I’m co-moderating a retreat with John Palfrey about the future of privacy, and one of the morning provocateurs was Hal Abelson. He mused back on the days of SAFE — a campaign against a U.S. government proposal for a “Clipper Chip” that would permit, with a warrant, the government to gain access to encrypted data [...]
After praising the iPhone as wholesome as warm bread, Colbert takes to task the iPhone for its “kill switch” (”It actually kills you!”). In the meantime, Gizmodo reports that there’s a “BossPrefs” app to disable it, joining the more labor intensive method of tricking the iPhone into thinking that the Apple update server is found [...]
It’s been clear from the start that information appliances like the iPhone, tethered to their vendors, would have a kill switch — that’s just a subset of the vendor’s (in the case, Apple’s) ability to reprogram any aspect of the phone from a distance at any time. In a world of third party apps, that [...]
I don’t mean to only talk about the iPhone apps system — Facebook apps, Google mash-ups, and plenty of other emerging platforms share the fascinating if troubling characteristics of iPhone apps — but it’s an example that’s continuing to expand.
On the one hand is the NYT’s reporting that the iPhone Apps Store has pressured non-iPhone-carrying [...]
The iPhone has come some way since the days when Steve Jobs pledged that Apple would “define everything that is on the phone.” Yet even with a software development kit allowing for outside coding, Apple reserves the right to … define everything that is on the phone. Application makers submit their apps for Apple’s approval, [...]
document.domain = “futureoftheinternet.org”;The makers of Scrabulous have apparently relaunched it as “Wordscraper,” a word game that can support a variety of rules, and whose tiles no longer look so much like Scrabble’s. Players can themselves set the rules to simulate a Scrabble game — but that would make the infringement that of the [...]
The NYT is blogging that Facebook has removed Scrabulous. Trying to get there through Facebook shows:
Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.
The app is apparently doing IP geolocation to see whom to turn away; when I [...]
One of the more contestable claims of the FOI book is that tethered information appliances like the iPhone, that either block outside apps or subject them to much more gatekeeping by the platform vendor, will not only complement the more open PC, but overtake it — that PCs themselves will become appliancized.
Already there’s talk of [...]
In 2006, two guys from India came up with Scrabulous, a Scrabble-like game that took off only after it was transformed from a standalone Web site into a Facebook app. Hasbro, holder of the Scrabble trademark in North America, noticed, as did Mattel, holder of rights elsewhere, and asked them to take it down. They [...]
Macworld is reporting that some iPhone application developers are having a difficult time adjusting to having to distribute their software only through Apple. They’re apparently too afraid to go on the record (!), but:
As developers update their applications — including bug fixes — it can take up to a week for a new version to [...]
