Translation of Carrier IQ's Media Release | Hacker News Reader

Translation of Carrier IQ's Media Release

daringfireball.net

145 pointssidwyn23 comments

I'd love it if Daring Fireball translated any of Apples more disingenuous press releases in a similarly cynical way.

Everything that Gruber produces has the ulterior motive of colouring Apple good / competitors bad. I find it all extremely boring.

... thanks; the down-vote just lets me know I'm on track.

I've learnt that on HN, when commenting on Gruber posts - negative laws of scoring generally apply :)

Which disingenuous press release?

What a painfully bad article.

Press releases can be disingenuously upbeat and straight-jacketed. From the hip snark this over the top is just as bad. Even innocuous statements in the release are torn apart. What a joke.

I believe that's just this author's style of writing about anything except Apple.

Agree. Easy target.

http://xkcd.com/114/

Have you read Gruber before? He has some winners, for sure, but he certainly writes for the sake of amusing John Gruber.

In my experience, he writes exclusively for the purpose of promoting Apple. Mercifully this article diverged from that singular goal.

It's a specific format of response called Fisking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking

Amongst other things it's been used many times previously to take apart the justifications that are often written to explain why a company's stupid moves aren't really stupid.

The "high as a kite" line is somewhat obligatory and comes from the sadly-departed Mark Pilgrim's skewering of Joel Spolsky, who was trying to tell everyone that IE8 was going to be a really good web browser when it came to implementing web standards, and that the standards didn't really matter much anyway. You can relive this moment from web history here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122550/http://diveintomar...

I believe that Pilgrim took that "High as a kite" quote from Gruber himself. http://web.archive.org/web/20110131103908/http://daringfireb...

Ah, right you are. The rabbit hole goes deeper than my memory does these days.

About Fisking, Robert Fisk himself wrote:

"I have to be honest: I don't use the Internet. I've never seen a blog in my life. I don't even use email, I don't waste my time with this. I am not interested. I couldn't care less. I think the Internet has become a hate machine for a lot of people and I want nothing to do with it." [1]

Robert Fisk seems to equate the Web with the Internet. You can't really blame him.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking

One thing that bothers me and that I do consider disingenuous is how every denial is specific ("not recording keystrokes"), while every affirmative statement of what they actually do is vague ("look at many aspects of a device's performance"). Oh really? Like what? Tell us exactly what gets sent to the carrier. Even if it varies by carrier, list some of the top things among all of them.

This analysis is as on point as it gets

It's called humor. It may not be appropriate on HN, but neither is bitching about it every time the source is you-know-who.

Also, there are no innocuous statements in press releases. And certainly not in this one.

> It's called humor. It may not be appropriate on HN [...]

Humor, or as in this case snarky look-at-my-clever-phrasing passed off as humor, is no excuse for writing pointless shit. The article offers no insight or useful discussion.

> [...] neither is bitching about it every time the source is you-know-who.

andrewvc was only complaining that the article was bad in and of itself.

Are you defending CarrierIQ?

I want to see him do a 360 if it's found in the iPhone.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/30/2601875/carrier-iq-refere...

It was

"Update: chpwn notes that initial research indicated that Carrier IQ's software may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode. In a blog post, chpwn confirms that, based on his initial testing, Apple has added some form of Carrier IQ software to all versions of iOS, including iOS 5. However, the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default. Finally, the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information than what has been seen on Android, limited to some call activity and location (if enabled), but not any text from the web browser, SMS, or anywhere else. We'll let you know when more details arise."

"Good investigative work by Grant “chpwn” Paul. iOS includes a Carrier IQ daemon, but it doesn’t seem to log any particularly sensitive information. Nothing like a keylogger or reading SMS messages. He’s documenting his research on Twitter as he goes." [1]

It's unnecessary to do a 180 (or 360, if he should end up in the same place) because this article isn't about iOS vs. Android or closed vs. open. This is about some company being disingenuous as to what their software does and cowering behind a misleading press release.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/01/carrier-iq-ios

This translation is rather true, and that's why it's hilarious :)

The best thing I've read from Gruber in a long time. Yeah, it's snarky, but it's mostly true - sadly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com