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Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

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Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#241

Post by amelius »

msellout wrote: post #193
Aissen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there's another alternative. Provide all these "insights" with offline, data-on-computers-you-own systems. The intelligence can be carried with you, without internet. This is traditional computing. Apple or Microsoft, or even any other competitor could provide that. They just need to sell you this software (oh and also build it first).

Not possible. The insights come from the combination of everyone's data, not the analysis of any individual in isolation.

I'd like Google to store only at most N bits of information about me. That way, when I type "python" in the search bar, Google knows I'm a programmer, and am not interested in results about snakes. However, google does not know what television show I watched last night, because that doesn't fit in the N bits that I'm allowing Google to store about me.

Viewed differently, the value of N specifies how uniquely identifiable the user is.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#243

Post by CHY872 »

byuu wrote: post #221
CHY872 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla's a non-profit - the money it collects goes into supporting additional open-source products. At the moment, it does this on income of $300 million per year (mostly from their search provider). Of this money, $200 million goes on software development, $10 million goes on running their services (downloads, sync etc), and $70 million goes on administration, general costs (buildings etc) and marketing. So yes, if…

> A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long, and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code. Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers requ…

Mozilla do a lot of work besides Firefox. They have Thunderbird, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, etc etc.

Brooks' estimates suggest that cost of development increases with the square of the length of the code.

Likewise, a single developer should expect to achieve around 10 lines of code per day on an established codebase. This is about $45 per line of code at SV rates.

Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work.

You wouldn't get $1M out of that Kickstarter. You could literally just change the default search engine and compile Firefox yourself.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#244

Post by collyw »

stephenr wrote: post #234
collyw wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Duck Duck go doesn't provide as good results, because it lacks the personalized data. Google knows that when I search for Django I want the web framework. Duck duck go gives me that as well as many links to the film. I think option 1 is more likely for Apple.

> Google knows that when I search for Django I want the web framework That isn't a good thing. http://dontbubble.us Unless Jamie Fox someday starts giving speeches about Django framework, this sounds like a pretty weak excuse to use a google-style (i.e. 'personalised') search engine. > I think option 1 is more likely for Apple. Google's business model is basically selling aggregated user data - not in the form of raw…

I have duck duck go set as my default, but when I want to get something specific and quickly, I often have to use the "g!" option. DDG works well for more "mainstream" searches but for niche stuff the results are not as good.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#245

Post by amelius »

Aissen wrote: post #208
msellout wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not possible. The insights come from the combination of everyone's data, not the analysis of any individual in isolation.

I'd like to disagree. When Google Now reads my email to track my delivery package number or flight number, it's my data. When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data. When it knows where I work and live to ask Google servers the weather or how long it would take to go somewhere, still my data used as the request base. When Google(+) Photos auto-tags my photos, still my data, although I'd admit the IA tr…

Agree to a certain point. When Google wants to make suggestions based on preferences of other people (known as collaborative filtering), how do you suppose that information is computed?

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#246

Post by prof_hobart »

Aissen wrote: post #208
msellout wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not possible. The insights come from the combination of everyone's data, not the analysis of any individual in isolation.

I'd like to disagree. When Google Now reads my email to track my delivery package number or flight number, it's my data. When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data. When it knows where I work and live to ask Google servers the weather or how long it would take to go somewhere, still my data used as the request base. When Google(+) Photos auto-tags my photos, still my data, although I'd admit the IA tr…

>When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data

It is, but that's pretty useless unless Google also knows so that it can send you the relevant updates.

>When it knows where I work and live to ask Google servers the weather or how long it would take to go somewhere, still my data used as the request base.

The weather, possibly (although again, it's not much use unless Google know enough to target the local weather at you). The how long to get there, not so much. One of the key things they use is info on where everyone else is. This is a classic case of pooling everyone's data in order to add value.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#247

Post by k-mcgrady »

onion2k wrote: post #126
callil wrote: post #85

They are setting the stage for announcing the launch of their google now compete which they will sell as more secure and private (no selling your info for ads!) [0] This is all part of their marketing campaign. [0] http://9to5mac.com/2015/05/27/apples-proactive-to-take-on-go...

I'm not sure it'd be possible to make a good competitor to Now without tracking what someone does all around the web. That's sort of the point of it - the more it knows the better it works.

The most useful things I get from Now are travel info (mostly comes from email/calendar), sports scores (I have to set these up manually), flights details (again from email), deliveries (again email). So they can do quite a lot with just email and calendar access. If you use iCloud they already have these things and don't sell ads against them so you can get some of the functionality (imo the best parts) without tracking. What parts of Now do you think they couldn't do without heavy tracking?

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#248

Post by [deleted] »

jakobegger wrote: post #99
magicalist wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tempted to flag your comment for the baseless and distracting claims it makes, but I'm going to hold off since it is essentially self-parodying. I am curious about the "You lot are a bunch of god germans" thing, though.

I understand the sentiment. As a long time Mac user it just gets tiring to hear again and again that Macs are overpriced junk from people who have never used a Mac before. But I also didn't understand the god germans line.

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#249

Post by k-mcgrady »

tolmasky wrote: post #118
threeseed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. iMessages is not dead simple. Not sure if you've ever worked on highly concurrent, real time systems but they are never as trivial as it seems to the lay outsider. And whilst I can't comment on it getting messages out of order (never happened to anyone I know) it isn't widespread based on media reports. 2. Not sure why you are comparing App Store with Amazon when Apple has an equivalent: the Apple Online Store. It…

1. Here you go, first result from Google search: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4408578?start=0&tstart=... . Problem starts in 2012, still going end of 2014. 50,000 views. My current issue with iMessages is the completely random behavior of whether my computer or phone will get the message. Before iMessage it was pretty deterministic, now its like a game! The frequent solution is to text my iMessage email AND p…

>> "imagine if every time Amazon added a new major product they took the ENTIRE STORE DOWN FOR HOURS."

Pretty sure this is marketing a not technical.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#250

Post by castell »

threatofrain wrote: post #170

Apple collects tons of user data, and I'm sure they use some of it to provide machine-learning backed services, and I'm sure they'll come out with much nicer products to compete with Google in the future, also enhanced by machine learning techniques. The difference that Tim Cook wants you to believe in is that Apple doesn't directly make money from your data, they just use it to improve their product; alternatively,…

It's more complicated. Apple's position as a hardware company that sells them with very good software is certainly the better position in comparison to Google, Microsoft & co.

Siri (as well as several other similar products) is based on Nuance technologies (speech recognition, text-to-speech, etc). It was recently in the news that Nuance outsourced their voice technology quality control (US based human workers listen to your voice data and checks the speech recognition quality, some workers mentioned they recognized single persons from reoccurring voice data). So your voice data is being processed by several parties.

The two big mobile OS vendors Apple and Google and also smaller players like Microsoft make it incredible hard to not-use their cloud storage&sync offering. Storage space is synthetically limited to low GB, with an high up price for additional storage. An SD-Card slot (= cheap extra storage, as a card is very cheap) is only available in Android devices (third party vendors hardware manufacturers like Samsung, Sony, etc.) but not from Google itself. All the inbuilt sync functionality only works with their own cloud storage, no third party cloud nor a simple sync over Bluetooth, Wifi or USB-cable. They could do better.

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