Boot up: iOS 6.1 bypassed no.2, Yahoos on Mayer, Pentagon looks at iOS and Google, and more

A vehicle drives along a newly constructed bypass in Nairobi, Kenya. The ones on iOS 6.1 are nearly as big.. Photograph: Ding Haitao/Xinhua Press/Corbis

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Why Google Glass is fascinating; Chromebook Pixel just puzzling >> Chicago Sun-Times

Andy Ihnatko:

This was a good week for the Glass project. I still don't know that Google has a viable product on their hands. But it's certainly no longer a pie-in-the-sky concept. The mockery that Glass received from some commentators during its first announcement in April of last year might have been understandable...but now it seems embarrassingly premature.
Google had something else to talk about last week, though. I can't remember a product that's baffled me harder or more roughly than Google's new Chromebook Pixel…
I talked to Google about the Pixel on launch day, asking some of the dumbest and most basic questions I've ever dared ask, but I'm still profoundly confused. Today, the Pixel seems to be serving a customer who doesn't exist. Even a power Chromebook user, I reckon, would be more likely to buy a $1300 Windows notebook and simply run webapps in the Chrome browser, right?

No, the new iOS 6.1 lock screen bypass bug does not allow access to your iPhone's file system >> The Next Web

Matt Panzarino:

Earlier today, word began getting around that there was a new way to bypass the iOS 6.1 lock screen and that this one was even worse, allowing full access to the user portion of the file system. Well, that's not exactly true, as we've uncovered with some simple tests.
The lock screen bug does in fact exist, and it works as advertised, bypassing the lock and bringing you to a blank black screen with just the status bar. But it allows you no access to anything, not pictures, not contacts and certainly not the file system.

Two ways to bypass the lock screen?

The iTunes Value Structure >> asymco

Note 2: My estimate for the iTunes Music payments to publishers is equivalent to about 60% of total [recorded] industry revenues.

BlackBerry threat? Pentagon to open networks to Apple, Google >> Financial Post

The Pentagon said it wants employees to have the flexibility to use commercial products on classified and unclassified networks. It plans to create a military mobile applications store and hire a contractor to build a system that may eventually handle as many as 8m devices.
"This is not simply about embracing the newest technology –- it is about keeping the department's workforce relevant in an era when information accessibility and cybersecurity play a critical role in mission success," Teri Takai, the department's chief information officer, said in a statement.

BlackBerry shares fell. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)

Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak? >> Boing Boing

Meanwhile, outside the filter bubble...

Gun violence research suffers from a lack of consistently recorded data and, for that matter, a lack of data, in general. As John Pepper, associate economics professor at The University of Virginia and the study director on the 2004 report, put it, "The data are just terrible."
Worse, critics say the methods used to analyze that data are also deeply flawed in many cases. What you end up with, researchers told me, is a field where key pieces of the puzzle are missing entirely and where multiple scientists are reaching wildly different conclusions from the exact same data sets. For instance, because of those differences in the definition of "defensive gun use" some researchers will tell you that Americans use a gun to defend themselves something like 1.5 million times every year. Others say it happens maybe 200,000 times annually.

Part one of a series. Read.

What has been the internal reaction at Yahoo to Marissa Mayer's no work from home policy? >> Quora

Based on this titanic list of three, possibly four, Yahoos, the answer is: positive.

The CCIA and RIM tell the FTC banning injunctions for FRAND patents can make smartphone wars worse >> Groklaw

The FTC is now suggesting that companies that own standards-essential patents and offer them under FRAND terms, like Motorola, should not be allowed to seek injunctions regarding those kinds of patents except in the most extreme of circumstances. But for decades, they had those property rights, the right to seek injunctive relief. How can a government agency just show up and take those traditional rights away by fiat, without reasonable compensation? That's not America, to me. I don't even like software patents, but as long as the patent system exists, you want it to be fair. And this just feels wrong.

This seems to be a case of Groklaw deciding which side it likes, and tailoring its thinking to go along with it. The reason to oppose injunctions on standards-essential patents (SEPs) - which Google (via Motorola) and Samsung own lots of - is that it would allow the owners of those SEPs to shut rivals who need to meet standards out of the marketplace, simply by withdrawing the rival's permission to use those patents. Being part of a standard requires licensing to all comers. (The idea that stopping injunctions over SEPs would make things worse is obvious nonsense. Nor is the FTC saying that SEP injunctions aren't ever allowed. )

Apple to FTC: Samsung and Google lose most of their cases over declared-essential patents >> FOSS Patents

Apple's letter raises the very important point (starting on page 6) that most patents that are declared essential to a standard (by their holders, typically without any independent verification of essentiality) actually aren't - and if someone wants to get paid for an allegedly standard-essential patent, a defendant must have the right to challenge the validity of the patent and its essentiality in court without having to pay for a portfolio license based on an arbitrated or court-determined value of an unverified portfolio. While the proposed consent decree generally mentions that challenges to validity, essentiality and infringement allegations don't make a company an unwilling licensee, a very recent InterDigital filing in lawsuits targeting Huawei and ZTE shows that some SEP owners nevertheless argue that they should receive royalties even without having to prove that their asserted patents are valid and actually used by an implementer of the standard in question.

Something of a new wrinkle that many of these claimed "standards-essential" patents actually aren't. Shouldn't there be a clear register of such things? And if not, why not?

On bias >> Benedict Evans

Apple Maps is a fiasco, but it is fundamentally a secondary issue and there is no evidence it affects sales. The same is true of skeumorphism, or 'openness' or a dozen other issues that people talk about. What matters is the addressable market. Criticisms of Apple product, by and large, do not matter so long as they do not affect sales, and there is no evidence that they do, to any material degree. Hence, they do not really interest me, regardless of whether I personally agree with them, as a user of the product.
Android is different. Android does not really face an addressable market question. 1.7bn phones will be sold this year, perhaps a little more, and half will be smartphones, and almost all of those that are sold for less than $400 will run Android. In a couple of years, if nothing changes, Android will be selling a billion units a year or more.
The important questions, therefore, are within Android: they are product questions. Something like a third of unit sales are in China and have little access to Google services. What does that mean? Another third to a half of units are sold by Samsung, and all the other branded Android OEMs are struggling. Android is fragmented, Android is very weak in apps for tablets, and so on, and so on. What do all these variations mean? Android is many different things in a way that the iPhone is not, and understanding those variations makes up the analytical challenge.