Computed·Blg - Mobile

Facebook's New App Center Promises Quality Over Quantity

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:28:00 +0000

-----

Last September, during the f8 Developers’ Conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that the company had no plans for a “central app repository” – an app store. Today, Facebook is changing its tune. The social giant has announced App Center, a section of Facebook dedicated to discovering and deploying high-quality apps on the company’s platform. The App Center will push apps to iPhone, Android and the mobile Web, giving Facebook its first true store for mobile app discovery.

The departure from Facebook’s previous company line comes as the social platform ramps up its mobile offerings to make money from its hundreds of millions of mobile users. This is not your father's app store, though.

Let's start with the requirements. Facebook has announced a strict set of style and quality guidelines to get apps placed in App Center. Apps that are considered high-quality, as decided by Facebook’s Insights analytics platform, will get prominent placement. Quality is determined by user ratings and app engagement. Apps that receive poor ratings or do not meet Facebook’s quality guidelines won't be listed.

Whether or not an app is a potential Facebook App Center candidate hinges on several factors. It must

• have a canvas page (a page that sets the app's permissions on Facebook’s platform)

• be built for iOS, Android or the mobile Web

• use a Facebook Login or be a website that uses a Facebook Login.

Facebook is in a tricky spot with App Center. It will house not only apps that are specifically run through its platform but also iOS and Android apps. Thus it needs to achieve a balance between competition and cooperation with some of the most powerful forces in the tech universe. If an app in App Center requires a download, the download link on the app’s detail page will bring the user to the appropriate app repository, either Apple's App Store or Android’s Google Play.

One of the more interesting parts of App Center is that Facebook will allow paid apps. This is a huge move for Facebook as it provides a boost to its Credits payment service. One of the benefits of having a store is that whoever controls the store also controls transactions arising from the items in it, whether payments per download or in-app purchases. This will go a long way towards Facebook’s goal of monetizing its mobile presence without relying on advertising.

Facebook App Center Icon Guidelines

Developers interested in publishing apps to Facebook’s App Center should take a look at both the guidelines and the tutorial that outlines how to upload the appropriate icons, how to request permissions, how to use Single Sign On (SSO, a requirement for App Center) and the app detail page.

This is a good move for Facebook. It will give the company several avenues to start making money off of mobile but also strengthen its position as one of the backbones of the Web. For instance, App Center is both separate from iOS and Android but also a part of it. Through App Center, Facebook can direct traffic to its apps, monitor who and how users are downloading applications and keep itself at the center of the user experience.

EU Votes To Lower Mobile Roaming Charges

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:26:00 +0000

Via CIO TODAY

-----

Business travelers -- and the enterprises that foot their phone bills -- have been complaining about high roaming fees in Europe for years. Now, some relief is finally in sight.

Indeed, both data roaming and phone calls travelers make while doing business (or taking a vacation) in Europe should be much cheaper this summer thanks to a deal done in the European Parliament this week.

Members of the European Parliament and the Danish Presidency of the Council of Ministers agreed to lower price caps on roaming. Parliament as a whole still needs to approve the deal. But if all runs smoothly the new rules will take effect July 1.

"I am satisfied that the Council approved Parliament's approach to tackle very high prices of phone calls, SMS and in particular of data roaming," said Angelika Niebler of Germany, Parliament's reporter for the draft legislation. "The proposed price caps ensure a sufficient margin between wholesale and retail prices to assure a level of competition that will enable new players to enter the market."

How Low Do They Go?

The agreement increases transparency and consumer protection to prevent bill shocks, Niebler said. That means European Union consumers no longer need to worry about accidentally running up huge bills when using their mobile devices both within and outside the EU. Of course, it's also a boon for consumers from other nations traveling to Europe.

How much savings are we talking about? According to the new rules, a downloaded megabyte would cost no more than 70 cents. That cost drops down to 45 cents in 2013 and 20 cents by July 2014. This is a big improvement, seeing as there is currently no price ceiling for mobile data services charged to consumers.

On the phone call front, the cost of a one-minute call would not exceed 29 cents under the new rules. That declines to 19 cents as of July 2014. That's down from 35 cents under the current legislation. Finally, an SMS would cost no more than 9 cents. That drops to 6 cents as by July 2014 and marks an 11 percent cut from current costs.

Nixing Roaming Altogether

"Mobile roaming charges in the EU are artificially high. Given the fact that they are trying to treat the entire continent like a single country, I don't understand why mobile roaming charges are so high between countries," said Mike Disabato, managing vice president of network and telecom at Gartner.

Practically speaking, the new rules mean that you only need one SIM card while traveling in Europe. Of course, you can't get a SIM card on an iPhone unless you buy an unlocked phone for $800. But if you do use a SIM card you will not have to change phone numbers every time you go to a different country.

"The new rules will make it a lot cheaper for people who actually have to do business in Europe. Any time you start reducing these types of rates it's a good thing," Disabato said. "We got rid of roaming charges a long time ago. It's about time they go in Europe. It will take until the EU decides they are going to make it happen."

Anatomy of a leak: how iPhones spill the ID of networks they access

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:38:55 +0000

Via ars technica

-----

This screen capture of a Wireshark session initiated by hacker Rob Graham shows his iPad 3 exposing the MAC address of his home router. The unique identifier could be viewed by anyone connected to the Starbucks hotspot he accessed.

An Ars story from earlier this month reported that iPhones expose the unique identifiers of recently accessed wireless routers, which generated no shortage of reader outrage. What possible justification does Apple have for building this leakage capability into its entire line of wireless products when smartphones, laptops, and tablets from competitors don't? And how is it that Google, Wigle.net, and others get away with publishing the MAC addresses of millions of wireless access devices and their precise geographic location?

Some readers wanted more technical detail about the exposure, which applies to three access points the devices have most recently connected to. Some went as far as to challenge the validity of security researcher Mark Wuergler's findings. "Until I see the code running or at least a youtube I don't believe this guy has the goods," one Ars commenter wrote.

According to penetration tester Robert Graham, the findings are legit.

In the service of our readers, and to demonstrate to skeptics that the privacy leak is real, Ars approached Graham and asked him to review the article for accuracy and independently confirm or debunk Wuergler's findings.

"I can confirm all the technical details of this 'hack,'" Graham, who is CEO of Errata Security, told Ars via e-mail. "Apple products do indeed send out three packets that will reveal your home router MAC address. I confirmed this with my latest iPad 3."

He provided the image at the top of this post as proof. It shows a screen from Wireshark, a popular packet-sniffing program, as his iPad connected to a public hotspot at a Starbucks in Atlanta. Milliseconds after it connected to an SSID named "attwifi" (as shown in the section labeled #1), the iPad broadcasted the MAC address of his Linksys home router (shown in the section labeled #2). In section #3, the iPad sent the MAC address of this router a second time, and curiously, the identifier was routed to this access point even though it's not available on the local network. As is clear in section #4, the iPad also exposed the local IP address the iPad used when accessing Graham's home router. All of this information is relatively simple to view by anyone within radio range.

The image is consistent with one provided by Wuergler below. Just as Wuergler first claimed, it shows an iPhone disclosing the last three access points it has connected to.

Mark Wuergler, Immunity Inc.

Graham used Wireshark to monitor the same Starbucks hotspot when he connected with his Windows 7 laptop and Android-based Kindle Fire. Neither device exposed any previously connected MAC addresses. He also reviewed hundreds of other non-Apple devices as they connected to the network, and none of them exposed previously accessed addresses, either.

As the data makes clear, the MAC addresses were exposed in ARP (address resolution protocol) packets immediately after Graham's iPad associated with the access point but prior to it receiving an IP address from the router's DHCP server. Both Graham and Wuergler speculate that Apple engineers intentionally built this behavior into their products as a way of speeding up the process of reconnecting to access points, particularly those in corporate environments. Rather than waiting for a DHCP server to issue an IP address, the exposure of the MAC addresses allows the devices to use the same address it was assigned last time.

"This whole thing is related to DHCP and autoconfiguration (for speed and less traffic on the wire)," Wuergler told Ars. "The Apple devices want to determine if they are on a network that they have previously connected to and they send unicast ARPs out on the network in order to do this."

Indeed, strikingly similar behavior was described in RFC 4436, a 2006 technical memo co-written by developers from Apple, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. It discusses a method for detecting network attachment in IPv4-based systems.

"In this case, the host may determine whether it has re-attached to the logical link where this address is valid for use, by sending a unicast ARP Request packet to a router previously known for that link (or, in the case of a link with more than one router, by sending one or more unicast ARP Request packets to one or more of those routers)," the document states at one point. "The ARP Request MUST use the host MAC address as the source, and the test node MAC address as the destination," it says elsewhere.

Of course, only Apple engineers can say for sure if the MAC disclosure is intentional, and representatives with the company have declined to discuss the issue with Ars. What's more, if RFC 4436 is the reason for the behavior, it's unclear why there's no evidence of Windows and Android devices doing the same thing. If detecting previously connected networks is such a good idea, wouldn't Microsoft and Google want to design their devices to do it, too?

In contrast to the findings of Graham and Wuergler were those of Ars writer Peter Bright, who observed different behavior when his iPod touch connected to a wireless network. While the Apple device did expose a MAC address, the unique identifier belonged to the Ethernet interface of his router rather than the MAC address of the router's WiFi interface, which is the identifier cataloged by Google, Skyhook, and similar databases.

Bright speculated that many corporate networks likely behave the same way. And for Apple devices that connect to access points with such configurations, exposure of the MAC address may pose less of a threat. Still, while it's unclear what percentage of wireless routers assign a different MAC address to wired and wireless interfaces, Graham and Wuergler's tests show that at least some wireless routers by default make no such distinction.

Wuergler also debunked a few other misconceptions that some people had about the wireless behavior of Apple devices. Specifically, he said claims that iPhones don't broadcast the SSID they are looking for from Errata Security's Graham are incorrect. Some Ars readers had invoked the 2010 blog post from Graham to cast doubt on Wuergler's findings

"The truth is Apple products do probe for known SSIDs (and no, there is no limit as to how many)," Wuergler wrote in a post published on Friday to the Daily Dave mailing list. He included the following screenshot to document his claim.

Mark Wuergler, Immunity Inc.

Connecting the dots

What all of this means is that there's good reason to believe that iPhones and other Apple products—at least when compared to devices running Windows or Android—are unique in leaking MAC addresses that can uniquely identify the locations of networks you've connected to recently. When combined with other data often exposed by virtually all wireless devices—specifically the names of wireless networks you've connected to in the past—an attacker in close proximity of you can harvest this information and use it in targeted attacks.

Over the past year or so, Google and Skyhook have taken steps to make it harder for snoops to abuse the GPS information stored in their databases. Google Location Services, for instance, now requires the submission of two MAC addresses in close proximity of each other before it will divulge where they are located. In many cases, this requirement can be satisfied simply by providing one of the other MAC addresses returned by the Apple device. If it's within a few blocks of the first one, Google will readily provide the data. It's also feasible for attackers to use war dialing techniques to map the MAC addresses of wireless devices in a given neighborhood or city.

Since Apple engineers are remaining mum, we can only guess why iDevices behave the way they do. What isn't in dispute is that, unlike hundreds of competing devices that Wuergler and Graham have examined, the Apple products leak connection details many users would prefer to keep private.

A video demonstrating the iPhone's vulnerability to fake access point attacks is here.

Updated to better describe video.

Image courtesy of Robert Graham, Errata Security

TI Demos OMAP5 WiFi Display Mirroring on Development Platform

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:31:00 +0000

Via AnandTech

-----

On our last day at MWC 2012, TI pulled me aside for a private demonstration of WiFi Display functionality they had only just recently finalized working on their OMAP 5 development platform. The demo showed WiFi Display mirroring working between the development device’s 720p display and an adjacent notebook which was being used as the WiFi Display sink.

TI emphasized that what’s different about their WiFi Display implementation is that it works using the display framebuffer natively and not a memory copy which would introduce delay and take up space. In addition, the encoder being used is the IVA-HD accelerator doing the WiFi Display specification’s mandatory H.264 baseline Level 3.1 encode, not a software encoder running on the application processor. The demo was running mirroring the development tablet’s 720p display, but TI says they could easily do 1080p as well, but would require a 1080p framebuffer to snoop on the host device. Latency between the development platform and display sink was just 15ms - essentially one frame at 60 Hz.

The demonstration worked live over the air at TI’s MWC booth and also used a WiLink 8 series WLAN combo chip. There was some stuttering, however this is understandable given the fact that this demo was using TCP (live implementations will use UDP) and of course just how crowded 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum is at these conferences. In addition, TI collaborated with Screenovate for their application development and WiFi Display optimization secret sauce, which I’m guessing has to do with adaptive bitrate or possibly more.

Enabling higher than 480p software encoded WiFi Display is just one more obvious piece of the puzzle which will eventually enable smartphones and tablets to obviate standalone streaming devices.

-----

Personal Comment:

Kind of obvious and interesting step forward as it is more and more requested by mobile devices users to be able to beam or 'to TV' mobile device's screens... which should lead to transform any (mobile) device in a full-duplex video broadcasting enabled device (user interaction included!) ... and one may then succeed in getting rid of some cables in the same sitting?!

New Samsung sensor captures image, depth simultaneously

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:19:00 +0000

Via electronista

-----

Samsung has developed a new camera sensor technology that offers the ability to simultaneously capture image and depth. The breakthrough could potentially be applied to smartphones and other devices as an alternative method of control where hand gestures could be used to carry out functions without having to touch a screen or other input. According to Tech-On, it uses a CMOS sensor with red, blue and green pixels, combined with an additional z-pixel for capturing depth.

The new Samsung sensor can capture images at a resolution of 1,920x720 using its traditional RGB array, while it can also capture a depth image at a resolution of 480x360 with the z-pixel. It is able to achieve its depth capabilities by a special process whereby the z-pixel is located beneath the RGB pixel array. Samsung’s boffins then placed a special barrier between the RGB and z pixels allowing the light they capture to give the effect that the z-pixel is three times its actual size.

In this early iteration of the new technology, Samsung used FSI technology only. In future applications, BSI could be applied doubling the quantum efficiency of the design further reducing cross-talk to the RGB pixels.

-----

Personal Comment:

Some additional information on BSI (Backside illumination)/FSI (Frontside Illumination):

CMOS Wiki

FSI/BSI White Paper (PDF)

World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:29:58 +0000

Via TorrentFreak

-----

A few days ago The Pirate Bay announced that in future parts of its site could be hosted on GPS controlled drones. To many this may have sounded like a joke, but in fact these pirate drones already exist. Project “Electronic Countermeasures” has built a swarm of five fully operational drones which prove that an “aerial Napster” or an “airborne Pirate Bay” is not as futuristic as it sounds.

In an ever-continuing effort to thwart censorship, The Pirate Bay plans to turn flying drones into mobile hosting locations.

“Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak last Sunday, announcing their drone project.

Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, was amazed to read the announcement, not so much because of the technology, because his group has already built a swarm of file-sharing drones.

“I thought hold on, we are already doing that,” Young told TorrentFreak.

Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that.

“Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere,” says the group describing their creation.

File-Sharing Drone in Action (photo by Claus Langer)

In short the system allows the public to share data with the help of flying drones. Much like the Pirate Box, but one that flies autonomously over the city.

“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.

One major difference compared to more traditional file-sharing hubs is that it requires a hefty investment. Each of the drones costs 1500 euros to build. Not a big surprise, considering the hardware that’s needed to keep these pirate hubs in the air.

“Each one is powered by 2x 2200mAh LiPo batteries. The lift is provided by 4x Roxxy Brushless Motors that run off a GPS flight control board. Also on deck are altitude sensors and gyros that keep the flight stable. They all talk to a master control system through XBee wireless modules,” Young told TorrentFreak.

“These all sit on a 10mm x 10mm aluminum frame and are wrapped in a vacuum formed aerodynamic cowling. The network is broadcast using various different hardware setups ranging from Linux gumstick modules, wireless routers and USB sticks for file storage.”

For Young and his crew this is just the beginning. With proper financial support they hope to build more drones and increase the range they can cover.

“We are planning on scaling up the system by increasing broadcast range and building more drones for the flock. We are also building in other systems like autonomous battery change bases. We are looking for funding and backers to assist us in scaling up the system,” he told us.

Those who see the drones in action (video below) will notice that they’re not just practical. The creative and artistic background of the group shines through, with the choreography performed by the drones perhaps even more stunning than the sharing component.

“When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colors, they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive,” the group explains.

Besides the artistic value, the drones can also have other use cases than being a “pirate hub.” For example, they can serve as peer-to-peer communications support for protesters and activists in regions where Internet access is censored.

Either way, whether it’s Hollywood or a dictator, there will always be groups that have a reason to shoot the machines down. But let’s be honest, who would dare to destroy such a beautiful piece of art?

Electronic Countermeasures @ GLOW Festival NL 2011 from liam young on Vimeo.

Google Sky Map development ends, app goes open source

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:44:00 +0000

Via Android Community

-----

If you’re a fan of Google’s augmented reality astronomy app Google Sky Map, I’ve got good news and bad news for you. Google announced that major development on the app has ended, so there will be no more major official releases from the company. On the plus side, they’ve decided to release the open-source code for Sky Map, so given enough developer interest it should be around for quite some time.

Sky Map started as one of Google’s famous 20% projects, which six of its employees launched by working in their company-sponsored spare time. The application was one of Android’s first showpiece apps, combining basic astronomical data overlaid on a smartphone camera to easily identify constellations, planets and other heavenly bodies by simply pointing the phone towards the sky. The free app has been downloaded over 10 million times from the Android Market.

Google is working with Carnegie Melon University so that its students can continue direct development. The company didn’t say if direct updated with computer scientist students’ code would make it into the android Market, but it’s a pretty safe bet. If you’ d like to give it a try for yourself, you can download the open-source code here. I fully expect a Star Trek themed version of Sky Map in the next few weeks which will allow me to view the Alpha Quadrant from my smartphone – get to it, devs.

Build Up Your Phone’s Defenses Against Hackers

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:12:00 +0000

Via The New York Times

-----

Chuck Bokath would be terrifying if he were not such a nice guy. A jovial senior engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta, Mr. Bokath can hack into your cellphone just by dialing the number. He can remotely listen to your calls, read your text messages, snap pictures with your phone’s camera and track your movements around town — not to mention access the password to your online bank account.

And while Mr. Bokath’s job is to expose security flaws in wireless devices, he said it was “trivial” to hack into a cellphone. Indeed, the instructions on how to do it are available online (the link most certainly will not be provided here). “It’s actually quite frightening,” said Mr. Bokath. “Most people have no idea how vulnerable they are when they use their cellphones.”

Technology experts expect breached, infiltrated or otherwise compromised cellphones to be the scourge of 2012. The smartphone security company Lookout Inc. estimates that more than a million phones worldwide have already been affected. But there are ways to reduce the likelihood of getting hacked — whether by a jealous ex or Russian crime syndicate — or at least minimize the damage should you fall prey.

As cellphones have gotten smarter, they have become less like phones and more like computers, and thus susceptible to hacking. But unlike desktop or even most laptop computers, cellphones are almost always on hand, and are often loaded with even more personal information. So an undefended or carelessly operated phone can result in a breathtaking invasion of individual privacy as well as the potential for data corruption and outright theft.

“Individuals can have a significant impact in protecting themselves from the kind of fraud and cybercrimes we’re starting to see in the mobile space,” said Paul N. Smocer, the president of Bits, the technology policy division of the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry association of more than 100 financial institutions.

Cellphones can be hacked in several ways. A so-called man-in-the-middle attack, Mr. Bokath’s specialty, is when someone hacks into a phone’s operating system and reroutes data to make a pit stop at a snooping third party before sending it on to its destination.

That means the hacker can listen to your calls, read your text messages, follow your Internet browsing activity and keystrokes and pinpoint your geographical location. A sophisticated perpetrator of a man-in-the-middle attack can even instruct your phone to transmit audio and video when your phone is turned off so intimate encounters and sensitive business negotiations essentially become broadcast news.

How do you protect yourself? Yanking out your phone’s battery is about the only way to interrupt the flow of information if you suspect you are already under surveillance. As for prevention, a common ruse for making a man-in-the middle attack is to send the target a text message that claims to be from his or her cell service provider asking for permission to “reprovision” or otherwise reconfigure the phone’s settings due to a network outage or other problem. Don’t click “O.K.” Call your carrier to see if the message is bogus.

For added security, Mr. Bokath uses a prepaid subscriber identity module, or SIM, card, which he throws away after using up the line of credit. A SIM card digitally identifies the cellphone’s user, not only to the cellphone provider but also to hackers. It can take several months for the cellphone registry to associate you with a new SIM. So regularly changing the SIM card, even if you have a contract, will make you harder to target. They are not expensive (about $25 for 50 of them on eBay). This tactic works only if your phone is from AT&T or T-Mobile, which support SIM cards. Verizon and Sprint do not. Another way hackers can take over your phone is by embedding malware, or malicious software, in an app. When you download the app, the malware gets to work corrupting your system and stealing your data. Or the app might just be poorly designed, allowing hackers to exploit a security deficiency and insert malware on your phone when you visit a dodgy Web site or perhaps click on nefarious attachments or links in e-mails. Again, treat your cellphone as you would a computer. If it’s unlikely Aunt Beatrice texted or e-mailed you a link to “Great deals on Viagra!”, don’t click on it.

Since apps are a likely vector for malware transmission on smartphones, Roman Schlegel, a computer scientist at City University of Hong Kong who specializes in mobile security threats, advised, “Only buy apps from a well-known vendor like Google or Apple, not some lonely developer.”

It’s also a good idea to read the “permissions” that apps required before downloading them. “Be sure the permissions requested make sense,” Mr. Schlegel said. “Does it make sense for an alarm clock app to want permission to record audio? Probably not.” Be especially wary of apps that want permission to make phone calls, connect to the Internet or reveal your identity and location.

The Google Android Market, Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace, Research in Motion BlackBerry App World and Appstore for Android on Amazon.com all disclose the permissions of apps they sell. The Apple iTunes App Store does not, because Apple says it vets all the apps in its store.

Also avoid free unofficial versions of popular apps, say, Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja. They often have malware hidden in the code. Do, however, download an antivirus app like Lookout, Norton and AVG. Some are free. Just know that security apps screen only for viruses, worms, Trojans and other malware that are already in circulation. They are always playing catch-up to hackers who are continually developing new kinds of malware. That’s why it’s important to promptly download security updates, not only from app developers but also from your cellphone provider.

Clues that you might have already been infected include delayed receipt of e-mails and texts, sluggish performance while surfing the Internet and shorter battery life. Also look for unexplained charges on your cellphone bill.

As a general rule it is safer to use a 3G network than public Wi-Fi. Using Wi-Fi in a Starbucks or airport, for example, leaves you open to hackers shooting the equivalent of “gossamer threads into your phone, which they use to reel in your data,” said Martin H. Singer, chief executive of Pctel, a company in Bloomingdale, Ill., that provides wireless security services to government and industry.

If that creepy image tips you into the realm of paranoia, there are supersecure smartphones like the Sectéra Edge by General Dynamics, which was commissioned by the Defense Department for use by soldiers and spies. Today, the phone is available for $3,000 only to those working for government-sponsored entities, but it’s rumored that the company is working to provide something similar to the public in the near future. General Dynamics did not wish to comment.

Georgia Tech Research Institute is taking a different tack by developing software add-on solutions to make commercially available phones as locked-down as those used by government agents.

Michael Pearce, a mobile security consultant with Neohapsis in Chicago, said you probably did not need to go as far as buying a spy phone, but you should take precautions. “It’s like any arms race,” he said. “No one wins, but you have to go ahead and fight anyway.”

What happened to innovative games?

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:01:00 +0000

Via #AltDevBlogADay

-----

Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.

However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.

Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism (if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop. Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit, showing that their hit games were also copied:

Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.

Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate” model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the original game, depending on how you look at it.

Did Google ever have a plan to curb Android fragmentation?

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:56:00 +0000

Via ZDNet

-----

Another day, another set of Android fragmentation stories. And while there’s no doubt that there is wide fragmentation within the platform, and there’s not real solution in sight, I’m starting to wonder if Google ever had a plan to prevent the platform for becoming a fragmented mess.

How bad’s the problem? Jon Evans over on TechCrunch tells it like it is:

OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. Ice Cream Sandwich is by all accounts very nice; but what good does that do app developers, when according to Google’s own stats, 30% of all Android devices are still running an OS that is 20 months old?

…

More than two-thirds of iOS users had upgraded to iOS 5 a mere three months after its release. Anyone out there think that Ice Cream Sandwich will crack the 20% mark on Google’s platform pie chart by March?

He then goes on to deliver the killer blow:

OS fragmentation is the single greatest problem Android faces, and it’s only going to get worse. Android’s massive success over the last year mean that there are now tens if not hundreds of millions of users whose handset manufacturers and carriers may or may not allow them to upgrade their OS someday; and the larger that number grows, the more loath app developers will become to turn their back on them. That unwillingness to use new features means Android apps will fall further and further behind their iOS equivalents, unless Google manages – via carrot, stick, or both – to coerce Android carriers and manufacturers to prioritize OS upgrades.

And that’s the core problem with Android. While there’s no doubt that consumers who’ve bought Android devices are being screwed out of updates that they deserve (the take up of Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ is pretty poor so far), the biggest risk from fragmentation is that developers will ignore new Android features an instead focus on supporting older but more mainstream feature sets. After all, developers want to hit the masses, not the fringes. Also, the more platforms developers have to support, the more testing work there is.

OK, so Android is fragmented, and it’s a problem that Google doesn’t seem willing to tackle. But the more I look at the Android platform and the associated ecosystem, it makes me wonder if Google ever had any plan (or for that matter intention) to control platform fragmentation.

But could Google have done anything to control fragmentation? Former Microsoftie (and now investor) Charlie Kindel thinks there no hope to curb fragmentation. In fact, he believes that most things will make it worse. I disagree with Kindel on this matter. He also believes that Google’s current strategy amounts to little more that wishing that everyone will upgrade. On this point we are in total agreement.

I disagree with Kindel that that there’s nothing that Google can do to at least try to discourage fragmentation. I believe that one of Google’s strongest cards are Android users themselves. Look at how enthusiastic iPhone and iPad owners are about iOS updates. They’re enthusiastic because Apple tells them why they should be enthusiastic about new updates. Compare this to Google’s approach to Android customers. Google (or anyone else in the chain for that matter) doesn’t seem to be doing much to get people fired up and enthusiastic about Android. In fact, it seems to me the only message being given to Android customers is ‘buy another Android handset.’

I understand that Google isn’t Apple and can’t seem to sway the crowds in the same way, but it might start to help if the search giant seemed to care about the OS. The absence of enthusiasm make the seem Sphinx-like and uncaring. Why should anyone care about new Android updates when Google itself doesn’t really seem all that excited? If Google created a real demand for Android updates from the end users, this would put put pressure on the handset makers and the carriers to get updates in a timely fashion to users.

Make the users care about updates, and the people standing in the way of those updates will sit up and pay attention to things.

Personal comment:

Google with Android OS is now in a similar place than Microsoft with Windows, and blaming Google to have this disparity of OS versions would be the same than blaming Microsoft on the fact that Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are still co-existing nowadays. One reason Android got that 'fragged' is that it has to face a rapid evolution of hardware and new kind of devices in a very short time, somehow having a kind of Frankenstein-like experience with its Android creature. Many distinct hardware manufacturers adopt Android, develop their own GUI layer on top of it, making Google having a direct control on the spread of new Android version quite impossible... as each manufacturer may need to perform their own code update prior to propose a new version of Android on their own devices.

The direct comparison with iOS is a kind of unfair as Apple do have a rapid update cycle by controlling every single workings of the overall mechanism: SDK regular updates push developers to adopt new features and forget about old iOS versions and new iDevice's Apps request the end-user to upgrade their iOS version to the last one in order to be able to install new Apps. Meanwhile, Apple is having control on hardware design, production and evolution too, making the propagation of new iOS versions much easier and much faster than it is for Google with Android.

Then, mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) do have a short life timeline and this was already true prior Google and Apple starts acting in this market. So whatever your name is Google or Apple, considering not proposing the very last version of your OS on so-called 'old' or obsolete hardware is a kind of an obvious choice to do. This is not even a 'choice' but more a direct consequence of how fast technology is evolving nowadays.

Now, smartphones and tablets hardware capabilities will reach a 'standard' level to become 'mature' products (all smartphones/tablets do have cameras, video capabilities, editing capabilities etc...) which may make easier for Android to spread over on all devices in a similar version while hardware evolution observes a pause. Already Apple's last innovations are more linked to software than real hardware (r)evolution, so Android may take benefit of this in order to reduce the gap.

Microsoft Reinvents Wi-Fi for White Spaces

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:29:00 +0000

Via TechnologyReview

-----

Microsoft has developed a new kind of Wi-Fi network that performs at its top speed even in the face of interference. It takes advantage of a new Wi-Fi standard that uses more of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also hops between the narrow bands of unused spectrum within television broadcast frequencies.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved limited use of "white spaces"—portions of spectrum adjacent to existing television transmissions. The ruling, in effect, expanded the available spectrum. Microsoft developed the new network partly as a way to push Congress to allow much broader use of white spaces, despite some concerns over interference with some other types of wireless devices, such as wireless microphones.

The fastest Wi-Fi networks, which can transmit data at up to a gigabit per second, use as much spectrum as possible, up to 160 megahertz, to maximize bandwidth. Krishna Chintalapudi and his team at Microsoft Research have pioneered an approach, called WiFi-NC, which makes efficient use of these white spaces at these speeds.

Rather than using a conventional Wi-Fi radio, it uses an array of tiny, low-data rate transmitters and receivers. Each of these broadcast and receive via a different, narrow range of spectrum. Bundled together, they work just like a regular Wi-Fi radio, but can switch between white-space frequencies far more efficiently.

That means the system is compatible with existing equipment. "The entire reception and transmission logic could be reused from existing Wi-Fi implementations," says Chintalapudi.

The team calls these transmitters and receivers "receiver-lets" and "transmitter-lets." Together, they make up what's known as a "compound radio."

The resulting wireless network doesn't increase data rates in specific ranges of spectrum above what's currently achieved with latest-generation technology. It does, however, make more efficient use of the entire range of spectrum, and especially the white spaces freed up by the FCC.

The new radio integrates with a previous Microsoft project that provides a wireless device with access to a database of available white-space spectrum in any part of the United States. That system, called SenseLess, tells a device where it can legally broadcast and receive. WiFi-NC then chooses the bands of spectrum that have the least interference, and broadcasts over them.

By sending its signal over many smaller radios that operate in slivers of the available spectrum, WiFi-NC suffers less interference and experiences faster speeds even when a user is at the intersection of overlapping networks. This is important because the white spaces that may be authorized for commercial use by the FCC are at the lower ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, where signals can travel much further than existing Wi-Fi transmissions.

Whether or not Microsoft's WiFi-NC technology gets commercialized depends on Congress, says Kevin Werbach, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, and an expert on the FCC's effort to make more spectrum available for wireless data transmission.

"The problem is that many of the Congressional proposals to give the FCC [the authority to auction off currently unused bandwidth] also restrict it from making available white spaces for devices around that spectrum," says Werbach.

Microsoft hopes WiFi-NC will persuade Congress to approve wider use of white spaces.

"It is our opinion that WiFi-NC's approach of using multiple narrow channels as opposed to the current model of using wider channels in an all-or-nothing style is the more prudent approach for the future of Wi-Fi and white spaces," says Chintalapudi. The team's ultimate goal, he adds, is to propose WiFi-NC as a new wireless standard for the hardware and software industries.

OLPC XO-3 tablet revealed

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:48:00 +0000

Via SlashGear

-----

OLPC had already announced it was bringing along its XO-3 tablet to CES this coming week; now we know what the new education-focused slate will look like. Less slimline than the older concepts and nowhere near as space-age as the earlier dual-screen XO-2 renders, the new silicone-clad XO-3 does at least have the bonus of actually fitting inside the Marvell ARMADA PXA618 processor and half gig of RAM we’re expecting.

Up front is an 8-inch screen – a 1024 x 768 Pixel Qi panel, no less, for indoor and outdoor visibility – with a peel-off silicone cover so as to protect it from scratches and bumps while in a schoolbag. There’ll also be solar panels on the inside, one of a trio of recharging options to keep the OLPC XO-3 running: as well as plugging it into the mains, should you have the luxury of being near an AC supply, there’ll be a hand-crank to manually top up the battery.

Sixty seconds of cranking is good for ten minutes of use, or so OLPC tells us, and the OS is either Android or the specialist education-focused Sugar platform. Ports – which are also covered up by that clever cover – include full-sized USB, audio and a memory card slot.

Best of all, though, is the price: OLPC expects the XO-3 to kick off at $100, though that will be for regular LCD rather than Pixel Qi versions. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to drop by Best Buy and pick one up, as OLPC will be selling direct to educational organizations and charities.

Malls track shoppers' cell phones on Black Friday

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:01:25 +0000

Via CNN

-----

Through this signage at Promenade Temecula, the mall is notifying shoppers that their phones may be tracked as they move throughout the premises.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.

Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.

The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?

While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.

But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.

The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked.

"We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to."

Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.

The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores.

The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order.

"We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone's cell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said.

Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, this technology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe and Australia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, hardly any shoppers decide to opt out.

"It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risks to privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out."

Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP, Fortune 500) and Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence to use their technology, Biggar said.

Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is not currently using it any stores, a company spokesman said. JCPenney declined to comment on its relationship with the vendor.

Why Apple and Google need to stalk you

Some retail analysts say the new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have been tracking shoppers for years through people counters, security cameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around.

And some even say websites that track online shoppers are more invasive, recording not only a user's name and purchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've left a site.

"It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is being collected anyway," Biggar said.

Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase, physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind of research, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath with their own sales figures, stores will have better measurements to help them improve the shopping experience.

"We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what's going wrong."

But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications of this kind of technology.

"Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?"

Last year, hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make it harder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligence scrambles those numbers twice.

"I'm sure as more people get more cell phones, it's probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource," Mulpuru said. "But I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out."

Personal comment:

One step further. I guess we have to be thankful to be given the ability to opt out the system by 'just' switching off our cell-phone!!!

Adobe kills mobile Flash, giving Steve Jobs the last laugh

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:27:27 +0000

Via The Guardian

-----

Focus in future will be on HTML5 as mobile world shifts towards non-proprietary open standards – and now questions will linger over use of Flash on desktop

Adobe is killing off development of its mobile Flash plugin, and laying off 750 staff as part of broader restructuring. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe, will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.

Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5 technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.

The existing plugins for the Android and BlackBerry platforms will be given bug fixes and security updates, the company said in a statement first revealed by ZDNet. But further development will end.

The decision also raises a question mark over the future of Flash on desktop PCs. Security vulnerabilities in Flash on the desktop have been repeatedly exploited to infect PCs in the past 18 months, while Microsoft has also said that the default browser in its forthcoming Windows 8 system, expected at the end of 2012, will not include the Flash plugin by default. Apple, which in the third quarter captured 5% of the world market, does not include Flash in its computers by default.

John Nack, a principal product manager at Adobe, commented on his personal blog (which does not necessarily reflect Adobe views) that: "Adobe saying that Flash on mobile isn't the best path forward [isn't the same as] Adobe conceding that Flash on mobile (or elsewhere) is bad technology. Its quality is irrelevant if it's not allowed to run, and if it's not allowed to run, then Adobe will have to find different ways to meet customers' needs."

Around 250m iOS (iPhone, iPod Touches and iPad) devices have been sold since 2007. There are no clear figures for how many are now in use. More recently Larry Page, chief executive of Google, said that a total of 190m Android devices have been activated. It is not clear how many of those include a Flash plugin in the browser.

At the start of 2011, around 20m devices had Flash in the browser, Adobe said, and it expected that by the end of this year the total would be 200m.

"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe Air for all the major app stores," Adobe said in the statement. "We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations.

"Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates."

The decision comes as Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe. An Adobe spokesperson declined to give any figures for the extent of layoffs in the UK. The company reiterated its expectation that it will meet revenue targets for the fourth quarter.

The reversal by Adobe – and its decision to focus on the open HTML5 platform for mobile – brings to an end a long and tumultuous row between Apple and Adobe over the usefulness of Flash on the mobile platform. The iPhone launched in 2007 without Flash capability, as did the iPad in 2010.

Steve Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, and Apple's engineers insisted that Flash was a "battery hog" and introduced security and stability flaws; Adobe countered that it was broadly implemented in desktop PCs and used widely on the web.

Jobs's antagonism was partly driven, his biography reveals, by Adobe's reluctance after he rejoined Apple in 1996 to port its movie-editing programs to the Mac and to keep its Photoshop suite comparable on the Mac platform with the Windows one.

But Jobs also insisted that mobile Flash failed in the role of providing a good user experience, and also would restrict Apple's ability to push forward on the iOS platform. Studies of browser crash reports by Apple's teams showed that Flash was responsible for a signficant proportion of user problems; Apple was also not satisfied that a Flash plugin would be available for the first iPhone in 2007 which would not consume more battery power than would be acceptable.

Jobs managed to persuade Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive and a member of the Apple board, to get YouTube to make videos available in the H.264 format without a Flash "wrapper", as was then used for the desktop implementation.

But the disagreements between Apple and Adobe intensified, especially when Android devices began appearing which did use the Flash plugin. Apple refused to use it, and banned apps from its App Store which tried to use or include Flash.

In "Thoughts on Flash", an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

"New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

Adobe's chief executive Shantanu Narayen hit back at Jobs, saying that "Thoughts on Flash" contained statements about the plugin that were false (relating to battery drain).

NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor revealed and detailed

nospam@example.com (Christian Babski) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:51:00 +0000

Via Slash Gear

By Chris Burns

-----

The next generation of mobile processors has arrived in the form of the NIVIDA Tegra 3, formerly known as Project Kal-El, a quad-core chipset with aspirations to dominate the Android landscape in 2012 as theTegra 2 dual-core processor dominated the majority of 2011. Though many of the details have already been revealed by NVIDIA before today on how Tegra 3 functions and is able to bring you the consumer more power, less battery consumption, and more effective workload distribution, this marks both the official naming of the chip as well as the official distribution of easy to process videos on how Tegra 3 will affect the average mobile device user.

NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset has been gone over in full detail by your humble narrator in two posts here on SlashGear just a few weeks ago in two posts, one on how there are actually [five cores, not just four], and another all about [Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing] aka vSMP. Note that back then NVIDIA had not yet revealed that the final market name for the processor would be “Tegra 3? at the time these posts were published, instead still using the codename “Project Kal-El” to identify the chipset. The most important thing you should take away from these posts is this: your battery life will be better and the distribution of power needed by your processor cores will be handled more intelligently.

NVIDIA has provided a few videos that will explain again in some rather easy to process detail what we’re dealing with here in the Tegra 3. The first of these videos shows visually what cores use which amount of power as several different tasks are performed. Watch as a high-powered game uses all four cores while browsing a webpage might only use a single core. This is the power of Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing in action.

NVIDIA Tegra 3: Fifth Companion Core

Next there’s a demonstration of an upcoming game that would never have been able to exist on a mobile platform if it hadn’t been for NVIDIA’s new chip architecture and the power of a quad-core chipset – along with NVIDIA’s twelve GPU cores of course. We had a look at this game back earlier this year in the first Glowball post – now we go underwater:

Glowball Video 2: Tegra 3 goes underwater

Finally there’s a lovely set of videos showing you exactly what it means for game developers and gamers to be working with the Tegra 3 chipset. The first video shows off how next-generation games are being made specifically for this chipset, developers working hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 so that gamers can get the most awesome experience in mobile history. Devour this, if you will:

NVIDIA Tegra 3: Developers bring Next-Generation Games to Mobile

You can also see several examples of the games in the video and how they’ve been improved in the Tegra 3 world. Riptide GP as well as Shadowgun have been reviewed and given hands-on videos by your humble narrator in the past – can’t wait for the enhanced visions! Next have a look at these games running side-by-side with their original versions. Make sure you’re sitting down, because you’re going to get pumped up.

Side-by-side Gameplay Competition vs Tegra 3

Down to the frames per second, this new chipset will change the world you live in as far as gaming goes. Of course it doesn’t stop there, but in that gaming is one of the best ways to test a processor on this platform, one made with gaming in mind of course, you’ve got to appreciate the power. Have a peek at this tiny chart to see what we mean:

Then head over to the post from ASUS on what the very first hardware running the Tegra 3 will look like. It’s the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, a 10.1-inch tablet from the makers of the original Transformer, a device made to pummel the competition and usher in a whole new age in mobile computing. We look forward to the future, NVIDIA, bring on another year of complete and total annihilation of the competition!