Speaking of copyright enforcing robots...

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Annalee Newitz:

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction's most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you're not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service UStream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, "The Doctor's Wife." Where Gaiman's face had been were the words, "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement." What the hell?

Idiots.

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Dieter Bohn, writing at The Verge:

In February of 2011, meeting notes from an executive level discussion described a "crisis of design" at the company. According to the notes, executives were concerned that Samsung was too focused on Nokia. The real competitor was Apple, and the problem was that when Samsung's "UX is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth."

If I read this correctly, Samsung still considered Apple, who entered the phone market in 2007, an "unexpected competitor" as late as 2011? Amazing.

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Justin Watt has discovered that the public WiFi gateway at the Courtyard Marriott in Time Square is defacing his website:

I really wanted to give Marriott the benefit of the doubt, but it turns out I was wrong. There is something more nefarious at work. Thanks to Danny in the comments, I learned that the “rxg” I saw in the injected CSS and JavaScript is short for Revenue eXtraction Gateway, a wireless hotspot gateway product built by RG Nets, Inc., and available for sale from Wlan Mall.

The Revenue eXtraction Gateway apparently inserts ads on every website accessed over it's public wifi network.

The idea of the wifi network at an expensive hotel monkeying with my network connection is bad enough, but the lack of disclosure and transparency is what really disturbs me. Readers will naturally associate the ads they see with the websites they see the ads on, no matter how inappropriate the ads may be. They have no way of knowing the ads are from a third party.

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Leo Laporte of the TWiT Network announces, through a tweet, that their show Game On is canceled after 12 episodes:

I've cancelled Game On. We planned 12 eps but the show was just too expensive and too little watched to do more. -sigh-

As they transition from one man with a microphone to a real network—they famously sunk a million dollars into a new studio last year—it seems like many of the same problems that plague traditional broadcast networks are proving unavoidable.

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Arguably Mac OS X's first major virus outbreak. If you have a Mac and are technically minded, it's worth following F-Secure's instructions to find out if you're infected.

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Shocking, but in light of the News of the World phone hacking scandal not too shocking. Seems Murdoch's anything-to-win attitude has completely permeated the organization.

I can't tell if their ends-justify-the-means argument is evil or just misguided…

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Matt Neuberg is shocked—shocked!—to discover that it's the top microphone, not the bottom, that's active during iPhone speakerphone calls.

Interesting enough, but then he whips out the tinfoil hat:

But I can’t resist also ranting briefly about why I didn’t know this simple and useful fact. I didn’t know about it because Apple didn’t tell me! [...] I didn’t discover it, because I didn’t know I needed to look for it.

And:

But by persisting in the myth that everything about an iPhone is obvious and that no manual is needed, Apple certainly does its users a disservice.

What part of that is myth? The microphone that's active during a conference call is an implementation detail. Why waste booklet space or customer brain cycles on it?

You're not supposed to speak right into the microphone. You don't even have to speak at the phone. (I've had plenty of good speaker phone calls with my iPhone on my desk across the room.)

The fact that Neuberg has apparently had years of speaker phone calls so good he never thought to ask which microphone was active, all while speaking into the wrong end of the phone, proves that this is not something most customers need to know.

As Apple products get easier and easier to use, there's a certain group of old-school Apple geeks that long for the days when Apple was a cult, and knowing the incantations to make the products work was a hard-won badge of honor.

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