All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called “consolidated.db.” This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. The coordinates aren’t always exact, but they are pretty detailed. There can be tens of thousands of data points in this file, and it appears the collection started with iOS 4, so there’s typically around a year’s worth of information at this point.

Your iPhone has been collecting your location data and Apple won’t tell you why.

And I thought Google was going to be Skynet

Apple defenders will probably ask what the big deal is, but your phone has been collecting your location without telling you, into a file you can’t control for a reason Apple won’t tell you. That is kinda a big deal.

Well worth watching the video of the geeks who discovered it.

BEN:      … And just briefly, while you’re all here, I’d just like to mention the new version –

JER:        – It’s very good.

BEN        – It’s, yes, yes it is, and it’s been developed by us in conjunction with BCT Global –

JER         – They won an award you might re-, was it last year?

BEN        – Yes … Maybe. No, no, I think you’re right, it was the Brazil Society –

JER         – Yes, that’s right. I knew that. I thought I knew that. They’re very, very good –

BEN        – - when it came to those big picture solutions we were so passionate and insistent on, on a, on a … they –

JER         – - there’s a narrative of resonant consistency within the – can you bring up the next slide? …

BEN        – - the bigger picture –

JER         – a narrative that’s scalable from your back-end …

BEN        – - you can bring anything into the landscape, there’s an intuitive circularity to the whole spectrum that’s just -

JER         – - it’s incredibly resilient … up to the front end, you can see here, you can see what it’s doing here, depending on the volume –

BEN        – - and there’s no limit on that.

JER         – No. None at all, we’ve managed to optimise a full facilitation of every conceivable touchpoint by fully integrating a top-down, client-driven approach to the landscape that ensures a level of granularity which conforms to the global regularity of systemic conformi –

BEN        – It’s more a reformation, I’d say, don’t you think?

JER         – What did I say? … Oh! Oh! Yes! Yes. Yes, that’s the word … I think that was the word I was chasing. Thank you.

BEN        – Okay.

JER         – Anyway. You can see, I’ll just, you can see the flexibility it provides, and I think you’ll find it –

BEN        – What we’ll do … I think, we’ll send you all the log-in details you need, … will that be …?

JER         – Sometime after lunch.

BEN        – Sometime after lunch. You’ll get the log-in, just use your regular password, and feel free to just have a look around, play with it, get familiar with the, with the, uh –

JER         – The circular intuitiveness of it will just –

BEN        – It’s very good. I think that’s the thing we’re most impressed by so far …

JER         – Definitely. Yes. Absolutely. By far.

BEN        – Anyway.

JER         – I think we’ll leave it there. Are there any questions?

BEN        – …

JER         – …

BEN        – …

JER         – …

BEN        – No?

JER         – …

BEN        – …

JER         – Anyway.

BEN        – Yes.

JER         – As we said …

BEN        – Anything you think we should look … just … anything to look into further… um, … well … well, we’ll leave all that up to you.

JER         – Yes. And thanks very, very much for your attention this morning everyone.

BEN        – Yes. Thank you.

JER         – And enjoy the rest of your day.

I think to myself, “How much money do they have to go to the ATM four times in thirty minutes?”.

……

Few years ago.

I’m inside the “gaming” room of the same pub.

My idea of “playing” a poker machine is to stick whatever dollar coins I may have in my pocket to see if I can win the cost of a couple beers back.

Mostly it doesn’t.

I shove a few coins in, staying standing, I won’t be there long. There’s a guy next to me. He says “Look” and I do, and he’s won a “jackpot”, about thirteen thousand dollars.

“Shit!”, I say, “Well done”.

My couple of dollars spent, I go to the bar, grab a drink and one of the papers they leave out for patrons, and go outside.

About twenty minutes later, I go back inside to return the paper (the “Courier Mail” doesn’t take long to read, believe me). The guy who won thirteen grand is still there, playing another machine, five bucks a spin.

……

Couple of years ago.

I’m in the “high-roller” room of a Gold Coast casino. A mate of mine makes in-house training videos for the Star City casino in Sydney, and he’s been asked to make one for this place and he’s asked if I’d like to be in it. “500 bucks for the day’s work and you get fed”, he says. “Done!”, I say, and then arrange to take a day’s leave from my “real” job.

You know what a “high-roller’s” room looks like?

A 150 buck a night motel room. At least this one did.

We’ve been assigned a couple of floor staff to look over us as we go about our business, make sure we don’t pinch anything.

“What is that worth?”, I ask one of them, pointing to a flat, embossed piece of plastic about the size of a slimline calculator under glass at a table.

“$50,000”, comes the answer.

“Shit”, I reply.

“These people”, I ask, “These people who spend fifty grand on just one bet. Do they actually enjoy it? I mean, are they having a good time?”

“They’re very serious about it. No. I don’t think they’re having fun. Not in the true sense of the word”.

“So what’s the bloody point?”

“They have money. That’s all.”

This video we’re making, it features a number of potentially troublesome scenarios that the casino floor staff need to be able to deal with. The woman who’s been playing for twelve hours straight and has soiled herself. The aggressive fucker who thinks a particular machine is his and his alone and abuses anyone who’s got it before him (that was one of my parts). The guy who’s trying to sell his mobile phone for a few extra bucks …

“Really?”, I ask the minder.

“Yes. Mobiles. Coats. Shoes.”

“Shoes?”

“Yes. Shoes.”

“Shit”, I respond.

I tell her that a few months previous, I shoved a couple coins in a machine and it went on a roll and I ended up with three hundred bucks.

“That’s how it starts”, she replies.

“No”, I say, “I took the money and went shopping. Bought a new bathmat and some luggage. And an electric toothbrush.”

She laughed.

……

Christmas, last year.

I’m in Sydney, visiting the parents, catching up with some friends.

They live in Sydney’s south-west.

I go up to the local pub one morning about 11.30. It’s a shithouse of a pub at the best of times, and certainly one to be avoided at night. My father told me that one time in the 1970’s he saw a guy get beaten to death with a pool cue one night in this place.

I have to walk through the “gaming” room to get to the bar. There’s hardly anyone there. Ideal. A quiet drink and a read of the paper on a nice, warm morning.

I order a drink.

And then …

In the corner.

That’s the machine for me. It’s practically got my name on it.

I drop six bucks in.

Bliss.

It’s an “Addams Family” pinball machine. With two levels of multiball!

This is the first pinball machine I’ve seen in a pub in maybe a decade.

And it’s been about that long since I’ve played one.

After two games, my 52 year old wrists feel like they’re about to crack in half.

And I have seven games left to play.

“This is how it starts”, I think to myself.

I play the seven games.

……

Last night. My local pub. Early evening. The “gaming room”.

I grab a beer, get a buck change, walk over to a machine and drop it in. Nothing.

I get a paper off the bar, take my drink and go outside.

A guy comes out.

“Winning?”, he asks, just making small talk while he has a smoke break.

“Not playing”, I reply.

“They’re bastards, those things”, he says, “that bloody Red Barron machine, mate, two hundred bucks, mate. Two hundred fucking bucks it got outta me. Fucking thing …”

They used to call them “one-armed bandits”.

Then they took away the arm, and called it a “game”.

He stubs out his cigarette, goes to the ATM, takes out some cash and goes back into the room.

To “play”.

To “play” a “game”.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking sad.

The MUTE button has relieved me of the tedium of listening to anything that has been said by Tony Abbott since he began banging on about the Brisbane flood levy from a couple months ago.

The MUTE button did save me from the sad and sorry spectacle of listening to more than about 12 seconds of Senator Mary Jo Fisher’s interpretive dance speech from a week or so ago, after which I switched channels to spare me the visceral horror of the visuals.

The MUTE button is my friend.

The MUTE button may well be proof that there is indeed a God, and that He/She/It is most definitely a compassionate deity.

Praise be to the MUTE button.

But we need another thing.

We need a MUTE button for the internet.

You would set up your internet MUTE button by inputting the names of anyone you could not give a flying fuck about and of whom you are sick and tired of hearing every time you click to a news site (I’m thinking Judy Moran, any Ibrahim brother who gets shot, Charlie fucking Sheen or any other dipshit celebrity having a public meltdown, a whole raft of politicians, pundits, property developers, Harvey Norman, Andrew Bolt, Pauline Hanson, anything even remotely associated with the television series “Underbelly” and so forth). And then, when you click upon a news site to find some actual fucking NEWS about some actual fucking STUFF, your MUTE button would filter any story containing those names from the page.

You could also input by subject. For example, “GREAT BIG NEW TAX!”.

Your very own, highly personalised internet filter, if you will.

I think this is an excellent idea.

Someone go make it.

Please.

One day people will be wondering just how they organised orgies pre-Nintendo.

Seriously. What. The. Fuck?

Last week when the most direct fighting broke out between North Korean and South Korean troops since the ceasefire in 1953 it wasn’t hard to notice that the way we were seeing the fighting being reported was different than it had ever been before. Unlike previous skirmishes we were not limited to waiting until after a conflict had occurred and reading or hearing a summary the next day in the newspaper or on the 6pm news bulletin. A combination of fast internet and social media was telling us what was happening on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in real time. On twitter helpful volunteers translated Korean to English faster than any news service and gave anyone interested an almost instantaneous view of what was happening as it was happening.

This is effecting governments in how they control the flow of information. Going back even as recent as ten years ago a similar incident of cross border fighting would have been dissected through official military liaisons to the media, giving governments an upper hand in how these incidents are reported. But now with the almost complete democratisation of information thanks to technology, the government can still try and influence how events are reported, but they are only one voice among many. The South Korean defence minister experienced this first hand, as pressure and criticism from the delay in returning fire on North Korean forces and the decision not to call in an air strike, he was forced to resign from his position a mere two days after the incident. Although social media didn’t cost Kim Tae-young his job, it did greatly increase the speed and wealth of information getting out that led to his resignation. This is a far cry from the time when the United States led a bombing campaign against Cambodia a secret from its citizens as recently as 1969. Keeping such a thing a secret is almost impossibility today in our hyper-connected world, and this leads to faster and more accurate criticism from an informed populace.

North Korea is one of the most repressive countries on the planet. Almost everything its citizens know about the outside world comes from official government sources. Its government goes to great lengths to keep any news coming from outside well beyond the reach of its citizens, less it undermine the official government line that North Korea is an idealised paradise that is the envy of the world, or that Kim Jong Il is some sort of demigod who scored 11 holes in 1 on his first game of golf, and that he doesn’t urinate or defecate.

The government issues radios that are hard tuned to government broadcasts and conducts random checks on its citizens to ensure that tech savvy individuals haven’t figured out how to tune into South Korean radio. There is no internet access for the average North Korean and due to the technological backwardness of the country the government has done an effective job in making sure that its citizens are largely ignorant of the outside world.

Slowly however, even in Stalinist North Korea this is changing, but not due to any position of its government but controlling the flow of information is becoming impossibility due to today’s technology. North Koreans who have escaped to South Korea in recent years have told that smuggled video cassettes, DVD’s, USB sticks and mp3 players have become more common in recent years. All of these pirated music, movies and other information may not seem important, but in a country where the only role of art is to glorify the state and the leader anything from outside can show North Koreans that the outside world is happier, healthier and richer than them. It can help break the illusion that the government tries to maintain.

A hacked North Korean radio that can pick up outside broadcasts may be too hard to hide for a North Korean citizen that is terrified of its government. A smuggled USB stick however could contain the complete works of Shakespeare, the deceleration of independence and thousands of other key texts and all in one small form that can easily be hidden from government authorities. In another 10 or 20 years technological change in how we pass on information could have improved in ways that we can’t currently imagine. Whilst I don’t think usb sticks and laptops alone can bring down the North Korean government, it may make it much harder for the government to be as repressive as it is with a more informed populace thanks to modern technology.

Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if five years from now cheap and superfast and dirt cheap handheld computers the size of an iPhone smuggled from China are easily found in the North Korean black market, and with this they could get a clearer view of the outside world and the true horrors of their oppressive regime? With this device there would be enough space to store virtual libraries, newspaper archives (as well as pirated movies and music) as well as pick up South Korean radio and television broadcasts. Wishful thinking maybe, but thanks to technology and globalisation it isn’t science fiction and it could change the lives of the North Korean people and be a catalyst of change in the direction of the country.

Ever since this cryptic message landed on the Apple site yesterday, Apple fanboys and tech enthusiasts have been going wild speculating about what this huge announcement could be. What could be so awesome that Apple hijacked its own website for a day?

Well, last night it was all revealed:

Eh...

How exciting. You can now download all of the Beatles albums straight from the iTunes store. How convenient? And without all those costs of shipping, handling and distribution, it will be at a totally reasonable price… right?

Wrong.

$35.99!?

Are they kidding… Why should I pay $35.99 for lower quality audio, no packaging, no liner notes and no album sleeve?

Especially when at JB Hi-Fi online:

with free shipping

Free shipping and a poster! And a real, hold in my hand CD with pictures and notes and a box I can put on my shelf. Shipped to the warehouse, then shipped to my door for cheaper than the digital version.

And this is why the music industry is dying. Music was always overpriced, but now they are running out of excuses to rip us off. Even from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense.

After the initial cost of producing the content, distribution of the album is basically free in the digital world. So if you sell 1 copy or 100 copies, it costs you no more or less to produce it. So if you sell one copy at $20 or 10 copies at $2 you end up in exactly the same position. In fact, if they offered cheap and easy downloads my guess is that they would actually make more money.

Amazon seemed to figure this out years ago, offering digital downloads starting from 99 cents. The high margin, low sale model the record labels are clinging to is going to kill them. Embrace low margin and high turnover, in the digital world it just makes sense.

ELSEWHERE: someone done made a funny flowchart.

Aside from the fact that Fibre is much, much faster. And upgrading fibre infrastructure once the cable is installed is easy and the technology is pretty much future proofed (last I checked not much goes faster than light). Aside from that, it fails to undestand how mobile Internet works.

So I drew them a quick beginners guide.

How mobile internet works. Note: Use of wires.

Compare this to how the Liberal party seems to think mobile Internet works:

Vodafone celebrates the average number of seconds it takes to get through to one of its call centre operators.

A very common theme on Twitter is people’s gripes with Vodafone’s customer service or lack of it. For example this tweet by @agreencow: I’m currently on hold to Vodafone for 35 mins. Ironically the longest call possible so far before loss of service.

It reminded me of a time when I was with Vodafone in the mid 2000s. Yes, I was taken in by the hype and coolness of it all. I was impressed with their funky ads and relationships with global sporting bohemoths like Manchester United, Ferrari F1 team and the Western Bulldogs.

As a journo I was invited to a Vodafone lunch at the fancy Botanical restaurant in South Yarra, where lovely PR girls named Sarah and Kylie showed me the latest Sony Ericsson  phone complete with MMS, WAP and polyphonic ringtones including a really cool one that made your ultrafunky handset sound like an olden days telephone!

Through less than journalistically ethical means I acquired one of these phones, which were the iPhone of their day – albeit with a better phone signal. Then one day I couldn’t send SMS so I called Vodafone for assiatance. I was put on hold where some really cool chick told me that my call was important in a way that sounded like if I continued to hold I may get sex.

I was at work and starting to get a little impatient when I fnally got hold of someone to help me.

Trent the Operator (in a sickingly upbeat groovy voice: “Hi it’s Trent here, how can I help you today?”

Me: “Finally! Hello Trent I can’t send text messages from my phone. When I try I get a message saying ‘unable to send SMS’.”

Trent: “OK, I can help you with that. Are you on your phone now?”

Me: “Yes, because calls to Vodafone are free from this phone”

Trent: “Oh OK, we’ll have to go through your settings so can you call me from a landline.”

Me: “Uhm OK. I was on hold for 40 minutes, will I be put on hold again?”

Trent: “No, call this number (reads out number) and you’ll come to the call centre direct and ask for me.”

Me: “Are you sure?”

Trent: “Yep, speak to you soon.”

So I called the number.

Really cool recorded chick: “Hi welcome to Vodafone, if you’re calling … ”

That’s when I (and a person who frequents this blog can verify this) threw my telephone at the wall making a frightful bang while yelling out “fuck you Vodafone I’m going back to fucking Telstra!”

Which I did, that day.

Perhaps if Vodafone spent a few more bucks employing people to man their call centres it wouldn’t need to spend many millions on its image.

How could I resist? I had to go and buy one:

Urbo Cool

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