Android has a cache of recently used locations that is overwritten fairly regularly. This information stays on the device. You need root level access to read the data.
Apple is maintaining a database of locations that extends back for months. This information is transferred off the device. From here, anyone can read the data with a simple application.
Also, the services that Google uses to track you are opt-in. You have to expressly accept the terms and conditions when install/first use Google applications. Apple did not make it known that they were even doing this.
Hush now, don't ruin a good anti-Apple flamefest. You're not giving the haters
As per my sig,
"Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument."
I can't help but be slightly baffled by the hordes of people who seem to think that Apple is somehow more powerful in the world of computing than Microsoft or that they are "more evil" than MS has ever been.
Nope, they are easily 20 times more evil then MS, they are just 20 times smaller. Perhaps that is why you are baffled.
Apple like lock-in far more then MS. Apple feel the need to control every aspect of the product. Apple dictate you must buy their hardware, Apple dictate you must distribute applications by their distribution channel, Apple dictate what browser you are permitted to use, Apple dictate that flash is not permitted regardless of if you want it or not. MS has done nothing of the sort. They never even tried to cripple Steam when GFWL was floundering, MySQL runs fine on Windows Server.
I'm no fan of MS but they aren't intrinsically evil, MS are greedy and evil is merely a side effect. If saving kittens was highly profitable, MS would be the foremost kitten recovery service in the world. All Microsoft wants is your wallet, once you've paid your yearly Danegeld MS will leave you be until next year. Apple on the other hand want your wallet, mind, body and soul. Complete control no matter how much you pay them.
That what I never understood about "fiscal conservatives" how can we save money if we have a new cost, namely profit margin. Until I hear a reasonable answer anyone who wants to offload government duties to a corporation will be just plain stupid in my book.
Most will complain about governmental efficiency and claim that the profit margin is easily covered by increases in efficiency.
This argument ignores three things.
1: Government departments are not that inefficient. There are a few bad examples that get constantly dragged up but on the whole, they perform their functions as well as most private entities. Lets take postal services vs couriers. For some reason the private sector cannot complete with the likes of Royal Mail, Australia Post and USPS, especially for low priority mail.
2: You can apply a corporate structure to a government department, this is done quite a bit in Australia and we call it "corporatisation". This separates departments from bureaucracy by forming their own executive leadership. The government effectively becomes the (only) shareholder. What people forget is that corporations also generate a lot of internal bureaucracy and will ignore inefficiency as long as it's not affecting the bottom line.
3: There's no profit to be found in government services. This is why so few private entities offering these services exist. A private security force could not operate as a general police force without a severe dip in services. A corporation can abandon a suburb when costs outweigh profits, the police cannot do this.
Because of this, "fiscal conservatives" and libertarians also put in my pants on head retarded column.
BTW, do we really want the tax office to become as ruthless as a corporation when it comes to collecting revenue?
They do not do things by the book. There is no book. The corruption, the nepotism, the thuggery, the ridiculous government-endorsed racism, the sheer idiocy and ignorance....
Welcome to Asia mate.
That's commonplace in every SE Asian nation. Thailand for Thais, Malaysia for Malays, Vietnam for Viets. Compared to their neighbours, Malaysia is quite open to foreigners considering I can buy land and my first car is tax free.
Corruption and graft is an economy in itself, but that's how things get done over there. Yep it's highly inefficient (which is why I laugh at the people who constantly whine about western governmental inefficiency) but it's cultural.
Yeah, nobody freaks out about the government being in charge of postal mail, and that's actively scanned by xray. And, there are always alternatives if you don't like it.
I don't really mind that Aust Post scans the mail I send through it, they have strict privacy policies they must adhere to and as the GGP pointed out, no incentive to actively snoop on me. Besides, X-Rays aren't really capable of telling what I wrote and all incoming mail is scanned by customs regardless of who is carrying it when it enters the country.
If I did have a problem with Aust Post I could easily use the more expensive options like couriers.
So if the Aussie government were to offer me a free ozemail.au account, I wouldn't be suspicious as this is exactly what a government is meant to do, provide infrastructure. Now whether I'd use its another question, such a service would have to provide significant advantages over Gmail considering both services would be free.
* Apple is selling pretty much every iPhone they can make.
Then why sue the company on whom, your technology is dependent.
If this is true (which it isn't, the shortage of Iphones is a delusion of Fanboys, I can go out and buy one myself in six hours if I hated my wallet (12:56 +8 GMT, no 24 Hour phone shops here))
* the iPhone (in various versions) is the single top-selling phone model, bar none. While overall, yes Android *phones* are selling equal-to-better, no single Android model is anywhere close to matching the iPhone. Therefore, why would Apple bother to chase just Samsung, and not LG, HTC, or a larger phone maker?
A sign of things to come.
It's the same as Windows vs Mac, Windows ran on anyones hardware, providing a standardised environment which could be used to run any application. Android is the same. A single application can be made to run across multiple versions and disparate hardware.
Apple are right to be scared, it's the 80's all over again, complete with the "look and feel" law suit.
* Suing over design won't achieve the premise in TFA... phone makers will just make it look/feel different to work around the stated patent(s). If Apple was truly chasing the goal of crippling Android as a whole, they'd be better off going after the *core* of Android (like, well, Oracle is doing. Speaking of which...)
Why?
Becuase Google can defend itself. That alone will scare Apple off.
Why else?
Because Apple and Google were close once, attack Google directly and all kinds of skeletons would fly out of the closet.
Why really?
Because they dont have to. If they can scare the manufacturers away, Google will piss away money on the Android project to no avail.
In other words Apple has too much to lose by attacking Google.
* Oracle is already working towards something that would achieve the same thing, but to provide Oracle an income stream - so why would Apple feel it had to do something similar, when Oracle is already doing it for them, and has been running that lawsuit long before Apple fired a shot across Samsung's bow?
But Apple already has something that generates an income stream. What you've unwittingly pointed out is that they are suing to protect that stream from a very advanced competitor.
Apple want to have a competitor eliminated. They cannot do it via technology so they are attempting to use the legal system as a cudgel.
(remember that Apple designed the A4, not Samsung).
Remember that Samsung designed the core, not Apple.
Shifting to a different core would cost them, not as much as trying to get another fab up and running in short order, not to mention lost sales.
What would lost sales do to the APPL share price? Considering its a share that pays 0 dividends. Financially minded owners would liquidate it in seconds, and that's most of APPL shareholders.
It's a cache that doesn't overwrite itself or roll every x days.
Meh. You want to nitpick semantics, go ahead. But like I said: how often is the location of a cell tower going to change? You really think that X days from now the tower might have been moved somewhere else, so that you'd better flush your old data and figure out the location again?
I sure as hell hope you aren't a developer.
If you are let me know who you work for, I never want to be one of your clients.
The point of a cache is to make future searches faster, this means holding the last few records, perhaps even 100 or the number of records for x minutes/hours/days depending on the size, relevance or how the data changes. The information Apple was collecting was lasting for months. Months, I've passed through at least 30 towers today, connected to 4 WiFi networks, multiply that by months. A cache should have rolled an a week, maybe two.
Delude yourself if you want, but I'll have not part in it. This is no mere cache, the sheer size of it defeats that purpose. A cache must be small to be effective.
I think it's because, with all the talk coming from Australia about censoring the internet, and all the actual banning of games they do, it's kind of surprising that Australia made it that high.
Why did it choose to mention who is number Four, as opposed to, say, number 26 on the charts? Why not say "US leads in Internet Freedom"? Is there a private conversation here that/.'ers aren't seeing? Or do I need my morning coffee?
Submitter here,
The article I based the submission on, is an Australian site. I chose the headline to dispel largely held beliefs amongst non-Australian/.ers. It is sad, I agree but people need to understand that there is no government enforced ISP censorship in Australia. It was defeated in Parliament 2 years ago, but is mentioned on/. to this very day.
It's the equivalent of me calling the US a rebellious British colony, which of course has been untrue for hundreds of years.
Failing to criticize our national governments simply because others do worse guarantees a slow creep towards that worse behaviour
Submitter here,
I agree with that point and dont think I could have put it any better.
The eyes of Australia's entire IT industry are on Senator Conroy like a hawk, the Labor party who proposed filtering in 2008 faced a revolt from their own back bench over the policy in 2009 and it failed to pass because the Greens and Independents voted against it.
My point with this submission, was to dispel the myth about the non-existent so called "great Australian firewall". But you also have a very valid point.
Likewise with my Nexus S. I know it tracks itself, because I have joined Latitude and keep my GPS turned on, but I can opt out of Latitude and disable the GPS, so it can't track itself. And at least I own that device, unlike the iStuff, which I apparently only lease from Apple...
In fact, you have to expressly opt in to lattitude by installing the latitude application.
I haven't not because I fear the Google (they are at least honest about why they collect my data) but simply because I dont use it.
Why would you think Apple would not permit WebM in a browser?
Apple is heavily in bed with MPEG-LA with a large stake in the license fees collected by H.264 licensing. MPEG-LA are also trying to sue Google for patent infringement on WebM.
Also Apple is doing everything within it's power to prevent Android from advancing (well advancing faster then it is) such as the recent Samsung suit.
Apple's browser complies with other open standards.
Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard in ages.
KHTML made Webkit open, Google made Webkit usable.
Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front.
"Hey, let's deliberately prevent our users from accessing the single largest content provider in the world as part of our pissing contest with Google over meaningless more-or-less identical (to the end user) media formats
Very good way of putting it.
But it's not like Apple or MS have a history of trying to foist their own standards by building them in to their products and it's not like Apple hasn't got a history of blocking something they don't like even when their customers want it.
Considering that iUsers already have to open a separate (Google provided) application to view you tube videos, Google will simply roll the codec in there and they wont lose the views from iUsers, the question is, when Android can use the browser, will Apple lose iUsers?
If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.
The format troops will be home by Christmas.
Unfortunately I dont share your optimism here. Google may have launched a veritable operation Overlord with WebM but the Axis of MPEG wont give up that easily.
Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front. Lets just face it, not being able to watch a video in the browser and having to open a separate application is just a pain in the butt, even on Android with supports true multitasking. Apple wont permit WebM to be in the browser and I'm not sure if MS will permit an alternate browser on WP7.
The desktop battle is trivial, the allies of Firefox and Chrome have already got dominance on the desktop, it's on the phone that the battle will be waged.
This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end but perhaps it is the end of the beginning.
I've carried on the war analogy a bit far haven't I?
The problem is that most of the stable orbits for a planet in a binary system result in very hot temperatures for part of it's orbit and freezing for the rest of the orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
Android has a cache of recently used locations that is overwritten fairly regularly. This information stays on the device. You need root level access to read the data.
Apple is maintaining a database of locations that extends back for months. This information is transferred off the device. From here, anyone can read the data with a simple application.
Also, the services that Google uses to track you are opt-in. You have to expressly accept the terms and conditions when install/first use Google applications. Apple did not make it known that they were even doing this.
As per my sig,
"Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument."
Nope, they are easily 20 times more evil then MS, they are just 20 times smaller. Perhaps that is why you are baffled.
Apple like lock-in far more then MS. Apple feel the need to control every aspect of the product. Apple dictate you must buy their hardware, Apple dictate you must distribute applications by their distribution channel, Apple dictate what browser you are permitted to use, Apple dictate that flash is not permitted regardless of if you want it or not. MS has done nothing of the sort. They never even tried to cripple Steam when GFWL was floundering, MySQL runs fine on Windows Server.
I'm no fan of MS but they aren't intrinsically evil, MS are greedy and evil is merely a side effect. If saving kittens was highly profitable, MS would be the foremost kitten recovery service in the world. All Microsoft wants is your wallet, once you've paid your yearly Danegeld MS will leave you be until next year. Apple on the other hand want your wallet, mind, body and soul. Complete control no matter how much you pay them.
Most will complain about governmental efficiency and claim that the profit margin is easily covered by increases in efficiency.
This argument ignores three things.
1: Government departments are not that inefficient. There are a few bad examples that get constantly dragged up but on the whole, they perform their functions as well as most private entities. Lets take postal services vs couriers. For some reason the private sector cannot complete with the likes of Royal Mail, Australia Post and USPS, especially for low priority mail.
2: You can apply a corporate structure to a government department, this is done quite a bit in Australia and we call it "corporatisation". This separates departments from bureaucracy by forming their own executive leadership. The government effectively becomes the (only) shareholder. What people forget is that corporations also generate a lot of internal bureaucracy and will ignore inefficiency as long as it's not affecting the bottom line.
3: There's no profit to be found in government services. This is why so few private entities offering these services exist. A private security force could not operate as a general police force without a severe dip in services. A corporation can abandon a suburb when costs outweigh profits, the police cannot do this.
Because of this, "fiscal conservatives" and libertarians also put in my pants on head retarded column.
BTW, do we really want the tax office to become as ruthless as a corporation when it comes to collecting revenue?
Welcome to Asia mate.
That's commonplace in every SE Asian nation. Thailand for Thais, Malaysia for Malays, Vietnam for Viets. Compared to their neighbours, Malaysia is quite open to foreigners considering I can buy land and my first car is tax free.
Corruption and graft is an economy in itself, but that's how things get done over there. Yep it's highly inefficient (which is why I laugh at the people who constantly whine about western governmental inefficiency) but it's cultural.
Yeah, nobody freaks out about the government being in charge of postal mail, and that's actively scanned by xray. And, there are always alternatives if you don't like it.
I don't really mind that Aust Post scans the mail I send through it, they have strict privacy policies they must adhere to and as the GGP pointed out, no incentive to actively snoop on me. Besides, X-Rays aren't really capable of telling what I wrote and all incoming mail is scanned by customs regardless of who is carrying it when it enters the country.
If I did have a problem with Aust Post I could easily use the more expensive options like couriers.
So if the Aussie government were to offer me a free ozemail.au account, I wouldn't be suspicious as this is exactly what a government is meant to do, provide infrastructure. Now whether I'd use its another question, such a service would have to provide significant advantages over Gmail considering both services would be free.
...bit of a problem or four in it, though:
* Apple is selling pretty much every iPhone they can make.
Then why sue the company on whom, your technology is dependent.
If this is true (which it isn't, the shortage of Iphones is a delusion of Fanboys, I can go out and buy one myself in six hours if I hated my wallet (12:56 +8 GMT, no 24 Hour phone shops here))
* the iPhone (in various versions) is the single top-selling phone model, bar none. While overall, yes Android *phones* are selling equal-to-better, no single Android model is anywhere close to matching the iPhone. Therefore, why would Apple bother to chase just Samsung, and not LG, HTC, or a larger phone maker?
A sign of things to come. It's the same as Windows vs Mac, Windows ran on anyones hardware, providing a standardised environment which could be used to run any application. Android is the same. A single application can be made to run across multiple versions and disparate hardware. Apple are right to be scared, it's the 80's all over again, complete with the "look and feel" law suit.
* Suing over design won't achieve the premise in TFA... phone makers will just make it look/feel different to work around the stated patent(s). If Apple was truly chasing the goal of crippling Android as a whole, they'd be better off going after the *core* of Android (like, well, Oracle is doing. Speaking of which...)
Why?
Becuase Google can defend itself. That alone will scare Apple off.
Why else?
Because Apple and Google were close once, attack Google directly and all kinds of skeletons would fly out of the closet. Why really?
Because they dont have to. If they can scare the manufacturers away, Google will piss away money on the Android project to no avail.
In other words Apple has too much to lose by attacking Google.
* Oracle is already working towards something that would achieve the same thing, but to provide Oracle an income stream - so why would Apple feel it had to do something similar, when Oracle is already doing it for them, and has been running that lawsuit long before Apple fired a shot across Samsung's bow?
But Apple already has something that generates an income stream. What you've unwittingly pointed out is that they are suing to protect that stream from a very advanced competitor.
Apple want to have a competitor eliminated. They cannot do it via technology so they are attempting to use the legal system as a cudgel.
(remember that Apple designed the A4, not Samsung).
Remember that Samsung designed the core, not Apple.
Shifting to a different core would cost them, not as much as trying to get another fab up and running in short order, not to mention lost sales.
What would lost sales do to the APPL share price? Considering its a share that pays 0 dividends. Financially minded owners would liquidate it in seconds, and that's most of APPL shareholders.
Meh. You want to nitpick semantics, go ahead. But like I said: how often is the location of a cell tower going to change? You really think that X days from now the tower might have been moved somewhere else, so that you'd better flush your old data and figure out the location again?
I sure as hell hope you aren't a developer.
If you are let me know who you work for, I never want to be one of your clients.
The point of a cache is to make future searches faster, this means holding the last few records, perhaps even 100 or the number of records for x minutes/hours/days depending on the size, relevance or how the data changes. The information Apple was collecting was lasting for months. Months, I've passed through at least 30 towers today, connected to 4 WiFi networks, multiply that by months. A cache should have rolled an a week, maybe two.
Delude yourself if you want, but I'll have not part in it. This is no mere cache, the sheer size of it defeats that purpose. A cache must be small to be effective.
Whether you like it or not, it is a database.
The question is, why would Apple be keeping a database on an Iphone users movements?
So you're saying the iPhone is mostly harmless, then.
No, I said "mostly useless" but I understand that the words get switched around when you machine translate it to Vogon and back again.
So far as I can tell, this data is basically just a cache of the stuff the Assisted GPS would otherwise have to go fetch via slower means.
It's a cache that doesn't overwrite itself or roll every x days.
Wait, didn't we used to call that a database.
Apple responded to this issue back in July of 2010. The major fuck up is that the file is not encrypted.
And the fact it's synced to another device. And the fact that they've already altered the EULA to permit them to share precise location data with third parties. http://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-change-apple-knows-your-phone-is-and-is-telling-people.html
I think it's because, with all the talk coming from Australia about censoring the internet, and all the actual banning of games they do, it's kind of surprising that Australia made it that high.
Yep, that's exactly why I submitted the article.
Why did it choose to mention who is number Four, as opposed to, say, number 26 on the charts? Why not say "US leads in Internet Freedom"? Is there a private conversation here that /.'ers aren't seeing? Or do I need my morning coffee?
Submitter here, The article I based the submission on, is an Australian site. I chose the headline to dispel largely held beliefs amongst non-Australian /.ers. It is sad, I agree but people need to understand that there is no government enforced ISP censorship in Australia. It was defeated in Parliament 2 years ago, but is mentioned on /. to this very day.
It's the equivalent of me calling the US a rebellious British colony, which of course has been untrue for hundreds of years.
Submitter here,
I agree with that point and dont think I could have put it any better.
The eyes of Australia's entire IT industry are on Senator Conroy like a hawk, the Labor party who proposed filtering in 2008 faced a revolt from their own back bench over the policy in 2009 and it failed to pass because the Greens and Independents voted against it.
My point with this submission, was to dispel the myth about the non-existent so called "great Australian firewall". But you also have a very valid point.
Likewise with my Nexus S. I know it tracks itself, because I have joined Latitude and keep my GPS turned on, but I can opt out of Latitude and disable the GPS, so it can't track itself. And at least I own that device, unlike the iStuff, which I apparently only lease from Apple...
In fact, you have to expressly opt in to lattitude by installing the latitude application. I haven't not because I fear the Google (they are at least honest about why they collect my data) but simply because I dont use it.
Why would you think Apple would not permit WebM in a browser?
Apple is heavily in bed with MPEG-LA with a large stake in the license fees collected by H.264 licensing. MPEG-LA are also trying to sue Google for patent infringement on WebM. Also Apple is doing everything within it's power to prevent Android from advancing (well advancing faster then it is) such as the recent Samsung suit.
Apple's browser complies with other open standards.
Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard in ages.
KHTML made Webkit open, Google made Webkit usable.
Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front.
"Hey, let's deliberately prevent our users from accessing the single largest content provider in the world as part of our pissing contest with Google over meaningless more-or-less identical (to the end user) media formats
Very good way of putting it.
But it's not like Apple or MS have a history of trying to foist their own standards by building them in to their products and it's not like Apple hasn't got a history of blocking something they don't like even when their customers want it. Considering that iUsers already have to open a separate (Google provided) application to view you tube videos, Google will simply roll the codec in there and they wont lose the views from iUsers, the question is, when Android can use the browser, will Apple lose iUsers?
The converse is worse: being forced to use a browser to watch videos, especially via, flash is a pain.
Explain.
Thought not. You're just bashing flash for no reason because it's the "in" thing to do.
Why does no one use a separate application for youtube on the desktop if using a browser to view YouTube is so horrible an experience?
Your point is not very well though out. Especially considering that dozens of applications that can view you tube are now available (VLC for one).
Step 4: Massive anti-trust fines!
Step 5: here you go Mr DOJ, the full specifications for the WebM format, in exactly the way we've implanted them, oh and have some source code too.
I've got enough for you too Mr EU, dont you worry.
Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM
Step 4: Profit (cmon, this is the one time this meme is appropriate, Google want to make a profit from YouTube).
If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.
The format troops will be home by Christmas.
Unfortunately I dont share your optimism here. Google may have launched a veritable operation Overlord with WebM but the Axis of MPEG wont give up that easily.
Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front. Lets just face it, not being able to watch a video in the browser and having to open a separate application is just a pain in the butt, even on Android with supports true multitasking. Apple wont permit WebM to be in the browser and I'm not sure if MS will permit an alternate browser on WP7.
The desktop battle is trivial, the allies of Firefox and Chrome have already got dominance on the desktop, it's on the phone that the battle will be waged.
This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end but perhaps it is the end of the beginning.
I've carried on the war analogy a bit far haven't I?
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just block all robot traffic to expertsexchange,
What if someone wants a sex change?
Are you suggesting they should get it done by armatures?
Those plants would be seriously goth.
How much more black could this plant be, none, none more black.
The problem is that most of the stable orbits for a planet in a binary system result in very hot temperatures for part of it's orbit and freezing for the rest of the orbit.
So a lot like Canada then?
When does Canada have very hot weather.
If there's more light energy to be collected, maybe they have enough energy to be mobile. But then they wouldn't be plants, they'd be Triffids.
There, fixed that for you.