Image via CrunchBase
There’s a story on this issue on GigaOm, which is worth reading for context.
I don’t think Facebook owns my friends. Do you think they own yours? If you think Facebook should re-enable the “Facebook Friends Exporter” extension, or—better still—simply allow people to use their own contacts as they please, “Like” this posting. Send Facebook a message.
The Four Horsemen of the Slightly-Belated Apocalypse (A. Dürer)
With all of my friends laughing it up over the failure of the much-anticipated apocalypse to appear yesterday, I was rereading some of the stuff on Camping’s (various) predictions, and I came across his statement that, “From April 1, 33 to April 1, 2011 is 1978 years”.
But it isn’t: it’s 1978 years less ten days.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII instituted our modern calendar, now known as the Gregorian calendar, as a replacement for the then-used Julian calendar (named for Julius Caesar). The problem with the Julian calendar was that it assumed that the year was exactly 365.25 days long, an annual error of about eleven minutes. By 1582, the spring equinox was falling as early as the 11th of March, thanks to a millennium or so of accumulated error. Several adjustments to leap years were made, but the main gross adjustment was to declare that March 11, 1582 was now March 21, 1582, by Papal decree.
Seems as though Camping forgot about this in his calculations (he may know the Bible better than I do, but I apparently know calendars better than he does). The world’s not ending until May 31st.
Oh, ye of little faith! If you were all excited about the Rapture yesterday and all depressed this morning, some angel is putting your name on a list right now, you betcha.
No, it didn’t. Apple made a statement confirming what I’d been suspecting: the consolidated.db file is a cache of cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations to speed up triangulation in Location Services on iOS, period.
“The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.”
So, if you’re worried about Apple tracking you,
“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
I’m hoping this settles things, but—knowing people—I doubt it. Two guys from Florida are planning on suing Apple in a class action suit, which will like go nowhere, and the Congress—as if it didn’t have actual problems to worry about in this country at the moment—is planning on holding hearings on this weighty, troublesome matter.
It turns out, not quite relatedly, that Facebook has been putting tracking cookies onto the computers of people who aren’t themselves Facebook users, but have simply visited sites that use Facebook Connect. Facebook’s explanation? “Oops.”
[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]
[UPDATE: I've taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database's CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]
My posting on my investigations into the content of the consolidated.db file on the iPhone has gotten some 40,000 views, so far, thanks to the magic of Slashdot. There have been a couple of worthwhile items that came up in comments, and I wanted to collect them into a follow-up posting here.
First, Alex Levinson, a researcher who’s done academic work on iOS forensics, posted an excellent column on this which probably deserved to make it to Slashdot more than mine did. It turns out that the existence of this file was not only known, but mentioned in Sean Morrisey’s book on iOS forensics, to which Alex was a contributor.
Second, even without a handy database of what is increasingly appearing to be cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations, people should be aware that their cell phone—as a simple consequence of its operation—”tracks” their movements, simply to enable the hand-off of the phone from one cel tower to the next. Your carrier maintains this information for some period of time, and will provide it to law enforcement in response to an appropriate subpoena.
Interestingly, a German politician, Malte Spitz, sued his carrier, Deutsche Telekomm, to get a copy of the records that they had maintained on him, and discovered that, between August 2009 and February 2010, they had recorded his geographical location some 35,000 times. Zeit Online has a fascinating visualization of Mr. Spitz’s movement and activities developed from this data.
Finally, and sadly, Brian Chen over at Wired has a follow-on to his original column where he gets off to a bad start by noting that people had been “spooked” by the revelation of the existence of this file on their iPhones, but without noting that it was his own headline the previous day—which claimed that iPhones were “tracking [their owners'] every move”, inaccurately as it turns out—which engendered a lot of the “spooking”.
If you’re concerned about this file’s being backed up to your desktop, I’d recommend that you turn on encrypted backups, which can be accomplished through iTunes, as this posting on Techland explains. I still haven’t got the slightest idea why people would be particularly worried about thieves getting this particular file off their desktops, but not (apparently) concerned about their address books, their email archives, their document folders or their calendars.
People are strange.
[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]
[UPDATE: I've taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database's CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]
There’s been a lot of discussion of the discovery that there’s a database file called “consolidated.db” on your iPhone, full of latitude and longitude coordinates. Most of it has been completely hysterical, and not based on an actual look at the data involved.
I downloaded Peter Warden’s iPhoneTracker program, as well as the source code for it, and played around with it a good bit yesterday. I’m not done—I haven’t done a raw dump of the locations in the file yet—but I’ve been able to determine several things, the most important of which is that the iPhone is not “tracking your every move”, by any stretch of the imagination.
The default version of the program deliberately muddies the location by restricting the locations to a certain level of precision, and also aggregates its data by week. I modified it to increase that resolution by ten times, and to aggregate the data on an daily, rather than a weekly basis. I discovered a number of interesting things.
First, note that there’s a slider along the bottom of the window, which is set to the extreme right, to show all locations no matter when they were collected. On the left side of the slider, there’s a “Play” button, which will animate the locations captured. You can also drag the slider’s “thumb” to see the data for an individual week (in the default version) or day, in my modified version.
Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker program can be found here. If anyone wants to reproduce the various tweaks I made to adjust the location and time resolution to be finer, drop me a note, and I’ll get you some details.
First, here’s a map of Amsterdam, showing every single location it collected there during my time there last July 23. As you can see, for 24 hours time, it’s not showing very much detail at all as far as my movements go.
Second, here’s a shot showing all of the data for the following day, July 24. I spent that day in Amsterdam until the late afternoon, when I took a train down to Den Haag:
As you can see pretty clearly, my ride on a train between Amsterdam and Den Haag is not depicted with even the slightest degree of fidelity or accuracy.
I’ve noticed that the amount and timing of the data collected is very odd as well: I’ve got multi-day gaps in the data, as long as almost two weeks on one occasion. Some days’ data clearly contains information that couldn’t possible have been collected on that day.
A good example is the set of locations dated Christmas Day of last year:
I was in the Central Valley, in Le Grand (about 15 miles south of Merced) all day Christmas Day and I never left the house. Not only does this show locations stretching from Santa Cruz in the West to Merced in the East (a distance of some 130-140 miles), but it shows movement up and down I5 for a distance of about 80 miles or so.
So, it’s entirely unclear to me what this data actually represents. What it most certainly doesn’t represent is the phone’s “tracking your every move” as the histrionic writers at Wired and The Atlantic would like you to think…
[UPDATE: Exactly the same kind of information seems to be getting stored on Android phones. Here's an application you can use to dump it out...]
[UPDATED UPDATE: I've put up a follow-on posting, with some additional interesting information...]
I’m not talking about the policies here, I’m talking about the implementation. A Canadian newspaper, the Examiner, is using Facebook’s much-touted commenting system on their site. When someone likes a comment you made there, or adds a comment to a thread in which you participated, you get a notification of it, right on Facebook. Innit cool?
Except that when you go to see what you’re being notified about, here’s what you get:
Facebook fails to trust itself. Should you?
You know, if you’re planning on hitting people with a nice “ARE YOU REALLY, REALLY SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU’RE DOING!?” warning every time they go to see what’s happened on a site you sold your commenting system to in response to a notification YOU generated, that’s not actually going to prove to be a terribly effective sales tool.
Just sayin’.
[UPDATE: I posted something about this on my Facebook wall before I wrote this posting. When I went back to look, they'd fixed it. I'm starting to suspect them of following my account in order to see what's busted. If this keeps up, I may have to bill them.]
I was trying to read a story on Charlie Sheen’s appearance last night at Radio City Music Hall—he managed to avoid alienating or boring the audience, so he’s batting about 60/40, overall—when I was thwarted in my efforts to finish reading the story by an overzealous T-Mobile/Samsung Galaxy S ad:
Where's the "Close" box...? (It ain't, that's where.)
There’s no way to reduce the ad, there’s no close box, and there’s no way to read the story it’s covering up.
Better still, the ad is at an absolute position, so making the window bigger doesn’t help. The only way to read the article is to make the window so small that the ad becomes invisible off the right side. Then you can scroll back and forth to read the single column of type in the article. This is about five different flavors of “dim-witted”. Brilliant thinking, guys.
Boy, the malware links are thick as the thieves who promote them on Facebook this morning. Many of my friends are tagged in them by credulous members of their friends lists, but they haven’t gotten me much so far. However, at the rate things appear to be going, the site is going to look like this in a month:
The Future of Facebook. Coming very soon.
Are you seeing more and more of this as well? Remember what I said several months ago about Facebook becoming a “bad part of town“? It’s all coming true before my eyes.
Are you seeing this, too? Are your friends falling for these scams, or are their friends?
Some Useful Guidelines:
Facebook does nothing to protect its users from this sort of thing. One of the best ways of keeping up to date on the various threats and scams which seem to be appearing more and more regularly on Facebook is to join the Sophos Security page on Facebook.
I learned today that, in response to complaints from Richard Stallman that the promotional materials for the upcoming GNOME Asia Summit were using terms like “open” and “open source” much too much, the “tag line” slogan has been replaced with one more to Richard’s liking, but which fails to mention GNOME at all.
Big win.
I am moved to propose that, in order to secure a better future for ourselves, we should lock Charlie Sheen, Julian Assange and Richard Stallman into an airtight vault, good for twelve hours worth of breathing. They should be made to debate whether complete openness and transparency on the part of governments, or software freedom, or an unlimited supply of drugs and porn stars holds more promise for the future of mankind. They would only be released when they had reached a consensus.
I See A Great Need.
Energy Conversion, or Crispy Bread? (image courtesty Zalgon)
I’ve just seen yet another “the ‘i’ in iPhone stands for ‘idiot’” rant—hilariously, in the mistaken belief that libical, a standard open source calendar library which is an undocumented and hair-raising piece of cruft, had something to do with Apple—and it reminded me of something I’d wanted to point out.
Most of the folks who like to hate on Apple for its closedness (and it’s certainly closed in some fundamental ways) are largely technical types who have a set of expectations around what they imagine “computers” to be, and they’re operating under the completely mistaken assumption that Apple is in the business of selling computers.
Few of these folks think of the device depicted above as an “energy converter” (although there are those, I imagine, who are inclined, perhaps, to “hack” their toasters; I suspect they’re a distinct minority). The folks at Cuisinart and Hamilton Beach are not selling energy conversion, as accurate a description as that may be of what the device does on some level. They’re selling hot, crispy bread.
Apple does not sell computers, they sell consumer appliances. But what they really sell is an experience: consistency and ease-of-use, and working right out of the box, combined with solid and thoughtful industrial design and user interface. And while they’re certainly not perfect, from all accounts, Apple’s customers generally agree that this is what they’re actually getting for their money.
Another manifestation of this misplaced umbrage this week is the revelation (sort of) that Apple is replacing the Phillips screws in iPhones that are brought in for repair with (slightly) more tamperproof Torx 5-lobe screws. Let’s note that the folks raising much of the misplaced umbrage are in the business of selling Torx 5-lobe screwdrivers, among other things, for those inclined to want to optimize their appliance’s performance on their own. They’re pricing this item about a third over what you can get it for on Amazon, by the way. Appliance manufacturers do this all the time, sorry: it’s intended to keep the clumsy fingers of well-meaning do-it-yourself-ers out of there, which has been repeatedly shown to cut down dramatically on time-wasting calls to support lines over matters for which no help can be provided: you broke it, dude.
Apple isn’t in the business of making products for technical types, and they never have been: the original Macintoshes were every bit as resistant to consumer meddling and “improvement” as the iPhone 4. I actually owned, for a good long while, the tool which was required to open unibody Macs, the infamous MacCracker. (This was an 15-inch Torx T15 screwdriver—the holes in which those screws were buried were deep—with an arrangement on the far end used to pry open the clamshell case once the screws had been removed.)
This misunderstanding—or rather, this clear understanding on Apple’s part of what they’re selling and to whom—is one of the reasons that Apple does as well as it does with the iPhone and the iPad, and why I believe that the upcoming flotilla of Android-based tablets will be chasing the iPad’s taillights for a good, long time: Android is largely being developed by a rather small number of “technical types”, open source licenses notwithstanding. (Mainstream Linux, driven by even more inward-looking, more deeply technical types will, in turn, chase Android’s various taillights, but that’s another story.)
There’s a lesson for designers and marketers here, but it’s not a new one.
