TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Justice Department seized two months of phone records for the Associated Press, apparently in relation to the AP reporting that a terrorist plot had been disrupted:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

Mathew Honan:

In well-defined markets, it’s rare to see a breakthrough device. And yet here we are. There are a lot of sleep and activity trackers to choose from right now, but none better than the Fitbit Flex. It is the most wearable, best-syncing device in the scrum, with the best app to boot. And it does all this at a great price.

This is one of the most interesting areas in technology right now.

Liat Ben-Zur:

So what’s the problem? Aren’t all these hot new connected IoT devices connected up to the cloud? Well, that’s the problem. We are oversimplifying the landscape. Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to one another, meaning they cannot benefit from the data, context or control of nearby IoT devices. That is why we currently need a separate app to control — and interface with — each connected thing we buy. This may be acceptable in the near term, but it cannot scale.

That’s not just a problem for Internet-connected devices, either; we have more web services than ever before, but they’re increasingly walled gardens. Beautiful gardens, maybe, but locking up so much data and so much user data is holding back the web’s development.

Health is a great example. We have weight tracking applications, meal tracking applications, exercise tracking applications and devices, sleep tracking applications—and hardly any of them speak to each other. That data should be combined for users, because it’s health data, and it’s their health data, but it’s mostly locked up into a number of different services.

That needs fixed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to build a feature someone else already does, but it should only be done when it makes sense. Every new service and device should not be an island unto itself.

Jim Dalrymple just announced the Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad.

Long-form articles will be a great complement to the Loop.

Jeff Jordan argues Amazon is Google’s biggest threat:

In Google’s case today, I am becoming increasingly convinced that their most challenging competitor isn’t another search engine like Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu or Yahoo! Japan. It’s Amazon, which is bringing a completely different take on search—in this case, product search.

Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box.  Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?

This perspective helps explain the Kindle Fire, too.

(Via Rian van der Merwe.)

Andrew Ng is helping lead a group at Google dedicated to making giant advances with neural networks:

It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.

Pretty good piece about the increasing overlap of neuroscience and neural network research for technological purposes, but what I want to emphasize is how much Google has invested in neural networks (or “artificial intelligence” generally, if you’d rather, but that term is pretty misleading). Both Apple’s and Google’s futures depend heavily on using user data and other data sources to provide value for users, and Google has a huge advantage here because they’ve been investing heavily in it for a very long time. It’s just as important to Apple, but Apple had to acquire the Siri team to gain the capability. That’s a huge disadvantage.

This isn’t just about speeding up voice recognition or making it more accurate, although that is an advantage Google Now has over Siri—using voice recognition in Google’s iOS search app feels much faster than Siri because it shows you what it thinks you’re saying as you say it. It’s much more than that; since this has been something very important to Google for a long time, and something of an intrinsic organizational competence, Google can move much quicker to develop the capability in Google Now than Apple can. Apple must move even quicker to make it a skill for Apple, too, and to take advantage of their own unique resources that Google doesn’t have.

Paper for iPad now has pinch-to-zoom support.

As usual with Paper, it’s a bit different than normal pinch-to-zoom. Rather than zoom the entire canvas, pinching places a loupe-like circle around the area you’re zooming on so you can make your changes while still retaining the entire canvas’s context. Smart.

One slightly related note, though: I still can’t get Paper’s two-finger undo gesture to work reliably for me. Gestures can make applications much better, but they can also make it maddening.

Peter Cohen:

On any given day, a quick check of the top-selling paid apps list in the Mac App Store will reveal Apple’s Keynote, Pages and Numbers in the top ten. It’s surprising, given that each of those apps was originally bundled as Apple’s iWork ’09 productivity suite, released in, you guessed it, January, 2009. It makes me wonder when or if we’ll ever see an update to them.

Something I sure didn’t notice while watching the Next Generation: Riker sits down like a crazy person.

Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater discuss “Before Midnight”:

Hawke: The first two films are so much about romantic projection. The third had to be the opposite of that. We couldn’t play that trick again.

Delpy: But it couldn’t be totally taken away from that romantic idea — otherwise it’s depressing.

One of the movies I’m most excited for this year.

Thinglist is an iPhone app for remembering things you want to try. Movies, books, restaurants, music, places. Great idea, and the app looks beautiful.

For just a small fee, you too can have your screenplay analyzed for maximum box office effectiveness:

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

How long before a similar process just writes screenplays? And, really, what would be lost?

Seema Jilani had this experience while attending the White House correspondents’ dinner:

As I left the hotel and my husband went to the ballroom for the dinner, I realized he still had my keys. I approached the escalators that led down to the ballroom and asked the externally contracted security representatives if I could go down. They abruptly responded, “You can’t go down without a ticket.” I explained my situation and that I just wanted my keys from my husband in the foyer and that I wouldn’t need to enter in the ballroom. They refused to let me through. For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him.

Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through — all Caucasian — without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? “Well, now we are checking tickets.” He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, “See? That’s what a ticket looks like.”

When I asked “Why did you lie to me, sir?” they threatened to have the Secret Service throw me out of the building — me, a 4’11″ young woman who weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, who was all prettied up in elegant formal dress, who was simply trying to reach her husband. The only thing on me that could possibly inflict harm were my dainty silver stilettos, and they were too busy inflicting pain on my feet at the moment. My suspicion was confirmed when I saw the men ask a blonde woman for her ticket and she replied, “I lost it.” The snickering tough-guy responded, “I’d be happy to personally escort you down the escalators ma’am.”