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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Autonomous mobile cybots called Skynet UNTAME.  What could possibly go wrong?