waffle

So remember when I wished for the “e-reading experience” to be less obsessed with pages and more with text, to embrace the ability to layout photos and videos as in a magazine and interactive material in the same way, to take advantage of the infinite horizontal wheel that a screen may afford and a non-scroll-wheel computer may provide?

It looks like someone got the memo.

Friend of mine leaves Android company to start venture that makes better Android software: cool.

Friend of mine makes TrickyLeaks, an Android game in which you put pipes together to stop corporate leaks from spreading while Julian keeps bulldozing them over (the pipes): neat.

TrickyLeaks goes on to be mentioned on WikiLeaks’ Twitter and profiled on Kotaku: awesome.

TrickyLeaks makes the corrupt machinery of backhanded corporate profiteering collapse and rebuilds the social weave of honesty, hard work and reciprocality into a strong, fine textile the softness of silk and the strength of diamonds, redeeming humanity: not yet. Possibly tomorrow. Buy his game though.

So it turns out that iOS 4 periodically saves the location of your iPhone in a file called consolidated.db; that this data is kept both a) at all and b) unencrypted; that the file is backed up and thus migratory along successive iPhones and never truncated; that this goes against Apple’s own self-proclaimed rules — “[Steve Jobs] also said he thought Apple took privacy very seriously, more than most other Silicon Valley companies. For instance, he said, rather than telling applications they had to ask to get location information, Apple provides the data and always puts up a screen asking for permission.” — and that there are still two camps: one that freaks out completely because Apple’s been keeping files on them on their device containing tracking information that they haven’t known about and one that acts like it’s always been Apple’s right to pull crap like this without asking and that questioning it is sensationalizing. (Update: Gruber has since linked to posts dealing with consolidated.db in a non-sensationalist way. Right now, we pretty much agree.)

Good, then, to have Al Franken asking Steve Jobs nine questions:

1. Why does Apple collect and compile this location data? Why did Apple choose to initiate tracking this data in its iOS 4 operating system?
2. Does Apple collect and compile this location data for laptops?
3. How is this data generated? (GPS, cell tower triangulation, Wi-Fi triangulation, etc.)
4. How frequently is a user’s location recorded? What triggers the creation of a record of someone’s location?
5. How precise is this location data? Can it track the users location to 50 m, 100 m, etc.?
6. Why is this data not encrypted? What steps will Apple take to encrypt the data?
7. Why were Apple consumers never affirmatively informed of the collection and retention of their location data in this manner? Why did Apple not seek affirmative consent before doing so?
8. Does Apple believe that this conduct is permissible under the terms of its privacy policy?
9. To whom, if anyone, including Apple, has this data been disclosed? When and why were these disclosures made?

Sure, it’s a politician asking these questions. But it’s the same questions everyone’s asking, and it lights a fire under Apple to provide some answers. Some people’s plea to calm “we’ve known about the file before” isn’t an answer to any of these questions as much as it’s a convenient excuse to avoid investigation, and it’s not at all clear why this file is so justified they can get away with keeping the records at all or in the dickish way they are currently being kept. Let’s not cook this frog any further.

Ars Technica: Report: Nintendo system with HD graphics to be revealed this month.

What, already?