I don't think the problem is so much collecting data, more what agreement the company collecting the data has with third party corporations and governments. Also, the fact that Apple includes full disk encryption for OS X, and encrypts all communications on iOS storage and in transit with personal keys, is a pretty good sign Apple is taking personal privacy seriously.
All the encryption in the world doesn't make any difference if it's easy to steal your account.
Unlike Facebook or Google, Apple practically had to be shamed into fixing an easily-gamed account reset process and adding two-factor authentication support (and then took their own sweet time rolling it out across their services) and had to be shamed again into adding rate-limiting on logins. Not to mention their spotty track record on other security issues (e.g."goto fail").
That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't done some things that are good for personal privacy. But their broader track record makes it clear that Apple only takes the appearance of personal privacy seriously. The reality, on the other hand, easily takes a back seat to things like UI simplicity unless that missing reality starts creating appearance problems.
I think that if they are collecting user data it's only due to Government pressure.
I can't imagine any business related reason that would require Apple to store and harvest user data. When you make such a large profit on hardware, you don't need to scrounge around for bits and bytes to sell to the advertisers.
Of course this excludes the minimum data they need to maintain warranties and your payment details.
They've got your iMessage/Facetime chat logs, they've got your stored unencrypted data in iCloud, they've got the apps that you're using and probably their settings or saved meta-data as well. Speaking of iCloud, they've got your contacts as well. Your iPhone is collecting your location and the Wifi networks around it and sending it to Apple's servers. At some point the iPhone was saving your location history in a local file as well, ready to be inspected by whomever got a hold of it. The operating system is completely closed / proprietary, so if it has back-doors in it, nobody will ever know.
I'm glad that Tim Cook is raising these issues and I realize that behind every piece of data they have there's a justification for it. But in our country we have a saying which applies here: he ate no onions and his mouth stinks not.
Both of those services are encrypted so what useful data would they have on it?
I think Tim Cook's point is that they collect data solely to improve your user experience. If they stopped tomorrow they would continue making money. Other companies collect data they need for user experience plus data advertisers will find valuable so they can sell it/exploit it. If they stopped collecting data tomorrow they would die unless they radically changed their business model.
That is correct, iMessage is encrypted, however they still have your metadata (who you're speaking with, timestamps) and because of how iMessage works (asymmetric cryptography with multiple public keys managed by Apple), it's easy on Apple's side to attach a new public key and device to your account such that anybody can then listen to the messages sent to you. And so, because you can't settle on a specific public key with the person you're talking with, the model is kind of broken, although it is better than nothing.
XMPP / OTR is a much better option for encrypted chats. It's fairly user friendly as well. Unfortunately big companies owning chat services are not fans of open standards.
But this is kind of like your phone company having complete access to all of your phone records. It's necessary for their business, but they gain nothing from investigating them, just like Apple gains nothing from monitoring who you are speaking with via email when you use an account from them. Or, how a traditional email service provider or ISP from the 90s wouldn't have cared about who you were talking to or what hosts you were communicating with, or what the content of that was.
Google is different, very different than these situations. Everything is read, torn apart, analyzed, and sold. They are organizing the world's information, but they consider your private information some of the most immediately monetizable information.
There really is a huge difference here, and though we all love Google and everything that it has done for us, we must also realize the great amount of power that we have given it over us. Yes, they are benevolent now, but they have much much much more reason than Apple to become less benevolent, and far far more power than Apple does in many respects.
There's no practical reason for a phone company to keep your phone records around, since phone companies are just carriers (although they try pretending that they are not).
Google does have justification for analyzing your activity. They can classify you and improve your search experience. As an example, when I'm searching for "Ruby", I'm getting different results than what my wife does. And local search results are vastly better than anything their competitors are displaying. And then they claim that whatever data they keep around, they are anonymizing it.
Of course, that's probably bullshit, plus they've got access to a huge database of emails. But then we are talking about potential and pretending that Apple does not have potential to do harm, or that it has less incentive than Google, well I don't buy that.
I should mention that at some point I worked on a system that was integrating with Google AdX, which is the platform that is supposedly selling the information you're talking about to advertisers. I must say that compared to other RTB platforms, they actually expose less information. You don't get a reliable user ID, you don't get an IP and they reject your application if you're setting cookies. It's very hard for advertisers that use AdX to build profiles.
Everyone is collecting user data for targeting and segmentation in marketing. Not sure Tim Cook knows everything that is going on at Apple. I've worked directly with several CEOs of larger companies and none new everything that was going on.
They are for sure. It's like if you fart and instead of owning up to your smelly fart you say, "Ewww. Who farted?" Or, you blame the fart on another person (in this case, Google) to distract people from identifying you as the smelly farter.
Yeah, you're probably right. I won't quit my day job. I saw farting as the collection of user data described in the article and thought the analogy was kind of funny.
I think one thing that will greatly help mobile experience for me is to add a reddit-style collapse comment section toggler. On mobile devices (and in some cases on desktops), it will help reach the lower comments easily without having to scroll a lot.
I am not sure why you were downvoted. I'd think it is in Apple's vested interest to actually not treat the older hardware so you buy new one. I am no talking about really old hardware. Example: I have seen my iPhone 5S get substantially slower after update to ios 8+.
It's not. some people are solving this problem with https://github.com/conda/conda. There are many ways to use conda for deployment. My preferred approach is the following:
For builds:
- build a conda environment for your project
- export your conda environment using conda list -e, and then take all the conda packages for those and put them into a single tarball
For deployment
- bootstrap a base python environment using miniconda http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html
- install that tarball of packages with conda install <mytarball.tar>
It's not as simple as a jar, but it's reasonably close
Sorta. It's not that easy in practice (although not terribly, hard since you can package up your python project with setuptools and then deploy it to an internal (or actual) PyPI followed up by using distribution packages for a wsgi server like gunicorn, mod_wsgi, etc). In reality, you typically care about third-party modules enough and building rpms/debs is typically not fun enough that you just have the normal pip/virtualenv story.
There is a solution from Twitter that my devops team has been flirting with called PEX[1]. It builds all of your dependencies into a zip file similar to a jar and sets it up to work by just putting it on your pythonpath. This would in practice be very similar to an uberjar.
Actually, building rpm/deb is quite easy, setuptools handles bdist_rpm by itself, for bdist_deb there is a plugin. For windows folks, bdist_msi is by default part of setuptools[1]. As a backup plan, you can still build eggs with bdist_egg and let pip handle the package manager duties for you.
The real complexity comes elsewhere - both in java and python world, setting up the java application server or wsgi server for python is more involved than just dropping an app there. And then there comes the debugging the exceptions... there I would pretty much prefer the python world.
Also, be careful with zipping python projects. While .zip is a valid member of pythonpath, packages can have problems with finding their assets (if they have any). For example, you cannot zip django this way.
[1] It even handles setting up vcvars when building native extensions. I was impressed, it was easiest building of windows binaries for free software I've ever seen.
Except that bsdist_rpm only builds the current package. That's not really any different than pip. You'd need to recursively build packages for all of the dependencies and have some magic to autodetect the provides/requires inside your little package ecosystem to be reasonable for any non-trival app to be deployable via rpm. This isn't impossible, but it's a far cry from PEX or uberjar.
It was too labor intensive. One would need to establish relationships with almost every event venue in order to catch a significant number of tech events.
What's the other app that you use?