21 karma · joined June 30, 2010
True in theory, not so much in practice. After having read a couple of books in iBooks, the books mostly seem like hasty OCR jobs (Ender's Game, while a fantastic book, definitely showed this). The iPad has the capability to do great formatting, but publishers don't seem to be doing a whole lot with it. For example, in Ender's Game, there's a little snippet of conversation before each chapter. In print it's very clearly differentiated with italics, the iBooks version lacks even that. Curiously, I seem to notice far fewer formatting problems with the Kindle app.
You bring up an astute point on the vague "network access" permission, but there's really not an easy answer to this. How would you fix it? Ask the developer to simply say what the access will be used for? In an malicious app, they'd obviously just lie. Short of actually displaying what data an app is sending, I don't see an easy answer.
Edit: also note that since DNS resolution is a redundant system, they'd have to shut down EVERY root nameserver (or at least the ones in the US) to stop resolution completely. Otherwise it'd basically just slow down, though potentially to the point where it'd become unusable.