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Tim Cook on Encryption, Public Safety, and Right to Privacy→

TIME’s Nancy Gibbs and Lev Grossman have published the full transcript of a Tim Cook interview that will be the subject of the magazine’s March 28 cover story.

It’s a lengthy interview, with Cook discussing a variety of issues related to the FBI’s requests in the San Bernardino case. Cook comments on his views on encryption in the modern technological landscape, how the US Congress should approach this debate, and why Apple views the FBI’s demands as a threat to civil liberties. It’s a great read with some fantastic passages.

The thing that is different to me about Messages versus your banking institution is, the part of you doing business with the bank, they need to record what you deposited, what your withdrawals are, what your checks that have cleared. So they need all of this information. That content they need to possess, because they report it back to you.

That’s the business they’re in. Take the message. My business is not reading your messages. I don’t have a business doing that. And it’s against my values to do that. I don’t want to read your private stuff. So I’m just the guy toting your mail over. That’s what I’m doing. So if I’m expected to keep your messages, and everybody else’s, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.

Now I think that would be really bad. I think it would be really bad because in order for me to keep them, I have to have a way to see them. If I have to have a way to see them and a place to copy them, you can imagine—if you knew where the treasure was buried at, and everybody else did, then it puts a bull’s eye on that target. And in the world of cyber security, the last thing you want is to have a target painted on you.

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Researchers Look to Smartwatches to Prevent Strokes→

Speaking of Apple Watch and heart problems, here’s the opposite end of the spectrum: the developers of Cardiogram are working with researchers of the UCSF Health eHeart Study to understand if heart rate data captured by smartwatches can generate insights to prevent strokes.

Heart researchers from the University of California, San Francisco as well as developers behind the heart rate-tracking app Cardiogram are teaming up to investigate if the tech built into smartwatches could be used to identify those at risk for a stroke or heart failure.

The research team will be honing in on one of the most commonly undiagnosed irregular heart conditions: atrial fibrillation, an irregular and often rapid heart rate also known as a type of arrhythmia.

Working within an observational study dubbed mRhythm, which kicked off on Wednesday, researchers will track data from participants using both the Apple Watch and Android Wear-based devices while looking for signs of irregular heart rates. These kinds of watches don’t have advanced electrocardiogram (EKG) machines inside. But they do include cheaper technology, such as LED lights, which can be used to measure blood flow in the wrist.

Like Apple’s ResearchKit, if these crowdsourced studies can lead to early diagnoses and better prevention, the impact of wearable devices on our lifestyle will be meaningful.

Those interested in the study can check out the details here.

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Kardia Band for Apple Watch→

Interesting idea for an Apple Watch band by AliveCor: the Kardia band will allow users to capture EKG directly from their wrist by placing a finger on the band for 30 seconds.

Users can record a single-lead EKG by simply touching Kardia Band’s integrated sensor that communicates with the Watch app, Kardia by AliveCor. The Atrial Fibrillation (AF) Detector then uses Kardia’s automated analysis process (algorithm) to instantly detect the presence of AF in an EKG, the most common cardiac arrhythmia and a leading cause of stroke. Also included is the Normal Detector, which indicates whether your heart rate and rhythm are normal, and the Unreadable Detector, which tells you when to retake an EKG so physicians receive only the highest quality recordings.

Users can also record voice memos on their Apple Watch to accompany each EKG that give doctors and caregivers a clearer picture of what was happening at the time of the recording — describing symptoms such as palpitations or external factors like caffeine intake. Kardia also integrates seamlessly with Apple’s Health app to include EKG data with steps and calorie intake to provide richer, personal analysis over time.

The Kardia band isn’t meant for fitness aficionados – rather, it’s designed for people with heart-related problems who would benefit from medical-grade EKG and the ability to store detailed reports and notes (including voice memos dictated on the Apple Watch). I’m curious to see if more companies (including Apple) will come up with Apple Watch bands with embedded sensors that can transfer data directly to the Watch (there were some rumors about this last year).

Also worth noting: AliveCor is run by Vic Gundotra (former Google VP and head of Google+) and they have a whole line of Kardia products (which also include smartphone cases for similar measurements).

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Connected: All Things Pizza→

Federico weighs in on the great pineapple pizza debate, then the conversation moves to Android N, the future of the Mac and iOS text editors.

On this week’s Connected, I also continued my exploration of Ulysses for iOS and my changing text editor preferences. You can listen here.

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Apple Music to Offer Unlicensed Remixes and DJ Mixes→

Glenn Peoples, reporting for Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Remixes and mashups are a huge part of what my girlfriend and I listen to on a daily basis (she’s a dancer, and she often needs remixes for her choreographies; she usually finds them on YouTube and SoundCloud). This is a nice differentiator for Apple Music, though the article suggests more streaming services will follow.

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An Indie’s Guide to the Press→

Club MacStories members know that ‘attention’ is a topic near and dear to my heart that I’ve been writing about for the past month or so in my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development. One aspect of attention that I haven’t covered yet is media attention. Today, in An Indie’s Guide to the Press, Curtis Herbert, maker of Slopes, a GPS tracking app for skiers and snowboarders, shares his experience and tips for dealing the press as an indie developer.

Hundreds of “I have an app…” emails hit the inboxes of the Apple-centric press every day. You’re not only competing for attention with other indies that have just as much passion about their app, though, you’re competing with the day-to-day news the tech sites have to write about. Readers trust these sites to filter out as much noise as possible. That is their job.

The most important thing I’ve realized about working with the press is that it’s all about finding the story. You have to answer the question why will their readers care?

Curtis’ advice is applicable to anyone pitching an app, not just indies. Every publication has a sense of who their readers are and what interests them. If you want to stand a chance of being heard through the noise, you need to understand that too.

As a developer myself who now writes at MacStories, two things have really struck me – the volume of pitches that MacStories receives on a daily basis, and the poor quality of many of them. Developers should heed Curtis’ advice. Doing so isn’t a guaranty that your app will be covered, but you will stand out from the crowd, which is the attention that gets your foot in the door in a way that many developers never achieve.

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Dropbox’s Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire→

Cade Metz published a Dropbox profile for Wired, detailing how the company migrated to their own storage infrastructure:

Cowling and crew started work on the Magic Pocket software in the summer of 2013 and spent about six months building the initial code. But this was a comparatively small step. Once the system was built, they had to make sure it worked. They had to get it onto thousands of machines inside multiple data centers. They had to tailor the software to their new hardware. And, yes, they had to get all that data off of Amazon.

The whole process took two years. A project like this, needless to say, is a technical challenge. But it’s also a logistical challenge. Moving that much data across the Internet is one thing. Moving that many machines into data centers is another. And they had to do both, as Dropbox continued to serve hundreds of millions of people. “It’s like a moving car,” says Dan Williams, a former Facebook network engineer who oversaw much of the physical expansion, “and you want to be able to change a tire while still driving.” In other words, while making all these changes, Dropbox couldn’t very well shut itself down. It couldn’t tell the hundreds of millions of users who relied on Dropbox that their files were temporarily unavailable. Ironically, one of the best measures of success for this massive undertaking would be that users wouldn’t notice it had happened at all.

People who are really serious about cloud storage should make their own hardware and software, I guess.

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Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on Encryption→

HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tackled the Apple-FBI fight over encryption in this week’s episode and did a phenomenal job. As always, Oliver uses humour as a tool to help illuminate the absurdity of various propositions, whilst also keeping people engaged when the topic is dry or complicated. As a result, this 17 minute video is perfect for anyone, even if you haven’t been paying much attention to this encryption debate so far.

You can watch the video on YouTube, but be warned it is NSFW. For those of you in countries where the video is geo-blocked (ugh), you should also be able to view it on the Last Week Tonight Facebook page.

Be sure to stick around to the end as there’s a brilliant satirical Apple advert that you really have to see.

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How Apple Saved My Life→

It can be easy to lose track of how technology changes lives. Apple takes great care to make products that are accessible, leading by example, and encouraging third-party developers to embrace accessibility, both at WWDC, and by maintaining APIs that make it easy to do so.

But the technical details are impersonal and abstract, which is why it is good to reflect on the real impact Apple’s efforts have on individuals. James Rath, a 20-year-old filmmaker who was born legally blind, made a short film about what the accessibility features across all of Apple’s products have meant to him since he and his family made an impromptu visit to an Apple Store in 2009:

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