And you are here why?

Apple released a little more information about #DifferentialPrivacy with a paper and an excellent blog post (°). A quick refresher - Under differential privacy, you • Collect user’s data (locally, or on the server) • Add noise to mask the data, but in such a way that when you • Average out the data, the noise averages out, and meaningful information emerges The trick, of course, is in the details, at the very least, you need to be careful in • calibrating the noise so that it averages out (algorithms matter!) • collecting and transmitting information in a manner that protects privacy (secure storage! encryption!) • keeping the information under privacy exposure thresholds (don’t combine data across different use cases! restrict the number of use cases!) etc. It's a fascinating read, and, I suspect, the very beginning of the field. I expect signal processing (Huffman coding, etc) to come into play any day now   (°) Learning with Privacy at Scale - the paper - h...

There is a nice writeup on this at Lawfare .  (TL;DR -  holding on to keys in a safe way such that 3rd parties can also access them repeatedly without high potential for catastrophic loss is impossibly hard) ...Apple’s design intentionally solved the problems that come from exceptional access schemes by removing itself from the equation. Rather than providing an exceptional access solution, Apple took the radical step of destroying those keys in order to have an acceptable level of protection.   [To] turn Apple’s Cloud Key Vault into an exceptional access mechanism....Apple would have to replace the HSM with one that accepts an additional message from Apple or the FBI—or an agency from any of the 100+ countries where Apple sells iPhones—saying “OK, decrypt,” as well as the user’s password. In order to do this securely, these messages would have to be cryptographically signed with a second set of keys, which would then have to be used as often as law enforcement ac...

/via WuMo

via MetaPicture

WuMo brings the pain... It never gets old :-)

Sheldon brings the pain

These posts pretty much sums up everything you need to know about my attitude towards fanboys. That said, every now and then somebody else truly encapsulates the experience.  In this case, WuMo has at it ...

Bloom County said it all, a long time ago Hackers, as a rule, do not handle obsolescence well. Mind you, the unsaid caveat should be "Unless you are a fanboy " (ref: the latest MessiahPhone)  

From AdamThinks , we have this brilliant parody of the iPhone rollout (video above - still image below)

Then --> Green is Good Now --> Greed is Good You all saw Apple removes green certification from its product range   here we are with word that Cupertino is no longer considered to be environmentally friendly where their product range is concerned, especially after Apple had requested the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) group which is in charge of setting environmental standards for electronics to remove all 39 – yup, you read that right, all 39 of its products from its green registry. Followed by the pretty rapid flip-flop In a letter to customers posted on the company website, Bob Mansfield, Apple senior vice president of hardware engineering, admitted it was a "mistake" to remove its products from EPEAT, a nonprofit rating group backed by many manufacturers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So what was it? Greed? Idiocy? Orneriness? Me, I'm betting on greed...  

From visual.ly a spectacular infographic. Click to embiggen massively

From BGR , Ubergizmo and others, is the story of a chinese vendor that is selling, wait for it, Home Buttons for the next iPhone. Yup. You got that right. Home Buttons . For the next iPhone. Why is this a story?  Really, WHY? Please, just shoot me...

Seriously, hasn't this traditionally been the other party's tactic? Something that the PC makers and Android device folks, etc. have adopted? As I've pointed out [The] Apple approach is software dominated while the "other" approach is fixated on hardware specs. Think about it - after an initial flurry of " How great is this iPhone display, wah! wah! w00t! ", you pretty much hear nothing else about it, but do hear a metric ton about Siri, iCloud, Apps, etc.  In the Android world however, virtually all the discussion about the new phones tends to be the exact opposite, i.e., after an initial flurry of " How great is Ice Cream Sandwich, rejoice! ", its all about pen-tile displays, quad-core processors, NFC , etc. To hammer the point home, just look at the discussion of any set of PCs vs Macs - the PCs are all about the latest processor from Intel, screen size, etc. while the Macs have always been about "oooh check out this t...

This is the Green Room points out that Mountain Lion's Safari will have a unified address bar. Just the one bar. No separate bars for URL and Search.... And now, back to the "Reprise" part.  Back in 2009, I tried to figure out how I could make Safari act as if it had just the one bar , and promptly got yelled at by - seemingly - half the fanboys on the intertubes.  I expect to see a parcel of posts (is that the collective noun? Lipton ?) saying either " Brilliant! Apple does it again" and variations thereof... The original post below in all its misery ... Consider the situation. You are trying to do something on your macintosh. Doesnt matter what.  Something.  You just can't figure out how to do it, so you ask.... At this point, the road bifurcates. The road more traveled (i.e., the way the rest of the  world - and clearly, the way any sane person - does it)  :  You get a response saying "Ah, just do blah blah blah..."...

Theres a new beta version of Apple's new Messages app available .  Before Lion I'd have been on this sucker, but now, ye gods, I wonder what kind of disaster it'll inflict on my Laptop.  Anybody else dumb plucky enough to check it out?  From the site... Send unlimited iMessages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.* Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Send photos, videos, attachments, contacts, locations, and more. Launch a FaceTime video call and bring the conversation face-to-face. Messages supports iMessage, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts.   Note: I'm not even getting into what Mountain Lion is going to break.  The sad thing is, I'll probably upgrade because, ye gods, it certain can't be worse than Lion, y'know?

Zach Holman talks about a company's Voice - specifically bringing up Apple's (which is brilliant in its simplicity and consistency). Apple commands their words exceedingly well. They aren’t the originator — or even the owner — of their particular voice, but they are the most visible. Mechanically, The Apple Voice is characterized by short, declarative sentences that are informally and personally delivered to you with a hint of smugness. Our most amazing iPhone yet.   10,000 songs in your pocket.   We think you’ll like it. For Apple, this voicing evokes two feelings: Accessibility . Formal tones feel heavier and more complex. The informal tone emits a feeling of simplicity, of fewer barriers to entry. Apple wants their products to be simple. Quality . Smugness is always a gamble — and you can lose that gamble — but when executed well it can set your product’s quality apart from the rest. Apple wants their products to be high quality. As a consumer company, thos...

Remember the contretemps around the iBook EULA ? To summarize - the EULA said, Feel free to create anything you want with this tool If you want to give the Fruits Of Your Genius away for free , rock on.  Do it however and wherever you want. If you you want to sell it however, You must sell it through us (Apple) If we don't want to sell it, you are Shit-out-of-Luck. And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. There was much discussion afterwards as to whether it was actually enforceable or not , but as it turns out, the whole point is moot, with Apple backing down today . From Ars Technica, we have the following If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not in...

(Seemingly) Aeons ago, I upgraded from Snow Leopard (10.6) to Lion (10.7).  And my long personal wi-fi nightmare began.  Actually, technically speaking, its not my nightmare.  Its our nightmare - check out this thread from Apple Support Communities, which is basically one long jazz riff to the tune of Hey Apple!  I upgraded to Lion.  My Wi-Fi now blows! Hey Apple ! 10.7.1 came with a bevy of promised Wi-Fi fixes - or rather, it didn't. 10.7.2 came with a new bevy of promised Wi-Fi fixes - and it didn't work either. But now, Hey Now , *now* they've got it all fixed. 10.7.3 is out, and I see from the release notes Resolve a Wi-Fi connection issue when waking from sleep I am hopeful! Nay, I am convinced that it will work this time.  After all, when has Apple ever failed me? (No, don't answer that.  Please don't.  Let me at least pretend for the next few hours...) Update :  Sigh.  Didn't work.  But I am hopef...