Mass Suicide Threat Results In Massive Lay-Offs For Foxconn Workers
Will Fan Boys finally rebuke their iPhones as more news of Foxconn’s inhumane treatment of workers surfaces in this ZNet article by Hana Stewart-Smith?
When 300 men and women climb onto a rooftop and threaten to commit suicide in protest over denied compensation, it is impossible not to wonder how a company could lead its employees into such desperation.
But Foxconn did.
A little over a week ago, 300 employees at Foxconn’s Technology Park in Wuhan, China threatened their own lives because they were denied a vital pay increase. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs without it, or they could quit and be compensated.
Many chose to quit, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of the former workers received the promised compensation.
Production at the company was temporarily halted. It was not until 9 pm the next day that the town’s mayor was able to talk the 300 down from the roof.
Foxconn…
The Glaring Omissions Of iPhone’s Siri
Apple’s new iPhone 4S has made waves for its voice-commanded virtual assistant, personified as “Siri”. However, users have noticed that Siri seems to have a blackout concerning certain topics — is Apple pandering to the Christian Right? Via Amadi Talks:
The recent illustrations of Siri, the iPhone 4S voice-recognition based assistant, failing to provide information to users about abortion, birth control, help after rape and help with domestic violence has gotten a lot of notice.
Siri can answer a lot of health related questions perfectly well, why shouldn’t we expect it to be able to answer reproductive health related queries too? Why treat reproductive health as a walled-off garden that the general public can’t or shouldn’t be exposed to?
Steve Jobs (Spiritually) Hated Power Switches
60 Minutes had a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs’ handpicked biographer Walter Isaacson (who has authored well received biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein). Video below and here’s an explanation for why your iPad or iPhone is a royal pain to turn off:
Walter Isaacson (Jobs’ biographer): I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50–50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said ‘yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.’ He said — and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
DARPA Tech Invades iPhones Now with Siri
Tim Stevens on Endgadget said this was happening back in ‘09. For all those who rushed out to get the new iPhone, if you are using Siri, you are giving a hell lot of personal info to Apple:
Microsoft’s little Clippy, the uppity paperclip who just wanted to help, never got a lick of respect in the ten years he graced the Office suite.
He’s long-since gone, but his legacy lives on through a DARPA project called CALO: the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. It’s intended for use to streamline tedious activities by military personnel, like scheduling meetings and prioritizing e-mails, but there are a few non-com spin-offs intended as well, like an iPhone app called Siri due to hit the App Store sometime this year. Siri will have more of a consumer angle, helping to find product reviews and make reservations, but we’re hoping a taste of its military upbringing shines through.
Looking At The iPod In 2003
The Dell DJ is slightly bigger than the iPod but claims a longer battery life. It was Dell that one investor held out as the rival with the greatest chance of success: ”No one markets as well as Dell does.”
It’s fascinating to read an article from eight years ago and feel that it was truly another era. Via the New York Times, Rob Walker’s piece “The Guts of a New Machine” examined the hype surrounding the cutting-edge devices known as portable mp3 players:
Two years ago this month, Apple Computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. A digital music player, it weighed just 6.5 ounces and held about 1,000 songs. There were small MP3 players around at the time, and there were players that could hold a lot of music. But if the crucial equation is ”largest number of songs” divided by ‘’smallest physical space,” the iPod seemed…
Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’
Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:
But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s…
Steve Jobs Has Died
Wow, AP just reported and go to the Apple homepage to confirm. In case anyone doesn’t know, he was battling cancer for years. In terms of significance aside from the human, Apple is considered to have more cash than the U.S. government.
“Death… is Life’s Change Agent”
Apple Plans New Headquarters Larger Than The Pentagon
Apple’s monolithic new base in California will have its own power grid and looks as though it could take off into space if conditions on Earth grow too dire. Via the Mac Observer:
New architectural information has been released about Apple’s proposed, so-called spaceship headquarters in Cupertino. Apple Campus 2 building include 2.8 million square feet of space in the ring-shaped structure with room for some 13,000 employees. Apple will be building its own power center to provide electricity for the campus and will require little supplemental power from the local grid.
According to the city, Apple will be restoring some of the area’s native vegetation with the assistance of arborists from Stanford University.
Is Apple Holding More Cash Than The U.S.?
Photo: TheIronLion
Do US companies have more money than the US government? Recent financial figures show that Apple does. Via BBC News:
Apple now has more cash to spend than the United States government.
Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that the country has an operating cash balance of $73.7bn (£45.3bn).
Apple’s most recent financial results put its reserves at $76.4bn (£46.9bn).
The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill to raise the country’s debt ceiling, allowing it to borrow more money to cover spending commitments.
If it fails to extend the current limit of $14.3 trillion (£8.7tn) dollars, the federal government could find itself struggling to make payments, and risks the loss of its AAA credit rating.
[Continues at BBC News]
Chinese Officials Close Imitation Apple Stores
Photo: BirdABroad
DVD bootlegs and ripoffs have been around for awhile now, but what about whole store ripoffs? At least fives “Apple” stores, including two that have already been shut down, are nearly perfect replicas of legitimate Apple stores. Wired reports:
After an American blogger in Kunming posted photos of “a beautiful [Apple store] ripoff” last week, Chinese officials began to investigate around 300 shops in the area, finding five fake Apple stores. Two of the stores, lacking the proper business permits, must now close their doors. Despite the intellectual property concerns, the other three remain open for now.
In China, companies aren’t allowed to copy the “look and feel” of other companies’ stores. These retail outlets are impeccable replicas of Apple stores, down to the winding staircases and employee t-shirts. In fact, the stores are so convincing most staffers believed they worked for an authorized Apple retailer. All five stores sold genuine Apple products,…
China’s Fake Apple Stores
Fascinatingly, in is now common in China to find counterfeit branches of the Apple store.
Then again, what makes any Apple store “real” when the point is to use psychology to sell an intangible “brand”? And how can you tell a real Apple store from a fraudulent one? Paradoxically, real Apple stores never say “Apple store”. The Consumerist reports:
An American blogger living in the middle of China was amazed to stumble across a fake Apple store in her town. It was a complete counterfeit of a real Apple store, designed to look like the real thing. It had signage, and employees walking around in the iconic blue shirts with those lanyard nametags. It had the big long wooden tables with Apple products on them and the typical Apple store winding staircase. But certain details were off.
None of the employee nametags had their names on it. They just said “staff.” And Apple never writes…
New Apple Technology Stops iPhones From Filming Live Events
F@ck you, Apple (had to get that out of my system). Fox News reports:
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Fans at concerts and sports games may soon be stopped from using their iPhones to film the action —as a result of new technology being considered by Apple, The Times of London reported Thursday.
The California company has plans to build a system that will sense when a person is trying to film a live event using a cell phone and automatically switch off their camera.
A patent application filed by Apple, and obtained by the Times, reveals how the software would work. If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the iPhone to disable its camera.
Apple declined to comment.
Happy Bloomsday, America!
Hand drawing of Bloom by Joyce
June 16th is the annual celebration of Leopold Bloom’s doomed wanderings through Dublin in 1904, as chronicled in James Joyce’s classic novel “Ulysses”. And in the 21st century, reality finally catches up with and overtakes fiction.
In 1921 a U.S. court banned Ulysses on the grounds that some of its graphic depictions of nudity and sexuality constituted pornography under the Postal Code. And while that decision was reversed in 1933 by a judge who could only have failed today’s more rigorous selection processes for illiteracy and cretinism, the private sector came to the rescue of public morals when Apple banned an online illustrated version from its iStore last year.
However, that victory had an even shorter half-life. A couple months later, presumably realizing that it would lose it’s investment completely if it maintained the ban, and that nobody would likely access anything remotely smacking of literary merit anyway, Apple decided…
Chinese Teenager Sells Kidney For iPad
A teenager in China has sold one of his kidneys in order to buy an iPad 2, Chinese media report. BBC News reports:
The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, told a local TV station he had arranged the sale of the kidney over the internet.
The story only came to light after the teenager’s mother became suspicious.
The case highlights China’s black market in organ trafficking. A scarcity of organ donors has led to a flourishing trade.
It all started when the high school student saw an online advert offering money to organ donors. Illegal agents organised a trip to the hospital and paid him $3,392 (£2,077) after the operation. With the cash the student bought an iPad 2, as well as a laptop.
Brain Scans Show Apple Products Triggering The Same Parts Of The Brain As Religion
Go figure — scans taken when Apple devotees were shown the company’s logo and products demonstrate that we literally worship our favorite brands. Digital Trends writes:
UK neuroscientists suggest that the brains of Apple devotees are stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that the brains of religious people are stimulated by religious imagery.
Alex Riley contacted the editor of World of Apple, Alex Brooks, an Apple worshipper who claims to think about Apple 24 hours a day, which is possibly 23 hours too many for most regular people. A team of neuroscientists studied Brooks’ brain while undergoing an MRI scan, to see how it reacted to images of Apple products and (heaven forbid) non-Apple products.
According to the neuroscientists, the scan revealed that there were marked differences in Brooks’ reactions to the different products. Previously, the scientists had studied the brains of those of religious faith, and they found that, as Riley…
Why Do Gadget Makers Wield A ‘Kill Switch’?
Photo: Stahlkocher (CC)
Mark Milian writes on CNN:
When you buy a video game from Best Buy, you don’t give the retailer the right to barge into your house whenever it wants. So why do we give that permission to software companies?
Most popular smartphone operating systems and other electronic gadgets include what security researchers refer to as a kill switch.
This capability enables the company that makes the operating software to send a command over the Web or wireless networks that alters or removes certain applications from devices.
Apple, Google and Microsoft include this function in their platforms, along with a few lines in their usage agreements describing the policy. Google and Apple executives say this feature is important in order to protect against malicious software.
“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told The Wall…
Department of Justice Asks for More Data from Apple and Other Smartphones
Today the United States Department of Justice took an alarming stance on the subject of data collection during a Senate hearing on mobile privacy. Rather than chastise Apple, Google, and other smart phone manufacturers over their data collection practices, the DOJ felt it was a better idea to encourage MORE data collection. Kashmir Hill writes on Forbes:
During a Congressional hearing today about how much privacy you deserve when it comes to your smartphone, senators made clear that they were uncomfortable with the sensitive location and personal data that iPhone and Android phones are collecting and to whom that data gets passed along.
During one panel, the senators grilled Google and Apple. During another, they had representatives from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission give the government perspective on data collection via mobile devices. While Jessica Rich of the FTC hinted that her organization would be investigating Apple soon,…
Apple’s Chinese Workers Treated ‘Inhumanely, Like Machines’ — Some Sign ‘Anti-Suicide’ Pledge
Wondering how that Apple “magic” happens at that “unbelievable” price? Gethin Chamberlain writes in the Guardian:
An investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers has revealed the shocking human cost of producing the must-have Apple iPhones and iPads that are now ubiquitous in the west.
The research, carried out by two NGOs, has revealed disturbing allegations of excessive working hours and draconian workplace rules at two major plants in southern China. It has also uncovered an “anti-suicide” pledge that workers at the two plants have been urged to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year.
The investigation gives a detailed picture of life for the 500,000 workers at the Shenzhen and Chengdu factories owned by Foxconn, which produces millions of Apple products each year. The report accuses Foxconn of treating workers “inhumanely, like machines”.
Among the allegations made by workers interviewed by the NGOs — the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations…
Verizon To Put Location-Tracking Warning Sticker On Phones
Julianne Pepitone reports in CNN:
In the wake of a giant brouhaha over the news that Apple’s iPhones record and store users’ locations, Verizon Wireless says it will start slapping ‘we can track you!’ warning stickers on its products.
Verizon’s announcement came in the form of a letter to Representatives Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. In March, they asked the four major wireless carriers to explain how and why they track mobile location data.
All four carriers acknowledged that they store location data for varying periods of time, but Verizon was the only company to suggest a warning label. The company says it will begin including the removable sticker on all new devices it sells.
The sticker warns: “This device is capable of determining its (and your) physical, geographical location and can associate this location data with other customer information. To limit access to location information by…
