Google launches Government Requests tool. Google is now making public information on the requests it receives from government agents to remove content from its search results or reveal private user data. The Government Requests tool currently displays the number and type of requests by country for the last six months of 2009. In a bit [...]

On April 3, an Adobe technical project manager demonstrated that Adobe’s new Air software could be used to develop across platforms—he created a Reversi game app that runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows 7, Ubuntu, and OS X (see potential caveats in comments here). Cool! As JZ said, via email, “if this is really possible, [...]

Recently, the Electronic Freedom Foundation posted the previously secret iPhone Developer Program License Agreement – a contract that apparently all iPhone app developers are required to click-sign before using Apple’s iPhone Software Development Kit.  Though a provision of the Agreement prohibits disclosure of its contents, EFF gained access by requesting it under the Freedom of [...]

AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of [...]

The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future [...]

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 [...]

Our worries about ubiquitous human computing*—summarized in this earlier post—fall into two broad categories. First, there are potential bad effects on the workers, since traditional labor-law protections may not apply in cyberspace. Second, there are potential bad effects on the world. One example that JZ has given in talks is that lobbyists could pay workers [...]

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, [...]

Apple’s Game-Changer, Downloading Now. Long NY Times article on Apple’s App Store and how it’s changed the model of what a smartphone should be. The good parts of the article: interesting data (100K apps for the iPhone, 14K for Android, 500 (!) for PalmOS; $1B a year in iPhone app sales), some valuable musings on [...]

Here’s a roundup of some interesting stories published recently on generativity, tethered devices, and as always, the iPhone. Generative Irrelevancy. Tim Sturgill considers Google’s video touting Chrome OS. He worries that it may be the “final nail…in the generative coffin,” but he also sees the virtue of moving beyond traditional OSes. See also JZ’s take [...]