Sky’s Blog

Now why would I say that? Google and Verizon announced yesterday (August 9, 2010) their joint statement on “an Open Internet.” [Verizon] [Google]

I can read the statement two ways. (continue reading…)

Tweet This Post

The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is seeking to modify the 1993 Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that Internet service providers must turn over transaction records on email communications and possibly web browsing records, upon receipt of a “national security letter” from the FBI. This particular legal process doesn’t require review by a judge—unlike search warrants.^[1]

The law does not allow access to the contents of those emails without judicial oversight…only the more externally-visible addressing information, and that does tend to be what email systems log and archive. On the other hand, the term “electronic communication transactional records” which is what the government could require ISPs to divulge, is not defined in federal statutes, according to the Washington Post.^[2] And so it could conceivably be extended to include other person-to-person communications, such as social media contacts

This is the same process the Bush administration used, in the early 2000s, to ask libraries to turn over the records of books checked out by patrons, which was strongly resisted by librarians at that time.

Phone companies keep records of all of the numbers you call, and these are subject to the same access rules. This has never been a question, and most people in the US are probably at least marginally aware of this.

The real question isn’t whether someone is reading your email addresses and headers—it’s how they are interpreting the titles, subjects, and names of the people you are corresponding with. In the McCarthy era here in the US, you could be blacklisted for associating with the wrong people.

If you have an inquiring mind, would you want someone to judge you based on the titles of the books or publications you’re reading? Or the subjects and addressees of your email?

---

[1] The Washington Post — original article 29 July 2010

[2] The New York Times 30 July, 2010 — secondary report and opinion

A whole nother ancillary question is whether your ISP actually keeps these records or not. If they do not, are they then exempt from having to turn over any records, or will the government require that they keep such records in the future? Some ISPs intentionally do not keep certain kinds of records, which helps keep your use of certain services anonymous. And, for instance, I’d guess that very few ISPs, if any, keep records of your browsing history, and this makes it prohibitively difficult to document all of the web sites you’ve visited.

Tweet This Post

They’re taking a bit of an extreme position, but in an article Is Apple Making iPhone 3G Totally Unusable To Force Upgrade? TechPulse360 hypothesizes that Apple is forcing an (equipment) upgrade on its customers by making iOS 4 run so slowly on the original 3G iPhones that they’re basically unusable. If course Apple execs aren’t that stupid. But they certainly did not test enough before releasing the system upgrade.

I reported to Apple about ten days ago^[1] that my 3G iPhone was balky and not reacting quickly enough to taps, and I wrote on Friday last week that a “genius” at the Apple Store had blown me off when I told him I wanted to talk with him about why my 3G phone was so slow. He told me to reset the phone to factory conditions and suggested that everything would be fine after that. He didn’t even tell me to come back later to check in—he just said go reset my phone. In other words, go fix the product myself. He really did not want to talk about it.

I really did feel like very few people were seeing or acknowledging this problem. And that perhaps I was one of very few people experiencing this slowness. Except that the AppleCare guy did say he was hearing this a lot…hmmm.

So finally I did reset my phone. And it didn’t make it any faster. It was still balky and stuttering when I tried to touch or drag on the screen. It was so frustratingly difficult to interact with that I just wanted to trash the iPhone and get a DroidX. I was/am that mad!

However, today when I removed a bunch of apps from my upgraded 3G iPhone, it did help quite a bit. I removed everything that has/had “push” notifications (New York Times, AP Mobile, LinkedIn, Facebook and a bunch of others—13 in total) or might be running in a background mode. I don’t know that any or all of them were the culprits, but I got rid of a long list of apps. And today, on a long urban hike, I ran EveryTrail (one of my favorite apps!) and a whole bunch of other apps with only a bit of slowness from time to time. Mostly I encountered the slowness when I was trying to slide the green button to open the phone after it had been sleeping for a while…like when I was trying to answer a call, which still can be a challenge with the slow 3G and the upgraded OS.

TechPulse360 is calling for Apple to offer a downgrade path back to iOS 3 — and I certainly agree with them. I’d like to be able to at least answer calls, and currently the phone is slow enough that this is difficult to do before the call jumps to voicemail.

---

[1] I called AppleCare, and a great tech took me through a discussion of why it might be slow, including suggesting that I drop some of the more demanding apps, like FaceBook and LinkedIn. And he suggested I visit the Genius Bar at an Apple Store for more help.

Tweet This Post

I made the mistake of letting my 3G iPhone go ahead and automatically upgrade to IOS 4 (the new version of the iPhone operating system) the day it was released.

What a mistake that was! But how could I have known in advance? I always upgrade my iPhone right away, hoping that it will do more and funner things.

More and funner I’m up for, but slower I was not expecting!

Now when the phone rings (if it rings at all), and I go to slide the green button on the screen to answer the call, it’s rare that the button even responds to my touch, let alone react fast enough to actually answer the call. The phone has turned into one little spinning beachball of death^[1] with this software upgrade. [The suggested  fix is in the last paragraphs of this article, in case you want to jump ahead.]

This video was so close to my own experience I howled with laughter:

Making products obsolete used to be a matter of adding new features to new physical products until you just felt you had to upgrade to the newest phone or computer, but now… (continue reading…)

Tweet This Post