Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

What type of butterfly is this? It was quite large (as big as my hand), and yellow / black! I’d love to know, so leave me some comments.

From the Smoking Gun comes a piece of testimony from Christopher Poole, 4chan’s founder moot, full of lovely gems such as:

Q. And the term “rickroll” you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going to be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, is that right?
A. Yes.
Q. He was some kind of singer?
A. Yes.
Q. It’s a joke?
A. Yes.

You should just be happy I don’t autoplay this:

If you’ve been following the “thin metal strip” antenna debacle, you’ll be happy to see that Bloomberg recently revealed the topic to be internally controversial inside Apple itself, up to a year before the iPhone 4 was released. In Apple Engineer Told Jobs IPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls, Bloomberg News reports:

Apple Inc.’s senior antenna expert voiced concern to Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs in the early design phase of the iPhone 4 that the antenna design could lead to dropped calls, a person familiar with the matter said.

Last year, Ruben Caballero, a senior engineer and antenna expert, informed Apple’s management the device’s design may hurt reception, said the person, who is not authorized to speak on Apple’s behalf and asked not to be identified. A carrier partner also raised concerns about the antenna before the device’s June 24 release, according to another person familiar with the situation.

So the plot thickens. The biggest outstanding question is, “What will Apple do next?” Well, just now I plugged in my iPhone and got the following software update notice:

iOS 4.0.1 Software Update for iPhone

This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guides for iPhone at http ://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone

I did the update and I don’t see any differences on my 3GS….