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31 posts with tag “Apple”

No, your iPhone is not listening to you

There’s a lot of FUD going around about your phone listening to everything you say and selling that data to advertisers. This is wildly and irresponsibly misleading.

I can’t speak for Android phones because those things are the Wild West of APIs and outdated OSes and malware, so use Android phones at your own risk.

Here is the claim being made, in short:

Any third-party (non-Apple) app you have installed on your iPhone can record and remotely save conversations taking place within earshot of your iPhone, even when the app isn’t running (in the foreground or in the background), and even when the phone is sleeping.

This is patently false. Third-party iOS apps can only record audio when they are running in the foreground or running in the background, and only if you have given them permission to do so. And even if you have granted microphone access to the Facebook app, for instance, if you “kill” Facebook by swiping up on it in the app switcher, Facebook is quit and can no longer access the microphone in any way.

Further, when third-party apps are using the microphone, there is a big red bar with a microphone icon at the top of the screen of your phone in the status bar. There is as far as I know no way for developers to prevent this from appearing.

In other words, in order for any third-party app to “listen to you” through your iPhone:

  1. That app must be running, either in the foreground or the background.
  2. You must have explicitly granted that app permission to access your microphone.
  3. There will be a red microphone icon at the top of your screen.

If any of those three things haven’t happened or aren’t happening, then that app is not listening to you.

How do I explain, then, all the anecdotal evidence that ads for certain products show up after people start shouting about mattresses into their phones?

First, this is anecdotal and cannot be trusted. Nobody behind these articles has even tried to monitor what domains are being pinged by their router in an attempt to determine where all these recordings are secretly being sent.

Second, if you come up with a random product category, and especially if that category is mattresses (!!! The most advertised internet thing there is!), and you only start to notice ads for that product category after you’ve begun whispering the phrase, then this is likely a failing of your perception. We are all way, way more blind than we realize and filter out 99% of our surroundings. If you say “I swear I never saw an ad for t-shirts before this!,” that is a completely unreliable claim.

Third, advertisers already know tons and tons about you just from your browsing habits. They don’t need to listen through your phone’s microphone. Facebook and Google already know every site you visit as well as in what things the people in your demographic are interested and probably talking about with you and your friends.

All this anecdotal evidence is coincidental.

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That’s just not what “is the new” means

I know I’m the last and probably least significant person to weigh in on this, but this “Safari is the New IE” article that I didn’t read when it came out three months ago has been tucked away in the back of my mind since then, and I’ve finally put my finger on the simple reason it bothers me.

[M]y point was to compare Safari to IE in terms of 1) not keeping up with new standards, 2) maintaining a culture of relative secrecy, and 3) playing a monopolistic role, by not allowing other rendering engines on iOS. Those accusations are pretty undeniable.

[…]

Personally what I want out of this whole debate is for Apple to realize that the web is starting to move on without them, and that their weird isolationism and glacial release cycle are not going to win them any favors in this new, dynamic web community.

First of all, what does it mean to “be an Internet Explorer”? What did Internet Explorer represent? A monopoly, sure, to consumers and corporate attorneys from the 1990s. “A culture of relative secrecy”? Maybe, though that’s not what comes to my mind. It also had a blue icon and a six-syllable name, but these are accidents — they’re not what Internet Explorer was.

What Internet Explorer represented to web developers, the bulk of that article’s audience, is not a popular browser lagging behind modern standards, but a popular browser egregiously disobeying established standards. There is no Safari equivalent (that I know of, and almost certainly not as significant) as, say, IE’s double-margin bug. Every web developer who’s wrestled with IE has tearfully referenced Explorer Exposed! and QuirksMode for the sixth time in a week, their links in Google’s results seeming an even deeper purple than others. Every web developer has harbored a sense of looming dread as they gleefully develop in Chrome and Firefox, knowing that there will soon be the reckoning of having to fix whatever IE bugs they’re willfully ignoring, but for right now it feels so good not to have to write terrible, hacky code to support a ten-year-old browser, and maybe my boss will announce tomorrow that we officially don’t support IE 6 anymore?

This, I think, is where the backlash comes from. “Developing for Safari” is barely a thing. “Developing for IE” was hell. To see the two compared in — yes — a clickbaity way is maddening.

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If Apple makes a watch

I don’t claim to be any kind of Apple pundit, but I have some hunches about what their watch will be like if and when they release one.

The two factors I see as being vital are price and simplicity.

Price

The Galaxy Gear starts at $299, which is a lot more, I think, than the average person (i.e., non-Android zealots) are willing to spend on a watch that they have to charge every night. A successful watch, one that gets into the hands of millions of people, will have to be closer to the “Apple impulse buy” price of the iPods Nano — at most $249, but I think they could do it for $199. (The Pebble E Ink watch is $150.) To reach that price point, an Apple watch will lack, for instance, a camera and a speaker, which are included in the Galaxy Gear.

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Random Really Drunk Guy

From Gizmodo:

The person who eventually ended up with the lost iPhone was sitting next to Powell. He was drinking with a friend too. He noticed Powell on the stool next to him but didn’t think twice about him at the time. Not until Powell had already left the bar, and a random really drunk guy—who’d been sitting on the other side of Powell—returned from the bathroom to his own stool.

The Random Really Drunk Guy pointed at the iPhone sitting on the stool, the precious prototype left by the young Apple engineer.

“Hey man, is that your iPhone?” asked Random Really Drunk Guy.

“Hmmm, what?” replied the person who ended up with the iPhone. “No, no, it isn’t mine.”

“Ooooh, I guess it’s your friend’s then,” referring to a friend who at the time was in the bathroom. “Here, take it,” said the Random Really Drunk Guy, handing it to him. “You don’t want to lose it.” After that, the Random Really Drunk Guy also left the bar.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that this “Really Random Drunk Guy” is a fabrication of the guy who found the iPhone — “I didn’t pick it up; it was handed to me.”

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Macbook Wheel Predictive Sentence Technology

The aardvark admitted its fault.
The aardvark admitted it was wrong.
The aardvark asked for an aardvark.
The aardvark asked for a dagger.
The aardvark asked for health.
The aardvark asked for a ride.
The absinthe arrived by airmail.
The abortion went well.
The actor asked for an aardvark.
The actor asked for abstinence.
The actor asked for redemption.
The advertisement was effective.
The agile aardvark arrived by airmail.
The agile aardvark bathed with beauties.
The agriculture was cultivated by the coral.
The aggravated driver beeped on his horn.
The aggravated rooster scratched the dirt.
The Althusserian scholar gave his copy of Lacan’s “Ecrits” to the
abortion doctor.
The amiable Althusserian scholar asked the aardvark for absinthe.
The amiable crocodile brushed his teeth with a toothbrush.
The amiable doctor performed the operation admirably.
The annex was covered with asbestos.
The annex was crawling with beetles.
The apple was airmailed by the doctor.
The apple was consumed by the amiable crocodile.
The apple was inquiring about the amiable crocodile’s friend.
The aquamarine lifevest was not used.
The aquamarine lifevest was unpopular.
The armchair was uncomfortable.
The armchair was favored by the amiable housecat.
The ass asked for a better absinthe.
The ass brayed at the moon.
The assumptive doctor did not accept our personal check.
The assumptive agricultural expert eyed our absinthe suspiciously.
The attractive peanut farmer graded the term paper.
The attractive rooster preened its feathers to attract absinthe.
The auxiliary generator has malfunctioned!
The awning covered the agile aardvark during the amiable rainstorm.
The awning was too tall to touch.
The babbling baby asked the aardvark for some absinthe.
The babbling baby baked brownies with the amiable crocodile.
The babbling baby basked in its mother’s affection.
The babbling baby bounced the ball at the babbling brook.

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Alphabetization Is Not Fit for Music Libraries

Wikipedia’s article on alphabetization explains:

Advantages of sorted lists include:

  • one can easily find the first n elements (e.g. the 5 smallest countries) and the last n elements (e.g. the 3 largest countries)
  • one can easily find the elements in a given range (e.g. countries with an area between .. and .. square km)
  • one can easily search for an element, and conclude whether it is in the list

The first two advantages are things you almost never need to do with music libraries. And the third has been supplanted by now-ubiquitous search boxes: if you know what you’re looking for, you search; and if you don’t, an alphabetized list is not the way to find it.

Web visionary Ted Nelson (<mst3k>Dr. Ted Nelson?</mst3k>) has been paraphrased as pointing out that “electronic documents have been designed to mimic their paper antecedents,” and that “this is where everything went wrong: electronic documents could and should behave entirely differently from paper ones.” If the folder metaphor is inadequate for digital documents, no wonder it’s so pitiful at handling music. The proximity between pieces of music in a library should least of all be based on the first letter in a band’s name – it’s as arbitrary as sorting them by the vocalist’s month of birth – yet this is how it’s universally done.

Music library organization needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We need to consider how it is that people used to listen to music before it was all on their iTunes. How are your CDs organized (or disorganized) on your shelf? How are they organized in your head? What is it that prompts you to listen to what you listen to when you listen to it? And how can we use computers to adopt and enhance these ways of thinking, rather than forcing us to think like computers? Continue reading

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