sounddust

What this argument is not taking into consideration is that some people don't use their device as much as others, and they do so by choice. Plenty of people will take a $10 discount to cut their phone usage a bit, and be happy that someone offered them the choice. Personally, I'm a data-crazed maniac who uses my iPhone constantly (and uses around 900MB/month) but that doesn't mean everyone is (or wants to be).

I'd also argue that there are only a few applications that consume large amounts of bandwidth, such as streaming/downloading audio and video. You can still take full advantage of your phone (with the exception of those two things) and not use much bandwidth.

In addition, two of the three carriers offer unlimited Free wifi to these access points with the iPhone plan, even if you're not an ISP customer. So you're doubly covered.

I checked the iPhone plans of the UK and Germany, and they both offer free Wi-fi access with the iPhone plans.

Regarding your other point, I think it was clear from the UI of the phone call that a voice chat icon will appear when video chat is available and you can switch to it at any point.

I haven't experienced this. I wear IEMs every day, and have worn them on 14-hour flights. Perhaps it depends on the person. In any case I don't see why they would be hotter (or hurt more) than silicone earplugs.

in-ear phones are more dangerous to your hearing than regular ones

Citation? Given that they block more noise than other earphones, logic would dictate that you don't need to play them as loud to achieve the same clarity. I find that I keep the volume on my iPhone very low when I use IEMs, as opposed to near-maximum when using the supplied earphones or headphones.

I think that there's a lot of criticism toward Gruber because his opinions are not a carbon-copy of the unified public geek opinion that you'd see on a site like Slashdot. I think it's refreshing to see a solitary source of Apple commentary in which the author actually attempts to understand Apple's motivations rather than blindly lambast them. Gruber is not afraid to criticize Apple (I've read dozens of criticisms of the app store approval process, for example).

And that's always been his attitude: The opinions from someone who is a long-time fan of Apple products and does not instantly overreact to every news story about them like most tech sites. You can't accuse someone of jumping the shark for consistently doing what they've been doing for years.

I still have these mails in my inbox. People who I've never met nor conversed with online in my life.

And whether it's sensitive depends on the context. Revealing one's IP reveals their location, and I can think of many cases in which this is sensitive information.

When the world's second largest site allows you to monitor the private chats of 400 million people - when it leaks your IP address to other people via e-mail for no reason - and now when it's leaking people's e-mail, then it's a big deal.

That's not even taking into consideration the privacy issues that were not bugs.

Is Google harvesting links from secure pages using their toolbar or something? Are people's personal mails leaking through other means?

I noticed that a few of them are indexed by Google because someone decided to reprint the email - URLs and all - to their blog. But that's a rare exception,and obviously not the case with the author of the article.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1A2

I still think it's a pretty bad move on AT&T's fault, and is probably an indication that they have secured exclusivity in the US for at least another year.

I think that Google should just track it internally and report it in Analytics. It would allow the publisher to do search analytics, and it would be good for the user too because it provides more privacy than the referrer field.

They were in regular contact with the person they were supposed to meet ("George"), who told them to meet in NYC. They took the greyhound to NYC. Given that there is also a Lux Lounge in NYC, what would make you think the existence of the lounge in DC is anything other than a coincidence? Everything we know about this situation indicates otherwise.

Also, there is a lot more info in that thread than what the one guy posted. There was at least one other Metafilter user who spent time with the girls, and it's certain that the police are going to investigate given the attention, so it's likely we'll know more soon.

http;//facebook.com/#!profile_id=123/reqs.php/456/v=photos&ref=pymk

This means "I am user 123 and I'm looking at the photos of user 456 after having clicked through to their profile. I found this user's profile through Facebook's friend recommendation page."

Why does Facebook have to put all that info in the URL in the first place?

The referring URL for an average site would simply share "I am an anonymous user that's looking at 456's photos".

An advertiser could use Facebook's Graph (where your name, picture and other information is forced to be public now and indexed via the above Ids) and you have extremely detailed info about someone and their Facebook activity.

Note: It looks like Facebook has stripped the part of the URL that needlessly self-identifies now, so that's good.

Those photos are indexed by Google and contain my name, even if I have chosen not to share photos I've been tagged in. I want to be able to see the list of public ones so that I can manually untag myself. Similarly, it would take too long for someone with thousands of wall posts to find the ones that might have accidentally been set to "everyone".

I think that it might have been better to wait until these were included before officially launching the tool, because the photo issue affects almost everyone on Facebook, and if people use this tool and everything checks out ok, they probably won't return again if you update it later.

2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo.

3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.

Ironically, right before the big push to erode users' privacy, it seemed that they might have taken it a step further and replaced your name with "facebook user", removing even your first name (I was never sure if this was intentional or a bug, but in any case it didn't last long as the big privacy changes came soon after).

2) Someone who is not even my friend commented on someone's status, and I got a notification because I made a comment before her. It leaked her IP address to me.

These situations are not comparable to e-mail, and I seriously doubt these people reasonably expected their IP address to be sent to me based on these actions.