…conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.
Apple’s response to queries about PRISM has an interesting sidebar. If you want your communications to be private, both you and who you are communicating with should use iOS.
A quick note to let you know that there is an issue in the feedly+twitter integration. The dev team is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. We will be releasing that fix by Friday night. As a temporary work around, you can use the buffer sharing option to post your tweets. We will update this post as soon as we have more information.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Dyson wanted its users to get the best value out of their purchases.
I wonder how effective this strategy is for getting the type of Promoter Scores that turn into recurring purchases – without the overt marketing normally required to achieve this.
Following Alex Stamos’ intriguing A Taxonomy of PRISM Possibilities I noted the following path suggested:
The PRISM program exists and gathers large amounts of information indiscriminately. The NSA is gathering broad data sets by passively sniffing huge amounts of traffic on backbones and at interchange points without the knowledge of the end-providers. The NSA is decrypting traffic using the private keys of these companies which it convinced them to turn over.
In short, one of the paths he seems to suggest is one where (2 B ii a c b) the NSA is passively sniffing without the knowledge of the end-providers but the NSA has their Private Keys.
Even though at first glance it might look like a contradiction – why would they allow them to have their Private Keys if they though they were likely to sniff their traffic, there’s always the chance the Private Key was handed over for other reasons at another time. The chance that this might be the case should now make any organisation become more than normally wary about who has access to their Private Keys.
Unless, and as Stamos says,
This is a way that these companies could cooperate with the NSA without large numbers of employees being involved.
And be able to pretend to themselves while denying in public – as many have – that they’ve allowed any backdoors by Government agencies into their servers and services.
Maybe Last.fm is the electric car and CBS is GM from the 70′s?
As a multi-year user of the service, so much this.
Someone should acquire Last.FM from CBS and do something with it.
A friend sent me a music video last night on twitter, which when I went to watch on my iPad, both within Tweetbot and in the YouTube app, couldn’t be enjoyed.
Errors varied from "The content holder did not make this available on mobile. Add to your playlist to watch on a PC" in the Tweetbot WebKit browser to "Not available on this platform" in the app. (The fact that, for many, the iPad is their PC probably doesn’t occur to the denizens of Google towers, perhaps?)
Coincidentally, I was listening to John Gruber’s The Talk Show at the time where he and software developer Daniel Jalkut were reminiscing with some disdain, as John can be wont to do, about the time when Flash ruled everything on the web. From Kids games to restaurant menus.
Now I don’t know if the reason why that They Might be Giants video was unplayable on my iPad was because it was encoded in Flash or because of the intransigence of the rights holder, but it reminded me of the days, before the iPad, when the Internet, games and so many other things were riddled with Flash, just because.
I see far too many examples, when it comes to technology, where the technology solution is allowed to define the problem, despite some of the best customer experiences often being where the technology underpinning the products are opaque to the user.
I know that Flash was a great solution for many problems, and in many ways still is. I also know that I daily, thank the iPad for helping kill its use in places where it didn’t belong and encourage providers to consider alternative, better solutions to problems customers have.
Update: I should probably be clear that, while I’m using the link and video I refer to in this post as an example of a bad user experience, I don’t know if that specific issue is caused by Flash or not. Here’s a possible workaround for the mobile site, though that won’t work on the YouTube app on the iPad.
Someone’s got to explain the craziness behind this.
Special Minister of State Mark Dreyfus says the bill will be withdrawn altogether if the Coalition does not support it.
"The whole basis for this particular package was the clear commitments that have been received from the Coalition," he said.
"If those commitments aren’t there anymore, we won’t be proceeding with this bill."
Mark Dreyfus learns there’s nothing like inheriting and having to implement someone else’s ideas. Especially if you end up having to defend them.
How does your former customer feel about you after they’ve exited their relationship with you?
If a horde of people decide to push that refresh back a year or two longer than usual, annual PC sales are going to drop precipitously as a result. Like, say, to the tune of a 7.8 percent decline.
I’d say they are being generous with that decline.
