> And NO ONE DOES HAVE ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION—NOT EVEN LAW ENFORCEMENT, barring a court order. So what’s your point?

Yes, if you hand your phone over to a trained hacker, and he or she jailbreaks it and grabs the file, sure, then you’re screwed. But that’s true of ANY PHONE. If I hand the criminal the keys to my car, he’s going to drive away with it, you know?

Ars Technica doesn’t usually go for this sort of trumped up link bait, so I was surprised when I read this story this afternoon.

Seriously. Paranoid much? If you’re worried about your boyfriend or girlfriend hacking into your phone to track where you’ve been, you’ve got much bigger problems.

> Sharon Nissim, consumer privacy counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said it is possible Apple is violating the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act, which allows telecom carriers to provide call information only in emergency situations. > > “By asking for permission to collect location data, Apple may be trying to get around its legal obligations, by asking people to give up privacy rights they don’t even know they have,” Nissim said. > > She added that a potential privacy concern is that law enforcement would be able to subpoena these types of records from people’s iPhones or iPads. Where to begin with this newest kerfuffle?

First and foremost, we’re talking about a locally stored file that never gets sent anywhere. It’s on your iPhone, and it’s on the computer you use to backup the iPhone. That’s it. Apple isn’t “tracking” you. Your phone is tracking you and keeping that information from anyone, including you, unless you get into this file.

If you encrypt your iPhone backups—and you should (it’s just a checkbox in iTunes to make it happen, and it has all sorts of benefits)—even someone with access to your computer can’t get to this information.

Your iPhone stores all sorts of other information, like a log of all your phone calls, how long the phone has been active, how many times it was rebooted, etc. Location data is hardly the only scary thing getting recorded on your phone. (You do know that your carrier is storing most of this log data and actually PRINTS IT OUT ON YOUR BILL and mails it to you, right? It’s not like it wouldn’t be easier to steal someone’s mail than to steal their phone or hack into their computer.)

ANY CELL PHONE and especially any device with GPS capability is capable of being tapped by your government for spying purposes. They don’t need this file to know where you’ve been.

All of this leads me to the obvious question: What’s the big deal? Computers log information. That’s what they do. Every keystroke, every mouse click, every tap—if you’re a software developer, you know that you have to log all of that stuff to be able to uncover bugs and figure out why things go wrong when they go wrong. The only concern comes when a company takes that logged information and attempts to profit from it in some clandestine way. Apple is ABSOLUTELY NOT doing this with your location information.

There’s nothing to see here, people. This is not a story. It’s kind of cool to look at the data, for fun, but you can save the tinfoil hats for another day.

> And that’s it. As of this posting, I still don’t know specifically what kind of problem she has with the song (obviously I take a few jabs at her, but y’know, it’s *satire* – that’s how it’s supposed to work). And I’m especially confused as to why she waited until I actually *recorded* the song (at her insistence!) before saying no. It’s not like there were any surprises in the finished song that she couldn’t have foreseen by, you know, READING THE LYRICS. > > A conventional release for the song and video would have also raised a nice chunk of change for the HRC – an organization which I have to assume Gaga supports. Hopefully, if fans enjoy hearing the song online, they’ll make a donation anyway. > > My parodies have always fallen under what the courts call “fair use,” and this one was no different, legally allowing me to record and release it without permission. But it has always been my personal policy to get the consent of the original artist before including my parodies on any album, so of course I will respect Gaga’s wishes. However, given the circumstances, I have no problem with allowing people to hear it online, because I also have a personal policy not to *completely waste my stinking time*. Seriously. Here’s a tip for all pop culture icons everywhere. Being parodied by the Simpsons or especially Weird Al is how you know you’ve made it to the pinnacle of pop culture in America. It’s an honor. It’s one of the highest honors, in fact, that you can receive as an “artist.” If you don’t understand that, then get out of the business and go flip burgers at McDonald’s or something. You’re taking yourself waaaaaaaaay to seriously.

Maybe, just maybe, GaGa has a legit reason for saying no to this song. If that’s the case, then have the balls to tell him to his face. And tell him BEFORE HE RECORDS IT, at YOUR REQUEST. Not after he incurs the expense and already agrees to donate all the profits from the song to A CHARITY YOU SUPPOSEDLY SUPPORT.

What a loser.

Update: Seems the decision has been reversed. According to Weird Al, Lady GaGa’s manager had made the decision without informing her. Once she heard the song herself, the manager apologized, and GaGa’s official “blessing” was granted. Which means the song will appear on Weird Al’s new CD, and the proceeds will still go to HRC. Well done, Miss GaGa. I still don’t like your music, but at least you were smart enough to make this right.

> In general, the PlayBook OS feels like it’s on the ice level of a Mega Man game — everything seems to be sliding away beyond your control. It’s a sloppy feeling, and that’s compounded by the fact that the OS doesn’t seem to be fully optimized for touch input yet; I found myself tapping and re-tapping on UI elements and web navigation with no result. In web apps like Gmail (which RIM provides a direct link to on the homescreen), I couldn’t get to certain message checkboxes even after double-digit attempts. Whether this is the overall UI acting buggy or an issue with the way the browser is interpreting touches is unclear, but it’s that sort of behavior which makes the product feel unfinished. Not optimized for touch input “yet”? Here’s the crux of the issue for this, and most of Apple’s competitors in the tablet space, with the exception of Palm’s WebOS. Rather than creating an OS from scratch that was designed specifically for touch, companies like Google and now RIM are simply buying an existing OS and rejiggering it to work with touch. And that’s never going to lead to an experience as pleasant as Apple’s iOS.

RIM seems to think that it can simply throw enough horsepower at the problem. In time, the theory goes, mobile devices will be able to run standard desktop OS software. It’s just a matter of the hardware catching up. But it’s not really about speed. There are so many other factors that make iOS superior to all the others.

I remain convinced that WebOS is the only serious competitor to iOS, as far as operating systems go. Whether or not Palm/HP can make a go of it is another story.

As far as RIM goes, I think this PlayBook will appeal to the diehards and a few IT types. But it’s going nowhere fast. All the slick hardware in the world won’t make up for a screen too small for any tablet-class usefulness, an OS that will always feel “sluggish” and unpolished (because it is), and a complete lack of a unified software ecosystem.

> An officer who conducted a pat-down of a 6-year-old girl in the New Orleans airport last week “followed proper current screening procedures,” the Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday. This is actually the problem. It’s the “proper current screening procedures” that are broken.

I’m not saying that a 6-year old should never be patted down. But you should have a legitimate reason to do so. Not just because she was randomly selected.

We have a system built on keeping up appearances, instead of identifying real threats. We use random searches instead of targeted searches, because they make people feel better. But that leads us to a situation where we’re safe from 6-year olds, but vulnerable to underwear bombers.

How many more of these videos are we going to have to watch before someone at TSA wises up and just copies the Israeli system?