By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 pm Thursday, May 24
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If you've got a major-brand camera with a built-in GPS, don't plan on taking any geotagged photos in China. Chinese law prohibits mapmaking without a license, and most of the large camera manufacturers have complied with this regulation by quietly slipping a censorship function into the GPS -- when you take a picture, the camera checks to see if it's presently in China, and if it is, it throws away its GPS data, rather than embedding it in the photo's metadata. On Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens looks at how several different manufacturers handle this weirdness -- how they phrase it in their manuals, and what their cameras do when they run up against this limitation. It's a fascinating look at the interface between consumer electronics, user interface, and the edicts of totalitarian regimes. In some Nikon cameras, for example, the GPS does work, but all its measurements are shifted about 500m to the west (!).
Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.
For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app.
The risk to consumers in freer countries is that personal electronics brands might be tempted to simplify their manufacturing processes by building just one device for the global market, catering to the lowest common denominator of freedom — especially if the more restrictive legal jurisdictions contain some of the most attractive markets, such as mainland China.
Still, in the absence of more information from Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Nikon and Samsung, I can’t decisively say whether this is the business logic behind their decision to cripple the GPS in their cameras. And yet uncrippled GPS cameras from Sony and others are freely available for sale in China, for example on Taobao, China’s eBay...
Why do Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Samsung and Nikon censor their GPS cameras?
(Thanks, Jeffrey!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:38 pm Monday, May 21
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The Village presents a video design fiction (?) for "Parking Douche," an app that lets you photograph the number plates of crappily parked cars in your neighborhood (in Russia) and submit them to a database. The app then buys hyper-geo-targeted ads that block the text on the websites being read by people in the same neighbourhood as the badly parked cars. The ads can't be dismissed until you share them on social media. Basically: if you park like a dick, then everyone who lives or works nearby will not be able to read the Web until they've seen and shared a picture of your dickishness.
Parking Douche
(via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:12 am Thursday, May 17
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The Met, London's police force, is buying "mobile device data extraction" devices that can suck all the data out of your phone "in minutes" -- that's where you've been, who you know, what you've said to them, what websites you visit, and, depending on your apps, what groceries you buy, when you've called for a cab, what your menstrual cycle is, what you eat, your passwords, and so on.
This is the police force that routinely DNA-swabbed suspects and refused to destroy the samples even after they were exonerated, despite being ordered to after a European high court ruling to the effect that this was illegal.
Does anyone know what technology they're buying, and what its limits are? I'd be interested in knowing if, for example, it is effective against the built-in Android mass storage encryption.
"When a suspect is arrested and found with a mobile phone that we suspect may have been used in crime, traditionally we submit it to our digital forensic laboratory for analysis."
Kavanagh said the new system located within the boroughs themselves will enable "trained officers to examine devices and gives immediate access to the data in that handset".
He said: "Our ability to act on forensically-sound, time-critical information, from SMS to images contained on a device quickly gives us an advantage in combating crime, notably in terms of identifying people of interest quickly and progressing cases more efficiently."
Met Police uses 'quick' mobile data extraction system against suspects
(via /.)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:17 pm Friday, May 11
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Word on the Apple blogs today: in development for iOS 6, a maps application developed entirely in-house, to replace the Google Maps program running on iOS since 2007. "The application design is said to be fairly similar to the current Google Maps program on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch," reports 9to5mac.com, "But it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience." Sources tell 9to5Mac the new app "will blow your head off." MacRumors has more. (via AllThingsD)
In the
New York Times, Brian X. Chen reports on Amtrak's plans to use Apple iPhones as an electronic ticket scanner on several routes, including Boston, MA to Portland, ME, and San Jose, CA, to Sacramento, CA. "By late summer, 1,700 conductors will be using the devices on Amtrak trains across the country," and passengers can choose to print tickets or display a bar code on their smartphone screens for conductors to scan.
— Xeni
Reuters: "with [the] Wii boom waning, the successor being prepared by the creator of Super Mario looks like a losing proposition, as
makers of smartphones and computer tablets take digital games to the bathroom, the commuter bus and back to the bedroom."
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 11:00 am Tuesday, Apr 24
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The California Location Privacy Bill (SB 1434) proposes to require cellular phone companies to stop their practice of giving your location data to the police without a warrant. Phone companies would still be allowed to give your information to the police if they got a warrant, first.
Naturally, the CTIA -- the mobile carriers' industry association -- opposes it. They say that it will be "unduly burdensome" to have to say no when the police show up without a warrant, and to keep track of how often they give your information to the cops, and why. Cyrus Farivar has more on Ars Technica:
In an April 12, 2012 letter addressed (PDF) to State Senator Mark Leno (author of the bill), CTIA says it is opposed to SB 1434 because it may "create confusion for wireless providers and hamper their response to legitimate law enforcement investigations." The group also states that "[the bill will] create unduly burdensome and costly mandates on providers and their employees and are unnecessary as they will not serve wireless consumers."
Earlier this month, the ACLU said it received over 5,500 pages from 200 local law enforcement agencies about their tracking policies. The organization concluded that "while cell phone tracking is routine, few agencies consistently obtain warrants. Importantly, however, some agencies do obtain warrants, showing that law enforcement agencies can protect Americans' privacy while also meeting law enforcement needs." In short, it seems like law enforcement can stay within the law, even when it takes the trouble to get a warrant—how is that confusing?
Cellphone industry opposes California location privacy bill
(via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Thursday, Apr 19
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Ess G writes, "Much as I don't want to encourage anyone to laugh at us here in Toronto, this is really just too ridiculous to share. Our Mayor has just launched his $1.99 app that makes it easy for people to report graffiti in need of cleaning up simply by taking a picture. For this low low price, the app saves graffiti haters the trouble of going through all the hard work of dialling 311. The attached link features a city-staged enactment complete with bad graffiti saying 'Fuck you, my turf.' Amazing."
Toronto's mayor Rob Ford is a kind of idiot-non-savant, a dunce and thug who rode to power by promising that he'd "end the gravy-train" of municipal spending and ended up chasing pissant causes like graffiti removal (he's going to charge small businesses to remove the graffiti on their walls, even if the graffiti in question is a beautiful mural that everyone, including the business-owner, approves of), tickets for bicycles that lock up to things other than official (and hens-teeth-scarce) bike-locks, and expensive vanity projects like removing brand-new bike-lanes; and barbarian red-meat politics like shutting down libraries in already underserved areas.
Releasing a $2 app to complain about graffiti is pretty much perfect Rob Ford -- the only thing that could make it more Fordian is if it made fart noises.
Chris Bateman reports on BlogTO:
"This is as efficient as it gets," remarked Ford at press conference earlier today. "This will make it easier than ever to report graffiti vandalism and help keep the city spotless.
Standing in front of local residents busily painting over tags on garage doors, Ford pointed to a bridge on Scarlett Road near Lambton Golf Club as a clean-up success story he hopes to replicate across the city. "Once people know we mean business, the people that are causing this mess are going to learn a tough lesson," he declared.
The app, which costs $1.99 (and is currently only available for iPhone), lets Apple smartphone users send photographs directly to the city with a request to remove of the offending material. If the property owner fails to clean up the tag, the city will - so they say - step in and bill the owner for the work.
Will anyone use Toronto's new anti-graffiti app?
(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail from a photo by Mariam Matti)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:19 am Friday, Apr 6
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A 29-year-old woman in Torrance, CA, has been arrested for driving on the 405 freeway while texting on her cellphone, with a kid in the back seat without a seatbelt, another kid in the back seat in an unsecured child seat, and an infant on her lap, while her license was under suspension.
At least one other driver on the road spotted the woman chatting and texting on her phone with the baby on her lap and contacted the police. When she was pulled over, she was still holding onto the baby, presumably because it would be cruel to put him in the glove compartment.
"Her excuse was that, while she was driving on the 91 Freeway near Compton, the 1-year-old started crying and in an effort to comfort the 1-year-old, she pulled the 1-year-old to the front seat," a police department rep tells CBS Los Angeles.
Happy distracted driving awareness month!
California Woman Takes Distracted Driving To Entirely New Level
By Cory Doctorow at 8:01 pm Monday, Apr 2
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It's clearly a bit of April foolery, but Donald Melanson's review of the PalmPilot Personal on Engadget does a nice job of capturing the excitement of those early PDAs. I owned every model of Palm and Handspring device for several years, and really organized my life around them.
Unlike many of the so-called "handheld PCs" of the day, Palm's devices weren't trying to be small computers. The apps and operating system were greatly simplified, with everything just a few taps away. Yet those apps also made the devices much more capable than the personal organizers that were popular at the time, which did only a few tasks and not very well. They may not have gone on to explode in use the way smartphones have in the past decade, but they found a niche and served it well for a good number of years.
Of course, there were areas that did leave some room for improvement. While the resistive touchscreen offers reliable stylus-based input, it's also low-res (160 x 160) and hard to see in less-than-ideal conditions, with an Indiglo-style backlight offering a poor substitute for a true backlit, color LCD. The limited internet capabilities offered by the devices also require a bulky 14.4k modem that originally cost an extra $129 -- and, of course, plugs into a phone jack.
What might have once been a slight drawback is a welcome feature today, though. The early Palm devices all run on a standard set of AAA batteries, which means that collectors and technology historians don't have to worry about hard-to-find rechargeable batteries (or worse, non-removable batteries) to keep them running for years to come.
USRobotics PalmPilot Personal review
By Cory Doctorow at 4:36 pm Monday, Apr 2
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ACLU affiliates across America requested information on local law enforcement's use of cell-phone tracking, and received a wealth of disturbing information about the extent of wireless tracking. They produced a map showing which police departments were discovered to be tracking people's phones without a warrant, either by getting gutless phone companies to fink out their own customers for warrantless fishing expeditions, or by buying some kind of "cell phone tracking equipment."
Many law enforcement agencies track cell phones quite frequently. For example, based on invoices from cell phone companies, it appears that Raleigh, N.C. tracks hundreds of cell phones a year. The practice is so common that cell phone companies have manuals for police explaining what data the companies store, how much they charge police to access that data, and what officers need to do to get it.
Most law enforcement agencies do not obtain a warrant to track cell phones, but some do, and the legal standards used vary widely. Some police departments protect privacy by obtaining a warrant based upon probable cause when tracking cell phones. For example, police in the County of Hawaii, Wichita, and Lexington, Ky. demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant when tracking cell phones. If these police departments can protect both public safety and privacy by meeting the warrant and probable cause requirements, then surely other agencies can as well.
Unfortunately, other departments do not always demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant when tracking cell phones. For example, police in Lincoln, Neb. obtain even GPS location data, which is more precise than cell tower location information, on telephones without demonstrating probable cause. Police in Wilson County, N.C. obtain historical cell tracking data where it is "relevant and material" to an ongoing investigation, a standard lower than probable cause.
Police use various methods to track cell phones. Most commonly, law enforcement agencies obtain cell phone records about one person from a cell phone carrier. However, some police departments, like in Gilbert, Ariz., have purchased their own cell tracking technology.
Is Your Local Law Enforcement Tracking Your Cell Phone's Location? (via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:56 pm Saturday, Mar 31
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Tomi Ahonen has a really interesting post on how it is that major, top-selling phone companies -- Siemens, Motorola, Palm, Nokia, Windows Mobile, RIM -- can see their sales fall off a cliff as the whole world seems to decide, en masse, that the phones are no longer the bee's knees. Ahonen marks it up to the fast replacement-cycle with phones, the tenuous relationship with dealers, and the concentration of power among the carriers.
I think there are three factors that help create The Cliff. First, there is the replacement cycle. The average replacement cycle for mobile phones in year 2000 was 21 months. By year 2006 it was down to 18 months. Today it is 16 months (all handsets). For smartphones it is even faster, at 11.5 months. A car is replaced something like every 3 or 4 years on average. A TV set once every 7 years. A personal computer every 3 and a half years. But mobile phones are replaced every year and a half, smartphones replaced every year (on average).
So if you have a bad model car, and your sales suffers because of it, you will not lose all your loyal customers in a year or two, because many of your customers have last year's model and are happy with it, and will not even come to your car dealership until two years from now to consider the replacement model, by which time you have had plenty of time to fix the problems with your current car model.
In mobile phones we do not have that luxury. The pace is so fast. And note that the rate of the collapse due to The Cliff is actually accelerating. This also suggests the replacement cycle and The Cliff are related.
A second point is the dealerships. Some technology is kind of 'protected' from rapid market fluctiations, because it is sold by the manufacturer's own stores (like Sony flagship stores for example) or through branded dealerships (like in new car sales) or by registered partners (like many personal computers, sold through 'VARs' Value Add Resellers, who are authorized with given PC brands). In mobile phones, there used to be no branded shops (Apple changed that of course) and Nokia briefly tried its own Nokia branded flagship stores - most of them have been discontinued. So if you have branded dealers, that helps dampen the fluctuation, even if you have a bad model year of your products, the damaging effect is not as severe. Mobile phones are sold whether in operator/carrier stores, or independent handset retailers, with essentially all handset brands and many of their models on display side-by-side in the store. Note, that of current handset makers, only Apple is a little bit immunized but not completely so, as it also operates its own Apple stores.
The third point is the carrier relationship. The operator/carrier has exceptional influence in the mobile phone handset business. If the carrier/operator decides to push a given phone, it can help it succeed, yes, but that is not dramatic gains. But if the the carrier/operator community decides to punish a given brand, it rapidly dies. We heard just now from Finland (of all places) that a survey of major handset stores in the biggest cities of Finland by the commerical TV broadcaster MTV3 - found that in most handset stores (both operator stores and independent stores) - even if the consumer asked for the Nokia Lumia by name - most sales representatives would not show the Nokia Lumia to the customer, and showed Samsung Android handsets instead. This even as the stores had Lumia in stock and the biggest in-store displays were featuring Lumia.
The 'Cliff Theory' ie How Handset Makers Die, why in Mobile Phones do Companies Collapse so Rapidly (Siemens, Motorola, Palm, Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile) (via Beyond the Beyond)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:17 pm Saturday, Mar 24
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An unattributed, anonymous set of images on Imgur purports to be an album of photos recovered from a "Chinese gangsters phone." They show a heavily tattooed man lounging with enormous piles of money, hanging out with a series of luxury cars, and participating in the torture of an unnamed man. They also show a pile of luxury goods, and the man hanging out with a cute dog. ABC's Karson Yiu notes that one of the man's cars has a Beijing number plate, another a number plate from Tianjin, and that the recurrence of "8888" in the plates is an indicator of status within the system, as "All 8 license plates are usually reserved for the especially privileged whether by power, fortune or connections."
Viral Pics Show Chinese ‘Gangsta’ Fondling Porsches, Puppies and Purse (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:13 pm Thursday, Mar 15
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A court filing from an FBI Special Agent reports that the Bureau's forensics teams can't crack the pattern-lock utility on Android devices' screens. This is moderately comforting, given the courts' recent findings that mobile phones can be searched without warrants. David Kravets writes on Wired:
A San Diego federal judge days ago approved the warrant upon a request by FBI Special Agent Jonathan Cupina. The warrant was disclosed Wednesday by security researcher Christopher Soghoian,
In a court filing, Cupina wrote: (.pdf)
Failure to gain access to the cellular telephone’s memory was caused by an electronic ‘pattern lock’ programmed into the cellular telephone. A pattern lock is a modern type of password installed on electronic devices, typically cellular telephones. To unlock the device, a user must move a finger or stylus over the keypad touch screen in a precise pattern so as to trigger the previously coded un-locking mechanism. Entering repeated incorrect patterns will cause a lock-out, requiring a Google e-mail login and password to override. Without the Google e-mail login and password, the cellular telephone’s memory can not be accessed. Obtaining this information from Google, per the issuance of this search warrant, will allow law enforcement to gain access to the contents of the memory of the cellular telephone in question.
Rosenberg, in a telephone interview, suggested the authorities could “dismantle a phone and extract data from the physical components inside if you’re looking to get access.”
However, that runs the risk of damaging the phone’s innards, and preventing any data recovery.
FBI Can’t Crack Android Pattern-Screen Lock
By Cory Doctorow at 5:43 am Sunday, Mar 4
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Concerned by the San Francisco BART system's decision to suspend cellular service to frustrate coordination among protesters angered by the fatal transit police shooting of an unarmed passenger, the FCC is holding a public inquiry seeking comment on who should be allowed to order cellular service shutoffs, and when. Here's the notice, with instructions for replying. Ars Technica's Megan Geuss writes:
But the FCC's public notice also states that law enforcement personnel have raised concerns that, "wireless service could be used to trigger the detonation of an explosive device or to organize the activities of a violent flash mob," suggesting local government authorities like BART should be allowed to retain some autonomy over service in its stations.
The FCC's decision will most likely set a clear precedent for other local government agencies. So far, two electronic public comments have been posted (the FCC lets you post comments online or send them in by mail), both in favor of more severe restrictions on who can turn off cell phone service and when. "The only time it should be legal to shut down a wireless network is when it is necessary to do so to repair a defect, or when it is necessary to prevent an attack that is compromising the ability of the network to function." said one commenter, "the government and government agencies are not wise enough to judge any other scenario in which one might think about shutting down a network."
Who can shut down cell phone service? FCC seeks public comment
