It would be one thing if we were talking about the source code that made the API function, but we're not. We're just talking about the idea of the API itself which is something Sun put out there explicitly for people to use (admittedly they wanted you to use THEIR virtual machine--not one written by Google). It may not be what they had in mind, but it's not as if Android is competing against Sun's VM so there's no real harm here. At the end of the day it's just a money grab by a company that bought Sun and is now growing increasingly irrelevant.
They looked at Apple's specs and said "Ok, we can make ours thinner than theirs by 1mm so we're the thinnest." That's not the same as "Ok, we can make ours look enough like theirs to confuse consumers into thinking their buying an iPad when they buy our product" which is the entire basis for Apple's claim here. They're saying they look so much alike people are confused. What's even more silly is the Galaxy tab comes in 3 different sizes.
Before Apple came into the field, everyone had 20+ years to come up with a phone / tablet design to shake the industry. Even with with the few players that gave up quickly, everyone else did NOTHING!
And Apple did nothing too. Why do you suppose that was? Oh wait, we know why--Steve Jobs himself told us the technology just wasn't ready yet. So perhaps the proliferation of smartphones post iPhone has less to do with everyone copying Apple and more to do with the fact that their time had simply come--as evidenced by the iPhone and all the rest. The fact that the iPhone and LG Prada phone look almost identical seems to be solid evidence of this theory. Smartphones were just headed in that direction, regardless of whole stole the crown.
Not that Apple didn't innovate. They certainly did. Their use of multiple sensors (ambient light, accelerometer, and later Gyroscope) turned out to be extremely influential and useful. And certainly they were among the first to use capacitive touch screens--though its not quite clear to me if that technology was going to supplant resistive either way or not.
Now Apple comes in with their iPhone and iPad and SUDDENLY everyone's products now looks like an iPhone and iPad. That is no coincidence at all.
Well first of all, plenty look and feel quite different. There are quite a few different shapes and sizes represented in the non-Apple camp.
Again, the Prada Phone actually proves you wrong. Other phones coming down the pipes already looked like the iPhone. That was the way we were headed. And Android phones were getting progressively bigger and bigger when the iPad was announced. It was inevitable that someone would have said "I do believe I'd like a 10 inch version of this for when I'm in the bathroom". Hell, look at the chumby. It was coming one way or the other.
Slashdot's Android fanboys are just delusional.
Irony!
It's no surprise that the Android OS itself is now in front of the gun barrel with patent and licensing violations, including Google's own internal messages that they knew Android's Java implementation was essentially stolen.
To be fair, they were talking about licensing in those emails. Not the patents for Java, but Java itself. That is, using Sun's own VM. They opted to do their own implementation instead (Dalvik). Their lawyers felt that if they did their own VM they'd be fine, legally-speaking. The lawsuit is over the patents, which is not quite the same issue, but Oracle's lawyers are happy to confuse it. We'll all just have to wait and see how that whole debacle pans out.
This is not bad for consumers. This is actually good for them because it will force Samsung to ACTUALLY COME UP WITH ITS OWN STUFF! Who knows? It might even be better!
Bro, it's a rectangle. The whole basis here is that it "looks" like an iPad. That's all. Are you telling me Apple invented the rectangle? I mean, common. It looks like every other tablet ever. Don't be silly.
Bottom line: Apple violates just as many patents as everybody else. You literally cannot build *anything* without violating someone's patent. Most companies know this, and so they aren't suing. They hold on to their patents in a defensive stance because they know that suing just means getting sued. Trust me, you do not want to live in the world where everybody is being held to the same standards Apple wants to hold Samsung to.
Yes, which means after 19 years you make a slightly modification and refile it and get a 20 year extension. Patents are basically forever, now in our current broken system.
Nope. The Samsung tablet in question bears no resemblance to the iPad in terms of software. Yes, there is a Touchwiz UI on their PHONES which looks pretty similar to the iPhone, but in the tablet space the ONLY similarity is the shape. Apple has successfully stopped sales of Samsungs tablet in Europe because apparently Apple owns the rights to the rectangle, now. That's pretty much the entire basis of their claim for the *tablet*, and that's all the judge considered. They're both similarly-sized rectangles. That's it.
First off, "single-handedly" is hyperbole. Clearly there have been lots of innovations in the arena of smartphones, and not all of them have come from Apple. In fact the last iOS update alone is proof of that, as a couple dozen of its most prominent new features are borrowed innovations (each one just as patentable as the weak patents Apple sued HTC with) from other smartphone manufacturers.
That aside, you are on the one hand saying that we owe Apple a great debt for their innovations because the quality of all the other products on the market place has increased significantly as a result of them, and on the other hand giving legitimacy to their attempts have those very same products REMOVED from the market. "We've been benefited so much from Apple's innovations, they deserve the right to take those benefits away from us as a reward." What Apple deserves for those innovations are the billions and billions and billions of dollars they have made and will continue to make going forward as a result of those products. They have been richly rewarded with unprecedented profits--they've been so wildly successful they even passed Exxon as the single highest-valued corporation in the world (for a bit, anyways). Do they really deserve the right to shut down the competition on top of that?
If they wish to continue to be rewarded on that same scale, they will need to continue to innovate just like everybody else. That is fair.
Taste of their own medicine? I take it you completely forgot about Nokia suing them, and Kodak before that? Or how about the company that sued them on the basis of the iPod's playlist?
To say that "Apple started it!" is extremely childish and naive.
But in the case of HTC and Samsung, Apple most certainly started it. It's like an elementary school. Some 6th grader beats up on a 4th grader, so he goes and picks on the 2nd graders. The 4th grader in question is no less a bully simply because he was bullied himself.
When Apple counter-sued Nokia, that was just perfectly reasonable self-defense. Nokia was the bad guy there. When they sued HTC with a collection of completely bogus patents simply because HTC had fewer patents for self-defense, Apple was being evil.
In the past few years we've seen some of the bigger and better-known names in tech resort to patent trolling simply because they find themselves falling behind their competitors due to a failure to innovate. Nokia, Microsoft and TiVo are all guilty. Apple, however, is about the only big name to start patent trolling before they hit their decline. They're doing it while on top. In that particular way, Apple's patent lawsuits are unique in the industry.
So while they certainly did not start the patent wars, they have definitely distinguished themselves with their misbehavior as of late and they undeniably did start the fights between HTC and Samsung.
What's unusual is that the Galaxy Tab looks and acts far less like an iPad than the Galaxy S does an iPhone. It's weird that they're gunning so hard after the tablet.
Unless Apple has a patent on the rectangle, I can't see how any court sees a resemblance. Their respective software doesn't look anything alike, and the form factor is basically the same as every tablet ever, including those that preceded the iPad.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I was a bit disappointed that the screen on my refurb unit had some blemishes, but on searching around I found that was fairly common and sending it back for a replacement was so likely to fix that (as I'd just get another dice roll on a refurb).
That aside, it does a pretty good job for everything I need it to do. People make a lot of noise about the iPad having more apps for tablets, but that's just really not a big deal. Ninety-nine percent of the use cases for a device like this just involves having a bigger screen for web browsing or video watching; the Nook Color with Cm7 handles this easily. The only app I really needed was Netflix, and it didn't take very much to make that work.
To be perfectly honest, since so much of what tablets are used for is web browsing, I can't imagine why anyone who didn't need the friendlier UI wouldn't prefer an android tablet. I absolutely LOVE that I have the option to use Flash when I need to. There's so much stuff you still just can't get any other way. Of course, Grandma might not love it so much since she wouldn't know how to switch it to "tap to enable" mode. I have an iPhone, and I'll probably replace it with another one--but I can't imagine I'll ever shell out for an iPad when I get so much more value out of an Android tablet in terms of cost and features.
The problem with articles relying on price estimates based on teardowns is that those are only semi-accurate when their current. Once they're a year old, like the iPad 2's estimate is, it's almost certainly way too high. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad 2 was actaully less expensive to build, at current prices, than the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Of course, Apple is less willing to accept a lower profit margin. They have less competition, since they're the only iOS tablet manufacturer.
So, connecting a MAC address to a physical home address is not personally identifiable? Putting that connection into a publicly accessible search engine like google.com does not qualify as a database? But location data stored only on your own phone & computer is not anonymous enough for you.
So you're concerned about the privacy implications of someone knowing the location and/or MAC address of your router? And again, it's no longer in a searchable database. Those queries were disabled. Why are you suddenly outraged about something so mundane now, and not years ago when Skyhook did it? Bottom line here, explain to me your worst case scenario. Give me some nightmare scenario that explains how this could have some negative impact on someone's life. If you can't, its not a privacy issue.
P.S. If you don't want Google having "your data", just login to your router, change the mac address to something new, and then put it on silent mode so that it doesn't announce itself. There's your opt-out, right there. Or, hell, put some encryption on it. The MAC address would be encrypted as well the payload with WPA (or even WEP if you just want to stop casual knowledge of your router's MAC address from getting out).
MAC addresses don't float around the packet. You don't need to store any payload data to get the address. It is at the same place every time. If you only want the MAC address (sender or receiver), you only get the MAC address because you only look at those specific bytes. There is nothing accidental about reading or storing payload data. Nor is there anything accidental about storing the physical address where you got that MAC address, connecting the two, and allowing everybody to search it.
No, they're at the front of the packet all the time, which is why each packet was truncated. We have someone who basically had some code that could parse MAC addresses, and some code from another project that was raw packet interception. Rather than taking the time to figure out EXACTLY which part of the packet he would need each time, he simply cut off all but the front few bytes (I believe it was the first 64 bytes) and dumped it into a file, then fed the file into a second program to parse out the MAC Addresses. He basically copied and pasted some code from a different project to make a quick and dirty solution.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It was a lazy, kludgey solution that some coder thought would save him a few hours of time writing some proper code that would have intercepted packets, checked their frame info to see if they were SSID announcements, parse to the mac address, then save only the mac address. He figured who would know the difference if the final output was the same? He didn't think it through, obviously.
Now you might say this means "Google did it on purpose", but clearly this is just one programmer not considering his actions, rather than an entire company acting with malice. You would be ignoring that there's no motive for Google to do this on purpose that makes any bit of sense, nor any explanation for why they would WANT to do this but then actively cripple their own data collection by truncating most of it. The level of ineptitude you're suggesting Google possesses if they did this on purpose is a few orders of magnitude greater than if they did it on accident.
Their defense was "ya we did it"? That is not a defense, that is "pleading guilty". Their defense is that unencrypted wireless networks are public conversation and thus not subject to wiretapping laws. What CNET is reporting in *this* article is confirmation of the presumption that client MAC addresses were recorded. No, its not a new angle, it is confirmation of a slightly older angle.
Again, no! You still are not getting it. They intentionally captured MAC addresses--capturing of private payload data was accidental. It's convoluted analogy time. It's
Actually, Option B is the easy one because Option B involves cutting and pasting, and then adding ONE line that truncates the packets. And then using a separate program later to parse the recorded data down to the relevant bits.
Option A involves actually writing stuff from scratch.
The programmer in question thought that B was the better answer because it would take him less time (by virtue of copy and paste) and the data was going to be machine parsed later to extract the relevant information. Rather than writing one fully-integreted cohesive solution, he copied and pasted to slap two separate ones together. It was lazyness, but the privacy implications probably never occured to him and nobody else really knew. Since the data was being machine parsed, it's not like anybody ever saw what was actually being recorded in it. Has it been more than 4 years since you just randomly opened a raw data file to see what was inside?
If you know programmers at all it really shouldn't surprise you to see something kludgey like this being done to save a few key strokes. Easier to mash two existing programs together than to write a new one, even if it clearly isn't the better option.
You're very confused. I have an iPhone myself, and I happen to like it very much--but lets all take our fanboy hats off and try to get some perspective on these two situations. If you view them from a distance, without letting your emotions for Apple into the picture, I think you'll agree they are VERY similar situations.
The iPhone was, for diagnostic reasons, recording cellphone tower data that ultimately equated to a log of its users locations. Apple's intent here was purely to be able to use the log file to diagnose and help fix phones sent to them for service. It was not malicious, but it *was* tracking. Because the log file existed, law enforcement agencies were collecting it from peoples phones without a warrant or pen register. This was problematic. Apple was not being malicious or TRYING to track its users, but that's effectively what happened. In other words, a poor design decision made by an Apple engineer led to a scenario with UNINTENDED privacy consequences.
As for the Google situation, Google wants to compete with a company called Skyhook. Skyhook uses a database of GPS coordinates combined with Wifi Router MAC addresses as a method of Geolocation for wifi-only devices. Each one of those MAC Addreses represents a wifi network that covers a specific geographic area. So if your wifi-only device can see 3 particular WiFI mac addresses, you can look into your database, figure out where those 3 networks overlap in the real world, and get a pretty good sense of where the wifi-only device (like an iPod Touch or a iPad) is even though it does not have GPS. Neat trick, right?
So Google wants to get in on that action. The first thing they need to is get their own database. That means basically going to each Lat/Long coord and recording what WIFI MAC addresses have reception in that location. Turns out, Google already has cars driving pretty much everywhere. Some smart guy somewhere says "Hang on, here's a thought, what if we had our cars that are already doing the mapping make this database. We could kill two birds with one stone!"
Good idea so far, right? There's just one problem, the Google engineer tasked with this gets lazy. He copies and pastes some raw packet capture code rather than write some from scratch. This code just captures EVERY packet--this is the simplest form of packet interception, not something you specifically have to "code for" as you say. Now all he wants is the MAC addresses, so he makes one tiny modification to this code causing it to truncate all but the first 64 bytes of the packet. This means MOST of the payload data is tossed out, and all the of the Mac addresses remain.
There's just one problem: Not ALL of the payload data is tossed out, and not ALL of the MAC Addresses are wifi routers sending out broadcast packets. Some of them are actually Mobile devices (which doesn't help Google's Geolocation database). So Google gets a lot of extra/unnecessary data. No big deal, right? Nobody will care, and the important thing is the code compiles and runs.
Now this is CLEARLY laziness/sloppiness and not malice. The fact that most of the payload data has been excluded (was truncated) is pretty solid proof of that. If Google was really after it, why would they only be logging a fraction of it and tossing the rest? Even after several years of this code running on Street View cars, they only had a few gigabytes of data total. It all fits on a single (small) hard drive. If you still think Google did this on purpose, you've only traded in your fanboy hat for a tinfoil one.
Neither one of these situations are intentional invasions of privacy, but ill-considered actions which lead to very unintentional privacy consequences. All of this, in both situations, was all very reasonable and seemingly very effective ways to complete a certain task--the consequences simply were not fully-considered beforehand.
Or they would have just deleted it? Or not turned it over? Germany didn't know it existed; they weren't looking for it. They were worried about the PICTURES being taken by streetview, not packet data. Google would have been breaking the law, of course, but how would they have been caught? They very probably would have gotten away with it.
What you've CLEARLY failed to grasp is that this story isn't new or news. It's just a different rehash of a VERY old story about Wifi Sniffing (somebody just realized that a packet that has payload data also shockingly has a MAC address with it and thinks we didn't already figure this out).
Google apologized many times, but they're done talking about it now. It's been a year. They probably apologized half a dozen times--hell they even got called before Congress (a long with Apple) and apologized there as well. Now if you're asking have they apologized for sniffing MAC addresses (and not the data they collected accidentally), then the answer is almost certainly no--nor should they.
Here are some other things you've failed to grasp:
1) MAC addresses are not personally identifiable information nor was the Apple data you quoted me on "anonymous". It, in fact, was personally identifiable because a database of device ID's for iPhones *does* exist, unlike MAC addresses.
2) Google doesn't allow you to "opt-out" because they already opted everyone out. They disabled this feature after the security researcher questioned pointed it out. You want to be "double opted-out"?
3) Google sniffed the MAC addresses on purpose. That was the whole point of the sniffing. They've never, ever denied that (nor should they, its a perfectly legitimate and useful thing to do--Skyhook does the same thing and that's why your iPod touch can locate itself without having GPS). What they didn't realize was that they also hadn't fully truncated the payload data of the packets they sniffed to get at the MAC addresses. Because the packet data they recorded was MACHINE PARSED (to extract the MAC addresses), nobody realized the extra data was there. If they had been recording it on purpose, however, they wouldn't have been truncating packets *at all*.
4) Of course those mac addresses were recorded! Of course they were used in Google maps. Google has said this all along. It was their DEFENSE, not something they were ashamed of. CNET is reporting on something that was eminently obvious to everyone when the initial story broke, assuming it's some shocking new angle when it's simply not.
You simply don't have a very good handle of the facts, but I don't blame you--very few people do. They go off half-cocked, read poorly-researched articles by CNET and then assume they know what happened.
I keep seeing this opinion on Slashdot, and I guess that it must be due to some incorrect belief that Google proactively stepped forward and admitted what happened, when the opposite is true.
Not true. Germany wanted to audit Street view. They had no idea about the packet sniffing. When Google was asked, they did their own internal audit first to find out what the German audit would reveal. That is when this issue was discovered, and that is when Google came forward with it. Nobody outside of Google had the slightest inkling of this sort of issue, and had Google simply deleted the data at that time (as I'm sure many companies would have), it's very likely that nobody would know about it now. Instead, they did the right thing.
Google's data collection occurred over 2006-2010, a period of four years in which they archived over 600 gigabytes of data. Four years. That's a long time to not be aware that your own software is sniffing everything. You're really telling me they never did a test run and noticed that they were archiving everything in range?
Each of the recorded packets was truncated, removing *MOST* but not all of the payload data. Google was after MAC addresses in order to create a Skyhook competitor. So most of the recorded data is data Google DID intend to record, and not data they did not intend to record.
Furthermore, there's a huge difference between saying that "Google didn't know" and "Nobody at Google knew". I'm just as positive that somebody at Google knew as I am that Google itself did not know. The thing is, the person at Google who knew, didn't think anything of it. The privacy implications just never occurred to them. The data was "mostly" cleaned of payload data and never actually seen by human eyes, merely automatically parsed to extract MAC addresses. The coder who set the whole thing up just got sloppy/lazy and didn't really consider the implications of his approach.
Furthermore, Google only admitted to the issue under threat of investigation by German regulators. Otherwise, you would have never known about it, and it's likely the data collection would have continued. What likely happened is that, internally, Google ignored the privacy issue because, like many Slashdotters, they incorrectly assumed that any publicly accessible network is fair game and that it's not their problem if it ends up in the recorded data. When they realized the information would be seen by German regulators and that it would create a public controversy, they suddenly acted as if they didn't know what was going on and that it was all a big accident they were trying to rectify through honesty.
Even if it was an accident, it's a criminally negligent one. But come on. Four years of accidental data collection? To believe that requires a level of gullibility that's never afforded to Microsoft or Apple around here. Let's be open about it--there is a pro-Google bias on Slashdot in which they are given the benefit of the doubt in all situations while their competitors are chastised for lesser flaws.
Your cynicism simply doesn't fit the facts. If Google was as evil as you think, we'd have never known about any of this. They revealed it before any German auditors had seen anything. It would have been so easy to cover their trail. We're talking about ONE hard drive's worth data at *Google* of all places. That's such an insignificant amount of data. How could such a tiny bit of *FRAGMENTARY* data (remember most of each packet was truncated before it was recorded) be a motive for Google to expose itself to this sort of scrutiny and liability? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It would be like suspecting Bill Gates of mugging a panhandler.
As for a pro-Google bias on Slashdot, every story posted by Timothy is pretty strongly anti-google, and he posts A LOT of stories. Check the history.
Google wants to collect MAC addresses. They do that on purpose. But they don't want mobile MAC addresses. They want FIXED ones, because that's what helps them Geolocate. Again, this all traces back to the same lazy coder who just copy and pasted some packet sniffing code into his project without bothering to change it to be smart enough to only record open wifi routers broadcast packets or to properly truncate the packet down to the MAC address. Instead he just had it take EVERY packet, keep the first 64 bytes, and dump the rest. This resulted in useless mobile MAC addresses also being recorded along with all the payload data that got Google into so much trouble.
Apple's issues were fairly similar to be honest, in both instances it was bad coding/poor-judgment by engineers creating bad privacy practices that were, in both cases, largely overblown in the media. Google, to its credit, at least had the decency to step up and say "Yeah, our mistake. We're sorry." while Steve Jobs COMPLETELY DENIED that the iPhone tracked users. In my book, that makes him a big liar. Apple's weasely response, no doubt, would be that if the data doesn't get uploaded to them its not really "tracking". But, practically speaking, that argument doesn't hold any water since the record is created, sometimes (but not always) finds it way to Apple, and its existence creates a liability for its users even if it isn't in Apple's hands. Neither company was being malicious or trying to invade their user's privacy, but at least Google showed a lot more forthrightness and honesty while Apple tried to hide the issue.
It already has. This is the same story for eons ago rehashed in yet another way with absolutely no new information whatsoever. Obviously, if we had payload data it wasn't from routers, so obviously there had to be MAC Addresses that weren't from routers either. We already knew all of this months and months and months ago and it caused at least as big of an uproar back then as the Apple location thing. In fact, it was bigger--since we still have governments investigating Google over this while Apple largely skated by unnoticed (other than some congressional testimony).
Well, we already know how this happened and Google's explanation was pretty reasonable and simple--but it all boiled down to sloppy coding, which I suppose is a sort of 'evil'. But at least then it's just one persons' own evilness, and not an entire companies. Oh, sure, some conspiracy theorists still think Google did this all on purpose, but those theories really don't fit the facts very well.
Then change the MAC addresses. It's public information that you broadcast. If you're not OK with it, don't do it. Put your network on silent mode, or set up some encryption. Skyhook has been doing this for years before Google was doing it. This is how it's possible to Geolocate a person when their on Wifi with a Wifi-only device. iPad's, for instance, depend on it.
But the fact is, your MAC address is not tied to you in the same way your IP address is. I can't go to your ISP and demand they tell me which customer has which MAC address, they don't know. I can't go to Apple and ask which iPhone owner's phone uses a specific address. Unless someone gets ahold of your phone and looks up the MAC address in the settings, there's no way for anyone to correlate this information back to you.
So we have had Google's explanation for what happened, and how a coder got lazy and just modified some existing packet capture software (which captured all packets, instead of just the ones used by networks to announce themselves). Rather than actually writing some simple routines to select which packets to record and properly remove all the payload data, he simply let it record every packet with *most* of it truncated. This left the MAC address and sometimes a portion of the payload data behind.
We all knew all this months and months ago. We knew that some of the payload data came from people using their computers/laptops/phones on WiFi networks. Does it take a super genius to realize that if they packets came from phones/laptops, and the payloads came from phones/laptops, that some of the MAC addresses might also come from those same phones/laptops? This is the same story once again rehashed and repackaged. There's absolutely 0 new information here. CNET might not have realized this was eminently obvious with the details of the original story, but most technically oriented people did.
And honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Your MAC address can't be traced back to you. It's more or less anonymous. Unless somebody has had access to your device, there's no way to tie the MAC address to you--and if that prospect concerns you, just change it. In Windows it's just a simple registry tweak to make your MAC address anything you want.
We've already heard the method they were using for capturing MAC addresses and how sloppy it was. We already knew they were collecting random packets, then truncating them to include the MAC Address and a small portion of the payload and then saving them. We know some of those payloads include packets sent by people GASP on their phones or laptops, therefore it stands to reason some of the MAC addresses must also be from those phones and laptops. We knew this months and months and months ago, but apparently CNET didn't make the connection so easily.
It's like we just keep rehashing the same old story over and over and over because nobody understood it the first time, and someone comes and puts a new spin on old data and suddenly it lives again. The thing is, you can change a registry key and change your MAC address. There's no big table of data somewhere that connects your MAC address to specific person. It's not even remotely the same as an IP address. Oh sure, you can say "Hey the MAC address of this device on my network matches the one on my network yesterday" but not "Hey, that's my neighbors MAC address" unless you've got some sort of access to the device in question.
So Google may know that a certain device was one place and also another place, but that's about the extent of the correlations they can really make with this data. Again, just as before, there's no reason to assume malice when sloppy coding is much more logical explanation. Google has nothing to gain and much to lose (PR-wise) by doing something like this on purpose, and a very reasonable and believable explanation was offered. Conspiracy theorists can continue to beat this dead horse if they like, but I'm an Occam's razor fan.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be one thing if we were talking about the source code that made the API function, but we're not. We're just talking about the idea of the API itself which is something Sun put out there explicitly for people to use (admittedly they wanted you to use THEIR virtual machine--not one written by Google). It may not be what they had in mind, but it's not as if Android is competing against Sun's VM so there's no real harm here. At the end of the day it's just a money grab by a company that bought Sun and is now growing increasingly irrelevant.
They looked at Apple's specs and said "Ok, we can make ours thinner than theirs by 1mm so we're the thinnest." That's not the same as "Ok, we can make ours look enough like theirs to confuse consumers into thinking their buying an iPad when they buy our product" which is the entire basis for Apple's claim here. They're saying they look so much alike people are confused. What's even more silly is the Galaxy tab comes in 3 different sizes.
Before Apple came into the field, everyone had 20+ years to come up with a phone / tablet design to shake the industry. Even with with the few players that gave up quickly, everyone else did NOTHING!
And Apple did nothing too. Why do you suppose that was? Oh wait, we know why--Steve Jobs himself told us the technology just wasn't ready yet. So perhaps the proliferation of smartphones post iPhone has less to do with everyone copying Apple and more to do with the fact that their time had simply come--as evidenced by the iPhone and all the rest. The fact that the iPhone and LG Prada phone look almost identical seems to be solid evidence of this theory. Smartphones were just headed in that direction, regardless of whole stole the crown.
Not that Apple didn't innovate. They certainly did. Their use of multiple sensors (ambient light, accelerometer, and later Gyroscope) turned out to be extremely influential and useful. And certainly they were among the first to use capacitive touch screens--though its not quite clear to me if that technology was going to supplant resistive either way or not.
Now Apple comes in with their iPhone and iPad and SUDDENLY everyone's products now looks like an iPhone and iPad. That is no coincidence at all.
Well first of all, plenty look and feel quite different. There are quite a few different shapes and sizes represented in the non-Apple camp.
Again, the Prada Phone actually proves you wrong. Other phones coming down the pipes already looked like the iPhone. That was the way we were headed. And Android phones were getting progressively bigger and bigger when the iPad was announced. It was inevitable that someone would have said "I do believe I'd like a 10 inch version of this for when I'm in the bathroom". Hell, look at the chumby. It was coming one way or the other.
Slashdot's Android fanboys are just delusional.
Irony!
It's no surprise that the Android OS itself is now in front of the gun barrel with patent and licensing violations, including Google's own internal messages that they knew Android's Java implementation was essentially stolen.
To be fair, they were talking about licensing in those emails. Not the patents for Java, but Java itself. That is, using Sun's own VM. They opted to do their own implementation instead (Dalvik). Their lawyers felt that if they did their own VM they'd be fine, legally-speaking. The lawsuit is over the patents, which is not quite the same issue, but Oracle's lawyers are happy to confuse it. We'll all just have to wait and see how that whole debacle pans out.
This is not bad for consumers. This is actually good for them because it will force Samsung to ACTUALLY COME UP WITH ITS OWN STUFF! Who knows? It might even be better!
Bro, it's a rectangle. The whole basis here is that it "looks" like an iPad. That's all. Are you telling me Apple invented the rectangle? I mean, common. It looks like every other tablet ever. Don't be silly.
Bottom line: Apple violates just as many patents as everybody else. You literally cannot build *anything* without violating someone's patent. Most companies know this, and so they aren't suing. They hold on to their patents in a defensive stance because they know that suing just means getting sued. Trust me, you do not want to live in the world where everybody is being held to the same standards Apple wants to hold Samsung to.
Mod me down, Android fans. That doesn't make your uncritical love of Google's ecosystem any less retarded.
Irony . . . overwhelming. Can't . . . go on. Tell my wife I love Android . . .
Apple has a patent on rectangles now, apparently. That's basically the only two things these devices share in common. Their UI's are nothing alike.
Yes, which means after 19 years you make a slightly modification and refile it and get a 20 year extension. Patents are basically forever, now in our current broken system.
Nope. The Samsung tablet in question bears no resemblance to the iPad in terms of software. Yes, there is a Touchwiz UI on their PHONES which looks pretty similar to the iPhone, but in the tablet space the ONLY similarity is the shape. Apple has successfully stopped sales of Samsungs tablet in Europe because apparently Apple owns the rights to the rectangle, now. That's pretty much the entire basis of their claim for the *tablet*, and that's all the judge considered. They're both similarly-sized rectangles. That's it.
First off, "single-handedly" is hyperbole. Clearly there have been lots of innovations in the arena of smartphones, and not all of them have come from Apple. In fact the last iOS update alone is proof of that, as a couple dozen of its most prominent new features are borrowed innovations (each one just as patentable as the weak patents Apple sued HTC with) from other smartphone manufacturers.
That aside, you are on the one hand saying that we owe Apple a great debt for their innovations because the quality of all the other products on the market place has increased significantly as a result of them, and on the other hand giving legitimacy to their attempts have those very same products REMOVED from the market. "We've been benefited so much from Apple's innovations, they deserve the right to take those benefits away from us as a reward." What Apple deserves for those innovations are the billions and billions and billions of dollars they have made and will continue to make going forward as a result of those products. They have been richly rewarded with unprecedented profits--they've been so wildly successful they even passed Exxon as the single highest-valued corporation in the world (for a bit, anyways). Do they really deserve the right to shut down the competition on top of that?
If they wish to continue to be rewarded on that same scale, they will need to continue to innovate just like everybody else. That is fair.
Taste of their own medicine? I take it you completely forgot about Nokia suing them, and Kodak before that? Or how about the company that sued them on the basis of the iPod's playlist?
To say that "Apple started it!" is extremely childish and naive.
But in the case of HTC and Samsung, Apple most certainly started it. It's like an elementary school. Some 6th grader beats up on a 4th grader, so he goes and picks on the 2nd graders. The 4th grader in question is no less a bully simply because he was bullied himself.
When Apple counter-sued Nokia, that was just perfectly reasonable self-defense. Nokia was the bad guy there. When they sued HTC with a collection of completely bogus patents simply because HTC had fewer patents for self-defense, Apple was being evil.
In the past few years we've seen some of the bigger and better-known names in tech resort to patent trolling simply because they find themselves falling behind their competitors due to a failure to innovate. Nokia, Microsoft and TiVo are all guilty. Apple, however, is about the only big name to start patent trolling before they hit their decline. They're doing it while on top. In that particular way, Apple's patent lawsuits are unique in the industry.
So while they certainly did not start the patent wars, they have definitely distinguished themselves with their misbehavior as of late and they undeniably did start the fights between HTC and Samsung.
What's unusual is that the Galaxy Tab looks and acts far less like an iPad than the Galaxy S does an iPhone. It's weird that they're gunning so hard after the tablet.
Unless Apple has a patent on the rectangle, I can't see how any court sees a resemblance. Their respective software doesn't look anything alike, and the form factor is basically the same as every tablet ever, including those that preceded the iPad.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I was a bit disappointed that the screen on my refurb unit had some blemishes, but on searching around I found that was fairly common and sending it back for a replacement was so likely to fix that (as I'd just get another dice roll on a refurb).
That aside, it does a pretty good job for everything I need it to do. People make a lot of noise about the iPad having more apps for tablets, but that's just really not a big deal. Ninety-nine percent of the use cases for a device like this just involves having a bigger screen for web browsing or video watching; the Nook Color with Cm7 handles this easily. The only app I really needed was Netflix, and it didn't take very much to make that work.
To be perfectly honest, since so much of what tablets are used for is web browsing, I can't imagine why anyone who didn't need the friendlier UI wouldn't prefer an android tablet. I absolutely LOVE that I have the option to use Flash when I need to. There's so much stuff you still just can't get any other way. Of course, Grandma might not love it so much since she wouldn't know how to switch it to "tap to enable" mode. I have an iPhone, and I'll probably replace it with another one--but I can't imagine I'll ever shell out for an iPad when I get so much more value out of an Android tablet in terms of cost and features.
The problem with articles relying on price estimates based on teardowns is that those are only semi-accurate when their current. Once they're a year old, like the iPad 2's estimate is, it's almost certainly way too high. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad 2 was actaully less expensive to build, at current prices, than the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Of course, Apple is less willing to accept a lower profit margin. They have less competition, since they're the only iOS tablet manufacturer.
So, connecting a MAC address to a physical home address is not personally identifiable? Putting that connection into a publicly accessible search engine like google.com does not qualify as a database? But location data stored only on your own phone & computer is not anonymous enough for you.
So you're concerned about the privacy implications of someone knowing the location and/or MAC address of your router? And again, it's no longer in a searchable database. Those queries were disabled. Why are you suddenly outraged about something so mundane now, and not years ago when Skyhook did it? Bottom line here, explain to me your worst case scenario. Give me some nightmare scenario that explains how this could have some negative impact on someone's life. If you can't, its not a privacy issue.
P.S. If you don't want Google having "your data", just login to your router, change the mac address to something new, and then put it on silent mode so that it doesn't announce itself. There's your opt-out, right there. Or, hell, put some encryption on it. The MAC address would be encrypted as well the payload with WPA (or even WEP if you just want to stop casual knowledge of your router's MAC address from getting out).
MAC addresses don't float around the packet. You don't need to store any payload data to get the address. It is at the same place every time. If you only want the MAC address (sender or receiver), you only get the MAC address because you only look at those specific bytes. There is nothing accidental about reading or storing payload data. Nor is there anything accidental about storing the physical address where you got that MAC address, connecting the two, and allowing everybody to search it.
No, they're at the front of the packet all the time, which is why each packet was truncated. We have someone who basically had some code that could parse MAC addresses, and some code from another project that was raw packet interception. Rather than taking the time to figure out EXACTLY which part of the packet he would need each time, he simply cut off all but the front few bytes (I believe it was the first 64 bytes) and dumped it into a file, then fed the file into a second program to parse out the MAC Addresses. He basically copied and pasted some code from a different project to make a quick and dirty solution.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It was a lazy, kludgey solution that some coder thought would save him a few hours of time writing some proper code that would have intercepted packets, checked their frame info to see if they were SSID announcements, parse to the mac address, then save only the mac address. He figured who would know the difference if the final output was the same? He didn't think it through, obviously.
Now you might say this means "Google did it on purpose", but clearly this is just one programmer not considering his actions, rather than an entire company acting with malice. You would be ignoring that there's no motive for Google to do this on purpose that makes any bit of sense, nor any explanation for why they would WANT to do this but then actively cripple their own data collection by truncating most of it. The level of ineptitude you're suggesting Google possesses if they did this on purpose is a few orders of magnitude greater than if they did it on accident.
Their defense was "ya we did it"? That is not a defense, that is "pleading guilty". Their defense is that unencrypted wireless networks are public conversation and thus not subject to wiretapping laws. What CNET is reporting in *this* article is confirmation of the presumption that client MAC addresses were recorded. No, its not a new angle, it is confirmation of a slightly older angle.
Again, no! You still are not getting it. They intentionally captured MAC addresses--capturing of private payload data was accidental. It's convoluted analogy time. It's
Actually, Option B is the easy one because Option B involves cutting and pasting, and then adding ONE line that truncates the packets. And then using a separate program later to parse the recorded data down to the relevant bits.
Option A involves actually writing stuff from scratch.
The programmer in question thought that B was the better answer because it would take him less time (by virtue of copy and paste) and the data was going to be machine parsed later to extract the relevant information. Rather than writing one fully-integreted cohesive solution, he copied and pasted to slap two separate ones together. It was lazyness, but the privacy implications probably never occured to him and nobody else really knew. Since the data was being machine parsed, it's not like anybody ever saw what was actually being recorded in it. Has it been more than 4 years since you just randomly opened a raw data file to see what was inside?
If you know programmers at all it really shouldn't surprise you to see something kludgey like this being done to save a few key strokes. Easier to mash two existing programs together than to write a new one, even if it clearly isn't the better option.
You're very confused. I have an iPhone myself, and I happen to like it very much--but lets all take our fanboy hats off and try to get some perspective on these two situations. If you view them from a distance, without letting your emotions for Apple into the picture, I think you'll agree they are VERY similar situations.
The iPhone was, for diagnostic reasons, recording cellphone tower data that ultimately equated to a log of its users locations. Apple's intent here was purely to be able to use the log file to diagnose and help fix phones sent to them for service. It was not malicious, but it *was* tracking. Because the log file existed, law enforcement agencies were collecting it from peoples phones without a warrant or pen register. This was problematic. Apple was not being malicious or TRYING to track its users, but that's effectively what happened. In other words, a poor design decision made by an Apple engineer led to a scenario with UNINTENDED privacy consequences.
As for the Google situation, Google wants to compete with a company called Skyhook. Skyhook uses a database of GPS coordinates combined with Wifi Router MAC addresses as a method of Geolocation for wifi-only devices. Each one of those MAC Addreses represents a wifi network that covers a specific geographic area. So if your wifi-only device can see 3 particular WiFI mac addresses, you can look into your database, figure out where those 3 networks overlap in the real world, and get a pretty good sense of where the wifi-only device (like an iPod Touch or a iPad) is even though it does not have GPS. Neat trick, right?
So Google wants to get in on that action. The first thing they need to is get their own database. That means basically going to each Lat/Long coord and recording what WIFI MAC addresses have reception in that location. Turns out, Google already has cars driving pretty much everywhere. Some smart guy somewhere says "Hang on, here's a thought, what if we had our cars that are already doing the mapping make this database. We could kill two birds with one stone!"
Good idea so far, right? There's just one problem, the Google engineer tasked with this gets lazy. He copies and pastes some raw packet capture code rather than write some from scratch. This code just captures EVERY packet--this is the simplest form of packet interception, not something you specifically have to "code for" as you say. Now all he wants is the MAC addresses, so he makes one tiny modification to this code causing it to truncate all but the first 64 bytes of the packet. This means MOST of the payload data is tossed out, and all the of the Mac addresses remain.
There's just one problem: Not ALL of the payload data is tossed out, and not ALL of the MAC Addresses are wifi routers sending out broadcast packets. Some of them are actually Mobile devices (which doesn't help Google's Geolocation database). So Google gets a lot of extra/unnecessary data. No big deal, right? Nobody will care, and the important thing is the code compiles and runs.
Now this is CLEARLY laziness/sloppiness and not malice. The fact that most of the payload data has been excluded (was truncated) is pretty solid proof of that. If Google was really after it, why would they only be logging a fraction of it and tossing the rest? Even after several years of this code running on Street View cars, they only had a few gigabytes of data total. It all fits on a single (small) hard drive. If you still think Google did this on purpose, you've only traded in your fanboy hat for a tinfoil one.
Neither one of these situations are intentional invasions of privacy, but ill-considered actions which lead to very unintentional privacy consequences. All of this, in both situations, was all very reasonable and seemingly very effective ways to complete a certain task--the consequences simply were not fully-considered beforehand.
Or they would have just deleted it? Or not turned it over? Germany didn't know it existed; they weren't looking for it. They were worried about the PICTURES being taken by streetview, not packet data. Google would have been breaking the law, of course, but how would they have been caught? They very probably would have gotten away with it.
What you've CLEARLY failed to grasp is that this story isn't new or news. It's just a different rehash of a VERY old story about Wifi Sniffing (somebody just realized that a packet that has payload data also shockingly has a MAC address with it and thinks we didn't already figure this out).
Google apologized many times, but they're done talking about it now. It's been a year. They probably apologized half a dozen times--hell they even got called before Congress (a long with Apple) and apologized there as well. Now if you're asking have they apologized for sniffing MAC addresses (and not the data they collected accidentally), then the answer is almost certainly no--nor should they.
Here are some other things you've failed to grasp:
1) MAC addresses are not personally identifiable information nor was the Apple data you quoted me on "anonymous". It, in fact, was personally identifiable because a database of device ID's for iPhones *does* exist, unlike MAC addresses.
2) Google doesn't allow you to "opt-out" because they already opted everyone out. They disabled this feature after the security researcher questioned pointed it out. You want to be "double opted-out"?
3) Google sniffed the MAC addresses on purpose. That was the whole point of the sniffing. They've never, ever denied that (nor should they, its a perfectly legitimate and useful thing to do--Skyhook does the same thing and that's why your iPod touch can locate itself without having GPS). What they didn't realize was that they also hadn't fully truncated the payload data of the packets they sniffed to get at the MAC addresses. Because the packet data they recorded was MACHINE PARSED (to extract the MAC addresses), nobody realized the extra data was there. If they had been recording it on purpose, however, they wouldn't have been truncating packets *at all*.
4) Of course those mac addresses were recorded! Of course they were used in Google maps. Google has said this all along. It was their DEFENSE, not something they were ashamed of. CNET is reporting on something that was eminently obvious to everyone when the initial story broke, assuming it's some shocking new angle when it's simply not.
You simply don't have a very good handle of the facts, but I don't blame you--very few people do. They go off half-cocked, read poorly-researched articles by CNET and then assume they know what happened.
I keep seeing this opinion on Slashdot, and I guess that it must be due to some incorrect belief that Google proactively stepped forward and admitted what happened, when the opposite is true.
Not true. Germany wanted to audit Street view. They had no idea about the packet sniffing. When Google was asked, they did their own internal audit first to find out what the German audit would reveal. That is when this issue was discovered, and that is when Google came forward with it. Nobody outside of Google had the slightest inkling of this sort of issue, and had Google simply deleted the data at that time (as I'm sure many companies would have), it's very likely that nobody would know about it now. Instead, they did the right thing.
Google's data collection occurred over 2006-2010, a period of four years in which they archived over 600 gigabytes of data. Four years. That's a long time to not be aware that your own software is sniffing everything. You're really telling me they never did a test run and noticed that they were archiving everything in range?
Each of the recorded packets was truncated, removing *MOST* but not all of the payload data. Google was after MAC addresses in order to create a Skyhook competitor. So most of the recorded data is data Google DID intend to record, and not data they did not intend to record.
Furthermore, there's a huge difference between saying that "Google didn't know" and "Nobody at Google knew". I'm just as positive that somebody at Google knew as I am that Google itself did not know. The thing is, the person at Google who knew, didn't think anything of it. The privacy implications just never occurred to them. The data was "mostly" cleaned of payload data and never actually seen by human eyes, merely automatically parsed to extract MAC addresses. The coder who set the whole thing up just got sloppy/lazy and didn't really consider the implications of his approach.
Furthermore, Google only admitted to the issue under threat of investigation by German regulators. Otherwise, you would have never known about it, and it's likely the data collection would have continued. What likely happened is that, internally, Google ignored the privacy issue because, like many Slashdotters, they incorrectly assumed that any publicly accessible network is fair game and that it's not their problem if it ends up in the recorded data. When they realized the information would be seen by German regulators and that it would create a public controversy, they suddenly acted as if they didn't know what was going on and that it was all a big accident they were trying to rectify through honesty.
Even if it was an accident, it's a criminally negligent one. But come on. Four years of accidental data collection? To believe that requires a level of gullibility that's never afforded to Microsoft or Apple around here. Let's be open about it--there is a pro-Google bias on Slashdot in which they are given the benefit of the doubt in all situations while their competitors are chastised for lesser flaws.
Your cynicism simply doesn't fit the facts. If Google was as evil as you think, we'd have never known about any of this. They revealed it before any German auditors had seen anything. It would have been so easy to cover their trail. We're talking about ONE hard drive's worth data at *Google* of all places. That's such an insignificant amount of data. How could such a tiny bit of *FRAGMENTARY* data (remember most of each packet was truncated before it was recorded) be a motive for Google to expose itself to this sort of scrutiny and liability? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It would be like suspecting Bill Gates of mugging a panhandler.
As for a pro-Google bias on Slashdot, every story posted by Timothy is pretty strongly anti-google, and he posts A LOT of stories. Check the history.
Google wants to collect MAC addresses. They do that on purpose. But they don't want mobile MAC addresses. They want FIXED ones, because that's what helps them Geolocate. Again, this all traces back to the same lazy coder who just copy and pasted some packet sniffing code into his project without bothering to change it to be smart enough to only record open wifi routers broadcast packets or to properly truncate the packet down to the MAC address. Instead he just had it take EVERY packet, keep the first 64 bytes, and dump the rest. This resulted in useless mobile MAC addresses also being recorded along with all the payload data that got Google into so much trouble.
Apple's issues were fairly similar to be honest, in both instances it was bad coding/poor-judgment by engineers creating bad privacy practices that were, in both cases, largely overblown in the media. Google, to its credit, at least had the decency to step up and say "Yeah, our mistake. We're sorry." while Steve Jobs COMPLETELY DENIED that the iPhone tracked users. In my book, that makes him a big liar. Apple's weasely response, no doubt, would be that if the data doesn't get uploaded to them its not really "tracking". But, practically speaking, that argument doesn't hold any water since the record is created, sometimes (but not always) finds it way to Apple, and its existence creates a liability for its users even if it isn't in Apple's hands. Neither company was being malicious or trying to invade their user's privacy, but at least Google showed a lot more forthrightness and honesty while Apple tried to hide the issue.
It already has. This is the same story for eons ago rehashed in yet another way with absolutely no new information whatsoever. Obviously, if we had payload data it wasn't from routers, so obviously there had to be MAC Addresses that weren't from routers either. We already knew all of this months and months and months ago and it caused at least as big of an uproar back then as the Apple location thing. In fact, it was bigger--since we still have governments investigating Google over this while Apple largely skated by unnoticed (other than some congressional testimony).
Well, we already know how this happened and Google's explanation was pretty reasonable and simple--but it all boiled down to sloppy coding, which I suppose is a sort of 'evil'. But at least then it's just one persons' own evilness, and not an entire companies. Oh, sure, some conspiracy theorists still think Google did this all on purpose, but those theories really don't fit the facts very well.
Then change the MAC addresses. It's public information that you broadcast. If you're not OK with it, don't do it. Put your network on silent mode, or set up some encryption. Skyhook has been doing this for years before Google was doing it. This is how it's possible to Geolocate a person when their on Wifi with a Wifi-only device. iPad's, for instance, depend on it.
But the fact is, your MAC address is not tied to you in the same way your IP address is. I can't go to your ISP and demand they tell me which customer has which MAC address, they don't know. I can't go to Apple and ask which iPhone owner's phone uses a specific address. Unless someone gets ahold of your phone and looks up the MAC address in the settings, there's no way for anyone to correlate this information back to you.
So we have had Google's explanation for what happened, and how a coder got lazy and just modified some existing packet capture software (which captured all packets, instead of just the ones used by networks to announce themselves). Rather than actually writing some simple routines to select which packets to record and properly remove all the payload data, he simply let it record every packet with *most* of it truncated. This left the MAC address and sometimes a portion of the payload data behind.
We all knew all this months and months ago. We knew that some of the payload data came from people using their computers/laptops/phones on WiFi networks. Does it take a super genius to realize that if they packets came from phones/laptops, and the payloads came from phones/laptops, that some of the MAC addresses might also come from those same phones/laptops? This is the same story once again rehashed and repackaged. There's absolutely 0 new information here. CNET might not have realized this was eminently obvious with the details of the original story, but most technically oriented people did.
And honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Your MAC address can't be traced back to you. It's more or less anonymous. Unless somebody has had access to your device, there's no way to tie the MAC address to you--and if that prospect concerns you, just change it. In Windows it's just a simple registry tweak to make your MAC address anything you want.
We've already heard the method they were using for capturing MAC addresses and how sloppy it was. We already knew they were collecting random packets, then truncating them to include the MAC Address and a small portion of the payload and then saving them. We know some of those payloads include packets sent by people GASP on their phones or laptops, therefore it stands to reason some of the MAC addresses must also be from those phones and laptops. We knew this months and months and months ago, but apparently CNET didn't make the connection so easily.
It's like we just keep rehashing the same old story over and over and over because nobody understood it the first time, and someone comes and puts a new spin on old data and suddenly it lives again. The thing is, you can change a registry key and change your MAC address. There's no big table of data somewhere that connects your MAC address to specific person. It's not even remotely the same as an IP address. Oh sure, you can say "Hey the MAC address of this device on my network matches the one on my network yesterday" but not "Hey, that's my neighbors MAC address" unless you've got some sort of access to the device in question.
So Google may know that a certain device was one place and also another place, but that's about the extent of the correlations they can really make with this data. Again, just as before, there's no reason to assume malice when sloppy coding is much more logical explanation. Google has nothing to gain and much to lose (PR-wise) by doing something like this on purpose, and a very reasonable and believable explanation was offered. Conspiracy theorists can continue to beat this dead horse if they like, but I'm an Occam's razor fan.