The History of Apple's App Store and Tracking Concerns

The concept of an app store was first introduced by Steve Jobs, who told us that we didn't need native apps for iPhone, but rather just use the web as the future. However, this approach wouldn't have necessarily prevented the proliferation of tracking devices on our phones, as there are already websites that spy on session data. Nonetheless, Apple's introduction of the app store was a significant milestone in the development of mobile technology.

In 2012, iOS 7 introduced support for a feature called do not track (DNT), which sent a signal to websites, analytics firms, plug-in makers, and AD networks requesting that they not track users. The DNT feature aimed to provide users with more control over their online privacy by informing websites of their tracking preferences. However, the voluntary nature of DNT made it ineffective in achieving its goal, as many people remained unaware of its existence or were unable to have their requests honored.

Studies revealed that a significant portion of users took advantage of DNT, but surprisingly, some prominent companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit, failed to comply with the feature's requests. This lack of adherence raises concerns about the effectiveness of voluntary solutions in protecting online privacy. The failure of DNT highlights the need for more robust measures to safeguard users' data.

To avoid being tracked as much, individuals can consider switching to DuckDuckGo as their browser or using a VPN service. While a VPN (Virtual Private Network) would not eliminate tracking entirely, it could help protect users from certain types of surveillance by routing their internet traffic through a secure connection. Additionally, enabling "prevent cross-tracking" and turning off third-party cookies can help limit the amount of data collected about users.

In response to growing concerns about user privacy, Apple has taken steps to introduce new features that better protect users' data. The company has explained its decision to abandon DNT, citing its limited effectiveness in achieving its goal. However, Apple is working on implementing alternative measures, such as intelligent tracking prevention, which aims to prevent long-term tracking and alert users when visiting sites that don't have this feature enabled.

Furthermore, Safari will now include a warning system for websites that fail to comply with DNT requests or flag them as potentially malicious or fishing sites. The browser also includes an autofill function that can log users into sites automatically, making it more difficult for tracking devices to collect user data. While these measures are steps in the right direction, they do not address the underlying issue of voluntary solutions failing to protect online privacy.

In conclusion, the concept of a mobile app store and the proliferation of tracking devices on our phones have significant implications for our online privacy. The introduction of DNT was an attempt to provide users with more control over their data, but its voluntary nature made it ineffective in achieving its goal. As Apple continues to evolve its features and introduce new measures to protect user data, it is essential to remain vigilant and critical of the methods used by companies to collect and use our personal information. By taking steps to increase awareness and implementing effective solutions, we can better safeguard our online privacy and create a more secure digital landscape.

In an effort to engage with its audience, Apple Insider offers a Q&A section where listeners can ask questions or share their concerns about Apple-related topics. For those interested in participating, please visit the show's website for more information on how to get involved.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is that friend to all mankind that good spirit that good Soul William Gallagher you should probably write these down beforehand it's that little hesitation as you try to find something now always scares me but do you not like them are you not are you not happy are you displeased so far happy but it's always have I disappointed you in some way William no you just scared me that's all but you know you're not going to change I can tell so um 10 seconds ago before we started recording you were saying that you had been heads down on the angel Aaron story and I said well so what's the angel and Aon story and you said well it's been 5 years and it's her decision and I I said to you what on Earth are you talking about man you buried the lead so tell me the story here from the beginning you mean the world does not know that Angela erant senior vice president of retailer of Apple is no longer senior vice president of Apple at retail officially she's leaving in April but she's already been replaced by uh dri Brien effective immediately so wait wait wait back up back up back up so there there are a couple of things here that I need to ask you because this is this has just taken me by surprise as I'm sure it took you by surprise yeah it's funny actually you don't I think the fact is you don't get very many big uh moves at Apple uh we had you like the the head of Siri being pushed around recently but you don't get uh Craig federi leaving you don't get Angela arens leaving I thought there there's some occasional reshuffling right some days Phil is in charge of the App Store some days Eddie Q is in charge of the App Store but Phil and Eddie are Main Stays right they haven't gone anywhere it's a solid team it's been going for a long time with really good I believe really good people in it so a major move uh it's quite eye popping um whoever it is so I mean retail has been one of those areas where we had Ron Johnson who was good and then we had and then we had although Ron Johnson was working alongside Steve and so the Steve and Ron Johnson combination was very strong and very good and of course Johnson had had success at Target previous to coming to Apple and he didn't quite follow that on his well at JC Penney but but never mind that uh JC Penney was their own story and of course they're admired in their own closings of stores and stuff right now now indeed then we had John Brown from Dixons John brow wasn't it yes John brow right I would know that name better than you after RN Johnson then we had John brow who was was a first class nons okay that seems harsh it certainly TR say he was unsuccessful is that more polite is that is that more acceptable in polite company to say it is also I don't know the details of it I just I was kind of against him uh when he started because he was head of Dixons which was a UK store very well known for poor customer service so him being hired as head of retail he kind of came pre-loaded with some baggage for me and I don't know the details of what he did I just know he didn't do it for very long so really I mean he had nine months in the job so really head of Apple retail it was uh uh the Ron and Steve show there was this caretaker bit in the Middle where Tim Cook uh took over from brow for a while and then there's been Angela aons and of important jobs in apple head of all of the stores including the online one it's gigantic so I move here is is massive it is now now brow it didn't last very long because it's very clear when you get to Apple if you're going to be effective or not and if you align with what they intend to have happen or not and and of course he came from Dixons and Dixons has a history of epic proportions of poor customer service especially post sale customer service which is what Apple prided themselves on and both both pre-sale and postale customer service and you know the retail stores were a place where you could go and have a genius help you through things or where the steps of service weren't designed to push you to sell they were designed to help you find the right solution for you that you could then consider about buying yeah I've told you this before I was in an Apple Store once looking for a particular cable I think it was to do a certain job and the Apple Genius said no yes you could buy this one uh but it's very expensive and for what you need uh you can get cheaper over there pointed through the store window at um whatever electronic store was opposite so they lost the sale that day but of course I came back and bought a Mac from them so in the end that service WIS out right and it's it's you know they they have steps of service that they used to teach people in the stores and I'm sure they still do although they changed since I knew them and they were things like you know you need to approach the customer you need to probe what their need needs are you need to listen and then you need to to sort of evaluate has has the solution that I presented been the solution that you were actually looking for does it sound like I heard your needs and presented the right thing and if you do those those kinds of things in store it's way better than directing you to sell the thing that the store wants to sell and and that's what Apple always succeeded at was was selling the thing that you really needed to buy that you really needed to solve your problem and under brow it they slashed post sale customer service to the point where it was difficult to get um any sort of of generosity or any sort of of you know yes you're two days out of your Apple care warranty but we understand that failures happen and that's so close like that we'll just go ahead and replace it on a manager say so kind of thing and that still happens a little bit these days but it's a lot more difficult and that's John brow's Legacy is making things harder for the consumer and that's the Legacy that you're saying Andel arens didn't uh supersede well it never it never Rose to her level of awareness that that there was even a problem you know had had brow not been there historically and we'd gone straight to Angela erand then I expect those policies would have probably continued and it would have been glorious but it it was it's never just brought to her attention that these things and changes have been made you know some people when they come make presumption uh we don't know what she was told or or what she looked for uh but uh she didn't appear to act on them yes I see your point so let's talk about things that she did act on for a moment obviously there have been sweeping changes you know we we originally didn't have these sorts we we you early early on in the very beginning of the stores there was the store theater and there were some educational days but that went away for a while the theater has disappeared from the stores during remodels and so forth and now we have today at Apple we went from having very little in the way of Education during the Braun John brow period to having a lot of Education now and not just education but sort of gathering and cultural you know informing each other yes okay that makes sense what other kinds of changes do you think we've seen in the in the stores that you would highlight wow see the thing I'm interested in is I I I think uh um uh when he came from Dixons your man just wanted to make a big splash and be seen for it whereas when aens came from bbery she was more concerned of the longer term thing so her biggest moves I think we'll never see they were all uh in in house internal stuff I think she's improved Apple's systems and she's also then brought forward uh today at Apple and overseen many more uh store launches and revamps and things but I I think she's more um uh skeletal change she's set them up very well for the future is how it seems to me so I think that's quite good really little bit there yes yes and you know there there were some other changes here I'm trying to think of them for a moment this just because there's there's so much going on right it's um I got to say I am very interested I mean I'm interested in Angel AR because she's a really interesting person but I'm also I think her position at Apple is fascinating so in a way my interest is kind of immediately transferred to dri O'Brien who has this uh amazing history at Apple that actually very few people know anything about she's been there three decades but uh she isn't um really referred to much in history she's been part of Apple manufacturing uh I think there's a piece of Fortune Magazine talks about how she was very good on uh demand um predictions things like this but uh for somebody uh compared to Aaron she has a very low profile and I think that's terribly interesting we'll see what will come of I I I think I think what I would say is that so 30 years is 1989 now 1999 was was after Steve Jobs left and was working on next and before his return in 97 when they immediately had to work on both reinvigorating people creating the culture that Apple would become again and making the hard transition from System 7 to system 8 and the Motorola processors to power PC processors well also okay so the 6800 Pro 68,000 processors to the the power PC processors there a huge number of transitions that had to take place and that was a time period where a lot of people sort of fell into the old Apple and and went by the wayside and got dismissed or went somewhere else and the new Apple that became successful and it's amazing that she made that transition to the new Apple and made it so strong WR L that she's been here all this time you know it was one of those time periods when Johnny I was tempted to leave Apple even so making it through that transition is a big deal now I was I was going back to thinking about some of the changes at at retail under the RN so Angel improved the infrastructure of Apple retail there was before online and Retail were separate and now they're unified you know when you you used to have a large number of things that were carried online that were not carryed in retail and that that's still somewhat true but they used to have separate buyers for them for example all right now I didn't realize that because I just I read a interview just a few days actually ago she an interview with Vogue business about um you the future of retail and one thing she mentioned was that I thought she was talking about companies other than Apple there this idea that you might have a store and then people go and buy online you don't see that as a failure of the store you see the two working together it's still a sale to the company um but you're saying that's actually a direct uh part of her having bought these things together that's oh absolutely so in let's say 2010 2011 there were different people in buying roles at Apple there were there were people that were buyers for online and there were separately positions that were buyers for the inore physical retail store mind you they're just selling Apple gear aren't they so buying no no no no no no no you're making a mistake when you think about that they're selling all of the accessories from all of the third parties so okay the the hersel bags the STM bags for laptop bags all of the Balon accessories and adapters that are along the wall all of the uh all of the iot devices now that are there that are home compatible all of the third party cases that that were there for so many years um all of these things have to get selected by a retail buyer or by the online buyer or in this case now uni ified buyer and get chosen to be brought into the store and there was a large number of things that Apple doesn't make that are sold in Apple Apple Stores both online and Retail and like I said before those were separate and now they're unified now they used to work together right you'd go in for a meeting at Apple and you'd go for a buyer meeting and you'd meet with two people the retail and the online but they wouldn't necessarily agree on what they were taking okay so I see in retrospect it's I mean sure it got that way through logical progression and things but in R it does sound Daft um so there you go she came in and unded apple I like it that's a nice job to well I mean it's it's not exactly daed right it's if you think about things if you're focused on your your online sales and you put one person in charge of it because it's big enough that it needs to have one person managing it or in that case a couple of people CU there was always the assistance to the buyers as well and you know they're looking at their numbers and and projections on and forecasting on what they think will sell and what they think things will sell like and you know if if you're go ahead and unifying that technically you're really just shuffling and turning the other buyer into sort of an assistant and and having the one final say on it but really they were big enough that it made sense to have it divided and it made sense that there were things that you would sell online in number that you may not sell in enough numbers to put in stores what was also daed was that worldwide was different so the way it would work is you would have not just your online buyer and your retail buyer for the US for example you'd also have them for the UK and they'd be separate people and for Australia and they'd be separate people and for the Far East Japan and China and so forth they'd be separate people and you know you could not you could technically go and get a meeting with the UK buyer and try and get into Apple UK but really what they wanted to do was be aligned with what the US was doing and so you really needed to go and get a meeting with the US and if you could get into the US than it meant you could go worldwide forgive me this is a side point but just saying it exactly that way reminded me I once interviewed somebody at Microsoft UK and he acted like he ruled the world and a personally invented Excel and for some reason the fact that he was just in the UK and really tickled me about it but there you another Point uh speaking of split roles there what do you think about the fact that um digri O'Brien continues to be uh Apple's vice president of uh people and is now retail plus people and I mean specifically plus the plus symbol not the end uh is that they couldn't find somebody to replace arant directly or is it a logical extension of a Brian's role well you know if you were writing the marketing copy around this announcement you might say something or or the PR Company around this announcement you might say something like the core of apple has always been the people right right yes and yes especially in the customer facing role where our retail stores are our direct connection with people our people in retail are are so important and so critical so it makes sense to have one person in charge of retail in charge of today at Apple in in charge of all of these ways that they relate and interact with people but as you're not uh writing the pr copy what by the way I'm available for hire if someone but uh no yeah it's it's um I I think that you know there there are common things that people do that are are what we call Human Resources right and Human Resources tends to be making sure that that employees are up to Snuff or performing well that people are meeting their goals or targets that people are meeting the company's goals and targets that the um that that in terms of having the right mix of people is a good thing and also making sure that you know Apple has enough in terms of benefits and compensation to make it attractive enough to keep people the good people there and and you know hiring and and this minutia like seasonal hiring right Christmas sales coming up make sure you have people on hand kind of thing and Apple has mastered those things for the most part so you know the question is is is J O'Brien also head of people for all of corporate Apple which seems like a big role to be taking on as well as retail I believe she is yes which means I mean I don't dadg her in any way and I'm looking forward to what she does I'm just curious because stereotypically um HR people tend to be very different from sales related people just in the corporations I've worked with so you know you you got to be certain that she's uh incredibly well informed at Apple and they wouldn't use her if she wasn't right for sales but it's an interesting mix and just makes me even more interested in her well yeah it it is interesting um but the way that Apple does sales is not exactly the way everyone else does sales there's a reason why there are no great Gateway 2000 retail stores anymore right yes yes you know there's there's the the the one thing that Apple does have to worry about is um their ability to hire and their ability to retain and at the same time what it means to maintain the corporate culture that they want to have and you know that's part of what Apple University was for but with every person that you add especially in a key role you are changing what the culture can be and so it it takes yeah and it takes that kind of effort to make sure that that things stay on the same track but I would say that aens moved the ball in a lot of ways that that you know the the we we used to have these massive lineups right I I remember like I said last episode waiting in at 3:00 a.m. for an iPad in 2010 and now no one does that because pre-orders are mostly kind of functional it's it really bad of me to say I quite miss the queuing up I only did it a couple of times to see what it was like but it was fun well it was a different era for Apple too let's let's think back and say that you know in in those days in in queuing up for iPhones for example 2007 yeah apple was profitable based off of the iPod but there was still very much a kind of cult feeling if you were into Apple stuff you were you were a little unique you were a little special at that point and that um it's not the same at all now that the uh you know the the iPhone is so widespread Apple stuff is so widespread that there is no real need to be to to have that camaraderie from lineups well so I I'm still special but in other ways I see your point okay um and with the sheer increase in volumes that Apple's gone through over her period Then yes that all seems inevitable um I could be Mis the figures here but I have a feeling I read her saying recently that when she was at berbery the London based Fashion retail that she was CEO of there was something like 11,000 employees overseas and then it's 70,000 uh at Apple in the stores and things and actually 70,000 was a bit low I think of it but uh that massive difference and what you said about you've been in an Apple retail store right and had trouble getting weighted on yeah uh yes 7,000 Birmingham uh fine at Apple Su hole just to credit the two local ones near me yes so no you go in you sort of fight for for someone to be able to pay attention to you to to get what you need of course that's part of what makes the um going and using the app store app and just checking yourself out if you're not buying something that's high dollar or has a unique serial code on it a good recently where I cannot remember what it is I went in to buy and I'd ordered it in the line I was picking up and anre and I walked in and on the way in my phone said uh you know hello you're here um go wait over at the iPad table and we're standing there and and I'm just thinking why are you making us wait at the iPad table William have you just bought an iPad um and that that caused an interesting discussion given the expense of iPads compared to whatever it was I was picking up so that is using ey beacons and and beacons and I beacons specifically are a thing that no one has really adopted outside of Apple it was meant to be This brilliant idea that you could as a or put beacons around your store and direct people to new things going on in your store and also by the way be able to track where people are moving around your store which would help you optimize your store perhaps but they didn't really catch on very well the uh Apple uses them Apple uses them to great success right Apple uses them so you enter the store they can announce that you should open up the app they can direct you to the iPad table or like like you say you know I I always thought a great application for them was the rental car agency where uh you you oh here's your car turn left okay right you know you you you walk off off the airplane you're you're you're totally uh knackered from being on the airplane for 10 hours and you get to the retail the the rental car desk and you have to wait in line for the rental car desk and then you you sign all the paperwork saying yes you're responsible yes you'll pay for the extra insurance whatever and then they say yeah your your your car is in slot e27 right so you drag yourself back out of the rental car agency you look down the parking lot trying to find row e and then you have to try and find slot 20 all this put beacons on every car and just keep them in the car Power them off the the cigarette lighter adapter you know the power socket and use the phone to check out your car have it direct you with beacons to your car in the lot you don't even read a retail counter anymore basically end all of that in line going to do next I don't know Apple no very curious now she has just picked up a lot of stock she sold off Apple shares or some number of them in October I think and so made yeah several million dollars out of that I don't think she's rushing to the unemployment office yet but um she could well just nip in sort out car rental on her way home yeah she could do it yeah yeah I mean that um so she's she's got some cash not enough to buy neckar Island but she's got some cash basically is what we're saying yes very curious to know if she ever comes back to bbery cuz the company hasn't has done as well since she left but you know neither I'm sure there are other companies that want her so we'll have to see I mean it's it's kind of rare that you'd come back isn't it uh Steve Jobs may have done something like that you're right are there other examples it's hard to think of them there there are a few examples along the way people who've been entrepreneurs and you know founded a business and then sold the business and then bought it back and and relaunched it kind of thing that happens from time to time but it's hard to think of a worldwide fashion brand like like berbery bringing back a CEO it just doesn't seem to happen as much to me to be fair the only things I know about the fashion industry I know from having watch what Hance has done I think the now I think the similarities of Technology are just riveting uh but I don't know the history I I used I pay attention to New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week every year because you learn so much it's really enlightening you know and it affects everything because if if you look so every year out of those two fashion shows uh Pantone picks the colors of the fashion show and the colors of the year and that's where they came from yep and so Pantone lays those out and then if you look every other product that that launches uses that color palette and you go into you go into uh over here a Walmart or a Target or or anyone's retail for example and the color palette is exact actly the one that Pantone has laid out and that Pantone color palette comes from New York and London Fashion Week I just assume everybody knocked off New York and London Fashion Week frocks but this is a more scientific rout to it all of these things it it's all connected the interconnectedness it is it really is we should talk about some other news now obviously Angela's news is is very striking and and is going to be a huge impact on Apple but the the the D that's kind of an interesting choice I I'm kind of curious to see how that plays out I'm interested in the fact that I don't know what arance is going to do between now and April because the moment uh this change was announced UMB brien's title was officially changed on the on the Apple website even to be both so presumably there's going to be a Handover period uh between the two but you have the impression that O'Brien probably knows everything already because she's so well rooted in the company so when will we see the difference maybe but you know if if you've laid out your plans and your road map for what you're going to accomplish in the coming year and you've got your one-year road map and you've got your your longer term five-year Road mapap of where you think things go then you want to lay that out and talk through and see you know here here's why we're doing these plans here's the plans we've made so far here's the actions that that mean that in 5 years we're going to be able to deliver on the 5year plan by doing the working year one you need to talk through that and and you know lay out here's all the that everything is it's not just a simple short transition it's it's a longer term thing and of course deciding if those plans are the same although you presume they would be but you started to say not let us back into this what else is going on I did hear the word qualcom flirting around and I thought of you that's interesting because I wasn't even going to talk Qualcomm yet you want bring up Qualcomm go ahead and lay it out uh well I was actually waiting for you to be the expert on this because because I know you've been following the story but um Apple has W um what do you call it emotion uh to narrow the damages that Kum can possibly uh get from them um right that sounds pretty handy doesn't it sense well a little bit good I mean for Apple yeah maybe so basically a a US federal judge granted Apple this motion to limit the damages that Qualcomm can claim in the patent trial now what this comes down to is that Qualcomm one of the complaints against Qualcomm is that they force chip buyers to sign patent licenses at unfair rates and there there's also been a set of charges where where they've been um asking lenses to pay twice basically you know Apple manufactures something and the manufacturer has to pay the license fee and then Apple also has to pay the license fee because they're shipping the product kind of thing and so what this is is a a a basically ruling that says that um they won't be able to claim damages from before the suit was filed in 2017 they can only claim Dam damages from that point they can ALS they they also can't claim damages on all of the patents that they were suing over that one of the patents was rejected as being a part of this which was a pat connected to graphics and power consumption so this is is generally the same batch of patents that Qualcomm brought before the ITC hoping to win an import ban um Apple was found to have infringed on one patent the commission recommended against the ban so that we're still awaiting a final ruling on that that should come in March it's just sort of all coalescing right there there are these different suits around the world Germany China so forth and also the US there's the the International Trade Commission is involved as well as federal judges in ter at the the um in terms of the patent licensing issue and so we're just we're just seeing these things begin to come together you mean it could be over one day a legal case could end hey hey the the Samsung UI case took years but eventually ended I secretly wonder if we're going to hear news that they found a new way to appeal something either side don't care it just always seems I don't believe legal cases ever settle that's eventually they do no eventually they do and you know why they do right everybody gets tired uh John Dice and John dice kind of I me I mean lawyers lawyers get paid for the hours right they build the hours but at at some point all right judges don't want to see this forever you don't you don't want your career to be known as the judge who only oversaw this one case for her whole life right okay yes this stuff has to come to an end at some point and the judges are the ones who tell you when it's over right they make the ruling later judges and so suped so event well there are appeals but you eventually exhaust your appeals options okay and then judges tell you it's over there as well okay well and that's you can see end inight with qualcom yeah okay that's probably a good thing then it means everybody can get on with making things doesn't itle making now what's uh Qualcomm making Qualcomm makes processors they make graphics chips they make uh chipsets for cellular modems they are going to have some of the very first actual 5G not AT&T 5G nonsense chipsets so that you can actually have gigabit service to your phone under ideal conditions so Qualcomm is not some some Pretender here they they do actually make stuff okay and Apple's been known to turn a lathe every now and again as well so Apple has yet to make their own cellular modem now as we've talked about in the past Apple's hiring Engineers that indicate they might but they have they made practically everything else themselves already so it doesn't seem unlikely that they'll go that way yeah they didn't start out that way though right you know they they originally were using processors that were not that bespoke they just started out with a billion dollars and a song in their heart a dream in their hands they were using they were using cellular modems and then when around iPhone 4 happened they had to get qualcom because Qualcomm is the only one that owns CDMA technology they uh you know they were using uh the the power VR Graphics chip for a while and then they would made their own it it it's because Apple controls the operating system Apple can dictate what it runs on and so they can start out with things that are off the shelf and then as they grow and gain more knowledge and more hiring they can and more capabilities they can build their own chips So eventually we may see them make their own cellular modem but for the time being they're relying on on other parties what's interesting about this case is that it looks as if it may require other parties to be able to produce the kinds of things that Qualcomm has had a lock on so it opens that up you know if if intel and mediatech are also making competent modems that you use Qualcomm CDMA technology do they need to go and make their own and the answer is only if they're really dissatisfied with the performance of the competitor Parts okay but right this moment Apple isn't making them qu's arding C the only thing actually being made this week it seems to me a 230 emergy ah well so the here's Emoji is interesting right Emoji is interesting in in in a way because people use it to communicate and because there is a standards organization called Unicode that decides what goes into it officially and yes they decide what goes into it officially and then people get to different organizations render them slightly differently Microsoft's Emoji are not exactly the same as the the as Google's or the same as Apple in fact you know examples of that have been the emoji for the gun the firearm you know originally originally they all used somewhat realistic looking symbols that looked like a firearm and then Apple changed it to a science fiction ray gun like you'd be find in 1950s sci-fi and then eventually everyone else also changed it to that because Unicode doesn't specify what the icon actually has to absolutely look like they they specify what the icon is supposed to represent and where it is in the font table where it is you know numerically as a code so that when an Android User types ray gun that that you you get a ray gun on Apple or on Microsoft right when you get a a frowny face you want that frowny face to appear on all the platforms as opposed to someone else interpreting it as a smiley face just as when you type uh uppercase or lowercase a you get the character 65 sent to your screen and your screen does the rest yes right across platform Prett good number yeah yeah so uh I'm interested in that side and there was I think a very interesting 99% invisible uh documentary covering the uh somebody's aim to get a new Emoji in but I never use emojis so I'm not you are old thanks goodbye I mean that's that's why you don't use them is they have no appeal to you you you don't use them with anyone who also uses them and you would rather type what you intend to say as opposed to put up a symbol to represent it possibly being a writer might have factor in this but I see a point yes I'm uh aging even as we speak yes and and there are a number of people uh some of them who tend to be youths who will type with a symbol AS shorthand rather than writing something out and shockingly they may not even punctuate and now they're going to get another 230 ways to express themselves I suppose that's I mean there's there's a whole study of discourse in in texting versus speech or texting versus other forms of more formal writing and you know when I said that that sometimes people don't punctuate it's interesting because punctuation takes on different meaning in in different contexts when you use a period in a text message people will say why are you so angry and you're like what do you mean I just put a period at the end of my sentence well the finality of that implies anger I have never heard that before and the number of text messages I've sent with full stops in would be all of them ever right to everybody right but your audience is is less and less composed of let's say 13y olds or 15 year olds the people that you're texting so you're saying when I've offended somebody so much that they've never spoken to me again it isn't because what I told them to do it's because I put a full point at the end it's B okay I thought I had you know Verve in my writing but no I've just got punctuation okay God knows what would happen if I use a semic on somebody uh first of all no one knows what that does anyway right well you and I know but I mean it's it's a lesser used piece of punctuation would you agree yes I was actually once told by BBC worldwide that I should never use semicolons because people don't understand what they are I asked uh how this person who told me this was getting paid because I didn't understand that either um but he cared on getting paid and I cared on using them and the public survived somehow yeah semicolon William do you remember 1989 uh what were you doing in 1989 I was looking ahead 30 years to the future of podcasting with you and wishing it would come sooner what about you uh 1989 was was one of those formative years for me 1989 was incredible um are you able to tell us what you did or is it n you know person sorry I I really can't I'm afraid I can't even share that but well thanks for bringing it up then you're welcome but you know 1989 was was a year of of we were sort of on the cusp of big changes right that was that was the year I think Tim berner's Lee began work on what would become internet would become the worldwide web rather you know I I feel like that was a year when desktop publishing really began to become something into its own we we actually had power books show up at the school that we were using to make the school newspaper with along about 1990 you we were we were on the cusp of something big it was almost there and you know when we're talking about about software the software changes since then have been huge too right yes absolutely have they been used yes you know and there there are days where I feel like the software really hasn't come very far at all you know we're doing the same tasks we were doing back then and the computers are incredibly more powerful but the software takes up tremendous amounts of resources now we were doing the same stuff back then just as well for at least some of it but okay but you know do you feel like the software you're using is kind of stuck in the past sometimes where are you going asking you I'm asking you do you feel like your software is stuck in the past uh I thought be contrary here but no I think in some ways I am I'm I'm still typing um that's pretty much it all I do but I'm now doing it on machines that are a million times faster than they were in the 90s so if anything I'm wasting the new resources of software but I know this isn't where you wanted me to go so leave me down the path just a little bit further all right so there there there are times when I use software and it feels old and crufty and feels like I'm I'm trying to make something work that just hasn't gotten on with the future yet and what I realize is that it's hard to choose software it's hard to choose what application you're going to use there are some things you use because everyone uses them and they're the standard and you just must right it's it's the reason why I try and not use Microsoft Office but I'm occasionally forced into opening it because everyone does right but at the same time if you're trying to find a replacement for things it's it's or or a tool to do just the thing you need to do it could be hard to choose so capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real software users and you can discover everything you need to make an informed decision that's that's a big deal because it's hard to know you you start searching for softare and you may find two or three applications and you're like well how do I know which ones in the time that we have left I want to talk about a couple of news it a couple things that I think are important disc and we sort of talked about this last week we were talking about responsible to even yog Studio soft Sugg no matter what kind of software your businesss easy to discover fastic fantastic readers um visit capa.com appleinsider for free today day to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider capter that's c a p t a.com slapple Insider so I was talking with one of our our re listeners uh AEL demos and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly and and ael's very smart and AEL is concerned about information security and and specifically where we're talking about but bugs that crop up security failings and responsible disclosure so for example there was a bug a uh security problem that was discovered in the Mac OS keychain now this was discovered by lenus henza which I also hope I'm pronouncing correctly now lenus is a veteran security researcher and he revealed the existence of this Mac OS keychain exploit but he said and somewhat controversially that he's not going to share the details with apple because of Apple's bug Bounty policies now a bug Bounty is where you report a bug and in exchange for reporting a bug they offer to pay you for the bug because bugs have value you know if if you don't sell the bug to the company or or get some reward for giving it to the company there are tons of Nefarious people online who will happily buy the bug and then exploited to the the uh detriment of all of your users so apple has a bug Bounty program but Apple's always paid a little less than everyone else and Apple has always had it very limited for what will qualify for it versus what won't now there's a demo application that that henza made called key steel and it's able to extract login and system passwords from the keychain without having any administrative Privileges and this is regardless of whether the system Integrity protection or Access Control lists are configured system Integrity protection was introduced a couple of releases of Mac OS ago and basically what it does is is it prevents system files from being modified and upon reboot restores them to a known good version and this is through cryptographic signing and and monitoring changes and things like that it basically means that you can be mostly sure that your Mac OS system is as it should be as it was shipped by Apple and not modified by someone outside or nefarious but keychain is is a big deal keychain traditionally has always been a part of Mac OS uh 10 and it stored your your login information for your your user account it stored your administrator password it stores Network passwords it stores uh all kinds of things and with the the addition of iCloud keychain Safari starts storing passwords in it as well now this is not an iCloud keychain bug this is a Mac OS keychain bug so you can go ahead and and extract passwords but you have to have this application running on the Mac that you're trying to extract them fun which means that it's uh you know it's not necessarily a remote hack but if you were an nefar person and built this thing then you could obviously convince someone social engineer them to install it on their Mac and then have it send passwords back over the network so there there is a real problem here but it doesn't affect your iOS devices or your iCloud keychain per se now hen's disagreement here stems from the fact that Apple's bug Bounty program only covers iOS it doesn't cover Mac OS and it's uh that that's a problem because it's a places maess at a disadvantage now you could say that's an oversight but that's where things stand now even within the iOS sphere like I said Apple has been criticized as being stingy you know they pay less than what third party firms offer um and and this isn't small money this is uh things like $2 million for a remote persistent zeroc click IOS Jailbreak and the most Apple will pay is 200,000 which you know you can see why why a re researcher would say that's questionable now researchers who are doing this are Independents and they tend to be working for themselves and that means that they become dependent upon these bug bounties paying out and so you know if you were just going to sustain yourself on that now 200,000 is a nice number but as I said before that only applies to iOS bugs and they have to be persistent remote and zero click now this keychain bug for Mac OS you could say that it's persistent you could say that it is um but it's not exactly zero click in the demo app that he's written although it certainly could be if it were written to be like that um and it's not remote at this time again although it could be so it's it's uh an interesting problem I I think that my hope is that Apple will revisit these policies because it's it's a very difficult situation when you have an independent researcher who's demonstrated the bug so you know that it's theoretical and or that it's even practical in that limited context of the demo and yet has not CH been been um convinced to disclose it you know last week we were talking about responsible disclosure and how the the parent of the 14-year-old worked so hard with apple to try and figure out how to disclose a bug and it was as if Apple wasn't really hearing it or making it easy for them to do it here the this person knows how to do responsible disclosure knows the Avenues to report it but has chosen not to because because it's it's um not attractive to them to do so based on the way Apple behaves there are people that think that this kind of thing should be done out of the goodness of their hearts but if you are trying to you know earn a living or or make it practical to keep researching then it seems that Apple should be willing to pay something for this kind of thing especially since it affects one of their core products and that is not the only security thing that I wanted to talk about today in addition to that you know separate but in the same vein right there are popular iOS apps that use something called glassbox STK to record user screens without permission now now why would you want to record someone's user screen on their iPhone there are a lot of good reasons if you've written an application and you want to see where people struggle with your interface if you want to see what people are using most about your app then this is a way of equipping your app so that it can go ahead and send back those screens and replay the session of people using it so that you can sort of understand what those interactions were like from a user interface standpoint it's actually really smart because it says that that you're paying attention to what your users are doing most and what they're trying to accomplish most and then you can go ahead and change your app to make those interactions easier now this is according to an investigation conducted by TechCrunch the analytics from glassbox and other companies like it allow customers to embed session replay technology into their respective applications so far so good these tools capture screenshots and user interactions including on-screen Taps and in some cases keyboard entry which are then sent back to app developers or glassbox servers for further examination now this is not the same kind of thing it's not as polished as the screen recording function that's built into iOS 12 but it effect it effectively screenshots an apps user interface at Key moments to determine whether its functioning is designed and because it can do that you can sort of Recon instruct the mobile application view in a visual format and technically glassbox so glassbox told TechCrunch that glassbox SDK can interact with the native application that it's bundled into and it can't break out the boundary of that app so it can't leave that app and get information from some other app so it's sandboxed and firewalled off in that way when a keyboard appears over the native app glass boox doesn't have access to it they said but if they're screenshotting then then you sort of think they could now glassbox customers include people like abber croman Fitch and Hollister hotels.com Expedia Air Canada Singapore Airlines monitoring users is nothing new monitoring users to to try and do this sort of interface research is nothing new but the problem comes when mishandling of session replays leads to sensitive information being exposed for example if you were trying to use the a Canada app Air Canada's app sent session replay data containing exposed passport and credit card numbers which could be a problem because some companies opt to send the app data directly to glassbox cloud and not to their own servers and and also you know you're trusting with that information in terms of your session for purchasing of of flights but do you really want that data living on long after that that flight's been purchased and furthermore you know if you tried to man in the middle attack it which is to say that you tried to intercept the traffic before it got to its destination uh you you'd find that most of the data that glass boox was transmitting was obfuscated although some screenshots contained unmasked email and postcodes so abomi and Fitch Hollister Singapore Airlines pass station replay directly onto glassbox while hotels.com and Expedia silid the by data and really only send it to their own domains now none of these apps privacy Poli policies make it clear that that's what glassbox is doing or that there's glassbox technology inside these apps that's being used to record their screens with companies that are not opting to include mention of user monitoring in Apple's mandated disclosures and glass boox itself lacking requirements on its own people are pretty much unaware that their actions are being so so observed so this is something to take into account right iOS is is fine iOS is secure but these apps are are leaking information and and sometimes with good reason and sometimes doing it ham-handed so it's it's not clear what's going to come out of this it's not clear if Apple's going to make a longer review process or going to start searching for this within apps or if people should monitor their own traffic with their you know network analysis and see where their stuff's being sent which is a little bit unlikely because you know who's actually going to do that in practice you know I I can do setup wire shark I can set up things like that to try and monitor it but on the whole it's generally something that doesn't happen the the the the thing is is that if we look back historically right the first the first so-called App Store was Steve Jobs telling us that we didn't need native apps for iPhone that we should just use the web and that web apps were the future and that wouldn't have necessarily prevented this because there are websites that completely spy on session data as well but it it would have been well maybe not that different than having these apps except that it wouldn't have been something that stayed resident on your phone it would have been something that wipes out from time to time which is not bad so that's another thing that you should be aware of be concerned about a little bit now Apple years ago iOS 7 introduced support for a feature called do not track that feature has just been removed in the 12.1 version of safari and basically DNT is a signal that is sent or do not track is a signal that sent to websites analy firms plug-in makers and AD networks and it's a request to not track the user and the problem with do not track is that it it was never actually complied with that that you could make that requ EST but there was no penalty if the organization at the other end failed to honor your request um even though as many as like 20% of people using the internet just want to be left alone and really don't want to be tracked the the private by Design search company that's Duck Duck Go um they they say that the voluntary nature of do not track makes it not foolproof at all makes it about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says please don't look in my house while all of your blinds are open uh but but there are a huge chunk of people who use do not track that are unaware that it's voluntary and have no idea that the request isn't being honored people that do honor do not track requests um tend to be medium Pinterest and Reddit Google Facebook and Twitter uh surprisingly do not honor do not track and I say surprisingly a little bit ironically you know you You' expect that Google whose business is based on indexing people's information is built around tracking right uh Facebook wants to know everything they can possibly know Facebook is going to not honor do not track Twitter does not honor do not track but medium Pinterest and Reddit do which kind of suggests that there are ways to form a business online that don't require tracking now what what should you do if you want to avoid being tracked as much right you should consider changing to Duck Duck Go as your brow browser or you could use the duck. go privacy browser you could switch your search engine to duck duo in Safari on mobile or Safari on web uh you could use a VPN service and there are VPN services that are reputable there are VPN Services where you're tunneling to an endpoint at the VPN service or if you really uh interested you could set up a VPN to your home in network network and and do that um although that would not get you free from tracking it would get you going through your home internet provider and being tracked there as opposed to being tracked through whatever mobile mob service you use when you're out in the world you can turn on prevent cross tracking and that's that's really it turning off thirdparty cookies which will cause functions and services to stop working now apple apple explained in their note that they're going to abandon DNT but they are are working on trying to make it so that Safari includes other privacy measures so they they've introduced new controls to prevent VR and AR app sets on websites from tracking user Behavior they've got intelligent tracking prevention to try and prevent long-term tracking and Safari user is going to be warned when visiting sites that don't have SSN enabled it's also going to warn users when you try and visit sites that are flagged as fishing or malicious sites and Safari will now log people into sites automatically when the password autofill function fills in the credentials on the site so trying to do these things is is Apple working to try and help you maintain PR privacy because what we found is that voluntary Solutions like do not track just don't work that's all the time for we have that's all the time we have today we'll meet you back next week right here on the Apple Insider podcast well and that also brings us to the conclusion of the show thank you so much for joining us this week I and my good friend William WR for Apple insider.com I'm Victor at Apple Insider he's William at Apple Insider and and what's your Twitter William people should go bug you on Twitter uh my Twitter is uh smiley face fridg magnet rean at Twitter or W gallaga oh my goodness why did I pick fridge magnets I'm I'm trying to think about right and my Twitter is whiskey cheeseburger no I'm I'm at V marks on Twitter and we like hearing from you we're so happy you listen to joined us for this week we'll be back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is that friend to all mankind that good spirit that good Soul William Gallagher you should probably write these down beforehand it's that little hesitation as you try to find something now always scares me but do you not like them are you not are you not happy are you displeased so far happy but it's always have I disappointed you in some way William no you just scared me that's all but you know you're not going to change I can tell so um 10 seconds ago before we started recording you were saying that you had been heads down on the angel Aaron story and I said well so what's the angel and Aon story and you said well it's been 5 years and it's her decision and I I said to you what on Earth are you talking about man you buried the lead so tell me the story here from the beginning you mean the world does not know that Angela erant senior vice president of retailer of Apple is no longer senior vice president of Apple at retail officially she's leaving in April but she's already been replaced by uh dri Brien effective immediately so wait wait wait back up back up back up so there there are a couple of things here that I need to ask you because this is this has just taken me by surprise as I'm sure it took you by surprise yeah it's funny actually you don't I think the fact is you don't get very many big uh moves at Apple uh we had you like the the head of Siri being pushed around recently but you don't get uh Craig federi leaving you don't get Angela arens leaving I thought there there's some occasional reshuffling right some days Phil is in charge of the App Store some days Eddie Q is in charge of the App Store but Phil and Eddie are Main Stays right they haven't gone anywhere it's a solid team it's been going for a long time with really good I believe really good people in it so a major move uh it's quite eye popping um whoever it is so I mean retail has been one of those areas where we had Ron Johnson who was good and then we had and then we had although Ron Johnson was working alongside Steve and so the Steve and Ron Johnson combination was very strong and very good and of course Johnson had had success at Target previous to coming to Apple and he didn't quite follow that on his well at JC Penney but but never mind that uh JC Penney was their own story and of course they're admired in their own closings of stores and stuff right now now indeed then we had John Brown from Dixons John brow wasn't it yes John brow right I would know that name better than you after RN Johnson then we had John brow who was was a first class nons okay that seems harsh it certainly TR say he was unsuccessful is that more polite is that is that more acceptable in polite company to say it is also I don't know the details of it I just I was kind of against him uh when he started because he was head of Dixons which was a UK store very well known for poor customer service so him being hired as head of retail he kind of came pre-loaded with some baggage for me and I don't know the details of what he did I just know he didn't do it for very long so really I mean he had nine months in the job so really head of Apple retail it was uh uh the Ron and Steve show there was this caretaker bit in the Middle where Tim Cook uh took over from brow for a while and then there's been Angela aons and of important jobs in apple head of all of the stores including the online one it's gigantic so I move here is is massive it is now now brow it didn't last very long because it's very clear when you get to Apple if you're going to be effective or not and if you align with what they intend to have happen or not and and of course he came from Dixons and Dixons has a history of epic proportions of poor customer service especially post sale customer service which is what Apple prided themselves on and both both pre-sale and postale customer service and you know the retail stores were a place where you could go and have a genius help you through things or where the steps of service weren't designed to push you to sell they were designed to help you find the right solution for you that you could then consider about buying yeah I've told you this before I was in an Apple Store once looking for a particular cable I think it was to do a certain job and the Apple Genius said no yes you could buy this one uh but it's very expensive and for what you need uh you can get cheaper over there pointed through the store window at um whatever electronic store was opposite so they lost the sale that day but of course I came back and bought a Mac from them so in the end that service WIS out right and it's it's you know they they have steps of service that they used to teach people in the stores and I'm sure they still do although they changed since I knew them and they were things like you know you need to approach the customer you need to probe what their need needs are you need to listen and then you need to to sort of evaluate has has the solution that I presented been the solution that you were actually looking for does it sound like I heard your needs and presented the right thing and if you do those those kinds of things in store it's way better than directing you to sell the thing that the store wants to sell and and that's what Apple always succeeded at was was selling the thing that you really needed to buy that you really needed to solve your problem and under brow it they slashed post sale customer service to the point where it was difficult to get um any sort of of generosity or any sort of of you know yes you're two days out of your Apple care warranty but we understand that failures happen and that's so close like that we'll just go ahead and replace it on a manager say so kind of thing and that still happens a little bit these days but it's a lot more difficult and that's John brow's Legacy is making things harder for the consumer and that's the Legacy that you're saying Andel arens didn't uh supersede well it never it never Rose to her level of awareness that that there was even a problem you know had had brow not been there historically and we'd gone straight to Angela erand then I expect those policies would have probably continued and it would have been glorious but it it was it's never just brought to her attention that these things and changes have been made you know some people when they come make presumption uh we don't know what she was told or or what she looked for uh but uh she didn't appear to act on them yes I see your point so let's talk about things that she did act on for a moment obviously there have been sweeping changes you know we we originally didn't have these sorts we we you early early on in the very beginning of the stores there was the store theater and there were some educational days but that went away for a while the theater has disappeared from the stores during remodels and so forth and now we have today at Apple we went from having very little in the way of Education during the Braun John brow period to having a lot of Education now and not just education but sort of gathering and cultural you know informing each other yes okay that makes sense what other kinds of changes do you think we've seen in the in the stores that you would highlight wow see the thing I'm interested in is I I I think uh um uh when he came from Dixons your man just wanted to make a big splash and be seen for it whereas when aens came from bbery she was more concerned of the longer term thing so her biggest moves I think we'll never see they were all uh in in house internal stuff I think she's improved Apple's systems and she's also then brought forward uh today at Apple and overseen many more uh store launches and revamps and things but I I think she's more um uh skeletal change she's set them up very well for the future is how it seems to me so I think that's quite good really little bit there yes yes and you know there there were some other changes here I'm trying to think of them for a moment this just because there's there's so much going on right it's um I got to say I am very interested I mean I'm interested in Angel AR because she's a really interesting person but I'm also I think her position at Apple is fascinating so in a way my interest is kind of immediately transferred to dri O'Brien who has this uh amazing history at Apple that actually very few people know anything about she's been there three decades but uh she isn't um really referred to much in history she's been part of Apple manufacturing uh I think there's a piece of Fortune Magazine talks about how she was very good on uh demand um predictions things like this but uh for somebody uh compared to Aaron she has a very low profile and I think that's terribly interesting we'll see what will come of I I I think I think what I would say is that so 30 years is 1989 now 1999 was was after Steve Jobs left and was working on next and before his return in 97 when they immediately had to work on both reinvigorating people creating the culture that Apple would become again and making the hard transition from System 7 to system 8 and the Motorola processors to power PC processors well also okay so the 6800 Pro 68,000 processors to the the power PC processors there a huge number of transitions that had to take place and that was a time period where a lot of people sort of fell into the old Apple and and went by the wayside and got dismissed or went somewhere else and the new Apple that became successful and it's amazing that she made that transition to the new Apple and made it so strong WR L that she's been here all this time you know it was one of those time periods when Johnny I was tempted to leave Apple even so making it through that transition is a big deal now I was I was going back to thinking about some of the changes at at retail under the RN so Angel improved the infrastructure of Apple retail there was before online and Retail were separate and now they're unified you know when you you used to have a large number of things that were carried online that were not carryed in retail and that that's still somewhat true but they used to have separate buyers for them for example all right now I didn't realize that because I just I read a interview just a few days actually ago she an interview with Vogue business about um you the future of retail and one thing she mentioned was that I thought she was talking about companies other than Apple there this idea that you might have a store and then people go and buy online you don't see that as a failure of the store you see the two working together it's still a sale to the company um but you're saying that's actually a direct uh part of her having bought these things together that's oh absolutely so in let's say 2010 2011 there were different people in buying roles at Apple there were there were people that were buyers for online and there were separately positions that were buyers for the inore physical retail store mind you they're just selling Apple gear aren't they so buying no no no no no no no you're making a mistake when you think about that they're selling all of the accessories from all of the third parties so okay the the hersel bags the STM bags for laptop bags all of the Balon accessories and adapters that are along the wall all of the uh all of the iot devices now that are there that are home compatible all of the third party cases that that were there for so many years um all of these things have to get selected by a retail buyer or by the online buyer or in this case now uni ified buyer and get chosen to be brought into the store and there was a large number of things that Apple doesn't make that are sold in Apple Apple Stores both online and Retail and like I said before those were separate and now they're unified now they used to work together right you'd go in for a meeting at Apple and you'd go for a buyer meeting and you'd meet with two people the retail and the online but they wouldn't necessarily agree on what they were taking okay so I see in retrospect it's I mean sure it got that way through logical progression and things but in R it does sound Daft um so there you go she came in and unded apple I like it that's a nice job to well I mean it's it's not exactly daed right it's if you think about things if you're focused on your your online sales and you put one person in charge of it because it's big enough that it needs to have one person managing it or in that case a couple of people CU there was always the assistance to the buyers as well and you know they're looking at their numbers and and projections on and forecasting on what they think will sell and what they think things will sell like and you know if if you're go ahead and unifying that technically you're really just shuffling and turning the other buyer into sort of an assistant and and having the one final say on it but really they were big enough that it made sense to have it divided and it made sense that there were things that you would sell online in number that you may not sell in enough numbers to put in stores what was also daed was that worldwide was different so the way it would work is you would have not just your online buyer and your retail buyer for the US for example you'd also have them for the UK and they'd be separate people and for Australia and they'd be separate people and for the Far East Japan and China and so forth they'd be separate people and you know you could not you could technically go and get a meeting with the UK buyer and try and get into Apple UK but really what they wanted to do was be aligned with what the US was doing and so you really needed to go and get a meeting with the US and if you could get into the US than it meant you could go worldwide forgive me this is a side point but just saying it exactly that way reminded me I once interviewed somebody at Microsoft UK and he acted like he ruled the world and a personally invented Excel and for some reason the fact that he was just in the UK and really tickled me about it but there you another Point uh speaking of split roles there what do you think about the fact that um digri O'Brien continues to be uh Apple's vice president of uh people and is now retail plus people and I mean specifically plus the plus symbol not the end uh is that they couldn't find somebody to replace arant directly or is it a logical extension of a Brian's role well you know if you were writing the marketing copy around this announcement you might say something or or the PR Company around this announcement you might say something like the core of apple has always been the people right right yes and yes especially in the customer facing role where our retail stores are our direct connection with people our people in retail are are so important and so critical so it makes sense to have one person in charge of retail in charge of today at Apple in in charge of all of these ways that they relate and interact with people but as you're not uh writing the pr copy what by the way I'm available for hire if someone but uh no yeah it's it's um I I think that you know there there are common things that people do that are are what we call Human Resources right and Human Resources tends to be making sure that that employees are up to Snuff or performing well that people are meeting their goals or targets that people are meeting the company's goals and targets that the um that that in terms of having the right mix of people is a good thing and also making sure that you know Apple has enough in terms of benefits and compensation to make it attractive enough to keep people the good people there and and you know hiring and and this minutia like seasonal hiring right Christmas sales coming up make sure you have people on hand kind of thing and Apple has mastered those things for the most part so you know the question is is is J O'Brien also head of people for all of corporate Apple which seems like a big role to be taking on as well as retail I believe she is yes which means I mean I don't dadg her in any way and I'm looking forward to what she does I'm just curious because stereotypically um HR people tend to be very different from sales related people just in the corporations I've worked with so you know you you got to be certain that she's uh incredibly well informed at Apple and they wouldn't use her if she wasn't right for sales but it's an interesting mix and just makes me even more interested in her well yeah it it is interesting um but the way that Apple does sales is not exactly the way everyone else does sales there's a reason why there are no great Gateway 2000 retail stores anymore right yes yes you know there's there's the the the one thing that Apple does have to worry about is um their ability to hire and their ability to retain and at the same time what it means to maintain the corporate culture that they want to have and you know that's part of what Apple University was for but with every person that you add especially in a key role you are changing what the culture can be and so it it takes yeah and it takes that kind of effort to make sure that that things stay on the same track but I would say that aens moved the ball in a lot of ways that that you know the the we we used to have these massive lineups right I I remember like I said last episode waiting in at 3:00 a.m. for an iPad in 2010 and now no one does that because pre-orders are mostly kind of functional it's it really bad of me to say I quite miss the queuing up I only did it a couple of times to see what it was like but it was fun well it was a different era for Apple too let's let's think back and say that you know in in those days in in queuing up for iPhones for example 2007 yeah apple was profitable based off of the iPod but there was still very much a kind of cult feeling if you were into Apple stuff you were you were a little unique you were a little special at that point and that um it's not the same at all now that the uh you know the the iPhone is so widespread Apple stuff is so widespread that there is no real need to be to to have that camaraderie from lineups well so I I'm still special but in other ways I see your point okay um and with the sheer increase in volumes that Apple's gone through over her period Then yes that all seems inevitable um I could be Mis the figures here but I have a feeling I read her saying recently that when she was at berbery the London based Fashion retail that she was CEO of there was something like 11,000 employees overseas and then it's 70,000 uh at Apple in the stores and things and actually 70,000 was a bit low I think of it but uh that massive difference and what you said about you've been in an Apple retail store right and had trouble getting weighted on yeah uh yes 7,000 Birmingham uh fine at Apple Su hole just to credit the two local ones near me yes so no you go in you sort of fight for for someone to be able to pay attention to you to to get what you need of course that's part of what makes the um going and using the app store app and just checking yourself out if you're not buying something that's high dollar or has a unique serial code on it a good recently where I cannot remember what it is I went in to buy and I'd ordered it in the line I was picking up and anre and I walked in and on the way in my phone said uh you know hello you're here um go wait over at the iPad table and we're standing there and and I'm just thinking why are you making us wait at the iPad table William have you just bought an iPad um and that that caused an interesting discussion given the expense of iPads compared to whatever it was I was picking up so that is using ey beacons and and beacons and I beacons specifically are a thing that no one has really adopted outside of Apple it was meant to be This brilliant idea that you could as a or put beacons around your store and direct people to new things going on in your store and also by the way be able to track where people are moving around your store which would help you optimize your store perhaps but they didn't really catch on very well the uh Apple uses them Apple uses them to great success right Apple uses them so you enter the store they can announce that you should open up the app they can direct you to the iPad table or like like you say you know I I always thought a great application for them was the rental car agency where uh you you oh here's your car turn left okay right you know you you you walk off off the airplane you're you're you're totally uh knackered from being on the airplane for 10 hours and you get to the retail the the rental car desk and you have to wait in line for the rental car desk and then you you sign all the paperwork saying yes you're responsible yes you'll pay for the extra insurance whatever and then they say yeah your your your car is in slot e27 right so you drag yourself back out of the rental car agency you look down the parking lot trying to find row e and then you have to try and find slot 20 all this put beacons on every car and just keep them in the car Power them off the the cigarette lighter adapter you know the power socket and use the phone to check out your car have it direct you with beacons to your car in the lot you don't even read a retail counter anymore basically end all of that in line going to do next I don't know Apple no very curious now she has just picked up a lot of stock she sold off Apple shares or some number of them in October I think and so made yeah several million dollars out of that I don't think she's rushing to the unemployment office yet but um she could well just nip in sort out car rental on her way home yeah she could do it yeah yeah I mean that um so she's she's got some cash not enough to buy neckar Island but she's got some cash basically is what we're saying yes very curious to know if she ever comes back to bbery cuz the company hasn't has done as well since she left but you know neither I'm sure there are other companies that want her so we'll have to see I mean it's it's kind of rare that you'd come back isn't it uh Steve Jobs may have done something like that you're right are there other examples it's hard to think of them there there are a few examples along the way people who've been entrepreneurs and you know founded a business and then sold the business and then bought it back and and relaunched it kind of thing that happens from time to time but it's hard to think of a worldwide fashion brand like like berbery bringing back a CEO it just doesn't seem to happen as much to me to be fair the only things I know about the fashion industry I know from having watch what Hance has done I think the now I think the similarities of Technology are just riveting uh but I don't know the history I I used I pay attention to New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week every year because you learn so much it's really enlightening you know and it affects everything because if if you look so every year out of those two fashion shows uh Pantone picks the colors of the fashion show and the colors of the year and that's where they came from yep and so Pantone lays those out and then if you look every other product that that launches uses that color palette and you go into you go into uh over here a Walmart or a Target or or anyone's retail for example and the color palette is exact actly the one that Pantone has laid out and that Pantone color palette comes from New York and London Fashion Week I just assume everybody knocked off New York and London Fashion Week frocks but this is a more scientific rout to it all of these things it it's all connected the interconnectedness it is it really is we should talk about some other news now obviously Angela's news is is very striking and and is going to be a huge impact on Apple but the the the D that's kind of an interesting choice I I'm kind of curious to see how that plays out I'm interested in the fact that I don't know what arance is going to do between now and April because the moment uh this change was announced UMB brien's title was officially changed on the on the Apple website even to be both so presumably there's going to be a Handover period uh between the two but you have the impression that O'Brien probably knows everything already because she's so well rooted in the company so when will we see the difference maybe but you know if if you've laid out your plans and your road map for what you're going to accomplish in the coming year and you've got your one-year road map and you've got your your longer term five-year Road mapap of where you think things go then you want to lay that out and talk through and see you know here here's why we're doing these plans here's the plans we've made so far here's the actions that that mean that in 5 years we're going to be able to deliver on the 5year plan by doing the working year one you need to talk through that and and you know lay out here's all the that everything is it's not just a simple short transition it's it's a longer term thing and of course deciding if those plans are the same although you presume they would be but you started to say not let us back into this what else is going on I did hear the word qualcom flirting around and I thought of you that's interesting because I wasn't even going to talk Qualcomm yet you want bring up Qualcomm go ahead and lay it out uh well I was actually waiting for you to be the expert on this because because I know you've been following the story but um Apple has W um what do you call it emotion uh to narrow the damages that Kum can possibly uh get from them um right that sounds pretty handy doesn't it sense well a little bit good I mean for Apple yeah maybe so basically a a US federal judge granted Apple this motion to limit the damages that Qualcomm can claim in the patent trial now what this comes down to is that Qualcomm one of the complaints against Qualcomm is that they force chip buyers to sign patent licenses at unfair rates and there there's also been a set of charges where where they've been um asking lenses to pay twice basically you know Apple manufactures something and the manufacturer has to pay the license fee and then Apple also has to pay the license fee because they're shipping the product kind of thing and so what this is is a a a basically ruling that says that um they won't be able to claim damages from before the suit was filed in 2017 they can only claim Dam damages from that point they can ALS they they also can't claim damages on all of the patents that they were suing over that one of the patents was rejected as being a part of this which was a pat connected to graphics and power consumption so this is is generally the same batch of patents that Qualcomm brought before the ITC hoping to win an import ban um Apple was found to have infringed on one patent the commission recommended against the ban so that we're still awaiting a final ruling on that that should come in March it's just sort of all coalescing right there there are these different suits around the world Germany China so forth and also the US there's the the International Trade Commission is involved as well as federal judges in ter at the the um in terms of the patent licensing issue and so we're just we're just seeing these things begin to come together you mean it could be over one day a legal case could end hey hey the the Samsung UI case took years but eventually ended I secretly wonder if we're going to hear news that they found a new way to appeal something either side don't care it just always seems I don't believe legal cases ever settle that's eventually they do no eventually they do and you know why they do right everybody gets tired uh John Dice and John dice kind of I me I mean lawyers lawyers get paid for the hours right they build the hours but at at some point all right judges don't want to see this forever you don't you don't want your career to be known as the judge who only oversaw this one case for her whole life right okay yes this stuff has to come to an end at some point and the judges are the ones who tell you when it's over right they make the ruling later judges and so suped so event well there are appeals but you eventually exhaust your appeals options okay and then judges tell you it's over there as well okay well and that's you can see end inight with qualcom yeah okay that's probably a good thing then it means everybody can get on with making things doesn't itle making now what's uh Qualcomm making Qualcomm makes processors they make graphics chips they make uh chipsets for cellular modems they are going to have some of the very first actual 5G not AT&T 5G nonsense chipsets so that you can actually have gigabit service to your phone under ideal conditions so Qualcomm is not some some Pretender here they they do actually make stuff okay and Apple's been known to turn a lathe every now and again as well so Apple has yet to make their own cellular modem now as we've talked about in the past Apple's hiring Engineers that indicate they might but they have they made practically everything else themselves already so it doesn't seem unlikely that they'll go that way yeah they didn't start out that way though right you know they they originally were using processors that were not that bespoke they just started out with a billion dollars and a song in their heart a dream in their hands they were using they were using cellular modems and then when around iPhone 4 happened they had to get qualcom because Qualcomm is the only one that owns CDMA technology they uh you know they were using uh the the power VR Graphics chip for a while and then they would made their own it it it's because Apple controls the operating system Apple can dictate what it runs on and so they can start out with things that are off the shelf and then as they grow and gain more knowledge and more hiring they can and more capabilities they can build their own chips So eventually we may see them make their own cellular modem but for the time being they're relying on on other parties what's interesting about this case is that it looks as if it may require other parties to be able to produce the kinds of things that Qualcomm has had a lock on so it opens that up you know if if intel and mediatech are also making competent modems that you use Qualcomm CDMA technology do they need to go and make their own and the answer is only if they're really dissatisfied with the performance of the competitor Parts okay but right this moment Apple isn't making them qu's arding C the only thing actually being made this week it seems to me a 230 emergy ah well so the here's Emoji is interesting right Emoji is interesting in in in a way because people use it to communicate and because there is a standards organization called Unicode that decides what goes into it officially and yes they decide what goes into it officially and then people get to different organizations render them slightly differently Microsoft's Emoji are not exactly the same as the the as Google's or the same as Apple in fact you know examples of that have been the emoji for the gun the firearm you know originally originally they all used somewhat realistic looking symbols that looked like a firearm and then Apple changed it to a science fiction ray gun like you'd be find in 1950s sci-fi and then eventually everyone else also changed it to that because Unicode doesn't specify what the icon actually has to absolutely look like they they specify what the icon is supposed to represent and where it is in the font table where it is you know numerically as a code so that when an Android User types ray gun that that you you get a ray gun on Apple or on Microsoft right when you get a a frowny face you want that frowny face to appear on all the platforms as opposed to someone else interpreting it as a smiley face just as when you type uh uppercase or lowercase a you get the character 65 sent to your screen and your screen does the rest yes right across platform Prett good number yeah yeah so uh I'm interested in that side and there was I think a very interesting 99% invisible uh documentary covering the uh somebody's aim to get a new Emoji in but I never use emojis so I'm not you are old thanks goodbye I mean that's that's why you don't use them is they have no appeal to you you you don't use them with anyone who also uses them and you would rather type what you intend to say as opposed to put up a symbol to represent it possibly being a writer might have factor in this but I see a point yes I'm uh aging even as we speak yes and and there are a number of people uh some of them who tend to be youths who will type with a symbol AS shorthand rather than writing something out and shockingly they may not even punctuate and now they're going to get another 230 ways to express themselves I suppose that's I mean there's there's a whole study of discourse in in texting versus speech or texting versus other forms of more formal writing and you know when I said that that sometimes people don't punctuate it's interesting because punctuation takes on different meaning in in different contexts when you use a period in a text message people will say why are you so angry and you're like what do you mean I just put a period at the end of my sentence well the finality of that implies anger I have never heard that before and the number of text messages I've sent with full stops in would be all of them ever right to everybody right but your audience is is less and less composed of let's say 13y olds or 15 year olds the people that you're texting so you're saying when I've offended somebody so much that they've never spoken to me again it isn't because what I told them to do it's because I put a full point at the end it's B okay I thought I had you know Verve in my writing but no I've just got punctuation okay God knows what would happen if I use a semic on somebody uh first of all no one knows what that does anyway right well you and I know but I mean it's it's a lesser used piece of punctuation would you agree yes I was actually once told by BBC worldwide that I should never use semicolons because people don't understand what they are I asked uh how this person who told me this was getting paid because I didn't understand that either um but he cared on getting paid and I cared on using them and the public survived somehow yeah semicolon William do you remember 1989 uh what were you doing in 1989 I was looking ahead 30 years to the future of podcasting with you and wishing it would come sooner what about you uh 1989 was was one of those formative years for me 1989 was incredible um are you able to tell us what you did or is it n you know person sorry I I really can't I'm afraid I can't even share that but well thanks for bringing it up then you're welcome but you know 1989 was was a year of of we were sort of on the cusp of big changes right that was that was the year I think Tim berner's Lee began work on what would become internet would become the worldwide web rather you know I I feel like that was a year when desktop publishing really began to become something into its own we we actually had power books show up at the school that we were using to make the school newspaper with along about 1990 you we were we were on the cusp of something big it was almost there and you know when we're talking about about software the software changes since then have been huge too right yes absolutely have they been used yes you know and there there are days where I feel like the software really hasn't come very far at all you know we're doing the same tasks we were doing back then and the computers are incredibly more powerful but the software takes up tremendous amounts of resources now we were doing the same stuff back then just as well for at least some of it but okay but you know do you feel like the software you're using is kind of stuck in the past sometimes where are you going asking you I'm asking you do you feel like your software is stuck in the past uh I thought be contrary here but no I think in some ways I am I'm I'm still typing um that's pretty much it all I do but I'm now doing it on machines that are a million times faster than they were in the 90s so if anything I'm wasting the new resources of software but I know this isn't where you wanted me to go so leave me down the path just a little bit further all right so there there there are times when I use software and it feels old and crufty and feels like I'm I'm trying to make something work that just hasn't gotten on with the future yet and what I realize is that it's hard to choose software it's hard to choose what application you're going to use there are some things you use because everyone uses them and they're the standard and you just must right it's it's the reason why I try and not use Microsoft Office but I'm occasionally forced into opening it because everyone does right but at the same time if you're trying to find a replacement for things it's it's or or a tool to do just the thing you need to do it could be hard to choose so capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real software users and you can discover everything you need to make an informed decision that's that's a big deal because it's hard to know you you start searching for softare and you may find two or three applications and you're like well how do I know which ones in the time that we have left I want to talk about a couple of news it a couple things that I think are important disc and we sort of talked about this last week we were talking about responsible to even yog Studio soft Sugg no matter what kind of software your businesss easy to discover fastic fantastic readers um visit capa.com appleinsider for free today day to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider capter that's c a p t a.com slapple Insider so I was talking with one of our our re listeners uh AEL demos and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly and and ael's very smart and AEL is concerned about information security and and specifically where we're talking about but bugs that crop up security failings and responsible disclosure so for example there was a bug a uh security problem that was discovered in the Mac OS keychain now this was discovered by lenus henza which I also hope I'm pronouncing correctly now lenus is a veteran security researcher and he revealed the existence of this Mac OS keychain exploit but he said and somewhat controversially that he's not going to share the details with apple because of Apple's bug Bounty policies now a bug Bounty is where you report a bug and in exchange for reporting a bug they offer to pay you for the bug because bugs have value you know if if you don't sell the bug to the company or or get some reward for giving it to the company there are tons of Nefarious people online who will happily buy the bug and then exploited to the the uh detriment of all of your users so apple has a bug Bounty program but Apple's always paid a little less than everyone else and Apple has always had it very limited for what will qualify for it versus what won't now there's a demo application that that henza made called key steel and it's able to extract login and system passwords from the keychain without having any administrative Privileges and this is regardless of whether the system Integrity protection or Access Control lists are configured system Integrity protection was introduced a couple of releases of Mac OS ago and basically what it does is is it prevents system files from being modified and upon reboot restores them to a known good version and this is through cryptographic signing and and monitoring changes and things like that it basically means that you can be mostly sure that your Mac OS system is as it should be as it was shipped by Apple and not modified by someone outside or nefarious but keychain is is a big deal keychain traditionally has always been a part of Mac OS uh 10 and it stored your your login information for your your user account it stored your administrator password it stores Network passwords it stores uh all kinds of things and with the the addition of iCloud keychain Safari starts storing passwords in it as well now this is not an iCloud keychain bug this is a Mac OS keychain bug so you can go ahead and and extract passwords but you have to have this application running on the Mac that you're trying to extract them fun which means that it's uh you know it's not necessarily a remote hack but if you were an nefar person and built this thing then you could obviously convince someone social engineer them to install it on their Mac and then have it send passwords back over the network so there there is a real problem here but it doesn't affect your iOS devices or your iCloud keychain per se now hen's disagreement here stems from the fact that Apple's bug Bounty program only covers iOS it doesn't cover Mac OS and it's uh that that's a problem because it's a places maess at a disadvantage now you could say that's an oversight but that's where things stand now even within the iOS sphere like I said Apple has been criticized as being stingy you know they pay less than what third party firms offer um and and this isn't small money this is uh things like $2 million for a remote persistent zeroc click IOS Jailbreak and the most Apple will pay is 200,000 which you know you can see why why a re researcher would say that's questionable now researchers who are doing this are Independents and they tend to be working for themselves and that means that they become dependent upon these bug bounties paying out and so you know if you were just going to sustain yourself on that now 200,000 is a nice number but as I said before that only applies to iOS bugs and they have to be persistent remote and zero click now this keychain bug for Mac OS you could say that it's persistent you could say that it is um but it's not exactly zero click in the demo app that he's written although it certainly could be if it were written to be like that um and it's not remote at this time again although it could be so it's it's uh an interesting problem I I think that my hope is that Apple will revisit these policies because it's it's a very difficult situation when you have an independent researcher who's demonstrated the bug so you know that it's theoretical and or that it's even practical in that limited context of the demo and yet has not CH been been um convinced to disclose it you know last week we were talking about responsible disclosure and how the the parent of the 14-year-old worked so hard with apple to try and figure out how to disclose a bug and it was as if Apple wasn't really hearing it or making it easy for them to do it here the this person knows how to do responsible disclosure knows the Avenues to report it but has chosen not to because because it's it's um not attractive to them to do so based on the way Apple behaves there are people that think that this kind of thing should be done out of the goodness of their hearts but if you are trying to you know earn a living or or make it practical to keep researching then it seems that Apple should be willing to pay something for this kind of thing especially since it affects one of their core products and that is not the only security thing that I wanted to talk about today in addition to that you know separate but in the same vein right there are popular iOS apps that use something called glassbox STK to record user screens without permission now now why would you want to record someone's user screen on their iPhone there are a lot of good reasons if you've written an application and you want to see where people struggle with your interface if you want to see what people are using most about your app then this is a way of equipping your app so that it can go ahead and send back those screens and replay the session of people using it so that you can sort of understand what those interactions were like from a user interface standpoint it's actually really smart because it says that that you're paying attention to what your users are doing most and what they're trying to accomplish most and then you can go ahead and change your app to make those interactions easier now this is according to an investigation conducted by TechCrunch the analytics from glassbox and other companies like it allow customers to embed session replay technology into their respective applications so far so good these tools capture screenshots and user interactions including on-screen Taps and in some cases keyboard entry which are then sent back to app developers or glassbox servers for further examination now this is not the same kind of thing it's not as polished as the screen recording function that's built into iOS 12 but it effect it effectively screenshots an apps user interface at Key moments to determine whether its functioning is designed and because it can do that you can sort of Recon instruct the mobile application view in a visual format and technically glassbox so glassbox told TechCrunch that glassbox SDK can interact with the native application that it's bundled into and it can't break out the boundary of that app so it can't leave that app and get information from some other app so it's sandboxed and firewalled off in that way when a keyboard appears over the native app glass boox doesn't have access to it they said but if they're screenshotting then then you sort of think they could now glassbox customers include people like abber croman Fitch and Hollister hotels.com Expedia Air Canada Singapore Airlines monitoring users is nothing new monitoring users to to try and do this sort of interface research is nothing new but the problem comes when mishandling of session replays leads to sensitive information being exposed for example if you were trying to use the a Canada app Air Canada's app sent session replay data containing exposed passport and credit card numbers which could be a problem because some companies opt to send the app data directly to glassbox cloud and not to their own servers and and also you know you're trusting with that information in terms of your session for purchasing of of flights but do you really want that data living on long after that that flight's been purchased and furthermore you know if you tried to man in the middle attack it which is to say that you tried to intercept the traffic before it got to its destination uh you you'd find that most of the data that glass boox was transmitting was obfuscated although some screenshots contained unmasked email and postcodes so abomi and Fitch Hollister Singapore Airlines pass station replay directly onto glassbox while hotels.com and Expedia silid the by data and really only send it to their own domains now none of these apps privacy Poli policies make it clear that that's what glassbox is doing or that there's glassbox technology inside these apps that's being used to record their screens with companies that are not opting to include mention of user monitoring in Apple's mandated disclosures and glass boox itself lacking requirements on its own people are pretty much unaware that their actions are being so so observed so this is something to take into account right iOS is is fine iOS is secure but these apps are are leaking information and and sometimes with good reason and sometimes doing it ham-handed so it's it's not clear what's going to come out of this it's not clear if Apple's going to make a longer review process or going to start searching for this within apps or if people should monitor their own traffic with their you know network analysis and see where their stuff's being sent which is a little bit unlikely because you know who's actually going to do that in practice you know I I can do setup wire shark I can set up things like that to try and monitor it but on the whole it's generally something that doesn't happen the the the the thing is is that if we look back historically right the first the first so-called App Store was Steve Jobs telling us that we didn't need native apps for iPhone that we should just use the web and that web apps were the future and that wouldn't have necessarily prevented this because there are websites that completely spy on session data as well but it it would have been well maybe not that different than having these apps except that it wouldn't have been something that stayed resident on your phone it would have been something that wipes out from time to time which is not bad so that's another thing that you should be aware of be concerned about a little bit now Apple years ago iOS 7 introduced support for a feature called do not track that feature has just been removed in the 12.1 version of safari and basically DNT is a signal that is sent or do not track is a signal that sent to websites analy firms plug-in makers and AD networks and it's a request to not track the user and the problem with do not track is that it it was never actually complied with that that you could make that requ EST but there was no penalty if the organization at the other end failed to honor your request um even though as many as like 20% of people using the internet just want to be left alone and really don't want to be tracked the the private by Design search company that's Duck Duck Go um they they say that the voluntary nature of do not track makes it not foolproof at all makes it about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says please don't look in my house while all of your blinds are open uh but but there are a huge chunk of people who use do not track that are unaware that it's voluntary and have no idea that the request isn't being honored people that do honor do not track requests um tend to be medium Pinterest and Reddit Google Facebook and Twitter uh surprisingly do not honor do not track and I say surprisingly a little bit ironically you know you You' expect that Google whose business is based on indexing people's information is built around tracking right uh Facebook wants to know everything they can possibly know Facebook is going to not honor do not track Twitter does not honor do not track but medium Pinterest and Reddit do which kind of suggests that there are ways to form a business online that don't require tracking now what what should you do if you want to avoid being tracked as much right you should consider changing to Duck Duck Go as your brow browser or you could use the duck. go privacy browser you could switch your search engine to duck duo in Safari on mobile or Safari on web uh you could use a VPN service and there are VPN services that are reputable there are VPN Services where you're tunneling to an endpoint at the VPN service or if you really uh interested you could set up a VPN to your home in network network and and do that um although that would not get you free from tracking it would get you going through your home internet provider and being tracked there as opposed to being tracked through whatever mobile mob service you use when you're out in the world you can turn on prevent cross tracking and that's that's really it turning off thirdparty cookies which will cause functions and services to stop working now apple apple explained in their note that they're going to abandon DNT but they are are working on trying to make it so that Safari includes other privacy measures so they they've introduced new controls to prevent VR and AR app sets on websites from tracking user Behavior they've got intelligent tracking prevention to try and prevent long-term tracking and Safari user is going to be warned when visiting sites that don't have SSN enabled it's also going to warn users when you try and visit sites that are flagged as fishing or malicious sites and Safari will now log people into sites automatically when the password autofill function fills in the credentials on the site so trying to do these things is is Apple working to try and help you maintain PR privacy because what we found is that voluntary Solutions like do not track just don't work that's all the time for we have that's all the time we have today we'll meet you back next week right here on the Apple Insider podcast well and that also brings us to the conclusion of the show thank you so much for joining us this week I and my good friend William WR for Apple insider.com I'm Victor at Apple Insider he's William at Apple Insider and and what's your Twitter William people should go bug you on Twitter uh my Twitter is uh smiley face fridg magnet rean at Twitter or W gallaga oh my goodness why did I pick fridge magnets I'm I'm trying to think about right and my Twitter is whiskey cheeseburger no I'm I'm at V marks on Twitter and we like hearing from you we're so happy you listen to joined us for this week we'll be back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is that friend to all mankind that good spirit that good Soul William Gallagher you should probably write these down beforehand it's that little hesitation as you try to find something now always scares me but do you not like them are you not are you not happy are you displeased so far happy but it's always have I disappointed you in some way William no you just scared me that's all but you know you're not going to change I can tell so um 10 seconds ago before we started recording you were saying that you had been heads down on the angel Aaron story and I said well so what's the angel and Aon story and you said well it's been 5 years and it's her decision and I I said to you what on Earth are you talking about man you buried the lead so tell me the story here from the beginning you mean the world does not know that Angela erant senior vice president of retailer of Apple is no longer senior vice president of Apple at retail officially she's leaving in April but she's already been replaced by uh dri Brien effective immediately so wait wait wait back up back up back up so there there are a couple of things here that I need to ask you because this is this has just taken me by surprise as I'm sure it took you by surprise yeah it's funny actually you don't I think the fact is you don't get very many big uh moves at Apple uh we had you like the the head of Siri being pushed around recently but you don't get uh Craig federi leaving you don't get Angela arens leaving I thought there there's some occasional reshuffling right some days Phil is in charge of the App Store some days Eddie Q is in charge of the App Store but Phil and Eddie are Main Stays right they haven't gone anywhere it's a solid team it's been going for a long time with really good I believe really good people in it so a major move uh it's quite eye popping um whoever it is so I mean retail has been one of those areas where we had Ron Johnson who was good and then we had and then we had although Ron Johnson was working alongside Steve and so the Steve and Ron Johnson combination was very strong and very good and of course Johnson had had success at Target previous to coming to Apple and he didn't quite follow that on his well at JC Penney but but never mind that uh JC Penney was their own story and of course they're admired in their own closings of stores and stuff right now now indeed then we had John Brown from Dixons John brow wasn't it yes John brow right I would know that name better than you after RN Johnson then we had John brow who was was a first class nons okay that seems harsh it certainly TR say he was unsuccessful is that more polite is that is that more acceptable in polite company to say it is also I don't know the details of it I just I was kind of against him uh when he started because he was head of Dixons which was a UK store very well known for poor customer service so him being hired as head of retail he kind of came pre-loaded with some baggage for me and I don't know the details of what he did I just know he didn't do it for very long so really I mean he had nine months in the job so really head of Apple retail it was uh uh the Ron and Steve show there was this caretaker bit in the Middle where Tim Cook uh took over from brow for a while and then there's been Angela aons and of important jobs in apple head of all of the stores including the online one it's gigantic so I move here is is massive it is now now brow it didn't last very long because it's very clear when you get to Apple if you're going to be effective or not and if you align with what they intend to have happen or not and and of course he came from Dixons and Dixons has a history of epic proportions of poor customer service especially post sale customer service which is what Apple prided themselves on and both both pre-sale and postale customer service and you know the retail stores were a place where you could go and have a genius help you through things or where the steps of service weren't designed to push you to sell they were designed to help you find the right solution for you that you could then consider about buying yeah I've told you this before I was in an Apple Store once looking for a particular cable I think it was to do a certain job and the Apple Genius said no yes you could buy this one uh but it's very expensive and for what you need uh you can get cheaper over there pointed through the store window at um whatever electronic store was opposite so they lost the sale that day but of course I came back and bought a Mac from them so in the end that service WIS out right and it's it's you know they they have steps of service that they used to teach people in the stores and I'm sure they still do although they changed since I knew them and they were things like you know you need to approach the customer you need to probe what their need needs are you need to listen and then you need to to sort of evaluate has has the solution that I presented been the solution that you were actually looking for does it sound like I heard your needs and presented the right thing and if you do those those kinds of things in store it's way better than directing you to sell the thing that the store wants to sell and and that's what Apple always succeeded at was was selling the thing that you really needed to buy that you really needed to solve your problem and under brow it they slashed post sale customer service to the point where it was difficult to get um any sort of of generosity or any sort of of you know yes you're two days out of your Apple care warranty but we understand that failures happen and that's so close like that we'll just go ahead and replace it on a manager say so kind of thing and that still happens a little bit these days but it's a lot more difficult and that's John brow's Legacy is making things harder for the consumer and that's the Legacy that you're saying Andel arens didn't uh supersede well it never it never Rose to her level of awareness that that there was even a problem you know had had brow not been there historically and we'd gone straight to Angela erand then I expect those policies would have probably continued and it would have been glorious but it it was it's never just brought to her attention that these things and changes have been made you know some people when they come make presumption uh we don't know what she was told or or what she looked for uh but uh she didn't appear to act on them yes I see your point so let's talk about things that she did act on for a moment obviously there have been sweeping changes you know we we originally didn't have these sorts we we you early early on in the very beginning of the stores there was the store theater and there were some educational days but that went away for a while the theater has disappeared from the stores during remodels and so forth and now we have today at Apple we went from having very little in the way of Education during the Braun John brow period to having a lot of Education now and not just education but sort of gathering and cultural you know informing each other yes okay that makes sense what other kinds of changes do you think we've seen in the in the stores that you would highlight wow see the thing I'm interested in is I I I think uh um uh when he came from Dixons your man just wanted to make a big splash and be seen for it whereas when aens came from bbery she was more concerned of the longer term thing so her biggest moves I think we'll never see they were all uh in in house internal stuff I think she's improved Apple's systems and she's also then brought forward uh today at Apple and overseen many more uh store launches and revamps and things but I I think she's more um uh skeletal change she's set them up very well for the future is how it seems to me so I think that's quite good really little bit there yes yes and you know there there were some other changes here I'm trying to think of them for a moment this just because there's there's so much going on right it's um I got to say I am very interested I mean I'm interested in Angel AR because she's a really interesting person but I'm also I think her position at Apple is fascinating so in a way my interest is kind of immediately transferred to dri O'Brien who has this uh amazing history at Apple that actually very few people know anything about she's been there three decades but uh she isn't um really referred to much in history she's been part of Apple manufacturing uh I think there's a piece of Fortune Magazine talks about how she was very good on uh demand um predictions things like this but uh for somebody uh compared to Aaron she has a very low profile and I think that's terribly interesting we'll see what will come of I I I think I think what I would say is that so 30 years is 1989 now 1999 was was after Steve Jobs left and was working on next and before his return in 97 when they immediately had to work on both reinvigorating people creating the culture that Apple would become again and making the hard transition from System 7 to system 8 and the Motorola processors to power PC processors well also okay so the 6800 Pro 68,000 processors to the the power PC processors there a huge number of transitions that had to take place and that was a time period where a lot of people sort of fell into the old Apple and and went by the wayside and got dismissed or went somewhere else and the new Apple that became successful and it's amazing that she made that transition to the new Apple and made it so strong WR L that she's been here all this time you know it was one of those time periods when Johnny I was tempted to leave Apple even so making it through that transition is a big deal now I was I was going back to thinking about some of the changes at at retail under the RN so Angel improved the infrastructure of Apple retail there was before online and Retail were separate and now they're unified you know when you you used to have a large number of things that were carried online that were not carryed in retail and that that's still somewhat true but they used to have separate buyers for them for example all right now I didn't realize that because I just I read a interview just a few days actually ago she an interview with Vogue business about um you the future of retail and one thing she mentioned was that I thought she was talking about companies other than Apple there this idea that you might have a store and then people go and buy online you don't see that as a failure of the store you see the two working together it's still a sale to the company um but you're saying that's actually a direct uh part of her having bought these things together that's oh absolutely so in let's say 2010 2011 there were different people in buying roles at Apple there were there were people that were buyers for online and there were separately positions that were buyers for the inore physical retail store mind you they're just selling Apple gear aren't they so buying no no no no no no no you're making a mistake when you think about that they're selling all of the accessories from all of the third parties so okay the the hersel bags the STM bags for laptop bags all of the Balon accessories and adapters that are along the wall all of the uh all of the iot devices now that are there that are home compatible all of the third party cases that that were there for so many years um all of these things have to get selected by a retail buyer or by the online buyer or in this case now uni ified buyer and get chosen to be brought into the store and there was a large number of things that Apple doesn't make that are sold in Apple Apple Stores both online and Retail and like I said before those were separate and now they're unified now they used to work together right you'd go in for a meeting at Apple and you'd go for a buyer meeting and you'd meet with two people the retail and the online but they wouldn't necessarily agree on what they were taking okay so I see in retrospect it's I mean sure it got that way through logical progression and things but in R it does sound Daft um so there you go she came in and unded apple I like it that's a nice job to well I mean it's it's not exactly daed right it's if you think about things if you're focused on your your online sales and you put one person in charge of it because it's big enough that it needs to have one person managing it or in that case a couple of people CU there was always the assistance to the buyers as well and you know they're looking at their numbers and and projections on and forecasting on what they think will sell and what they think things will sell like and you know if if you're go ahead and unifying that technically you're really just shuffling and turning the other buyer into sort of an assistant and and having the one final say on it but really they were big enough that it made sense to have it divided and it made sense that there were things that you would sell online in number that you may not sell in enough numbers to put in stores what was also daed was that worldwide was different so the way it would work is you would have not just your online buyer and your retail buyer for the US for example you'd also have them for the UK and they'd be separate people and for Australia and they'd be separate people and for the Far East Japan and China and so forth they'd be separate people and you know you could not you could technically go and get a meeting with the UK buyer and try and get into Apple UK but really what they wanted to do was be aligned with what the US was doing and so you really needed to go and get a meeting with the US and if you could get into the US than it meant you could go worldwide forgive me this is a side point but just saying it exactly that way reminded me I once interviewed somebody at Microsoft UK and he acted like he ruled the world and a personally invented Excel and for some reason the fact that he was just in the UK and really tickled me about it but there you another Point uh speaking of split roles there what do you think about the fact that um digri O'Brien continues to be uh Apple's vice president of uh people and is now retail plus people and I mean specifically plus the plus symbol not the end uh is that they couldn't find somebody to replace arant directly or is it a logical extension of a Brian's role well you know if you were writing the marketing copy around this announcement you might say something or or the PR Company around this announcement you might say something like the core of apple has always been the people right right yes and yes especially in the customer facing role where our retail stores are our direct connection with people our people in retail are are so important and so critical so it makes sense to have one person in charge of retail in charge of today at Apple in in charge of all of these ways that they relate and interact with people but as you're not uh writing the pr copy what by the way I'm available for hire if someone but uh no yeah it's it's um I I think that you know there there are common things that people do that are are what we call Human Resources right and Human Resources tends to be making sure that that employees are up to Snuff or performing well that people are meeting their goals or targets that people are meeting the company's goals and targets that the um that that in terms of having the right mix of people is a good thing and also making sure that you know Apple has enough in terms of benefits and compensation to make it attractive enough to keep people the good people there and and you know hiring and and this minutia like seasonal hiring right Christmas sales coming up make sure you have people on hand kind of thing and Apple has mastered those things for the most part so you know the question is is is J O'Brien also head of people for all of corporate Apple which seems like a big role to be taking on as well as retail I believe she is yes which means I mean I don't dadg her in any way and I'm looking forward to what she does I'm just curious because stereotypically um HR people tend to be very different from sales related people just in the corporations I've worked with so you know you you got to be certain that she's uh incredibly well informed at Apple and they wouldn't use her if she wasn't right for sales but it's an interesting mix and just makes me even more interested in her well yeah it it is interesting um but the way that Apple does sales is not exactly the way everyone else does sales there's a reason why there are no great Gateway 2000 retail stores anymore right yes yes you know there's there's the the the one thing that Apple does have to worry about is um their ability to hire and their ability to retain and at the same time what it means to maintain the corporate culture that they want to have and you know that's part of what Apple University was for but with every person that you add especially in a key role you are changing what the culture can be and so it it takes yeah and it takes that kind of effort to make sure that that things stay on the same track but I would say that aens moved the ball in a lot of ways that that you know the the we we used to have these massive lineups right I I remember like I said last episode waiting in at 3:00 a.m. for an iPad in 2010 and now no one does that because pre-orders are mostly kind of functional it's it really bad of me to say I quite miss the queuing up I only did it a couple of times to see what it was like but it was fun well it was a different era for Apple too let's let's think back and say that you know in in those days in in queuing up for iPhones for example 2007 yeah apple was profitable based off of the iPod but there was still very much a kind of cult feeling if you were into Apple stuff you were you were a little unique you were a little special at that point and that um it's not the same at all now that the uh you know the the iPhone is so widespread Apple stuff is so widespread that there is no real need to be to to have that camaraderie from lineups well so I I'm still special but in other ways I see your point okay um and with the sheer increase in volumes that Apple's gone through over her period Then yes that all seems inevitable um I could be Mis the figures here but I have a feeling I read her saying recently that when she was at berbery the London based Fashion retail that she was CEO of there was something like 11,000 employees overseas and then it's 70,000 uh at Apple in the stores and things and actually 70,000 was a bit low I think of it but uh that massive difference and what you said about you've been in an Apple retail store right and had trouble getting weighted on yeah uh yes 7,000 Birmingham uh fine at Apple Su hole just to credit the two local ones near me yes so no you go in you sort of fight for for someone to be able to pay attention to you to to get what you need of course that's part of what makes the um going and using the app store app and just checking yourself out if you're not buying something that's high dollar or has a unique serial code on it a good recently where I cannot remember what it is I went in to buy and I'd ordered it in the line I was picking up and anre and I walked in and on the way in my phone said uh you know hello you're here um go wait over at the iPad table and we're standing there and and I'm just thinking why are you making us wait at the iPad table William have you just bought an iPad um and that that caused an interesting discussion given the expense of iPads compared to whatever it was I was picking up so that is using ey beacons and and beacons and I beacons specifically are a thing that no one has really adopted outside of Apple it was meant to be This brilliant idea that you could as a or put beacons around your store and direct people to new things going on in your store and also by the way be able to track where people are moving around your store which would help you optimize your store perhaps but they didn't really catch on very well the uh Apple uses them Apple uses them to great success right Apple uses them so you enter the store they can announce that you should open up the app they can direct you to the iPad table or like like you say you know I I always thought a great application for them was the rental car agency where uh you you oh here's your car turn left okay right you know you you you walk off off the airplane you're you're you're totally uh knackered from being on the airplane for 10 hours and you get to the retail the the rental car desk and you have to wait in line for the rental car desk and then you you sign all the paperwork saying yes you're responsible yes you'll pay for the extra insurance whatever and then they say yeah your your your car is in slot e27 right so you drag yourself back out of the rental car agency you look down the parking lot trying to find row e and then you have to try and find slot 20 all this put beacons on every car and just keep them in the car Power them off the the cigarette lighter adapter you know the power socket and use the phone to check out your car have it direct you with beacons to your car in the lot you don't even read a retail counter anymore basically end all of that in line going to do next I don't know Apple no very curious now she has just picked up a lot of stock she sold off Apple shares or some number of them in October I think and so made yeah several million dollars out of that I don't think she's rushing to the unemployment office yet but um she could well just nip in sort out car rental on her way home yeah she could do it yeah yeah I mean that um so she's she's got some cash not enough to buy neckar Island but she's got some cash basically is what we're saying yes very curious to know if she ever comes back to bbery cuz the company hasn't has done as well since she left but you know neither I'm sure there are other companies that want her so we'll have to see I mean it's it's kind of rare that you'd come back isn't it uh Steve Jobs may have done something like that you're right are there other examples it's hard to think of them there there are a few examples along the way people who've been entrepreneurs and you know founded a business and then sold the business and then bought it back and and relaunched it kind of thing that happens from time to time but it's hard to think of a worldwide fashion brand like like berbery bringing back a CEO it just doesn't seem to happen as much to me to be fair the only things I know about the fashion industry I know from having watch what Hance has done I think the now I think the similarities of Technology are just riveting uh but I don't know the history I I used I pay attention to New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week every year because you learn so much it's really enlightening you know and it affects everything because if if you look so every year out of those two fashion shows uh Pantone picks the colors of the fashion show and the colors of the year and that's where they came from yep and so Pantone lays those out and then if you look every other product that that launches uses that color palette and you go into you go into uh over here a Walmart or a Target or or anyone's retail for example and the color palette is exact actly the one that Pantone has laid out and that Pantone color palette comes from New York and London Fashion Week I just assume everybody knocked off New York and London Fashion Week frocks but this is a more scientific rout to it all of these things it it's all connected the interconnectedness it is it really is we should talk about some other news now obviously Angela's news is is very striking and and is going to be a huge impact on Apple but the the the D that's kind of an interesting choice I I'm kind of curious to see how that plays out I'm interested in the fact that I don't know what arance is going to do between now and April because the moment uh this change was announced UMB brien's title was officially changed on the on the Apple website even to be both so presumably there's going to be a Handover period uh between the two but you have the impression that O'Brien probably knows everything already because she's so well rooted in the company so when will we see the difference maybe but you know if if you've laid out your plans and your road map for what you're going to accomplish in the coming year and you've got your one-year road map and you've got your your longer term five-year Road mapap of where you think things go then you want to lay that out and talk through and see you know here here's why we're doing these plans here's the plans we've made so far here's the actions that that mean that in 5 years we're going to be able to deliver on the 5year plan by doing the working year one you need to talk through that and and you know lay out here's all the that everything is it's not just a simple short transition it's it's a longer term thing and of course deciding if those plans are the same although you presume they would be but you started to say not let us back into this what else is going on I did hear the word qualcom flirting around and I thought of you that's interesting because I wasn't even going to talk Qualcomm yet you want bring up Qualcomm go ahead and lay it out uh well I was actually waiting for you to be the expert on this because because I know you've been following the story but um Apple has W um what do you call it emotion uh to narrow the damages that Kum can possibly uh get from them um right that sounds pretty handy doesn't it sense well a little bit good I mean for Apple yeah maybe so basically a a US federal judge granted Apple this motion to limit the damages that Qualcomm can claim in the patent trial now what this comes down to is that Qualcomm one of the complaints against Qualcomm is that they force chip buyers to sign patent licenses at unfair rates and there there's also been a set of charges where where they've been um asking lenses to pay twice basically you know Apple manufactures something and the manufacturer has to pay the license fee and then Apple also has to pay the license fee because they're shipping the product kind of thing and so what this is is a a a basically ruling that says that um they won't be able to claim damages from before the suit was filed in 2017 they can only claim Dam damages from that point they can ALS they they also can't claim damages on all of the patents that they were suing over that one of the patents was rejected as being a part of this which was a pat connected to graphics and power consumption so this is is generally the same batch of patents that Qualcomm brought before the ITC hoping to win an import ban um Apple was found to have infringed on one patent the commission recommended against the ban so that we're still awaiting a final ruling on that that should come in March it's just sort of all coalescing right there there are these different suits around the world Germany China so forth and also the US there's the the International Trade Commission is involved as well as federal judges in ter at the the um in terms of the patent licensing issue and so we're just we're just seeing these things begin to come together you mean it could be over one day a legal case could end hey hey the the Samsung UI case took years but eventually ended I secretly wonder if we're going to hear news that they found a new way to appeal something either side don't care it just always seems I don't believe legal cases ever settle that's eventually they do no eventually they do and you know why they do right everybody gets tired uh John Dice and John dice kind of I me I mean lawyers lawyers get paid for the hours right they build the hours but at at some point all right judges don't want to see this forever you don't you don't want your career to be known as the judge who only oversaw this one case for her whole life right okay yes this stuff has to come to an end at some point and the judges are the ones who tell you when it's over right they make the ruling later judges and so suped so event well there are appeals but you eventually exhaust your appeals options okay and then judges tell you it's over there as well okay well and that's you can see end inight with qualcom yeah okay that's probably a good thing then it means everybody can get on with making things doesn't itle making now what's uh Qualcomm making Qualcomm makes processors they make graphics chips they make uh chipsets for cellular modems they are going to have some of the very first actual 5G not AT&T 5G nonsense chipsets so that you can actually have gigabit service to your phone under ideal conditions so Qualcomm is not some some Pretender here they they do actually make stuff okay and Apple's been known to turn a lathe every now and again as well so Apple has yet to make their own cellular modem now as we've talked about in the past Apple's hiring Engineers that indicate they might but they have they made practically everything else themselves already so it doesn't seem unlikely that they'll go that way yeah they didn't start out that way though right you know they they originally were using processors that were not that bespoke they just started out with a billion dollars and a song in their heart a dream in their hands they were using they were using cellular modems and then when around iPhone 4 happened they had to get qualcom because Qualcomm is the only one that owns CDMA technology they uh you know they were using uh the the power VR Graphics chip for a while and then they would made their own it it it's because Apple controls the operating system Apple can dictate what it runs on and so they can start out with things that are off the shelf and then as they grow and gain more knowledge and more hiring they can and more capabilities they can build their own chips So eventually we may see them make their own cellular modem but for the time being they're relying on on other parties what's interesting about this case is that it looks as if it may require other parties to be able to produce the kinds of things that Qualcomm has had a lock on so it opens that up you know if if intel and mediatech are also making competent modems that you use Qualcomm CDMA technology do they need to go and make their own and the answer is only if they're really dissatisfied with the performance of the competitor Parts okay but right this moment Apple isn't making them qu's arding C the only thing actually being made this week it seems to me a 230 emergy ah well so the here's Emoji is interesting right Emoji is interesting in in in a way because people use it to communicate and because there is a standards organization called Unicode that decides what goes into it officially and yes they decide what goes into it officially and then people get to different organizations render them slightly differently Microsoft's Emoji are not exactly the same as the the as Google's or the same as Apple in fact you know examples of that have been the emoji for the gun the firearm you know originally originally they all used somewhat realistic looking symbols that looked like a firearm and then Apple changed it to a science fiction ray gun like you'd be find in 1950s sci-fi and then eventually everyone else also changed it to that because Unicode doesn't specify what the icon actually has to absolutely look like they they specify what the icon is supposed to represent and where it is in the font table where it is you know numerically as a code so that when an Android User types ray gun that that you you get a ray gun on Apple or on Microsoft right when you get a a frowny face you want that frowny face to appear on all the platforms as opposed to someone else interpreting it as a smiley face just as when you type uh uppercase or lowercase a you get the character 65 sent to your screen and your screen does the rest yes right across platform Prett good number yeah yeah so uh I'm interested in that side and there was I think a very interesting 99% invisible uh documentary covering the uh somebody's aim to get a new Emoji in but I never use emojis so I'm not you are old thanks goodbye I mean that's that's why you don't use them is they have no appeal to you you you don't use them with anyone who also uses them and you would rather type what you intend to say as opposed to put up a symbol to represent it possibly being a writer might have factor in this but I see a point yes I'm uh aging even as we speak yes and and there are a number of people uh some of them who tend to be youths who will type with a symbol AS shorthand rather than writing something out and shockingly they may not even punctuate and now they're going to get another 230 ways to express themselves I suppose that's I mean there's there's a whole study of discourse in in texting versus speech or texting versus other forms of more formal writing and you know when I said that that sometimes people don't punctuate it's interesting because punctuation takes on different meaning in in different contexts when you use a period in a text message people will say why are you so angry and you're like what do you mean I just put a period at the end of my sentence well the finality of that implies anger I have never heard that before and the number of text messages I've sent with full stops in would be all of them ever right to everybody right but your audience is is less and less composed of let's say 13y olds or 15 year olds the people that you're texting so you're saying when I've offended somebody so much that they've never spoken to me again it isn't because what I told them to do it's because I put a full point at the end it's B okay I thought I had you know Verve in my writing but no I've just got punctuation okay God knows what would happen if I use a semic on somebody uh first of all no one knows what that does anyway right well you and I know but I mean it's it's a lesser used piece of punctuation would you agree yes I was actually once told by BBC worldwide that I should never use semicolons because people don't understand what they are I asked uh how this person who told me this was getting paid because I didn't understand that either um but he cared on getting paid and I cared on using them and the public survived somehow yeah semicolon William do you remember 1989 uh what were you doing in 1989 I was looking ahead 30 years to the future of podcasting with you and wishing it would come sooner what about you uh 1989 was was one of those formative years for me 1989 was incredible um are you able to tell us what you did or is it n you know person sorry I I really can't I'm afraid I can't even share that but well thanks for bringing it up then you're welcome but you know 1989 was was a year of of we were sort of on the cusp of big changes right that was that was the year I think Tim berner's Lee began work on what would become internet would become the worldwide web rather you know I I feel like that was a year when desktop publishing really began to become something into its own we we actually had power books show up at the school that we were using to make the school newspaper with along about 1990 you we were we were on the cusp of something big it was almost there and you know when we're talking about about software the software changes since then have been huge too right yes absolutely have they been used yes you know and there there are days where I feel like the software really hasn't come very far at all you know we're doing the same tasks we were doing back then and the computers are incredibly more powerful but the software takes up tremendous amounts of resources now we were doing the same stuff back then just as well for at least some of it but okay but you know do you feel like the software you're using is kind of stuck in the past sometimes where are you going asking you I'm asking you do you feel like your software is stuck in the past uh I thought be contrary here but no I think in some ways I am I'm I'm still typing um that's pretty much it all I do but I'm now doing it on machines that are a million times faster than they were in the 90s so if anything I'm wasting the new resources of software but I know this isn't where you wanted me to go so leave me down the path just a little bit further all right so there there there are times when I use software and it feels old and crufty and feels like I'm I'm trying to make something work that just hasn't gotten on with the future yet and what I realize is that it's hard to choose software it's hard to choose what application you're going to use there are some things you use because everyone uses them and they're the standard and you just must right it's it's the reason why I try and not use Microsoft Office but I'm occasionally forced into opening it because everyone does right but at the same time if you're trying to find a replacement for things it's it's or or a tool to do just the thing you need to do it could be hard to choose so capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real software users and you can discover everything you need to make an informed decision that's that's a big deal because it's hard to know you you start searching for softare and you may find two or three applications and you're like well how do I know which ones in the time that we have left I want to talk about a couple of news it a couple things that I think are important disc and we sort of talked about this last week we were talking about responsible to even yog Studio soft Sugg no matter what kind of software your businesss easy to discover fastic fantastic readers um visit capa.com appleinsider for free today day to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider capter that's c a p t a.com slapple Insider so I was talking with one of our our re listeners uh AEL demos and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly and and ael's very smart and AEL is concerned about information security and and specifically where we're talking about but bugs that crop up security failings and responsible disclosure so for example there was a bug a uh security problem that was discovered in the Mac OS keychain now this was discovered by lenus henza which I also hope I'm pronouncing correctly now lenus is a veteran security researcher and he revealed the existence of this Mac OS keychain exploit but he said and somewhat controversially that he's not going to share the details with apple because of Apple's bug Bounty policies now a bug Bounty is where you report a bug and in exchange for reporting a bug they offer to pay you for the bug because bugs have value you know if if you don't sell the bug to the company or or get some reward for giving it to the company there are tons of Nefarious people online who will happily buy the bug and then exploited to the the uh detriment of all of your users so apple has a bug Bounty program but Apple's always paid a little less than everyone else and Apple has always had it very limited for what will qualify for it versus what won't now there's a demo application that that henza made called key steel and it's able to extract login and system passwords from the keychain without having any administrative Privileges and this is regardless of whether the system Integrity protection or Access Control lists are configured system Integrity protection was introduced a couple of releases of Mac OS ago and basically what it does is is it prevents system files from being modified and upon reboot restores them to a known good version and this is through cryptographic signing and and monitoring changes and things like that it basically means that you can be mostly sure that your Mac OS system is as it should be as it was shipped by Apple and not modified by someone outside or nefarious but keychain is is a big deal keychain traditionally has always been a part of Mac OS uh 10 and it stored your your login information for your your user account it stored your administrator password it stores Network passwords it stores uh all kinds of things and with the the addition of iCloud keychain Safari starts storing passwords in it as well now this is not an iCloud keychain bug this is a Mac OS keychain bug so you can go ahead and and extract passwords but you have to have this application running on the Mac that you're trying to extract them fun which means that it's uh you know it's not necessarily a remote hack but if you were an nefar person and built this thing then you could obviously convince someone social engineer them to install it on their Mac and then have it send passwords back over the network so there there is a real problem here but it doesn't affect your iOS devices or your iCloud keychain per se now hen's disagreement here stems from the fact that Apple's bug Bounty program only covers iOS it doesn't cover Mac OS and it's uh that that's a problem because it's a places maess at a disadvantage now you could say that's an oversight but that's where things stand now even within the iOS sphere like I said Apple has been criticized as being stingy you know they pay less than what third party firms offer um and and this isn't small money this is uh things like $2 million for a remote persistent zeroc click IOS Jailbreak and the most Apple will pay is 200,000 which you know you can see why why a re researcher would say that's questionable now researchers who are doing this are Independents and they tend to be working for themselves and that means that they become dependent upon these bug bounties paying out and so you know if you were just going to sustain yourself on that now 200,000 is a nice number but as I said before that only applies to iOS bugs and they have to be persistent remote and zero click now this keychain bug for Mac OS you could say that it's persistent you could say that it is um but it's not exactly zero click in the demo app that he's written although it certainly could be if it were written to be like that um and it's not remote at this time again although it could be so it's it's uh an interesting problem I I think that my hope is that Apple will revisit these policies because it's it's a very difficult situation when you have an independent researcher who's demonstrated the bug so you know that it's theoretical and or that it's even practical in that limited context of the demo and yet has not CH been been um convinced to disclose it you know last week we were talking about responsible disclosure and how the the parent of the 14-year-old worked so hard with apple to try and figure out how to disclose a bug and it was as if Apple wasn't really hearing it or making it easy for them to do it here the this person knows how to do responsible disclosure knows the Avenues to report it but has chosen not to because because it's it's um not attractive to them to do so based on the way Apple behaves there are people that think that this kind of thing should be done out of the goodness of their hearts but if you are trying to you know earn a living or or make it practical to keep researching then it seems that Apple should be willing to pay something for this kind of thing especially since it affects one of their core products and that is not the only security thing that I wanted to talk about today in addition to that you know separate but in the same vein right there are popular iOS apps that use something called glassbox STK to record user screens without permission now now why would you want to record someone's user screen on their iPhone there are a lot of good reasons if you've written an application and you want to see where people struggle with your interface if you want to see what people are using most about your app then this is a way of equipping your app so that it can go ahead and send back those screens and replay the session of people using it so that you can sort of understand what those interactions were like from a user interface standpoint it's actually really smart because it says that that you're paying attention to what your users are doing most and what they're trying to accomplish most and then you can go ahead and change your app to make those interactions easier now this is according to an investigation conducted by TechCrunch the analytics from glassbox and other companies like it allow customers to embed session replay technology into their respective applications so far so good these tools capture screenshots and user interactions including on-screen Taps and in some cases keyboard entry which are then sent back to app developers or glassbox servers for further examination now this is not the same kind of thing it's not as polished as the screen recording function that's built into iOS 12 but it effect it effectively screenshots an apps user interface at Key moments to determine whether its functioning is designed and because it can do that you can sort of Recon instruct the mobile application view in a visual format and technically glassbox so glassbox told TechCrunch that glassbox SDK can interact with the native application that it's bundled into and it can't break out the boundary of that app so it can't leave that app and get information from some other app so it's sandboxed and firewalled off in that way when a keyboard appears over the native app glass boox doesn't have access to it they said but if they're screenshotting then then you sort of think they could now glassbox customers include people like abber croman Fitch and Hollister hotels.com Expedia Air Canada Singapore Airlines monitoring users is nothing new monitoring users to to try and do this sort of interface research is nothing new but the problem comes when mishandling of session replays leads to sensitive information being exposed for example if you were trying to use the a Canada app Air Canada's app sent session replay data containing exposed passport and credit card numbers which could be a problem because some companies opt to send the app data directly to glassbox cloud and not to their own servers and and also you know you're trusting with that information in terms of your session for purchasing of of flights but do you really want that data living on long after that that flight's been purchased and furthermore you know if you tried to man in the middle attack it which is to say that you tried to intercept the traffic before it got to its destination uh you you'd find that most of the data that glass boox was transmitting was obfuscated although some screenshots contained unmasked email and postcodes so abomi and Fitch Hollister Singapore Airlines pass station replay directly onto glassbox while hotels.com and Expedia silid the by data and really only send it to their own domains now none of these apps privacy Poli policies make it clear that that's what glassbox is doing or that there's glassbox technology inside these apps that's being used to record their screens with companies that are not opting to include mention of user monitoring in Apple's mandated disclosures and glass boox itself lacking requirements on its own people are pretty much unaware that their actions are being so so observed so this is something to take into account right iOS is is fine iOS is secure but these apps are are leaking information and and sometimes with good reason and sometimes doing it ham-handed so it's it's not clear what's going to come out of this it's not clear if Apple's going to make a longer review process or going to start searching for this within apps or if people should monitor their own traffic with their you know network analysis and see where their stuff's being sent which is a little bit unlikely because you know who's actually going to do that in practice you know I I can do setup wire shark I can set up things like that to try and monitor it but on the whole it's generally something that doesn't happen the the the the thing is is that if we look back historically right the first the first so-called App Store was Steve Jobs telling us that we didn't need native apps for iPhone that we should just use the web and that web apps were the future and that wouldn't have necessarily prevented this because there are websites that completely spy on session data as well but it it would have been well maybe not that different than having these apps except that it wouldn't have been something that stayed resident on your phone it would have been something that wipes out from time to time which is not bad so that's another thing that you should be aware of be concerned about a little bit now Apple years ago iOS 7 introduced support for a feature called do not track that feature has just been removed in the 12.1 version of safari and basically DNT is a signal that is sent or do not track is a signal that sent to websites analy firms plug-in makers and AD networks and it's a request to not track the user and the problem with do not track is that it it was never actually complied with that that you could make that requ EST but there was no penalty if the organization at the other end failed to honor your request um even though as many as like 20% of people using the internet just want to be left alone and really don't want to be tracked the the private by Design search company that's Duck Duck Go um they they say that the voluntary nature of do not track makes it not foolproof at all makes it about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says please don't look in my house while all of your blinds are open uh but but there are a huge chunk of people who use do not track that are unaware that it's voluntary and have no idea that the request isn't being honored people that do honor do not track requests um tend to be medium Pinterest and Reddit Google Facebook and Twitter uh surprisingly do not honor do not track and I say surprisingly a little bit ironically you know you You' expect that Google whose business is based on indexing people's information is built around tracking right uh Facebook wants to know everything they can possibly know Facebook is going to not honor do not track Twitter does not honor do not track but medium Pinterest and Reddit do which kind of suggests that there are ways to form a business online that don't require tracking now what what should you do if you want to avoid being tracked as much right you should consider changing to Duck Duck Go as your brow browser or you could use the duck. go privacy browser you could switch your search engine to duck duo in Safari on mobile or Safari on web uh you could use a VPN service and there are VPN services that are reputable there are VPN Services where you're tunneling to an endpoint at the VPN service or if you really uh interested you could set up a VPN to your home in network network and and do that um although that would not get you free from tracking it would get you going through your home internet provider and being tracked there as opposed to being tracked through whatever mobile mob service you use when you're out in the world you can turn on prevent cross tracking and that's that's really it turning off thirdparty cookies which will cause functions and services to stop working now apple apple explained in their note that they're going to abandon DNT but they are are working on trying to make it so that Safari includes other privacy measures so they they've introduced new controls to prevent VR and AR app sets on websites from tracking user Behavior they've got intelligent tracking prevention to try and prevent long-term tracking and Safari user is going to be warned when visiting sites that don't have SSN enabled it's also going to warn users when you try and visit sites that are flagged as fishing or malicious sites and Safari will now log people into sites automatically when the password autofill function fills in the credentials on the site so trying to do these things is is Apple working to try and help you maintain PR privacy because what we found is that voluntary Solutions like do not track just don't work that's all the time for we have that's all the time we have today we'll meet you back next week right here on the Apple Insider podcast well and that also brings us to the conclusion of the show thank you so much for joining us this week I and my good friend William WR for Apple insider.com I'm Victor at Apple Insider he's William at Apple Insider and and what's your Twitter William people should go bug you on Twitter uh my Twitter is uh smiley face fridg magnet rean at Twitter or W gallaga oh my goodness why did I pick fridge magnets I'm I'm trying to think about right and my Twitter is whiskey cheeseburger no I'm I'm at V marks on Twitter and we like hearing from you we're so happy you listen to joined us for this week we'll be back next week\n"