today announced that Prime members can now enjoy six months of free unlimited access to The Washington Post National Digital Edition, a subscription usually retailing for $9.99 per month. After the first six months of access to world-class national and international news, Prime members can continue to enjoy unlimited digital access with a discounted monthly subscription rate of only $3.99, a savings of 60% per month.

What I find most interesting about this is the parallel with Apple. Just as Apple continues to add elements to its ecosystem to add value to all the other ecosystem elements, so goes Amazon, using the Washington Post to add value to Amazon Prime. If you value the free (and then discounted) digital access to the Washington Post, you’ll be more likely to re-up your Amazon Prime membership.

The addition of Transit to Apple Maps is fantastic, even better when you live in a city with a complex mass transit system.

To see this for yourself, fire up the Apple Maps app in iOS 9. Clear the search bar, then tap in it. A series of 8 circles should appear in it. Tap the one labeled Transport.

Next, tap one of the Transport circles that appear. For example, if you live near a bus line, tap Bus Stops. Your map should be populated by local bus stops, with a scrolling list of stops at the bottom.

If your local stops don’t appear, tap the info (i in a circle) button in the lower right corner and make sure the Transit tab is tapped. Mine was on Map by default. With the Transit tab tapped, you’ll have a transit-oriented map. Zoom way in to see your local stops.

Tap on a stop and you’ll see how far you are from it. You’ll also see a list of buses that stop at that stop and, most importantly, you’ll see how long until the next bus gets there. If you tap on the time (all the way on the right), the time of the next 3 buses will appear (Thanks Benjamin Mayo!)

Update: Updated the post to show how to get to the Transit view on Apple Maps. Hat tip to Gordon Meyer for walking me through that.

As usual, Federico does a bang up job in this review.

Today, I’m launching my own iOS 9 content blocker, called Peace, to bring peace, quiet, privacy, and — as a nice side benefit — ludicrous speed to iOS web browsing.

I always like the software Marco makes.

Gruber responding to a Nilay Patel tweet:

Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way.

Fucking right.

Rene Ritchie really outdid himself here. This is a long, almost encyclopedic read, but well written and full of useful detail. Lots of screenshots, too.

Find yourself a couch to curl up on, this is worth the read.

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5mac:

AT&T today has revealed a slight change to how it is handling throttling users grandfathered into unlimited data plans. Up until today, AT&T has throttled unlimited data users when they hit 5GB of usage and are in a congested area. As a reader has pointed out to us this evening, however, the carrier has updated its website with a new policy for throttling those on an unlimited data plans…

From the AT&T web site:

We recently revised our practices such that Unlimited Data Plan smartphone customers can now use 22GB of high-speed data during a billing period before becoming subject to network management practices that might result in reduced data speeds and increased latency.

As always, Unlimited Data Plan smartphone customers will still have the comfort of knowing that, no matter how much data they use in a billing cycle, they will continue to pay a single monthly flat rate. That is the essential promise of the Unlimited Data Plan, and we are pleased to continue honoring that promise. Further, speed reductions will occur only when the customer is using his or her device at times and in areas where there is network congestion and only for the remainder of the current billing cycle after the customer has exceeded the 22GB data usage threshold.

We will notify customers during each billing cycle when their data usage reaches 16.5GB (75% of 22GB) so they can adjust their usage to avoid network management practices that may result in slower data speeds.

If you’ve got one of those vintage AT&T unlimited plans, good to know what the rules are.

If you already have a podcast or are considering creating one, you’ll need a good mic (or two or three). Veteran podcaster Marco Arment put a bunch of mics through their paces, with sound samples and recommendations. Absolutely worth digging through (bookmark and pass along). You’ll learn a lot and, I suspect, this will keep you from wasting money on the wrong mic.

Note that the review is still active, meaning Marco is still finding new Mics to test. Excellent.

[Via Daring Fireball]