My latest Locus column is "What’s Inside the Box," a discussion of whether owners, users or third parties should be able to know and/or control what their computers are doing:
The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this:
The owner (or user) of a device should be able to know (or control) which software is running on her devices.
This is really four answers, and I’ll go over them in turn, using three different scenarios: a computer in an Internet cafe, a car, and a cochlear implant. That is, a computer you sit in front of, a computer you put your body into, and a computer you put in your body.
Ashkan Soltani, a researcher specializing in privacy and security, said Google’s explanation of its approach would be “surprising to most users, since they’d likely be unaware of this arbitrary difference in the phone’s storage system.” Mr. Soltani said that to users, Google’s permissions system was ”akin to buying a car that only had locks on the doors but not the trunk.”
Here's a good brief look at the state of CyanogenMod, a free/open fork of the Android operating system that lets you do a lot more with your tablet/phone. I really like the way that CyanogenMod exerts force on the Android ecosystem: back when Google was unwilling to ship a tethering app (even for "Google Experience" phones like the Nexus One), CyanogenMod gave users the choice to tether. I think that the number of users who went to the fork freaked out both Google and the carriers, and in any event, tethering quickly became an official feature of Android.
At first blush, the move is a bit baffling. Twitter, the quintessential consumer internet service, would seem to have little need for a company that has revamped Android security from the ground up for business use. But the micro-blogging site may simply be acquiring Whisper Systems for its talent — including Marlinspike, who serves as the startup’s chief technology officer, and roboticist Stuart Anderson — and the two companies do have a certain affinity. Both pride themselves on the support they’ve provided to protesters in the Middle East.
It is good that Amazon does not receive your encrypted traffic, and does not record any identifying information about your device. And there are other benefits to user privacy that can result from cloud acceleration mode. For one, the persistent SPDY connection between the user’s tablet and Amazon’s servers is always encrypted. Accordingly, if you are using your tablet on an open Wifi network, other users on that network will not be able to spy on your browsing behavior.
