User Rating: 5 / 5
I can honestly say these new fetures are super cool, very useful Apple has nailed it
so cool , there are some killer features I have been wanting for years now are in the
new OS update and IOS changes check out the video I am sure you will agree
User Rating: 5 / 5
It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?
Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week.While you’re sleeping, your iPhone stays busy.
It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?
Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.
And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.
What you can do to limit app tracking: 5 privacy tips
Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.
You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.
IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.
And your iPhone doesn’t only feed data trackers while you sleep. In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.
The Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler explains all the things companies can get if you use their default privacy settings. How to change them: wapo.st/SayNoToDefaults (Jhaan Elker, David Jorgenson, Geoffrey Fowler/The Washington Post)
“This is your data. Why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don’t know what they’re going to do with it?” says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer for Disconnect. He hooked my iPhone into special software so we could examine the traffic. “I know the value of data, and I don’t want mine in any hands where it doesn’t need to be,” he told me.
In a world of data brokers, Jackson is the data breaker. He developed an app called Privacy Pro that identifies and blocks many trackers. If you’re a little bit techie, I recommend trying the free iOS version to glimpse the secret life of your iPhone.
Yes, trackers are a problem on phones running Google’s Android, too. Google won’t even let Disconnect’s tracker-protection software into its Play Store. (Google’s rules prohibit apps that might interfere with another app displaying ads.)
Help Desk: Ask our tech columnist a question
Part of Jackson’s objection to trackers is that many feed the personal data economy, used to target us for marketing and political messaging. Facebook’s fiascos have made us all more aware of how our data can be passed along, stolen and misused — but Cambridge Analytica was just the beginning.
Jackson’s biggest concern is transparency: If we don’t know where our data is going, how can we ever hope to keep it private?
Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer for Disconnect, hooked columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler's iPhone into software so they could examine the personal data flowing out of the phone. (James Cornsilk/The Washington Post)
The app gap
App trackers are like the cookies on websites that slow load times, waste battery life and cause creepy ads to follow you around the Internet. Except in apps, there’s little notice trackers are lurking and you can’t choose a different browser to block them.
Why do trackers activate in the middle of the night? Some app makers have them call home at times the phone is plugged in, or think they won’t interfere with other functions. These late-night encounters happen on the iPhone if you have allowed “background app refresh,” which is Apple’s default.
With Yelp, the company says the behavior I uncovered wasn’t a tracker but rather an “unintended issue” that’s been acting like a tracker. Yelp thinks my discovery affects 1 percent of its iOS users, particularly those who’ve made reservations through Apple Maps. At best, it is shoddy software that sent Yelp data it didn’t need. At worst, Yelp was amassing a data trove that could be used to map people’s travels, even when they weren’t using its app.
A more typical example is DoorDash, the food-delivery service. Launch that app, and you’re sending data to nine third-party trackers — though you’d have no way to know it.
App makers often use trackers because they’re shortcuts to research or revenue. They run the gamut from innocuous to insidious. Some are like consultants that app makers pay to analyze what people tap on and look at. Other trackers pay the app makers, squeezing value out of our data to target ads.
Hands off my data! 15 default privacy settings you should change right now.
In the case of DoorDash, one tracker called Sift Science gets a fingerprint of your phone (device name, model, ad identifier and memory size) and even accelerometer motion data to help identify fraud. Three more trackers help DoorDash monitor app performance — including one called Segment that routes onward data including your delivery address, name, email and cell carrier.
DoorDash’s other five trackers, including Facebook and Google Ad Services, help it understand the effectiveness of its marketing. Their presence means Facebook and Google know every time you open DoorDash.
The delivery company tells me it doesn’t allow trackers to sell or share our data, which is great. But its privacy policy throws its hands up in the air: “DoorDash is not responsible for the privacy practices of these entities,” it says.
All but one of DoorDash’s nine trackers made Jackson’s naughty list for Disconnect, which also powers the Firefox browser’s private browsing mode. To him, any third party that collects and retains our data is suspect unless it also has pro-consumer privacy policies like limiting data retention time and anonymizing data.
Microsoft, Nike and the Weather Channel told me they were using the trackers I uncovered to improve performance. Mint, owned by Intuit, said it uses an Adobe marketing tracker to help figure out how to advertise to Mint users. The Post said its trackers were used to make sure ads work. Spotify pointed me to its privacy policy.
Privacy policies don’t necessarily provide protection. Citizen, the app for location-based crime reports, published that it wouldn’t share “your name or other personally identifying information.” Yet when I ran my test, I found it repeatedly sent my phone number, email and exact GPS coordinates to the tracker Amplitude.
After I contacted Citizen, it updated its app and removed the Amplitude tracker. (Amplitude, for its part, says data it collects for clients is kept private and not sold.)
“We will do a better job of making sure our privacy policy is clear about the specific types of data we share with providers like these,” Citizen spokesman J. Peter Donald said. “We do not sell user data. We never have and never will.”
The problem is, the more places personal data flies, the harder it becomes to hold companies accountable for bad behavior — including inevitable breaches.
As Jackson kept reminding me: “This is your data.”
A billboard advertising Apple's iPhone privacy is displayed during CES 2019 in Las Vegas. (David Becker/Getty Images)
The letdown
What disappoints me is that the data free-for-all I discovered is happening on an iPhone. Isn’t Apple supposed to be better at privacy?
“At Apple we do a great deal to help users keep their data private,” the company says in a statement. “Apple hardware and software are designed to provide advanced security and privacy at every level of the system.”
In some areas, Apple is ahead. Most of Apple’s own apps and services take care to either encrypt data or, even better, to not collect it in the first place. Apple offers a privacy setting called “Limit Ad Tracking” (sadly off by default) which makes it a little bit harder for companies to track you across apps, by way of a unique identifier for every iPhone.
And with iOS 12, Apple took shots at the data economy by improving the “intelligent tracking prevention” in its Safari web browser.
Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time
Yet these days, we spend more time in apps. Apple is strict about requiring apps to get permission to access certain parts of the iPhone, including your camera, microphone, location, health information, photos and contacts. (You can check and change those permissions under privacy settings.) But Apple turns more of a blind eye to what apps do with data we provide them or they generate about us — witness the sorts of tracking I found by looking under the covers for a few days.
“For the data and services that apps create on their own, our App Store Guidelines require developers to have clearly posted privacy policies and to ask users for permission to collect data before doing so. When we learn that apps have not followed our Guidelines in these areas, we either make apps change their practice or keep those apps from being on the store,” Apple says.
Yet very few apps I found using third-party trackers disclosed the names of those companies or how they protect my data. And what good is burying this information in privacy policies, anyway? What we need is accountability.
Getting more deeply involved in app data practices is complicated for Apple. Today’s technology frequently is built on third-party services, so Apple couldn’t simply ban all connections to outside servers. And some companies are so big they don’t even need the help of outsiders to track us.
The result shouldn’t be to increase Apple’s power. “I would like to make sure they’re not stifling innovation,” says Andrés Arrieta, the director of consumer privacy engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If Apple becomes the Internet’s privacy police, it could shut down rivals.
Jackson suggests Apple could also add controls into iOS like the ones built into Privacy Pro to give everyone more visibility.
Or perhaps Apple could require apps to label when they’re using third-party trackers. If I opened the DoorDash app and saw nine tracker notices, it might make me think twice about using it. src
User Rating: 5 / 5
So I recently tried the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra a pretty good phone but just too big and over priced, not to mention its on android so thats bad too .. here is why I am saying this .. so I bought the phone and figured I need the Buds pro to go with them so all the fancy optiosn will work and sound good well they didnt and they sound like crap on android , the noise cancelling is spotty at best with android and barely sounds passable.
I got rid the phone I still kept the ear buds today for an experiment I connected the Samsung Buds pro to my iPhone 12 Pro and played some music well that was just awesome it had killer bass the vocals were great everything worked and thevolume was only at 1/2 !!! i turned it up and boy was it great !!
I previously tried the Apple Airpods 2 on the Samsung phone it was ok not bad but not great .. I also tried the airpods pro with the S21 ultra same response not bad .. not really optimized for the device.
but the iPhone with the Galaxy Buds PRo on the other hand have been so good, I am not going to use the airpods now .. the sound quality is night and day I have not had a phone call yet .. but I am sure it will be fine. I listen to rock music or metal, sometimes trance and all the bass was big and great vocals great ..
update** it does connect to the Phone portion but disconnects .. that may be a Apple Competition thing it has not been steady on the phone yet, if I get it to stay connected I'll mention it here, but for music its great !
User Rating: 5 / 5
So I have the both of them right now Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the Apple iPhone 12 Pro, your probably wondering why lol well if you know me .. then you know I have been testing phones for since 2000 and well im an I.T. guy to boot. I actually did have a reason for getting the two, The S21 ultra has the best Wifi Speed on the planet with the 6E band they were first to the party and no one else has this wifi band so I am able to get 950 Mbps Plus Download speed over Cable Wifi a 100 ft away upstairs steady! Where the iPhone cant do that best was about 500 or so .. now there is that 120 refresh rate phew that thing is smooth on the S21 Ultra, the screen is super nice and since this is android you can still get all the apps from IOS .. no loss really. all the widgets and cusotmization is great and freeing ..
iPhone 12 Pro I had before the S21 Ultra a heavy stylish design from iPhone 5 60 hertz screen IOS is smooth and easy as we all know .. but the design is mighty old .. the Wifi is slow , the LTE is ok at best. Cameras are good nice photos .. games good apps in general. truth be known IOS is flat out boring and I am tired of the same phone over and over again with no changes.
it took 10 Generations to get Widgets lol
I have been using Airpod 2 for a long time and they have been good they recently started having issues connecting and volume going down and other symptoms .. I picked up Airpod Pros to day and well these things have the best noise cancellation I have ever heard. Itsd like night and day its un real just how much different these are and the sheer power of Airpod noise cancellation. Sound is good and steady they are smaller and a little bit of a pain to tak ethem out of the case but maybe i'll get used to it .. the version 2 never bothered me taking them out .. they were a different shape. The case for the Airpod pro is a bit bigger .. but not really a big deal the seal the Airpod pro makes is very good, you almost feel like your in a room by your self lol they are so quiet .. this is only day 1 .. so far very nice.
User Rating: 5 / 5
So i've been looking in to this a little while now, I have had my Airpod 2 for about 2 years now .. they are starting to die .. so. I am looking at new ones but what to get .. then I see the Airpod pro I was a little on the fence with the price and all,
I did a ton of research about earphones with other brands. having said that I saw the leak of the Airpod 3 which is a upgrade to the 2md gen that are starting to die for me .. lol its not mean to be better than the pro edition.
If I know Apple im willing to say they will be pretty darn good to say the least and that apple figured somthing out to improve sound for the pro version 2 and they will be working on it .. so why not release the 2nd gen with that upgraded style lol One thing I can say is in researching all the earbud devices was do not pay attention to the prices, test them out or look deeper into what they actually have to offer .. I must stress, price is not the deciding factor .. if you cant afford it .. dont buy any, save and get the ones you like .. dont compromise.
Razer Hammerhead 1, pro - first gen not so much, 2nd gen alot better actually good
Bose Sport Buds - really nice they get good reviews stick in the ear pretty good
Samsung Galaxy Pro Buds - Some like some not .. have more options compared to the Live edition
Samsung Buds Live - some like these pretty good
Bose Quiet Comfort Senhiesser true wireless II - very nice quality top rated mic as well, lacking in options
Apple AirPod Pro's - top rated audio and mic quality
User Rating: 5 / 5
Operating Systems
Ok, campers this is going to be a rant. Lets start with Apple and their Idea to create a pretend OS, So this OS comes accross as a local operating system but it calls home all day and everywhere else using Google to maintain updates and safe browsing. I remember people complaining about MAC OS X Catalina which wasnt compatible with things now its the goto, because Big Sur is just terrible .. its dog slow, chock full of calls home and everywhere else to stay afloat. you cant even play a game like diablo III with 64 Gb of Ram on a 27" i5 on Cable Gigabit Internet . I know its the trend to run a thin client type of OS while attempting to offer a local OS style. but really lets think about this .. your caching a ton of data for this fake OS and tying up the bandwith all day long with data images, calls home and to other places to maintain allthe services being offered by the OS. This is a waste of effort and energy makes no common sense what so ever, consier the alternatives .. I know what your going to say what about the hackers and trojan horses and all that stuff when its remote you dont get that .. oh sure .. so placing all your money over the wifi and Internet is safer ? Packet Sniffing and Wifi hacks is better ?
Yah right surrrrrrrrre .. Lets consider that apple is always saying how customer safety and user security is job one right ? Ok a Remote OS does not sound safe to me.
IOS is more 50/50 mobile OS, Mac OS X 70/30 more like they need to scale that back to 50/50 its too much of a bandwidth hog. Microsoft Windows 10 with all its back doors .. is sadly not as bad as Mac OS X big slouch. Windows is not my favourite OS on the planet .. but its like Kraft dinner its not great but it fills a void. We have 2 camps for the majority of day to day computing. Then there is Linux, which is not all that consumer friendly but is more stable and more secure over all. All hail Linus Torvalds for creating an amazing OS that the worlds important things rely on, like banking, like 3D Animation houses and rendering farms, data centers, government offices and more.
So Mac OS X is based off a UNIX platform .. really ? your saying outloud .. yes its true , named FREE BSD. Which is a great OS, a pain in the ass to install but stable and good quality, secure and a good choice if your going to base a OS on something. Mac OS X has come a long way since 10.0 was released back when dressing up a UNIX environment with Pictures and Images.
Phones
So lets see what are the leaders today and what were the leaders of the past and why. Apple iPhone 12 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, Google Pixel 5 seem to be the big three right now and their variations. IOS the Apple mobile platform is quite stable and has been a walled garden ever since Steve Jobs Announced it to the world, saying the only thing you will need to use this iPhone device is your finger .. just genius :) having said that IOS has not changed much since launch .. why change if its working right ? kinda boring to have the same thing .. the app store kinda cluttered .. but all in all IOS apps are cleaner, more functional and free from viruses for the most part .. point Jobs/Apple.
Google Android has made this OS which is the PC of the mobile market . more over the kraft dinner of PC style applications, they are many they are sloppy , they have viruses .. but getting better. Google dpes work hard on its Free OS Platform which it licences out to Phone Manufactures for a money but thats the cost of doing business whne you dont have your own OS.
BlackBerry! oh my bet you havent heard about them in a while the once top of the market, BlackBerry phones had the best signal, best call quality , fast and easy to operate, secure and really awesome but no apps .. yep thats what took them out, their ability to prepare for the move forward apps is and was where it was at. People wanted more to do with their devices .. and with the small screens they were not made for multimedia .. sorry Mike L you should have saw this coming man ..
Samsung the biggest manufacture of anything electronic goes mobile one day follwing Apple, since they have been business partners for over 40 years Apple has been using samsung ram since day one I believe .. just crazy and all that follwed like the phone design copying, idea was simple we have direct access to all the devices why not copy what we see .. lol sure that makes perfect business sense .. we have the know how, the electronics, the screens and more hell lets do this Sammy jumps on it lol. Apple is suing us again .. ya what ever .. we made all their parts lol here's a few bucks .. catch you later hehe.
LTE Internet Service
Everything is wireless these days .. over the ever evolving version of wireles bandwisth available 1,2,3,4,5G Long Term Evolution, Advanced etc. Now the boy wonder Elon Musk firing off Rock 'N Satelite Internet for people around the world, whoah .. so Electric Cars and Space ships not enough ? lol watch him go! way to be innovative man excellent progress. He has truly operated on his own power creating options for the world .. tirelessly doing what ever it takes to be an evolution provider.
5G so wev'e heard its fast and does a lot but some say the radio sgnal is harmful to us .. being too strong .. anything can be, but I get where they are coming from, we do need to take care of our own as well as tech advances. wireless headsets are a better option to holding a device to your head .. might sound better too ..
Computers
Well gamers are leading the pack with advanced home computers with brands slowly dying out and no name style PCs are the new norm, so brands still out ther for PCs like Razer then there there is Dell which bought Alienware .. I am not a fan of the new Alienware machines .. they work fine but look ugly as hell .. some look like a damn blender. Dell killed Alienware cool design. Razer still makes cool styles .. with good video card components and sound. Some might complain about the accessories being of a lesser quality .. and a bit pricey ..
more to come ....
jameZ
