One more reason not to get one. #WarOnPhotography:
Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, whenever they like.
All the coppers have to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed “sensitive”, and needs to be “protected from externalities” and Apple will switch off all its gear.
Smart move, Apple.
Apple will be very popular in China.
Actually, this is bullshit:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/oh-noes-apple-has-patented-big-brother/
“The part the link-baiters are freaking out about is a single sentence in the middle of the “background” part that says:
Covert police or government operations may require complete “blackout” conditions.
The context that nobody is quoting is that the surrounding paragraph makes it clear that they’re talking about screen brightness.”
Read the whole link. And Jamie Zawinski, though a notable Unix hacker (xscreensaver, XEmacs, Mozilla anybody?), well-known to be unhappy with the state of Linux, and who raised a lot of eyebrows in the hacker community by switching to Apple products in the mid-2000s, is hardly an Apple partisan, as you can see by perusing his blog entries indexed by the Apple keyword.
BTW, I don’t get the Apple hate in your blog (this isn’t the first time you’ve been, shall we say, less than rigorous in your dismissal of Apple products). At least when you’re dealing with Apple, you can be confident that you are their customer. That goes double for the iPhone, since Apple prevents the carriers from installing their own stupidware and generally isolates the user from carrier nonsense. With Android in specific and Google in general, you are the product; Google’s customers are the advertisers and the carriers.
And before anybody starts in with “Apple is for hipsters and computer illiterates” or “Apple is a cult/religion”, that doesn’t apply to me: I cut my computing teeth on a PDP-11 running Berkeley Unix, have written hundreds of thousands of lines of working code in everything from assembler to Jovial to Fortran to Ada to C/C++ to Perl to Python to Scheme to…, in the ’90s I used to teach a class to engineers on how to get the most out of the X Window System, was one of a handful of people at my former employer running a dual-boot WinNT/Slackware Linux machine, built my own computers for many years, still keep my resume in TeX using my own formatting macros, etc. When I switched to Macs for my home machines in early 2007, I discovered a winning combination of “it just effing works for me AND my family” and “I can still run XEmacs and hack on this” that I never got out of Linux or Windows. And with the iPhone, I have what is for me a very good general-purpose handheld computer that puts my old Palm Tungsten to shame.
I have no interest in convincing others that they should switch to Apple products; everybody should evaluate what is important for them and make their own informed decisions. But the key is informed, and by posting misleading and outright wrong nonsense like you did here, you do a disservice to people who are trying to be informed.
“Apple is a cult/religion”, that doesn’t apply to me
Circling the Unix wagons?
I kid, i kid.
Actually, Cthulhu, it isn’t BS at all. Read the patent linked and it is apparent that it covers the complete disabling of all features in an area that doesn’t have to be covered by a cell boundary. Although how this is going to be accomplished isn’t stated, it is reasonable to assume that there would be some device dedicated to that purpose.
So yes, the patent does cover means for the cops (or other State or non-State entities such as corporations) to switch off your cellphone without so much as a by-your-leave. Of course, it’s already possible to prevent you from transmitting the data out – but this goes further than that.
And one can bet that if the ability to do so is available then it will be used. And not just by the State brownshirts, either.
Did you read the IBM patent? Obviously not…
It sounds as credible to me as the story that we embedded virus software in printers sent to Iraq prior to Gulf War I, and activated them to shut down Iraqi air defenses just prior to the start of hostilities. That made the rounds a few years ago, and is still probably regarded by many as fact. But it was a complete fabrication.