larryjw

mobird said:

Now if only the buffoon Al Gore would take a hike.

I suppose I should not be shocked at the animosity toward Al Gore. The Republican rumor machine did a great job convincing the majority of Americans that presidential candidate Al Gore was incompetent and undeservedly took credit for the internet, and presidential candidate John Kerry didn't deserve war hero status. Both lies. In a fact-free world in which we've have lived for 40 years (it's not a recent phenomenon), you're probably right.

However, Al Gore's appropriateness to be on the Apple Board cannot be denied -- if facts have any value. I'll give the key evidence as to Gore's contributions from two of those who architected the Internet.

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ihatescreennames said:

I’m not clear on why this guy is so hell bent on getting his name added to the patent/s. How does he stand to benefit? I don’t believe it would be monetarily. 

Case in point, my neighbor has his name on a few patents that belong to a company he used to work for. The company makes fasteners and one was “revolutionary” in the deck screw industry. His name is one of the names listed in the patent for that product. Other than being an interesting thing to tell people he doesn’t get anything for it. The company owns the patent, not my neighbor. He now works for a small company that installs shower doors. 

To answer your first question: It's the law. If there are inventors who do not appear on the patent, then they will continue to have patent rights to the patent. 

Apple will own the patent "by assignment". An inventor not mentioned on the patent has effectively not assigned his patents to Apple. 

My guess is that all these Apple Data Centers do something. My guess is the data is actually stored in those servers. 

Since it’s public knowledge — not that the public actually knows anything — that Apple’s iCloud services used cloud services software from Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and others depending on location (such as country), I’m not surprised that Apple is actually doing what they said they were doing.

I do remember years ago Apples attempt to build their own cloud services failed, because they were not successful in building such a system from scratch. They made it clear then that they would be using the cloud services from existing providers, implemented at Apple’s own data centers. 

dysamoria said:

auxio said:

cornchip said:

I'm not that knowledgeable in OS code engineering, but I understand it at a basic level so I get that it's possible, yet on another level, I don't get why this kind of stuff should be allowed to happen. Seems like anything out of the ordinary should just automatically be shut down. Which I guess the OS architects have made every attempt to ensure, and is what the hackers are constantly attempting to circumvent. So I guess this stuff will just always happen. At least in my lifetime.

The tricky part with iMessage is that they need to allow all sorts of things to be put into messages: text, emoji, images, videos, etc.  Which allows for many different avenues of attack using things which look like legitimate messages, but are really executable code in disguise.

But why are our CPUs executing that errant code? A CPU has no mechanism to separate executable code that was initiated with intent from that which was passed through an overflow, etc?

There is no difference between executable code and data -- that is the nature of Von Neumann machines. Executable code is just data ... until something called an interpreter (for that data) looks at the data and treats it as commands to execute. Everything above the hardware level is just a sequence of 0's and 1's. Every interpreter will try to make sense of that sequence in its own way. Maybe that sequence represents a book, but it isn't unless the book interpreter is told to interpret it, and then that "book" is really executable code which the book interpreter "executes" to render on your device. 

Of course, the interpreter is just data until another interpreter is told to interpret that data as a sequence of commands to execute. The CPU is just another interpreter, and because most CPU's are actually micro-coded, there is another interpreter within the CPU which executes the micro-code data and treat that data as commands. Things finally do happen because this recursion does terminate (it's not an infinite regress), but the number of levels of interpretation is quite large. 

We'll see if Apple's involvement with credit cards ends up being a benefit.

If the agreement with Goldman Sachs is anything like Apple's agreement with Cingular way back in 2007 for the iPhone, it may have a profound effect. 

If any of you recall how poor the cellular phone industry was prior to the iPhone and the Cingular contract, the phone companies ran the show, dictated features (mostly lack of functionality). Cingular was willing to give up all control to support the iPhone. If I remember correctly, not even the CEO of Cingular knew what was coming, except that the Cingular tech folks had to add major functionality to handle messages, data, and would let Apple control the phone functionality. The Apple-Cingular agreement was as disruptive as hell.

We know little about the agreement with Goldman Sachs. My guess is the Apple-Goldman Sachs agreement will be a pale disruptor compared to Apple-Cingular. We'll see.