Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I’m not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, there is little in the computer world more Orwellian than a widely used and much loved hand held device being distributed widely and lovingly, which secretly keeps track of your location, and secretly storing those data where they could later become available to The State. I wonder what else they are keeping track of? I wonder if we know where all the copies of these data are stored?

The Linux-based Android system also collects these data but does not send it to Big Brother unless you tell it to.

Following is a summary of recent posts and news reports on this and closely related topics to give you an idea of the nature and magnitude of this problem.

How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To: Smart phones include geotagging features that many people aren’t aware of.

People were up in arms this week about the privacy implications of news that the iPhone gathers location information and stores it in a file on the user’s computer. But experts say that smart-phone owners are unknowingly taking a much bigger risk with information about where they go all day. During a presentation at the computer security conference Source Boston, Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs and Larry Pesce, a senior security consultant with NWN, described the way photos taken by many phones are routinely encoded with latitude and longitude tags. When users post those photos online through services such as TwitPic, they often expose much more personal data than they realize.

“It is definitely true that folks don’t [understand] the risk,” says Jackson. …

iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go: Privacy fears raised as researchers reveal file on iPhone that stores location coordinates and timestamps of owner’s movements

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….

3 Major Issues with the Latest iPhone Tracking “Discovery”

Today, two researchers for O’Reilly media published an article claiming discovery of a hidden tracking system on the iOS 4 operating system. Using simple techniques, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden extracted data off of an iOS version 4 device and wrote an open source software utility to effectively graph this data onto a map. As a fellow researcher, I champion their creativity and their development. As an expert in this field, I have three points of argument to raise….

(In the above article, the writer seems to make the claim that it is not as bad as everyone says because some people knew about this months ago.)

How police have obtained iPhone, iPad tracking logs

Law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner’s approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations.

Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads, which became the topic of criticism this week after a researcher at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif., described in detail how it works. Apple had acknowledged to Congress last year only that “cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information” is “intermittently” collected and “transmitted to Apple” every 12 hours. …

How to See the Secret Tracking Data in Your iPhone: Your iPhone is tracking your every move. We take a look and tell you what you can do about it.

Coverage of the iPhone tracking “feature” has ranged from concern to outrage. “I don’t know about you, but the fact that this feature exists on an iPhone is a deal-killer,” wrote PCMag Columnist John Dvorak, shortly after news broke. PCMag Executive Editor Dan Costa drew a softer line, writing, “Apple may not be actively tracking you, but it did turn your phone into a tracking device without telling you.”

As frustrating as it is to learn that your iPhone has been spying on you, collecting an unencrypted treasure trove of your travels, the truth is we knew this was happening. Last June we reported that Apple updated its privacy policy, stating that it could, “collect, use, and share precise location data, including real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.”…

It’s not just the iPhone, Android stores your location data too

…The file is only accessible on devices that have been rooted and opened up to installation of unsigned apps. This is similar to the way that the iPhone used to store the data before it was made available to developers using the iPhone’s background API for location sharing.

Now however, the iPhone data is exposed to casual access using an application called iPhone Location Tracker that is similar in intent to the app that Eriksson has created for Android phones….

Weaponizing GPS Tracking Devices: Researcher demonstrates how he was able to easily turn Zoombak personal GPS devices against their owners

Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in your smartphone or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, car, pet, or shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location, a researcher has discovered.

Security researcher Don Bailey at SOURCE Boston today disclosed the newest phase of his research on the lack of security in embedded devices, demonstrating how he is able to hack vendor Zoombak’s personal GPS locator devices in order to find, target, and impersonate the user or equipment rigged with these consumer-focused devices.

A letter from Al Franken to Steve Jobs (PDF)

Linux has perfectly good fonts these days, and they are getting better.

Patents held by Apple Corporation did not allow basic technology (the Bytecode Interpreter)to be implemented in Linux fonts (without paying). FreeType (the Linux font system) worked around this and things were workable, but still, having the Apple technology would have been better. But now….

As of May 2010, those patents have expired and as of July 12 with version 2.4.0, Freetype ships with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled. Version 2.4.1 was released July 18 to address a small bug found in 2.4.0. Freetype is released under a BSD-style FreeType License and the GPL.

Bwahahaha!!! The patents always expire, the dam always breaks, the grip always loosens. Bwhahahaha!!!

Item 2:

An Open Source 8-Bit Computer to Save the World

At a recent local LUG I regularly attend, Braddock Gaskill gave a wonderful presentation on an open source 8-bit computer he had created. This was his first public debut of the device and every person in attendance was enthralled. Later, we met over coffee since I wanted to let him know (and ask if it was ok) that I thought his device would make for a great piece for Linux Journal. Braddock agreed and we started to chat about both the Humane Reader & Humane PC.

Read about it here.

Item 3:

A government agency in India which apparently develops technology now has a pad-tablet thingie that is somewhat less expensive than the iPad.

It is not quite yet available, but it will have a 7 in ch color touch screen, 2 gigs of storage, WiFi, Ethernet, low power demand, a solar-power option, a scaled down version of Linux, and possibly a web cam. There may in the end be different versions available.

And when it is released in the near future, it will cost 35 bucks, with 20 dollars being the final target price.

Huh.

And by “you” I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics.

In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I’m going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise.

What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational arguments. The skeptic applies these rational arguments generally, and makes most or all important decisions on the basis of these arguments, where possible. When the skeptic fails to apply the rational argument and develops a belief that is not rationally tested, or that is rationally rejected, the skeptic compartmentalizes that belief as needed, and does not mind when laughed at by other skeptics for such belief.

In other words, a skeptic is a (typically) human (as in flawed) rational thinker with imperfect information living in a world very different from the one economics modelers often assume.

What is skeptical computing? This is a bit more complicated because computing itself is a vague concept as I’m using it here. I mean using computers as a person and the choices you make, but if you are a highly placed IT person that may be quite different than if you are mainly writing letters and keeping track of your schedule. So one dimension of complexity is scale. In addition, you may have more or fewer choices as to what hardware, operating system, and application software you can use. So one dimension is that of available options. Finally, there are probably stylistic choices and personal proclivities that have to do with experience or something specific to you.

For instance, I find that the very pretty, soft, stylized rendering of fonts and other visuals on the current Mac System X to be hard to read, so for me using a Mac no matter how wonderful it might otherwise be is difficult and slightly painful. I therefore feel quite excused for not using one. People who have only used Windows for many years may not like another OS that is far superior simply because of what they are used to (i.e, being crapped on by their computer). There is an irrationality to that, but the irrationality exists as the larger societal level, not necessarily at the personal level.

It might be easier to define skeptical (i.e., rational) computing by defining what it is not. I know a lot of irrational Windows users and a lot of irrational Mac users. People who will tell you that Macs never do anything wrong, or that their Windows machine has never crashed. Those would be the non-skeptical, insane people.

And then there is Linux. Linux is actually the operating system of Skeptics who have a) choice b) some interest in the technical aspects of computer use and c) a tiny bit of experience or training. Linux actually works for more people than that, but making that argument is hard. I’d rather say to people “Linux is not for everybody” and then chuckle quietly when I think what that really means.

My point being, very simply this: Rational people use Mac’s and Linux, depending on various factors. Many rational people are, sadly, forced to use Microsoft systems and software. Woe is them.

So, what is the rational choice regarding buying an iPad?

Well, the most rational choice for most people is probably to not buy one at all until a few months has gone by, because that is what one should always do with totally new hardware if you can. Second or third generation configurations usually become default and basic in a few months, difficulties are worked out, prices drop, and so on.

But aside from that, there seems to be two categories of argument emerging to never buy one, or to at least be very negative about the Apple iPad, or, in some cases, to even bash them with baseball bats and put them in blenders instead of using them. And these arguments are wrong, from a skeptical, rational point of view.

The first is in what appears to be a rather quirky design. The new iPad can only be connected to the outside world in a limited number of ways, and the usual methods of connecting are in some cases lacking. This seems strange, even uncanny. But remember how uncanny the first Macs that had no floppy drives were? That seemed so odd, so counter intuitive, so bizarre, they might as well have been talking dogs or something. But now, nobody has a floppy drive, and we are all so much happier. True, we have thumb drives out the wazoo, and can still never find the files we want, but at least there are no more piles and drawer-fulls of floppy disks laying around everywhere! Yay!

My point being: You might think some of the design aspects of the new iPad are strange, but you might just be behind the curve. Apple has repeatedly introduced totally new ideas that freaked everyone out and that have become universally accepted. They may have only 10 percent of the market, but 100 percent of home computer users use Apple-like desktops and don’t use floppies.

The second strike against the iPad is the number and diversity of negative reports about hardware and to some extent software.

This is where the skeptical part really comes into play. This is where the autism vaccine deniers are separated from the rational people, but in computer-think. Here is the truth: For the average established computer system, the percentage of actual hardware failures, flaws, or quirks that get blogged about … I’m talking about individual instances here, where Joe Schmo has a broken machine and writes a blog or live journal entry about it or comments on an existing blog … is tiny. A small fraction of the instances in which someone’s USB port breaks make it into the blogosphere as news, or are turned into YouTube videos.

In contrast, for brand new, aggressively marketed and hyped hardware and software from a major company like Apple, the percentage of possible (not even actual) hardware glitches that get onto the Internet and discussed rather loudly is … NOT tiny. It might be closer to ten percent. Maybe more.

So you have to take the news with the proverbial grain of salt.

I don’t like Apple’s proprietary approach, and I distrust specialized hardware. But I DO own a kindle and I love it. I’d probably like an iPad very much.