American Butifarra » Hardware

Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move, Sort of…

Claude — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:26:30 +0000

My friend @DenisGobo shared a post about how your evil iPhone was tracking your every move in order for Apple to do {fill in nefarious act here} with your precious private information.

This disclosure was found by a couple of researchers:

We’d been discussing doing a visualization of mobile data, and while he was researching into what was available, Alasdair discovered this file. At first we weren’t sure how much data was there, but after we dug further and visualized the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements. It also became obvious that at least some other people knew about it, but it wasn’t being publicized.

So I decided to follow the instructions and extract this data from my phone backups, using the Python script and SQLLite plugin for Firefox referenced in the researchers’ post, which turned out to be more fun than scary. AT&T customers data is stored in the CellLocation table while Verizon users data is saved in the CDMACellLocation table.

My private data revealed

I was not impressed by the amount and quality of the data. I’ve only had my iPhone since Verizon began to offer it, but I expected more than 980 rows of data. So I proceeded to download the timestamp and location information to a comma separated value file that I promptly uploaded to Open Heat Map and the following map was revealed.

Here is where I think the premise of evilness by Apple falls apart. This data is useless. As far as I can tell, since I’ve had the phone in my possession from day one, some of the locations are completely off. I have not frequented a place near the Jersey shore or Long Island, NY.

It’s obvious this data represents cell tower locations more than it does my normal travel if you were to map it with a GPS.

Don’t fear the big bad Apple. At least not yet.

Sky News Video: Apple iPhone tracking device raises privacy issues

UPDATE: Alex Levinson destroys the premise that Apple is using this data for malicious purposes here.

Is My Mac’s SuperDrive Dead?

Claude — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:50:04 +0000

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been unable to burn DVDs on my MacBook Pro. I insert a blank disc whenever the SuperDrive prompts for one, it then checks and checks for about a minute before ejecting the disc. At first I thought this was related to the type of disc I was using, TDK DVD-R 1-16x 4.7GB, but they burned just fine on my wife’s slightly older iMac.

Have you reset your PRAM and NVRAM lately?

After a bit of Googling for a fairly recent and verifiable solution I decided to reset the machine’s parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) as suggested by some folks and Apple’s technical support site. It works!

Try this before you declare your SuperDrive dead and go out and buy a new one.

iTunes Crashes During Sync Post 2.2.1 Upgrade – FIX

Claude — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:27:37 +0000

ITunes began crashing on Super Bowl Sunday after I upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest firmware, version 2.2.1 — Since then I have reinstalled iTunes, did a factory restore of the iPod to no avail.

A few minutes ago I was looking through the Apple discussion groups and came across this fix by Jeff McCord. It is a simple one when you think about it:

Deauthorize your computer
Authorize it again
Visit the App Store and “Buy” a free app
Sync up

I am a happy camper again. All my music, movies, videos and audio books are back!