Haven't all Apple drones been outfitted with anal probes anyway?
No, but they do have mindwave receiver plates implanted in their parietal lobes (individuals with the potential to become full-blown Apple fanboys are identified early during prenatal testing, with the plates installed shortly after birth. It's a minor procedure, actually.) The parents of children so outfitted are rarely even aware of anything unusual about their offspring, except for an unexplainable attraction to shiny objects, a fascination with all things "Mac", and an odd tendency to repeat the letter "i".
During times of crisis (for example, when the iPhone antenna problems were discovered, or the first multitasking Android phones appeared), rationalization signals are broadcast, keeping the Apple-using population from suffering any undue cognitive pressure due to corporate PR problems. "It's no problem, really, I just hold the phone with my teeth, like this" or "why would you want multitasking anyway?" It's a kindness, really.
Under ordinary circumstances, however, this capability is used as a revenue-enhancer, and is known colloquially as the "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field."
RTFA! Apple do not need location information for my Mac Pro, yet they collect it. We're not just talking about phones here.
Well, sure. The information is just as useful to them, it's just that they probably won't need to collect it from your personal computer again unless the router's MAC address or external IP change (indicating that possibly you've moved.) Although, actually, GeoIP-type services can tell a lot just from your IP. The question in my mind is how accurately do they need to place you in order to do whatever it is they want to do with your location?
A database of where I was last week/month/year has very little benefit to advertisers.
You are short on imagination. If I know what you are doing now, and I know what you were doing last year, then I can try to identify people who will be doing what you are doing now based on the similarity of what they're doing now to what you were doing a year ago and sell them stuff that you buy now.
Thank you, Mr. Paranoid, for my fourth laugh of the day reading the comments in this article.
Yeeaaah, right. When your soon-to-be ex-wife's lawyer subpoenas your iPhone and has an expert witness read out that log in open court, demonstrating very clearly that said phone (and presumably its owner) were precisely located at a Ms. Tiffany O'Rourke's three-bedroom ranch on 34 of the last 37 days that you were supposedly "working late", I suspect you might change your tune. Especially after your ex takes you for every penny you've got.
Or at least, maybe you might start deleting that file on a regular basis, assuming that you don't need root permissions to do so. Just another reason to have control over what's stored on your own property. Hell, when I went out to choose my new Android phone a few months ago, I made damn sure it was rootable first (and rooted it as soon as I got it back home.) Furthermore, if Apple was going to keep that file indefinitely, the very least they could have done was to properly encrypt it. You'd then have some control over where that information ends up: at least some cop or lawyer couldn't just demand your phone and have it squeal on you. If Apple had done that one simple thing, we wouldn't be talking about this now.
Does the iPhone actually have such a button (in general, not just relating to tagging pictures)?
I'm not an iPhone owner, so I don't know from personal experience, but I believe that this discussions revolves around this tracking and logging occurring regardless of user settings. That's why it's so bad.
I've explained it before, I will never buy Apple again. I bought into the hype some years ago, and regret each and every purchase for various reasons.
Good for you. I mean that. I know several people who have been through similar experiences and should have regretted those decisions but, somehow, seem unbothered by them.
On a separate note all divorce lawyers are going to love using this data now:-)
Good one, but your comment highlights the importance of data security. Hell, the Tollway where I live uses a transponder system to collect tolls and keeps that data indefinitely: pretty much any lawyer can request that information. Apparently, it's already been used in a number of cases like the kind you mention, so it's not just criminal activity and police investigations that you have to worry about when it comes to location logging. So yeah, that pocket-sized personal computer we're all carrying can definitely squeal on us if it's not programmed correctly.
Misinformed would be my guess. Lying at that level has consequences that most corporations don't want to face, so he was probably misiniformed, and the manager that told him that was probably unaware of the security implications anyway. It's still gonna bite them in the ass though.
I just wish the Android phones didn't feel so cheaply built.
There's quite a range of Android products, so you don't get to say *all* Android phones. I have an HTC Vision (e.g. T-Mobile G2) and it's anything but cheaply built. Bit of a tank, actually... heavier than most because of the metal enclosure. "Feels" a hell of a lot more solid than the iPhone. Has a nice slide-out keyboard as well, although frankly I use that less than I thought I would (mostly when typing in a console display.) Easy to root, very clear display, integrated CPU/GPU combo. Overclocks extremely well: stock clock is 800 Mhz, but I run it at 1.2 Ghz with the Interactive CPU governor enabled. HTC makes some nice phones, so I'd definitely check them out if you're considering a switch.
Another nice thing about Android is that you aren't stuck with the user interface provided by the phone vendor. Android supports so-called "home apps", and there are number of excellent home app replacements for Android which can give you an entirely different experience. Theme support is there. Is it an iPhone? No... but it's competitive, better in some respects (like, heh, privacy) and as a user it gives you a lot more options, a lot more control.
Also, as you may have gathered from my other posts, I'm a big fan of Cyanogenmod, the premier third-party Android distro out there. Faster, more stable, more featureful than the stock firmware, and it's had a LOT of eyes on the codebase (which is readily available from Github), eyes not beholden to either Google or the carriers. Steve Kondik and his crew didn't focus on glitter (they left that to the GUI people) but did focus on performance and reliability, and there they've done a hell of a job.
Though the lawsuits against Google are almost entirely from slimy class action lawyers trying to make a buck, not anyone *actually* materially hurt by any specific practice/incident.
It's called a "deep pockets" lawsuit, and is a big part of why large corporations (and rich individuals) have lots of lawyers on hand.
Are you new to the debate game? You're supposed to let people know who you are in a public debate. Just FYI.
Why? I'm not posting A.C. but you don't really need to know who I am to have a conversation. What you need is a valid (or at least interesting) perspective with maybe some useful facts to go along with it.
In my case, I don't even use the stock Android firmware (I'm running Cyanogenmod, as it happens) and given how many developers have been over that codebase, replacing large swaths of it, the odds of some sneaky little tracking routine surviving are pretty close to zero. That's part of why I don't use stock firmware anymore (among many other reasons) and won't even consider an Apple wireless product. Or one from Microsoft for that matter. And if such had been uncovered, it would have been cause for a major backlash against Google. So I doubt there's anything like that in there: too big a risk. If there is some nasty bit of GPS action going on, it's most likely in the radio blob, which is proprietary in most phones, and not under Google or the carrier's control anyway. Face it, Google is (correctly, I think) banking on the implicit tradeoff here: people will give up some privacy (which isn't all that important to most people anyway) for Google services based upon that data. They really don't need to be sneaky: how many people really even give a damn about this issue other than privacy watchdogs and some Slashdotters? The untold millions of unwashed Facebook users certainly don't, and a lot of them have Android and iPhones.
Oh, right, hardware is transmitting data not including OS in the process. And this totally escapes sniffers on the network people set up to see what's being transmitted. Another tinfoil hat technology in motion?
Well, the radio blob in most smartphones is vendor proprietary. My Android phone has a couple of ARMs in it: one runs Android and the other runs the radios. At this point I don't believe that HTC has open-sourced the radio firmware yet, so I suppose it would be possible for the firmware to transmit GPS data without the OS being aware of it, however that would require an impressive conspiracy between HTC and Google (or HTC and the carriers, or maybe HTC and Google and the carriers.) But yeah, I suspect that somebody would have picked upon that by now. It would be, well, News for Nerds.
Remember we're talking about a Corporation here, not a person (despite the fact that they are equivalent in the USA, this does not apply everywhere). While I as a person have certain rights in terms of freedoms, it does not follow that Google has the same rights. Under Canadian law they don't and in fact have additional restrictions that a person does not have.
So what may be perfectly legal for you or I to do by ourselves may not be legal for us to do as a representative of a corporation.
Min
Sure, which does not in the least change the fact that your Wi-Fi access point is doing what it's doing whether you want it to or not, leaving the possibility of interception and logging, legal or otherwise. If that bothers you... turn off the goddamn WAP.
Try taking a photograph of a landmark building with an expensive looking camera. Make sure it's a rental, because the cops might break it while you're resisting arrest.
You're right about that, insane as it is. Copyright abuse isn't just for record labels anymore.
I'm sorry, but you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you're broadcasting it in clear text for anybody to intercept. The reality is that
The reality is that Google flat out denied that they were collecting any data but what was needed for their location services - just days before the news broke that they lied. Ohh, "accidently" stored more data than they needed. Which they weren't aware of. Despite storing it in their database.
So what? If you don't want the data logged, don't broadcast it. The protocol permits that information to be intercepted by anyone, and if that bothers you, maybe you shouldn't be using Wi-Fi in the first place.
How is this acceptable to the myriad people who expected privacy from setting the secure bit on their routers?
"Stupid is a stupid does, sir." You get what you pay for, and if you can't be bothered to learn the rudiments of the technology you use, you shouldn't be using it. And "privacy" is a loaded term: Google wasn't cracking anybody's system, wasn't logging private information, wasn't breaking any encryption, they were logging plaintext broadcasts.
If you don't want even that minimal information tracked then turn off your goddamn router, or encase your premises in screen wire. And in any event, this is about Apple: we've already beat Google to death on this one.
Seeing how the internet is the cloud where else do you expect internet sites to go?
No, if you throw a packet into the "cloud" known as the Internet, it usually comes out where you wanted it to go, and you don't need to know the path it took to get there. "Cloud computing" is an entirely different concept (or, rather, a set of somewhat related concepts that mean different things to different people.) The Internet just schleps data from here to there.
And kudos to the Army for sponsoring this. It's the least they could do to support their sons and daughters who give life and, in many cases, limb for their country.
Actually, if you look at the history of medicine (especially emergency medicine) it owes a lot to the military. Many civilians are alive today because of the R&D investments made by military forces around the world.
I wonder, though, if we hadn't been spending so many of our resources on breaking windows in other countries, how much more science and medical technology we could have potentially developed by today.
That's a common outlook, but it's frequently wrong. The reality is that the military in most developed countries can demand tremendous resources, and apply them to pure research efforts. Obviously, the intent is to increase military capability in most cases (and certainly being able to preserve the lives of trained soldiers is one of them) but the public often benefits from the knowledge gained. The kind of investment big governments can afford is rarely seen in the private sector (which doesn't look beyond the next stock report) and it applies to a broad spectrum of efforts in everything from electronics, medicine, near-space development, nuclear technology and many others. Fact is, there's nothing like a good high-tech war to advance science on multiple fronts very, very quickly. Yes, it's expensive, in terms of both money and lives, but there it is. World War II sent us decades ahead of where we would have been if we hadn't had to defeat enemies with at least as much on the ball as we had. Doesn't even have to be a shooting war either: the Cold War encouraged both sides to spend billions on R&D, and much of the technology you take for granted nowadays came directly from those conflicts.
You would think they would be able to do better than 90%. With that accuracy you would fall down the stairs at least 1 out of every 10 times you go down them.
I recently dumped the C-Leg for a general mechanical leg because it drove me nuts how I had no say how the C-Leg tried to guess what I was doing... and if it didn't know, it would go into geriactric safety mode. I don't plan on using another knee that I have to recharge until this kind of tech actually comes to fruitation. I have a feeling it will be another 5 to 10 years.
I'd say you're right... they're going to have to do better than that. Training and experience will help, as will improvements to the firmware that runs the things. There's going to have to be something fairly sophisticated in there, some kind of expert system that can make correct judgments about what the user is trying to do even in the face of occasional bad control input.
When you factor in the additional R&D required, plus the time it takes to get FDA approval for something like this, five or ten years is probably a good guess. I think it's going to happen though. Did you ever read Heinlein's Starship Troopers? Not the stupid movie they made from it. The powered prosthetics the teacher was wearing were an apt description of the end result of this research.
It's finally happening. We've seen this in so many shows, but this time it's actually real.
But please go ahead and get your jokes and references in. I'll start: Ghost in the Shell, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fullmetal Alchemist
Maybe. But they're gonna need a lot better batteries before this really gets popular. Steve Austin's limbs were nuclear-powered, remember... he didn't have to worry about low-battery warnings. Fuel-cells maybe: if it runs out, just pop in another propane cylinder.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't all Apple drones been outfitted with anal probes anyway?
No, but they do have mindwave receiver plates implanted in their parietal lobes (individuals with the potential to become full-blown Apple fanboys are identified early during prenatal testing, with the plates installed shortly after birth. It's a minor procedure, actually.) The parents of children so outfitted are rarely even aware of anything unusual about their offspring, except for an unexplainable attraction to shiny objects, a fascination with all things "Mac", and an odd tendency to repeat the letter "i".
During times of crisis (for example, when the iPhone antenna problems were discovered, or the first multitasking Android phones appeared), rationalization signals are broadcast, keeping the Apple-using population from suffering any undue cognitive pressure due to corporate PR problems. "It's no problem, really, I just hold the phone with my teeth, like this" or "why would you want multitasking anyway?" It's a kindness, really.
Under ordinary circumstances, however, this capability is used as a revenue-enhancer, and is known colloquially as the "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field."
RTFA! Apple do not need location information for my Mac Pro, yet they collect it. We're not just talking about phones here.
Well, sure. The information is just as useful to them, it's just that they probably won't need to collect it from your personal computer again unless the router's MAC address or external IP change (indicating that possibly you've moved.) Although, actually, GeoIP-type services can tell a lot just from your IP. The question in my mind is how accurately do they need to place you in order to do whatever it is they want to do with your location?
A database of where I was last week/month/year has very little benefit to advertisers.
You are short on imagination. If I know what you are doing now, and I know what you were doing last year, then I can try to identify people who will be doing what you are doing now based on the similarity of what they're doing now to what you were doing a year ago and sell them stuff that you buy now.
Never fear, I will eventually figure this out.
Thank you, Mr. Paranoid, for my fourth laugh of the day reading the comments in this article.
Yeeaaah, right. When your soon-to-be ex-wife's lawyer subpoenas your iPhone and has an expert witness read out that log in open court, demonstrating very clearly that said phone (and presumably its owner) were precisely located at a Ms. Tiffany O'Rourke's three-bedroom ranch on 34 of the last 37 days that you were supposedly "working late", I suspect you might change your tune. Especially after your ex takes you for every penny you've got.
Or at least, maybe you might start deleting that file on a regular basis, assuming that you don't need root permissions to do so. Just another reason to have control over what's stored on your own property. Hell, when I went out to choose my new Android phone a few months ago, I made damn sure it was rootable first (and rooted it as soon as I got it back home.) Furthermore, if Apple was going to keep that file indefinitely, the very least they could have done was to properly encrypt it. You'd then have some control over where that information ends up: at least some cop or lawyer couldn't just demand your phone and have it squeal on you. If Apple had done that one simple thing, we wouldn't be talking about this now.
Does the iPhone actually have such a button (in general, not just relating to tagging pictures)?
I'm not an iPhone owner, so I don't know from personal experience, but I believe that this discussions revolves around this tracking and logging occurring regardless of user settings. That's why it's so bad.
I've explained it before, I will never buy Apple again. I bought into the hype some years ago, and regret each and every purchase for various reasons.
Good for you. I mean that. I know several people who have been through similar experiences and should have regretted those decisions but, somehow, seem unbothered by them.
Weird.
On a separate note all divorce lawyers are going to love using this data now :-)
Good one, but your comment highlights the importance of data security. Hell, the Tollway where I live uses a transponder system to collect tolls and keeps that data indefinitely: pretty much any lawyer can request that information. Apparently, it's already been used in a number of cases like the kind you mention, so it's not just criminal activity and police investigations that you have to worry about when it comes to location logging. So yeah, that pocket-sized personal computer we're all carrying can definitely squeal on us if it's not programmed correctly.
Sewall was lying or badly misinformed.
Misinformed would be my guess. Lying at that level has consequences that most corporations don't want to face, so he was probably misiniformed, and the manager that told him that was probably unaware of the security implications anyway. It's still gonna bite them in the ass though.
I just wish the Android phones didn't feel so cheaply built.
There's quite a range of Android products, so you don't get to say *all* Android phones. I have an HTC Vision (e.g. T-Mobile G2) and it's anything but cheaply built. Bit of a tank, actually ... heavier than most because of the metal enclosure. "Feels" a hell of a lot more solid than the iPhone. Has a nice slide-out keyboard as well, although frankly I use that less than I thought I would (mostly when typing in a console display.) Easy to root, very clear display, integrated CPU/GPU combo. Overclocks extremely well: stock clock is 800 Mhz, but I run it at 1.2 Ghz with the Interactive CPU governor enabled. HTC makes some nice phones, so I'd definitely check them out if you're considering a switch.
... but it's competitive, better in some respects (like, heh, privacy) and as a user it gives you a lot more options, a lot more control.
Another nice thing about Android is that you aren't stuck with the user interface provided by the phone vendor. Android supports so-called "home apps", and there are number of excellent home app replacements for Android which can give you an entirely different experience. Theme support is there. Is it an iPhone? No
Also, as you may have gathered from my other posts, I'm a big fan of Cyanogenmod, the premier third-party Android distro out there. Faster, more stable, more featureful than the stock firmware, and it's had a LOT of eyes on the codebase (which is readily available from Github), eyes not beholden to either Google or the carriers. Steve Kondik and his crew didn't focus on glitter (they left that to the GUI people) but did focus on performance and reliability, and there they've done a hell of a job.
There is no indication that the data in the cache database is being transmitted to Apple.
dZ.
No, but if you think about it, the reason they're collecting and storing it on the phone is that some day they might want it. And there it is.
No, the reason they are spying on your location is to start working on location-aware advertisements. They want to out-Google Google...
Well, that will be interesting. Both companies are technically competent.
For them and there partners to sell us stuff they think we want or need for our own good
Our good doesn't come into play here. This is about increasing sales of products, whether we want them or not.
wooosh
Yeah. Did you get jet lag too?
Google gets away with calling their stuff "FOSS" while withholding the source.
Steve Kondik would probably disagree with you.
Though the lawsuits against Google are almost entirely from slimy class action lawyers trying to make a buck, not anyone *actually* materially hurt by any specific practice/incident.
It's called a "deep pockets" lawsuit, and is a big part of why large corporations (and rich individuals) have lots of lawyers on hand.
But a years worth (or more) of historical tracking is pointless.
Well. Maybe not pointless, exactly. But not of much use to the phone's user, I agree.
Are you new to the debate game? You're supposed to let people know who you are in a public debate. Just FYI.
Why? I'm not posting A.C. but you don't really need to know who I am to have a conversation. What you need is a valid (or at least interesting) perspective with maybe some useful facts to go along with it.
In my case, I don't even use the stock Android firmware (I'm running Cyanogenmod, as it happens) and given how many developers have been over that codebase, replacing large swaths of it, the odds of some sneaky little tracking routine surviving are pretty close to zero. That's part of why I don't use stock firmware anymore (among many other reasons) and won't even consider an Apple wireless product. Or one from Microsoft for that matter. And if such had been uncovered, it would have been cause for a major backlash against Google. So I doubt there's anything like that in there: too big a risk. If there is some nasty bit of GPS action going on, it's most likely in the radio blob, which is proprietary in most phones, and not under Google or the carrier's control anyway. Face it, Google is (correctly, I think) banking on the implicit tradeoff here: people will give up some privacy (which isn't all that important to most people anyway) for Google services based upon that data. They really don't need to be sneaky: how many people really even give a damn about this issue other than privacy watchdogs and some Slashdotters? The untold millions of unwashed Facebook users certainly don't, and a lot of them have Android and iPhones.
Oh, right, hardware is transmitting data not including OS in the process. And this totally escapes sniffers on the network people set up to see what's being transmitted. Another tinfoil hat technology in motion?
Well, the radio blob in most smartphones is vendor proprietary. My Android phone has a couple of ARMs in it: one runs Android and the other runs the radios. At this point I don't believe that HTC has open-sourced the radio firmware yet, so I suppose it would be possible for the firmware to transmit GPS data without the OS being aware of it, however that would require an impressive conspiracy between HTC and Google (or HTC and the carriers, or maybe HTC and Google and the carriers.) But yeah, I suspect that somebody would have picked upon that by now. It would be, well, News for Nerds.
Remember we're talking about a Corporation here, not a person (despite the fact that they are equivalent in the USA, this does not apply everywhere). While I as a person have certain rights in terms of freedoms, it does not follow that Google has the same rights. Under Canadian law they don't and in fact have additional restrictions that a person does not have.
So what may be perfectly legal for you or I to do by ourselves may not be legal for us to do as a representative of a corporation.
Min
Sure, which does not in the least change the fact that your Wi-Fi access point is doing what it's doing whether you want it to or not, leaving the possibility of interception and logging, legal or otherwise. If that bothers you ... turn off the goddamn WAP.
Try taking a photograph of a landmark building with an expensive looking camera. Make sure it's a rental, because the cops might break it while you're resisting arrest.
You're right about that, insane as it is. Copyright abuse isn't just for record labels anymore.
I'm sorry, but you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you're broadcasting it in clear text for anybody to intercept. The reality is that
The reality is that Google flat out denied that they were collecting any data but what was needed for their location services - just days before the news broke that they lied. Ohh, "accidently" stored more data than they needed. Which they weren't aware of. Despite storing it in their database.
So what? If you don't want the data logged, don't broadcast it. The protocol permits that information to be intercepted by anyone, and if that bothers you, maybe you shouldn't be using Wi-Fi in the first place.
How is this acceptable to the myriad people who expected privacy from setting the secure bit on their routers?
"Stupid is a stupid does, sir." You get what you pay for, and if you can't be bothered to learn the rudiments of the technology you use, you shouldn't be using it. And "privacy" is a loaded term: Google wasn't cracking anybody's system, wasn't logging private information, wasn't breaking any encryption, they were logging plaintext broadcasts.
If you don't want even that minimal information tracked then turn off your goddamn router, or encase your premises in screen wire. And in any event, this is about Apple: we've already beat Google to death on this one.
Seeing how the internet is the cloud where else do you expect internet sites to go?
No, if you throw a packet into the "cloud" known as the Internet, it usually comes out where you wanted it to go, and you don't need to know the path it took to get there. "Cloud computing" is an entirely different concept (or, rather, a set of somewhat related concepts that mean different things to different people.) The Internet just schleps data from here to there.
And kudos to the Army for sponsoring this. It's the least they could do to support their sons and daughters who give life and, in many cases, limb for their country.
Actually, if you look at the history of medicine (especially emergency medicine) it owes a lot to the military. Many civilians are alive today because of the R&D investments made by military forces around the world.
I wonder, though, if we hadn't been spending so many of our resources on breaking windows in other countries, how much more science and medical technology we could have potentially developed by today.
That's a common outlook, but it's frequently wrong. The reality is that the military in most developed countries can demand tremendous resources, and apply them to pure research efforts. Obviously, the intent is to increase military capability in most cases (and certainly being able to preserve the lives of trained soldiers is one of them) but the public often benefits from the knowledge gained. The kind of investment big governments can afford is rarely seen in the private sector (which doesn't look beyond the next stock report) and it applies to a broad spectrum of efforts in everything from electronics, medicine, near-space development, nuclear technology and many others. Fact is, there's nothing like a good high-tech war to advance science on multiple fronts very, very quickly. Yes, it's expensive, in terms of both money and lives, but there it is. World War II sent us decades ahead of where we would have been if we hadn't had to defeat enemies with at least as much on the ball as we had. Doesn't even have to be a shooting war either: the Cold War encouraged both sides to spend billions on R&D, and much of the technology you take for granted nowadays came directly from those conflicts.
You would think they would be able to do better than 90%. With that accuracy you would fall down the stairs at least 1 out of every 10 times you go down them.
I recently dumped the C-Leg for a general mechanical leg because it drove me nuts how I had no say how the C-Leg tried to guess what I was doing... and if it didn't know, it would go into geriactric safety mode. I don't plan on using another knee that I have to recharge until this kind of tech actually comes to fruitation. I have a feeling it will be another 5 to 10 years.
I'd say you're right ... they're going to have to do better than that. Training and experience will help, as will improvements to the firmware that runs the things. There's going to have to be something fairly sophisticated in there, some kind of expert system that can make correct judgments about what the user is trying to do even in the face of occasional bad control input.
When you factor in the additional R&D required, plus the time it takes to get FDA approval for something like this, five or ten years is probably a good guess. I think it's going to happen though. Did you ever read Heinlein's Starship Troopers? Not the stupid movie they made from it. The powered prosthetics the teacher was wearing were an apt description of the end result of this research.
It's finally happening. We've seen this in so many shows, but this time it's actually real.
But please go ahead and get your jokes and references in. I'll start: Ghost in the Shell, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fullmetal Alchemist
Maybe. But they're gonna need a lot better batteries before this really gets popular. Steve Austin's limbs were nuclear-powered, remember ... he didn't have to worry about low-battery warnings. Fuel-cells maybe: if it runs out, just pop in another propane cylinder.