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 […]

Three great articles with themes and variations on FOI ideas: Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus […]

Those of you who follow Professor Zittrain’s work know that he’s been writing and thinking about ubiquitous human computing for the last several months. Another name for it might be distributed human computing: the phenomenon of disaggregating a task into component pieces and then parceling them out around the world. Perhaps the best-known example is […]

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 […]

There are many reasons to worry about cloud computing.  Data stored in the cloud can be difficult to extract for you, yet all too easy to demand by government.  Applications running the cloud can mean new gatekeepers between you and code you might want to run. (And in discussing these issues, people don’t even agree […]

Professor Zittrain has spent time on this blog and elsewhere discussing the future of cloud computing. One of his frequent suggestions is that it should be easier to move data within the cloud, so we don’t all get locked into a certain photo storage system, or spreadsheet provider, or what have you. It seems that […]

Thanks for all the great comments (here, and in replies directly to JZ on FB and Twitter) on why Facebook apps haven’t taken off the way, say, iPhone apps have. I thought I’d try to summarize some of the dominant themes to think about whether the problem is inherent or created by Facebook itself. 1. […]

A little behind the times, but here’s the update on the Google Voice story. Apple and Google both responded to the FCC’s letter; Apple’s reply is here and Google’s is here. So what did we learn? On the upside, we learned a lot about the approval processes for both the iPhone and Android phones; more […]