Apple Loses My Respect

Re: Metastasis

Check it out - I beat the WSJ by three days on this:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704123204576283580249161342.html

Meanwhile, we can all give a sigh of relief because the Apple god apparently says his daemons don't track us:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/25/steve-jobs-on-ios-location-issue-we-dont-track-anyone/

In a week or two all will be known and it will be interesting to see if the bad guys are made to offer an opt-out, or if the frogs settle down and go back to their routine.
 
Re: Apple Loses My Respect

Bennett Prescott said:
...I agree, however, only a stupid criminal would bring their cell phone to the location of a crime they were committing. Fortunately the vast majority are stupid. However, I am not a criminal (and I can prove it!), and I don't want my phone keeping a record of everywhere I've been either. I can think of nothing good to be done with that data.
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That's why Tony Soprano always used a coin-op phone and never carried a cell phone; he also never used an EZPass on the NJTP. Drug dealers and other nefarious operators who need telephonic mobility use "burners" (throwaway phones) they paid for in cash without disclosing their identity.
 
Re: Contemporary Culture Loses My Respect

Langston Holland said:
It's not Apple, it's people.
...
our prostitution to the machine of convenience. I, for one, will not sell.
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That's a big part of the problem: "We" want it all, we want it easily and we want it now. If you don't want to be tracked by a cell phone: Don't use one. Problem is that we want our cake - and we want to eat it, too.

I for one am not surprised at all that ANY cell phone or phone carrier will keep track of us. Imagine this: You get an outrageous phone bill, and fuming with irritation you call your phone company and tell them: "I didn't call this much". And they tell you: "Yes, you did". And then you tell them: "Oh, yeah? Prove it". And they tell you: "On the date of so and so you spoke to the following number for so and so long while connected to tower 49 in so and so area - should we continue?". Check your travel/work log - was I there or not? Is tower 49 right by your teenage daughters favourite hangout? Etc. Case closed.

If I was providing a mobile phone service I would demand I be allowed the means of getting my money in case a customer refused to pay - this is by far not the worst case of "big brother sees you" we all deal with now and will deal with even more in the future.
 
Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

Apple is going to fix 99% of the problem and allow an opt-out on the location tracking file. In standard Newspeak, Apple did not promise to stop downloading and storing current location data. Instead its Ministry of Truth issued the following absolute proof of innocence in reference to iPhone tracking; it "has never done so and has no plans to ever do so."

No doubt that if my wife had concerns about my fidelity to her, the strongest possible thing I could say to set her at ease would be "I have no plans to cheat on you".

The good news:

"Apple said it would release an iPhone software update in the next few weeks that reduces the size of the database cached on the phone, ceases backing up the cache and deletes the cache entirely when location services are turned off."

Edit:

A well reasoned review of Apple's "response" by another guy I've become acquainted with. He's a very pro-Mac guy (as I am) that is very unhappy with Apple over this tracking arrogance (as I am):

April 25: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2011/20110425_1_AppleTracking--howto.html

April 27: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2011/20110427_1_AppleTracking--howto.html
 
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Re: Contemporary Culture Loses My Respect

kristianjohnsen said:
That's a big part of the problem: "We" want it all, we want it easily and we want it now. If you don't want to be tracked by a cell phone: Don't use one. Problem is that we want our cake - and we want to eat it, too.

I for one am not surprised at all that ANY cell phone or phone carrier will keep track of us. Imagine this: You get an outrageous phone bill, and fuming with irritation you call your phone company and tell them: "I didn't call this much". And they tell you: "Yes, you did". And then you tell them: "Oh, yeah? Prove it". And they tell you: "On the date of so and so you spoke to the following number for so and so long while connected to tower 49 in so and so area - should we continue?". Check your travel/work log - was I there or not? Is tower 49 right by your teenage daughters favourite hangout? Etc. Case closed.

If I was providing a mobile phone service I would demand I be allowed the means of getting my money in case a customer refused to pay - this is by far not the worst case of "big brother sees you" we all deal with now and will deal with even more in the future.
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I think following Apple's response today there is a simple solution. I admit I am a longtime Apple fan, but I also admit I think the "it's a bug" line is lame. Even if it is a bug, it should have been explained better. However the explanation of what the data is, and how it is used is good. I think that now that they are going to shorten the time frame of the tower and hotspot location data they should also increase the radius that the date encompasses. Since the data is locations submitted by all iPhone users who have connected to those locations, they should make the radius of the data 100 miles. That would make it useless for locating a phone by looking at the tower location since it would be over 3000 square miles, but would still provide the phone with accurate location data of the cells and hotspots it is near when it needs to send its location. Since the database would only be a week's worth of data instead of years worth it shouldn't be a hell of a lot bigger.

Mac
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

While the "solution" may be looked on by many as imperfect, I am thrilled to see how this worked out in big picture terms. Users told Apple in no uncertain terms they were displeased, Apple is changing its behavior. No regulation needed. Other providers beware.
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

Bennett Prescott said:
While the "solution" may be looked on by many as imperfect, I am thrilled to see how this worked out in big picture terms. Users told Apple in no uncertain terms they were displeased, Apple is changing its behavior. No regulation needed. Other providers beware.
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To be fair, if they had guidlines to follow (or break) in the first place they wouldn't have had the opportunity to displease in the first place. How many get away with crap because nobody speaks up? Or get away with things for a while when it should have been "nipped in the bud"?

If a road has many dangerous curves I'd rather the speed limit was on the side of caution, instead of starting at warp speed and just lowering every time someone died.
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

kristianjohnsen said:
If a road has many dangerous curves I'd rather the speed limit was on the side of caution, instead of starting at warp speed and just lowering every time someone died.
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I have great faith in the ability of most people to accurately judge an appropriate speed for the road... I mean, they must, they're always ahead of me taking 60MPH corners at 25!
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

I always liked the concept of negative feedback. Highways are designed with target speeds in mind, but people rarely mind them. IMO every fatal crash deserves a simple white cross on the side of the road. If one stretch of road or intersection collects a huge stack of crosses, maybe make adjustments to the road or speed limit in that area.

I know as a driver, seeing a bunch of crosses on the side of the road suggesting others did not successfully negotiate that particular stretch of road would give me something to reflect upon.

JR
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

John Roberts said:
I always liked the concept of negative feedback. Highways are designed with target speeds in mind, but people rarely mind them. IMO every fatal crash deserves a simple white cross on the side of the road. If one stretch of road or intersection collects a huge stack of crosses, maybe make adjustments to the road or speed limit in that area.

I know as a driver, seeing a bunch of crosses on the side of the road suggesting others did not successfully negotiate that particular stretch of road would give me something to reflect upon.

JR
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A bunch of crosses on the side of the road about ten miles from my house is negative feedback of another kind altogether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_hillside_memorial

If this is deemed too political for this forum I understand and abide by the decision of the moderator.
 

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Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

Lee Brenkman said:
If this is deemed too political for this forum I understand and abide by the decision of the moderator.
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Lee,

We go to great effort to allow this sort of thing as long as it doesn't significantly detract from the original discussion. If an obvious conversation fork begins it will probably get split off. You are always welcome to start this sort of discussion in a new thread in the basement.
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

Bennett Prescott said:
Lee,

We go to great effort to allow this sort of thing as long as it doesn't significantly detract from the original discussion. If an obvious conversation fork begins it will probably get split off. You are always welcome to start this sort of discussion in a new thread in the basement.
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Thanks Bennett,

To speak to the original topic of this thread. I personally assumed when I got my ancient, but still in use, LG "dumb" phone from Verizon, that the GPS in it could be used to track my whereabouts. I've never thought anything other than my emails and anything posted on the Internet ANYWHERE were "private".

There's a fine line between websites, cell phone providers and ISPs, collecting my demographics for their financial gain and an infringement on my privacy.

If that line is crosses somewhere I'll go off the grid, if that's even possible.

cheers,
gramps
 
Re: Contemporary Culture Loses My Respect

Personally, I think their original storage scheme and fix sucks. Here's why: they store everything with a time stamp. For anonimity and anti-tracking purposes, this is awful, as any location data (no matter how small) can be replayed in time.

One of the reasons they probably stored the date is that they had planned to flush records out of a certain age... but that is siliness too. This also causes the same location-to-access_point record to be stored multiple times, just with a different date.

Date-time stamps should be left out of it. What they should do is decide what the max size they want is for the cached location database. Then, every time the phone sees a new location-to-access_point association, it stores that (sans date-time). If the association already exists, it would increment a counter for that association (i.e. I've seen this MAC address for this router and I've had this normalized Geolocation 20 times). Then, as the database reaches capacity, it starts to purge the records that have the fewest hits (i.e. where I go the least). The location records would look like this:

Location - Access Point Identifiter - Count (maybe some other data would be needed like the type of Access Point, WiFi, Cell tower, etc).

The other thing they would do (if they are smart) is to use a grid coordinate location scheme and a look up table to convert to rough Lat/Lon. Storing records with specific Lat/Lon may actually produce way too many records given the "exactness" of it. Grid coordinates could map rougly to half kilometer by half kilometer squares or something, because remember the purpose is to just speed up location identification until the network and/or GPS can get an exact fix and most people are just using this to get a list of nearby restaurants anyway.
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

John Roberts said:
I always liked the concept of negative feedback. Highways are designed with target speeds in mind, but people rarely mind them. IMO every fatal crash deserves a simple white cross on the side of the road. If one stretch of road or intersection collects a huge stack of crosses, maybe make adjustments to the road or speed limit in that area.

I know as a driver, seeing a bunch of crosses on the side of the road suggesting others did not successfully negotiate that particular stretch of road would give me something to reflect upon.

JR
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Spoken like a true EE :twisted:

P.S. Negative Feedback in a social sense implies self control. Ohhh noooo. Self control would be a baaaad thing. :evil:
 
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Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

John Roberts said:
I always liked the concept of negative feedback. Highways are designed with target speeds in mind, but people rarely mind them. IMO every fatal crash deserves a simple white cross on the side of the road. If one stretch of road or intersection collects a huge stack of crosses, maybe make adjustments to the road or speed limit in that area.

I know as a driver, seeing a bunch of crosses on the side of the road suggesting others did not successfully negotiate that particular stretch of road would give me something to reflect upon.

JR
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Here's the practical problem with your idea: Do you "protect" eastbound or westbound traffic with your crosses when putting them up on a really curvy road? Or do you put up two crosses for each death, one on either side of the curve?

Your idea follows the typical "it won't happen to me"-logic where everybody wants to benefit from the crosses, wheras nobody wants to turn into a cross. I can think of a long list of reasons why you might have an accident while negotiating turns on a dark, narrow, slick and unfamiliar streach of road even if you are careful. To me, having road signs warning us of perils isn't any more unnatural than us driving big metal machines.

Of course we could just all drive 3 KM/h all the time...
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

kristianjohnsen said:
Here's the practical problem with your idea: Do you "protect" eastbound or westbound traffic with your crosses when putting them up on a really curvy road? Or do you put up two crosses for each death, one on either side of the curve?
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Obviously, you put the cross facing the direction the person who died was coming from... I was thinking in terms of divided highways like interstates, If divers from both directions are involved, like on two lane roads, perhaps two crosses.
Your idea follows the typical "it won't happen to me"-logic where everybody wants to benefit from the crosses, wheras nobody wants to turn into a cross. I can think of a long list of reasons why you might have an accident while negotiating turns on a dark, narrow, slick and unfamiliar streach of road even if you are careful. To me, having road signs warning us of perils isn't any more unnatural than us driving big metal machines.

Of course we could just all drive 3 KM/h all the time...
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No, I want to know where bad stuff happens precisely because I know it could happen to me (I totaled one car on the interstate so I know.). I would like real data, not just some government puke's opinion. We can benefit from both, you listen to your government advice, I'll weight that against what the history for that stretch of road says.

FWIW driving at 3 KM/h might not even work to eliminate all accidents. I recall driving on interstate highways probably designed for safe transit at 80 MPH back when we had a nationwide 55 MPH speed limit (to conserve fuel). It probably saved fuel, but I saw way too many drivers reading books or newspapers while they were driving. I recall personally having trouble keeping my mind from wandering with things happening that slowly. A 55 mph speed limit today would probably have drivers logged onto the internet and posting to threads like this while driving.

My suggestion to apply feedback where deaths occurred was independent of speed limit, but I guess faster drivers could use this to know where they might want to slow down. It is a fact of life that most roads have dangerous places, why not help history advise us? "Danger, something bad happened right here.. multiple times in fact".

Studying history to not repeat other's mistakes is a good thing. IMO

JR

PS Sorry about feeding the veer...
 
Re: Nothing is Wrong and We're Going to Fix it

kristianjohnsen said:
Here's the practical problem with your idea: Do you "protect" eastbound or westbound traffic with your crosses when putting them up on a really curvy road? Or do you put up two crosses for each death, one on either side of the curve?

Your idea follows the typical "it won't happen to me"-logic where everybody wants to benefit from the crosses, wheras nobody wants to turn into a cross.
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, some people actually *are* better drivers than others. The insurance industry sure thinks so.
 
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