December 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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I’ve been poking fun at Apple’s intellectual property design claims for some time now. Then, I got a look at Apple’s “suggestions” on how Samsung could avoid Apple’s legal wrath and I realized I hadn’t even scratched the surface of how absurd Apple’s claims are.
In a recently revealed Apple court document (PDF) we see an Apple-paid expert witness explaining why Apple’s designs should be protected under intellectual property law and how Samsung could have avoided Apple’s unique design decisions.
December 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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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 doesn’t mean that it’s being used to gather intelligence about the user or passed along to the carrier.” Tell it to the judge. The class-action lawsuits have already begun.
Besides, thanks to white hat hacker Trevor Eckhart’s video we already knew that Carrier IQ’s rootkit was grabbing an amazing amount of private information. Coward explains though that “What it [Eckhart’s video] doesn’t show is that all information is processed, stored, or forwarded out of the device.”
OK, then why is it being collected if it’s not to be processed, stored, or forwarded? I mean I’m a former network administrator, I get why carriers want to know about why calls are dropped, why a text goes missing into the ether and so on. What I don’t get is why, for example, Carrier IQ or a carrier is collecting a text’s content.
December 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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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 that Apple bakes this snooper into every phone. With other smartphones, the carriers, such as AT&T and Sprint, add it into your phones’ firmware before it gets into your hands.
Carrier IQ and the carriers aren’t talking much about their snooping ways.
December 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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December 01, 2011, 7:00 AM — It used to be that when I said “cloud services,” people’s eyes would glaze over and in minutes they’d be gently snoring. That was then. This is now. While CIOs and CTOs still debate about what role the cloud will have in business, personal cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone’s computing plans.
That’s not you you say? You don’t use a cloud service? Really? Do you use Dropbox to store files? Do you get your e-mail at Gmail? Are you experimenting with Apple’s iCloud? Doing work with Google Apps, Office 365, or Zoho Docs? Congratulations, you’re a cloud user. You may be thinking a lot of those are software as a service (SaaS) offerings that mimic traditional client-server computing, and you’d be right. But they’re also all cloud services.
Lately, though, personal cloud services have been moving into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) realm. It’s in IaaS that you find file storage, media serving, and a variety of other ad hoc services for either no or minimal costs. So many of these services have been popping up, and with so many different service offerings, that I thought it was well past time to take an overview of what’s what in personal IaaS.
November 30, 2011
by sjvn01
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I know many people think Klout, the social network reputation measurement service, is utter nonsense or even evil. Too bad. Klout does matter. Businesses may give you work or a job depending on your Klout score. You may find that troubling. Deal with it. What I find far more troubling is that Klout scores can bounce up and down like hyperactive five-years old on a trampoline.
What the heck is your social network reputation you ask? According to Esther Schindler, co-author of the forthcoming book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Twitter Marketing, while “No one can comfortably compare how important one person is compared to another,” the bottom line is that “some people can have more of an impact on your company than can others and that’s why services have sprung up to measure social media influence. ” Klout isn’t the only company that tries to measure this–PeerIndex and TweetGrader do as well-but it’s the most important of them.
I used to think Klout was dumb… and then an editor who was trying to talk me into writing a book wanted to know what my Klout score was. Since then I’ve talked to others and they tell me that their would-be employers wanted to see high Klout scores before giving them a job or contract. So, while you may doubt Klout’s value, your potential employers do care about your Klout score.
November 30, 2011
by sjvn01
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Some fools still have this delusion that software patent and product design wars have something to do with some mythological real value of intellectual property (IP). While there are indeed cases involving a better mouse-trap, most such cases are about nothing but extorting cash from people who create real products, or, in the case of Apple vs. Samsung, Apple trying to preserve its market share against a would-be competitor.
Apple makes great products, but you wouldn’t know it from the way it’s attacking Samsung. Rather than let the marketplace decide whose products are better, Apple wants the courts to decide. Specifically, Apple is slugging it out with Samsung in a minimum of 19 lawsuits in 12 courts in nine countries on four continents.
Let that sink in for a minute. Apple is trying to use intellectual property law as a bludgeon around the world to protect its sales.
Around the globe the battle goes. In Australia, Samsung wins, for now, the right to sell their Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. In Germany, Samsung redesigns the same tablet in an attempt to avoid a European Union wide sales ban. And, the battle goes on and on.