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- Apple Issues New Warning For Millions Of iPhone Users [Updated] - Forbes
- The new Mac Pro goes up for order December 10 - TechCrunch
- In wake of Shutterstock’s Chinese censorship, American companies need to relearn American values - TechCrunch
| Apple Issues New Warning For Millions Of iPhone Users [Updated] - Forbes Posted: 07 Dec 2019 04:53 PM PST Yesterday Apple was caught red handed and now the company has admitted that the settings in millions of iPhones are misleading users about their use of location data, and promised to fix it.  Apple's new iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max has checking your location without your ... [+] The admission, issued to TechCrunch, follows research published by security specialist Brian Krebs which reveals Apple's new iPhone 11 range are seeking information about their location even when users have specifically changed the phone's privacy settings to stop this from happening. Something that Krebs notes violates the company's own privacy policy. Update 12/7 - 9to5Mac has confirmed through carriers that iOS 13.3 will be released next week. It is expected to bring Apple's promised fix for this problem as well as support for FIDO2 security keys and new parental controls for limiting Phone, Message and FaceTime usage based on contact and time. In response, Apple initially dismissed the finding (which Krebs documented in a video, embedded below) as "expected behavior". But today the company has changed its tune, warning users that the range's new Ultra wideband chip is behind the background checks: "Ultra wideband technology is an industry standard technology and is subject to international regulatory requirements that require it to be turned off in certain locations," said Apple in its statement. "iOS uses Location Services to help determine if an iPhone is in these prohibited locations in order to disable ultra wideband and comply with regulations." Apple states that "The management of ultra wideband compliance and its use of location data is done entirely on the device and Apple is not collecting user location data." Something that initial research backs up. What will raise eyebrows, however, is Apple's next course of action. Having claimed it had to follow international regulatory requirements, the company now says it will enable these background location checks to be disabled in an upcoming iOS update. Which means they didn't need to be done in the first place. Needless to say, Apple should've just come clean in the first place and this will raise suspicions among those who are protective of their privacy. Especially as it comes just months after Apple admitted it hired contractors to secretly listen to Siri audio snippets recorded by owners' iPhones. Although anonymised, a whistleblower revealed they heard clips which included private medical information, drug deals and recordings of couples having sex. Apple subsequently apologised, shut down the centre and promised to give users a privacy setting which would enable them to delete their Siri recordings in a future iOS update. That duly arrived in the form of iOS 13.2. Personally speaking, I think there are enough differences between these new background location checks and the Siri recordings that users should be less concerned this time around. That said, when the company's own Privacy Page states "At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right" - it set itself a high bar. And, along with transparency, it is one the company has fallen below again. ___ Follow Gordon on Twitter and Facebook More On Forbes Apple Announces Display Repair Warnings For New iPhones Apple iOS 13.2.3 Release: Should You Upgrade? Apple AirPods Pro Vs AirPods: What's The Difference? |
| The new Mac Pro goes up for order December 10 - TechCrunch Posted: 08 Dec 2019 04:55 AM PST  After more than a year of teasing, Apple finally unveiled the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June. The long wait was finally over — though Apple left out one key detail: when, precisely the high end desktop would arrive, beyond a purposefully vague fall timeframe Earlier this, however, the company began sending out pre-pre-order notifications to potential consumers (spotted by Marques Brownlee), noting the orders will open December 10. When, precisely, they'll start shipping is another question entirely, of course, but at the very least, you can get a raincheck for the extremely exepsnive Christmas present. The system starts at $5,999, plus the $4,999 Pro Display XDR monitor. You should probably also factor in the much ballyhooed stand, which adds another $999 to the price tag. Of course, price has never been Apple's main selling point — something that goes double for the Mac Pro line. And the company's clearly not holding anything back with this system, as it recommits itself to creative professionals. Contrary to earlier rumors, Apple noted back in September that the new Pro will be built in the U.S., like its predecessor. |
| Posted: 08 Dec 2019 03:25 AM PST  It's among the most iconic images of the last few decades — a picture of an unknown man standing before a line of tanks during the protests in 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In just one shot, the photographer, Jeff Widener, managed to convey a society struggling between the freedoms of individual citizens and the heavy hand of the Chinese militarized state. It's also an image that few within China's "great firewall" have access to, let alone see. For those who have read 1984, it can almost seem as if "Tank Man" was dropped into a memory hole, erased from the collective memory of more than a billion people. By now, it's well-known that China's search engines like Baidu censor such political photography. Regardless of the individual morality of their decisions, it's at least understandable that Chinese companies with mostly Chinese revenues would carefully hew to the law as set forth by the Chinese Communist Party. It's a closed system after all. What we are learning though is that it isn't just Chinese companies that are aiding and abetting this censorship. It's Western companies too. And Western workers aren't pleased that they are working to enforce the anti-freedom policies in the Middle Kingdom. Take Shutterstock, which has come under great fire for complying with China's great firewall. As Sam Biddle described in The Intercept last month, the company has been riven internally between workers looking to protect democratic values, and a business desperate to expand further in one of the world's most dynamic countries. From Biddle:
Those petitions have allegedly gone nowhere internally, and that has led employees like Stefan Hayden, who describes nearly ten years of experience at the company as a frontend developer on his LinkedIn profile, to resign: The challenge of these political risks is hardly unknown to Shutterstock. The company's most recent annual financial filing with the SEC lists market access and censorship as a key risk for the company (emphasis mine):
Thus the rub: market access means compromising the very values that a content purveyor like Shutterstock relies on to operate as a business. The stock image company is hardly unique to find itself in this position; it's a situation that the NBA has certainly had to confront in the last few weeks: It's great to see Shutterstock's employees standing up for freedom and democracy, and if not finding purchase internally with their values, at least walking with their feet to other companies who value freedom more reliably. Unfortunately, far too many companies — and far too many tech companies — blindly chase the dollars and yuans, without considering the erosion in the values at the heart of their own business. That erosion ultimately adds up — without guiding principles to handle business challenges, decisions get made ad hoc with an eye to revenues, intensifying the risk of crises like the one facing Shutterstock. The complexity of the Chinese market has only expanded with the country's prodigious growth. The sharpness, intensity, and self-reflection of values required for Western companies to operate on the mainland has reached new highs. And yet, executives have vastly under-communicated the values and constraints they face, both to their own employees but also to their shareholders as well. As I wrote earlier this year when the Google China search controversy broke out, it's not enough to just be militant about values. Values have to be cultivated, and everyone from software engineers to CEOs need to understand a company's objectives and the values that constrain them. As I wrote at the time:
I ultimately was in favor of Google's engagement with China, if only because I felt that the company does understand its values better than most (after all, it abandoned the China market in the first place, and one would hope the company would make the same choice again if it needed to). Google has certainly not been perfect on a whole host of fronts, but it seems to have had far more self-reflection about the values it intends to purvey than most tech companies. It's well past time for all American companies though to double down on the American values that underly their business. Ultimately, if you compromise on everything, you stand for nothing — and what sort of business would anyone want to join or back like that? China can't be ignored, but neither should companies ignore their own duties to commit to open, democratic values. If Tank Man can stand in front of a line of tanks, American execs can stand before a line of their colleagues and find an ethical framework and a set of values that can work. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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