irons

"Infrastructure" has the luxury of being value-neutral. Cloudflare wishes that were also true of it, frequently and publicly, to no avail.

* use TestFlight for centralized distribution of pre-release apps, through Apple (with some lighter-touch app review involved), or

* use enterprise signing (which requires enrolling in a more expensive program and jumping through some corporate hoops, with your apps subject to deactivation if you abuse it) to install on an unrestricted number of devices theoretically owned by your company, or

* whitelist a pretty low number of specific iOS devices to install arbitrary apps onto — I think that limit is still 100 devices per year, per developer account

This sounds like it removes the whitelisting requirement from the third option. Hope it's enough friction to prevent the worst aspects of sideloading from taking hold.

To pick an example from today: http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/daily-mail-journali...

And then there's this: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/bittor...

"[W]hen we ask [ISPs] if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download—thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic—there is an uncomfortable silence," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote last month. "That's because the ISP argument isn't sensible. Big ISPs aren't paying money to services like online backup that generate more upstream than downstream traffic. Data direction, in other words, has nothing to do with costs."

In other words, you're describing a situation in which Comcast blackmailed Netflix for access to Comcast's customers as one in which Netflix claims they "should not have to pay for internet traffic". This is detached from reality.

That story is based on 2009 research: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25548144?seq=2

Admitting that gerrymandering isn't the problem puts the solution further out of reach, unfortunately. Generational change is slow and painful.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Misce...

Assuming that they'll be available indefinitely strikes me as a willful mistake.

I'd also dispute your last point that we'll be able to clearly see the effects — despite the continued ability to sell direct (Developer ID looks like a great thing), sandboxing as Apple's chosen to implement it is going to result in fewer apps, not merely worse ones.

See also Anandtech's writeup of the substantial new chip fabrication improvements going into this year's version of last year's iPad: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5789/the-ipad-24-review-32nm-a...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/why-we-shoul...

Running a story like this using relative percentages, but no absolute values, is absurd and contemptible.

I'm not finding any absolute values for meningioma rates in any other stories about this particular study, but old pal wikipedia says:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningioma

Many individuals have meningiomas but remain asymptomatic (no symptoms) for their entire life, so the meningiomas are not discovered until after an autopsy. 1-2% of all autopsies reveal meningiomas which were unknown to the individuals during their lifetime, since there were never any symptoms. In the 1970s, tumors causing symptoms were discovered in 2 out of 100,000 people, while tumors discovered without causing symptoms occurred in 5.7 out of 100,000, for a total incidence of 7.7/100,000. With the advent of modern sophisticated imaging systems such as CT scans, the discovery of asymptomatic meningiomas has tripled.

I think I'll worry about something else.

If Facebook did exactly as you suggest and walled off advertisers from all but aggregate user detail, it wouldn't have affected this app, or anyone using similar techniques.

Facebook's whole lever for motivating people to provide that information is so they can share it with their friends. Why would anyone fill out a demographic profile to be kept under lock and key by Facebook for advertisers?