- This goes way beyond the supply chain leaks that power Ming-Chi Kuo's analyst reports. Perhaps an Apple QA engineer or contractor? Disgruntled SWE? In any case leaker is in a world of hurt if Apple identifies him/her
- Wonder if 9 to 5 Mac and MacRumors get limited access from Apple now that they published these leaks. I'd say yes.
- "As best I've been able to ascertain, these builds were available to download by anyone, but they were obscured by long, unguessable URLs [web addresses]," wrote John Gruber, a blogger known for his coverage of Apple.
It would be ironic if some third-party connected to Apple tested iOS 11 and used Internet Explorer to download the release which causes the visited URL to be indexed by Bing. Maybe the download URL pops up in Bing if you find the right keywords.
I can’t find the recent news article but this story[1] is the same in essence: Bing starts indexing web pages it impossibly can know about unless some Microsoft software sends visited URLs to Bing. In the news I remembered it caused some sensitive leaks because company secrets, only obscured by unguessable URLs, were suddenly listed on Bing.
"We do look at anonymous click stream data as one of more than a thousand
inputs into our ranking algorithm. We learn from our customers as they traverse
the web, a common practice in helping to improve a wide array of online
services. We have been clear about this for a couple of years (see Directions on
Microsoft report, June 15, 2009)."
> Indeed, the statement that Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, emailed me yesterday as I worked on this article seems to confirm the allegation:
As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking...
Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites.
Also (same link):
> Microsoft does disclose that Suggested Sites collects information about sites you visit. From the privacy policy:
When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information.
To help protect your privacy, the information is encrypted when sent to Microsoft. Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included."
And (refering to Bing toolbar):
> The install page highlights some of what will be collected and how it will be used:
improve your online experience with personalized content by allowing us to collect additional information about your system configuration, the searches you do, websites you visit, and how you use our software. We will also use this information to help improve our products and services."
From the same article (at the time, in 2011) Google deny using their services to index search results, FWIW. But AFAIK Microsoft never made such a clear denial - do you have a reason to be so confident in your claim?
> Bing says it does NOT do this. It says there is no Google specific search signal that it being used, no list of all the popular pages as selected just by Google users. Instead, it has a “search signal” based on searching activity observed across a range of sites.
For example, if you did a search on Amazon, Bing might detect that. A search on eBay might get spotted. A search on Yahoo, that also might get extracted. Any number of searches might be identified. Bing would associate the next page you went to after doing those searches as being a possible “answer” to those searches.
> “We aggregate the information,” Shum said. “The entire clickstream gets weighted along with different signals,” he explained. “For head queries, we have more signals. For tail queries, we have less. For the Google ‘synthetic’ queries [done for the Google sting operation], we have nothing.”
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So Bing seem to, as a ranking signal, capture URLs that look like searches, and then the next page - which is pretty clever. If that next page is not already indexed (or alternatively perhaps if they have no other ranking signals for the search they spotted) they seem to index that site as part of ranking that signal. And that was 2011, who knows how much cleverer Google and Bing have got since then.
- Wonder if 9 to 5 Mac and MacRumors get limited access from Apple now that they published these leaks. I'd say yes.
- "As best I've been able to ascertain, these builds were available to download by anyone, but they were obscured by long, unguessable URLs [web addresses]," wrote John Gruber, a blogger known for his coverage of Apple.