iFlame 6S

I was mildly asleep as around 6am in the morning “someone” turned on a very bright light. There was a weird hissing sound. I woke up quite annoyed after around 10 seconds. But what I saw was beyond belief.

There was a roughly 30cm flame burning on my wife’s nightstand. I immediately went over and saw her iPhone on fire. I tried slapping it a few times which made the flames smaller so that I could disconnect the charging cable. I tried picking up the phone, but the case around was melting which burned my fingers. I then knocked it onto the ground (maybe not the smartest move), but I wanted to get the flames away from the lamp shade, plants and wall paper.

It seems the combination of disconnecting the charger and hitting the floor temporarily extinguished the flames. I immediately grabbed the phone at a point that seemed like it was not melted, ran to the kitchen and threw it into the sink. I let the water run over the phone for around a minute. I then filled a bowl with water and put the phone into it to make sure it doesn’t flare up again.

ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ we got off lightly 😅 … the whole situation could have turned into a huge disaster. ☠

Bye, Bye, TUAW

In retrospect I must admit, I was wondering why my TUAW news feed had dried out … when it started spewing Engadget junk, I knew something was wrong. A quick Internet search confirmed my fears: TUAW is no more, AOL killed it. :'(

Not all is lost … there’s still a glimmer of hope … several writers have found a new home at Apple World Today … but still no news on what’ll happen to Chris Rawson’s rumor roundups. :'(

https://twitter.com/riyadpr/status/579653083736723456

Choosing Comfort Over Privacy

It looks like Apple “needs” to upload even your unsaved documents to its servers to make the newly introduced Continuity “feature” work.

Also it seems Apple silently uploads names and email addresses of all the people you correspond with–no, not only the ones in your address book–just to have a “consistent” experience when displaying recent addresses.

It scares me how little their customer’s privacy must be worth when they choose (these are not accidental data “leaks”) to silently violate them in order to provide comfort features.

Update 2014-10-30:
It seems there is at least a hidden configuration option to turn this behavior off:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

 

Apple’s Spotlight Search Phones Home

OS X Yosemite seems to have gained the feature to “phone home” when you do spotlight searches. It’ll send search terms and your location data to Apple’s servers. Of course it’s perfectly in line with Apple’s recent “trust us, we won’t collect unnecessary data” rhetoric.

[…] Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher and consultant, confirmed the behavior, labeling it “probably the worst example of ‘privacy by design’ I’ve seen yet.” Users don’t even have to search to give up their privacy. Apple immediately sends the user’s location to the company, according to Soltani.

You can turn it off, but it’s on by default.