WWDC. (Photo: flickr.com/deerkoski)

Apple went all-in on Steve Jobs' vision of a PC-less future at WWDC, says Steven Levy. [Wired]

Speaking of Mr. Jobs, in 1987 he applied for security clearance and had to admit that yes, okay, there was a chance someone one day might try to blackmail him. [Threat Level]

Meanwhile, you might want to make sure LulzSec hasn't jacked your Twitter password. And that is why you reel in those third-party authorizations. [PC Mag]

Here, for the love of God, we'll even be a little servicey and direct you to directions for better passwords. [Information Week]

Feeling a little... targeted? Perhaps it's because Microsoft and Yahoo are offering politicians the ability to sell highly customized ads. Will this election ever end?[ProPublica]

When we were freshmen, all we got were dorky lanyards. Now the incoming class at Seton Hall University gets Lumia 900s. [Engadget]

It's not a cyber cold war until the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists show up. [MSNBC]

WWDC. (Photo: flickr.com/deerkoski)

It seems Apple's implacable customer service department finally met its match, in the form of China's state-run media.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, for the last two weeks, prominent media outlets China Central Television and The People's Daily have subjected Apple to a  campaign of criticism about the way it treats its Chinese customers, including numerous editorials and a prime-time special which "offered examples of the company's resellers failing to honor warranties appropriately." Broadcasters harped on unfair warranty policies, in particular. In response, Tim Cook has now issued the second personal apology of his tenure.

In a letter on the company's Chinese site, he wrote:

"We are aware that a lack of communications…led to the perception Apple's attitude was arrogant and that we do not care and attach importance to consumer feedback. We express our sincere apologies for any concerns or misunderstandings this gave consumers."

He promised a review of the company's warranty policy.

Good thing there's a statute of limitations on apologies for every time Steve Jobs was a dick to someone.

Boom.

Dear 20 or so religious recap followers,

You probably noticed that I took last week’s episode off. I could give you a list of reasons: it was really busy at work, I was trying to wind down for Thanksgiving, and catching the West Coast feed starting at 10 p.m. Pacific is a bitch. But ultimately, I just didn’t feel like watching it. The first two episodes left me narcoleptic and an unopened Xbox game seemed like more fun.

But Nitasha, Betabeat’s editor, convinced me to give it one last try. Well, I’m glad I did. I managed to stay awake for the entire episode! And it was definitely the most authentic of the season. It may have helped that I was getting texts from Gabe Rivera, founder of the famous tech news aggregator Techmeme, that my startup and I made an appearance in this week’s show. (Gabe was in NYC at the time and claims that he was just “flipping” through the channels). My favorite subject was going to be on . . . me!

Recap: This week opened up with Hermione kickboxing with her trainer pretending the punching bag was Sarah’s face. Ben does some crunches. Kim goes to hottie Dwight for advice on quitting her job (Sorry, but Jay is still cuter). Sarah brags. Kim quits. Kim cries. Kim drinks some wine. Ben and Hermione get rejected by another VC. Kim parties. David, Ben, and Hermione head to a tech party. Hermione freaks. Hermione cries. Hermione drinks. Hermione throws a drink. Wrap!

How Real? Once again, I'll generously start them off at 100% real Silicon Valley. Last time I tried this, the show scored a miserable 10% (blame Sarah Austin.)

“Minimum Viable Product” +20%

Kim, the former NBA cheerleader, mentions to Dwight that she wants to quit her cushy job at Ampush and launch her own startup to initially build a “minimum viable product”. Mind blown. This is real techy, product management shit! Product managers refer to it as “MVP,” which loosely translates to building products with a limited features set in order to get traction and meaningful feedback from early adopters. So either Kim (1) has actually spent some time on product launches or (2) she reads way too much TechCrunch. Either way, respect.

Sarah Austin -50%

Ladies and gentleman, we have our Snooki. Sarah is still very tanned and still kind of a dumdum, but it’s pretty innocuous. She does these video interviews--sorry, lifecasts--with somewhat famous startup CEOs in a real folksy-how-do-I-turn-my-iPhone-on kinda way. It worked! I’m convinced she knows nothing about startups and tech! Then she goes and says, “I’m one of the original bloggers of Silicon Valley.” I think what Sarah meant was that she had a Blogger account and owned a Flip camera in 2007? I mean, c’mon, the Valley gave birth to tech blogging greats like Michael Arrington, MG “Fucking!” Siegler, Rip Emerson, and many others. She caps it off by proclaiming that she’s the White Oprah of the Valley. I better just move on before I bang my head into my brand new iPad mini. #humblebrag

Dwight’s Apartment +20%

This brogrammer lives in a pigsty. There’s like dirty sandals, unwashed dishes, probably a used condom all just laying about his one bedroom apartment. Later it comes out that Dwight lives in Sunnyvale, which is effectively BFE to the San Francisco tech set. But it is about half the price to rent there and it’s easier to tap older engineering talent that are likely to stick around. For a first time entrepreneur? Legit.

Kim’s $1M in Equity -15%

Someone’s been told a lie here. There’s no way in hell she’s walking away from $1 million in shares. I have no insights into their cap table or funding line, but unless she owns like 30% of the company, it doesn’t add, especially given the space that Ampush Media is in. At last count there’s like 4,000,000 of these Facebook ad optimization companies running amok in the Valley with little liquidation options on the horizon for these guys. Sorry, Kim. You’re still cute though!

Quoting Steve Jobs (Kim) -5%

Kim finally quits her job and gathers some friends to celebrate at popular SF club Harlot. Looking pretty inebriated, she mutters to Dwight how happy she’s leaving do her own thing because, “She’s been wasting her time living someone else’s life.” Shaking my head…it’s a Steve Jobs quote from a commencement address that he delivered at Stanford in 2005. Girl, that's just tacky.

My Debut +40%

You’ve had to endure three episodes to finally (finally!) see yours truly in a scene. I was working the door at a huge networking party that I threw during Apple’s WWDC. I don’t want to brag, but I fucking killed it. Totally legitimized the show over night. However, I instructed them not to shoot me from my right side. I will be talking to Randi Zuckerberg about that.

Appcelerator +10%

This is the amazing mobile startup that I work at. Total legit! Buy some of their software? #GratuitousPlug #AlwaysBeHustlin’

Tally

For episode 4, we get a record-setting final score of 120% real Silicon Valley! Granted it was mostly buoyed by the appearance of my awesome startup, my CEO (Jeff Haynie), and myself. But I think it's a sign of good things to come. In all seriousness, I think the folks in the Valley should be rooting for the show to be a hit. If it isn’t, this will likely be the last startup show for a mainstream audience that you will see greenlit for a while. And that’s a loss for all of us that call this wonderful place our home. [Ed note: Sorry, Best Coasters, it looks like New York is already on the hook for sloppy seconds.]

Michael Ian Black (Getty Images)

Reddit's "IAmA" question-and-answer sessions can be thorny territory for celebrities brave enough to wade into the seething, snarking masses. Redditors who catch the scent of bald PR stunts can rhetorically (and gleefully) crap on promotions-friendly scripts and set them on fire. Comedian, author and Expedia.com naked traveler Michael Ian Black has just braved the wilds of the web's premiere link aggregator and as far as we can tell, survived.

Reflecting on Woody Harrelson's no-good, very bad Reddit experience a few months ago, Betabeat asked Mr. Black to comment on the session.

He told us he was familiar with the IAmA sub-Reddit but not a frequent visitor to the site in general. "But," he said, "I heard they have a subgroup for Furries so I'll probably be there a lot more often in the future."

Regarding his reasons for the IAmA, Mr. Black said, "I would never do one of those for kicks. It was too stressful trying to keep up." The IAmA, he said, was "definitely for my new book."

Mr. Black, who has an active Twitter presence, is promoting the book he co-wrote with professional Blonde Republican Pundit Meghan McCain, America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom.

Questions posed to Mr. Black went in unpredictable directions. Mr. Black, who first achieved notice as a cast member on MTV's mid-1990s comedy improv show The State, rolled with the punches. "They were pretty good questions, for the most part," he told Betabeat, "I mean, what are you supposed to ask somebody other than the normal questions about career or stupid jokey questions."

"I was more interested in the stupid jokey questions," Mr. Black said, "But only because the career-related ones were so familiar to me."

Mashable aggregated some of the funnier exchanges, like the following, which had the added advantage of explaining the conception of the book Mr. Black wrote with Ms. McCain:

unequalized: How did your roadtrip/book project with Meghan McCain come about? Is she as down-to-earth and not-as-nuts-as-her-last-name-implies as she comes across on Twitter? Also, since you were part of MTV in the ’90s, what’s your take on the shitshow it has become now?

One night, I was on Ambien and got on Twitter. Saw that she was on too, and asked her if she wanted to write a book together. (We’d only met, one time, over satellite.) So we didn’t know each other before we agreed to write America, You Sexy Bitch. We just decided to do it on a whim and hit the road together for a month. And yes, she is both as down-to-earth and crazy as you would think.

On Twitter, Mr. Black recently complained of a virulent case of poison ivy:

My poison ivy now has syphilis.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) June 9, 2012

We asked him if this apparently Ebola-like strain of ivy had any effect on his ability to answer Redditors' questions. Mr. Black said, "It's not Ebola. It's the leprosy strain. It means that my limbs are going to fall off in the itchiest way possible." Mr. Black said his severe poison ivy did affect his typing during the IAmA. His fingers, he said, were "bubbly from oozing pus, which is worse for keyboards than Diet Dr. Pepper, and only half as delicious."

As Redditors might do in any given IAmA thread, we strayed off-topic and asked Mr. Black about the Twitter war he started a couple of years ago with actor and director LeVar Burton, of Star Trek: Next Generation and Reading Rainbow fame.

Mr. Black was solemn. "I will always be at war with LeVar," he said,  "It is now America's longest Twitter war, eclipsing even the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr Twitter War of 1801-1804."

Mr. Burton, who will be one of the celebrity presenters at Apple's upcoming WWDC, is traveling and has not returned our request for comment.

We will update this post if Mr. Burton gets back to us or Mr. Black is indeed discovered frequenting the Furries sub-Reddit.

As SiliconBeat noted, the domain's registration information on WhoIs is listed as private. Of course, that doesn't mean that their grievances don't ring true. It's quite possible that interested developers might be nervous about publicly signing up for the cause. After all, Apple's had an uneasy relationship with developers for years. Back in 2009, Marco Arment said of their reluctance to answer questions at WWDC, "We could probably have a more open discussion with Kim Jong-il about North Korea’s nuclear policy."

The list of complaints on App Developer Union's website range from Apple's response to the more recent Lodsys patent debacle to Apple's long-standing revenue-share cut of 30 percent from app sales, a policy that has been in place since Apple owned its App Store for third-party developers in 2008.

1. Put a stop to the cloning of apps: developers give sweat & tears to creating them and it's not fair, or good for the ecosystem, when cloned apps become promoted apps.

2. Resolve the Lodsys patent issue by one or more of the following:

• Show the developer community your license to the Lodsys patent so developers can make a fully informed decision about whether to take a license or to rely on Apple's
• Indemnify app developers against Lodsys (and others) on your platform
• Pay for the developers' patent license(s) out of your cut

3. Get to something more equitable than that 30% share you are taking from app sales; the more money app developers make, the better off the ecosystem!

Guess we'll have to wait until next week's WWDC to see if the group gains traction. In the meantime, the website also turned their requests into an easy-to-digest video narratives, if you're looking to stoke your populist ire.

SpaceX's Dragon. (SpaceX.com)

Aereo goes to court [Wall Street Journal]

Larry Ellison goes sailing [Seattle Times]

John Gruber goes into a K-hole [Daring Fireball]

Kevin Rose goes to Google Ventures [All Things D]

MegaUpload moves to dismiss [CNET]

Paul Ceglia's latest team of lawyers goes home [AllFacebook]

SpaceX Dragon heads home, too [AP]

Lotus pose.

Time magazine was almost finished closing its latest issue, which will hit stands Friday, when the news of Steve Jobs' death broke. So for the first time in what AdWeek says may have been three decades, the magazine stopped the presses. Mr. Jobs' image now graces the front cover for the eighth and perhaps final time. Its entire 'feature well' will also be devoted to covering his legacy.

Businessweek and Newsweek also have special issues planned, the former an ad-free tribute. Wired.com's striking black homepage is also still ad-fee--featuring only an image of Mr. Jobs and quotes mourning his passing--just as it did last night. But Time's issue is of particular note because it will feature an essay from Walter Issacson, Mr. Jobs' biographer, who just had his deadline pushed up by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Issacson's essay is behind a paywall, but Fortune.com has excerpted the part where he describes the day Mr. Jobs first tried to pitch him on writing his life's story.

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from him. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I'd worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn't heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He'd be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted, instead, to take a walk so we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd. I didn't yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

But I later realized that he had called me just before he was going to be operated on for cancer for the first time. As I watched him battle that disease, with an awesome intensity combined with an astonishing emotional romanticism, I came to find him deeply compelling, and I realized how much his personality was ingrained in the products he created. His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business, so I decided to try to write his tale as a case study in creativity.

It seems Mr. Jobs' love of walking was a constant. As Daring Fireball's John Gruber noted poignantly in this tribute, even four months ago at Apple's WWDC conference, Mr. Gruber noticed "fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels" of Mr. Jobs' uniform gray New Balance 993s.

What me worry?

Reuters social media editor Anthony "SoupSoup" DeRosa is an avid Tumblr user who recently walked away from the platform in frustration after one too many problems with the service. He published a long piece today about the ways in which Tumblr is working to manage its massive growth and got an interview with Tumblr founder David Karp.

As has been the case in Tumblr's dealing with fallout from Rich Tong's fashion week proposal and conflicts with the developer behind the popular extension Missing e, Mr. Karp offered no apologies for the way his company was coping with its growing pains. A few choice quotes:

I’m generally really proud of how we communicate as a company. It’s not particularly easy when there are so many subsets of the community with dramatically different interests and questions.

Although we’ve had the occasional communication breakdown that we work hard not to repeat, I think we’ve done a good job of being honest, accessible, and thoughtful over the last 4 years.

I also love that everyone on our team contributes to our Staff blog — a blog we’re not afraid to curse on — and that we’re quite disciplined in staying out of the fray when incendiary people lie about us.

Mr. DeRosa ends his piece by noting that, "I walked away from my conversation with Karp feeling like they want to operate similar to the way Apple does, protecting their vision for how their product looks and choosing who gets to appear "in their store." Apple has managed to make that aspect part of what makes their products great; it remains to be seen if this approach will work for Tumblr as well."

It's a fair comparison, save that one is the richest company in the world famous for its high-quality products and the other is a blogging platform with little revenue infamous for it instability.

As for Mr. Karp's comments that he was proud of how they communicated with their partners, Mr. DeRosa got on the record a story Betabeat also heard about Mr. Tong, Tumblr's fashion director, in which he ignores and then insults AOL's StyeList blog. While Tumblr had early success partnering with fashion companies, Mr. Tong soured many of those relationships when he arrived by failing to return emails, showing up to meetings unaware of who the client was, snubbing former partners during fashion week and replying to their hurt feelings with, "You can do business the way you see fit, and we’ll do the same."

It's hard to imagine Steve Jobs defending an Apple employee who publicly bungled business and insulted valuable clients and partners. In fact, one of Mr. Jobs's great strengths was his ability to tell the truth, even when it hurt. During his legendary keynote at WWDC in 1997, when Apple was being slammed in the press and pummeled by the stock market, Mr. Jobs was brutally honest about the company's own failings. He realized that the only way to break with internal problems and chart a new course was to face the reality of what Apple had become.

Mr. Karp, by contrast, seems obstinate and paranoid. He may think Tumblr is "staying above the fray when people lie about us," but the stories about Rich Tong have now come from three reporters working with sources across the fashion industry. That is not an "occasional communication breakdown," but a pattern of behavior with serious consequences for Tumblr's business.

The same is true for the ongoing issues with Jeremy Cutler, the developer behind the popular Missing e extension, which found fans by providing simple features that Tumblr, with its large staff and millions in venture funding, failed to create. Rather than support Missing e, Tumblr has tried to shut it down, even threatening to go after Mr. Cutler's personal blog when he stopped using their API in order to comply with their rules. Tumblr has communicated almost nothing about this situation before today's piece in Reuters, which left it looking like a bully.

Tumblr clearly has tons of potential and seems poised to raise yet another round of funding which will help it to scale on both the front and back end, meaning, hopefully, less stability issues and more new features. But if their response to the problems that arise continues to be silence, snubs and threats, they will find themselves with few allies as they seek to make the difficult journey from a popular platform to a profitable business.

Smixx

Amazing new track from Corey Smith, aka Smixx, a musician, freelance iOS/WP7 developer and co-founder of Cardinal social music sharing platform. Smixx has been spinning tech raps for a while now, like "Developers feat. Steve Ballmer" and "One More Thing featuring Steve Jobs from WWDC 2011."

But start-ups are where Betabeat's heart really lies, so this track was the first to catch our attention. That, and @aplusk tweeted it out. Enjoy below the jump.

Takin' VC Money (Money Cash IPO's) by Smixx

"They have to make something that actually makes people's lives better. It's funny how straightforward it is. People often think business requires some trickery, you have to corner the market or something like that. But actually what you have to do is make people's lives better. And the amount of value you create is the sort of rectangle where one side is the amount of people and the other side is how much you make their life better. Big rectangle, big value, you're rich."

After that, it's just a matter of being Zen:

"You know actually the right thing to do in a start-up is not worry about it too much. The right thing to do in a start-up is like you're a mosquito, right? And like maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, and you just like zoom along and don't spend your time looking over your shoulder. And if you get killed like okay, you do another start-up."

For skeptics, Graham then offered some concrete evidence. "There's only ever been one out of 316 companies we've funded, there's only ever been one, that's been killed by a competitor." That company was Kiko, a calendar service that lost half its users in a month when Google Calendar came out. But the founders went on to create Justin.tv. Added Graham:

"Just work on making people's lives better. Don't spend your time on making people's lives better, but also do it in a way Apple won't do. Who knows what Apple's gonna do? And mostly they won't. Apple can't do 500 different thing. So there's a small chance they'll kill you. You just take that risk."