Tag Archives: media

Outraged about Apple Tracking Your Every Move? Read This.

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Once again, mainstream media, fed by tech journalists who should know better, get half the facts wrong and blow the other half out of proportion.

The big tech news these days is the story about Apple’s iDevices, including iPhone and iPad, “secretly” logging location information as you go about your daily business. The information is stored on your iDevice and then backed up to your computer when you sync — just like all the other information on your iDevice. (That’s what a backup does: it makes a copy so you have in case data is lost.) The media grabbed this one and ran with it, making a big deal about privacy concerns and even going so far as to suggest that this data is somehow getting back to Apple, which might be using it for some dark, secret purpose. The “discoverers” of this plot even worked up a program that can extract this data from your backup and plot it on a map. Just to show how thorough this information is, tech journalists were quick to seize it and plot their own movements.

Makes you angry, huh? To think that some big corporation is tracking your every move?

To hear interviewees on the radio, read blog posts and news stories, and read the comments left on blog posts, you’d think the government should be knocking down Apple’s doors and grabbing every storage device in sight to snatch this oh-so-valuable information from them. The media is outraged and they’ve made the public outraged, too.

Don’t Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story

There’s just one problem: The story, as reported by most media outlets and bloggers, isn’t entirely true.

Sure, iOS does log location information in a “hidden” file that’s synced to your computer when you back up your device. And sure, that hidden file isn’t encrypted (although it is hidden). But it doesn’t go anywhere else — certainly not to Apple. As was pointed out by someone actually knowledgeable about the situation in an NPR interview I heard yesterday (sorry; can’t find link), the state of California has laws governing the gathering and use of this information. It would be very stupid for Apple to violate this law.

(And do you honestly think that Apple devices are the only ones logging this kind of information?)

You Said they Could!

Guess what? In the iPhone Software License Agreement users agree to give Apple permission to gather this information:

(b) Location Data. Apple and its partners and licensees may provide certain services through your iPhone that rely upon location information. To provide and improve these services, where available, Apple and its partners and licensees may transmit, collect, maintain, process and use your location data, including the real-time geographic location of your iPhone, and location search queries. The location data and queries collected by Apple are collected in a form that does not personally identify you and may be used by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. By using any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its partners’ and licensees’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data and queries to provide and improve such products and services. You may withdraw this consent at any time by going to the Location Services setting on your iPhone and either turning off the global Location Services setting or turning off the individual location settings of each location-aware application on your iPhone. Not using these location features will not impact the non location-based functionality of your iPhone. When using third party applications or services on the iPhone that use or provide location data, you are subject to and should review such third party’s terms and privacy policy on use of location data by such third party applications or services.

Credit Where Credit is Due

So what’s the real deal? You could probably learn more about the facts by reading a blog post written by someone who discovered this back in 2010. Yes, this isn’t a new discovery. It was uncovered not long after the release of iOS 4. It was presented at the Paraben Forensics Innovation Conference in Salt Lake City in November 2010. It was covered in an Apress book called iOS Forensic Analysis that was released in December 2010. It was published in a paper in January 2011; the same month it was presented at the 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

In other words, this isn’t news. Evidently, the “discoverer” who has the most media connections and can shout the loudest gets all the credit.

What’s the Big Deal?

And how can so many people be so outraged about this? It’s absurd in a time when many well-connected iPhone users — and others — are publicly broadcasting their location day in and day out by check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other sites.

The irony of the outrage was best summed up in a tweet that came down my Twitter stream from Mike_FTW yesterday:

7:04: Check-in from bathroom. 7:38: Check-in from café. 8:15: Check-in from bus stop. (Mayor!) 8:35: Bitch about Apple tracking my location.

So what’s the big deal? There’s a log of your locations on your phone and in a hidden file on your backup computer. I’m sure as I type this there’s already an app under development that’ll wipe it clean for anyone who’s really concerned.

HeliNews

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A magazine for helicopter pilots and operators.

One of the things that has always bothered me about being a helicopter pilot — rather than an airplane pilot — is the dearth of good reading material about flying helicopters. The standard flying magazines here in the U.S. — Flying, Plane & Pilot, AOPA Pilot, Flight Training, etc. — rarely have an article written specifically about helicopters, for helicopter pilots, or by a helicopter pilot.

Sure, sometimes they throw us a bone, but it’s always with a catch. For example, in 2003 Flying magazine did a review of the Robinson R44 Raven II, but it had to share its pages with a review of a Porsche Cayenne. (You can read the article here.) It’s more common for them to put one of their airplane pilot/writers in a helicopter for a flight to write a “gee whiz, that’s cool” piece about helicopters, often fraught with technical errors. I remember one piece I read in a magazine where the author claimed that you must never let go of the collective, but you could let go of the cyclic. That author has obviously never flown a Robinson or Long Ranger — both of which I’ve flown extensively. I assume they’re representative of most helicopters: they have a pilot-friendly collective but a cyclic that’ll have the aircraft doing aerobatics if you let go of it.

What’s Out There

In the U.S., there are several helicopter-specific magazines. Rotor & Wing is the granddaddy, a monthly magazine with industry-specific content. Like most print publications, its page count has dwindled considerably in recent years. Content seems geared toward the heavy hitters of the industry, with articles about helicopter sales, new developments in helicopter technology and avionics, and reports from the North Seas and military operations. While I realize that it’s an important source of information for the industry’s heavy hitters, it can be pretty dry reading sometimes — especially for a small desert-based piston pilot like me.

Rotor, the magazine of the Helicopter Association International (HAI) is a quarterly publication. HAI is the helicopter industry’s big association. I was a member for about 2-1/2 years but soon realized that they really didn’t give a damn about operators with fewer than five helicopters. Everything they do is for the “big guys.” Their magazine isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if you’re interested in anything other than HAI’s internal operations and the big operators they service. And their Web site is ugly, difficult to navigate, has many non-functioning links and “features,” and contains little content of value to non-members. (One of these days, I’ll have to write more about my experiences with HAI.)

Vertical MagazineVertical magazine is a slick publication from Canada. Of all the aviation magazines that arrive on my mailbox regularly, it’s the one I prefer. It’s got more content geared toward helicopter operators and pilots. It regularly covers issues such as flight training and does profiles of specific helicopter operators and operations. The photography is outstanding. And while I feel that they still gear content toward the big operators, there’s enough in each issue to satisfy the reading needs of little owner/operators like me.

HeliNews

HeliNewsApparently, however, the best helicopter-specific magazine comes from down under. Australia-based HeliNews is a magazine any helicopter owner or pilot can really sink his or her teeth into. It combines photography that’s almost as good as what you’d find in Vertical with articles written by helicopter pilots for helicopter pilots.

I recently received two sample issues of the magazine. The May 2008 issue has articles covering the following topics:

  • Profile of a corporate CEO who does mustering (cattle herding) with an R44
  • A day in the life of a New Zealand contract pilot in Scotland
  • Australian Navy – U.S. Coast Guard pilot exchange program.
  • Australian Federal Police helicopter operations
  • Helicopters in the movies (just part one in this issue; I don’t have part two!)
  • Military helicopter air show team
  • Practicing autorotations to grass
  • How ADS-B works
  • Switching from Robinson R22 to turbine helicopters and back

All this in addition to the usual collection of columns, editorials, and news about the helicopter industry.

My question: Why can’t a North American publication give us more content like this? Rotor & Wing? Vertical? Are you listening?

Me? Writing for HeliNews?

You might be wondering why I have two copies of this magazine. After all, I don’t think it’s widely available — or perhaps available at all — in the United States.

Well, I’ve been asked to submit an article for the magazine and, if I don’t drop the ball by procrastinating and I submit something worthy of publication, I’ll be a HeliNews author. At least once.

There’s nothing more pleasing to me than to have some of my work published in a high quality magazine.

So if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work.

On Bird Strikes

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Not nearly as rare — or as dangerous — as you think.

Yesterday’s dramatic landing of an Airbus plane in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey has put the topic of bird strikes on everyone’s mind. As usual, the media is spinning stories about it, apparently to generate the fear that sells newspapers, gets listeners, and keeps viewers glued to the television set.

Pilots — the people who know aviation a lot better than the average news reporter — also know a bit about bird strikes.

Bird Strikes are Not That Rare

The truth of the matter is that bird strikes aren’t nearly as rare as many people think. I can think of five bird strike incidents that touched my life:

  • Years ago, on a Southwest Airlines flight taking off from Burbank, our plane flew through a flock of white birds. It was nighttime and I don’t know what the birds were — seagulls? — but I clearly saw them in the glow of the plane’s lights, flying past the wings as we climbed out. When we landed in Phoenix and I left the plane, I glanced through the open cockpit door and saw the blood on the outside of the windscreen. Bird strike.
  • On my first day of work as a pilot at the Grand Canyon, one of the other pilots had a bird strike during a tour. The bird had passed through the lower cockpit bubble and landed in a bloody heap on the pilot’s lap. He flew back with the bird there and a very distraught front seat passenger beside him. The cockpit bubble needed replacement, of course.
  • While waiting at the Grand Canyon for my charter passengers to complete an air tour with one of the helicopter operators there, the helicopter my passengers was on suffered a bird strike. The pilot calmly reported it as she flew in. When she landed, there was bird guts and blood at the top center of the helicopter’s bubble. She’d been lucky. The helicopter, an EC130, has a central intake for the turbine engine and the bird hadn’t been sucked in.
  • On my very first rides gig with my R44 helicopter, I was taking a group of three passengers for an 8-minute tour around a mountain near Aguila, AZ when I heard a loud clang. Instruments okay, controls felt fine, passengers weren’t reacting. I didn’t know what it was until I landed. That’s when one of my ground crew pointed out the dent in my landing gear’s fairing. My first (and hopefully, only) bird strike had been a non-event for me, but likely a lot more serious for the bird. (Of course, I wasn’t very happy to get a dent on an aircraft only 11 hours old.
  • When a friend of mine took me up in her Decathalon airplane for a little aerobatic demonstration, we hit a bird on takeoff. It went right into the engine at the base of the prop and we instantly smelled cooking bird. My friend climbed enough to circle back and land safefly at the airport. She shut down the engine and climbed out. I watched from the passenger seat as she pulled the remains of a relatively small bird out of the cooling fin area of the engine. After discarding the bird bits, she climbed back in, started up, and we took off again.

That’s five examples of bird strikes I had firsthand knowledge of. In three of those instances, I was on board an aircraft that struck one or more birds. So when people seem amazed that an airliner hit a bird or two, I’m not amazed at all.

According to Wikipedia’s Bird Strike entry:

The first reported bird strike was by Orville Wright in 1905, and according to their diaries Orville “…flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard’s cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.”

I’d venture to guess that it happens to at least one airliner every single day.

Bird Strikes Rarely Cause Crashes

The media would like you to think that bird strikes cause crashes. They can, of course — yesterday’s Airbus ditching proved that. They can even cause fiery crashes with deaths. The media wants you to be afraid — very afraid.

But as my above-listed examples also prove, bird strikes can be non-events, often without causing any damage at all to the aircraft.

So what’s an air traveler to do? Worry that his next flight might end with a swim in an icy river or a fireball death? Or stop worrying about it?

What do you think?

On a more personal note: I’m glad the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 didn’t attempt a landing at Teterboro. My sister lives in an apartment building on the approach end of one of the runways there. A crash there wouldn’t have had a happy ending.