The iPhone is the king of the hill when it comes to smartphones. Everyone knows that, right? Well, that isn’t exactly true – in North America RIM (the Blackberry) holds about half of the entire smartphone market. Globally, Symbian-based devices (primarily from Nokia) are the most popular, followed by the Blackberry and then the iPhone (with Windows Mobile and Android getting small portions of the pie, followed by the once-mighty Palm).
Full Article (Nixie Pixel - nixiepixel.com)
In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.
Full Article (Ars Technica - arstechnica.com)
Microsoft’s lawyers this week engineered a pair of important takedowns, one laudable and the other highly-charged. The software giant orchestrated a legal sneak attack against the Web servers controlling the Waledac botnet, a major distributor of junk e-mail. In an unrelated and more controversial move, Redmond convinced an ISP to shutter a popular whistleblower Web site for hosting a Microsoft surveillance compliance document.
Full Article (Krebs on Security - krebsonsecurity.com)
If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on services that regular Gmail accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz. After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify and confirm the problem. Let’s call her/him “Helpful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said. To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.
Full Article (Smarterware - smarterware.org)
In the early spring of 2009, a team of doctors at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University lifted a 2-year-old into an MRI scanner. The boy, whom I’ll call Bryce, looked tiny and forlorn inside the cavernous metal device. The stuffed monkey dangling from the entrance to the scanner did little to cheer up the scene. Bryce couldn’t see it, in any case; he was under general anesthesia, with a tube snaking from his throat to a ventilator beside the scanner. Ten months earlier, Bryce had received a portion of a donor’s liver to replace his own failing organ. For a while, he did well. But his latest lab tests were alarming. Something was going wrong — there was a chance that one or both of the liver’s bile ducts were blocked.
Full Article (Wired - wired.com)
The online version of Technology Review today carries a story I wrote about a government funded research group that is preparing to release a new free tool designed to block “drive-by downloads,” attacks in which the mere act of visiting a hacked or malicious Web site results in the installation of an unwanted program, usually without the visitor’s consent or knowledge.
Full Article (Krebs on Security - krebsonsecurity.com)
It was claimed yesterday that Windows 7 machines are “alarmingly low” on memory, with 86 percent of Windows 7 machines using 90-95 percent of their physical memory. Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software, a company developing performance monitoring software, cited data from his company’s XPnet community. Community members use a freely downloadable tool that periodically uploads performance data to the XPnet servers, and it’s this data, from a few tens of thousands of computers, that was used to justify the claim.
Full Article (Ars Technica - arstechnica.com)
Attacks against the power grid are likely to rise and intensify during the next 12 months as smart grid research and pilot projects advance, according to utility security experts and a recently published report that analyzes threats to critical infrastructure. The so-called Project Grey Goose Report on Critical Infrastructure points to state and/or non-state sponsored hackers from the Russian Federation of Independent States, Turkey, and China as the main threats to targeting and hacking into energy providers and other critical infrastructure networks.
Full Article (DarkReading - darkreading.com)
Sometimes geeky technical details matter only to engineers. But sometimes a seemingly arcane technical decision exposes deep social or political divisions. A classic example is being debated within the Mozilla project now, as designers decide whether the Mozilla Firefox browser should trust a Chinese certification authority by default. Here’s the technical background: When you browse to a secure website (typically at a URL starting with “https:”), your browser takes two special security precautions: it sets up a private, encrypted “channel” to the server, and it authenticates the server’s identity. The second step, authentication, is necessary because a secure channel is useless if you don’t know who is on the other end. Without authentication, you might be talking to an impostor.
Full Article (Freedom to Tinker - freedom-to-tinker.com)
The Great Tech Divide: Your users are very stupid. (Maybe.)
Re: Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login (ReadWriteWeb/Google/Facebook debacle)
More importantly, this highlights a more interesting and descriptive problem with technology today. Not that people are stupid, but just how detached a sizable chunk of the population is from the new structure of our society. If there are people who have trouble telling which site they are on, how many people are there out there who can’t use the site at all?
These are truly amazing things to consider, being that our society is essentially bound at the hilt to technology-based communication. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it really is true: what seemed like barrage of really stupid people turned out with more careful inspection to be probably the most stupendous example of the tech divide you will see for, at minimum, a very long time. Not stupid people, but people who don’t know — perhaps can’t be bothered to know — about the address bar. People who use the internet for certain specific functions, and nothing beyond that. People who only want to know how to do what they need to do, and precisely nothing else.
School-issued laptops are becoming more and more common these days, but thanks to the action of one high school, students and parents might have second thoughts about bringing them home. The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student, Blake J. Robbins, have filed a lawsuit against his school district after discovering that school officials had allegedly been remotely accessing the laptop in order to take webcam photos of the students at home (via BoingBoing). There are a number of unanswered questions about this story, but if true, it could mean serious penalties for the Lower Merion School District.
Full Article (Ars Technica - arstechnica.com)
On foursquare, location & privacy... #pleaserobme
Weekend Plan: Sit on couch. Send fake check-ins to @foursquare. Wait for evil robbers to show up. Whack them with baseball bat. #pleaserobme
…Profit?
Paranoia, anybody?
So in a previous post, I discussed “Convergence Theory“, which is the concept that argues people will “go with the crowd”. There’s a new fad in town, and it’s all about ditching foursquare because you think you’re going to get robbed.
In this case, frankly, I’m appalled. This is absurdity at its best. Lets all get on the paranoia choo-choo with Jennifer Van Grove and the silly website she’s blogging about, cancel our foursquare accounts, and go hide at home in fear. Sorry to call you out like this Jen, but this is purely knee-jerk baseless paranoia. If someone sees me IN THE PARKING LOT AT THE GROCERY STORE, then they also know I’m not home. This isn’t anything new.
Full Article (Aten Labs - atenlabs.com)
On foursquare, location & privacy…
… That being said, figured I’d share one of my favorite comments from this Gawker post poking fun at the whole “foursquare as robbery accomplice” angle:
You might as well argue that you should never tell anyone that you have a job, because then people will know you are at work from 9-5 every day, and can use the white pages to find your home and rob you! Or that you should never, ever update your Facebook status to let people know you’re on vacation. Or that you shouldn’t blog that you’re at work, or at a restaurant, or in another city, or anywhere other than home. Or that you should never upload mobile pix to Flickr when you’re out at night. Or for that matter, you should never, ever, ever tell anyone that you’re anyplace on the phone, because you know who may be listening in? Robbers! Robbers who want to steal your precious, precious, precious shit! (by mat-honan)
That’s it from us for tonight. Thanks again for all your support,
Full Article (foursquare - foursquare.com)
Foursquare Responds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut Up
The team behind the hot location-based service Foursquare took the time tonight to write a rare longer post about location privacy. Their basic stance: we take privacy very seriously and understand it. Also, that service Please Rob Me should shut up.
In fact, it seems the entire impetus behind Foursquare’s post was Please Rob Me, the mock service set up in an attempt to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting points.
Full Article (TechCrunch - techcrunch.com)
Dubai authorities have released extensive footage from surveillance cameras that allegedly shows the movements of a professional 11-person assassination team in the hours before and after a top Hamas leader was killed last month in a hotel room. The footage, taken from cameras at the Dubai airport and several luxury hotels, follows the activities of ten men and one woman as they arrived in Dubai on various European passports and moved among various hotels and a shopping center, changing into disguises at one point, during the hours before Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed.
Full Article (Threat Level/Wired - wired.com)
iPhone Facebook App
If you enable this feature, contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook and your friends’ names, photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.
Full Article (Emergent Chaos - emergentchaos.com)
Facebook SPAM on BlackBerry Devices
I always thought the Facebook Application for BlackBerry was a buggy, slow piece of junk. Now I have noticed that this application is being abused by spammers to propagate Viagra and Percocet SPAM. The screen shot to the right is an actual Facebook notification I received on my BlackBerry. There seems to be an interesting bug in the Facebook Application for BlackBerry in which a spammer can spoof the “facebookmail.com” domain to have SPAM messages show up in your notifications list within the BlackBerry Facebook application. This only works if you have the Facebook for BlackBerry Application installed AND you have an email account configured on your BlackBerry (yes, this includes a corporate email account as well). The email account you have configured on your BlackBerry is where you actually receive the SPAM message, not through Facebook.
Full Article (Spylogic.net - spylogic.net)
Just say no! BlackBerry + Facebook = Security FAIL
What makes this troublesome from an information protection standpoint is that, the Facebook application is actively scanning your email inbox. In the case of many, many Blackberry users, this is not your personal email, but your corporate email. Of the 13,934,752 monthly active users (according to facebook.com) I’m sure you all read the EULA when you installed the app right? That’s another post…
Full Article (Noodle On This - noodleonthis.wordpress.com) via Idiosyncratic Routine
