Linked List: October 8, 2014

Wednesday, 8 October 2014

The Horror of a ‘Secure Golden Key’ ★

Outstanding piece by Chris Coyne:

Perhaps the reason the WaPo is so confused is that FBI Director James Comey has told the media that Apple’s anti-backdoor stance only protects criminals. Unfortunately he’s not seeing beyond his own job, and WaPo didn’t look much further.

Apple’s anti-backdoor policy aims to protect everyone. The following is a list of real threats their policy would thwart. Not threats to terrorists or kidnappers, but to 300 million Americans and 7 billion humans who are moving their intimate documents into the cloud. Make no mistake, what Apple and Google are proposing protects you.

Whether you’re a regular, honest person, or a US legislator trying to understand this issue, understand this list.

‘Other’ Dark Matter ★

John Moltz, back in August:

My wife’s iPhone 5 has been complaining about space for months. To date she’d just keep reducing the amount of music she was keeping on it in order to install new apps. Finally I took a look at it yesterday. She only had two and a half pages of apps no videos and just 2 GB of music. Even on a 16 GB phone that shouldn’t fill it up.

Plugging it into her MacBook, I could see the “Other” part of the usage bar was huge, at least 2/3 of the bar if not half. So I suggested restoring it. I restored the phone to a base iOS 7.1.2 install and then restored the most recent backup in iTunes (yes, I back up to iTunes because I’m old school). If you’re going to try this, remember to select to encrypt the backup (and that you have a backup after doing that), that way you won’t have to enter all your passwords again.

I didn’t take notes of the sizes before restoring because I’m an idiot, but I can tell you she got back somewhere between 6 and 7 GB of space.

A bunch of the emails I’ve gotten today from readers who’ve struggled with the iOS 8 OTA update requiring more free storage space have mentioned this factor — “Other” consuming several gigabytes of space that gets freed up if you do a full restore. Not sure what’s going on there, but it seems like something Apple should look at.

HTC Re Camera ★

Certainly a novel idea, but I’m not sure why anyone would buy this. It just seems pointless. Maybe they’re going after the GoPro market?

Apple Event on October 16: ‘It’s Been Way Too Long’ ★

Curious slogan, given that it can’t be a reference to how long it’s been since we’ve had an Apple special event. A reference to retina iMac displays, perhaps?

And as Jason Snell points out, they’re clearly referencing the classic six-color Apple logo. I love that.

(Wild guess: Perhaps the slogan suggests the return of Mac hardware in a variety of colors?)

Apple: ‘Resolve Issues With an Over-the-Air iOS Update’ ★

Just added a footnote to my piece today saying the same thing I’ll say here, but it’s worth a standalone entry: Apple should provide a link to this support document when alerting users that they don’t have enough space to install an iOS update. It’s really quite helpful.

MacRumors: ‘iOS 8 Adoption Stagnates Just Two and a Half Weeks After Launch’ ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

After almost three weeks of availability, Apple’s iOS 8 operating system is now installed on 47 percent of devices, according to new numbers posted on Apple’s App Store support page for developers.

That marks a very slight increase in adoption over the past two weeks, as back on September 21, iOS 8 was installed on 46 percent of devices. 47 percent of iOS users continue to stick to iOS 7, possibly due to a number of bugs that have plagued the launch of iOS 8.

Very worrisome — a canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator that casual users no longer trust Apple with major iOS updates. Last year the number for iOS 7 adoption was in the 70s in October, which was a faster adoption rate than iOS 6 the year prior.

Follow-Up: “Note to Self: It’s the Storage Space, Stupid”.