Daily Archives: February 6, 2020

Apple’s Independent Repair Program Is Invasive to Shops and Their Customers, Contract Shows

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Last August, in what was widely hailed a victory for the right-to-repair movement, Apple announced it would begin selling parts, tools, and diagnostic services to independent repair shops in addition to its “authorized” repair partners. Apple’s so-called Independent Repair Provider (IRP) program had its limitations, but was still seen as a step forward for a company that’s fought independent repair for years.

Recently, Motherboard obtained a copy of the contract businesses are required to sign before being admitted to Apple’s IRP Program. The contract, which has not previously been made public, sheds new light on a program Apple initially touted as increasing access to repair but has been remarkably silent on ever since. It contains terms that lawyers and repair advocates described as “onerous” and “crazy”; terms that could give Apple significant control over businesses that choose to participate. Concerningly, the contract is also invasive from a consumer privacy standpoint.

In order to join the program, the contract states independent repair shops must agree to unannounced audits and inspections by Apple, which are intended, at least in part, to search for and identify the use of “prohibited” repair parts, which Apple can impose fines for. If they leave the program, Apple reserves the right to continue inspecting repair shops for up to five years after a repair shop leaves the program. Apple also requires repair shops in the program to share information about their customers at Apple’s request, including names, phone numbers, and home addresses.

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Participating repair shops must allow Apple to audit their facilities “at any time,” including during normal business hours. According to the contract, Apple may continue conducting audits, which can involve interviewing the repair shop’s employees, for five years following termination of the contract.

These audits go beyond Apple dropping in on businesses to interrogate workers. The contract requires that IRPs “maintain an electronic service database and/or written documentation” of customer information to assist Apple in its investigations. According to the contract, that database must include the names, phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses of customers, stipulations that gave Perzanowski “serious misgivings.” As he noted, “some consumers may prefer an independent repair shop, in part, to reduce the data Apple maintains about them.”

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the one-sidedness of Apple’s terms are evident from the outset, when it defines its “agreement” with independent repair businesses to include any additional documents Apple chooses to release in the future.

“Like Darth Vader, they can alter the deal and you can only pray they don’t alter it any further,” Walsh said.

Source: Apple’s Independent Repair Program Is Invasive to Shops and Their Customers, Contract Shows – VICE

Wacom tablet drivers phone home with names, times of every app opened on your computer

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Wacom’s official tablet drivers leak to the manufacturer the names of every application opened, and when, on the computers they are connected to.

Software engineer Robert Heaton made this discovery after noticing his drawing board’s fine-print included a privacy policy that gave Wacom permission to, effectively, snoop on him.

Looking deeper, he found that the tablet’s driver logged each app he opened on his Apple Mac and transmitted the data to Google to analyze. To be clear, we’re talking about Wacom’s macOS drivers here: the open-source Linux ones aren’t affected, though it would seem the Windows counterparts are.

[…]

Wacom’s request made me pause. Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy?”

Source: Sketchy behavior? Wacom tablet drivers phone home with names, times of every app opened on your computer • The Register

VMWare starts pricing more for CPU with > 32 cores

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Pricing is being tweaked upwards where software is licensed on a per CPU basis. If the chip has more than 32 cores like, say, a 64 core AMD EPYC, then users will need to fork out for two CPU licences.

Both AMD and Intel will cheerfully sell punters chips with more than the requisite 32 cores, and utilising such chippery with the original per-CPU pricing was, in a very real way, a useful method of getting more bang for one’s buck from the software.

With Intel struggling to make enough of its high-end hardware to satisfy demand, AMD looked set to steal a march with the likes of the EPYC 7742. VMware’s pricing change will you make you think twice about the benefits of sticking a core-dense processor into a server with a view to keeping software costs down.

Virtzilla claims “the change moves VMware closer to the current software industry standard model of core-based pricing” and indeed, the likes of Microsoft (PDF) and Oracle (PDF) both use core-based pricing these days, although even the most determined apologist would struggle to suggest the move is aimed at anything other than boosting the bottom line.

Naturally, observers have been less than impressed by the move.

Source: Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs • The Register

Japanese robot could call last orders on human bartenders

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The repurposed industrial robot serves drinks in is own corner of a Japanese pub operated by restaurant chain Yoronotaki. An attached tablet computer face smiles as it chats about the weather while preparing orders.

The robot, made by the company QBIT Robotics, can pour a beer in 40 seconds and mix a cocktail in a minute. It uses four cameras to monitors customers to analyze their expressions with artificial intelligence (AI) software.

“I like it because dealing with people can be a hassle. With this you can just come and get drunk,” Satoshi Harada, a restaurant worker said after ordering a drink.

“If they could make it a little quicker it would be even better.”

Finding workers, especially in Japan’s service sector, is set to get even more difficult.

The government has eased visa restrictions to attract more foreign workers but companies still face a labor shortage as the population shrinks and the number of people over 65 increases to more than a third of the total.

Source: Japanese robot could call last orders on human bartenders – Reuters

Neural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone

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Denis Shiryaev wondered if it could be made more compelling by using neural network powered algorithms (including Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI and DAIN) to not only upscale the footage to 4K, but also increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second. You might yell at your parents for using the motion smoothing setting on their fancy new TV, but here the increased frame rate has a dramatic effect on drawing you into the action.

Aside from it still being black and white (which could be dismissed as simply an artistic choice) and the occasional visual artifact introduced by the neural networks, the upgraded version of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat looks like it could have been shot just yesterday on a smartphone or a GoPro. Even the people waiting on the platform look like the costumed historical reenactors you’d find portraying an old-timey character at a pioneer village.

Source: Neural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone

Google’s Takeout App Leaked Videos To Unrelated Users

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In a new privacy-related fuckup, Google told users today that it might’ve accidentally imported your personal photos into another Google user’s account. Whoopsie!

First flagged by Duo Security CTO Jon Oberheide, Google seems to be emailing users who plugged into the company’s native Takeout app to backup their videos, warning that a bug resulted in some of those (hopefully G-rated) videos being backed up to an unrelated user’s account.

For those who used the “download your data” service between November 21 and November 25 of last year, some videos were “incorrectly exported,” the note reads. “If you downloaded your data, it may be incomplete, and it may contain videos that are not yours.”

Source: Google’s Takeout App Leaked Videos To Unrelated Users

Google Says Developers Can Now Purchase Latest Smart Glasses, still look stupid

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Google is making it easier for developers to purchase the latest version of its smart glasses, with the company saying on Tuesday that the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is now available from some hardware resellers.

“We’ve seen strong demand from developers and businesses who are interested in building new, helpful enterprise solutions for Glass,“ Google said in a blog post, adding that the new headset was already being used by people with jobs in logistics, manufacturing and field services.”

Source: Google Says Developers Can Now Purchase Latest Smart Glasses – Bloomberg

Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap

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It’s all so painfully familiar: with a crunch date of February 3, the Democratic Party in Iowa decided to charge ahead with an IT rollout that comprised an entirely new software system spread out across thousands of sites to record the result of the Democratic caucus for its presidential nominee.

It was, inevitably, a complete failure. The results from the Iowa caucus were supposed to come in nearly 24 hours ago. Instead, it has become a rolling news cycle of tech catastrophe.

We’re not even going to bother to dig into lessons learned because they are the same ones that every sysadmin since the dawn of time has dealt with – and spends their entire career warning the suits about, to greater and lesser degrees of success.

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We could write pages and pages of reports about how differently people experienced this almighty IT cock-up but what’s the point? If you’re reading The Reg you already know what the problem is and the details quickly become irrelevant.

Here’s what’s happened: the suits hired a company because they were swayed by their CVs and sales talk and didn’t run it past anyone that knew what they were doing. Then the suits didn’t listen to all the people telling them it was a bad idea and they should delay rollout. And they didn’t allow sufficient time for testing and training.

Source: Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap • The Register

For details read the article – the amount of cockups will make you laugh, if not cry.