In an MIT Technology Review article reprinted on Mashable, David Talbot covers the emerging privacy concerns surrounding Apple’s storage of questions addressed to Siri. Apple says that the recordings are used only for Siri’s operation and to help improve understanding and recognition, but privacy wonks worry that the voiceprints could be used to identify the speakers. Where should the privacy line be drawn between providing services that require storage of personal information and worrying about Big Brother? follow link
Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Siri Usage Generates Privacy Concerns