Slashdot Mirror
Sleeping iPhones Send Phantom Data
Stoobalou writes with a story that got started earlier this month when iPhone users in the US and the UK noticed that their phones seemed to be sending large data bursts via 3G overnight. (Providers are ending unlimited contracts, so iPhone users are paying more attention to how much data they are using.) The discussions began on MacOSRumors and an Apple discussion forum. Thinq.co.uk makes this guess as to what is going on, but doesn't offer much in the way of substantiation: "The simple fact of the matter is — as far as we can tell — that the iPhone's push notifications and other small transfers of data are totted up throughout the day and the total for all of those notifications is added up after dark and sent to your airtime provider while your phone is sleeping. If these tiny amounts of data were individually listed your bill would probably be the size of a telephone directory. The reason it is using the 3G network rather than Wi-Fi is that all iPhones up to and including the 3Gs turn off Wi-Fi push functionality while the phone is in sleep mode, in order to preserve battery life. The iPhone 4, incidentally, has better power management so will not need to do this."
iPhones are dreaming!
Do iPhones dream of non-walled Androids?
Living With a Nerd
Combine this news with the timing of the AT&T 2GB cap announcement with the release of iPhone 4, and well, it smells like a forced upgrade.
My blog
The headline is contradicted in the summary. It should read: Sleeping iPhones Appear To Send Phantom Data.
Turns out they don’t, it’s just a total of use from the entire day that accumulated a lot of tiny data transfers made by the iPhone’s system which are too numerous and trivial to itemize on the bill.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The iPad (even non-3G) and the Touch also have the ability to stay logged into a WiFi network in very low power mode and so can get push data over WiFi. And I can't imagine these were forced by AT&T.
Besides, what if you are in an AT&T dead zone (of course we all know these are mythical ;) and you get a FaceTime(TM) call or try to Find My iPhone? Wouldn't you like it to get through on WiFi even though you can't get a push over 3G to your phone?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's not a few bucks in my bill that I care. I worry about my phone sending out data surreptitiously in the middle of the night. What the hell is it sending?
I don't usually bash Apple users. As much as I don't like Apple's practices, and as much as I'd like to see everyone using Free Software, it beats using windows. But this time, this guys scared the fuck out of me. They catch their phone sneaking out data in the middle of the night, and none of them is truly worried about it. They are sort of wondering "Oh, what could it be?". It doesn't matter what it is. Apple has no right to phone home without specific user authorization. The way Apple and Microsoft users have accepted the fact that they don't really own their devices, and that their corporate overlords can control their phone/computer is scary, to say the least.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I have automatic notifications turned off and a few other settings and yet my 3GS battery will go down more than half during the day without any usage. Come on, an iPad has 30 days standby - and while I understand a phone always has to be listening, it seems awfully short.
Seriously, I'd mod you down if I hadn't already posted in here.
Stop with the pariah attitude. If you post tangentially related (at best) stuff about how you don't like Apple repeatedly, you'll get modded down, period. Add something to the discussion besides (hey, did you know Apple is still censoring apps!) and you might be treated differently.
Just because you want to say it a lot doesn't mean people want to hear it everywhere.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No, they are trying to avoid having users wake up to virtually dead batteries.
Me? I have an Android G1. I know to plug it in overnight. And I have a Motorola P790 for those moments when I don't have an outlet handy.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A dollar per second? That's insane. There'd be a revolt if providers in the US charged that much. To think my current $30/month would only buy me 30 seconds of data if I lived in Europe?
Craziness. There's no way that can be right.
I live in a fringe area. While I get a good number of bars with Edge, 3G is hit or miss. I work in town where 3G reception is good though so I usually keep 3G on. That said, I have noticed that some evenings my battery drains almost completely while just sitting on my dresser. It's not every night so I chalked it up to reception. However, this makes more sense if it's trying to transmit data with a crappy signal.
for me as I don't get a good 3G signal at my house!
Go AT&T!
I like microcars
The phone bill for my Windows Mobile shows the same thing. It adds up all my data usage for the day, and shows it on the bill at midnight. Activesync operates on my phone between 8am and 11:59pm, so it might be in some way related to that, or maybe it is just the way Telefonica does it.
At least in the U.S., it's not like buyers don't know what's going on. Since locked phones are the NORM here, and AT&T doesn't bother to obfuscate or lie about the terms, iPhone buyers know or should know what they are getting into.
No exuses. If you're not smart enough to figure out what you're buying with an iPhone, you might want to reconsider buying one. The pariah attitude is, as noted, just wrong. Enjoy your iPhone and accept the terms and conditions you have accepted.
And if you truly don't like Apple/Jobs/et al exercising such control over your experience, get a different phone and leave us out of it. I'm not whining about the dead-end my G1 is at, it was inevitable and I knew it when I bought it in 2008.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm not sure how true this is, but if I'm on 3G my battery life drains at an alarming rate during high data transfer, audio streaming etc... When Im on WIFI my battery lasts substantially longer.
Anyone else notice this too?
The iPhones are using 3G bandwidth overnight to report on how much 3G bandwidth they used during the day?
Undoubtedly no; it’d be tallied up on the provider’s end and then added to your bill by a batch queue running daily. Other than that relatively minor detail, I think their theory is pretty sound.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Voices of sanity are being drowned here on Slashdot
No, they're not. Not any more or less that with any other article. That post of yours was absolute trolling. You weren't "speaking up against Apple" for any reason than the usual jihad.
Plenty of posts critical of Apple are modded up in every single discussion. Some of them are right, some of them are wrong, and some of them should be modded troll.
Sad to see Slashdot descend into a Apple fanboy site.
Oh horseshit. What's worse than the fanboys (who have always been around) are the haters (who are always vocal about being marginalized by fanboys--almost universally injected into the discussion by the haters).
Happened to me yesterday when I questioned Apple's practices.
You didn't question their practices. You made a mix of false statements and one-sided condemnations.
1. In the US you have very little choice in carrier. Lots of phones are exclusive to the carrier. You can not get a Droid on Sprint, and Evo on TMobile or a G1 on Verizon.
2. Some people feel that having Apple as a gate keeper is a benifit. Many people feel that Atari failed and the Video game market crashed back in the 80s because of the influx of really bad games.
3. All cell phone makers dictate what you can load on their phones. You can not put WinMo on a Samsung Moment.
Apple doesn't dictate you choices for you. There isn't an Apple police that will make you by an iPhone.
What are get modded down for is ranting.
While your complaints are pretty valid they are also universal as far as Cell Phones. By singling out the iPhone are are being a hate boy instead of a fan boy. Even Android has some restrictions on what they will put in the store.
If you don't like Apple don't buy or develop for the iPhone there fixed that for you.
BTW I do not own an iPhone or a modern mac. I have a Mac+ that I keep around just for fun.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I fail to see how having no choice in carrier (absent "jail breaking" the phone - what an odd turn of phrase to use on a device *I own*) is a positive.
What the hell are you talking about? One can buy an iPhone from a variety of carriers. Oh, you're conflating what happens in the US with the entire world. Silly you.
You got modded down for the Foxconn bit sparky.
Foxconn build stuff for HP, Cisco, Nintendo, and I think Microsoft.
That comment was clearly a troll and unbalanced. So yea it was both a flamebait and a troll.
Get over the persecution complex.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It isn't. S/he might mean 1$/MB. Even then, most iPhones are on large data plans that include hundreds of MB per month. I know people here that use 3G for their home internet connection - and you wouldn't do that if it cost $1/second!
I understand your qualms, but, I just don't share them.
Yes, Apple maintains control over the app store. But, generally it's intended (at least, in theory) to ensure that the user doesn't have a crappy experience. I have a new iPad, and from just the free apps that are available for download, it largely does everything I need it to do.
Heck, I seem to recall seeing an app which basically a stripped down browser that operated in safe mode, and chucked all of the data when it was done. So you had "private" browsing such as it is. One could surf porn using that if they so chose, but Apple doesn't want to sell or be associated with porn.
However, I'd point out that only just last week or so, Microsoft said they'd not be allowing porn on the Windows Mobile devices, so it's not like Apple is doing anything different there. I'm betting that under most circumstances, most fortune 500 companies don't want to be associated with porn.
As to the products ... between using my iPods (I have four accumulated over a decade), my iPad, and iTunes, I've come to appreciate the very integrated experience, it "just goes" -- your mileage may vary, but people using Apple products are actually kind of happy for the rubber-bumpers and safety rails. I'm acutely aware of the fact that they've covered up the sharp edges and made sure to put safeties in all of the outlets. But, I really enjoy it for that fact, and, IMO, it actually contributes to the overall experience. If I want to operate with complete freedom, I have Linux, FreeBSD, XP, and Vista boxes I'm free to do anything on I want.
As far as the whole carrier thing, I would go so far as to say that every cell phone I've ever owned has been tied to the carrier who sold it to me, and the exclusive deal Apple originally did with AT&T kept that business model going. I also understand they're going to start selling unlocked iPhones, so one could be unchained and not need to jailbreak.
I guess if you think your freedom is being restricted, their products aren't for you. If you actually feel like they've just set you up with good choices that work and do what you need, you don't see it that way. And, it's apparently a completely binary position from what I've seen lately on Slashdot. It doesn't seem to be possible for their to be a middle ground.
To me, I like their products because they strip out all of the fiddly bits and focus on what it is you want to do with them. Having my iPad controlled by my existing iTunes actually simplified things for me. Far more so than a netbook, which I think would both require more care and feeding, and still be beholden to the keyboard and mouse model. Checking my email in my backyard while playing iTunes and then going back to my e-book ... well, that alone was worth the price of admission. Same goes for taking some documents I need to review away from my desk, and sitting in a comfy chair. I'd rather review a whole slew of technical stuff not sitting bolt upright in a chair, and not with a laptop sitting in my lap. This is more like a hardcopy.
And, really, for defending Apple, recent stuff shows me I'm more likely to get modded down than you are. On a lot of threads is seems mindless Apple bashing gets modded up, and actually trying to discuss the issue and defend Apple gets one modded as Troll. Because everyone has some pet crusade that, for them, makes any and all Appler products completely EVIL ... and people seem unwilling to acknowledge the point that their point of view doesn't match that of the people who actually choose to use, and enjoy, Apple's stuff.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The way I'm reading this makes it seem like they buried the lead. The iPhones are using 3G bandwidth overnight to report on how much 3G bandwidth they used during the day? That's stupid! That's stupid like 8 different ways.
If they were it would be.
Instead it's a matter of when data usage is reported on your bill - nothing more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From what I've seen, that work both ways.
Neither side is actually evaluating the arguments of either -- they're just completely polarized and frothing at the mouth. As a result, people are modding up/down any post which supports/contradicts their own position. That includes the pro-Apple and anti-Apple crowds.
I'm sad to see if descend into both a place that is purely polarized by ideology, and leaves no room for rational discussion. As you say, voices of sanity are being drowned out.
Just because you don't agree with what people say about Apple, doesn't make you right (or them any more so than you for that matter). When it comes to what people want out of technology, there's more than one right answer. So, you can't really say "this is always wrong and everyone who disagrees is a doody head", although that seems to be the mood around here lately. Microsoft neither always sucks nor is it always good, and the exact same applies to Apple.
It's actually two (or more) competing sets of fanbois, all with a particular burr under their saddle. :-P
And, let the poo-flinging begin. ;-)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Depends if you think of the phone as a 'portable personal computing device', or really just 'an appliance'.
Like you, I couldn't stand anyone telling me what software I could or could not run on my personal computer (running Linux or Windows or whatever). It's a ~personal~ microcomputer which I should be able to make run any arbitrary code I desire to feed into it. I can even write my own software for it.
Some might also consider a phone to be the same - a completely open bit of personal hardware that they should be allowed to do with as they please.
OTOH I think a lot of people out there (not saying I'm one of them) consider a phone as merely an appliance. They buy it in the knowledge that its not an 'open' device you can do what you want with. But they don't care. I mean ... they don't really care that I can't run arbitrary code on their DVD player or their microwave or their car stereo system or whatever. And they think of a phone as being in the same class of device - they just want it to work and don't have a desire to do anything more fancy with it.
Apple has been successful selling such locked down products to that kind of consumer. You (and I) disagree with that approach, but there are good alternatives out there, so there's no real reason to get worked up about it. If I don't like it, I won't buy it.
The 'locked to a carrier' thing is also strictly a US thing. In my country (and most others) you can just whack any old SIM card in an iPhone and it will work on any network like any other phone. I should also point out that Apple's actual ~computers~ (i.e. Mac OS X running laptops and desktops) are still open platform 'personal computers' ... indeed these days you can even run Windows or Linux on them). So I don't think the lock-ins pervade every product they sell. Just the iPad/iPhone/iPod/etc.
But you're right - you shouldn't be modded as troll for discussing these things. They are legitimate concerns with Apple's products. But I just think that you are not Apple's target market - you want a computer when they are really just trying to sell an appliance.
I don't understand this story at all. Part of it seems to be implying this is just an accounting thing...your phone isn't actually sending data then, the bill is just reporting the tiny amount of push transfers it did during the day as a single instance at night. (Otherwise, you'd have hundreds of '20 byte' listings during the day as the phone asks 'New data?' and the other end says 'Nope'.)
That seems reasonable, but then another part of the article seems to imply this is real, because it's using 3g 'during' it.
Yet another part seems to imply it's imaginary, as people have been refunded money from it.
Which is it? Those are three different things!
If there really is some big transfer thing, the phone could certainly be collecting all that and sending it as soon as it's on wifi, and only using 3g if it's been 24 hours or whatever.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If they become pure data machines then the data will become the primary revenue source and voice will be subsidized by it. Put the cost of operating the network on the data plans and data plans will suddenly no longer be the 'cheap' way to communicate.
no jobs is just getting user info using a backdoor data channel.
We've noticed that our comparatively-ancient Nokia 2610 (prepaid AT&T) does this as well - we noticed because both our car stereo and our PC's speakers pick up transmissions from AT&T phones.
Thing is, we observed it transmitting even when it's turned off...
"But telecoms providers send out millions of automatically-generated bills every month and to expect their never to be a mistake is hopeful to say the least." If that was an intentional mistake, it's brilliant. Unfortunately, it's probably just bad editing.
That's a great conspiracy theory, but it sounds more like your battery was shot and you lost all your settings every time because the phone lost power.
There is no OS upgrade mechanism over the air.
I've had both the 3G and 3GS and have never had an issue with "forced" upgrades... iTunes doesn't even force upgrades on me it asks me if I want to upgrade, I say no. problem solved. You sure your phone just wasn't buggy?
My only other dreams are to be invisible in a chocolate factory and to date a celebrity.
how is babby formed?
Fact 1: The bills don't seem to add up for everbody, but the total usage portions of the bill sound about right.
Fact 2: At least one users in airplane mode/off mode the charges will not show up until the phone is turned on.
Fact 3: The GSM-series 3G data technology is packet based, not connection based, so a fully itemized bill would list every packet. The other options for the phone company is to attempt to group collections of packets as pseudo-connections (which is not ideal), or itemize by day (or hour, etc), or have no data of itemization.
Presumption 1: People would prefer real itemization.
Conclusion 1: The 3G phone companies are keeping two books, at least for the iPhone. One tracks the actual data you used, packet by packet. The sum of this is accurate, and is what you are actually billed for.
Conclusion 2: The other book contains the connections as and data usage as reported by the phone. This allows for clear itemization, as the phone can determine which packets would be proper to group as a single connection. These are the line items that appear on the bill.
Conclusion 3: If the phone screws up the reporting in some way, weird data usage lines would appear on the bill, and the data usage may not add up.
Conclusion 4: The line items in question are probably a result of some glitch in the iPhone code that is misreporting things. It may be an attempt to account for push notifications, but the numbers are not always correct.
Conclusion 5: The billing departments are not aware of the double books, so they cannot assure customers that the line items shown are potentially erroneous, but that the amount actually billed will be correct.
Caveat 1: The above conclusions fit all the data I have seen, and I am not aware of any simpler explanation that accounts for everything, but one may exist.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Because Apple "Just Works". For varying values of "Just Works".
This is a perfect example of the emperors clothes as it applies to Apple. Actually suggesting that someone put the phone in Airplane mode is crazy. Unless they are using it for an alarm clock, having the phone sit turned on with no passive functions possible, and no one to initiate an active function, Airplane mode is just an inefficient form of "OFF". Suggesting that someone turn their phone off every night so that they don't get charged exorbitant fees for some unknown, and certainly unneeded function is no better than telling someone they would be better off running Window Me as their primary OS over whatever they currently have installed.
A phone that must be turned off every night is kludgy and broken, providing a terrible user experience.
Are you sure? I am positive the actual total data line item you are actually charged for is done on the carrier's end. To do anything else is idiotic.
However, it is entirely possible that the individual line items on the bill are as reported by the phone. That would explain why the time is variable, why some were reporting the numbers don't add up, and what at least one macrumors user reported: the line item does not show up if the phone is in airline mode or off, but does show up at the time the phone is turned backed on.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
It’s possible, but it just begs for someone to hack the system and have fake usage stats sent so that they get unlimited access for the lowest monthly rate.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
What?
Really? What?
Don't Nintendo, HP and Microsoft produce just as many ads?
Really this level of mindless hate boy is every bit as annoying as mindless fan boy!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No. What I was proposing was that the billing system track actual usage. You pay exactly what you used.
However the data line items in the bill have nothing to do with what you are charged. They are just a listing of what your phone reported. So your phone could report an Exabyte of usage but you used only 1 Gig, so you don't pay any overage.
Or you use 3 gigs, but the phone reported only a meg of usage. So the only data usage line would be for 1 MB, but the total data line would read 3GB, and you would be charged for exceeding the cap by 1 GB.
I.E. the individual lines are for the convenience of the end user in determining when data was used, but only the actual data used really matters.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
The haven't banned Admob you retard! Maybe, just maybe, you are getting modded down not because you oppose Apple, but because you don't know WTF you're talking about. This comment is a perfect example. In your hysteria to hate on Apple you blow things out of proportion or just outright tell falsehoods. I think that deserves getting modded down.
I had no idea that’s what you meant. Yeah, it sounds plausible.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
That's precisely how I see it. I like my iPhone. I also like my Wii and DSi and Nook, which are appliances and/or computers in exactly the same way.
However, the iPad goes over the "appliance" line for me, which is one reason why I'm not getting one. (Another reason, of course, is that the set of stuff I want to do on a portable device that's not covered by my phone, my DSi, my Nook, or my laptop is rather small.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wow, I didn't follow your link until after I posted before, but once I did I found out my post was right on the money. You didn't get slammed because you were anti-Apple, you got slammed because you were lying or disingenuous on EVERY single point in your post. Did you expect to get patted on the back for telling blatant lies?
Bullshit. There is no way to upgrade the OS over the air. You *must* sync it to update the OS.
Thus, the rest of your post is highly questionable given that glaring lie.
Oh bullshit, you're lying your ass off. Are you seriously trying to say that they did that to you, and only you (since if it was happening it would have been found by now and the uproar would have been huge!)?
They most certainly did NOT upgrade the OS without your knowledge or approval. Based on the rest of your rant, you most likely just transitioned from one of your personalities (who had updated the phone) to your other personality (who wasn't aware of the update). Either that or drugs were involved because what you outlined did not happen.
You can catch it in the act.
I just turned off WiFi and 3G, forcing my iPhone onto AT&T's 850 MHz 2G network.
Now any data transmitted triggers a very audible BRAPPPA-BRAP-BUZZ! through the speakers.
Turn up the volume and go to bed.
On EDGE it will take a long time upload all that data. It will be quite obvious if this is really happening.
Also, use cheap speakers, fancy ones might be shielded. I didn't even plug them into the phone.
-j
Yea I love how people worry about taking a karma hit?
Why?
It sure doesn't effect the money you take home or anything else in the real world.
ACs are just that. Too afraid to be responsible for what they post.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ah, okay. So the data transfer is the iPhone essentially sending un-itemization data to the phone company.
Well, it's flatly absurd to charge people for that, for one thing.
Secondly, if the phones are, as the article claims, transferring up to sixty megs of data, it's idiotic to only use the 3G instead of offloading that to wifi if possible.
Perhaps it's some sort of security thing, or perhaps the data isn't even going to an IP address at all, but straight into the underlying data network that IP happens over, but still. There should be a logical way to simply hold the data until on a wifi network or a certain amount of time passes.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The link in the summary is to Mac Rumors, not to Mac OS Rumors, which is an unrelated site.
I'm not sure you know what an appliance is. Lets look at some traditional appliances and see if you would be ok with the manufacturer deciding what you put in it...
Toaster? Nope. You would be livid if the manufacture tried to prevent you from using wheat bread. Blender? Nope. Oven? Nope. Refrigerator? Nope. Stove? Nope. Appliances are things that you buy, and you put whatever you want in them. Once you have paid for them, the manufacturer no longer has a say. If anything, viewing the iPhone as an appliance should make people even MORE pissed about the way Apple handles the situation.
Telephony sessions are typically billed at the end of the session. Phone calls are billed when they are disconnected, SMS's when they are delivered, etc.
GPRS sessions (not individual sockets, the entire IP tunnel) are also typically billed when they are torn down too. This means that on some platforms data sessions can go unbilled for a long, long time. I've heard of months-long Blackberry sessions.
Now, the iPhone doesn't fully close down GPRS sessions when it goes idle, we saw that story a while ago. It does a fast disconnect, leaving the session running and hoping to reconnect to it later. What may be happening is that these sessions time out in the middle of the night, when the phone goes idle for long enough, resulting in a middle of the night charge for data from the entire day.
These long running sessions are being noticed by carriers, and they are starting to request mid-session commits, where the bill isn't updated at the end of the session, but at set intervals.
Of course there's the question of what sort of appliance. My refrigerator is an appliance. It will refrigerate anything I care to put in it. Even non-foods. There is no committee that gets to decide that, no rules from the manufacturer.
Agreed that people should not mod you down for disagreeing with you. I doubt you'll ever change your mind by reading anyone's opposing arguments though. You need a device that isn't locked down or controlled, you won't ever find an Apple mobile device fitting the bill. The whole philosophy of Apple under Steve Jobs is basically that the company will define the user experience for you. If you want more control over your devices, you'll have to look somewhere else. It's as simple as that.
As a user, I have no problem with using an iPad or iPhone because I can get all of the apps I need. Jailbreaking doesn't appeal to me. I can see why people wouldn't want to use an Apple mobile device, and that's fine by me. We're all different and have different needs.
Broken analogy. Say I buy a toaster and want to put wheat bread, or white bread, or really any other slice of bread in it, I can. Same for bagels or perhaps English muffins, I can. Why? Because that's the stated function of the appliance. However, what if I decided I wanted to cook a pizza in my toaster? Obviously, this would not work well, and the manufacturer never claimed it would. Sure, you could probably modify your toaster to cook frozen pizzas (jail break?) but the manufacturer doesn't support it and isn't going to help you convert your toaster to doing that.
Now replace "making toast, not pizza" with "running app store apps, not others" and you can see how the iPhone is an appliance.
You would have to say "toasting bread bought at Safeway" to compare to "apps bought in Apple App Store", and you would have to replace "have toaster self destruct if bread from Whole Foods was used" to compare with what Apple is doing. Claiming that the iPhone wasn't designed to run application X, so it is OK for Apple to try to stop you is disingenuous. The iPhone was designed to run third party apps. It is only who you bought it from that decides whether Apple will try to break your phone, or even try to stop you from running it.
You would not accept that from any other appliance manufacturer. You only accept that from Apple because "it's on a computer", and that makes it magically different.
Could this be some form of passive tracking by default?
Could a clandestine service have asked the telco and Apple to make phones more trackable out of the box?
Sloppy younger people would just think not making a call is 'off' but the phone is still seen on the network?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I have Little Snitch installed, and every website I've designed with iWeb phones home to mac.com before a page will load, even when the site is not hosted at mac.com.
If you block mac.com with Little Snitch, you cannot navigate to your domain. Somehow the code in the sites generated by iWeb is passing some kind of information to Apple's servers and tracking every access by every user to every website ever designed with iWeb.
This cannot be accidental or an oversight, because this must generate huge amounts of traffic to Apple's servers, and this traffic costs them money and bandwidth to receive & transmit. They must be doing something with all that traffic data.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
The iPhone was designed to run third party apps.
Wrong. The iPhone was designed to run third party apps purchased through the Apple app store. That is the advertised feature.
Why don't you talk about how the XBox 360, Wii, and PS3 don't allow any and all third-party apps? Heck, the 360 requires you to purchase a subscription to Live Gold just to use Facebook, or any other app. And really, those machines are MUCH closer to a regular computer than a phone is. So why do people like you harp on how the iPhone is so closed? Evidently millions of customers disagree, so much that huge corporations like Google, Microsoft, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, etc. are going down a very similar route in order to gain customers their way.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Presumption 1: People would prefer real itemization.
Conclusion 1: The 3G phone companies are keeping two books, at least for the iPhone. One tracks the actual data you used, packet by packet. The sum of this is accurate, and is what you are actually billed for.
Conclusion 2: The other book contains the connections as and data usage as reported
Jesus Fucking Christ - can nobody here remember the infamous "300 page iPhone bill"? Detailed billing was the default until a few days after people loudly complained about it. Detailed on paper now costs money, detailed is still available online.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"(Providers are ending unlimited contracts, so iPhone users are paying more attention to how much data they are using.)"
AT$T is ending unlimited contracts.... those of us on sprint or verizon or whatever arent having this problem.
But then, we arent using iphones are we?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/19/1315202 Poor schmuck.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If you look at detailed power consumption data, you will see that wifi is way, way more efficient than cellular. Thus, either Apple made a huge mistake in power conservation programming, Apple and AT&T are intentionally inflating 3G data usage or this theory is completely wrong.
Yes, but AIUI the detailed billing available now is not the same detailed billing that was originally available. That 300 page bill would probably be something more like 10 pages under the current system. That original system was probably accounting for each an every packet, (possibly grouping all packets from a TCP connection together), while the modern detailed billing most definitely does not do that.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
brings the trolls out
it's not just iphones. it's ALL PHONES FROM ATT.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/another-iphone-mystery-explained/
Fortunately, this one has a happy ending. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel tells me:
“What your readers are seeing is a routine update of the daily data activity on their devices—whether the iPhone or other handsets—to ensure billing accuracy. Customers are not charged for any data usage as part of this routine update
Now wait a minute: The iPhone is doing processing and transmitting when its lights out - ON my phone, with my network time, and electrical services?
Q: Where in the ATT Wireless contract do they get to use my phone for their billing processing for FREE?
Let's think about this: Assuming 3.5 million iPhones are calling home every night - and that it takes $2.50 worth of services - shouldn't users be given the option of selling that service time to ATT with a 20% profit margin?
That's one heck of a lot of distributed compute power guys. Either ATT pays for it - or the user should get a tax break for allowing ATT to use their phone for ATT business purposes.
Theft of services is theft of services.
Gentle readers, rev your engines!
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