You're wrong. Foxconn makes everything, the Kindle, The Xbox360, the Wii, The PS3, Motorola cell phones, Intel branded motherboards. Apple is a big customer, but only about 20% of their business.

Apple does have a good deal of say, for the factories supplying Apple, which Apple regularly audits and requires human rights policies to be upheld. You can read their audit and required remediations openly published on Apple's web site as well as see a list of the suppliers Apple has stopped working with entirely because of human rights violations. Now see what information you can find on what all those other companies have done. Have any of them ever done anything to make things better? And it is Apple the Daily Mail decides to pin it on. Brilliant!

How about Intel, Amazon.com, Cisco, HP, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, and Samsung? All too small to mention? I agree mentioning Apple gets more eyeballs, but because of their popularity and news appeal, not just size. Not mentioning these other companies is absurdly irresponsible reporting.

Everyone does business with companies that work people like slaves, especially in the electronics industry. Apple stands out because jobs actually tried going to all US manufacturing with his company Next and because Apple is about the only company firing suppliers for human rights violations and requiring changes to woking conditions for factories supplying Apple. Moreover, they're the only company conducting audits and openly publishing them for all to see, including what changes they require supplier to make. And there is the worst part of all this. It pays to shut up and do bad things, because being open and honest about what's happening while working to make things better for people, just gets the press to write misleading articles attributing abuses at your competitors' factories to you.

Apple is probably the best in the industry for working conditions in China and they do publicize that. Newspapers, however, don't care because Apple's popularity makes demonizing them sell more papers, even if it's doing so by misinformation. Apple audits their suppliers, publishes the audits openly and actually takes corrective measures. They dropped a number of suppliers because of poor working conditions, too long of hours, or child labor. They forced others to change policies and provide compensation to workers in order to keep their business. Basically no other company in the industry does this. Daily Mail should be ashamed of the way they spin Foxconn as an "Apple supplier" without mentioning all the other companies like Intel, Nokia, HP, Acer, etc. and not bothering to find out if the plants they are complaining about are the ones Apple audited and required changes at, or service some other company entirely. And they can't even plead ignorance because they mention Apple's audits as one of their sources.

Except, this article isn't "bringing it to light" it is obscuring what is going on by focusing only on Apple in a very misleading way. It is entirely probable some of the issues they mention are happening at plants making things for Sony(or some other company) because, Sony, unlike Apple has not stepped in to stop the practices. By referring to Foxconn only as an Apple supplier and not checking to see which company is funding the practices that are abhorrent, all that is happening is they are providing incentive to make things worse.

That would be fine, if it were happening, but Apple is the one company that is not allowing them to use underage workers or make people work extreme numbers of hours. They're the one company that is actually investigating and firing suppliers for just those practices. But all that is obscured by the slanted reporting.

They did at one point, or in a way. Jobs left Apple and founded Next which did all it's manufacturing in the US, not the third world. Unfortunately, people were not wiling to pay a premium for that and elected politicians who would not even enforce the antitrust laws on the books, so Next was purchased by Apple and went back to the status quo. So Apple does the only thing that they can to stay in business, prevent the abuses at the facilities they work with, using regular openly published audits and reports on what action they take in response to abuses. Sorry, but picking on the only company doing anything is really, really counter productive, and trying to spin what Foxconn does overall, not at plants making things for Apple, as though it was Apple's fault is likewise counter productive.

The issue we were discussing is the list of cell towers and wifi networks stored on iPhones and which Apple has changed in this update. As for logging user location data anonymously, I'm sure Apple is doing so, at least they said they were when I clicked through the location stuff on the maps application in my phone. But that is a significantly different from what we were discussing.

I'm all for investigating abuses in Chinese labor and dealing with them, but tis article is counter-productive. First, it constantly refers to Foxconn only in relation to Apple, not mentioning the dozens of other corporations it supplies. It repeatedly refers to facilities run by "Apple's supplier" but doesn't mention if they were actual facilities that make things for Apple and which Apple audits yearly and openly publishes information about and what they found and what action they took. It mentions Apples audits in the phrase, "...but its[Apple] own audit reports suggest suppliers in China may not meet up to these standards." It does not mention the list of changes Apple required from various suppliers nor the numerous suppliers Apple fired outright for violating Apple's human rights policy.

I find this article irresponsible because it is just heaping bad press on Apple (not the rest of the industry) when in truth Apple is the only company I have been able to find actually taking a stand and doing something about the problem. There is no mention of Asus, Sony, Intel, Acer, Nokia, etc. who are all supplied by Foxconn. Thus readers are misled into thinking Apple is the issue. All this article does is motivate Apple to stop publishing audits and stop all the good work they've been doing to remediate the labor problem. I'd like to be the first to throw a big "Fuck you!" to the Daily Mail for their irresponsible, slanted journalism.

Well, wrong in that it kept a large cache instead of a small one. Most users probably care a lot more about rapidly finding their location all the time than they do about the possibility that someone with access to their phone or an unencrypted backup thereof could generate a very rough estimate of their locations over time.

Then you have no idea what the software was doing. Why don't you find out by doing something crazy like reading.

Data wasn't collected. It was downloaded TO the phone and cached there. The "collected data" was collected on your phone and stored there as well as in any backups of your phone. What you do with it is up to you if you have an iPhone.

Your understanding is flawed. It wasn't logging the nearest cell tower or wifi. It was, based on location, downloading to the phone a list of nearby cell towers and wifi networks (from a crowdsourced database run by Apple) so that when the user used an app that requested the location of the phone, this cache could be used to quickly generate a rough estimate and speed up the GPS location. This is a very useful optimization for most of us and the fact that it allowed people to generate a very rough log of our locations over time was simply an unintended side effect.

Indeed, you do need two cables run under the desk. I was merely pointing out that your assertion about my statement that I only needed one cable between my computer and desktop was not correct, probably because you misread it.

It is these days, mostly limited to the professional market, but largely because Firewire never took off as a mainstream standard. There is not technical limitation to Thunderbolt that requires a computer involved in direct transfers, as USB does. This means if Thunderbolt does take off, this limitation is removed and all those use cases open up for direct transfer between devices of all sorts, sans computer.

Lots of people are lax about security, but not everyone. When it is simple and easy, I find it nice to put my work in a fire safe for the night, where burglars and accidents do not threaten it. For more sensitive contracts, it also greatly reduces liability.

That's great and all if it were not completely wrong and based on unfounded speculation as pointed out in this article that quotes Dave Salvator, speaking on behalf of Intel. He states that exclusivity is, "not the case. Apple saw the potential of Thunderbolt, and worked with Intel to bring it to market. Other system makers are free to implement Thunderbolt on their systems as well, and we anticipate seeing some of those systems later this year and in early 2012."

So they need to spend more time convincing vendors who have already announced products, like Lacie who you can pre-order a Thunderbolt Little Big Disk from? What more, exactly, do you want Apple to do? As for Western Digital and Seagate, do they even make drive enclosures?

So instead of reading the fucking article you thought you'd post about it? Brilliant!

Nope, I plug my monitor power cord directly into the UPS, not into my computer.

Again, nope. Firewire over Thunderbolt can negotiate transfers between the devices directly with no intermediate computer, just as Firewire itself can now.

Because a portable drive is the easiest way to transfer large volumes of date, of course. Also for security reasons sometimes you have to take data with you physically, when you leave and put it in a safe.

I might also mention this is finally a published industry standard not tied to any one vendor that can work as a docking port for laptops, basically making traditional docking stations no longer needed.

Which is why for several years there all USB devices shipped only in bondi blue to match the look of the iMac? Sorry, but Apple basically created the mainstream USB peripheral market before the PC market caught up and started using them as well.

I'm glad to see Apple rolling out Thunderbolt to their whole lineup and not restricting it to the high end. Anything they can do to promote this and get it mainstream for all computers will be a benefit to the industry and end users. Tangles of cords, switching cords, and unchainable unintelligent standards have been hampering us for too long. No, I don't want to have to have a computer in between my video camera and my high capacity storage drive. No, I don't want to have more than one cable between my monitor and computer and yes I want to plug USB devices, microphones, hard drives, etc. to the device on top of my desk instead of climbing under it. The throughput and flexibility here has been needed for a long time. Come on industry, full speed ahead with this one!