Ars Technica: ATM heist clears $1 million exploiting Citigroup e-payment flaw:

“In order to obtain the case, the conspirators exploited a loophole in Citi’s account security protocols, which caused Citi’s account reconciliation systems to treat identical, near-simultaneous withdrawals as duplicates of a single withdrawal from an individual Citi Checking account,” prosecutors alleged in the indictment. “In exploiting this loophole, the conspirators withdrew identical sums of money in succession from a single Citi checking account all within a specific time window. This allowed the conspirators to fraudulently withdraw several times the amount of money deposited into each account.”

Sounds like it’s right out of a movie.

GigaOm: Sandy takes out Gawker, Huffpo other sites

It’s ironic these websites went down.

The Internet as we know it today is based on ARPANET, with the defining characteristic of being a decentralized network. ARPANET started as a project within the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960’s.

While the design of the Internet doesn’t specifically dictate for individual websites to always be accessible, companies like Gawker and Huffpo should have the resources for more than one New York-based cluster of servers.

Load balancing, anyone?

This past Thursday, CNBC’s Jon Fortt spoke with Steve Ballmer about the new Microsoft Surface (via The Loop). Ballmer explained how neither Google nor Apple “has a product that you can use, that lets you work and play, that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any of those price points.”

Ballmer’s got a point.

I wish there were both games for the iPad as well as business applications.

I also wish Apple and third party vendors had figured out how to make magnetic smart covers and keyboards for the iPad.

John Gruber on Google’s new $249 Chromebook by Samsung:

“You know what I’d like? An ARM-based computer that doesn’t run anything other than a web browser and gets only 6.5 hours of battery life.” —No One

I can think of one classy guy who would might like one.

And we know how that ended.

Shawn Blanc nails Microsoft Surface in one sentence:

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Microsoft’s Next Big Thing was a keyboard.

See, what Shawn doesn’t understand is Microsoft isn’t going into the future with their new product, they’re going back to the future. The Flux Capacitor in Microsoft’s Delorean is all screwed up, hence the eternal catch-up game they’ve been playing since Windows 95.

They were stuck in 2002 with their original line of tablet computers, and they’ve mistakenly traveled to present-day 2012. They intended to travel to April 2, 2010, one day before the original iPad was announced. They have no idea Apple already announced a second generation iPad on March 2 2011 with a magnetic Smart Cover (in an array of colors and also featuring a pleasing *click*).

The whole time-shifting thing is complicated.

Microsoft really does think it’s hot stuff with their magnetic keyboards.

I still find it ironic that in today’s age of mobile computing and tablets, Microsoft is emphasizing the least mobile component of their new product as the differentiator.

I wonder if the keyboard inclusion is twofold – 1) they don’t want to let go of Windows and the PC Era and 2) without the keyboard, it’s too close, hardware-wise to an iPad.

Pagan Kennedy at the NYTimes tells us who made the Escape Key:

The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.”

As antiquated as some people might consider it today, I still use it a lot.

After updating my iPhone 4 to iOS 6 a few weeks ago, iTunes isn’t able to ‘see’ it on my home WiFi network. Since I rarely have to need to sync my iPhone with iTunes, this isn’t a huge deal, but it still bothered me.

I was able to resolve this by turning off WiFi on my iOS devices, then from my MacBook, I logged into my router and delete all connected devices (on a Linksys router it’s located under: Status > Local Network > DHCP Client Table).

Once I deleted all connected devices, I re-enable WiFi on my iPhone, relaunched iTunes and boom, my iPhone was showing up once again in the lefthand sidebar.

(via Marcel Brown)

I’ve wondered if Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface are half-baked.

Now I’m wondering if they’ve even been put in the oven.

People are seduced by Apple’s products, partly because they can touch them. I’m not sure Microsoft knows seduction.

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

—William Gibson

I just finished watching John Gruber and David Pogue on Charlie Rose.
Quick thoughts: Pogue is a cheeseball, as is expected. Hyperbolic and weird. Gruber was composed, not very camera-friendly but gave solid answers to Charlie’s questions.
In all though, it’s really hard to give a thorough explanation of the iPhone 5 and the state-of-affairs in as little time as they both had with Charlie. I think they both did as good as job as they could. Pogue with his goofiness and Gruber with his straight-shooter responses.

On August 28, Apple was granted a patent for, “Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.” It was originally filed June 26, 2008.
From the United States Patent Office (via Natural News):

Apparatus and methods for changing one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device, such as upon the occurrence of a certain event. In one embodiment, the event comprises detecting that the wireless device is within range of one or more other devices. In another variant, the event comprises the wireless device associating with a certain access point. In this manner, various aspects of device functionality may be enabled or restricted (device “policies”). This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and/or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter “sleep mode” when entering a sensitive area.

What this patent means is Apple has been granted the ability to determine when and where you can use particular functions on your iPhone. I’m curious who or what determines what a “sensitive area” is.
This doesn’t give me warm, fuzzy feelings.

Neven Mrgan talks about pixel art and the art of preserving pixel size:

I’ve made three games whose art style could be described as “pixel art”. What is typically meant by this is “graphics that exaggerate pixels”, with images built of “blocks” larger than the smallest points the display can show. “Big pixels”, right?

I’m often asked this question about those games: do you draw your art at double size? If you think the answer is completely obvious, you’re not alone; I think so too. But since it’s not obvious to everyone, I’ll explain.

It’s crazy to think we’re moving into a post-pixel world.