Sitemap spelunking reveals more about today’s event

Making the rounds on Twitter today was a series of data reveals from Apple’s own site. Some terrific detective work from the usual suspects.

Interesting to me how this new way of digging for information, what I would call “sitemap spelunking”, has become the norm. I think, in part, this emerged because Apple tightened the screws on their employees surreptitiously sharing info with reporters. But at the same time as security has tightened, data mining has become big business, and those techniques are hard at work here.

One particular approach I’ve seen used here, is to search a sitemap for obvious URLs, the use the URL form to guess at non-obvious, hidden URLs. So if you encountered a file called …/iphone_X, you might try loading a file with the same path, ending in …/iphone_Xs.

I suspect that next year’s Apple/journalist whack-a-mole game will change, with Apple doing a better job making URLs harder to guess, and journalists developing a new set of tools to unveil those URLs.

Follow the headline link to learn the latest from 9to5Mac, or just hold off until Apple reveals things for themselves.