Apple's Surprise Announcement

Oh great, even without Jobs being there to insert his reality distortion field into the announcements of the upcoming announcement to be announced on March 9th the interwebs are going at least gaga, if not worse.

Just so you don't have to wait more than a week to find out just what those secretive geniuses at the infinite loop (Fruit Lops, anyone?) are going to say, here are the actual facts as we now know them.

Those amazing innovators aren't going to announce a new watch (that was Pebble, did you miss it, bub?). They aren't going to announce a car or truck (Tesla and Google are already busy trying to dismantle the recently-rescued rusty three don't you know). They aren't even going to announce a new iPhone, iPad, or a new name for Siri.

No, they seem to be channeling Luther Burbank rather than Irving Cupertino (or whatever his name really was). After a decades-long program of grafting and cloning, Apple scientists have actually succeeded in creating miniature (or bonsai) versions of the original Macintosh apple tree - and they claim these miniature trees (shrubs?) actually bear full-size fruit. The first successful tree-let was named LISA - Living In-Situ Apple-producer. I kid you not - these guys are brilliant (just ask them).

Now you can belly up to the genius bar and have a glass of hard apple cider while you wait for the indentured hipster to replace the shattered glass in your iPhone.

Yes, the mighty have fallen, folks. Apple is reduced to producing apples.
Chumps.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose

We Didn't Start the Fire!

Oh great, another corporation trying to grab information about its customers in order to sell them even more stuff they can't afford.
If Google tried this kind of thing, they'd get hauled before Congress.
If Microsoft tried it, the fanbois would come up with the nastiest names to call them.
Ah, but since Amazon is everyone's favorite bookstore (you know, that box with a smile!) they can grab all our internet traffic and "enhance" our experience.

bah!

Amazon's "new" browser system - Silk - for the Kindle Fire offloads much of the actual browsing work from the Fire itself to the Amazon Cloud service. That "new" really belongs in quotes, because this is just a repeat of what BT did to its UK customers with Phorm - snagging all the traffic and using it to suggest products, serve ads, store data about each surfer (they call them punters over there - go figure?!) all without really making it clear that they were going to be profiting from the data that the punters were handing over, pretty much without thinking about it or saying it was OK with them.
Amazon will now have all the requests - probably even the https / SSL / TLS traffic - made by each Fire device, and will map that directly to the Amazon accounts of the owners so they can make sure they offer up products related to whatever it is that those folks are looking at in other places. You think cookie trails are too invasive now? Just wait for Silk to the the standard model of a browser based on whatever ISP you're using and it won't matter if you delete cookies or use incognito windows or other sandboxing systems - the cloud will have all your information:

all your surfing are belong to us!

It's going to get even worse when IP v6 is the law of the internet since each device will be able to have a static IP address and when that's added to the Phorm / Silk pattern of slurping all the browsing activity from everyone everywhere and making commercial use of it it's only a matter of not very much time until the various government agencies around the world will be getting everything from the cloud that pertains to anyone and everyone and there's not enough tin foil in the world to make hats to stop all that!


Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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