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Apple Releases iOS 4.3.3 To Fix Location Tracking
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has released a software update (iOS 4.3.3) to fix the much-talked-about iPhone Location Tracking bug. Apple faced a lot of criticism over the issue — iPhone and iPad secretly tracks users' locations and saves them in the device's cache as well as in a hidden file which is copied to the PC whenever the computer gets synced with device."
I'm pretty sure it was a feature, not a bug.
The update does not help if you are using an older unsupported iPhone or iPod.
FIX or hide somewhere else?
Apple's prices.
I must be the only person who thought that feature was nice. Given that it's not shared with anybody, it is nothing but useful for me.
When I go on vacation or someplace interesting, I drag along a GPS logger so I know where I've been, and I can geolocate my pictures. I have to take another device in my backpack and keep it charged etc. If my phone did that, I'd be happy as hell. There are apps for that, but they suck serious battery. This low resolution database would be a nice compliment to to the GPS logger.
Sheldon
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone. As of March 11, 2011, Apple stopped updating the iPhone 3G.
It look like after 2 years, you're no longer an Apple customer. You're a former customer until you prove otherwise with your wallet.
Disclaimer: I can't find any official statement from Apple about their current 3G support policy. But they did exclude th 3G from this update.
Like Google did with Android? hide it away and make it only accessible if you root the phone.
wow! 666MB to delete a file? not that bad at all!!
I like how there's more outrage over apple tracking users and then denying it than there is over all the suicides and anti-suicide pledges from the workers making these devices.
Two years is double or four times as long as other phone providers.
A Sony Ericsson phone is effectively abandonware as soon as you buy one. A HTC phone is released every 6-12 months and with such a large number of phones to support you won't see many or any updates after 12 months.
Apple's support for the iPhone is pretty exception in the mobile phone market. So unless you can provide an example of a mobile operator who provided support after two years I think you need to stop whining.
My understanding was that what was being logged was not the users' locations but rather that of the nearest cell tower or hotspot.
Your understanding is flawed. It wasn't logging the nearest cell tower or wifi. It was, based on location, downloading to the phone a list of nearby cell towers and wifi networks (from a crowdsourced database run by Apple) so that when the user used an app that requested the location of the phone, this cache could be used to quickly generate a rough estimate and speed up the GPS location. This is a very useful optimization for most of us and the fact that it allowed people to generate a very rough log of our locations over time was simply an unintended side effect.
Given how limited the phone choice is, and how 'special' iPhone users are, and the premium they pay, and the fact that this 'bug' got (or will get) apple into trouble...
You can hardly compare can you?
I think it's more an issue of them thinking that it wouldn't really bother anyone, especially that the point of it was to help the GPS function run better. So this update is probably going to increase GPS location speeds in certain cases (ie. if you're somewhere you haven't been for a while). Apple have said that the data will have its lifespan reduced (ie. it will only keep a short amount of time worth of updates), thus enabling it to still actually work. Also if you turn off Location Services, then the data file will get deleted.
And? I am neither a fan nor customer of apple, but I would say that if you last purchased something 2+ years ago... you're *not* a customer. You're a former customer.
Isn't this (the update) an implied admission that the original software tracking was wrong?
Well, wrong in that it kept a large cache instead of a small one. Most users probably care a lot more about rapidly finding their location all the time than they do about the possibility that someone with access to their phone or an unencrypted backup thereof could generate a very rough estimate of their locations over time.
I don't see how it could have been coded in, and have had the behavior described to it, as an accident.
Then you have no idea what the software was doing. Why don't you find out by doing something crazy like reading.
What will become of the data already collected?
Data wasn't collected. It was downloaded TO the phone and cached there. The "collected data" was collected on your phone and stored there as well as in any backups of your phone. What you do with it is up to you if you have an iPhone.
Personally, I'm waiting for iOS 4.4.1 - it not only is a stable release, it also has anti-suicide factory-worker code in it.
(posted from my iPad2)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Isn't this (the update) an implied admission that the original software tracking was wrong? I don't see how it could have been coded in, and have had the behavior described to it, as an accident. What will become of the data already collected?
Good grief. Still want this to be an issue?
Design document:
We want to be able to determine location very very quickly. Much faster than GPS.
Developer: ...OK. I'll just keep a cache of visited towers/wifi and their GPS location cached. That'll be super fast!
That's it, folks. The whole thing. non-jailbroken apps can't read the cache, so nobody cares. The cache never gets sent to Apple, so nobody cares. But it turns out that the cache is backed up to the computer, so people freak out. OH NOES!
Design document:
Make people shut up about this file.
Developer: ...Good grief. OK, I won't back up the cache to iTunes. And while I'm in the code, I'll trim the cache size - looks like it was getting big for some people.
That's it. No story.
My understanding was that what was being logged was not the users' locations but rather that of the nearest cell tower or hotspot. But whatever, hurf durf, Steve wuz spying on us.
OK, so you're justifying Apple tracking their users to within a few hundred yards.
What CAN'T you justify, fanboi?
I might be called a fanboi, but they were caching location data in what seemed like a logical manner to speed up location services. Many users, myself included, enjoy speedier access.
Sure, they should have encrypted it by default, but it's not like their users had any expectation that they weren't being tracked. They were surprised by an unencrypted cache of location data, but ATT, Verizon, Sprint, ???, are already readily tracking user locations of all phones on the network. I would think someone silly if they expected the location services apps they are using aren't tracking them as well.
People that get upset and say "OMG! APPLE IS BIG BROTHER!" are the same people who get upset when very private information on facebook is seen by people they didn't realize could see it.
Ah yes, and with your extensive knowledge of the apple software build process your going to she some light on it? You obviously don't write software... (or even widgets:D)
First, it's 2011. Most OEM's support android phones for months, not years. Second, people like you are looking for something to qq about. you would complain if your water was wet. Shut up.
From my experience, the 3G barely ran iOS 4. I don't blame them for stopping support of it or the "classic". Those users should stay on 3.2.2 and jailbreak it.
If you live in the states and bought a phone 2+ years ago, you are probably eligible for a very cheap upgrade from your carrier, provided you're willing to re-up your contract.
Given the high-profile nature of this, even if you're not due for a re-up because you bought a refurb 3G 6 months ago, I'd suggest picking up your phone and calling customer service for your cell provider, and asking them what they can do to help you out. If you're willing to renew your contract, I'd bet they'd be willing to cut you a deal on a new phone (maybe a free 3GS, or a cheap iPhone 4), or a discount on some other Android-ish device if that's your fancy.
Yes, it would be nice if they supported all of these devices forever. No, they don't do so today. So you can gripe on Slashdot, or you can call your cell provider and see if they're willing to cut you a deal on an upgrade. They usually are if you say "I'll go to $some_other_carrier over this, but I'd be willing to renew my contract today for 2 years if you can make something happen."
regardless, this demonstrates the benefits of free software. A similar phone loaded with aosp would have lifetime updates thanks to cyanogenmod.
My understanding was that what was being logged was not the users' locations but rather that of the nearest cell tower or hotspot.
Your understanding is flawed. It wasn't logging the nearest cell tower or wifi. It was, based on location, downloading to the phone a list of nearby cell towers and wifi networks (from a crowdsourced database run by Apple) so that when the user used an app that requested the location of the phone, this cache could be used to quickly generate a rough estimate and speed up the GPS location. This is a very useful optimization for most of us and the fact that it allowed people to generate a very rough log of our locations over time was simply an unintended side effect.
In order to get that data a third party would have to either steal your phone or steal your iPhone backups from your computer. Either way, you would have bigger problems than a log file with your locations.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Since it didn't actually track your location, only present a database of known network points around you, you actually couldn't use it to track anything. I had a look at my own data and you couldn't tell where I lived or worked from it, and those are places I go every day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The database is not of the nearest tower or hotspot. It is of many nearby ones, (e.g. within dozens of miles). By having this cache of local known positions, the GPS can resolve in seconds, rather than in minutes.
Look at any analysis of the actual data and you'll see that the points do a very poor job of tracking locations. Some of the points are predictions on where you might go. The point of a cache is to have the data at hand before it's needed, so that when it is needed, it's right there. It's possible he was somewhere near Las Vegas is not tracking.
OK, so you're justifying Apple tracking their users to within a few hundred yards.
Nope, wherever you were it was downloading stuff from a mile or two around you, possibly more. Looking at my own data I could not have told where I lived or worked from it, because it was too widespread and of course not related to where I was specifically. Not even centering the range of data collected really told you anything...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To produce a traffic database, the location of the phones must be read and transmitted to Apple. Claims that they only send location data and never pull it is clearly false.
The issue we were discussing is the list of cell towers and wifi networks stored on iPhones and which Apple has changed in this update. As for logging user location data anonymously, I'm sure Apple is doing so, at least they said they were when I clicked through the location stuff on the maps application in my phone. But that is a significantly different from what we were discussing.
My understanding was that what was being logged was not the users' locations but rather that of the nearest cell tower or hotspot.
Your understanding is flawed. It wasn't logging the nearest cell tower or wifi. It was, based on location, downloading to the phone a list of nearby cell towers and wifi networks (from a crowdsourced database run by Apple) so that when the user used an app that requested the location of the phone, this cache could be used to quickly generate a rough estimate and speed up the GPS location. This is a very useful optimization for most of us and the fact that it allowed people to generate a very rough log of our locations over time was simply an unintended side effect.
In order to get that data a third party would have to either steal your phone or steal your iPhone backups from your computer. Either way, you would have bigger problems than a log file with your locations.
Or obtain your phone by subpoena.
In some cases it may be the entire intent of the excercise is to determine what your location has been.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Depends on the warranty, no?
Automobile emission control systems (and, broadly interpreted, that includes the drivetrain) have an EPA-mandated 10 year / 100,000 mile warranty in the USA. That would mean the car you bought 9 years 11 months and 30 days ago still makes you a current customer.
Owning something that will be supported or last for only 2 years? I try to avoid that if possible.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
sorry to burst your bubble (well, actually, not really) but is that what you have seen for Android phones? You know, the ones that can't upgrade from 1.6 to 2..
First, it's 2011. Most OEM's support android phones for months, not years.
Second, people like you are looking for something to qq about. you would complain if your water was wet.
Shut up.
I see so you arguments are:
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
2) People should never complain
3) You like to abuse and bully people
I bet you'd defend Apple if they went around with squads killing people and committing atrocities. Brand loyalty is for suckers.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
OK, so Apple's warranty is for only one year. As far as I know, they haven't violated any of the terms of their 25 page contract I never read. As far as I can tell, their support is as good as any cell phone company. (Not a high bar to get over.) So you're justified in calling me a whiner.
Still, after paying more for that phone than I've paid for some computers, I'm pretty unhappy with Apple. I've been using Apple computers continuously (but not exclusively) since 1985. I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you bought it.
I really don't want to start another 2 year commitment on a smartphone. And the iPad I'm considering looks like less of a bargain if it is going to be made intentionally obsolete in 2 years.
No, i just think 2 years in today's market is fair. If they wanted to wow me they could do better. Apple's done it's share of shady stupid shit, but most companies have. (google, ms) I would throw them under a bus if android's UI was actually fully accelerated in 2.3. Maybe ice cream. Or maybe not. rows of icons is boring.
btw: if you feel abused a bullied, then you sir, have lead a sheltered life.
And People still can't stop making shit up! There is one file. (the Cache) its not hidden. It contains locations of cell towers and wi-fi APs. It does not contain the users location. The data for each tower was over written and only logged when towers came into range. As such the data never could be used to "trace some ones every move". The data would only show the general location of the user (being somewhere near a tower). The app that showed the locations sensationalized the whole thing by showing a week or mores worth of data by default putting in many more data points. Many days would actually contain few or no data points at all. And no one has shown this data being sent to Apple.
agreed but savvy consumers will vote with their wallet and with the benefit of hindsight choose wisely next time. :-)
Yeah clearly that data needs to be synchronised to iTunes
OK, one last time for the cheap seats: Apple syncs everything as part of an iPhone backup. They do this so that when you restore from backup you get the device back to its backed up state (kinda the point), temporary files included. When you actually look at a backup all manner of cache files are included. It is not only a backup of data, it's a backup of device state.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Well duh! why cache data that's already on The Motherships (Google's) servers. And note the file did not keep years worth of data just years old data. Data for each tower was overwritten. Thus the further you went back the less data there was.
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous. iPhone 3G was supported from july 2008 to march 2011, that's nearly 3 years worth of OS updates for that model of phone. Its successor, the iPhone 3GS, was released june 2009 at which time the writing was on the wall for the older hardware but it was supported well after that.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone.
"'untrackerd' Cydia Tweak stops iOS Location Data Storing."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
WHAT you mean that when I click the button that says use location services the the phone secretly uses location services!!! I'm shocked NOW SHUT UP!
The data wasn't sync the users folder was the file just happened to be in it. HEY IDIOT THAT"S WHY ITS CALLED A BACKUP.
Except that - "According to tests by independent security researcher Samy Kamkar, the iPhone was also collecting new data on cell tower and Wi-Fi networks when location services were off, and sending this data back to its servers. It's unclear whether the update stops these collections as well. According to Skyhook's Morgan, the collection of the data and the downloading of the cache to the phone typically work hand-in-hand." - From an article by the Reg. So - I'm sorry but they're collecting data when location services are off and they're transmitting that back to Apple. THAT'S SPYING!!!!
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
"Don't expect the company to fix its mistakes, just spend more money!"
wasnt there an apple spokesman saying that apple NEEDED to know locations of its customers to provide them 'better service' ? just 1-2 days ago in a story we read here ?
Read radical news here
No, the problem is that when you say "Don't use location services", Apple continues to use if anyways.
No actually your understanding is flawed. Data is from radio logs. The poster was Right.
iPhone 3G stopped being sold in June 2010
The myTouch 3G (i.e. the second Android phone in the U.S.) is currently running Android 2.2. That puts it on par with the iPhone 3GS. The G1 is the first "high end" (there really was no such term when it came out since there were no low end devices) Android phone by HTC to outright stop receiving updates. The Droid, similarly, is running Froyo, and receives important updates. Sure, the low end phones stop getting updates after 6-12 months, but if you consider that the same market is usually met by the previous year's iPhone, it's comparable. Just a point of clarification: while it's true that Gingerbread is the latest version of the OS, most of the improvements were hardware support (and a slight color scheme change). If a phone already functioned on Froyo, the user wouldn't really notice much difference if it was updated. For that matter, bug fixes for 2.2 continued to be released after 2.3 was out. In that respect, Gingerbread could be seen as more of a fork than a true update, and will be merged back in when Honeycomb and GoogleTV are merged in Ice Cream Sandwich. I ran both Froyo (CM 6.1) and Gingerbread (CM 7) on my myTouch 4G and could hardly tell the difference.
NO the don't haven't and never have. The only issue was that the log file was still being updated. However it was not used and could not be without turning location services on.
The database is not of the nearest tower or hotspot. It is of many nearby ones, (e.g. within dozens of miles). By having this cache of local known positions, the GPS can resolve in seconds, rather than in minutes.
I can turn on my HTC Touch Pro 2 (a 2 year old device) when I touch down in Bangkok, Shanghai, Berlin, Los Angeles or Seattle (all places I've been to and used GPS/location services within in the last 5 weeks) and it locks on position in less than 10 seconds. Subsequent uses in the same region (within ~150 km radius) locks within 2-3 seconds. No cache needed - if you have a decent GPS chipset to start with.
The point of a cache is to have the data at hand before it's needed, so that when it is needed, it's right there.
Why worry about where I was last week or last month, when I'm looking for position right now... You can query the cell system for current position of the tower to which you are connected, and get the current data in a matter of a second or two. Why do you need to store all the places you've ever been, for something that has relevance right now?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A location cache would have no need to record timestamps unless the data were to age out (which it did not). Nor would it need to record the same bit of data with a new time stamp while maintaining the old one. There would be absolutely no reason to ever have the same data point twice with different time stamps. In an aging system, you would just update the time stamp on the existing point so that it didn't age out.
The iPhone 3G has this bug, but is not being fixed...
That's because Apple wants to know where all the cheapskates live. If you're still using a 3G, you are not worthy. The data will be pooled and you will never, never see an Apple store there.
It's the truth....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's sweet - thanks. And since Apple is ignoring the 3G, the risk of jailbreaking it is much lower. Apple's not going to patch the 3G flaws that allow jailbreaking.
It was, based on location, downloading to the phone a list of nearby cell towers and wifi networks (from a crowdsourced database run by Apple)
Clearly "based on location" in the above is a loaded statement as it implies that something like GPS coordinates were being used to determine where you were at the time. More likely it was using the nearest hotspot or cell tower to then request a list of hotspots/cell towers in the vicinity. While this would give an approximation of your location, it's a far cry from sending out your actual specific location. That being said, Apple never actually clarified this aspect of it so who knows what's true and what isn't. I'd personally tend to err on the side of "Apple is not trying to screw everyone," though I know others would disagree.
No, you (and the GGP) are wrong.
I suggest that before installing the update you try for yourself to access the infamous database from your latest iPhone backup. (One of the "fixes" in the iOS 4.3.3 update is that the database will no longer be backed-up). You can get the instructions on how to locate the SQLite database and how to open the CellLocation table using the SQLite Manager plug-in for Firefox directly from the people that "discovered" the issue. The most relevant fields are Timestamp, Latitude and Longitude.
The timestamp field shows the time of an entry in seconds since January 1st, 2001, at 0:00. The first shocking thing is that the data is not acquired continuously or at a regular interval, but rather in "blobs". Each of these "blobs" of data will have several entries, some five or less, but most (in my case) have 60 or more, *many* more, sometimes over 100. All those entries have literally the EXACT SAME timestamp, to the microsecond. I can't believe that my iPhone sees more than 100 different WiFi stations and cell towers at the SAME time.
Furthermore, most of the many entries for each particular "blob" happen to be several miles (up to 25) from the location where I know I was at that particular timestamp (say, midnight on a Wednesday). And indeed the info is close to useless: the average of all the 121 entries in the blob in a particular case was over 1.5 miles away from my actual location, and even the average of the 15 points closest to me (note that that required a priori knowledge of what you are looking for: my location) was 0.55 miles away.
My point is: Apple may be collecting the data from the radio logs to create their famous "crowdsourced" database, but the CellLocation table, which is the center of the whole issue, is not data from the radio logs of your specific device.
This is a very useful optimization for most of us and the fact that it allowed people to generate a very rough log of our locations over time was simply an unintended side effect.
A very useful function for sure. I would love to be able remember where I was all last week. I figure since they'll always have this info anyway, we should be able to use it also.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
That reminds me when I was a kid and didn't want to take baths. I would point out to my mom that I shouldn't have to bathe because, after all, other kids would be even filthier than me and that was OK!
My mom though, would have none of it. She forced me to take a shower daily, under the argument that it didn't matter if other kids were filthier, that I should be clean nevertheless.
The truth is that companies will try to get away with as much crap as possible, and it's up to us consumers to demand the best possible treatment rather than settle for the lowest common denominator and call it a day, just because "everbody else is the same or worse".
As an iPhone 3G owner which I've just barely finished paying for (bought in late February 2009), I'm dismayed that Apple has simply decided that a perfectly working piece of hardware just won't get any security fixes. I don't know if they should be asked to provide security fixes forever, or for ten years, or for five. I know two years is too little and I couldn't care less what Sony Ericsson or anyone else does. I didn't buy a phone from them, I bought one from Apple, I still regularly buy stuff from them through their store, and I resent basically being told I no longer matter to them. If they don't think I'm no longer a customer of theirs then maybe I shouldn't be one, a thought that I'll definitely keep in mind next time I buy a phone (two or three years down the road, when my trusty 3G stops working or actually becomes obsolete).
The data wasn't sync the users folder was the file just happened to be in it. HEY IDIOT THAT"S WHY ITS CALLED A BACKUP.
If it's temp data it DOESN't NEED TO BE BACKED UP. See, I can yell too.
The irony is fanboys such as yourself are this abusive and don't get modded down, but anyone daring to criticise the great Apple (all hail!) gets modded into oblivion. I'm not the idiot here.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The HTC Touch Pro 2 uses a Qualcomm CPU with a gpsOne aGPS module. The iPhone 4 uses a Broadcom BCM4750 single-chip aGPS.
The tracking sensitivity on the gpsOne is -160dB, with TTFF of 1s/29s/35s for hot/warm/cold startup. Power consumption data not available; it's always part of the CPU.
The tracking sensitivity on the BCM4750 is -162dB, with TTFF of 0.5s/30s for hot/cold startup. Power consumption is 13mW.
The BCM4750 is a better aGPS chip, but mostly due to its greater sensitivity and independence from CPU choice - there's not a lot of difference in TTFF between the two.
If you get fix times in under 10sec, but over 1sec, the phone is probably providing hints via a cache.
Given I have a 3GS with the much poorer Hammerhead II aGPS chipset, patch 4.3.3 is a pretty big net loss for me; I think I'll just skip it until I'm forced to take this Apple bashwagon generated downgrade as a part of a major release upgrade. :(
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous.
You're kidding me, right? This is the same manufacturer that's famous for selling a phone that drops out if you hold it wrong, and screens that scratch if you look at them harshly.
I've had few things from Apple and their support is my #2 reason for disliking them. My #1 reason is lockdown and crippling in order to sell the next model. #3 is their draconian control of the sales channels.
Every product I've owned or used at work from Apple has given me nothing but trouble. Just junk, and their customer service stinks. Apple is NOT geek friendly, is NOT stylish and does NOT provide good support.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
And there are certifiably paranoid haterz who would respond to news of Apple removing location services from iOS with shrieks that this proves they will instead be locating cell phones covertly, at the same time they complain that augmented reality and navigation apps would subsequently suck ballz on the iPhone.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Actually that was a feature. It's not needed any more since OBL's been tracked.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
My car is going on 6 years old. The rOads i drive it on are atill the same. So yeah, im happy to keep it. The roads My iphOne drives on will likely be obsoleted in 2.
The problem with relying purely on GPS is that it can't be in use all the time, especially when the phone is on standby, since it takes quite a bit of power to run the GPS hardware. When the phone wakes up it can take up to 2 minutes for it to get a full GPS lock on it's location.... but by identifying nearby cell towers/wifi base stations, it can return its approximate coordinates instantly.... It just needs to query a database that can return those rough coordinates of such cell tower ID/Wifi base stations MAC, then use the GPS to fine tune it in the background.
Of course, the issue is that a database that maps cell tower/base station to a GPS coordiate has to be stored somewhere. Your phone either has to access it live (which if it goes to a server can be monitored live and give away your location), or it can access an internal database (like the iphone does, except it got backed up as part of the system image). Either way there's no way around it, since cell towers and wifi base stations don't naturally broadcast their own GPS coordinates.
Now I don't know about you, but I'd be awfully annoyed wait 2 minutes every time my phone has to figure out where the heck it is; especially if I'm trying to pull up a map at the side of the road, or at a place that GPS won't work at all, such as an underground parking garage.
It's already the case that when slave labor practices are brought to light you have thousands of fanboys ranting about raising the standard of living in developing countries and it's better than starving (as if paying a living wage were simply not an option).
I hate Apple with a passion but think they're actually improving the standard of living in developing countries by offering work there.
The question is: are the workers free to leave for a better opportunity? If not, then they're slaves.. otherwise they're just poor, and hiring poor people is a nice thing to do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Or subpoena the same information from the carrier... and oh yeah, that tracking hasn't stopped.
You're at the complete wrong end of the spectrum.
>I guess I'm pining for the days when a computer was still
>pretty useful and still getting updates 5 years after you
>bought it.
My iPhone 3G was rather creaky with iOS 4. But my 2007 iMac is still my primary computer, still useful, and still getting updates. And based on the developer previews, I do expect it to run Lion fairly well. The only reason I can think of that won't "last" five years is if I switch to a MacBook Pro. And even then, I'd pass it along to a friend who could get some use out of it... almost certainly past the five year mark.
Imagine all the people...
2nd Generation iPod Touches stopped getting iOS updates when they were 1.2 years old. iPod Touch 3rd Generation was released 9/9/09, and iOS 4.2.1 (the last one for iPod Touch 2nd Generation) was released November 22, 2010.
From your posts in this thread, your clear grinding axe and your belligerent "Apple can do no right" dogma, I suspect that the reason "every Apple product" gives you trouble is down to the common factor in all of those interactions: you.
Given today's flurry of posts in this thread your neckbeard must be seriously chafed.
What about licenses and DRM which tie purchases to device, meaning restoring to a different device you can lose your data. (Don't care if it allos 2, or 3 or 5 devices....bottom line if you have trouble with your phone you can lose more than the worth of the phone).
Are you daft, bro? Do you actually have any idea of what you're talking about or just spewing random hater crap?
I've backed up and restored the same image onto THREE DIFFERENT IPHONES now. Including my upgrade from a 3G to a 4. And can you guess how much data I've lost? Bingo! Not a single app. Not a single song. Not a single video.
Go back under your bridge, troll.
Not only that, but a public company is bound by US law to maximize profits for its shareholders. And you maximize profits by lowering costs, not by paying higher wages for philanthropic purposes.
What judge in his/her right mind would issue a subpoena for data that could tell you AT BEST "well, syousef might possibly have been in Seattle on the 12th of February. Or it could have been any of millions of other iphone users who were in Seattle on that day. But in any case, knowing where cell towers and wifi hotspots in Seattle are seems to be helping syousef's location services out. Yay!"
That's right. None.
No. It's more like the antennagate thing. They're having a big laugh right now back at headquarters. You know why? Because otherwise they'd be crying at the stupidity of you all.
That's even more disingenuous. It was never a cache. Your phone told Apple where cell towers and hotspots were. Apple anonymized and aggregated the data. Your phone then downloaded a subset of that dataset from areas that it guessed might be useful to you. That's it. Nothing to do with your actual location at all.
And yes, it was user data so it was backed up and moved to a new phone if you switched. Why the hell would you want to download a NEW dataset when you already had one?
Try reading some. It doesn't hurt much.
yes, I know. The public good coinciding with the commercial good, wtf? It's almost like that Adam Smith guy was onto something!
How we know is more important than what we know.
ZOMG! Stop the presses!
you got a problem with your oOos?
I bet you'd defend Apple if they went around with squads killing people and committing atrocities.
Because that's SO exactly what he said!
keeps a list of recently viewed websites. Mozilla Foundation is spying on you!
This is about the same as Apple has done here. Caching a list of recently seen (or possibly seen based on your location) antennae with their location (not: your location but theirs) to give your GPS a faster fix next time.
However, while a limit of 2MB browsercache is ridiculously low it turned out that 2MB for location-data is a lot and at least if people turn off GPS this cache could be purged. And saving data on the location of seen GSM Towers while GPS is turned off (some provide them themselves ota) may lead to misunderstandings.
Nothing to see here but a unintendedly big size limit and a dissonance between engineers thinking "Location is not provided to Apps" and user experience "no location data even if acquired passively is used in any way".
The other topic - saving your position _for_a_day_ and sending the visible antennae to Apple anonymized - is something completely different.
Yeah? They sync firmware?
If you are talking about the OS, the latest image is found in "~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates" no need to image the entire thing each time. Stuff like baseband is downloaded when it gets upgraded to flash onto the phone, again no need to sync it every time.
What about licenses and DRM which tie purchases to device, meaning restoring to a different device you can lose your data. (Don't care if it allos 2, or 3 or 5 devices....bottom line if you have trouble with your phone you can lose more than the worth of the phone).
Give me an actual example of this, it doesn't exist (on iOS devices at least.) I can't even think of a third party app that does this.
You're living in fanboy fantasy land! It's rotten tomatoes from the cheap seats.
Stooping to cheap and meaningless insults like "fanboy" is an automatic defeat. Stick to rational arguments please.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
and get an iPhone... ;^)
Let's not forget that there are TWO carriers out there that sell iPhones: AT&T and Verizon. I happen to be a customer of the latter.
Guess what. While AT&T is going to be getting iOS 4.3.3, my iPhone4 is still plodding along on iOS 4.2.7, and iTunes reports I have the latest software update! When do Verizon users get to catch up with the rest of the world?
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
So, what's the big deal with this? The only problem is the fact that it was left unencrypted. If anyone is upset that a company knows where they are due to their device which they carry, they should keep in mind that the cell phone carriers already know this information and keep it in a database. These databases are made readily available to law enforcement without any requirements for a subpoena or court order. They just log onto a portal, select what they want and pay a nominal fee to the telco. I would think that this is of greater concern than Apple's screwup in not encrypting the file.
Like it or not, when you're buying new equipment, you're looking at less than two years' support in most cases. I don't necessarily think this is a good thing (I remember when appliance warranties were 5, 10, 15 year), but the only way to avoid it today is to buy various extended support packages at inflated prices.
Of course it's not quite the same, as software is not warrantied item to begin with. It's been a while since I read an EULA, but the last I checked , there are disclaimers left and right -- namely, no warranty; and -- as importantly -- no obligation set forth wherein the vendor is required to provide any ongoing updates at all.
And as you mentioned, automobiles are under special rules.