Apple's maps

The discovery last week that Apple seems to have used some tiles from Open Street Map (OSM) in its new iOS version of the iPhoto application has provoked speculation about yet another company making the switch to OSM. However, it seems that the data used is from some time ago, and even contained errors which have since been corrected in OSM. One great advantage of community sourced mapping is that errors get detected and corrected. The data has also been used with no attribution of its source, a condition of using OSM data.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean your iPhone is not following you

One of my initial ideas for a post to inaugurate this blog was going to be something about how the use of smartphones equipped with GPS means that many users of these devices freely share important data about their movements. Then came the revelations concerning the iPhone apparently storing data about where the user had been in a file held on the phone itself.