Boing Boing » mobile

Apple can decrypt iPhones for cops; Google can remotely "reset password" for Android devices

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 12 May 2013 15:49:04 +0000

Apple apparently has the power to decrypt iPhone storage in response to law-enforcement requests, though they won't say how. Google can remotely "reset the password" for a phone for cops, too:

Last year, leaked training materials prepared by the Sacramento sheriff's office included a form that would require Apple to "assist law enforcement agents" with "bypassing the cell phone user's passcode so that the agents may search the iPhone." Google takes a more privacy-protective approach: it "resets the password and further provides the reset password to law enforcement," the materials say, which has the side effect of notifying the user that his or her cell phone has been compromised.
Ginger Colbrun, ATF's public affairs chief, told CNET that "ATF cannot discuss specifics of ongoing investigations or litigation. ATF follows federal law and DOJ/department-wide policy on access to all communication devices."
...The ATF's Maynard said in an affidavit for the Kentucky case that Apple "has the capabilities to bypass the security software" and "download the contents of the phone to an external memory device." Chang, the Apple legal specialist, told him that "once the Apple analyst bypasses the passcode, the data will be downloaded onto a USB external drive" and delivered to the ATF.
It's not clear whether that means Apple has created a backdoor for police -- which has been the topic of speculation in the past -- whether the company has custom hardware that's faster at decryption, or whether it simply is more skilled at using the same procedures available to the government. Apple declined to discuss its law enforcement policies when contacted this week by CNET.

It's not clear to me from the above whether Google "resetting the password" for Android devices merely bypasses the lock-screen or actually decrypts the mass storage on the phone if it has been encrypted.

I also wonder if the "decryption" Apple undertakes relies on people habitually using short passwords for their phones -- the alternative being a lot of screen-typing in order to place a call.

Apple deluged by police demands to decrypt iPhones [Declan McCullagh/CNet]

(via /.)

Former Tory mayor admits to beating up woman who videod him parking illegally

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:55:15 +0000

Brian Coleman, a former Conservative mayor and concillor has admitted to assaulting a constituent who was video-recording him while he parked illegally to use an ATM. Coleman had been unpopular for passing strict parking rules, and the woman whom he assaulted was a local parking campaigner.

Coleman, of Essex Road in Finchley, was ordered to pay £1,385, including a £270 fine, prosecution costs of £850 and £250 to the victim as compensation.
Ms Michael, 50, a mother-of-two, who suffered injuries including scratches to her wrist and soreness to her shoulder and chest, called on Coleman to resign.
She said: "[I was] looking at my phone and all of a sudden he's upon me, it was pure shock.
"I think he's bullied and intimidated people for a long long time and I think he has now got what has been long overdue."

Barnet Councillor Brian Coleman admits parking row attack [BBC]

How is a $12 phone possible?

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:41:04 +0000

Bunnie Huang paid a visit to Shenzhen's Mingtong Digital Mall and found a $12 mobile phone, with Bluetooth, an MP3 player, an OLED display and quad-band GSM. For $12.

Bunnie's teardown shows a little bit about how this $12 piece of electronics can possibly be profitable, but far more tantalizing are his notes about Gongkai, "a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching." It's the Pearl River Delta's answer to the open source hardware movement, and Bunnie promises to write more about it soon.

How is this possible? I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I’m trying to learn. A teardown yields a few hints.
First, there are no screws. The whole case snaps together.
Also, there are (almost) no connectors on the inside. Everything from the display to the battery is soldered directly to the board; for shipping and storage, you get to flip a switch to hard-disconnect the battery. And, as best as I can tell, the battery also has no secondary protection circuit.
The Bluetooth antenna is nothing more than a small length of wire, seen on the lower left below.
Still, the phone features accoutrements such as a back-lit keypad and decorative lights around the edge.
The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a Vanchip VC5276. Of course, with price competition like this, Western firms are suing to protect ground: Vanchip is in a bit of a legal tussle with RF Micro, and Mediatek has also been subject to a few lawsuits of its own.
The MT6250 is rumored to sell in volume for under $2. I was able to anecdotally confirm the price by buying a couple of pieces on cut-tape from a retail broker for about $2.10 each. [No, I will not broker these chips or this phone for you...]

The $12 Gongkai Phone

Groups across America call on Congress to fix DMCA

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:49:28 +0000

Boing Boing is a co-signatory to an open letter (PDF) to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, calling on them to fix the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on jailbreaking and unlocking your devices. This laudable effort was spearheaded by Public Knowledge:

"It is important for Congress to remember that people are waiting on them to solve this problem once and for all. We've seen that Congress wants to ensure that consumers can unlock their phones, but consumers, entrepreneurs, academics, and public interest organizations all agree that we need lasting solutions to make sure that people can use their wireless devices without fearing copyright laws.
"A minor change to the law is all it would take to end this controversy for good. Beyond that, though, this situation shows there are deeper problems with the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA, and the time is ripe for hearings investigating the harms that come from this law."

Public Knowledge Asks Congress for a Permanent Fix to Cell Phone Unlocking

Researchers show method for de-anonymizing 95% of "anonymous" cellular location data

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:34:18 +0000

Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility, a Nature Scientific Reports paper by MIT researchers and colleagues at Belgium's Universite Catholique de Louvain, documents that 95% of "anonymous" location data from cellphone towers can be de-anonymized to the individual level. That is, given data from a region's cellular towers, the researchers can ascribe individuals to 95% of the data-points.

“We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high, thereby emphasizing the importance of the idiosyncrasy of human movements for individual privacy,” they explain. “Indeed, this uniqueness means that little outside information is needed to re-identify the trace of a targeted individual even in a sparse, large-scale, and coarse mobility dataset. Given the amount of information that can be inferred from mobility data, as well as the potentially large number of simply anonymized mobility datasets available, this is a growing concern.”
The data they studied involved users in an unidentified European country, possibly Belgium, and involved anonymized data collected by their carriers between 2006 and 2007.

Anonymized Phone Location Data Not So Anonymous, Researchers Find [Wired/Kim Zetter]

Canadian "pipeline" game enrages humourless oilpatch blowhards

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:26:34 +0000

Adam Young sez,

A developer made a game that's a spin on the old "waterworks"/"pipe mania" type game with an oil pipeline theme... complete with pixel-art anti-pipeline protesters. Like most indie developers, they were eligible and applied for funding from a variety of sources. They are donating a portion of the proceeds to the David Suzuki Foundation.
Apparently this made some blowhards angry, who think that "tax dollars funded the game" and shouldn't fund a game about blowing up pipelines, and that the developer donating to a non-profit charity somehow constitutes an ethics violation, having received so-called "tax-dollar funding". Tax breaks and grants and things are available to all sorts of content and media producers in Canada. Game development and film production and the like are industries that are very active here. It's also not illegal to donate proceeds to non-profit charities.

Pipe Trouble

Access files on locked, encrypted Android phones by putting them in a freezer for an hour

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:42:50 +0000

This is alarming, if true: according to a group of German security researchers at the University of Erlangen, if you put a locked, encrypted Android phone in the freezer for an hour and then quickly reboot it and plug it into a laptop, the memory will retain enough charge to stay decrypted, and can boot up into a custom OS that can recover the keys and boot the phone up with all the files available in the clear. The attack is called FROST: "Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones," and it requires a phone with an unlocked bootloader to work.

At the end of 2011, Google released version 4.0 of its Android operating system for smartphones. For the first time, Android smartphone owners were supplied with a disk encryption feature that transparently scrambles user partitions, thus protecting sensitive user information against targeted attacks that bypass screen locks. On the downside, scrambled telephones are a a nightmare for IT forensics and law enforcement, because once the power of a scrambled device is cut any chance other than bruteforce is lost to recover data.
We present FROST, a tool set that supports the forensic recovery of scrambled telephones. To this end we perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM. We show that cold boot attacks against Android phones are generally possible for the first time, and we perform our attacks practically against Galaxy Nexus devices from Samsung. To break disk encryption, the bootloader must be unlocked before the attack because scrambled user partitions are wiped during unlocking. However, we show that cold boot attacks are more generic and allow to retrieve sensitive information, such as contact lists, visited web sites, and photos, directly from RAM, even though the bootloader is locked.

FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones

Android developer fights evil patent troll

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:24:36 +0000

Katie sez, "The video profiles software developer Austin Meyer, who is the target of a patent troll lawsuit involving a company called Uniloc, which owns a patent for the "System and Method for Preventing Unauthorized Access to Electronic Data." Meyer's flight simulator app X-Plane, like most paid applications on the Android market, uses the authorization system. Uniloc purchased the patent in question at a bankruptcy proceeding. Despite the enormous risk, and the enormous cost just to defend against a patent suit, Meyer is resolved to do so. The broader point of the video is that something needs to be done to stop patent trolls from simply buying patents in order to intimidate innovators into paying them a settlement. Patent trolls are a huge tax on innovation and add nothing to the marketplace."

How Patent Trolls Kill Innovation (Thanks, Katie!)

EFF-Austin benefit after Cory's Book People event on Feb 22

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:17:47 +0000

After my event at Austin's Book People on Feb 22, I'll be doing a benefit for EFF-Austin on their location privacy campaign. We did this the last time I came through town and it was tremendous -- come on out!

An evening with Cory Doctorow and EFF-Austin

What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:22:32 +0000

You will have heard that the US Copyright Office has lifted the temporary ruling under which you were allowed to unlock your phone. EFF explains in detail what this ruling means (it's not what you think -- and in some ways, it's worse):

First, the good news. The legal shield for jailbreaking and rooting your phone remains up - it'll protect us at least through 2015. The shield for unlocking your phone is down, but carriers probably aren't going to start suing customers en masse, RIAA-style. And the Copyright Office's decision, contrary to what some sensational headlines have said, doesn't necessarily make unlocking illegal.
Unlocking is in a legal grey area under the DMCA. The law was supposed to protect creative works, but it's often been misused by electronics makers to block competition and kill markets for used goods. The courts have pushed back, ruling that the DMCA doesn't protect digital locks that keep digital devices from talking to each other when creative work isn't involved. And no creative work is involved here: Wireless carriers aren't worried about "piracy" of the software on their phones, they're worried about people reselling subsidized phones at a profit. So if the matter ever reached a court, it might well decide that the DMCA does not forbid unlocking a phone.
Now, the bad news. While we don’t expect mass lawsuits anytime soon, the threat still looms. More likely, wireless carriers, or even federal prosecutors, will be emboldened to sue not individuals, but rather businesses that unlock and resell phones. If a court rules in favor of the carriers, penalties can be stiff - up to $2,500 per unlocked phone in a civil suit, and $500,000 or five years in prison in a criminal case where the unlocking is done for "commercial advantage." And this could happen even for phones that are no longer under contract. So we're really not free to do as we want with devices that we own.

All that said, if you were convicted, the maximum penalty under the law for unlocking your phone is now greater than the maximum penalty for turning it into an IED.

Is It Illegal To Unlock a Phone? The Situation is Better - and Worse - Than You Think

Sitegeist: mobile app mines public data to tell you about the spot you're standing in

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:23:09 +0000

Nicko sez, "Sitegeist is a free Android and iPhone app from the Sunlight Foundation that helps you to learn more about your surroundings in seconds. Sitegeist takes public data about the people, housing, history, environment and things to do for any U.S. location and presents it in easy-to-view infographics. Just scroll and swipe your way through the categories to get a feel for the area. Everything from age distributions to political contributions and median home values to record temperatures. It makes complex localized data easy to understand so you can get back to enjoying the neighborhood. The app incorporates publicly available data from a number of sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, InfluenceExplorer.com, the Dark Sky weather API and even Yelp and Foursquare. Sunlight will continue to add and improve on the app as more rich data becomes public."

(Thanks, Nicko!)

Kids' apps get a failing report-card on privacy

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:39:09 +0000

A Federal Trade Commission report on data-collection in kids' apps paints a dismal picture of compliance with privacy and data-collection regulations. The survey found that most apps aimed at small children failed to disclose their data-collection practices.

The agency reviewed 400 of the most popular children’s apps available on Google and Apple platforms, and reported that only 20 percent disclosed their data collection practices.
“The survey results described in this report paint a disappointing picture of the privacy protections provided by apps for children,” the report said.
Regulators said they were investigating whether the practices of certain apps violated a federal law requiring Web site operators to get parents’ permission before collecting or sharing names, phone numbers, addresses or other personal information obtained from children under 13.

It's part of a larger pattern of dysfunction with electronic media and kids. For example, the license agreement for all the online ebook stores says that you're not allowed to lend or share your ebooks, but they also all heavily promote books aimed at children who are too young to have their own credit-cards. Judging from the license agreements, these bookstores expect that their electronic kids' picture books are being bought by grownups for their own consumption, and not for "sharing" with the children in their lives.

Apps for Children Fall Short on Disclosure to Parents, Report Says [NYT/Natasha Singer] (Thanks, Peter!)

Nexus 7: a perfect, low-cost, rugged, easy tablet that works for the whole family

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:31:42 +0000

My family have been using the Google Nexus 7 Tablets since they shipped in July. We've carried them on several trips, dropped them dozens of times, used them at home, work, and on holiday, and the unanimous verdict is that these are just delightful little tablets.

The Nexus 7 is the first tablet in the "Nexus" line (Nexus devices receive Google's official stamp of approval, ship unlocked, and run stock Android operating systems without any vendor crapware). Unlike the first highly trumpeted Android tablets -- particularly the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which I reviewed last year -- the Nexus seems to have been designed with users in mind first, and corporate profits second. Unlike the Samsung tablets, it uses a standard charging cable (something that's especially nice when you're travelling, as it means one fewer cable in the bag) that can be purchased from lots of vendors for cheap. It doesn't come with any crapware, and updates itself directly from Google when Android gets a refresh (mine refreshed itself yesterday).

I've used a lot of ~7" devices before -- Nooks, Kindles and Kobos -- and have always found that a couple weeks in my pocket or gear-bag were sufficient to completely destroy them. The ereaders don't have super-tough Gorilla Glass screens, and none is rugged enough for the kind of klutzy, overburdened travel I end up on. I reluctantly abandoned ereaders a year ago, after killing six in as many months. I say "reluctantly," because I'd really come to love the 7" form-factor, perfect for holding in one hand while on the go, perfect for bedtime ereading. It's also a great size/weight to keep in a bag all the time, rather than deciding on a day-to-day basis whether to pack it along. 7" tablets are in the grey-zone between a phone and a tablet, and I stopped bothering to remove it at airport checkpoints in the UK and US. About 90 percent of the time, no one seems to care, and I've got one fewer thing to fiddle with on my way through security. Finally, it's a good size for little hands as well as grown-up ones.

So I was happy to once again be in possession of a 7" tablet. I've found the Nexus 7 to be a breeze to use. Jellybean, the latest iteration of Android, has plenty to love about it, including the Google Now predictive search that uses your location and search-data to guess at the information you'll be needing. For once, this feels like a good privacy quid-pro-quo: if I let Google see some of my data, it will use that to actually feed me back useful information, including things like daily exchange rates while I'm travelling overseas, a pedometer that uses the built-in accelerometer to count my steps, and travel times to places I've recently looked up. I don't use a Google calendar for most of my scheduling (I'm uncomfortable with giving the company this information), so there's some functionality I'm not seeing, and I'm happy to be making that trade off.

The Google Play store -- where apps and entertainment can be downloaded either for free or money -- is pretty good. My wife deals with both iOS and Android (she's co-founder of a startup that needs to work on both) and tells me that the Play Store's apps are up to anything in the Apple App Store. Even better is the fact that I can easily and legally opt to buy apps from rival stores, including those operated by Samsung and Amazon, or from independent developers. iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad are designed to thwart efforts to install software that Apple has not blessed. Apple doesn't just reject apps due to quality concerns, either -- for example, the company forbade its users from accessing an app that reported on US drone-strike deaths overseas. Whatever your feelings about the politics of drones, I think most of us would agree that it's none of Apple's business if you want to find out more about this subject. Worse, it's illegal in most places to jailbreak phones and tablets to allow for unauthorized installations (a temporary reprieve for this regime exists in the US, but it only covers phones and not tablets, and does not legalize providing jailbreaking services, which means that iPhone owners must use illegal, unregulated software to liberate their phones, and have no practical way of knowing if the jailbreaking programs are leaving their phones in insecure states). And Apple has spent lots of money lobbying regulators to keep jailbreaking illegal. As a creator who earns his living from copyright, I want to use and encourage platforms that don't give mere electronics companies a veto over my right to sell my products to my audience (this is such a no-brainer that it's amazing that governments keep getting it wrong: it's a triumph of lobbying over common sense and simple justice).

The specs on the Nexus 7 are great. The high-resolution touchscreen is crisp and responsive. The battery life is exemplary. The processor spec has hit that sweet-spot where the tablet always seems faster than the apps I want to run on it, meaning that I never feel like it is sluggish or delayed. The WiFi access is reliable, even on troublesome 802.11n networks -- in fact, when I find myself in situations where a laptop won't talk to an 802.11n network, I sometimes log my Nexus 7 into the network instead and then tether it over USB to the recalcitrant laptop, using it as an impromptu WiFi adapter. Tethering with all Android devices is so easy that it should be the model for the whole industry. I first discovered the joy of tethering when I was a MacOS user and discovered that it only took a few clicks to use a laptop to share a wired connection over Ethernet or vice-versa. This is still possible with MacBooks, as far as I know, but it came late to both Android and iOS, and the one time I tried it with someone else's iOS device, it was a cumbersome process involving Bluetooth pairing, and only allowed one device to share the connection. With Android devices, it's a matter of a couple taps to turn the tablet or phone into a WiFi hotspot.

The Nexus 7 doesn't come with built-in cellular data (there's a forthcoming version that supports HSPA+, one of the 4G "standards"). I usually get it online with WiFi (at home, hotels, the office) or by tethering it to my Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Nexus -- I've figured out that I'm never disappointed if I just buy a Nexus-branded device). I don't find that to be a real drawback -- in fact, I prefer only paying one connectivity bill, using my phone as the cellular Internet hub for my laptop and tablets, rather than paying a subscription fee for each.

Getting set up on the Nexus 7 was very easy. All my apps were visible and trivial to download and configure, once I'd logged it into my Google account (I wish there was an alternative to using Google as the sole provider for the activation stuff, and hope that something will surface). I use Firefox for Android -- a fabulous browser, which I prefer to the built-in one supplied by Google -- and it synchs with my desktop Firefox, using an encrypted data-transfer that allows me to share passwords, history and bookmarks between devices without giving the Mozilla Foundation (or someone serving a warrant on them) the ability to read my data. I use K9 mail to access the POP-mail server I use, and NewsRob to read and manage RSS. The official Twitter client works well, too (though I really, really wish it would synch up a killfille of people whose tweets shouldn't be shown to me, even if they @ me -- other clients support this, but don't synch up across devices).

Notwithstanding all of the above, there's still some room for improvement with the Nexus 7. First of all, Google needs to sort out MTP, the file-transfer system it borrowed from the defunct Microsoft Zune. Theoretically, this is superior to simply presenting the tablet as a USB mass-storage device because it allows users to load and unload files from the tablet using their desktops while continuing to use the tablet. This would be nice. But in practice, MTP just sucks. The Linux support is so complex and clunky that it might as well not exist at all (ironic, given that Android is a flavor of GNU/Linux). Mac user friends tell me the same is true for them. I've basically given up on using MTP to transfer files at all. Instead, I use Airdroid, an app that transfers files over the local network using a browser. That works OK, but it's a poor second-best to what we used to have, in the days before Android went MTP. It's been more than a year since that day, and it still sucks. That is inexcusable, and I imagine it's a dealbreaker for some users.

The Nexus 7's physical design is close to ideal, but the power and volume buttons are a little close together, and sometimes trying to turn it down results in turning it off. There's only one (front-facing) camera, which is great for Skype and recording yourself talking, but isn't up to much else, packing only 1.2 megapixels. The lack of a rear-facing camera means that you'll still want to carry around a phone or camera on holiday, since it's tricky to shoot with a device where the viewfinder and the lens are facing the same direction, unless you're shooting self-portraits.

The built-in software suite could use some tweaking. The "Gallery" app plays videos, but not many formats. I'm always forgetting which video app supports which formats, and I've often thrown a ripped DVD or downloaded YouTube video on the device to watch later (or as a last-ditch toddler hypnotizer), only to discover that I've got the combo wrong again. The Play Videos app (which accesses a DRM-crippled video store) would be a natural place to organize videos, and to play them back without hassle. Likewise, the built-in Play Books app is fine for buying ebooks (though it's very hard to tell which of these are DRM free), but it sucks as a hub for all the ebooks you toss at the device. Having to figure out which app is needed for which format has been a solved problem since the mid-nineties, when all the browser vendors finally started supporting all the different graphics formats in use. Format wars are stupid, wasteful and frustrating, and as Joshua learned, "the only way to win is not to play."

Google also needs to work a bit on the software updating process. If you use your Android device every day (as I do, with my phone), it's no problem to run app updates as they show up. But if you put a device away for a few weeks -- which happens with the Nexus 7 -- you might come back to dozens of waiting updates, each of which has to be tediously clicked through and approved. It would be much better to have an "update all" option.

But the Nexus 7 is not only a good device in its own right, it's also a huge step forward toward user-centric, innovation-friendly products that are both excellent in and of themselves, and part of a great ecosystem of developers, retailers, and creators. Best of all, it's relatively cheap: $237 from Amazon resellers or $249 from Google for the 16GB model (compare with the $329 starting price for the iPad Mini, its most direct competitor). They're selling well, too: Asus, who manufacture the Nexus 7, claims to be selling about a million of these every month.

Google Nexus 7 Tablet

Anti-scratch spray for device screens apparently works

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:17:27 +0000

Red Ferret reviewed Liquid Armor, a "nanotech" spray that you apply to your mobile device screen in order to prevent it from scratching. They found it very effective and easy to use:

All in all we were very surprised (really!) to find that the coating does seem to actually work. It’s hard to believe that a spray on coating can have that much effect, but unless we’re missing something, it does appear to protect the screen very well indeed under stress. It works with glass of course, so don’t expect the same results if you have a cheaper plastic screen, and it pays to remember that the spray needs to be re-applied every 3 to 6 months to maintain protection.
Overall, we’re going to give it a 5 out of 5. Easy to apply, effective, low impact on screen functionality and not too expensive. We’d like to hear from more real world experiences, but for now it’s a thumbs up recommendation from us.

Liquid Armor – hardcore phone screen protection from a simple nano spray [Review]

Entire, working mobile phone with SIM free in this week's Entertainment Weekly

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:18:18 +0000

This week's issue of Entertainment Weekly sports a live-tweeting interactive video display. The folks from Mashable did a teardown to see how this was accomplished, and discovered that there is a complete (albeit without a case or keypad) Foxconn Android phone glued between the pages, along with a T-Mobile SIM. By poking around, they were even able to make phonecalls with it.

They didn't show what happened if you put the SIM in another phone, which would be a neat trick, and I also wondered about the injunction to turn off mobile devices for takeoff and landing.

We Found a Free Smartphone Embedded Inside Entertainment Weekly (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

AdHawk: who's behind that political ad?

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:20:20 +0000

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez,

The Sunlight Foundation recently launched a free mobile app to help voters better know who is buying political ads this election year. Ad Hawk available for iPhone and Android, listens to campaign, super PAC and issue ads on the TV or radio and then lists information about who placed the ads, their campaign finance profile and other information.
Ad Hawk is simple to use: just listen, identify and learn. When you see a political ad on TV or hear one on the radio, open the app to have Ad Hawk start listening to the ad. In less than 30 seconds, Ad Hawk will create an audio fingerprint using open-source technology and start searching our database of thousands of ads for a match. We identify new ads by monitoring media reports and the YouTube channels of political groups and campaigns. When Ad Hawk finds a match, users will get information on their phone about how much money the ad's sponsor received or spent, where the ad is on the air and media reports about the candidate or political group.

Ad Hawk: Identify Political Ads As They Air

If ghosts suffered with autocorrect

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:45:27 +0000

High concept from the Hairpin's Mallory Ortberg: "Text-messages from a ghost:"

hey im gaunting you ok
Do you mean haunting
yeah sorry i don’t have any fingers
so im poltergeisting a stick to help me text this
Who is this?
oh sorry im a ghost
So do you live inside this phone
yeah kind of

Text Messages From a Ghost (via Making Light)

(Image: Ghost Dance Texture, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from oddsock's photostream)

Judge says it's OK to use your seized phone to impersonate you and entrap your friends

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:51:00 +0000

A federal judge has upheld the practice of police using seized phones to impersonate their owners, reading messages and sending sending entrapping replies to contacts in the phone's memory, without a warrant. The judge reasoned that constitutional privacy rights don't apply to messages if they appear on a seized device -- even if the messages originated with someone who has not been arrested or is under suspicion of any crime:

A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is "nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers," akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner.
Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police. He claimed that the same rule applied to letters and e-mail. (Police would still need to seize or search a phone or computer legally, and phones are much easier for cops to seize than computers, which generally require a warrant.)
"On his own iPhone, on his own computer, or in the process of electronic transit, Hinton's communications are shielded by our constitutions," he wrote, referring to both the state and federal constitutions. "But after their arrival, Hinton's text messages on Lee's iPhone were no longer private or deserving of constitutional protection." Penoyar rejected Roden's privacy arguments on similar grounds.

It's legal: cops seize cell phone, impersonate owner

Apple rejects "Angry Syrians"

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 13:04:30 +0000

Frederic Jacobs produced an iOS app called "Angry Syrians," which was apparently blessed by Rovio. It was intended to raise awareness of the ongoing bloodbath in Syria. Apple rejected it because "We found your app contains defamatory or offensive content targeted at a specific group, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines." (the defamed and offended group in question is the brutal Assad regime and its supporters). (via Hacker News)

On-demand ice-cream trucks from Uber

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 17:04:38 +0000

Uber, a spunky startup that's made a name for itself by using mobile devices to hook up people with rolling stock -- starting with an app that let idle limo drivers in San Francisco know about people who couldn't get a cab due to the city's notoriously dysfunctional taxi regulations -- has a great new stunt. They're giving ice-cream truck drivers and people who want ice-cream the ability to understand each others' needs: if you're willing to buy five or more ice-creams, you can signal that and nearby truck-drivers will see and respond to your desire. The service is available in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington DC.

* You can request ice cream by selecting the ‘ice cream cone icon’ in your Uber app.
* Set the location where you want the ice cream truck to show up and tap ‘request ice cream delivery here.’
* You’ll receive an ETA and be able to communicate with the driver.
* The ice cream truck will deliver five ice creams (you will have the option to order more when the truck arrives).
* We’ll bill your credit card card on file $12 for each bundle you order and hook you up with some sweet Uber swag.

#OMGUBERICECREAM (via Hacker News)

People overestimate mobile privacy, lawmakers are out of touch with privacy expectations

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:53:17 +0000

My friend Jen Urban of UC Berkeley and her colleagues Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Su Li have just published Mobile Phones and Privacy, a paper in the BCLT Research Paper Series, and a summary. In a nutshell, people totally overestimate the privacy of the data on their mobile phones, they oppose all the current legislative directions on mobile privacy, including the ability of the police to plunder their phones for "suspicious" information and the practice of carriers retaining detailed logs of their activity.

We've just released another tranche of data from our 2012 consumer privacy survey. This one focuses upon privacy issues surrounding mobile phones. As with our other studies, this is a telephonic (landline and wireless) survey of Americans with a sample size of about 1,200 people. Some highlights:
We asked consumers whether they thought information on their mobile phones was private in three different ways:
* A large majority—78%—of Americans consider information on their mobile phones at least as private as that on their home computers. Fifty-nine percent consider it “about as private” and 19% consider it “more private.” Those under 45 were more likely than those over 45 to respond that data on phones was more private than data on home computers.
* A large majority rejected the idea that law enforcement should be automatically able to search a cell phone of someone who is arrested. 76% supported requiring officers to get permission from a court prior to searching a mobile phone in this situation.
* We asked consumers whether they would be willing to lend their phones to others. While most would lend it to a spouse or close friend, most would not lend their phone to an acquaintance or work colleague. When we probed for explanations, privacy rationales dominated the resistance to lending the phone to others.
In addition to determining individuals expectations around privacy, we asked a number of specific questions about business practices:
* A large majority objected to the basic premise behind the established business relationship. 74% said that businesses that they frequent should not be able to call them, even if the consumer provides the cashier with her phone number.
* We asked about the information practices of apps and found rejection of common business models. 81% of respondents said they would “definitely not allow” (51%) or “probably not allow” (30%) sharing contact lists in order to receive more connection suggestions.
* Americans support strong limits on data retention in the wireless context. 46% answered that wireless phone location data should not be kept at all. The next largest group—28% of respondents—answered that the data should be kept less than a year.

Android Jelly Bean is sweet

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:15:21 +0000

I got an over-the-air update to my Nexus Galaxy last night, and I'm now running version 4.1 of Android, AKA Jelly Bean. My preliminary impression: holy shit, this is awesome. Fast! Like a time-lapse of my old phone with all the waiting edited out. Haven't tried the voice-search yet, but I will.

Police Tape: an ACLU mobile app to secretly record the police

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 23:00:54 +0000

Police Tape is an Android app from the American Civil Liberties Union that is designed to allow citizens to covertly record the police. When activated, it hides itself from casual inspection, and it has a mode that causes it to send its recording to an ACLU-operated server, protecting against police seizure and deletion.

Citizens can hold police accountable in the palms of their hands with "Police Tape," a smartphone application from the ACLU of New Jersey that allows people to securely and discreetly record and store interactions with police, as well as provide legal information about citizens' rights when interacting with the police. Thanks to the generosity of app developer OpenWatch, the ACLU-NJ is providing Police Tape to the public free of charge.

The ACLU says that an iPhone version is "coming soon," though it remains to be seen whether something so potentially controversial passes muster with the App Store.

Police Tape

iPhone app makes a game of monitoring pain for young cancer patients

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:50:38 +0000

[Video Link] Canada's Hospital for Sick Children (aka SickKids) and the Cundari creative agency are developing a iPhone app called "Pain Squad" to help monitor and report physical pain and emotional wellness in young cancer patients. Snip from a post on Springwise:

Using the narrative of a police force hunting down pain, users are inducted as a rookie officer working on the case. Patients fill out a daily survey – which asks questions relating to whether they felt pain that day, how intense it was and its location – and can progress through the ranks of the force when they keep their records updated. The concept was created by Toronto-based media agency Cundari, who got stars from Rookie Blue and Flashpoint – two primetime cop shows in Canada – to appear in videos that are unlocked when patients do well and progress the narrative. By gamifying the process, the app gives patients an incentive to keep a daily journal of their pain. The app is still in the testing phase but SickKids hopes to release it later this year.

When I was in the hospital for breast cancer surgery, nurses popped in constantly to ask how my pain levels were; when they knew I was sufficiently doped up but saw me cry, they figured I was going through emotional pain.

But my relatively brief hospital stay is nothing compared to the longer-term in-patient stays many cancer patients must endure. And with many forms of cancer, monitoring pain levels over time is critical because that information can reveal the progression or retreat of disease.

I can see how a handheld app might encourage better data gathering, and more accurate tracking, especially in younger people with cancer who have different levels of comfort in communicating their condition with (older, adult) hospital staff. I haven't played with the app, and the proof is in how the young people with cancer feel about it—but it sounds like a great idea.

(thanks, Maria Popova!)

Disgruntled customer destroys T-Mobile UK store

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 21:34:58 +0000

A man in Manchester was denied a refund by a T-Mobile store, so he destroyed it, smashing fixtures and spraying around with a fire extinguisher. He's apparently up on criminal damages charges. There's not really any excuse for this kind of thing, but mobile phone operators... Well, I suspect that many people have fantasized about doing exactly this.

T-Mobile Store Rampage Caught On Video For Everyone To Enjoy

VLC on Android

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:40:57 +0000

VLC, the world's greatest video player, is now in beta for Android. It's a bit shaky, but it's also amazing news. (via LifeHacker)

Essential mobile adventure games

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:16:18 +0000

Konstantinos Dimopoulous offers the 10 adventure games you must play on iOS. Android gamers have plenty to choose from too (albeit buried in Google Play's "Puzzle" section), including the just-released director's cut of Broken Sword.

Ringbow: Bluetooth game controller you wear on your finger

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 03:29:17 +0000

"Ringbow" is a recent, half-funded Kickstarter project from a team that includes Andrew Hartman, design director of Philips Electronics. It's a Bluetooth game-controller that you wear on your finger, serving as "a mouse, keyboard and joystick simultaneously." A $35 pledge gets you one when they ship.

Since touch screens are controlled with fingers, a finger-worn tool, specifically a ring, is the natural choice for complementing them. Operating Ringbow with your thumb, in conjunction with using a touch device, enables countless new features and a much more efficient user experience. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions providing powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies.
Operating the ring with your thumb while using your finger to touch a device provides powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions.

Ringbow - Next Generation Gaming Accessory (via Red Ferret)

Students: build a mobile/web app, get $15K/£10K in venture capital

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:25:19 +0000

Tim writes:

If you're like most college students we know, you'll be headed for a few weeks of downtime now that the academic year is winding up. But what are you going to do over the summer if you don't have your internship at Google or Goldman already lined up? Here's one idea: enter the Lean Investments Summer 2012 App Challenge. It's a startup contest with a difference: instead of being judged on Powerpoint slides or a business plan, you're being asked to actually build something over the summer: a web or mobile app that's really useful (yup, it's a wide as that).
The challenge is being run by Lean Investments, the seed VC fund that's the vehicle of Tim Jackson, one of Europe's leading tech entrepreneurs, investors and commentators. And the prize is a package of cash investment, office space, mentoring and funding introductions.
There's one more twist to the story: what if you have a great idea but you don't write software, or if you're a genius developer but you don't have an idea? No problem. The guys at Lean allow you to register your interest, and they'll matchmake to help you team up with someone who has the skills you don't have.
The only drawback? Once you get drawn in, you may not get much of a tan this summer. But if you're planning to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, maybe you'll have time to go to the beach later on in life...

Challenge (Thanks, Tim!)

Self-delusion is an ugly thing

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:01:46 +0000

Self-delusion is an ugly thing: "While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about."