Car Modern 2011

+1. My IP is being logged right now most likely. No matter where you go, using any communication device, you can be tracked. If you're that paranoid, get off the grid. Every phone company tracks your location. This for iPhone users is just a log of it on your phone.

I do agree, however, that the consolidated.db file should at least be encrypted if it is to remain on the device. Now any good crook knows all they need is your iphone to find out when best to rob you.

What is actually tracked is not _your_ location, it is the location of WiFi basestations around the country. Which Google, Apple, and Skyhook use for their "poor man's GPS" that allows a device with WiFi but without working GPS to find its location. Skyhook started this by having cars drive round the country, recording the position of WiFi devices. Google and Apple, having the infrastructure, use a more efficient method to do this - instead of driving cars throught the country, they use people's iPhones or Android phones to collect the same data. Note they are not collecting _your_ data, they are collecting the data of WiFi base stations that you happen to pass with your iPhone.

The database file is most likely there so your phone knows which information it has already sent, so it doesn't send info about the same basestation twice. That should be easily checkable - is the database full with hundreds of copies of your home location or not? Does it have dozens of copies of locations along your way to work? I think each location is recorded only once, so a crook stealing the phone would know places where I have been, but not how often I go where. So they would have very little clue where to find me.

And the whole scenario seems very unlikely. It would be very, very rare that a specific person is robbed intentionally. That robber will most likely come to your home without having any idea who lives there, or wait in a dark alleyway and rob the next person to come along, not stealing your phone in order to find other information about you and rob you again. It is just a hypothetical danger that is not actually going to happen.

But what actually does happen and worries me (well, I'm not worried, but some people should be), is that apparently it is possible to access Google's database. There is a website where you can enter the MAC address of your router, and it will find its location. It found mine within about 100 meters. That might make it possible to find people who don't want to be found. So anyone who moves to escape a stalker, or goes into witness protection, they better not take their router with them to the new home.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8H7)

Only in US. For the rest of the World (the northern part of it) summer starts on June 1st and ends on August 31st :)
Really? So we just disregard the ACTUAL start and end times of seasons now? June 21 to Sept 21 is summer.

The "actual start dates"? Season start and end dates have changed over time and cultures. The solstices used ro be Midsummer's Day and Midwinter's Day, not the start of Summer and the start of Winter.

Why would they give the Macbook that but leave the iMac with the original Core Duo? Doesn't make sense. I would think all three would get it or just the Macbook Pro.

The report out of China was about companies supplying macbooks, not the one's supplying the iMacs. They said nothing about the iMac because they weren't in that model's supply chain. I would expect the iMac to updated at the same time as well. I'm also betting that the macbook pro and macbook both get core 2 duo chips, with MBP getting faster ones with 4MB L2 cache, and MB getting slower ones with lower L2 cache.