Disastrous Implications of New Apple Patent for Blocking Cellphone Video - storify.com. Apple patents mobile camera that other people can shut off. An Apple patent describes a system for allowing venue owners to override compliant cameras. The patent describes using an infrared signal that compliant cameras would detect; in the presence of this signal, the device would not allow its owner to activate its record function.
It is intended for use at live events and galleries and museums, and it will be a tremendous boon to policemen who shoot unarmed subway riders, despotic armies putting down revolutions as well as anyone else who is breaking the law or exercising coercive power. This is part of an increasing trend to designing hardware and software that allows remote parties to override the instructions of the owners and users of devices. This trend, coupled with the increasing degree to which devices are privy to our secrets, our sensitive information, and even our biological functions, worries me an awful lot.
Apple's killjoy patent may thwart illegal mobile recording. Apple's Jobs confirms iPhone 'kill switch' Mr Jobs also announced that in the month since the iPhone 3G was released and the Application Store launched, around 60 million applications had been downloaded for the iPhone and iPod touch. About $30 million (£15 million) in revenue has been generated by the store. Developers keep a 70 per cent slice of this revenue, while Apple take the remaining 30 per cent. Mr Jobs said Apple was on course to make about $360 million this year from the App Store. "Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that," Mr Jobs told the Wall Street Journal.
"We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software. " And the iPhone could be a serious threat for the likes of Nintendo and Sony after all -- one of the most popular applications for the iPhone and iPod touch is a computer game, Super Monkeyball, which effectively turns the device into a handheld games console. Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves. Update, 4/27/11 — Apple has posted a response to questions raised in this report and others. By Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file.
Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. A visualization of iPhone location data. Click to enlarge. The presence of this data on your iPhone, your iPad, and your backups has security and privacy implications. What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it’s on any machine you’ve synched with your iOS device. In the following video, we discuss how the file was discovered and take a look at the data contained in the file. Who has access to this data? iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go | Technology. Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010. "Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers. Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said: "This is a worrying discovery. Tous les utilisateurs d'iPhone sont pistés. Dire où l'on se trouve en permanence via son smartphone, c'est simple comme bonjour : on peut le déclamer à qui ça intéresse (indice : personne) via les versions mobiles des réseaux sociaux type Facebook ou Twitter, ou check-iner comme un fou sur les appli spécifiques de géolocalisation comme Foursquare.
Mais il y a un autre moyen, d'autant plus simple qu'il est automatique : avoir un iPhone et permettre sans le savoir à Apple de pister nos moindres déplacements. La découverte est signée Alasdair Allan et Pete Warden, deux spécialistes qui l'ont annoncé aujourd'hui à la conférence Where 2.0 après l'avoir explicité sur le site Radar . Leur trouvaille peut être résumée ainsi : les iPhone et iPad 3G fonctionnant sous le système d'exploitation iOS4 (disponible depuis juin 2010) enregistrent régulièrement la localisation des produits dans un fichier caché, dont le contenu est restauré à chaque sauvegarde ou migration d'appareil. Lire les réactions à cet article.
Alexandre HERVAUD. Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move. Researchers have discovered that the iPhone is keeping track of where you go and storing that information in a file that is stored - unencrypted and unprotected - on any machine with which you synchronize your phone. It is not clear why Apple is collecting this data. Data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden came across the file - "consolidated.db" - while they were thinking about the potential trove of mobile data stored on a cellphone and thinking about ways to visualize this data. Allan and Warden will present their findings today at the Where 2.0 conference. While it is not unusual for cellphones to track users' location, that information is typically kept behind a firewall and it requires a court order for others to be able to access it.
This isn't the case with this particular file, raising serious questions about privacy and security. Tracking Your Coordinates Since iOS4 The file contains longitude and latitude data, recording the phone's coordinates along with a timestamp. Press Info - Apple Q&A on Location Data. Apple HumancentiPad - South Park. Apple Responds To Location Tracking Kerfuffle, Says It’s Innocent, Blames Bugs. Apple aims to – finally – set the record straight about the gathering and use of location information by iOS devices. The entire Q&A can be found below. Apple starts off by stating that it has never tracked, and will never track the location of a customer’s iPhone. The company goes on to say it’s partly to blame for any ‘confusion’ about it, though, because users haven’t been ‘educated’ to fully understand the technical issues with providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information. That said, the company did identify several ‘bugs’ which it says it will fix shortly.
As we posited earlier, Apple says it’s merely maintaining a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending geo-tagged locations, both anonymously and encrypted. Apple says it simply can not identify the source of this data (i.e. your location). Does Apple’s response sound credible to you?
Apple Q&A on Location Data: 1. Apple Q&A on Location Data. CUPERTINO, Calif. --(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices. 1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone? Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone.
Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so. 2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this? 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Software Update Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that: reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, ceases backing up this cache, and deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.