Boot up: HTC's Nexus 9, Apple's dead livestream, and Watch in detail

Actually, it really looked like this inside the theatre. Photograph: Screenshot/Apple

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Mike Lowe:

HTC will be the brand behind the Nexus 9 tablet, as revealed by Nvidia in an document leak from the technology company itself as filed with the US International Trade Commission (a link which has since been pulled from Google).

"The HTC Nexus 9, expected in the third quarter of 2014, is also expected to use the Tegra K1" reads a line from the paper. Oops.

We've been scratching our brains as to where the next Nexus tablet had got to, given that it's overdue, but the leak appears to confirm what the rumour mill has been suggesting for some time. HTC will handle the hardware, while Nvidia will provide the core power from its Tegra K1 - a much needed boost for the company's otherwise widely ignored processor.

Kashmir Hill:

"The philosophy of some bug bounty hold-outs is, 'We don't negotiate with terrorists,'" says Jake Kouns of the Open Security Foundation. "Why would we incent you to try to attack and break our stuff?"

Whether Apple's having a bounty program would actually mean that a bunch of pervs wouldn't know what Jennifer Lawrence looks like naked is debatable. But Apple is one of the notable tech hold-outs in instituting a bug bounty program that incentivizes security researchers to find problems in its products and report them. "Bug bounty programs are all the rage at the moment," says Kouns. "If you're not doing a bug bounty program, you're perceived as not really caring about problems."

Google and Facebook have been running bug bounty programs for years. As of August 2013, Google had paid out $2m in rewards. Facebook has given out as much as $33,500 as a bounty for a critical bug. Twitter joined the bug bounty train this summer, and has already used it to squash 55 bugs.

Would cost Apple a lot less than a U2 album release.

Benjamin Clymer:

I was lucky enough to be invited to Cupertino to witness the announcement of the Apple Watch firsthand, and though I do not believe it poses any threat to haute horology manufactures, I do think the Apple Watch will be a big problem for low-priced quartz watches, and even some entry-level mechanical watches. In years to come, it could pose a larger threat to higher end brands, too. The reason? Apple got more details right on their watch than the vast majority of Swiss and Asian brands do with similarly priced watches, and those details add up to a really impressive piece of design. It offers so much more functionality than other digitals it's almost embarrassing. But it's not perfect, by any means.

He really knows stuff about watches. His "sleeve" remark is well-observed.

On net neutrality:

If internet access providers can block some services and cut special deals that prioritize some companies' content over others, that would threaten the innovation that makes the internet awesome.…

We believe that consumers should continue to enjoy open on-ramps to the internet.

That means no Internet access provider should block or degrade internet traffic, nor should they sell 'fast lanes' that prioritize particular internet services over others. These rules should apply regardless of whether you're accessing the internet using a cable connection, a wireless service, or any other technology.

Apple's live stream of the unveiling of the iPhone 6 and Watch was a disaster today right from the start, with many users like myself having problems trying to watch the event. While at first I assumed it must be a capacity issue pertaining to Akamai, a deeper look at the code on Apple's page and some other elements from the event shows that decisions made by Apple pertaining to their website, and problems with how they setup storage on Amazon's S3 service, contributed the biggest problems to the event.

Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event. As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable.

Social media-isation killed the video feed? Commenters disagree about the cause, however - they think (and give reasons to explain) it's somewhere in the video/broadcast production side. A gigantic screwup, whichever.

John Beatty gives a detailed explanation (want to understand tokenised NFC? Start here) and this note:

Say you're an order-ahead app enabling consumers to buy food and pick it up later. You really don't want to be in the payments business, but how else do you collect money from the consumer and to the restaurant? There's so much friction in the system that the typical way is to become the merchant-of-record, which is a position you accept begrudingly. Chargebacks and disputes? It's your problem now.

Network-level tokenization, and iPhone in particular, will radically change this dynamic. Commerce apps won't be forced to become aggregators any longer - they simply need to use the iOS payment SDKs, and the SDK from the merchant acquirer, to process the payment.

Ex-Googler Tim Bray:

An­droids have had the APIs, and most devices have had the hardware, for years now. One problem has been Apple; there are lots of apps that don't get built when a huge pro­por­tion of well-heeled cus­tomers can't play. Well, now they can, in principle. 

Payment and… Yeah, there's no doubt that payment is the ap­pli­ca­tion that's get­ting the headlin­er at­ten­tion. But it would be trag­ic ?— ? trag­ic ?— ?if Ap­ple didn't pro­vide an open API to that nifty NFC hard­ware.

Here's just one sam­ple ap­pli­ca­tion, be­cause it's the kind of thing I'm think­ing about these days. Suppose you want se­cure com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which means you've got a pri­vate key on your phone. And suppose you don't 100% trust your phone-unlock set­up to pro­tect ac­cess to your key. Wel­l, you car­ry a lit­tle NFC doohick­ey on your key­chain, and when you need to use the key, you pull it out of your pocket and tap the back of the phone with it.

Apple is expected to publish an NFC API for iOS 8, but not sure it will go into that detail.

The iPad story demonstrates why it may be a hugely ambitious for Apple to try to position the Apple Watch as a $350 premium product. Considering the display size, that price is massive compared to tablet or phablet prices out there. It's weirdly out of step with the original iPad pricing philosophy, which was based on offering a lot of value relative to expectations in 2010. And of course, Apple fans are now tied to both iPhone and iPad upgrade costs.

Selling a third device to an Apple household is not the same as selling the first or second. That's what makes projecting sales volumes for the Apple Watch so fiendishly difficult. Many analysts are now projecting 30m or even 40m annual unit sales for 2015.  That seems to be on the steep side with given the pricing approach Apple has taken.

Just going out looking for a story where a new Apple product is introduced and everyone says "that's the perfect price!" Might a little while.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard

To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the free Delicious service.

View the original article here