- Day 197 – Shadow On The Rocks
- Day 198 – Cube Under Construction
- Day 199 – Step 1: Guts
- Day 200 – Lion!
- Day 201 – Upgrade
- Day 202 – Caution… Men Working
- Day 203 – Ugly Pink Shirt Book
Project 365 Week 29
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Tag Archives: Apple
Project 365 Week 20
A little late posting this one. This was a really rainy week, so hard to get much done.
- Day 134 – Yankee Stadium Flags
- Day 135 – Ugly Week
- Day 136 – Statue Of Liberty Tilt Shift
- Day 137 – The End Of The World Is Almost Here!
- Day 138 – Apple Store
- Day 139 – Flower
- Day 140 – Mickey Mantle
On Apple’s Location Tracking
The controversy over Apple’s “Location Tracking” is quite interesting. It’s worth making clear that the nodes stored in the database are approximations of cell phone towers and WiFi hotspots you’re likely to encounter rather than your location(s) at any given point in time. It’s a way to “prime the well” when doing a GPS lookup to improve performance.
Apple notably failed in a few key ways which should serve as a lesson to others:
- Always disclose what you’re doing. – Never just assume what you’re doing with someone’s information is cool. Apple could have mitigated a lot of this had they disclosed what the phone was actually doing from day 1. Never transmit anonymous or personal information without letting the user know first.
- Never store more than you need – I can’t believe how many companies mess this up. Storing user information is a liability. A good business limits it’s liabilities to only what’s necessary to conduct business. Storing so much data, and not expunging was a very bad move and amplified the situation. On top of not letting users know what was going on, there was no way to purge information. This just made things much worse. Apple went as far as backing up what should be an expendable cache.
- Always be paranoid with information – Apple states “The local cache is protected with iOS security features, but it is not encrypted. Beginning with the next major release of iOS, the operating system will encrypt any local cache of the hotspot and cell tower location information.” in the response to Edward J. Markey. This should have been encrypted since day 1. Various tools existed for a few years that could read this data in the surveillance community. Apple undoubtedly knew people were using this data sometimes for illicit purposes. No company has gotten in trouble for being to secure with customer information with anyone other than the NSA or FBI.
It’s worth noting that their software update in response to this controversy is actually pretty good and pretty thorough. I’m surprised they couldn’t quickly shim some encryption around it. The iOS is loaded with enough DRM and crypto.
On another note, I fully expect some court cases to be reopened now that “cell phone records” are not quite as accurate as they were falsely billed to be. Also companies who marketed software are capable of showing a users location history may be liable as this wasn’t accurately vetted. If they did good testing they would have seen the extent of it’s “tracking”. It seems inevitable.
Lastly, I wonder how much battery life, and how much bandwidth this was utilizing. Some customers are on metered WiFi (especially some hotspots). To geo-tag one must turn on GPS, meaning battery life was being drained behind the scenes.
Apple’s full response can be found on Congressman Ed Markey’s website (copied here for perpetuity).
Project 365 Week 18
A little more old stuff than I’d like. Need to fix that.
- Day 120 – Hot Wheels 2
- Day 121 – Grand Central Flag
- Day 122 – Cavernous
- Day 123 – The Plant 2 Weeks Later
- Day 124 – US Roundel
- Day 125 – Apple Remote
- Day 126 – Derek Jeter Bobblehead
Hi My Name Is Joe And I Work In An Apple Factory
It’s a pretty interesting video. I should note it’s 80′s in every way, shape and form. This almost feels like a tour given to Mister Rogers via “Picture Picture“.
I acknowledge this blog post has way too many childish elements.
Atomic Tom’s “Take Me Out” Subway Video
Here’s an interesting video that went viral over the past few days. Brooklyn based band Atomic Tom’s instruments allegedly were stolen. Their resolve led them to use their iPhones and film a music video on the subway using their phones as instruments. Or so the story goes. I’m not sure if it’s a viral sensation or viral marketing.
I’m a bit skeptical about this one. They claim it was one take, multiple cameras were present, iPhones were the sole instruments used. I don’t have the time to analyze it close enough, but the sound is a little questionable. The thing that really gets me is the quality of the vocal track. While you can hear some ambient subway noise in the background it’s hard to imagine the phone picking everyone up so clearly when they are all singing given the position of the microphone and pick up so little subway noise otherwise. The iPhone does try to reduce ambient noise as much as possible, but this just seems to be beyond what it would do. Of course they could have done a little post-production work there. They don’t really say what post-production entailed.
Playing an iPhone instrument for the length of a song especially given their performance also seems a bit difficult. All four not messing up would be impressive, especially on a moving train.
Regardless, this little viral marketing seems to be working. Over the weekend it’s views were still in the thousands. It’s clearly on the way to the 2 million mark as of this blog post.
At least one of the apps used is iShred: Guitar + Effects, which is pretty cool.
Floating Stairs
An interesting tidbit about the NeXT corporate offices:
The architectural centerpiece was a “floating” staircase with no visible supports
I’d be curious to know if this had any influence on the glass staircases used in the modern-day Apple stores such as the 5th Ave store in New York. Perhaps Mr. Jobs was fond of those stairs when he was at NeXT.
Apple’s College Market Share
From iPodNN:
Only a little over 20 percent of 212 polled students say they bought a new computer in the last three months, as compared to over 30 percent in 2009, 40 percent in 2008 and nearly 70 percent in 2007. Mac share has meanwhile risen to 38 percent, from 32 percent in 2009, 29 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Apple is now tied with Dell, and doing better than HP’s 13 percent and Toshiba’s 5 percent.
There’s a perfectly logical explanation for declining trend in new computer purchases by students and it’s not the recession: they already have computers. The days of the one family computer until kids go off to college are mostly gone in the middle class who dominate college in the United States these days. Why buy a new computer outside of your normal upgrade cycle just because your going to a new school? Given a typical 4 year lifespan of a computer I suspect it will stabilize around 20-25%, most of whom bought new computers replacing current computers.
As for Apple’s growth: Largely chic factor. Outside of some computer science folks who actually understand the UNIX architecture under it, I’d venture most students use nothing but a web browser, iTunes and maybe Microsoft Office and couldn’t give a solid reason why they choose what they choose. The handful who do will say “it’s more secure” without anything coherent reasoning to back that up. The computer science folks started the migration several years ago when Mac’s started to turn up in lots of high-tech offices. AutoCAD coming back to Mac also means that engineering students will soon be able to use Mac’s as well.
Cable Fail
I’ve been looking for a 4 conductor male TRS connector (Apple iPhone headset jack) for a small project. Simple enough. I found a cheap extension on Amazon a week ago that seemed to fit the bill. For posterity here’s what the description says:
Technical Details
- Made and designed to work seamlessly with the Apple iPhone.
- Will act as an extension cable, carrying both the stereo audio and microphone signals from your device.
- Allows the adapter to be used with stereo headphones that also have integrated microphone functionality
- Made with Nickel plated materials, 3.5mm 4-pole plug, 3.5mm 4-pole jack and a 10 cm (L)
- A perfect accessory for your NEW Apple iPhone.
Emphasis mine.
It arrived in an envelope containing a tiny ziplock back with no labeling (it’s barebones). When I hooked it up it seemed that audio quality wasn’t very good. I never bothered to check out the microphone. At that price it obviously didn’t make fiscal sense to return it as the postage costs about as much as it’s worth. So I decided to finish dissecting it.
From what I can tell it’s actually 3 wires. Each is a different color (red, copper, green) with some white strands in the core. The female jack has two prongs with one wire attached to each and the enclosure itself which seems like it’s the ground. My suspicion is that the audio is either combined or only one channel is used making it actually mono. The jacket I dissected was molded on so it was virtually impossible to remove the plastic without severing the thin wires in the process.
Here’s what the wire and the female jack (sideways on the bottom) look like:
Here’s the jack from the back side. I suck at photography and only have a P&S camera, so it’s a bit blurry:
I’m now debating trying another vendor or a more expensive 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm adapter.
My original plan was to find a new 4 conductor TRS male plug, but that proved impossible via the usual sources. 3 conductor is easy.
If anyone has suggestions feel free to reach out.
MacBook Pro Sleeps When Lid Closes
The MacBook Pro still has a quirk that has always bothered me. It’s not a hardware issue, it’s a software issue. Power users with laptops know about “closed clamshell” or “closed display” mode. That’s when you use a laptop with a desktop keyboard and mouse and the laptop remains closed. I don’t think any OS I’ve used totally gets this totally right, they all have their quirks. The MacBook Pro just has this one quirk that gets to me.
The problem with the MacBook Pro is when you have the computer open and on and you connect another display you’re given the option to mirror or use the display as a second display. If you mirror and close the laptop it goes to sleep. That’s completely illogical. There seems to be no way to disable going to sleep in this situation that I can find. I can’t imagine why anyone would want another behavior when closing a laptop while having a display and input device connected. When no display is connected and the laptop is closed, it should obviously sleep.
Searching on Google returns numerous forum threads with people who also have this gripe. Even a check box in the Energy Saver pref panel to facilitate this would do nicely.
For the record Windows is no saint either. It’s handling of monitor resolutions, especially if your desktop display is a different resolution is abhorrent. It can result in anything from reshuffling icons to putting windows out of the display area. I’ve never even bothered with such functionality in Linux, at least not yet so I can’t speak to its competency in this area.