ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Apple posted its earnings for its third fiscal quarter this week, and as expected, they were enormous. Apple reported third quarter revenue of US28.57 billion and a net profit for the quarter of US$7.31 billion (US$7.79 per share), a new record. All this without a new iPhone. Reminding us that it’s a hardware company, Apple sold 3.95 million Macs, a 14 percent increase over the same quarter last year. It sold 20.34 million iPhones—a whopping 142 percent increase over the same period last year. The iPad was clearly the winner, however, as Apple sold 9.25 million of the devices, a 183 percent increase over last year’s third quarter. Apple now has US$76 billion in cash, US$10 billion more than last quarter.

Internet

Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners this week that DSL broadband technology is “obsolete.” Stacey Higginbotham, writing for GigaOm, cites Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice as saying that Stephenson told his audience, “to chase Comcast we built DSL, it is obsolete now” during a question-and-answer session.

US House Republicans have proposed legislation that would allow broadcasters to buy their way out of the public interest. All they have to do is purchase spectrum licenses at the next auction. Similarly, the legislation would allow wireless providers to buy their way out of the public interest with the same terms. “Unlicensed spectrum”—the public airwaves—are being auctioned once again to the highest bidder. According to Stacey Higginbotham, writing for GigaOm, this puts “... the future of the proposed White Spaces broadband, also known as Super Wi-Fi… in doubt.” Public Knowledge sponsored a national day of action earlier this week.

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Demand Progress and fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, has been indicted in Boston on charges of stealing more than four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and JSTOR, an online journal archive. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a US$1 million fine. The indictment alleges that Swartz broke into an MIT wiring closet to commit wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture. Demand Progress equated Swartz’s actions with “... checking too many books out of the library,” but failed to address the allegation that Swartz broke into a wiring closet. JSTOR, for its part, published a “misuse incident” statement, claiming that “the content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.” JSTOR also denies being a part of any legal action against Swartz. Milton J. Valencia, writing for the Boston Globe, has the most complete account of the situation. Nancy Scola, writing for the American Prospect, has the best initial analysis. Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, reports that two days after Swartz’s indictment, “... a giant collection of articles from the same service has been posted to the notorious file sharing search engine, The Pirate Bay.”

Media

To no one’s surprise, Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch both claimed ignorance of their publications’ telephone hacking when they appeared before a parliamentary committee investigating the matter. The Guardian has the best ongoing coverage, including a list of the 10 things learned from the hearing. A comedian from UK Uncut pied the senior Murdoch part-way through the performance, and that, unfortunately, became the story. Braden Goyette, writing for ProPublica, has a complete rundown of the scandal by the numbers. And here’s Mallary Jean Tenore’s five-minute explainer for Poynter on the phone hacking scandal.

Politics

Andy Mannix and Mike Mullen, writing for City Pages, disclose and explore Michele Bachmann’s complete congressional record. It’s not very pretty.

Publishing

Scribd is apparently getting deeper into publishing with Float, a new reading product.

Spirituality

Deepak Chopra hopes to combine meditation and computer gaming with Leela for the Xbox 360’s Kinect system. The Kinect will detect users’ body positions and then guide them through meditation exercises. Chopra told Derrik J. Lang, writing for the Associated Press, “I personally believe that you can accelerate neural development and biological evolution through video games. Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing right now. What we’re doing is creating addictions to violence, adrenaline and mindlessness, rather than mindfulness. That was my personal motivation to get involved in this medium.”

Sustainability

When Zipcar enters a city, car ownership and use go down while walking, biking, and use of public transit goes up. That’s what Zipcar found after studying its entry into Baltimore for a full year. An astounding 72 percent of Zipcar’s Baltimore members said their use of Zipcar made it less likely that they’d buy or lease a car.

Technology

Cringely, who has been , makes the astonishing claim that because “Google was privately told by the [George W.] Bush administration not to bid.”

Melissa Rach, writing for Brain Traffic, adroitly explains everything you need to know about editorial calendars. Instead of making your work fit the format of someone else’s editorial calendar template, begin by defining a purpose and prioritizing calendar variables, Rach writes.