The app store has a “date night” category and one featured app is called “just the tip” and I was very confused.

— Tim Maly (@doingitwrong) January 27, 2012

Today, we have a very interesting bit of news, tipped to us by a source close to Apple. According to them, Apple is testing Siri on devices other than the iPhone 4S. The device specifically mentioned to us was the iPhone 4, but we can most likely assume that other devices are being tested as well. This means that we will potentially see a software update that allows Siri to run on older devices. Currently, it only runs on the iPhone 4S, but Apple has given employees access to a special software version that incorporates Siri’s features on to older devices. Hackers and developers are currently working for a port, but if Apple releases this in a software update any time soon, they may not need to.

Grain of salt, and all that.

Just let that neologism roll around your brain like you’re trying to extract all the nuance from a swig of Manischevitz. Then check out the exciting “features.”

Let me first say I have no knowledge of what Apple plans to do with the Siri purchase. I read the rumors just like everyone else and it appears that Apple is getting ready to reveal what it has done with Siri over the past year and a half (we were actually expecting it at WWDC). Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.

I guess we’ll see tomorrow.

Only 25 years old, with little more than a high school education, Albert had created the perfect bubble, a hermetically sealed moral universe in which he made the rules and controlled all the variables — and the only code that mattered was the loyalty of his inner circle. He even had an insurance policy, one designed to keep him a step ahead of the federal agents charged with tracking cybercrime: For the past four years, Albert had been working as an informant for the Secret Service, helping federal agents to identify and bust other rogue hackers. His double life as a snitch gave him an inside look at how the feds try to safeguard the nation’s computer data — and reinforced his own sense of superiority. “Psychologically,” his sister later told a judge, “it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall.”

I felt like the outcome of the story was less interesting than the details, but if you’re fascinated by psychology, and crime, and the internet it’s still worth a read.

The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being. For example, if a user is making a meeting with me, they will say “setup meeting with Mark” and the first “bubble” of the conversation thread will say that. After that, the system will speak back: “which e-mail address should Mark be notified at, work or personal?” This question will both be spoken out loud by the iPhone Assistant and shown as a new “bubble” in the conversation thread. The user will then respond with the email address they want to notify me at, and the appointment will be made.

The speculation is this feature will only work with the new iPhones, and not the iPhone 4 or 3GS, because of processor and RAM requirements.

The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.

In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.

The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.

Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.

This is both an ad for Nokia’s Voice Visualizer, which doesn’t seem to exist, and another example of Hillman Curtis’s beautiful video work.