By Alison@Creekside NYTimes: New iPhone’s Fingerprint Scanner: “Coming just one day after leaked documents suggested that the National Security Agency is able to hack into smartphones, the unveiling of a new iPhone with a built-in fingerprint scanner prompted dismay and mockery…” Business Insider: NSA Slides Refer To iPhone Owners As ‘Zombies’ Cryptome/ Spiegel Online: How the NSA Accesses Smartphone […]
Microsoft: Team player
By Alison@Creekside Feel free to drop by this Microsoft ad and give it a thumbs down. “At Microsoft, your privacy is our priority.” Indeed. About that … Guardian: How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages • Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism • Outlook.com encryption including Hotmail unlocked even before official launch • Skype worked […]
PRISM is just the beginning
By David@Sixthestate.net As you may have heard, the Obama administration has been outed as ambitiously Big Brother-ish, overseeing a National Security Agency surveillance program which essentially scoops user data from every major online source — Facebook, Google, Skype, even Apple — and puts it into the world’s largest personal information database. (This, surprisingly, means Facebook […]
Think you bought that DVD? Think again.
By John Klein (aka Saskboy) Imagine buying a house, and being locked out of the basement by the previous owner. That’s what digital locks do. If you’ve been following Canadian politics, particularly the new Copyright Act (Canada’s DMCA) Bill C-11, you’ve heard of “digital locks.” A digital lock, or Digital Rights/Restrictions Management (DRM), is a […]
Letter to Steve Jobs
by Eric Pettifor Dear Mr. Jobs: I write to you on the occasion of your death to congratulate you on making a difference. As more of a technology visionary and businessman than a true geek (that was your erstwhile partner Steve Wozniak, or “Woz”), you may not recall that this was the concern of a […]
Adobe Previews Adobe Flash Killer
By Eric Pettifor Back in March, I criticized Apple for not including support for Adobe Flash in their iPad tablet. Their reasoning seemed to be, at least in part, that Flash was going away, to be replaced by HTML 5 with support from javascript and CSS, to which I responded that may very well be, […]
iKnow Where You Were Last Summer
by Eric Pettifor So, it turns out that phones running the iOS 4 update of June, 2010 log date and location wherever their owners take them. The data sits there on the phone. It is not transmitted to Apple, so the charge cannot be made that Apple is actively spying on its customers. But do […]
Xoom vs iPad 2
By Eric Pettifor A couple of posts ago I wrote of the Motorola Xoom tablet, extolling its virtues while trying to convince myself that I don’t need one. And truly, I don’t. My little netbook is all the portable computing I really need. What I might want, and might actually get (if it was in […]
I don’t need a tablet. Repeat.
by Eric Pettifor Okay, I’m starting to want a tablet. No, not the iPad for which I expressed my underwhelmedness back in February of 2010, but the Motorola Xoom to be released this quarter, perhaps even as soon as next month. What’s so great about the Xoom? Well, if you’re one of those who have […]
The Chrome revolution has been postponed
by Eric Pettifor Last year at this time I predicted that a small revolution in web apps would occur in 2010, thanks to the introduction of Google Chrome OS, and may have implied that this would have a negative effect on the iPhone. I also expressed the opinion that, if all went well with the […]
