Category Archives: Apple

The iPad and time-shifted reading

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Fascinating TechCrunch post by Erick Schonfeld on how the iPad changes people’s reading habits.

One of the reasons bookmarking apps like Read It Later and Instapaper are becoming so popular is because we are inundated with news and interesting links all day long, but have no time to read them. But just as DVRs helps us shift our TV viewing to better fit our own schedules, these apps helps us time shift our online reading. And according to some data put out earlier this month by Read It Later, it looks like the iPad is becoming the time-shifting reading device of choice.

Read It Later offers a bookmarklet which enables one to ‘save’ a Web page for offline reading on an iPad. The people who run the service surveyed the bookmarking habits of its users over the course of a day. The rate of bookmarking was pretty uniform in the period 7am – 6pm but drops off sharply after 9pm. They then looked at when iPad users read the articles they have saved and found that the time reserved for reading is shifted all the way to the right, with the sweet spot being between 7 PM and 11 PM at night. This suggests, they say, that “iPad usage is competing with primetime TV for people’s attention (or that they watching TV with iPad in hand, or shifting their TV viewing to other times).”

This is intriguing — and squares with my own experience. Instapaper is one of the Apps I use — and value — most.

BlackBerry: a smouldering platform

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Not quite burning yet. But emitting smoke. Sobering assessment of what RIM’s latest results tell us. Excerpt:

When reporting its fourth quarter in March, RIM had forecast revenues in the range of $5.2-$5.6bn and profits of between $770-812m.

Instead, they both came in lower. Now, you might look at that and say that revenues are up, and shipments are up – so what’s the worry?

First, it’s in the gap between those two – which led to the fall in profits. Basically, you can see clearly from those numbers that RIM must be getting less money per phone. Quite substantially less, if you take into account the average cost of a PlayBook (which is going to be a lot more than a BlackBerry).

We would have been able to tell you exactly how much it was getting per handset – but following its results last time, RIM said it would stop giving out both average selling prices (ASPs) for handsets and the total number of BlackBerry subscribers, which it had been doing since the beginning of 2002. And another financial point: the company is to buy back 5% of the outstanding shares. I won’t go into the mechanics of why share buybacks are bad (two quick reasons: the company should have better things to spend its cash on, such as R&D, and buybacks featherbed executive share options). But when a company circles the wagons by reducing the amount of data it gives out and does a buyback, something is wrong.

Here’s what’s wrong: RIM’s platform is burning. Except that this isn’t the fully-fledged conflagration that Stephen Elop perceived at Nokia. It’s more of a smouldering. But it’s happening nonetheless, and it’s been happening for a long time: RIM hasn’t released a major new phone since August 2010. (Yes, that’s nearly as long as Apple.) It sort-of showed off a new version of the Torch in May; that will actually be released in September. (Way to kill the sales, people.)

RIM’s management knows it has a problem, but doesn’t seem to be able to make the shift – the very difficult shift, it should be noted – from the old BlackBerry OS to the new QNX platform that is going to power forthcoming BlackBerrys (and already powers the PlayBook).

QNX-based phones have been much promised; RIM hasn’t however delivered.

That figures. I’ve noticed how almost all my corporate contacts — the people who once had BlackBerrys to a man or woman — now have iPhones.

T.S. Eliot, the iPad and me

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This morning’s Observer column.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was first published in 1922, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. And in case you’re wondering what a technology columnist is doing making pronouncements like that, I should explain that I’m just quoting Andrew Motion, who used to be poet laureate and knows about these things. But for mere mortals, or at any rate engineers like me, the complexity of the poem has always put it out of reach. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to read it before concluding that it would have to be added to my list of futile aspirations.

Until now.

What has changed is that last week Touch Press, an innovative publishing outfit founded by Max Whitby, Theodore Gray and Stephen Wolfram, in partnership with the olde-worlde publisher Faber & Faber, launched a digital edition of the poem for the Apple iPad…

LATER: Interesting blog post by one of the App’s designers.

iCloud roundup

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The combination of iCloud with Apple’s coming mobile operating system will allow make its mobile devices more like standalone computers. Users will be able to activate and operate iPads and iPhones without ever needing to connect them to a computer running iTunes.

“We’re living in a post pc world,”said Scott Forstall, Apple’s SVP for iOS software, who shared the stage with Jobs, “if you want to cut the cord, you can.”

Forstall said that many of Apple’s customers were now people without computers who wanted their iPad or iPhone to be their only device.

(Emphasis added.)

[Source: Technology Review.]

The “post-PC” claim was made when the iPad was launched, but seemed idiotic at a time when the only way of activating the device was to hook it up via an umbilical cord to iTunes running on a PC. The surprise is that it took Apple this long to get around to it.

LATER: The NYT reports it like this:

Mr. Jobs said people will no longer have to manually sync mobile devices with their PCs, an approach that he said has become too unruly now that millions of people own music players, smartphones and tablets, each with photos, music, apps and other types of documents.

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” Mr. Jobs said, speaking on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference here. “We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”

“Everything happens automatically, and there is nothing new to learn,” he added.

STILL LATER: I love the Register’s headline over its report on the WWDC presentation:

Apple opens iCloud to world+dog

Jobs: ‘It’s not as crap as MobileMe. Promise’

EVEN LATER: Nieman Journalism Lab has a useful analysis of the iCloud announcements.

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…

Apple makes late entry into whack-a-mole game

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

After weeks of dodging the issue of a recent widespread malware outbreak, Apple has changed course and is addressing affected customers’ concerns.

On Tuesday, Apple finally posted instructions on its support site on how to avoid or remove the malicious program, and said an Mac OS X update in the coming days will remove it or block it from installing in the first place.

The MacDefender malware, one of the few to actually target Mac operating systems, is a phishing program that fools users into thinking they are downloading anti-virus protection when it’s actually going after credit-card information. ZDNet estimates between 60,000 and 125,000 Mac users have been affected in the past month, and in an eyebrow-raising report quoted an Apple tech support insider who said they were expressly forbidden from helping callers remove the malicious program. That supported leaked internal documents that Gizmodo published last week which, among other things, told customer service reps: “AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.”

While support from Apple is a welcome development, the company’s initial reaction is disturbing from a customer-service standpoint. Just as disturbing to many Mac users is the realization that their OS’s, so long considered safe from most Internet viruses, are not immune after all.

This is beginning to look like a pattern. Remember the clueless way Apple handled the problem with the iPhone 4 antenna and then the controversy about the ‘bug’ which enabled iPhones to accumulate and store unencrypted location data on the devices? The problem Apple has is that its reputation for effortless design superiority now leads to corporate paralysis whenever events threaten to undermine the image.

And of course there is the problem that as the Mac becomes more and more successful, the juicier a target it presents for malware.

UPDATE: The Apple advisory note is already out of date.

Ed Bott says “File that memo under, ‘Too little, too late.'”

Within 12 hours of Apple’s announcement, the author of the original Mac Defender program had a new variant available that renders key portions of the current Mac Defender prevention plan obsolete.

A security researcher for Intego, the Mac-centric security company that identified the original Mac Defender, found the first example of this new code via a poisoned Google search very early this morning.

Several factors make this specimen different. For starters, it has a new name: MacGuard. That’s not surprising, given that the original program already had at least three names. But this one is divided into two separate parts.

The first part is a downloader. In the original version, this asked the user to enter his or her administrator password. The new version works on the assumption (generally correct) that most Macs are single-user machines –which means that the user has the requisite privileges and so the malware bypasses the admin-password dialogue. The software then installs an application named avRunner, which launches automatically and installs the second part, which is similar to the original Mac Defender. The installer then deletes itself from the user’s Mac, so no traces of the original installer are left behind.

So Apple is now embarked on the same game of whack-a-mole that Microsoft has had to play for years. The evidence so far suggests that Steve Jobs & Co aren’t experienced players. Maybe they need help from Redmond, where they know more about this than anybody else.

Privacy in the networked universe

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From a comment piece by me in today’s Observer.

Recent events in the high court suggest that we now have two parallel media universes.

In one – Universe A – we find tightly knit groups of newspaper editors and expensive lawyers trying to persuade a judge that details of the sexual relations between sundry celebrities and a cast of characters once memorably characterised by a Glasgow lawyer as “hoors, pimps and comic singers” should (or should not) be published in the public prints.

If the judge sides with the celebs, then he or she can grant an injunction forbidding publication. But because news of an injunction invariably piques public interest (no smoke without fire and all that), an extra legal facility has become popular — the super-injunction, which prevents publication of news that an injunction has been granted, thereby ensuring not only that Joe Public knows nothing of the aforementioned cavortings, but also that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

In the old days, this system worked a treat for the simple reason that Universe A was hermetically sealed. If a judge granted the requisite injunctions, then nobody outside the magic circle knew anything.

But those days are gone. Universe A is no longer hermetically sealed.

It now leaks into Universe B, which is the networked ecosystem powered by the internet. And once news of an injunction gets on to the net, then effectively the whole expensive charade of Universe A counts for nought. A few minutes’ googling or twittering is usually enough to find out what’s going on.

This raises interesting moral dilemmas for Joe Public…

The Apple spyPhone (contd.)

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It’s fascinating to see what happened overnight on this story. Firstly, lots of people began posting maps of where their iPhones had been, which is a clear demonstration of the First Law of Technology — which says that if something can be done then it will be done, irrespective of whether it makes sense or not. Personally I’ve always been baffled by how untroubled geeks are about revealing location data. I remember one dinner party of ours which was completely ruined when one guest, a friend who had been GPS-tracking his location for three years, was asked by another guest, the late, lamented Karen Spärck Jones, if he wasn’t bothered by the way this compromised his privacy. He replied in the negative because he had “nothing to hide”. There then followed two hours of vigorous argument which touched on, among other things, the naivete of geeks, the ease with which the punctiliousness of Dutch bureaucracy made it easy to round up Dutch Jews after the Germans invaded Holland in the Second World War, the uses to which location data might be put by unsavoury characters and governments, Karl Popper and the Open Society, etc. etc.

Michael Dales has a couple of interesting blog posts (here and here) about the iPhone data-gathering facility. And, like all geeks, he’s totally unsurprised by the whole affair.

It seems rather than worry geeks, most of us find the data amazing. I suspect that’s because most of us know that this data could be got otherhow anyway – all it really shows is where your phone has been, and the phone operators know that anyway – and I typically trust them a lot less than I trust Apple (not that I think Apple is angelic, it’s a shareholder owned company, but I generally have a more antagonistic relationship with phone companies than I do Apple). So the fact the data resides on my phone is handy – if I was worried about people tracking where my phone goes then I’d never turn it on.

Michael also sees positive angles to this.

If you have a Mac and want to see where your iPhone has been (and then, like most people, post it to the Internet :) then you can get the tool to do so here. What I think is potentially really exciting is what you can do with the data now that you have access to it, not just your phone company. Quentin has already had the idea that you could use it to geotag your photos, which would be awesome, but how about things like carbon calculators, trip reports, and so on?

This post attracted a useful comment from ScaredyCat which gets to the heart of the problem:

The brouhaha isn’t just about the data being stored, it’s about the data being stored unencrypted. I love data like any geek but you do have to wonder why the data is being collected in the first place.

Precisely. What the data-logging and storage facility means is that your iPhone is potentially a source of useful confidential information for people who would have no hope of obtaining that information legally from a mobile phone network.

This point is neatly encapsulated by Rory Cellan-Jones in his blog post:

This obviously has intriguing implications for anyone who possesses one of these devices. What, for instance, if you had told your wife that you were off on a business trip – when in fact you had slipped off to the slopes with some mates – and she then managed to track down your iPhone location file? (I should stress that this is an imaginary scenario).

For divorce lawyers, particularly in the United States, the first question when taking on a new client could be “does your spouse own an iPhone?” And law enforcement agencies will also be taking a great interest in the iPhones – or iPads – of anyone they are tracking.

The other interesting thing about the spyPhone story is that, according to Alex Levinson, it’s an old story. He says that

Back in 2010 when the iPad first came out, I did a research project at the Rochester Institute of Technology on Apple forensics. Professor Bill Stackpole of the Networking, Security, & Systems Administration Department was teaching a computer forensics course and pitched the idea of doing forensic analysis on my recently acquired iPad. We purchased a few utilities and began studying the various components of apple mobile devices. We discovered three things:

* Third Party Application data can contain usernames, passwords, and interpersonal communication data, usually in plain text.
* Apple configurations and logs contain lots of network and communication related data.
* Geolocational Artifacts were one of the single most important forensic vectors found on these devices.

After presenting that project to Professor Stackpole’s forensic class, I began work last summer with Sean Morrissey, managing director of Katana Forensics on it’s iOS Forensic Software utility, Lantern. While developing with Sean, I continued to work with Professor Stackpole an academic paper outlining our findings in the Apple Forensic field. This paper was accepted for publication into the Hawaii International Conference for System Sciences 44 and is now an IEEE Publication. I presented on it in January in Hawaii and during my presentation discussed consolidated.db and it’s contents with my audience – my paper was written prior to iOS 4 coming out, but my presentation was updated to include iOS 4 artifacts.

Thanks to David Smith for passing on the link to the Levinson post.

The Apple spyPhone

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Oxford to Cambridge and then London from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

Fascinating video of location data routinely and covertly gathered by an iPhone belonging to research Alasdair Allen. I came on it via an intriguing Guardian story which reported that

Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010.

“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been,” said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Only the iPhone records the user’s location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google’s] Android phones and couldn’t find any,” said Warden. “We haven’t come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this.”

Lots more information (plus a downloadable open source application that enables you to locate the file containing your location data history) on Pete Warden’s site. He’s got some helpful FAQs, including these:

What can I do to remove this data?

This database of your locations is stored on your iPhone as well as in any of the automatic backups that are made when you sync it with iTunes. One thing that will help is choosing encrypted backups, since that will prevent other users or programs on your machine from viewing the data, but there will still be a copy on your device.

Why is Apple collecting this information?

It’s unclear. One guess might be that they have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that’s pure speculation. The fact that it’s transferred across devices when you restore or migrate is evidence the data-gathering isn’t accidental.

Is Apple storing this information elsewhere?

There’s no evidence that it’s being transmitted beyond your device and any machines you sync it with.

What’s so bad about this?

The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in an easily-readable form on your machine. Any other program you run or user with access to your machine can look through it.

It’s interesting that the mobile operators also keep this data, but the cops have to get a special order to access it. (Which they often do, as we find out in evidence to murder trials, for example.) But anyone who gets access to an iPhone (or, it turns out, a 3G-enabled iPad) can get it without going through any legal palaver.

Interesting, ne c’est pas? n’est-ce pas?

(Thanks to Duncan Thomas for correcting my French.)