March 8th, 2010 | by Jennifer | published in cloud, cybersecurity, Facebook, Future of the Internet, ubicomp | 3 Comments
A roundup of happenings that bear on the issues in The Future of the Internet – Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an update [...]
December 30th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in Android, cybersecurity, Future of the Internet, iphone, ubicomp | 1 Comment
Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about openness as [...]
December 23rd, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in Android, Book, cybersecurity, Future of the Internet, iphone | 2 Comments
As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking. The NY Times observes that as computing — and especially commerce — moves onto mobile devices, security threats are growing. “It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security … People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than ever before, [...]
November 10th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in cybersecurity, Future of the Internet | 4 Comments
Most readers of this blog probably use several Google products; my rough count is that I use about 15. Privacy advocates have been understandably concerned about having so much information stored by one company. In partial response to these concerns, Google created the Google dashboard, a site that tells you which Google apps you use [...]
September 30th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in Android, cybersecurity, iphone | 1 Comment
As promised, here’s some of what we learned about the app approval process from Google and Apple’s letters to the FCC. There’s nothing ground-shaking, but a few details of interest to smartphone obsessives. Apple: Apple says a staff member tests every submission for technical issues like bugs and unauthorized protocols. More holistically, they look for [...]
April 2nd, 2009 | by jz | published in cybersecurity, Future of the Internet | 2 Comments
The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. Congress will shortly take up a bill to “empower the government to set and enforce security standards for private industry for the first time.” Today’s conventional wisdom in cybersecurity circles is that: we’re very much open to attack (defined lots of ways; often people mean: PCs attached [...]
February 21st, 2009 | by jz | published in cybersecurity | 2 Comments
Autonomous mobile cybots called Skynet UNTAME. What could possibly go wrong?
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