OhRyan.ca

With less than 48hrs to the next iPhone announcement, I thought I’d weigh in on the iPhone 5 teardrop prediction with some first-hand experience.

I have a TV remote that’s roughly teardrop shaped and every single time without fail I hold it upside-down.

In this blogger’s opinion, there will be no teardrop iPhone.

It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.

Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.

A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.

Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:

You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.

I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.

At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.

Thanks to Matt Wiebe for mentioning the rumour that Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2 supports TrueType fonts and providing a handy link to test: http://thatwasnotok.com/tt-test.html

A screenshot from my install of the iOS 4.2 GM seed on an iPhone 3G:

Double-U Tee Eff, it’s cnettv flash video streaming to my non-jailbroken iPhone, in Firefox? Yup. This is all thanks to the Cloud Browse app.

The app details don’t give any information about how this is actually working. As far as I can tell the app makes a VNC-type connection to a virtual machine on Amazon EC2. Works like a charm.

Get it while it lasts though, seems like the sort of app Apple might pull from the App Store.

In celebration of one year in the app store iPlayPhone is now free!!!

[iTunes Link]