iPhone saves lives. Well, a life anyway

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Heartwarming Wired story.

U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a documentary about the impact of poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds.

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.

The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

“I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me,” said Woolley, recounting the earthquake to MSNBC. “It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and we both lunged and everything turned dark.”

Woolley’s incident highlights a large social implication of the iPhone and other similar smartphones. A constant internet connection, coupled with a device supporting a wealth of apps, can potentially transform a person into an all-knowing, always-on being. In Woolley’s case, an iPhone app turned him into an amateur medic to help him survive natural disaster.

Bet Steve Jobs never thought of that.

IPREDator launches. Howzat, Mandelson?

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Latest front opens in the arms race — Pirate Bay’s Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public | TorrentFreak.

With a beta launch coinciding with the introduction of the controversial IPRED law in Sweden, the service promised to offer users an anonymous connection to the Internet. IPRED gave the copyright holders increased power to track down pirates, and with the launch of IPREDator the creators neutralized this new ‘threat’.

Much like many other comparable VPN services, Ipredator allows users to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. The interest in services like this is booming. In Sweden alone, an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are already hiding their identities online, and that number is expected to rapidly grow in the new year.

Not us, guv

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You may be puzzled by this Telegraph report.

Both France and Germany’s governments have respectively advised computer users to download an alternative web browser to the most popular browser in the world, after a security flaw was detected.

The French government issued an advisory to computer users, recommending that they switch to a different web browser, such as Firefox or Google Chrome. It follows a similar move by the German government, after it was discovered that Internet Explorer contained a serious security flaw that could be exploited by hackers and cybercriminals.

However, a spokesman from the British Cabinet Office told The Telegraph that the British government would not be issuing a similar warning and instead would be referring anyone who was concerned about cyber security to getsafeonline.org.

Microsoft last week admitted that its Internet Explorer browser was the weak link in recent attacks by hackers who pried in to the email accounts of human rights activists in China. But the company said that the German government had over-reacted about the threat posed by the vulnerability, and that general users were not at risk.

Cliff Evans, head of Security and Privacy at Microsoft UK, advised people who were still using Internet Explorer version 6 to upgrade to version 8 – which is the most recent version of browser and less susceptible.

He said: “The quantity of exploits which have occurred been minimal and very targeted. The general public do not need to worry and we have not yet had a case in the UK.”

Of course, this could be an example of the UK government keeping its head while all around them others are losing theirs.

Alternatively, it could be due to the awkward fact that every PC in the vast NHS system is required to run IE 6 — which is a real pain if you’re a company trying to pitch web 2.0 products at the health service.

LATER: Charles Arthur’s take on it in the Guardian.

Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet

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Long and characteristically wise and thoughtful post by Rebecca MacKinnon on l’affaire Google.

I am not one of those people who believe that the Internet is going to eliminate the human need for geographically-based government. But I do believe that we're starting to enter a time when enlightened governments will slowly come to recognize that their legitimacy along with the well-being of the societies they govern will be improved if they figure out ways not just to peacefully coexist – but to share power with the global cyber-nation. Each has a duty to help us – citizens of both physical and cyber space – to keep the other's power in check. Both must submit to appropriate public oversight. Both must commit to high standards of transparency if they want our trust – which they require in order to be successful and powerful for the long haul. We're very far from figuring out how to make it all work. But it is in our own self-interest as netizens to be proactive in doing what we can to help companies and governments come to grips with what is, unavoidably, in their own long-term interest.

Worth reading in full.

Freedom to link

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Terrific Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.

Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.

We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett [Struan Bartlett, founder of NewsNow, an aggregator that Murdoch papers are now blocking from linking to their content], “is a common public amenity.”

I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness on which ­journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around ­Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.

I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel. But if we give anyone the right to restrict our use of that image or information, then we also give the mayor the right to gag us when we want to publish a picture of him skulking into that opium parlour.

What’s public is public – that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public.

Right on, man! (As we ageing hippies like to say.)

Now the French government is advising people to stop using IE

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Well, well. Even I’m surprised by this.

Following in the footsteps of Germany last week, France is now advising its population to use an alternative browser pending a patch for an Internet Explorer vulnerability.

The French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) published an advisory on Friday January 15 stating “pending a patch from the publisher, CERT recommends using an alternative browser.” In the advisory Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are both listed despite Microsoft confirming the vulnerability is only exploitable on Internet Explorer 6.

Last week the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) issued a similary advisory urging its population to stop using IE. According to the BSI the flaw will, put simply, “perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system.” The BSI noted that even running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode isn’t enough to stop the flaw. Microsoft issued further insight into the vulnerability this morning in a company blog posting. The software giant confirmed the exploit is only effective against Internet Explorer 6.

Wonder if French and German users will pay any attention to this.

The Balkanisation of the Internet

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Even the New York Times is catching up with the reality, as evidence by this piece in today’s online edition.

As the Internet grew, it became fragmented and linguistically diversified. It developed borders, across which it now works in different ways.

In Spain, for instance, you can share music and movies with virtual impunity; in France, doing that is likely to cost you your Internet connection.

In China, meanwhile, it may soon be nearly impossible to use Google. The company, saying the security of its e-mail had been breached in a campaign to spy on Chinese dissidents, announced last week that it would stop censoring Google.cn, its Chinese Web site, and might have to withdraw from China.

No matter what happens in the fight between Google and Beijing’s leaders, one thing seems clear: the company is not going to be able to turn the clock back to 2006. That year, Google itself helped to fracture the Internet by creating Google.cn.