iPhone Demo Video
Apple provides a Apple iPhone guide tour on the website to show the features of the new device.
Worth to see!
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June 26, 2007
Cell hack geek stalks pretty blonde shocker
Cellphone-hack surveillance techniques, long the preserve of government operatives, may have gone mainstream as a family in the western USA reports unusually competent cellphone stalking.
The News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, carried reports last week of a harassment campaign bearing all the hallmarks of being orchestrated by frustrated teenage boys - except that it was technically sophisticated. An attractive 16-year-old girl and her family and friends have experienced eavesdropping via their mobile phones even when turned off, calls billed from their phones even when turned off, contact data lifted from phones remotely, ringtones replaced with threatening recordings, and so on.
This sort of thing is extremely unusual in normal life, and the News Tribune reports that local plods and cell-company reps have struggled to believe the beleaguered Kuykendall family and their fellow victims.
Nonetheless, others have learned about such things the hard way. US Army operators from the ultra-secretive "Intelligence Support Activity," (also known under its various rapidly changing codenames, for instance "Gray Fox" and "Centra Spike") were remotely activating Pablo Escobar's cellphone as long ago as the early '90s. British analysts are widely believed to have intercepted Osama bin Laden's cellphone traffic during the invasion of Afghanistan, and the "Activity" reportedly turned on al-Qaeda chief Qaed Senyan al-Harethi's phone remotely in 2002 so as to target him with a Hellfire missile from an overhead Predator drone.
More recently it has been revealed that the FBI routinely turn Mafia bosses' cellphones into remotely operated bugs. Business executives advised by competent security pros have long been in the habit of removing the batteries from their phones at vulnerable times or during important meetings. The mobile-phone-as-bug strategy has been public knowledge for a while now.
As for the hostile calls all seeming to come from the unfortunate Courtney Kuykendall's own phone, "cloning" attacks, in which a subscriber's identity is copied over the air from their phone and then used fraudulently - perhaps running up a huge bill in their name - are ordinary criminal stuff, and the local cops in Fircrest really ought to be up on that by now.
At least some spy software packages are available commercially, marketed at the suspicious spouse. And massive tech sophistication isn't always required: a sports science student at Loughborough University in the UK was able to intercept his love-object's comms through the simple method of knowing someone at the phone company. One might think that even local plods might be waking up to this sort of thing nowadays.
Ms Kuykendall and her allies could easily enough mount a little electronic-warfare campaign of their own, if the cops don't know how. One obvious tactic that would probably work in the UK would be enabling cell-tracking on one's own phone and then pulling the battery. Next time the cloned phone pops up - bingo. Target localised.
The next step after that for Pablo Escobar in 1993 was the arrival of the murderous "Bloque de Busqueda" hit team from the Colombian police, accompanied, according to rumour, by members of Delta Force. Shortly thereafter the Medellin drug lord was dead, supposedly shot while trying to escape. Senyan al-Harethi probably never even knew what hit him in 2002. If the Kuykendalls and their friends are as angry as one might expect, the results for their unknown harasser might be almost as bad.
June 05, 2007
Symbian OS
Symbian OS is a proprietary operating system, designed for mobile devices, with associated libraries, user interface frameworks and reference implementations of common tools, produced by Symbian Ltd. It is a descendant of Psion's EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors.
Symbian is currently owned by Nokia (47.9%), Ericsson (15.6%), Sony Ericsson (13.1%), Panasonic (10.5%), Siemens AG (8.4%) and Samsung (4.5%). While BenQ has acquired the mobile phone subsidiary of Siemens AG the Siemens AG stake in Symbian does not automatically pass to BenQ - this will need the approval of the Symbian Supervisory Board.
Design
Symbian OS's major advantage is the fact that it was built for handheld devices, with limited resources, that may be running for months or years. There is a strong emphasis on conserving memory, using Symbian-specific programming idioms such as descriptors and a cleanup stack. Together with other techniques, these keep memory usage low and memory leaks rare. There are similar techniques for conserving disk space (though the disks on Symbian devices are usually flash memory). Furthermore, all Symbian OS programming is event-based, and the CPU is switched off when applications are not directly dealing with an event. This is achieved through a programming idiom called active objects. Correct use of these techniques helps ensure longer battery life.
All of this makes Symbian OS's flavor of C++[citation needed] very specialised. However, many Symbian OS devices can also be programmed in OPL, Python, Visual Basic, Simkin, and Perl - together with the Java ME and PersonalJava flavours of Java.
Competition
At its lowest level lie the base components of Symbian OS. This includes the kernel (EKA1 or EKA2 - see the 'History' section), and the user library which allows user-side programs to request things of the kernel. Symbian OS has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel. It contains a scheduler and memory management, but no networking or filesystem support. These functions are provided by user-side servers. The base layer includes the file server, which provides a fairly DOS-like view of the filesystems on the device (each drive has a drive letter, and backslashes are used as the directory delimiter). Symbian OS supports various filesystem types including FAT32 and Symbian OS-specific NOR flash filing systems. The filesystem is generally not exposed to the user through the phone user interface.
Immediately above base are a selection of system libraries. These take all shapes and sizes, including character set conversion, a DBMS database, and resource file handling.
Further up, the software is not so readily arranged into a stack.
History
Psion
In 1980, Psion was founded by David Potter.
EPOC16
Psion released several Series 3 devices from 1991 to 1998 which used the EPOC16 OS, also known as SIBO.
EPOC OS Releases 1–3
The Series 5 device, released in 1997, used the first iterations of the EPOC32 OS.
EPOC Release 4
Oregon Osaris and Geofox 1 were released using ER4.
In 1998, Symbian Ltd. was formed as a partnership between Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion, to explore the convergence between PDA's and mobile phones.
EPOC Release 5 aka. Symbian OS 5
Psion Series 5mx, Series 7, Psion Revo, Psion Netbook, netPad, Ericsson MC218 were released in 1999 using ER5.
ER5u aka. Symbian OS 5.1
The first phone, the Ericsson R380 was released using ER5u in 2000. It was not an 'open' phone - software could not be installed. Notably, a number of never-released Psion prototypes for next generation PDAs, including a Bluetooth Revo successor codenamed Conan were using ER5u. The 'u' in the name refers to the fact that it supported Unicode.
Symbian OS v6.0 and 6.1
Sometimes called ER6. The first 'open' Symbian OS phone, the Nokia 9210, was released in 2001.
Symbian OS 7.0 and 7.0s
First shipped in 2003. This is an important Symbian release which appeared with all contemporary user interfaces including UIQ (Sony Ericsson P800, P900, P910, Motorola A925, A1000), Series 80 (Nokia 9300, 9500), Series 90 (Nokia 7710), Series 60 (Nokia 6600, 7310) as well as several FOMA phones in Japan.
In 2004, Psion sold its stake in Symbian.
Also in 2004, the first worm for mobile phones using Symbian OS, Cabir, was developed, which used Bluetooth to spread itself to nearby phones. See Cabir and Symbian OS threats.
Symbian OS 8.0
First shipped in 2004, one of its advantages would have been a choice of two different kernels (EKA1 or EKA2). However, the EKA2 kernel version did not ship until Symbian OS 8.1b. The kernels behave more or less identically from user-side, but are internally very different. EKA1 was chosen by some manufacturers to maintain compatibility with old device drivers, while EKA2 offered advantages such as real-time response. 8.0b was deproductized in 2003.
Symbian OS 8.1
Basically a cleaned-up version of 8.0, this was available in 8.1a and 8.1b versions, with EKA1 and EKA2 kernels respectively. The 8.1b version, with EKA2's single-chip phone support but no additional security layer, was popular among Japanese phone companies desiring the real-time support but not allowing open application installation.
Symbian OS 9.0
This version was used for internal Symbian purposes only. It was deproductised in 2004. 9.0 marked the end of the road for EKA1. 8.1a is the final EKA1 version of Symbian OS.
Symbian OS has generally maintained reasonable binary compatibility. In theory the OS was BC from ER1-ER5, then from 6.0 to 8.1b. Substantial changes were needed for 9.0, related to tools and security, but this should be a one-off event. The move from requiring ARMv4 to requiring ARMv5 did not break backwards compatibility.
A Symbian developer proclaims that porting from Symbian 8.x to Symbian 9.x is a more daunting process than Symbian says. [2]
Symbian OS 9.1
Released early 2005. It includes many new security related features, particularly a controversial platform security module facilitating mandatory code signing. Symbian argues that applications and content, and therefore a developers investment, are better protected than ever, however others contend that the requirement that every application be signed (and thus approved) violates the rights of the end-user, the owner of the phone, and limits the amount of free software available. The new ARM EABI binary model means developers need to retool and the security changes mean they may have to recode. S60 platform 3rd Edition phones have Symbian OS 9.1. Sony Ericsson is shipping the M600 based on Symbian OS 9.1, and should ship the P990 in Q3 2006. The earlier versions had a fatal defect where the phone hangs temporarily after the owner sent hundreds of SMS'es. However, on 13 September 2006, Nokia released a small program to fix this defect[3].
Support for Bluetooth 2.0 (was 1.2)
Symbian OS 9.2
Released Q1 2006. Support for OMA Device Management 1.2 (was 1.1.2). S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 phones have Symbian OS 9.2.
Symbian OS 9.3
Released on 12th July 2006. Upgrades include native support for Wifi 802.11, HSDPA, Vietnamese language support.
Symbian OS 9.5
Announced in March 2007. Features up to 25% reduced RAM usage resulting in better battery life thanks to introduction of demand paging. Applications should launch up to 75% faster. Native support for mobile digital television broadcasts in DVB-H and ISDB-T formats and also location services. Additionally, SQL support is provided by SQLite.
Moblog
Moblog is a blend of the words mobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or Moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device.
Much of the earliest development of Moblogs occurred in Japan, among the first countries in the world where camera phones (portable phones with built-in cameras) were widely commercially available.
According to Joi Ito's History of Moblogs, the first post to the web from a mobile user was from Steve Mann in 1995. He used a wearable computer, a more elaborate predecessor to modern Moblogging devices. The first post to the Internet from an ordinary mobile device is believed to be by Tom Vilmer Paamand in Denmark in May 2000.
The term "Moblogging" itself was coined by Adam Greenfield to describe the practice in 2002. He went on to organise the First International Moblogging Conference (or 1IMC) in July 2003 in Tokyo, with the help of Paul Baron, Gen Kanai, Carsten Schwesig and Steve Graff. Less known about is the First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference that took place a day before the real 1IMC event.
The term is sometimes pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable - MOBlog - out of affinity with the ideas about social self-organization developed in Howard Rheingold's "Smart Mobs".
Weblogs made from portable devices are also sometimes known as cyborgLogs, abbreviated as 'glogs, especially when primarily image-based.
Illicit and taboo activities have proven popularity in some early Moblog experiments, while family-oriented moblogs may be soon implementing advanced filter controls. See Drewing for more information about the delinquency publishing fad.
In 2004, Singapore launched a National Day Moblog on National Day. Apparently, it is the first national Moblog in the world.
Early on in Moblogging users sent their media to a Moblog server via MMS or email. Recently software has become available which allows people to have the same rich experience they had while blogging from their PC. Some countries are even using moblogs for pedagogical purposes. The Singapore Government oraganizes annual Campus Moblogging competitions between its primary and secondary schools www.campusmoblog.com.sg
The art of the Moblog is that "a picture tells a thousand word." By posting pictures the Moblogger is able to allow the viewer to look through their eyes, to visually experience where he or she is and what he or she is doing. Words often do not describe what a picture can do very easily. Moblogging is becoming more widespread through the use of websites where anybody with a cameraphone and the ability to send pictures can create an account and participate by uploading pictures on the fly.
June 01, 2007
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
On the Website of D5 you can find the video of an interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Worth seeing!
Twitter: What are you doing?
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.
Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently three gateway numbers are available: short codes for the USA and Canada and a UK number for international use. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier.
Twitter began as a research and development project inside of Odeo, Inc. by Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey, and debuted in March 2006. The Twitter team won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. They gave the following playful acceptance speech: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
Twitter is experiencing numerous challenges related to its growing user base. The Wall Street Journal wrote, "These social-networking services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Prominent Twitter users include U.S. presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama, podtech.net blogger Robert Scoble, Xbox blogger Larry Hryb, and tech podcasters Leo Laporte and Veronica Belmont (as well as many others). On April 4, 2007, Laporte left Twitter for Jaiku due to trademark problems with his TWiT trademark.
The first Twitter security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007 by Nitesh Dhanjani. The problem was due to Twitter using the SMS message originator as the authentication of the users account. Nitesh used fakemytext.com to spoof a SMS message, Twitter then posted the message on the victims page. This vulnerability can only be used if the victims phone number is known.