Practical Technology

Carrier IQ, the mobile phone network analysis company at the heart of the smartphone spyware scandal, isn’t talking to me, but it is talking to AllThingsD. To them, Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing, explained that “The software receives a huge amount of information from the operating system. But just because it receives it [...]

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Isn’t it wonderful? It turns out that a spyware rootkit from a company called Carrier IQ is on hundreds of millions of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Only Windows Phone-powered smartphones seems to have avoiding this program that reports on almost everything you do with your phone. In the case of iPhones, it appears [...]

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Besides search and social networking, Google keeps getting deeper and deeper into the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. While Google hasn’t opened the doors for anyone in the world to use Google Voice yet, Google has just made it possible for Google Talk users to call land-line and mobile phones around the world. In [...]

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f you really know how Skype works, you know it’s about as safe as juggling firecrackers. Skype, the popular VoIP program, relies on every PC running Skype between you and who you’re calling to serve as stepping stones for your conversation. That’s bad. What’s worse is when Skype doesn’t check to see if Skype calls [...]

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I told you so. I knew that Steve Ballmer could talk all he wanted about how Microsoft would continue to support non-Microsoft platforms, but that there was no way he’d actually do it. The first proof is here. Digium, the company behind the popular open-source Asterisk private-branch exchange (PBX) program, has announced that Skype has [...]

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