Tag Archives: apple

Apple Gives Its Middle Finger to the NSA

by HildredCouncil Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m a little late getting started this morning, even though I actually woke up much earlier than usual. What happened is that I wrote a post; then lost it by hitting the wrong key and blowing away my browser window; then recreated it; and then decided not to publish it after all. I’m still not sure if this is because the post was genuinely ill-conceived, or because I’m just too cowardly to put it up. Questions, questions….

In any case, I’m fascinated to see this tidbit among all the boring recent Apple iPhone news (bigger screen, thinner profile, yawn):

Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user information.

….The key is the encryption that Apple mobile devices automatically put in place when a user selects a passcode, making it difficult for anyone who lacks that passcode to access the information within, including photos, e-mails and recordings. Apple once maintained the ability to unlock some content on devices for legally binding police requests but will no longer do so for iOS 8, it said in the new privacy policy.

I’m not sure how universally this kind of technical fix can be applied elsewhere. I have a feeling that in practice, it’s probably a limited solution. But it would certainly be a bit of poetic justice if the NSA’s overreach and the government’s unwillingness to rein them in led to a sea change in private security that simply makes it impossible to respond to mass requests for customer data.

Of course, this might not be the end of things. For the time being, actual traditional governments with police forces and courts are still more powerful than even the highest of high-tech corporations. If Congress passes a law requiring Apple to maintain unlock codes, then they’ll have to do it whether they like it or not. I wonder how this is all going to play out?

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Apple Gives Its Middle Finger to the NSA

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Your iPhone is about to get (a little) less toxic

by DesireeHoddle Posted on August 14, 2014

Your iPhone is about to get (a little) less toxic

By

Ian Higgins

Apple is upping its green game in a big way, thanks in no small part to former-EPA-chief-turned-Apple-exec Lisa Jackson. On Wednesday, the company announced an official ban of two toxins from its iPhone and iPad production lines, following a five-month-long “Bad Apple” campaign launched by China Labor Watch and Green America.

Benzene and n-hexane, used primarily to clean and polish electronics during the final stages of production, are known to cause a slew of negative health effects including leukemia and nerve damage. Activist groups harangued the company for its use of the chemicals until it conducted its own investigation of 22 of its plants.

Naturally, Apple’s internal probe found nothing of consequence (the use of the chemicals wasn’t widespread, it insists, and didn’t endanger a single worker; what little it did find fell well within the company’s existing safety standards). In true EPA style, though, Jackson and her team tightened the existing rules to explicitly prohibit the use of benzene and n-hexane in final assembly processes. Although the company will still use a tiny bit during the earlier stages of production, Apple, Jackson writes, “treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously.” Hmm.

From the AP:

“This is doing everything we can think of to do to crack down on chemical exposures and to be responsive to concerns,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We think it’s really important that we show some leadership and really look toward the future by trying to use greener chemistries.”

Hear, hear. And at least Apple has now released an actual list of the substances it regulates to the public, making world domination by iThings a little more transparent.


Source
Apple Bans Use of 2 Chemicals in iPhone Assembly, Associated Press

Sara Bernard is a Grist fellow, wilderness junkie, and globetrotter. Follow her on Twitter.

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Cellucor C4 Extreme Pre-workout W/NO3 Green Apple 60 Servings 330g

by 07ld5ksl Posted on August 4, 2014

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

by RafaelClopton Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Twitter today followed in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook by releasing statistics on the race and gender of its workforce. The company certainly deserves credit for voluntarily making its diversity stats public, unlike, say, Apple. “Like our peers, we have a lot of work to do,” Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity and inclusion, admits on the company blog. But perhaps that’s an understatement; Twitter actually lags far behind its peers on some key measures. For instance, only 1 out of every 10 Twitter tech employees is a woman:

Twitter

In case you’re wondering, other large tech companies have significantly better gender diversity (though it’s still abysmal compared to professions such as law or medicine). At Facebook and Yahoo, 15 percent of tech workers are women. At Google and LinkedIn, it’s 17 percent. In 2010, Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News found that women held 24 percent of computer and mathematics jobs in Silicon Valley and 27 percent of those jobs nationally (though those categories may be broader than how they’re defined by leading tech companies, as Tasneem Raja explores in this great piece on America’s growing gap in tech literacy).

More MoJo coverage of diversity in tech.


Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought


Is Coding the New Literacy?


Charts: Tech’s Pipeline Problem


Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts


Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

Unlike its peers, Twitter can’t entirely blame its dearth of female coders on the talent pipeline: About 18 percent of computer science graduates are women. Instead, Van Huysse points to a slew of efforts to “move the needle” at Twitter, such as supporting the groups Girls Who Code and sf.girls and hosting “Girl Geek Dinners.”

As other reporters have noted, major tech firms started releasing their workforce data shortly after I obtained a batch of Silicon Valley diversity figures from the Labor Department and began asking them for comment. But pressure to release the stats has also come from a campaign by Color of Change and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, which have demanded the stats during a string of private meetings with Valley execs, and last week launched a Twitter-based campaign to urge Twitter to make its diversity numbers public. Strikingly, only 1 percent of Twitter’s tech workforce and 2 percent of its overall workforce is African-American:

Jackson argues that improving Twitter’s diversity isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a good business decision. It turns out that “Black Twitter” isn’t just a meme. According to a recent Pew survey, 22 percent of African-American internet users are on Twitter, while only 16 percent of White internet users tweet. Meanwhile, usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ is roughly the same between Blacks and Whites.

In short, Twitter might make more money by hiring more people who reflect its audience. “There is no talent deficit, there’s an opportunity deficit,” Jackson said in a press release responding to Twitter’s data. “When everyone is ‘in,’ everyone wins.”

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

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Friday the 13th Black Cat Blogging – 13 June 2014

by LolitaYork Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I found myself idly wondering what the deal was with that iPhone ad featuring a song about chicken fat. In our glorious modern era, of course, even the idlest curiosity can be satisfied in a few seconds, so after the Miami Heat had slunk back to their locker room I came out and googled it. It turns out that I’m just barely too young to remember its origins. It was written by Meredith Willson (of Music Man fame) as part of John F. Kennedy’s physical fitness program in the early 60s and performed by Robert Preston. The idea was to send recordings to schools across the country, where it could be played for our nation’s youth in an effort to get them to shape up.

So that’s that. But in my googling I came across a few other comments about the revival of this song. I wanted to share this one from Danger Guerrero:

Okay, so there are two things going on here. The first thing is that Apple is promoting the fitness-assisting capabilities of its fancy new product by using a quirky, notable fitness-related song from over 50 years ago.

….The second and much more important thing is that apparently John F. Kennedy commissioned the creator of The Music Man to write a song that would inspire pudgy children to do push-ups, and that guy went back to Kennedy at some point after that with a song riddled with lyrics like “Nuts to the flabby guys! Go, you chicken fat, go away!,” to which Kennedy replied, presumably, “Perfect. Ship it to every school in America.” This is incredible. And can you even imagine the left-right poo-flinging that would take place on cable news if this happened today? It would be chaos. Hannity’s head might literally explode on-camera. I vote we try it.

So now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with Friday Catblogging. Nothing, really. I suppose I could make up some connection, but there isn’t one. I just felt like mentioning it. But now your patience is rewarded. Today you get to see what greets me every time I get out of the shower in the morning. A cat. Just sitting there waiting for me in the most inconvenient possible spot, so I have nowhere to step out. In other words, typical feline behavior. She seems very pleased with herself, and I think she was especially pleased today when she forced me to step over a black cat on Friday the 13th. Apparently no one has told her that if I get hit by a meteor, the cat food gravy train dries up.

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Friday the 13th Black Cat Blogging – 13 June 2014

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Solar Power Conspiracy?

by TeganRignall Posted on June 7, 2014

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Solar Power Conspiracy?

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Citgo Gets Green Light to Poison

by RositaRCOdtxyl Posted on June 7, 2014

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

by KianBittner Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things. So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.”

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

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Who Gets Special Access to Comcast’s Customers? Who Decides?

by DieterSkillern Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Things that make you go “hmmm”:

Apple Inc. is in talks with Comcast Corp. about teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web, people familiar with the matter say.

….Under the plan Apple proposed to Comcast, Apple’s video streams would be treated as a “managed service” traveling in Internet protocol format—similar to cable video-on-demand or phone service. Those services travel on a special portion of the cable pipe that is separate from the more congested portion reserved for public Internet access.

People familiar with the matter said that while Apple would like a separate “flow” for its video traffic, it isn’t asking for its traffic to be prioritized over other Internet-based services.

Making video-on-demand operate properly requires careful engineering. It doesn’t work if you just dump it out on the public internet and call it a day. However, that careful engineering costs money, and it’s not unfair for companies to demand reasonable compensation of some sort if they’re the ones who bear the costs.

But who decides what’s reasonable and what isn’t? In a competitive market, the market eventually decides. Price signals and competition do the heavy lifting with only light government regulation to set a level playing field and police the worst abuses. But when companies like Comcast have effective monopoly control over internet access in their territories, who decides then? There are no market forces to rely on. So, for example, when Netflix finally agrees to pay a fee to Comcast for delivery of its video content, the quality of Netflix transmissions miraculously goes up almost instantly. Apparently there were no infrastructure issues at all and no special buildout costs. It was just a matter of Comcast extorting some extra revenue from Netflix.

The Apple case is different in the details, but it raises the same basic principle: Who decides? Who gets special access to Comcast’s customer base? Who gets shut out? The market can’t provide any guidance because Comcast has little genuine competition in this space.

So who decides?

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Who Gets Special Access to Comcast’s Customers? Who Decides?

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Dear Apple: Don’t Work With Russian Company Whose Creative Director Advocates "Burning Gays in Ovens"

by billytalley1169 Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, a coalition of over 15 Russian LGBT organizations encouraged Apple to avoid business dealings with Euroset, the largest phone retailer in Russia, whose creative director gained recent notoriety for wanting to shove all gay people “alive into an oven.”

Ivan Okhlobystin, who stars on the Russian version of Scrubs in addition to working for Euroset, also compared homosexuality to fascism and declared it an “overt sign of mental abnormality” at a “spiritual talk” in Novosibirsk last month. He later confirmed his comments on Twitter, suggesting his anti-gay stance would draw customers to Euroset stores for a “good mood.”

In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook dated January 5, the LGBT rights coalition emphasized the dangerous potential of hate speech in an already volatile environment: “Okhlobystin’s statements have been enthusiastically published by the Kremlin’s propaganda press and distributed across entire Russia just adding additional fuel to the rampant homophobic campaign that already resulted in at least 26 murders and countless hate crimes against Russian LGBT population sic.”

The letter calls on Cook to “set Apple as an example of a corporate citizen who supports basic human rights.”

Activists are turning to Western suppliers like Apple after getting little response from Okhlobystin’s employer. Six LGBT rights organizations wrote to Euroset President Alexander Malis on December 26, asking him to “clarify how Okhlobystin’s views are aligned with the values and principals of Euroset company, and to make a statement on inadmissibility of bullying and violence based on prejudice.”

Malis told Russian newspaper Izvestia that “Ivan expressed his personal opinion, and we will not fire him for that. Of course, we are against burning anyone in furnaces.”

The coalition plans to reach out to other Western mobile phone companies doing business with Euroset. Current suppliers for the company include Google and Samsung.

Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment on its relationship with Euroset or its plans for addressing the letter’s concerns. In September, the two companies were negotiating iPhone sales, and in late October, Euroset began selling iPhones in some of its Russian stores.

Read the coalition’s full letter below:

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Dear Apple: Don’t Work With Russian Company Whose Creative Director Advocates "Burning Gays in Ovens"

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