Category: technical

What’s the difference between the image on the left and the image on the right?

The image on the left is the recently posted map [gizmodo.com] of the data that is being stored in your iPhone (and your computer that your iPhone syncs with). That data amounts to all the locations you have taken your phone since you upgraded it to iOS 4.

The image on the right is basically the same type of data — though it’s presented as an animation so you only see one spot in the image above. That data is from the your phone company — and it does not matter what phone you have, just having a phone on the network is enough for the operator to collect the data, and in many places they are required by law to keep this data for some period of time. (The map on the right also shows all the calls and messages to and from the phone; in this case stripped of the details but be assured the raw data that your phone company has does show who you are calling, I wonder if Apple is creating a log of this data on your iPhone too? I bet they are.) I ranted about this map a while back [confusion.cc].

There seems to be a lot of concern about the fact that your iPhone is logging this type of data. The FCC want’s to know why. Congress wants to know why. (See here [politico.com]). But there does not seem to be anywhere near as much concern about the fact the your phone company has the same data, more detailed data in fact. There should be. In fact, if privacy is your concern, or fear of Big Brother, you should be much more concerned about what your phone company knows than what Apple might know.

The big difference to me between the two is that the historical data that Apple is collecting is on the device and backed up to your computer. While the data that is collected by your phone service provider is on their servers and therefore subject to Lawful Intercept. According to Wikipedia Lawful Intercept [wikipedia.org] is:

obtaining communications network data pursuant to lawful authority for the purpose of analysis or evidence.

That means that all that data; including locations, calls made, calls received, messages sent and received, as well as who those calls and messages where to or from, is available to law enforcement if needed. This is generally a good thing; if it helps to catch murderers or sexual predators or other criminal types. But it’s not hard to image it being used for less savory purposes like tracking dissidents or in more authoritarian places tracking political opponents or protesters. This is the kind of data that warrantless wiretapping was collecting, and it’s done by just making a request to your phone service provider —if the provider or the government is good enough they could collect this data in real time. Meaning we are all carrying around Big Brother approved “bugs” in our pockets.

It’s also worth noting that the data collected by your phone company is required for it to provide the service you are paying for. There has been speculation about what Apple wants this data for; I imagine it will come down to advertising or something, some way to make more money off of iPhone owners; in the end Apple is a company interested in making money. In this case consumers will quickly forget the issue while privacy advocates piss into the wind about for much longer.

What good is the cloud? I don’t get it. This article on PC Mag [pcmag.com] talks about how all the new cloud services will change our concept of content ownership but I think it’s bullshit. I don’t disagree with anything in the article but I think it’s all a dream, a crack dream, until one issue is solved. One issue which is outside the scope of the cloud service providers: bandwidth!

At the same time as we are seeing all these new cloud services providing us storage and access to our purchased content 24/7 streaming to any device, anywhere, any time, we are also seeing the death of unlimited bandwidth. Even for home access. How am I supposed to stream my content all over the place if I don’t have any bandwidth?

Take this scenario from the PC Mag article:

The parent whose child wants to watch “Dora the Explorer: Big Sister Dora” over and over and over again doesn’t have to own the DVD or even the digital file. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can see Dora play big sister at home, on the iPad, in the car, and on mommy’s smartphone. They own the movie or, more likely, have an all-you-can eat subscription service, so each viewing costs nothing except the price of Internet access.

The emphasis is mine, because it’s the part that kills the whole scenario.

I might be a strange consumer by today’s measure — I’ve digitized all my content. I’ve got more then 1200 CDs that I digitized before I started buying digital music; 200+ DVDs that I have digitized and 7 years worth of digital photos and video that alone amount to more then 12 gigs worth of keepers. All in all I have more than a terabyte of digital content. All happily sitting on my 8TB NAS server mirrored and stripped high up on the shelf in the back room.

To get streaming access to all this content today I can jump through a bunch of hoops and make it work. But… I would max out my mobile data plan every month — 12GB — due to my daughter streaming Dora, and Toy Story 3 and Kai-Lan and whatever new, or old, show it was this week (actually currently it’s My Neighbor Totoro), to the iPad while we are driving or shopping or wherever. So for now she is restricted to the content that is actually on the device, and I fill up the devices quickly. I can’t even put all the Pixar movies on the iPad and have the family photos on there, 64GB is just not enough.

While I may be the exception today this will be normal one day when every piece of content we ever buy is stored on the cloud, ready for on-demand download or streaming to any device over any network. But until the bandwidth issue is solved it will be any network accept the mobile one and only till the service provider throttles me or cuts me off for exceeding my bandwidth cap for the month. Bottom line; the scenario from the PC Mag article is pointless without unlimited bandwidth. Memory is cheap — bandwidth is the new memory.

Sometimes it’s easy to wonder what all the privacy advocates are screaming and yelling about all the time. While I agree with much of what they say, I find it hard to explain why privacy is important to Joe-not-a-geek. Enter the power of visualization:

This is from an interactive feature at Zeit Online [zeit.de]. Very cool. They took data collected by a mobile operator about a specific person and linked it with data taken from his public internet sites (such as twitter) to create scary — very cool, but scary — timeline of his activities. Now what’s missing is who he called and messaged, that data was not released but you can bet the mobile operator has it.

Now imagine this, in real-time, for every one on every mobile operator running on a big screen in a secret room somewhere. The technology exists. Imagine the CIA tracking ‘suspected terrorists’. Imagine being on that list. Imagine Bin Ali’s, Mubarak’s or Gaddafi’s secret police using this to anticipate protests and sending in the thugs before the protest even begins.

This article [zdnet.com] and several others making the rounds in the past few days point to Microsoft re-branding the cloud backup service it included with its’ short lived Kin line of mobiles. The cloud backup – Kin Studio – was the coolest feature of the Kin phones, maybe not the most sexy but the most useful. Now it looks like Microsoft may add it to Windows Phone 7 handsets – if they combine it with the Windows Live service, providing 25GB of free cloud storage connected to the users Hotmail/Windows Live and Office Live accounts then they may have a compelling offer.

Of course Microsoft is not the only mover, Apple has long had its’ MobileMe service which has significant overlap. To date this product has only attracted hardcore Apple fan-boys, but for over a year now there has been a rumor that Apple will drop the subscription fee and include as a free service for all iOS devices (more recently there has been a rumor that Apple will drop the subscription fee to $20 a year, I think maybe it will be free for 1 year with your iOS device and then $20 a year unless you buy a new iOS device). Link this to the rumored iTunes media cloud service that will run out of the billion dollar datacenter Apple has built in North Carolina. Again this could be a very useful service providing automated backup and streaming of all of your media (movies, photos, music, contacts, messages) from the cloud.

Google wouldn’t have to move very far to offer the same sort of service with Android.

In my time in the telco industry I’ve seen several projects at mobile operators around the world try to provide this type of data backup service. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any that actually succeeded. They died for many reasons —customers not willing to pay for the service, limited features, crippled features, lack of marketing, lack of handset support…

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And

All in all I think the data-backup-as-a-service boat has already set sail and the telcos will be left behind due to their own dithering on how to make money on the offering. The same thing that happened to them with Location Based Services —they could not figure out how to make money on it so they never launched it, the phone makers opened the on-device location services (initially mandated for emergency number calling) to application developers and they figured out how to make money from it. So the telcos are left with LBS systems that cost them money but generate no revenue and don’t provide any value even in generating ‘customer stickiness’. And if you need a computer network that connects smaller networks, it’s imperative that you learn what is WAN.

C’est la vie. Real consumer service innovation in the mobile market continues to move away from the telcos and towards the internet. It’s one more step on the road to mobile dumb pipe networks.

I would like to make a request to Apple for a new UI enhancement to be released in the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 update.

See, here’s the thing. I use WiFi and Bluetooth all the time. But turning WiFi on and off and switching networks (I do this often as Singapore has municipal WiFi and shitty though it is, I use it until I’m somewhere with a better network, like home or the office, then I need to switch), or changing Bluetooth devices is not convenient. For example to change the WiFi network I am attached to I have to 1. Go to the home screen, 2. Open “Settings”, 3. Select WiFi 4. Choose a new network. This is too many steps for something that I use multiple times a day.

Now, one way to fix this would be to add two more hardware switches like there is for audio on. You could switch WiFi and Bluetooth on and off and flipping it on would bring up the selection box. OK. But Apple has a thing about buttons. So maybe not.

On the other hand… The iPad has a “tap and hold” gesture, that has shown up in the latest OS SDK for the iPhone/iPad. I’d like to use this as an easy way to get to the pertinent WiFi and or Bluetooth settings. First we need to make a small change in the title bar; today if WiFi or Bluetooth are turned off you don’t see their icons:

I propose to change this. I’d like to see the WiFi and Bluetooth icons always on the title bar:

This necessitates a new icon: WiFi off. I based this one on the Mac title bar’s WiFi off icon. I’m sure the UI guys at Apple can make it beautiful.

Now that we have icons let’s use them! Let’s look at WiFi. Using the “tap and hold” gesture I just tap and hold on the WiFi icon would bring up a dialog allowing us to turn on WiFi:

Then I can turn on WiFi and see a list of available networks:

That seems much faster and easier to me.

I’d do something similar with Bluetooth, but I’m too lazy to mock it up.