Day: January 10, 2022

Happy Public Domain Day 2022! – The Public Domain Review

Happy Public Domain Day 2022! – The Public Domain Review:

On the chime of midnight last night, as many of us welcomed in — by booze-fuelled countdown or bliss of sleep — the start of a new year, the public domain had a special moment too, welcoming in many thousands more works into its ever-growing expanse, including Winnie The Pooh, poems by Dorothy Parker, and Franz Kafka’s The Castle.
Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

[Stravinsky eh? Cool.]

Apple: ‘iCloud Private Relay Overview’ (PDF)

Apple: ‘iCloud Private Relay Overview’ (PDF):

New whitepaper from Apple with a lot of details about how iCloud Private Relay works. Still doesn’t list Apple’s CDN partners for the second relay hop, but that’s obviously some sort of strategic decision on Apple’s part. As the paper makes clear, you don’t need any particular trust in those CDN partners, because they never receive anything that could identify you, or locate you any more precisely than an 800 km2 region.

iCloud Private Relay is still officially in beta, but it’s been so reliable for me that I had to check just now that I’ve got it enabled on all my eligible devices.

[I haven’t tried it yet. Good to know it’s going well.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Facebook App Reads Accelerometer Data

Facebook App Reads Accelerometer Data:

Zak Doffman (via John Wilander):

Facebook goes even further, using the accelerometer on your iPhone to track a constant stream of your movements, which can easily be used to monitor your activities or behaviors at times of day, in particular places, or when interacting with its apps and services. Alarmingly, this data can even match you with people near you—whether you know them or not.

Just like the photo location data, the most serious issue here is that there is absolutely no transparency. You are not warned that this data is being tracked, there is no setting to enable or disable the tracking; in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off the feature and stop Facebook (literally) in its tracks.

Researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk warn that “Facebook reads accelerometer data all the time. If you don’t allow Facebook access to your location, the app can still infer your exact location only by grouping you with users matching the same vibration pattern that your phone accelerometer records.”

[Facebook sucks.]

Source: Michael Tsai