The current outcry over the location tracking file in your iPhone (and presumably iPad) isn’t exactly much ado about nothing, but is mostly the news media trying to make hay out of it and counting on Apple’s name to attract viewers.
This location tracking file is present both on the iPhone itself and in your backups that you make when you sync your iPhone. By itself, the file doesn’t do anything. Your iPhone apparently doesn’t send it to Apple or anyone, and you can’t be tracked in real time (using that file – there may be plenty of other ways to do that). The biggest concerns are (1) why is Apple doing it? What benefit is it to them or the user? and (2) it can be exploited by a third party that can access your backup on your PC or Mac.
As to why Apple is doing it, who knows? It may be a debugging tool that was left in place because nobody thought it would hurt anything. Perhaps Apple was planning to use it in the future. Maybe even they have nefarious plans to perhaps anonymously aggregate it and sell the data to location-based ad providers. I doubt we’ll ever get a really straight answer to this one, but for the moment, the file is harmless as long as it stays on the device. It isn’t harmless to Apple’s image, however, so I assume it will go away or be changed soon.
If someone has access to your backups, you’ve got bigger problems than them knowing where you’ve been. They can get your financial information, your passwords (assuming you have your browser save them), and more. I know people are suggesting you encrypt your iPhone backup using iTunes’ encryption feature, but that surely isn’t enough to keep yourself safe. Use FileVault if you’re on a Mac or BitLocker or TrueCrypt for Windows. I’ve used all of these and they all work well and don’t seem to slow things down. So far, I haven’t lost a byte due to these encryption mechanisms. By using these approaches, along with good passwords, you can keep your data safe. If you don’t use something like that, there isn’t any sense in worrying about your iPhone location file. The door is open, so worrying about whether you closed a window isn’t relevant.
While this little Apple controversy makes for fun and exciting news, it is a trivial threat to our privacy, particularly given all the scary things that ad networks and others do to track us and our browsing/buying habits. Anyone who threatens to dump their iPhone over this issue is a little overly reactionary (there are other reasons to be mad with Apple about iPhones, but this isn’t one I’d worry about). I’m sure Apple will issue an update in the next month that either removes or significantly reduces the history kept in that location tracking file.
Many people are confused by the spelling of the Hiperwall® name, often misspelling it “Hyperwall” or even “Hyper Wall.”
The name Hiperwall is a registered trademark owned by the University of California (UC Irvine, in particular) and exclusively licensed for commercial use by Hiperwall Inc.
The goal of the research project led by Falko Kuester and myself when we were UCI professors was to develop technology to drive extremely high resolution tiled display walls. Our approach differed from that of other tiled display systems in that we wanted our system to scale easily to huge sizes, so we needed to avoid the centralized rendering system (read potential bottleneck) that most other had. Therefore, we put powerful computers behind the displays. These display nodes perform all the rendering work for their display and had little interaction with other display nodes. We use a central control node that simply commands the display nodes what to display, but doesn’t get in the path of the rendering, thus doesn’t bottleneck the system.
Because of this very distributed and highly parallel computing approach, our system is much more responsive than most other tiled display systems, therefore we called it the Highly Interactive Parallelized display Wall, or HIPerWall for short. The acronym is a little forced, because we had to ignore the word “display,” but the idea is pretty clear. You can see the research project logo on this image of the desktop screen for the HIPerWall Mini system we showed at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in 2006. At 72 million pixels screen resolution, the HIPerWall Mini was one of the highest resolution displays in the world at the time.
You’ll note that the “IP” in HIPerWall is highlighted in a different color. This is because we based our technology on the Internet Protocol (IP) rather than proprietary protocols or networks so we could interoperate and use standard, off-the-shelf equipment. This is one of the main reasons Hiperwall systems are so cost-competitive today: we use our advanced software on COTS computers, displays, and networks to create a powerful tiled display system without proprietary servers, amplifiers, and non-scalable bottlenecks.
About the same time we built HIPerWall, NASA Ames built a much smaller tiled display named Hyperwall, which surely led to some name confusion. NASA’s current Hyperwall is even higher resolution than the original 200 MPixel HIPerWall. In the meantime, Apple has made some displays for their stores to show iOS App sales, unfortunately naming them Hyperwall, too.
So to summarize, Hiperwall is the product derived from HIPerWall the research project. NASA and Apple both have Hyperwall systems, which are unrelated to each other and unrelated to Hiperwall.
Since Apple enabled AirPrint in the latest iPad and iPhone updates, I’ve wanted to be able to use it. AirPrint currently only works with a few HP printers, though some software solutions can make printers shared by your Mac available too. Since I didn’t want to leave my Mac on all the time, and I wanted to replace my Lexmark all-in-one inkjet anyway, I got an HP 6500A Plus from Costco.
The printer hardware looks to be quite good and robust, though HP is always good with hardware. Software has been weak in the past, but the new HP drivers for Windows seem good (the Mac drivers still stink, but more on that in another post where I rant about lousy printer and scanner drivers).
After a quick firmware update, I tried AirPrint, but the iPad didn’t see the printer. I had made the dreadful mistake of hooking the printer to my wired network rather than wireless. Once I switched to wireless, AirPrint worked fine.
So what’s the problem? Printing and scanning over wireless are much slower than on a wired network (I have GigE everywhere in my house). And the printer can’t be on both at the same time. So if I want AirPrint, I can’t have good performance and vice versa.
It seems to me that broadcast is broadcast, so the printer should be just as discoverable on the wired network from my iPad as it is on the wireless bridged network. So it looks like the idea of AirPrint is good, but HP’s implementation is not so good.
Perhaps this will get fixed in an update, but I won’t hold my breath.
I am and have been a huge fan of the powerful Oracle (formerly Sun) VirtualBox, but if you use VirtualBox and want it to continue to work well, wait a bit before upgrading to the shiny new version 4. As with most big upgrades, this one took 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and a step sideways:
Forward: The new user interface is a significant improvement and I look forward to the day I can use it properly. (Bonus half step forward: the new architecture with separate extensions seems to be a good idea, but is perhaps not trouble-free yet.)
Sideways: (This problem existed in the 3.2 releases as well, so is not new.) I use a Windows 7/32 guest on a Windows 7/64 host, and if I enable both the 3D and 2D graphics acceleration, the guest Windows crashes right as it reaches the high-res login screen. This seems to be an interaction with current NVIDIA drivers, as it only started happening a month or two ago when I updated to the latest drivers for my GTX280 card.
Back 1: I need to use USB flash drives a lot, and there was nothing I could do to get VirtualBox 4.0.2 to mount my flash drive in the guest OS. Even after installing the extension that provides USB 2.0 support (perhaps the UI should prompt for that if USB 2.0 is enabled and it is missing), the VB driver captured the drive from the host (it disappeared from My Computer), but any attempts to mount it in the host were met with an error dialog from VB. I tried deleting and recreating the filter to no avail. The latest Guest Extensions were installed (see below), yet nothing proved able to mount the flash drive.
Back 2 (half step): In order for the new Guest Extensions to install Direct3D support (which I don’t really use, but install anyway because I like the idea of having it available), you have to reboot the guest into Safe Mode and install the Guest Extensions. While this ends up working, it’s an unusual and annoying step.
So my solution was to revert back to VirtualBox 3.2.12, which works just fine. My flash drive mounts without trouble and I can insert it as needed.
I tried to check the forums for the solution to any of these problems, but was unable to search the forum, so didn’t see these specific problems amidst the active discussions.
I want to be clear that I think VirtualBox is a good thing and this post is just warning people that the latest version is not trouble-free. I have no doubt that in another update or two, it will be superior to the old 3.2 version and meet all my needs. Keep of the good work Oracle and VB devs!
In mid-December (the 12th to be exact), we had temperatures in the 80s and beautiful blue skies, so we went to Crystal Cove State Park for sightseeing and a walk along the beach. Pictures are at:
Norton Internet Security 2010 quit working on me today telling me that the subscription expired. Yesterday, it told me it had 2 days left. As you can see from the screen capture below, it tells me I have a day left, but it expired anyway. Apparently the Norton programmers were sloppy when it came to deciding it was the expiry date and shut it down early.
Now I have Norton Internet Security 2011 at home ready to install, but after this crappy behavior, I’m very tempted to return the unopened box and just use the free Microsoft security product and never give Norton another penny.
I use Eclipse for my Java development. I used to use JBuilder Turbo, but it’s now so hard to get a license of it for more than one computer, I’ve given up and went to straight Eclipse.
Eclipse is a really good development environment with on-the-fly compilation and generally excellent features and a few annoyances. One of the biggest annoyances is its update/install system that usually doesn’t actually find updates and typically doesn’t do a good job of installing new components. One day, I tried to install the profiling tools and the install system had such a hard time finding the components to install, campus security blocked access to the Hiperwall lab because they were sure only malware would hit 70 FTP servers in a few seconds. No, it was Eclipse, it turned out, after I got us blocked a second time. So clearly no Eclipse component installs on campus. When trying at home, I game up after an hour or so of it not finding the components. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the Eclipse developers – they rely on free hosting for mirrors of the files, but the mirrors may not always be up to date or even complete.
Because of these troubles, I tried and am still using Yoxos. Yoxos creates a custom Eclipse at start time, which delays the initial start quite a bit as the components are downloaded, but if nothing changes, future starts are fairly fast. It allows you to select which components you want and then downloads (from Yoxos’ servers) and installs them for you. It works very well and I haven’t had any trouble with a Yoxos-built Eclipse.
The version I’m using is currently free, but as Yoxos is a commercial entity, they charge for some services and this version may eventually cost something. Whether it will be worth the money to save hassle depends on the cost. But for now, Yoxos is a terrific way to use Eclipse and is highly recommended for Java developers.
I recently upgraded my iPad and iPhone 3GS to iOS 4.2.1 with eventual success, but some problems along the way. In both cases, the OS installation appeared to go fine, but later in the day when I launched the iPod app to listen to some music, nothing showed up. All my music, podcasts, and playlists were missing. When I plugged each back into iTunes, the utilized space graph showed that the music must still have been there, but somehow the iPod app didn’t see it. Another sync for each (with a REALLY slow backup in the case of the iPad) restored the music to its previous state without having to re-download any of it to the units.
iOS 4.2.1 seems like a very nice system, but Steve Jobs’ quote saying “iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product” is a bunch of crap. The iPad with iOS 4.2 gives almost the exact experience of the earlier iPad OS, but with a few goodies around the edges. The multitasking, for example, is very nice and probably more useful on iPad than iPhone, but most users won’t notice it. Apps launched fast on the iPad before, so the slight improvement of swapping in an app that was in the background is not as impressive as it is on a slower device like my iPhone 3GS. And the iPad’s battery is big enough that it can handle the slight additional power draw of background apps.
I played a bit with AirPlay by sending music and sounds to my home stereo via an original Airport Express. It works well. When I get an Apple TV, I’m sure it will be even better, with the ability to stream video.
I am also very pleased with one particular bug fix. I have a nice Samsung bluetooth stereo headset that is great for listening to music wirelessly, but the play/pause controls didn’t work on the iPad (but they did on the iPhone under iOS 4.1). Under the new iOS, they work on iPad as well! Nice job, Apple!
So far, iOS 4.2 is a big plus for the iPad and a small improvement over iOS 4.1 on the iPhone.
I’m in favor of the idea of backing up data offsite to avoid disasters and their effects. Living in California, where we overdo it in both earthquakes and fires, data safety is essential. While I was working on my dissertation research and the dissertation itself, I would back all of it up on a CD every few months and mail the CD to my wife’s relatives living across the country.
These days, it should be easier to do offsite backup, but our data is much bigger, too. Companies like Mozy and Carbonite offer unlimited online backup for reasonable monthly fees. Jungle Disk is a pay-as-you go plan that uses Amazon S3 or RackSpace Cloud for storage (since those commercial services charge by the GB, that cost is passed on to the customer).
I use Mozy on my Windows PC and it mostly works (on the PC, I’ll talk about Mac in a minute). The biggest problem with Mozy (and if you read all the complaints on the web, Carbonite too) is that it is so slow. I use the PC in a building and on a campus that has gigabit speeds all the way to the internet provider, yet the upload speed was always kilobits per second or maybe 1 mpbs. And there were long periods of time where the upload rate was 0, yet the internet connection was fine. Clearly Mozy throttles bandwidth and sometimes even stops uploads. This is apparently a really big problem if you need to restore a few hundred GB of data. Mozy and the others don’t really have a good solution to this. At least the services, such as Jungle Disk, based on commercial storage clouds can’t do as much bandwidth throttling, because the cloud owners manage the networks and it is in their best interest to make access fast (and they likely don’t know or care what data is being stored there).
While Mozy is tolerable on my PC, it was completely worthless on my Mac. I designated a few hundred MB of files, including my Quicken file and other documents that I couldn’t afford to lose. Mozy claimed it was done backing up for months, yet when I checked into it, it had apparently only backed up a single 42KB file. So I had a false sense of security, but really was completely unprotected, which is intolerable. Therefore, I deleted Mozy forever from my Mac and will delete it from my PC when my subscription expires in a couple months.
I have recently been trying CrashPlan on my Mac, which is pretty nifty. It manages both online backup and backup to local storage. It seems to have a family plan for a very reasonable rate, but for the moment, I’m using the 30 day free trial, and the online backup has been fast (my cable modem’s full upload rate). The backups to local storage also work fine, though it seems to have a bit of trouble remembering to be able to use a disk image on a network file server as a backup destination. But overall, CrashPlan seems like a pretty good solution to backup, plus would make restoration from local backup fast and easy while remote restores would obviously be slower, but available in case of disaster.
I will present a talk on “Hiperwall: From Research Project to Product” at the UCI EECS Colloquium at 5PM on Wednesday, Nov. 10, in McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium.
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