Tech wrap: Apple iOS apps to require “explicit” OK to share your contacts
Apple tweaked its policy on permission iOS apps need to access the contact information of users after legislators sought more information from the company regarding its privacy policies.
“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” an Apple spokesman told Reuters. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
The announcement came after Path, a San Francisco startup, attracted widespread criticism last week after a Singaporean developer discovered that Path’s iPhone app had been quietly uploading his contacts’ names and phone numbers onto Path’s servers. In the following days, other tech bloggers discovered that iPhone apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare similarly uploads user data – without permission, in some cases. Later, blogger Dustin Curtis, wrote in a widely distributed post that “there’s a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user’s entire address book, without their permission to remote servers and then store it for future reference.”
Chinese technology firm Proview, which has been seeking to ban all shipments of Apple’s iPad tablet into and out of China, said that customs authorities had told it that the sheer size of the market and the popularity of iPads would make it difficult to impose a ban. The legal battle between Proview and Apple centers around using the name “iPad” in China, which a Chinese court last year said Proview owned the trademark rights to. Authorities in some Chinese cities had ordered retailers to stop selling Apple’s iPad due to the dispute.
Working conditions at Chinese manufacturing plants where Apple’s iPads and iPhones are made are far better than those at garment factories or other facilities elsewhere in the country, according to the head of a non-profit agency investigating the plants. The Fair Labor Association is beginning a study of the working conditions of Apple’s top eight suppliers in China, following reports of worker suicides, a plant explosion and slave-like conditions at one of those suppliers, Foxconn. Auret van Heerden, president of the FLA offered no immediate conclusions on the working conditions, but he noted that boredom and alienation could have contributed to the stress that led some workers to take their own lives.
Telemarketers will have to get written consent before placing automated calls to consumers under new rules the Federal Communications Commission voted to adopt. The FCC will enforce stricter rules on so-called telemarketing “robocalls,” mandating that these autodialed or prerecorded calls can only be placed to consumers who have already agreed in writing to receive them. Companies will no longer be able to point to an established business relationship with a consumer to justify the automated pitches. All robocalls will also have to include an automated opt-out option to allow consumers to immediately notify telemarketers that they no longer want to receive these calls.
Congress plans Facebook “hackathon” to boost engagement with public
Top legislators on both sides of the aisle in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Thursday they will work with Facebook engineers and independent developers to make it easier for the public to engage with lawmakers and follow the legislative process.
The first-ever Congressional Facebook Developer Hackathon will take place Dec. 7 at the Capitol, bringing together lawmakers, academics and developers to find ways to make Congress more transparent and accessible.
A hackathon, a term coined by computer programmers over a decade ago, generally refers to a meeting where new programs and applications are collaboratively developed.
With the growing influence social media like Facebook and Twitter has in people’s everyday lives, “it is essential that Congress fully incorporate these platforms into its daily operations,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.
Cantor will host the event along with Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer.
“Americans have a right to petition government, and new online technologies are giving that right exciting new possibilities,” Hoyer said in a statement.
While logistics will not allow for the all-night coding sessions typical of hackathons, the event will look at how legislative data that the House has already made available can be used by developers to build apps the public can easily understand and garner information from.
Microsoft’s Kinect eyes path beyond gaming, into other industries
As Microsoft Corp’s Xbox gaming console nears its 10th anniversay, the company said its future may lie beyond gaming.
“That’s still the core of what we do, but if you think of the next 10 years of our business, it’s all the new opportunities and possibilities that Kinect is opening us up to,” Craig Cincotta, director of communications for Xbox, told Reuters.
Microsoft’s Kinect, launched last year, is a sensing camera and microphone device that plugs into the Xbox 360 console, allowing users to play games purely with gestures and voice commands.
The device flew off shelves, setting a record sales pace for a consumer electronics device, and was immediately attractive to hackers who devised ways of making it work on standard computers.
“People in academics and hobbyists started using it in ways that in reality we knew that it had the potential, but we hadn’t thought of certain applications yet,” Cincotta said.
Microsoft announced last week it would release a commercial version of the Kinect software development kit in early 2012.
I can imagine many applications and uses for this wonderful technology, and it is nearly limitless, well sort of. Imagine playing chess online in a more interactive way than just clicking with the mouse, now that would bring some excitement into an old game.
David – http://www.regencychess.co.uk
Tech wrap: Sony suffers as TV picture dims
Sony warned of a fourth straight year of losses, with its television unit alone set to lose $2.2 billion on tumbling demand and a surging yen, sinking its U.S. shares and raising concerns about the viability of its high-profile TV business. Investors had expected Sony to reduce its profit forecast, but not flag a swing to massive losses.
The maker of Bravia TVs, Vaio computers and PlayStation game consoles cut its sales forecast for TVs, cameras and DVD players and said it may report a 90 billion yen ($1.1 billion) net loss for the current financial year, scrapping its earlier net profit estimate of 60 billion yen.Sony’s U.S. listed shares closed down nearly 6 percent.
A small Spanish tablet maker won a patent infringement battle with Apple in a rare victory against the tech giant in its global defense of markets for its iPads, a court document showed. Spain’s Nuevas Tecnologias y Energias Catala (NT-K) successfully appealed a 2010 injunction from a local court to ban the import of its tablet computer — manufactured in China — to Spain. NT-K, from the Valencia region of Spain, is demanding compensation from Apple for losses during the ban of its product and is suing the U.S. giant for alleged anticompetitive behavior.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be sent to Sweden from Britain to face questioning over alleged sex crimes, the British High Court ruled, rejecting his appeal against extradition. Assange now has two weeks to consider whether to make a final appeal to the Supreme Court. However, any recourse to Britain’s highest judicial body can only be made on a point of law considered by judges to be of general public interest, so permission to appeal must be obtained first from the High Court.
Google launched and then pulled a much-anticipated Gmail app for Apple iOS devices via Apple’s App Store. Initially launched to make access to Google’s email service faster and easier, the app was removed after it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t working, causing “users to see an error message when first opening the app,” Google said in a blog posting. No estimate was given for when the Gmail app would return to the App Store.
Yahoo unveiled a handful of products to try and bolster its mobile and social networking offerings, as the struggling Web company continues to evaluate its future. Among the new products unveiled were a multimedia newsstand for tablets dubbed Livestand, a weather application for Android mobile devices, and a new version of IntoNow, a social application related to television, for the iPad. Yahoo has long endured criticism for lacking a more comprehensive strategy for engaging Web users who are drifting away from PCs and spending more time on tablets and smartphones.
AOL’s third-quarter revenue dropped 6 percent because of its dwindling dial-up Internet access business though it beat analysts expectations and its stock rose more than 11 percent. “Investors have gotten used to disappointment from AOL especially in the forward outlook,” said Benchmark analyst Clayton Moran. “Mainly there are no negative surprises in this quarter… and the forward outlook seems to be more stable.” Prior to the rally, AOL shares were down more than 40 percent year to date.
Is a Facebook iPad App finally coming?
In the nearly 15 months since Apple launched its iPad, there’s been one conspicuous absence for users of the tablet: a Facebook app.
That will change in the coming weeks, as Facebook, the world’s No.1 Internet social network, prepares to unveil an app specially-designed for the iPad, according to a report in the New York Times today.
In development for almost a year, the Facebook iPad app is now in its final stages of testing and has received close attention throughout the process from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Times reported, citing anonymous sources. The report said the app will have capabilities beyond what’s available on Facebook’s website, such as specialized video and photo features.
A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters the company has nothing to announce regarding an iPad app and doesn’t comment on the development of future products. He said Facebook has a great relationship with Apple, citing the work the two companies had done together on Facebook’s existing app for the iPhone.
There has been increasing speculation that Facebook and Apple are increasingly at odds.
Earlier this week, the blog TechCrunch described a secret planby Facebook to undermine Apple’s control of the app market, by encouraging software developers to create apps that run directly in a mobile Web browser, thus bypassing Apple’s App Store.
And Apple of course struck a deal to integrate Twitter directly into the next version of its iPhone and iPad software, a move that could threaten Facebook by making Twitter the social networking service of choice for Apple users.
Tech wrap: Apple sues Samsung over “slavish” copies
Apple sued rival Samsung Electronics claiming that Samsung’s Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablet “slavishly” copies the iPhone and iPad, according to court papers. The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges Samsung copied the look, product design and product user interface of Apple’s products. Samsung violated Apple’s patents and trademarks, the suit alleges.
Twitter is in talks to buy TweetDeck for around $50 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. TweetDeck is an add-on program that helps Twitter users view and manage their tweets and messages on other services such as those offered by Facebook and Foursquare. Twitter has allowed advertisers’ “promoted tweets”, that show up when users perform searches on Twitter, to appear on TweetDeck as part of a revenue-sharing agreement, The WSJ wrote.
Texas Instruments’s quarterly earnings missed Wall Street expectations by a penny as expenses rose after two of its Japanese factories were damaged in the country’s largest-ever earthquake. The company, which plans to buy analog chip maker National Semiconductor Corp for $6.5 billion, said one of its factories will “soon” resume full production, and added that it expects a strong second half.
Match.com said it will begin checking users against the national sex offender registry, days after a class action lawsuit was filed by a woman allegedly sexually assaulted by a man she met on the dating site.
There’s an app for:
- Taking a virtual walk up the aisle of Westminster Abbey ahead of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding: The Abbey 3D app gives Android, iPhone and iPad users access to the historic royal church, flashing up “hotspots” of information and their significance on the day of the wedding and show a cross-section bird’s-eye view of the abbey showing the layout of the church.
- Watching Flash videos on iOS devices: iSWiFTER bypasses Apple’s objections to the popular streaming video format, running the Flash content at its own data center and then sending video to the user’s iPad, which has to be connected to a Wi-Fi connection.
Tech wrap: Wozniak open to active role at Apple
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told Reuters he would consider returning to take an active role at the consumer electronics giant. Wozniak, a lifelong hands-on engineer, said he liked technology to be relatively open so that he could add his own touches. “My thinking is that Apple could be more open and not lose sales,” said Wozniak, but added: “I’m sure they’re making the right decisions for the right reasons for Apple.”
The Justice Department approved Google’s purchase of ticketing software company ITA Software as long as Google licensed the software to rivals, continued to upgrade it and created firewalls to hide ITA clients’ proprietary information. Google said it would soon bring out a new travel search tool.
Google CEO Larry Page moved to streamline decision-making at the company’s key social network, mobile, Internet software and YouTube product groups. Social networking chief Vic Gundotra, Android head Andy Rubin, Chrome senior vice president Sundar Pichai and YouTube head honcho Salar Kamangar were given a direct reporting line to Page and greater autonomy, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic spy agency, called for access to encrypted communication providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Skype, saying the uncontrolled use of such services could threaten national security. The proposal provoked a wave of negative comments in the Russian language online, with many saying the country could follow China’s attempts to limit the Internet.
Startup Fusion-io, backed by Steve Wozniak and Michael Dell, said it can outwit computer-storage incumbents like EMC by putting a solid-state flash memory drive directly into the computer server rather than in the traditional storage area, which is further away and takes longer to reach, effectively speeding up data processing by a factor of 10.
There’s an app for:
- Wealth management on tablets: Orion Advisor Services’ MobileAdvisor app displays portfolios, performance information and contact information and allows advisers using Orion’s platform to rebrand the app, so clients download it, log in, track their portfolios, and view videos that the adviser provides. LogMeIn connects Apple iPad users to their office desktop computers, giving wealth managers information wherever their clients need it.
Tech wrap: Microsoft cries foul
The hunted became the hunter when Microsoft filed its first-ever complaint to antitrust regulators, claiming that Google thwarts Internet search competition. Thomas Vinje, who led a coalition that won EU fines against Microsoft said the software maker “has learned from its own unpleasant experiences how to cause maximum disruption for its competitors via competition law”. Google controls over 90 percent of the Internet search advertising market in Europe, well ahead of Microsoft’s Bing. And browsers such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome have eaten away at the market lead by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Google is tightening control over its “open” Android operating system to reduce fragmentation and restrict additional partnerships that it doesn’t understand, Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance and Peter Burrows writes. Google says its procedures are about quality control, early bug fixes, and building toward a “common denominator” experience, Vance and Burows add.
Small-budget film producers have nearly perfected a slick, courtroom-based business strategy that’s targeted suspected movie downloaders, writes Wired’s David Kravets. One lawsuit alleged 5,865 illegal downloads of the film Nude Nuns With Big Guns, asking a federal judge to order ISPs to dig into customers’ records for names. It was the first step in a process that could lead to each defendant receiving a letter suggesting they settle the case, lest they wind up named in a public lawsuit having downloaded Nude Nuns With Big Guns, Kravets adds.
James Cicconi, the head of AT&T’s lobbying effort to acquire T-Mobile USA, said government remedies to free up more U.S. airwaves for wireless services are not coming fast enough and were an important driver behind his company’s bid. AT&T estimates it will carry the equivalent of the volume of all the mobile traffic it handled last year in the first six or seven weeks of 2015.
Anti-virus software maker ESET’s Randy Abrams lauded Facebook for making users’ preferences remember if they log in to “grossly insecure apps such as Farmville” from unsecured connections, like those found at coffee shops and airports, and restoring encrypted connections to Facebook once users log back in. Abrams called developers who haven’t fixed their apps to afford you a safe Facebook session “careless”. You can find your connection preferences on Facebook under Account->Account Settings->Account Security. Check the box beside “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible” to enable the feature.
Tech wrap: Amazon’s storm cloud
Amazon.com faced a backlash from the music industry after it introduced Cloud Drive, an online “music locker” that lets customers store music files on the company’s Web servers instead of their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection directly from browsers and on phones running Google’s Android OS. Sony Music was upset by Amazon’s decision to launch the service without new licenses for music streaming.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive “is an amazing value and pretty easy to use”, but won’t kill rival Dropbox just yet, Business Insider’s Steve Kooch wrote. The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka thinks Amazon’s cloud move isn’t earth shattering and “if you’re a music lover looking for a paradigm shift in the way you consume tunes, this won’t be it”.
Mozilla released its Firefox 4 Internet browser for Android phones, which allows desktop users to synchronize their history, bookmarks, tabs and passwords, according to Mozilla.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who returned this week to the company after a two-year absence, said he wants to make the microblogging site more approachable to the masses, acknowledging that the service is “something that people can’t immediately get their head around”.
AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile USA came under scrutiny from New York’s attorney general, who said he is looking into its possible anti-competitive impact.
News Corp held talks to give control of Myspace to the music label-owned video site Vevo.com, but the likelihood of a deal being reached was slim, a person with knowledge of the talks said.
Separately, News Corp said that an increase in new, paying digital subscribers to its UK paper The Times has more than compensated for a drop in print circulation.
What a colossal waste of bandwidth if all music was in the cloud. Pay as you go internet will soon follow, and you will have to keep on paying for access to your already paid for music. This will be the not-so-popular streaming services re-packaged as ownership. Fortunately, I can store all my music myself, and play it flawlessly anywhere, already. iPod rules!
Tech wrap: Amazon vs eBay…fight!
EBay said it will buy e-commerce service provider GSI Commerce for $1.96 billion in cash to build up its online marketplaces, as it ramps up its battle with Amazon.com. GSI is attractive to eBay because of its expertise in taking customer orders, managing them and filling them, which also happens to be an area of strength for Amazon. GSI, which owns Web businesses such as Rue La La and ShopRunner, also provides retailers such as Aeropostale and TJX’s Marshalls chains with technology, payment processing and customer care services for their e-commerce sites.
There will be no iPhone 5 announcement at Apple’s 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to The Wall Street Journal’s John Paczkowski. Instead, we should expect a software event, Paczkowski writes, quoting an Apple’s WWDC press release: “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.” He goes on to speculate that the delay may be due to Apple timing the release of a 4G LTE-compatible iPhone 5 with AT&T’s expected roll-out of its 4G LTE networks mid year.
Apple “piled another brick onto the ramparts of its walled garden,” only considering apps that are sold through the Mac App Store for this year’s Apple Design Awards, The Register’s Rik Myslewski writes. “This move makes it clear that Apple is enforcing a two-tiered status for Mac OS X apps: those it allows into the store, and those that remain outside it,” Myslewski adds.
The U.S. and Europe are converging in their Web privacy positions, partly through intensive meetings in recent months between regulators from Washington and Brussels, writes Eva Dou. Final legislative proposals expected from the U.S. in June or July and from the EU later this year. Europe has wanted strict measures to protect individuals privacy while the U.S. has tended to prefer giving companies responsibility for policing themselves, according to Dou.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is returning to the company as executive chairman, CEO Dick Costolo announced. Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 along with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and served as its first CEO until being replaced by Williams in 2008, will remain CEO of Square, the mobile payment startup he co-founded in 2009. Square said in a statement that it would remain Dorsey’s top priority.
The Fix, a daily website about drugs, alcohol, addiction and recovery, launched. It was founded by Radar Magazine creator Maer Roshan who, after selling Radar, moved to LA and entered rehab for alcohol abuse, writes The Next Web’s Courtney Boyd Myers. “The site will mix serious subjects such as addiction and rehabilitation with humor, celebrity content, feature writing, news, video and Zagat-like reviews of rehab facilities. Imagine an AA after party, hosted by TMZ,” Myers says.
