Commentary

Sep 2012 09

Apple Clouds Privacy Beyond Acceptance: EFF AWOL

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

Revised: 20120913

The perspicacious South Park Season 15’s ‘HumancentiPad’ slammed Apple for its social imperialism, as well as users for their gullibility. It being South Park I can only repeat their caveat to watch at your own risk. But if there were any doubt about their targets, I’ve just found a real, stomach-turning systematization by Apple of even poorer taste, but sadly uninformed by Trey and Matt’s higher wisdom.

The issue is transcription, whereby your computer converts your speech into text characters or perhaps computer operations. In following this field I’ve owned all versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows. Whatever its faults, this has been the leading program for many years, and my only real reason for having a fast Windows machine. The Mac never had anything like it; the third-party MacSpeech being utterly lame until a few years ago apparently licensing the Dragon engine. (Likely enabled by Apple’s switch to Intel processors.)

But the huge productivity difference remained: correct-ability. Dragon succeeded because it adapted to your voice. You could teach it. When it erred, you could nudge it back on course to create a truly efficient process in fact used by hundreds of thousands of professionals. However, MacSpeech remained unteachable. It seemingly didn’t get that part of Dragon, and remained essentially useless.

Imagine my glee to discover there might be a reason for the iPad—built in dictation! I tried it for a simple list. Its performance was mediocre.  It inserted unpredictable and inexplicable processing delays. There was no correction interface and it didn’t seem to be adapting to my speech. Against my denials, it actually seemed to be accessing the web, and dutifully crashing more often than not.

But wait, surely this new version released in the extremely cloudy Mountain Lion 10.8.1 must have a complete implementation for my screaming, solid-state 17″ Pro. They must have gotten adaptivity right by now.

In their minds they did. And their answer is so technically arrogant and extravagant it strains the credulity of their entire PR scheme about their real motivations and the security of your data in their cloud. Searching in vain for an adaptation interface I found their EULA for transcription:

When you use the keyboard dictation feature on your computer, the things you dictate will be recorded and sent to Apple to convert what you say into text. Your computer will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; and the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (for example, “my dad”) of your address book contacts.  All of this data is used to help the dictation feature understand you better and recognize what you say. Your User Data is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

Information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at www.apple.com/privacy.

You can choose to turn off the dictation feature at any time. To do so, open System Preferences, click Dictation & Speech, and then click Off in the Dictation section. If you turn off Dictation, Apple will delete your User Data, as well as your recent voice input data. Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Dictation and other Apple products and services. This voice input data may include audio files and transcripts of what you said and related diagnostic data, such as hardware and operating system specifications and performance statistics.

You can restrict access to the Dictation feature on your computer in the Parental Controls pane of System Preferences.

This is stunningly outrageous. As Dragon has proven for over a decade, it is absolutely unnecessary to send all your voice data off your machine to obtain premier performance. Such a scheme adds delay and bandwidth cost with no apparent benefit to the task. I dare say, Apple’s suggested concept is dubious: do they propose to build a library of all the speech patterns in the world? And by when? And are my voice and personal relationships to my Address Book—oh, sorry, I forgot it is Apple’s Address Book—so critical to their success that they have to steal my voice? They don’t have enough different voices among their 47,000 U.S. employees to tune their transcription? Nor within millions of recorded Support calls? Nor internationally? Nor among their legions of alpha-test partners? Seriously? My real-time input is that important to the viability of Apple’s adaptive dictation? Wow. Then it seems Apple should pay me for using iCloud.

Apple ‘geniuses’—as you so modestly redefine language to falsely elevate yourselves—I don’t actually need my dictation optimized for the entire U.S. population nor the world. After twenty years of this nonsense I simply want Macintosh to transcribe adaptively using a program that you can update periodically like any others—and that doesn’t interrupt my time nor compromise my privacy with espionage! I’m in this game: I exactly predicted iTunes Match. For that matter, I was the first to put sound on Intel processors, in 1993. But this dictation architecture is an idea so bizarre, so off-the-wall that I would not have thought it even a remotely reasonable solution, when you are already holding a so-called supercomputer with 32 Gb minimum in your hand. Why on earth would you invoke a network for a job that needs to be fast and local, and for which superabundant processing resources and software already exist?

It seems to me that if they cared at all for our security, real geniuses would have figured out a more efficient way to tweak their Nuance-supplied (Dragon) software than entailing the constant overhead of shipping millions of voice files to Cupertino. After all, the same technology ran on Windows/Intel standalone. Doesn’t it make you kind of wonder why they—no, you—would pay so much to store all of this voice material indefinitely? They must think your junk is quite valuable—though the resulting daily customizations on your behalf can not be much more than parametric adjustments as easily made locally by Dragon software with a downloaded model. And if they cared at all for our security, real geniuses might even be able to design a simple, non-threatening correction interface that likely would not confuse us any more than their arbitrary interface changes to justify system releases. Tellingly, of course none of this requires anything resembling true genius, just honesty and sincerity. Yet Apple doesn’t think we deserve even a simple disclosing dialog box. They may or may not be legally covered, but they are now ethically bared.

The parsimonious explanation for the indignities we are instead dealt by this strategy is most credible: profit. Computing is only incidental to Apple’s future business: marketing demographics. Apple is selling dictation that does not work unless you tell them everything. All your thoughts, business agreements, inventions, all your emails, pillow talk, everything. Voice memos. Bookmarks. All of your information. Captured in their formats, such as the only allowed predictably-searchable Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents. Siri operations revealing real-time trends. Photostreamed images and videos of your family and friends openly subject to facial recognition which you obediently supply through iPhoto. They want it all. All of you and yours. In your cloud. Or their cloud. Whatever. They really prefer you no longer bother to ask for respect for your life and property: the distinction is now moot. You are for resale. Period.

Please, actually read their privacy statement then try to believe you can fully trust them in concert with “their partners.” Every colorful manager in the U.S.’s now most valuable company might have once been by definition ‘insanely great.’ But that long-uncolored broken fruit may now signify merely ‘schizophrenically insane.’ How else classify conscienceless barkers paid to famously evangelize—that is, propagandize—that they have your interests at heart, while surreptitiously implementing non-negotiable, comprehensive access to your personal communications that the government can’t even obtain without warrant and for which they have a short and mediocre record of protection? We are to believe that, solely for your convenience, they unnecessarily and secretly bundled with dictation essential disclosure of all your ideas, feelings, and relationships. And you can just take it or leave it—if you accidentally even learn about it! Apple’s dictation solution disguises that you are talking to them, not your computer. Apparently mocking even TRUSTe’s commitment to “choice and transparency” as generally understood, Apple’s elusive EULA allows them to ensure most of their users obliviously inter-radiate exhaustive revelations; each life to become a brick in their Global Tower of Babel 2.0. Or, once aware, supplicate elsewhere for service with integrity.

Apple makes this an easy choice and growing competitive opportunity for independent enablers of protected, personal clouds—which actually may not be mandatory for sync nor a desirable security exposure. Unfortunately but predictably, iCloud is now the prime target of hackers worldwide who are happy just to teach Apple apparently deserved lessons in humility—the reports evolve daily. So, you can plan on two things. One, your iCloud data will be scrutinized, analyzed, and data-mined in every conceivable way to ensure that the most possible money can be taken from you by Apple’s new top customers: partnered megacorporations that manipulate the media and the world through demographics. Two, your iCloud data will be further stolen as arguably, it may already have been. Hackers—including the government itself—may get your data and voice recordings before the geeks are done wankin’ with them.

Laughing off FCC’s fining Google an entire $25,000, Apple’s competitor itself could with relative impunity continue to scoop up your now audio-embellished privacy with their street snoops simply to embarrass Apple. Ready to hear you dictating your journal on YouTube? After all, it could be your 15 minutes of fame, times 300,000 views.

The country’s dominant personal technology provider is out of control, their competitors’ patent trolling has gone stratospheric, but we seem to be on our own. As the EFF remains in straight-jacketed self-admiration before their fun-house mirrors—built with Google’s $1M donation in 2011—I have to do their job.

Which is to say: Boycott iCloud. You can’t get anything back. But you can stop sustaining the leeches. Keep your data local, in common formats readable by a variety of likely future apps; encrypt backups with Retrospect, for example; remotely backup to storage specialists like Carbonite. Re-evaluate your real needs for daily sync compared to what you are giving away. You may find even the minimum plan a lousy deal.

To invoke South Park Eric Cartman’s mildest possible condemnation, “Screw you guys. I’m going home.”

Apr 2012 18

FCC Leadership: Headless, Gutless, Senseless

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

Revised: 20120602

This is too sad to belabor. But you need to know that the agency that promises to protect us from cyberwarfare by hardening the internet cannot even protect us from Google.

In obvious pre-election fear of the new web robber-barons, after a two-year effort FCC just punted and fined Google $25,000 for illegally gathering servers full of personal communications with their street snoops. Does anyone imagine Google officers chastened and dissuaded, or simply laughing their asses off as they unroll a well-planned series of strategic workarounds?

For perspective, FCC routinely levies minimum fines of $17,000 against wayward FM pirates, CBers, hams, and restaurants with cell phone quieters. FCC just fined Clear Channel $22,000 simply for vague contest terms. They got ripped off! For only $3,000 more, Clear Channel could have bought the rights to data-mine all of the country’s personal online activity.

FCC’s purported investigation was stymied simply by one engineer claiming the 5th Amendment and hence offering no information on those who green-lighted the project. Though its Chairman is an admittedly brilliant Communications jurist and former Supreme Court clerk, FCC was curiously unable to uncover essential evidence despite this stonewalling. (Notably, several European agencies are not so timid either in their fines or continuing investigations.)

Now FCC implies that Congress missed something; as if we don’t have enough laws and precedent against invasion of privacy, illegal wiretapping, to say nothing of that pesky 4th Amendment protecting personal security. In fact, Mr. Genachowski has been legally advising the FCC since the early 90s, specifically assisting two previous Chairmen by writing their telecommunications legislation; and now twenty years later finds enough loopholes surrounding encryption to obstruct his own decisiveness on behalf of the public? Ultimately, Google got off simply because you didn’t encrypt all of your love letters and other private information. Their theory is that you invited data rape. That is how your FCC is protecting you today; by deciding your digital life is all fair game for the unseen.

Effectively, Chairman Genachowski just told every internet service they could do whatever they like by simply adding $12,500 per year to their cost of doing business. What nonsense be this? Was he oblivious to privacy issues when writing the laws or only now while incapable of respecting them? You cannot call this incompetence: he is too smart. We are left only to suspect the accelerated collusion and corruption surrounding this budget-strapped and weakened FCC since Genachowski’s rise to stardom with The 1996 Telecom Act—which also dissolved your rights against cell towers in your back yard.

Julius, can we just cut through the crap? Any ambiguity here resides only in the minds of the industry that put you there and continuously pushes the limits of conspiracy to steal personal data for profit. Otherwise there would have been no basis for action at all, no need for over two years of continuing international investigation, no grounds for anyone to claim the 5th, no need for bullshit excuses about encryption, no need for House Energy & Commerce to investigate you as a paradigm study for needed reforms, and finally, no need for the U.S. public to live with Federal acquiescence in this cover-up and continued erosion of our rights to privacy.

Mr. Genachowski, again, please exit through the gift shop with your former colleagues via that golden revolving door that you have so publicly applauded. I was going to refrain from saying that you have ill-served the President, until finding that Wikipedia already predicted you to be gone in 2011: “criticisms have become numerous and increasingly vocal among consumer groups and legislative supporters about his lack of substantive accomplishments to date.”

Yes, it gets worse. This update notes a March 11 report from The Hill that oxymoronically reports the White House wants to move Genachowski out of FCC because of his inaction, to Commerce Secretary, which needs a more active leader. I can only conclude that no one can make sense of this without further information that is apparently not public.

Revised: 20130323: Mr. Genachowski has resigned.

Mar 2012 07

Actually, Radio is NOT a First Amendment Issue

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

Any more than is driving a car. You need a license. Otherwise you are presumed likely to hurt people due to ignorance and lack of skill—just like Limbaugh.

The indubitable reasoning instigating the Communications Act of 1934 realized that if everyone had a radio transmitter at their will, no radio system could work. Pretty simple and extremely rational: You would have a situation where all could shout, while none listen—in other words, today’s Internet. But I digress.

As a limited national resource, the nature of the radio medium does not permit of simple analogies with the public square nor freedom of the press. You can place twenty times the newspaper vending machines in a city block than you can allocate radio stations to serve it. If you prefer, fill the sidewalk with 1000 megaphones and petitioners; but you can’t just add 1000 radio stations.

So, broadcasters are obliged to maintain their limited number of competing licenses by sharing the airwaves on behalf of the public. Necessarily, not every viewpoint will get the infinite airtime it no doubt deserves. Responsibility for the public interest is not simply heaped equally upon each station. More realistically, FCC expects good faith attempts at serving the public interest largely by encouraging a general even-handedness of representative stations in a ‘market.’ Consistent with their recently tossing “the fairness doctrine,” FCC is happier seeing competing stations than forcing each to schizophrenically adopt opposing orientations to the listener’s confusion. The relevant discussion is not at the lofty heights of the Supreme Court but at the thoroughly empirical and gritty level of how broadcasters attend to their community in context with others, and in consideration of significant variation in national market traditions.

Even the police do not have ‘free speech’ on police radios, nor pilots on aviation channels. Though the mandates for the Amateur Radio Service or Citizen’s Band are different still, the principle remains the same: Free speech takes a back seat to the prescribed communication purposes of all radio Services. And most Services maintain constant lobbying to ensure the FCC receives no cause for thought about increasing their performance standards or restricting their spectrum allocations. Thus, large-scale complaint filings such as about the SuperBowl costume fiasco have been observed to make the broadcast industry abundantly nervous. For specific stations, a large complaint file can seriously complicate their license renewal.

Today’s dysfunctional FCC has not impressed anyone with responsiveness. Nevertheless, if you want to end broadcast hate-mongering save your time arguing about free speech with dittoheads, and use it to entreat your friends to file virtually daily complaints against that lard-ass, mentally- and morally-defective, excrement-luncher—this IS the internet, after all—at:

File Complaint | FCC.gov

Jan 2012 18

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook: Imagine a World with Respect for Intellectual and Creative Property Rights

By Stanley Jungleib1 Comment

Wholesale theft has been a widely-rationalized right of the cheap, lazy, and generally bewildered since the web’s inception. Strong action against online piracy is long overdue, and the Stop Online Piracy Act is the justified legal reaction caused by the failure of on-line services to take responsibility for their peddling stolen goods. Zealots seeing no other way besides theft to get knowledge, have likely as well never considered supporting local public libraries. And with ultimate hypocrisy, Wikipedia now reveals its true understanding of who controls everything the public gave it for free—themselves!

Jan 2012 16

2012: The Ordeals of Insight

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

Besides the November elections, for many of us the biggest ordeal in 2012 will likely be campaign-level carpet-bombing by ‘insights’ about 2012. The slapstick articles aligning The Mayan Calendar, the obligatory Nostradamus, and The End of Days. The thick but vacuous best-sellers. 66.6% of the pre-GED History channel. In fact, there is no rare galactic alignment due. So, the rearrangement of continents is a non-starter. As well, believers may not meet their makers, and neither will our problems necessarily explode nor be solved.

Though it may not sell well, I suggest 2012 will be a year as any other—like the weather itself—no more predictable, no less chaotic. There will be hurricanes in Florida. Of the hundreds of daily earthquakes, a few will merit news coverage. Accidents will happen. An Italian sea captain will inexplicably use a half-billion dollar ship as his personal surfboard. And sure, Iran seems deliberately provocative of military intervention, but even this kind of confrontation is hardly unprecedented for the historical Persia. (A prior trade route blockage having stimulated discovery of the New World.)

To the extent one cares, the facts of the matter are thus: NASA – The Great 2012 Doomsday Scare.

So, one of the best results for which to hope is that on December 22, a segment of the population will look around at their hysterical collections of hysterical popularbacks and magazines, reflect on their time wasted listening to hapless commentators, decide that they have been conditioned for the last time by the publishing industry, traditional and  “social” media outlets, and declare their mental independence from them.

Perhaps then the perennial, beguiling, idle cliche’ about “the shift in consciousness which the planet is about to undergo” can finally be laid to rest in favor of a less selfish, indolent, and oblivious awareness of world events that recognizes rather than substitutes for humanism and activism.

Now that would be revolutionary, because I suspect that the exploited and starving billions sleepless from gunfire in the night are not waiting for liberation or food from supposed bourgeoisie ‘shifts in consciousness’ arbitrarily linked by marketeers to The Mayan Calendar. More likely, they would justifiably regard such insightful, profiteering light-worker missionaries actually daring to message that view among them to be irrelevant if not insane contributors to their ordeals, murder-able simply for their sandals.

Dec 2011 19

Thank you Christopher Hitchens

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

I took my early writing lessons from Bertrand Russell and H.L. Mencken, the former having mastered the understated, and latter the overstated, culturally-indispensable duty of iconoclasm. Until finding Hitchens it seemed the rising tides of U.S. conformism and fundamentalism had erased the last vestiges of journalistic criticism. Like Mencken, we witnessed Hitchens cross the line occasionally even with his colleagues. But like Mencken, we understood his impatience was informed by the sufferings he witnessed, the duplicities he discovered, and his zeal for vigorous, rational, evidence-based debate. In both writers, polemic may guide but bombast is only a deliberately obvious last resort …

“If you care about the points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where that is.”

… while attending to our evolutionary reliance upon dialectic:

“It is idiotic to believe that consensus is the highest good… In life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation.”

“Again, it is a matter of how one thinks and not of what one thinks.”

Pondering my sympathies for these three models, I yesterday found myself saying something ridiculous: “Damn. Now that Christopher is dead someone has to fill his shoes.” Merely that he might enjoy the utter audacity of such a remark sustained my laughter. Today the appropriate rejoinder emerges obvious: the obligation enures to each of us, in fact, as (even before his illness was reported) he concluded Letters to a Young Contrarian:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive.

Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.

Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.

Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.

Picture all experts as if they were mammals.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.

Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

Journalists hoping to best Hitchens’ legacy must realize they will never be able to blog their way there. They must courageously test these principles in the back alleys and on the front lines of world conflict, mirroring as doggedly and lucidly to us as did he all the wrongs traceable to national or personal irresponsiblity or crippled thinking, that can indeed be uncovered by informed and determined individuals.

Like Mencken and perhaps Russell, Hitchens successfully modeled the transmutation of his personal quirks and failings into widespread respect—largely through his own self-acceptance. Finally, in the tradition of the peripatetic Hemingway, Hitch’s exemplary endurance and prolific output leaves lessons indispensable for the budding, future contrarian; for whom we must also wish his character to heed tolls loudly.

Nov 2011 23

Sons of Sam

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

It is not hard to decipher what motivates malevolent University administrators and staff who choose to mistreat and attack our children. A sickening video from U.C. Regents Chair Sherry Lansing sent to U.C. supporters summarizes these rationalizations in neat totalitarian tradition: “We had information.”

What she really means is “We have aspirations.” Four decades ago, an otherwise decent scholar who authored the admirable Language in Thought and Action, launched a Senatorial campaign on the backs of students trampled upon by his violent handling at San Francisco State. He easily became a conservative darling and star—skillfully developing the nonsensical sound bite into a Senatorial win. Yet, his supporters were oblivious that the demands of leadership change utterly when you can’t just boss people around, and hard-lining ‘outsider’ Sleepin’ Sam Hayakawa with his iconic, stupid tam-o’-shanter served California with possibly the worst Senate term in history.

Fatigued by Schwarzenegger’s laughable ‘outsider’ reign, modern Californians rightly feared and rejected the ultra-unqualified hard-lining ‘outsider’ Meg Whitman—who’s platform basically consisted of jailing anyone who disagreed with her. Tomorrow we can indeed be quite thankful she lost, as even more violence would have certainly resulted.

Now consider ultimate ‘outsider’ U.C. sophomore President Mark Yudof and his Texas-bred brand of justice; a former law professor who amidst spreading protests tellingly could not think to proactively direct his staff to refresh themselves on California law and precedent. While his U.C. Public Relations executes a full court press upon editorial boards around the state, simply review the U.C. Davis footage. Squint as you may, you cannot see any actual danger to these officers. They were reportedly acting under policy set by Davis Chancellor “I approved it before it blew up in my face” Katehi. The primary assailant was not a scared rookie, but a seasoned veteran with significant authority poisoning the defenseless in calm deliberation.

Having hosted what may well be a Kent State-level national catalyst, U.C. is convening task forces and holding webinars and expressing concern. They absurdly speak of ‘sensitivity training’ for those hired to flaunt their insensitivity. But ‘administrative leave’ is pro-forma, and while Yudof has commissioned an outside investigation, he has neither offered nor demanded full accountability.

As if the video is not sufficient reason for the Regents to act in concert, as if U.C. did not give birth to the Free Speech Movement and a dozen others so has not already ‘studied’ the issues for fifty years, Yudof wants his policy answers not now but in 30 days—that is, 30 news cycles—buried amidst vacation and the holidays. After all, as Sleepin’ Sam proved, you can use our children as chips in ‘Texas Hold-Em’ with impunity for at least that long, and just see what hand politics deals you.

Lastly and tragically, ultimate insider Governor Brown’s astonishing silence as he consults his polls and shops for the perfect tam-o’-shanter profoundly disappoints this writer and thoroughly reinforces the present interpretation. His staff blithely told the Fresno Bee these are “local matters.” That is over-the-top insane: even disregarding the legal and moral issues, and damage to the state’s reputation, the U.C. system is documented by Yudof’s detailed September, 2011 report to be so intertwined with California’s economy that disruptions there can ripple throughout the state potentially with a 10X effect. And now that resource is at risk by failed management.

Jerry—cute hat, but don’t snore so loudly! Instead, take this leadership lesson from your dad: “When there is no consensus, only urgency, I will speak out.”— Governor Pat Brown (Second Inaugural Address, January 7, 1963). You could start by telling us what he would have done had you the convictions—right or wrong—to have sat with those kids.

 

Update: On 2013 May 08, Chair Lansing wrote alumni that “Mark Yudof is ending his tenure as President of the University of California on August 31st.”

Aug 2011 31

FCC and BART: Countdown On Collusion

By Stanley JungleibNo Comments

FCC: Your business—your only business—is communications. You don’t need to finely analyze circumstances; we have courts to address protestor and police actions. The facts relevant to your purview are clear enough for virtually every disinterested expert and informed civil rights organization to have reached the same, somewhat obvious conclusion: BART’s action simply cannot be allowed to generalize within a democracy. You must by now have identified the irresponsible parties within BART, so all you need to do is act quickly, decisively, and consistently while you have any credibility left whatsoever.

< OlderNewer >
Blue Taste Theme created by Jabox