When news of a massive illicit photo ring run by a high school football team in Canon City, Colo., broke this week, parents around the country were left scratching their heads.

How could a scandal involving at least 100 students and hundreds more nude photos go undetected for so long?

The answer: photo vaults.

Disguised to look and function like an innocent smartphone app, photo vaults — also known as “ghost apps” — allow people to conceal photos, video and information in plain view on their phone. They’ve been around since at least 2011, but have grown increasingly common as smartphones have gained popularity. The App Store and Google Play are littered with apps designed to help users hide their activity and camouflage sensitive information.

“If you look at your kid’s phone, everything looks normal, but one of the apps turns out to actually be some way to send messages to and from others that aren’t meant to be permanent,” George Welsh, the superintendent of Canon City school, told NBC affiliate KKTV.

—How Colorado teenagers hid a massive nude sexting ring from parents and teachers

Michael Lopp has added drones to his list of “holy shit” moments:

I’ve written about this topic before, but as it’s been a few years since I’ve experienced a Holy Shit, it bears repeating. A Holy Shit moment is when you first discover a new idea that drastically and forever changes your perspective. You know when you’re having these moments because you stop, you stare at the new idea or thought with your mouth half open, and you say – out loud – “Holy shit.” Here are three from my life to help you calibrate:

Telnet – Sitting in the computer lab at UCSC as Frank explained, “Type telnet 81.201.83.45. Ok, now enter this user name and password. Great, you are now logged into a computer in Germany.” Pause. I’m what? Pause. Holy shit, the whole world is eventually going to be connected.

Doom – Playing Doom primarily on the promise of Castle Wolfenstein 3D. I distinctly remember walking around a corner in the game and having an Imp leap out at me. I jumped out of my chair, Holy shit, the computer will eventually be able to render the world as I see it and I’ll be able to walk around.

iPhone – Writing my first email of significance where it wasn’t an absolute mobile chore to do what I did effortless on my desktop. Wait. Holy shit, a computer is not just a bulky something that sits on my desk. Computers are going to disappear by being everywhere.

You are unable to un-see a Holy Shit moment. It is burned in your brain because the world as you knew it is now forever different. This brings us back to drones.

I too have a father who’s an engineer and I too want to buy him a drone.

Ok, I want a drone too.

I just don’t have an extra $700 to drop on one.

Ben Bajarin on Android’s “good enough” problem:

One of the most interesting observations about all of this is that the Innovator’s Dilemma was supposed to impact Apple. This was a fundamental tenet of most bear cases. When the market for smartphones became filled with good-enough devices at very low prices, why would anyone buy an iPhone? Yet this is impacting Samsung exactly according to the guidebook — but not Apple.

The fundamental lesson to learn here is that the Innovator’s Dilemma, in this case, only applies to Android land, because all the hardware OEMs run the same operating system. As I’m fond of saying, when you ship the same operating system as your competition, you are only as good as their lowest price. This is the curse of the modular business model.

What about Apple?

One of the most interesting observations about all of this is that the Innovator’s Dilemma was supposed to impact Apple. This was a fundamental tenet of most bear cases. When the market for smartphones became filled with good-enough devices at very low prices, why would anyone buy an iPhone? Yet this is impacting Samsung exactly according to the guidebook — but not Apple.

The fundamental lesson to learn here is that the Innovator’s Dilemma, in this case, only applies to Android land, because all the hardware OEMs run the same operating system. As I’m fond of saying, when you ship the same operating system as your competition, you are only as good as their lowest price. This is the curse of the modular business model.

Which brings us to today in late 2015 with Microsoft pretending to drop their modular business model.

This is the telegram that broke news of the American Civil War.

via The Combustion Chamber

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica on the data plundering going on in iOS and Android:

Apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store frequently send users’ highly personal information to third parties, often with little or no notice, according to recently published research that studied 110 apps.

The researchers analyzed 55 of the most popular apps from each market and found that a significant percentage of them regularly provided Google, Apple, and other third parties with user e-mail addresses, names, and physical locations. On average, Android apps sent potentially sensitive data to 3.1 third-party domains while the average iOS app sent it to 2.6 third-party domains. In some cases, health apps sent searches including words such as “herpes” and “interferon” to no fewer than five domains with no notification that it was happening.

Well fuck, this is awesome.

via The Awl

These startups-finding-their-way stories blow my fucking mind. Maybe they shouldn’t but they do. How people can raise tens of millions of dollars without shit to show for it is beyond me (maybe this is why I’ve never started or worked at a startup).

Take Javascript platform, Famo.us:

Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.

Pivot. A brilliant word Silicon Valley loves to use. Wouldn’t it be nice if we non-entreprenuers could pivot on things in our lives? Like if those pesky rent payments aren’t working out, just pivot on them. The rent-paying world is ripe for disruption. Be innovative and begin paying your rent with a new currency you come up with yourself.

Back to Famo.us:

Famo.us’ ambitions were always lofty and a bit tough to explain. During the company’s debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Startup Battlefield competition, rather than giving a traditional pitch, Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb spent his whole six minutes asking people to imagine what could be done if apps were 3D instead of 2D and demoing a floating periodic table.

The judges seemed baffled, as you can see below. That’s in part because just days earlier, the team made its first pivot away from what it called BenchRank, a ranking system for people, into an HTML5 development platform. Newcomb and then-intern Mark Lu found they couldn’t build what they wanted with HTML5’s limitations, so they set out to fix them. That led co-founder Dan Lynch and much of the team to depart, leaving Newcomb and Lu to handle Disrupt.

Pick a pivot and go with it, guys.

One more nugget:

I spoke to Newcomb, who confesses that for six months the company struggled to come up with a way to actually earn money. A source close to the company tells me Newcomb pushed the engineer-heavy company into “ideation mode” that made some employees feel like the startup lacked direction. They described engineers as being “fed up.”

Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

Just couldn’t come up with a way to earn money. Classic.

Walt Mossberg:

I think it’s time for Google to start making its own hardware, at least for smartphones, and at least for the Nexus line and for a class of low-priced phones aimed at developing markets.

Yes, I know that Google briefly owned, and then sold, an entire phone manufacturer, Motorola. Yes, I know that Google has dabbled in hardware with products like the Chromecast and the Chromebook Pixel, and had to kill another internal hardware venture, a home media player called the Q.

But it’s perfectly possible for a company with Google’s clout and resources to hire more hardware engineers and designers, create unique devices, and outsource its manufacturing.

Really, Walt? Fucking brilliant. How did you possibly come up with this idea?

So original.

Update: I’m not saying Walt Mossberg got his idea from Tim Bajarin, or anyone else. I’m saying the idea of a software company making it’s own hardware (or vice versa), is not a new or insightful idea. It’s obvious because we see it working so amazingly with Apple.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Star Wars Trilogy Redub had me dying.

via Coudal

Good advice.

Excercise is good for your brain.

PuzzlePhone is a new project on Indiegogo. It’s a phone with modular parts. It runs Android. And they claim it lasts up the 10 years? No way. Apple just introduced 3-D Touch on the iPhone 6S. There’s no telling where Android is going to be in 10 years (or the smartphone market).

James Vincent at the Verge also notes their flexible funding structure:

Flexible funding can be something of a warning sign on Indiegogo as it means that the campaign organizers will keep the money they raise no matter what happens. Obviously this doesn’t mean that all flexibly funded campaigns are scams, but it’s not always a good look. Puzzlephone says it was “forced” to go with flexible funding as Indiegogo only allows payment via PayPal for fixed funding campaigns. The company notes that it has also already raised funding for R&D, so the Indiegogo money is only for manufacture, shipping, and the product itself.

There’s no way I would give them my money to be a guinea pig. Their goals of being ‘upgradable and sustainable” are admirable (if they’re genuine) but they’re not realistic.

Amazon is selling those olde tymey books:

Amazon got its start as an online bookseller, and now — over 20 years later — it’s decided to sell books the old-fashioned way. On Tuesday, Amazon will open a store in Seattle called Amazon Books. Not only is it one of Amazon’s first physical locations, but it’s also Amazon’s first physical bookstore. Amazon says that it won’t entirely be doing things like a traditional store, however; it’ll be relying on Amazon.com data — including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread’s popularity — to decide which books to stock. Curators will have some say, too.

Well how about that.

Amazon dries up retail competition with their portfolio of features, making shopping easy as pie, and now they jump into selling physical books.

Makes me wonder what Bezos has in store for his Washington Post.

—Brian Eno

via Austin Kleon (via The Made Shop)