TWEET THIS: Twitter now fastest-growing social network in the world

Interesting chart over at Global Web Index:

Contrary to popular perception, Twitter has always been more of a niche social network in most countries around the world. In our first wave of research in July 2009, we estimated that Twitter had just 35.47 million monthly active users across the markets covered at the time. Twitter, however, is shaking off that niche status with impressive style, and as we being 2013, it is the fastest growing social platform on the planet.

GWI.8, the Q4 2012 dataset from GlobalWebIndex, shows that the number of active Twitter users grew 40% from Q2 2012 to Q4 2012. This is equal to 288 million monthly active users (claimed to have used or contribute to Twitter in the past month) across the 31 markets currently researched by GWI (representing nearly 90% of the global internet population aged 16 to 65). That marks a whopping growth rate in active users of 714% since July 2009.

An incredible 21% of the global internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis...

...As the chart below shows, the way people are using Twitter is changing in two respects. Firstly, it is becoming a passive source of discovery for users and secondly, users are using more as a tool or service rather than a pure social service. Amazingly, only 51% of active users claim to have posted a tweet in the past month. This means that half the active user base is just reading, reacting or using Twitter as a source of discovery. The caricature of the average Twitter user banally talking about what they had for breakfast is dying...

...All of these changes in usage underline the changing nature of Twitter (and the broader social media landscape) from a peer-to-peer or personal publishing platform, to the social infrastructure that links our internet experience across multiple devices and allows us to use the internet more efficiently. It’s quite possible that the majority of Twitter users in future will have very little or no interaction with the Twitter web page, and only use it through third party apps, aggregation services, operating system integration or via connected devices such as your TV...

I don't know about all of this newfangled Twitter stuff. I'm still banking on Friendster making a comeback.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

HOW COOL IS THIS? First Grader Becomes Youngest Person Ever to Develop a Mobile Game

What were you doing in the first grade?

Remember the name Zora Ball. At seven years old, she's the youngest person to ever create a mobile game app, which was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania's Bootstrap Expo last month.

Zora used the Bootstrap programming language, and lest you think her older brother Trace, who was a STEM scholar of the year at Zora's charter school, did the work for her, she reconfigured her app on the fly when asked, according to the Pittsburgh Courier.

This could be the beginning of a long career as a programmer and developer for Ball. But first she has to get through first grade.

Isn't it startling to consider that -- like Zora -- humanity remains in the infancy stage when it comes to computers? What will the next five or so decades bring? Or, for that matter, the next five years?


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

IRONIC PRIVACY FAIL: Facebook Founder's Sister Suffers Photo Leak

Well, if the sister of Facebook founder Jerry Zuckerberg screwed up her own privacy settings, what chance do the rest of us have?

...Mark Zuckerberg's sister Randi has complained about a Facebook privacy breach.

Randi, the former head of marketing for Facebook and the executive producer of Bravo's reality series Silicon Valley, complained when Callie Schweitzer, director of marketing and projects at VoxMedia, posted a photo of Randi and her family (including Mark) reacting to the new Poke app. Randi originally circulated the photo on Facebook to her friends, but Schweitzer posted it publicly on Twitter:

...Zuckerberg and Schweitzer have since deleted the conversation, but according to BuzzFeed, Schweitzer originally wrote "@randizuckerberg demonstrates her family's response to Poke" with a link to the pic. Randi then replied "@cschweitz: Not sure where you got this photo. I posted it only to friends on FB. You reposting it on Twitter is way uncool."

The article implies that Schweizer was not actually connected directly to Randi, but had simply subscribed to her updates.

So the failure was presumably either user error by Randi or facilitated by the vagaries of Facebook's notoriously nebulous privacy settings.

It doesn't help that this particular incident follows hot on the heels of Instagram's (a Facebook acquisition) public relations disaster.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook will get this privacy thing right, balancing the need to generate top-line growth with the privacy requirements of a fickle user community.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Facebook Just Destroyed Instagram

Well, these developments don't seem customer-friendly:

Over the past few years, I have been fairly critical about Facebook — starting first with its absurd valuation, and then moving to its abuse of privacy and data mining about its users, its frequent unannounced changes to its terms, and the general disdain with which it treats its users.

Although I was an Instagram fan, once [Facebook] bought the company, I stopped using the app (there are lots of alternatives)... This morning, I was reading the latest terms of service for the photo app — and they are nothing short of insane.

Facebook will be adding advertisements into Instagram’s application — and you and your kids may be part of them... here are the changes in Instagram’s privacy policy that you should be aware of:

1. Instagram can share information about its users with Facebook, its parent company, as well as outside affiliates and advertisers.

2. You could star in an advertisement — without your knowledge.

3. Underage users are not exempt.

4. Ads may not be labeled as ads.

5. Want to opt out? Delete your account.

Number five turns out to be a great idea — this morning, I deleted my Instagram account. At this rate, its only a matter of time before Facebook gets deleted.

Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

BUT SHE HAD IT COMING: Chinese woman gets tasered for buying too many iPhones

Memo to self: don't buy too many iPhones at one time.

...local TV news stations in New England were having a field day Wednesday with blurry cellphone video of a tiny 44-year-old Chinese woman being held to the ground and tasered outside an Apple Store by a pair of Nashua, N.H., police.

Piecing together the accounts of the police, the woman's 12-year-old daughter and her American boyfriend, this is what led to the confrontation:

The woman, Xiaojie Li, a Chinese national who lives in Newton, Mass., bought two iPhone 5s last Friday at the Apple Store in Nashua's Pheasant Lane Mall and was told when she tried to purchase more that she'd reached Apple's two-per-customer limit. When she made a video of other customers she claimed had bought more than two units, Apple staffers asked her to leave.

She revisited the mall Tuesday to pick up two more iPhone 5s she had ordered online, but the store refused to sell them. The store manager asked her to leave -- a request she says she didn't understand. The manager then asked a police officer assigned to provide mall security to escort her out.

"The officer approached her, told her she wasn't welcome in the store, and she refused to leave," Nashua police captain Bruce Hansen told WCVB TV. He described the use of electroshock weapons as standard procedure when a subject refuses to obey a lawful order or resists arrest.

According to police, Li was carrying about $16,000 in cash when she was arrested. She said she was buying the phones for relatives in China. Even if she was an iPhone 5 reseller, her boyfriend told a WCVB reporter, "does it rise to the level of getting a beating from police?"

Li has been charged with two misdemeanors -- criminal trespass and resisting arrest.

Two questions:

(a) So "refusing to leave" is a Tasering offense?

and:

(b) has her boyfriend told Xiaojie (pronounced Chao-Che, as far as you know) about, eh, eBay??!

GOOGLE THROWS DOWN THE GAUNTLET: Says Mobile War is Over and Android Has Defeated Apple

Interesting analogies drawn by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt:

Google (GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt believes the war between Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iOS is just about over and his side has won. In an interview with Bloomberg, the former CEO said that the current mobile battle is similar to the computing war that took place more than 20 years ago between Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple. The executive notes that Google is “winning that war pretty clearly now.”

...Schmidt’s words aren’t without merit; Android has seen explosive growth since its debut and controlled nearly 70% of the market this year. In fact, the operating system has been projected to dominate the smartphone market over the next four years while continuing to eat away at Apple’s tablet market share.

The Chairman’s comparison to Microsoft of the 1990s is fairly accurate. Windows was able to conquer the operating system space because of the strong support it had from a variety of manufacturers, while Apple refused to license OS X. Google has taken an approach similar to Microsoft’s, but rather than licensing the software it gives it out freely. This has helped the Android operating system see unprecedented growth.

“The core strategy is to make a bigger pie,” Schmidt said. “We will end up with a not perfectly controlled and not perfectly managed bigger pie by virtue of open systems.”

If taking shots at Apple wasn’t enough, the executive also jabbed the world’s largest social network, calling Google+ a “viable competitor to Facebook.” While Google’s social networking site has had its fair share of success, topping 500 million total users in a little over 14 months, it is no match for Facebook’s one billion monthly active users.

My prediction is that Google will continue to nibble away at Facebook, cable companies and wireless providers. This will prove extremely healthy for consumers because the latter two industries desperately need the benefit of robust competition.


Hat tips: Image via The Android Invasion, Story via BadBlue Tech News.

LATEST SMARTPHONE MARKET SHARE DATA: Apple Regains Top Spot, Edging Out Android

Here's a great table spotted in PC World that breaks down the latest smartphone sales by OS and carrier:

Android sales have declined in the U.S., helping iOS regain the top spot among smartphone platforms sold in the three-month period ending in October, according to the latest research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

...The figures from Kantar are different from a recent comScore MobiLens survey that found that Android is dominating with 53.6 percent of the market after a 1.4 percentage point increase. Apple was in second with 34.3 percent of the market after a 0.9 percentage point increase. Both surveys rely on user interviews, but the comScore survey does not include the month of October, while Kantar’s does...

...The month of October is relevant to this study because this is when iPhone 5 sales took off after a late September launch. Kantar attributes Apple’s double-digit rise in share specifically to the iPhone 5.

...Also thanks to the iPhone 5, AT&T has regained its spot as the top-selling smartphone carrier for the latest period, with 34.7 percent of smartphones sold, overtaking Verizon at 27.5 percent. Sprint and T-Mobile follow with 19.9 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively...

It's shocking to think back just three short years ago, when Apple and RIM were battling neck-and-neck for leadership of the smartphone market. It's been a fast downhill ride for the BlackBerry platform ever since.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com/Tech.

IT'S COME TO THIS: App Converts Any Photo Into Awesome Censored Nude Version, 60 Minutes-Style

And the four horsemen of the apocalypse were just spotted a couple miles south of town:

Nudifier: Turn Any Photo Into a Hilarious Censored Nude

The old cliche trick for getting over stage fright is to imagine the audience naked. We like to imagine everyone naked. That's what this app is for—except it censors out all the dirty bits and pieces.

What does it do?

Nudifier turns a photo of a fully clothed (or not) person (or animal) into a nude with TV-like pixel censorship around their private parts. Simply use the app's eyedropper to select the person's skin color, draw that color over their loins, and let the app turn that region into pixelation. Now share it with all your friends to the chagrin of the subject...

I can not confirm the Beltway scuttlebutt; i.e., that Joe Biden is the most prolific user of Nudifier.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com/Tech.

THE GREAT OBAMAPHONE SCANDAL: Another Fraudulent Program That "Is Completely Out of Control"

I gleaned some interesting news from this Fox News Baltimore report that appears relevant to our ongoing discussion of the debt, personal responsibility, and Joe Biden's mullet:

• Vans are driving around Baltimore offering free "Obamaphones", which you -- the beleaguered taxpayer -- are funding

• The phone program is, in the words of the report, "completely out of control, not just here in Baltimore, but all over the country"

• Baltimore resident Monique Crawford says that she has "30 phones, and all of them are [turned] on"

• She was able to get each one in "five, ten minutes."

• Private, prepaid cellphone companies are giving away phones to people in Baltimore and dozens of other cities... all paid for by you.

• In Baltimore, the number of Obamaphone subscribers has ballooned from 6,000 in 2008 to 231,000 in 2011

• Some residents just stand in line for phones, and then sell them to drug dealers

Buried in each of our monthly cellphone bills is line-item called a "universal access fee", which is helping to fund this insanity.

Isn't a giant, bloated, corrupt and unaccountable federal bureaucracy grand?

This administration needs to go.

The Kickstarter project that set out to raise $100,000 and ended up raising $10 million instead!

Kickstarter is a three-year old crowd funding website that has truly taken off. Crowd funding's been around for a while, but until Kick Starter it was never easy to connect good ideas with potential customers and investors. Kickstarter changed all that and, so far, it's been used to raise over $323 million for more than 10,000 projects. While most projects are quite small (raising less than $10,000) a few have hit startling fundraising achievements.

A CNBC list of the top 10 Kickstarter projects has a very interesting and useful number one project: The Pebble E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android.

Pebble is a customizable watch. Download new watchfaces, use sports and fitness apps, get notifications from your phone.

Pebble is the first watch built for the 21st century. It's infinitely customizable, with beautiful downloadable watchfaces and useful internet-connected apps. Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, alerting you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails and messages. While designing Pebble, we strove to create a minimalist yet fashionable product that seamlessly blends into everyday life.

Apps bring Pebble to life. We're building some amazing apps for Pebble. Cyclists can use Pebble as a bike computer, accessing the GPS on your smartphone to display speed, distance and pace data. Runners get a similar set of data displayed on their wrist. Use the music control app to play, pause or skip tracks on your phone with the touch of a button. Don't worry about the rain, Pebble is water-resistant! If you're a golfer, feel free to bring Pebble onto the course. We're working with Freecaddie to create a great golf rangefinder app for Pebble that works on over 25,000 courses world-wide. Instead of using your phone, view your current distance to the green right on your wrist. These apps will be the first, with more in the works!

...Pebble can change instantly, thanks to its brilliant, outdoor-readable electronic-paper (e-paper) display. We've designed tons of watchfaces already, with more coming every day. Choose your favourite watchfaces using Pebble's iPhone or Android app. Then as the day progresses, effortlessly switch to the one that matches your mood, activity or outfit.

If you need to stay on top of things, Pebble can help with vibrating notifications, messages and alerts. Dismiss a notification with a shake of your wrist. Don't worry, it's easy to disable all notifications.

I think Pebble has a real chance to make it big. Why?

If you think about the trends that have dominated computer technology, they tend to revolve around miniaturization. From mainframes, to minicomputers, to personal computers, to smartphones and tablets: people want smaller, more functional devices that are always there to assist them.

Pebble seems to fit that template.

While its fundraising cycle is over, you can now order the watches over at Pebble's Kickstarter site.

Oh, but remember: they didn't build that.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com/Tech.

Great Chart Shows How End-User Technologies Are Morphing

Great chart at ZDNet, which accompanies a friendly warning to corporate IT:

Tablets are likely to become the primary computing experience for workers over the next few years. What will it take to successfully shift IT delivery to these devices given the security worries, legacy IT landscape, BYOD, and other issues?

A few weeks ago the IT analyst firm Forrester made what is probably the first major declaration that tablets will soon become the primary computing device for most users, even going so far as to say that they will ‘rule’ personal computing in the near future. While I think the numbers speak for themselves on this, I also believe that many organizations are either unready or unwilling to hear this yet.

Part of the reason for this avoidance is because of the substantial overhaul it will require IT departments to undergo, and major change is invariably painful and difficult. This retooling includes the full gamut of IT responsibilities: Infrastructure, architecture, processes, tools, skills, and governance, right when so many companies are also dealing with many other generational IT disruptions.

Another reason for unpreparedness is that the tablet revolution has largely become a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon...

...The real lesson is this: To get the primary advantages of tablets will require more than paving the old cowpath (i.e. merely conducting a literal translation of legacy IT to tablets.) Tablets are fundamentally different computing devices with entirely new capabilities. To get the real competitive advantage of the next-generation of end-user computing will require rethinking how tablets and their innate capabilities and strengths can be used to transform business processes. Location-awareness, always-connectedness, augmented reality, pervasive video/audio, and more can create highly situational and context-aware apps that hold the potential to provide hard business benefits. These benefits include boosting worker productivity, improving decision making, saving time, enabling more self-service, and reinventing business processes to operate in deeply integrated, highly immersive, and seamless new ways.

Suffice it to say that these changes -- BYOD and tablet computing -- are so disruptive that many companies' IT shops will have real difficulty making the shift.

Chinese-made smartphones include lovely bezel design and a backdoor into all your data, but mostly a backdoor into all your data

The People's Republic of China (or PRC) is a land rife with slave labor, pollution, intellectual property theft, and repression of religion. In other words, it's Thomas Friedman's (pronounced: fried-man's) ideal society.

And the cyberwar that the PRC (or, rather, the People's Liberation Army or PLA) is waging worldwide, much of it against American assets, continues apace, unremarked upon by the President, his sycophants or the State Department.

Exhibit 9 million: A lovely backdoor installed on Chinese-made smartphones:

The ZTE Score M is an Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) phone available in the United States on MetroPCS, made by Chinese telecom ZTE Corporation.

There is a setuid-root application at /system/bin/sync_agent that serves no function besides providing a root shell backdoor on the device. Just give the magic, hard-coded password to get a root shell:

$ sync_agent ztex1609523
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)

Nice backdoor, ZTE.

darn, geek.com says it is real.....

If anyone reading this owns a ZTE Score M Android smartphone, your device has been found to include a backdoor allowing root access without user authentication.
The discovery of the backdoor comes via a post on the text storage website Pastebin. It has since been confirmed via Reddit by Justin Case of Cunning Logic and TeamAndIRC. He has confirmed with someone at ZTE that the backdoor does indeed exist and that a fix is in the works.

Oh look, we'll just make a master key!  You locked that door?  :-)
Nice guys, nice.... oh and ZTE makes more than phones -- they're the 5th largest telecommunications manufacturer in the world. 

It's imperative that more Americans become aware of the danger to our information infrastructure posed by the PLA. I, for one, would be hard-pressed to trust any technology made in the PRC.

And that's a lesson that many companies have learned the hard way.

BlackBerry Maker RIM Announces New Device That People Will Actually Buy

Eh, it is April Fool's Day, after all.

...RIM said sales of BlackBerrys fell sharply in the latest quarter, leading to the company's first revenue decline in seven years. Its subscriber growth rate from the previous quarter also hit an all-time low of 3%. And two of RIM's top officers stepped down, leaving RIM's executive bench as shallow as it has ever been.

Meanwhile, morale has flagged amid the unrest, according to executives inside and outside the company.

At a dinner meeting in February between RIM's chief technology officer, David Yach, one of the executives who left Thursday, and chief information officers from companies and government agencies, including the Department of Defense, the mood from the RIM side was somber, according to a person who attended the dinner.

...The company's market capitalization hovers over $7 billion, a big bite for any buyer to swallow. Some bankers said there would be few buyers at that price tag for the whole company.

The exception would be giants like Microsoft Corp. andNokia Corp. The two explored a joint bid for RIM last year, according to people familiar with the situation, but those talks were preliminary and didn't lead to a bid.

Nokia has adopted Microsoft's operating system for its latest smart phones. Given that close partnership, the two could make a coordinated approach, if they decided to bid, according to people familiar with the situation.

If they jointly bid, the two companies would likely scrap RIM's mobile operating system and instead equip BlackBerrys with Microsoft's Windows software, with Microsoft taking over RIM's enterprise network, these people said.

RIM was on top of the world just three short years ago. Now they're gasping for air.

Most tragically, they failed to leverage their primary assets -- a secure, global network and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) software that manages corporate connectivity -- and instead tried to concentrate on the fast-moving device market. This task was made decidedly more difficult by the entrance of Google's Android operating system, which is distributed free to device makers and supports incredible diversity for handsets.

If RIM had concentrated on building highly secure client software packages for iPhones and Androids using its BES management console to control all of these devices, it would have a huge revenue stream that could have funded its device and OS operations. Instead, it failed to leverage BES on other devices, and thereby created a market for secure clients from companies like Good Technologies and MobileIron.

As it stands today, I don't see how RIM survives as a device maker.

Way cool: new smartphone has built-in projector, throws 50" display

Daddy like:

The concept is simple: take a full-powered 4-inch Galaxy smartphone and add a 15-Lumens LED-powered, nHD projector. The result is a yellow and black phone that at first glance looks like a slightly fatter version (it’s 12.5mm thick and weighs 145.3 grams) of any of today’s top 3G phones.

Samsung didn’t skimp much to squeeze in the projector or, potentially, keep the price down. The Beam has a 5 MP camera (a tad less than the 8 MP we’re now used to), 8 GB of storage (upgradeable via micro-SD card to 32 GB) and 768 MB of RAM. It’s also running Android 2.3. The 480×800 screen looked clear and bright, but those specs and the screen are not the real story here. It’s reasonable to assume that the only reason someone would buy the Galaxy Beam is if you desperately wanted a dual phone/projector.

In operation, the Galaxy beam appeared flawless. It’ll play virtually anything you run on the small screen, and had no trouble shining a roughly 3-ft image onto an 8- or 9-ft ceiling. Images in a fully darkened room were very sharp and bright, but since it relies on the smartphone speakers for sound, you’ll want to hook up external speakers. Samsung execs told us that they’re working on a variety of docks and accessories.

The phone also worked well in presentation mode. Samsung execs projected a presentation on a nearby screen and changed slides by touching the Galaxy Beam’s screen.

The Telegraph asserts that the Beam "can show films and pictures at up to 50"."

You can easily envision salespeople clamoring for this type of device.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com.

Photos: Chinese Environmental Coalition Issues Scathing Report on Apple and Pollution

A report issued yesterday by the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (www.ipe.org.cn) says Apple Computer has made a conscious decision to "use polluting companies whilst sacrificing the environment and [surrounding] communities... so as to continue to grab for their own super profits [while turning] itself into a barrier to China’s pollution reduction."



The report, frankly, is downright frightening. The following is an excerpt, by no means complete, that alleges serious issues with Apple's supply chain in China.



Could someone tell the EPA so that they can pursue an investigation... overseas?

In the report titled ‘The Other Side of Apple,’ published January 2Oth, 2011, the coalition of environmental organizations brought to light many serious problems in Apple Inc.’s supply chain in China. After the report was published, Apple went on to issue their own annual CSR report in which they acknowledged, for the first time, that 137 workers had been poisoned by n-hexane while working at a production line for one of their products...



Yet, to this very day, some of the poisoned workers’ very reasonable demands for treatment and compensation have not been fully resolved. The workers have written three letters to Apple, but they have not received a word of reply. Furthermore, Apple remains completely non-responsive about the pollution cases raised by the environmental groups...



On the one hand Apple has been silent about its environmental and social responsibilities, yet at the same time, in order to satisfy the upsurge in market demand, the company continues to expand its supply chain in China..



...Apple Inc.’s policy of not commenting and to bury their heads in the sand when queries are raised by the public does not mean that the problems of pollution and poisoning within the supply chain will automatically vanish. On the contrary, its continuously expanding supply chain signifies that its environmental risks will also simultaneously increase. Faced with a stubbornly evasive Apple Inc., a number of Chinese environmental NGOs decided to dig deeper and to further investigate the environmental problems that exist within Apple’s supply chain. Through five months of research and field investigations we found that the pollution discharge from this enormous industrial empire has been expanding and spreading throughout its supply chain, seriously encroaching on the local communities and their environment.

...

Case 2 – Wuhan Meiko Electronics: Large Volumes of Wastewater Discharged into Surrounding Rivers and Lakes

[Meiko Electronics'] wastewater contains the heavy metals nickel and copper, local residents had misgivings about water pollution since the factory was first built... ...we discovered that the relevant departments had pushed Meiko Electronics to discharge treated water into their neighbor, Chenming Paper Factory’s, large discharge outlet, therefore reducing pollution emissions. We learned that the factory had a chlorine accident in April 2008 that led to the poisoning and hospitalization of 18 workers...



...Walking along the side of the drainage channel we were very startled to discover that the whole waterway was flowing with a milky white liquid. We rode in a small fishing boat out into Nantaizi Lake. The water in the lake was an ash grey color with white bubbles accompanying groups of black floating objects... [The lake] is directly linked to the Yangtze River meaning the contaminated water will eventually feed into the Yangtze River...



...After just a few drops of rain landed, steam appeared out of the polluted milky water in the tunnel entrance and was blown over by the wind, bringing with it an acidic odor that made everyone want to cough. “Our generation drinks polluted water but the next generation will be drinking poisoned water” said Wan Zhengyou...



...We found the Chenming Paper Factory discharge outlet and saw a very thick metal pipe discharging torrents of brownish red wastewater into the river. A large amount of white foam was forming on the surface of the river and flowing on towards the Dongfeng sluice gate. After arriving at the Dongfeng sluice gate we saw that the wastewater and white foam were able to flow directly and unhindered straight into the Yangtze. An elderly keeper of the sluice gate told us that at night the wastewater foam discharge was much greater and it often had a stench that was so bad he was unable to sleep... ...the amount of nickel discharged per year could be as much as 0.017 tons, 16.06 times the amount permitted...

...

Case 3 - Kaedar Electronics & Unimicron Electronics: Affected Citizens Kneel & Ask for Help

The company Kaedar Electronics (Kunshan) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Kaedar Electronics) is located in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. We came to know of Apple’s relationship with this company through a commercial bribery scandal. This company holds a 2006 pollution record in the Pollution Map Database...



...Kaedar Electronics’ main product is the outer casing and interior of notebook computers... According to the residents, [a] “poisonous gas” that is sometimes discharged [from the factory [and] they do not dare open their windows, otherwise they will wake in the middle of the night choking...



...in these ten years, the village’s stream that once had relatively clean water has now turned inky black [and] many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village’s cancer rates...



...During the investigation, the villagers spontaneously took water from the stream, pouring the water into a plastic bottle. Suffering from gastric cancer, Zhu Guifen, who has already had her stomach removed due to cancer, clutched a plastic bottle; along with more than ten middle-aged villagers they assembled in front of us. At that time, we were astonished by the scene in front of our camera. These ladies, with an average age of 55 suddenly and simultaneously fell to their knees, clutching the bottle of polluted water and pleaded “We beg you, help us! Help us ordinary people!”...



...since 2007, from just the No.8 section of Tongxin Village, the number of people who have suffered from cancer or died from cancer was more than nine, and the total population of the section of the village was less than 60...

...

Case 10 – Foxconn Chengdu: The Blood Stained iPad2

At around 19:00 on May 20th, 2011, there was a large explosion during production in the polishing workshop along the production line of the iPad 2 at Foxconn’s Hongfujin Chengdu factory. The explosion resulted in the death of two workers and injuries to 16 others. Not long after, another of the workers died from their injuries, bringing the total number of dead to three...



...The explosion was initially identified as having been caused by the buildup of aluminum dust inside a ventilation duct that was ignited when an electrical device was turned on... A dust explosion not only causes a huge blast but can also produce toxic gasses... Staff members who worked in the polishing workshop have said that “although we were wearing face-masks, our whole bodies were covered with the dust,” so it was obvious that the workshop’s dust control system had some problems.



...In delving deeper into the causes of the incident people were surprised to discover that this huge factory, made up of eight different factory buildings and covering an area of 250 acres was built in only 76 days... On March 2nd, 2010, Apple’s new product, the iPad 2 was unveiled... for the three months of July, August and September, a total of 4.19 million iPads were sold and Apple have said that if it wasn’t for a lack of supply they could have sold even more... Apple needed to urgently expand production output.



...The cost of Foxconn building their factory at such haste was the injuries to 18 young workers, three of whom are no longer with us, leaving behind broken families and endless sorrow. The fact that this company was able to pass an audit by a team led by the vice president in charge of manufacturing and then win the main global order for Apple’s iPad 2 should lead people to raise legitimate questions about Apple’s auditing process. However, these questions cannot be answered because Apple will neither proactively disclose information nor respond to queries regarding specific suppliers...



* * * * * * * * *

Apple has already made its decision to stand on the wrong side, to use the loopholes in China’s developing environmental management, to use polluting companies whilst sacrificing the environment and the communities at this expense, so as to continue to grab for their own super profits and in the meantime turn itself into a barrier to China’s pollution reduction. Consumers also need to make a choice.



We believe Apple’s consumers cannot accept the poisoning of the environment, the harm to communities and the sacrifice of employee rights in exchange for their fashionable IT products.

Compare and contrast: in America, the EPA is punishing farmers for made-up violations like dust and milk spills. The Labor Department is torturing Boeing for daring to build a factory in a right-to-work state. And various arms of the federal bureaucracy are terrorizing Gibson Guitars for importing wood -- legally -- from foreign countries.



Meanwhile, companies that manufacture overseas -- and/or are in bed with the administration -- appear to have not a care in the world.




Hat tip: Reuters.

"Android is easily dominating all other competitors in the mobile space"

RIM, Microsoft hardest hit:

According to ComScore, 70 percent of handset owners sent out an SMS during the three-month period. Using a browser and downloading applications came in second and third with 41.1 percent and 40.6 percent of Americans engaging in those activities, respectively...



...ComScore's study is just the latest research to conclude that Android is easily dominating all other competitors in the mobile space. Earlier this month, another research firm, NPD, said that during the second quarter, Android was running on 52 percent of all smartphones sold in the U.S., besting iOS, which secured 29 percent market share. NPD concluded that BlackBerry OS had 11 percent share... Android's success is helping the U.S. smartphone market explode. During the three-month period ended July, 82.2 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone, ComScore found. That figure was up 10 percent from the prior three-month period...



According to ComScore, Samsung's handsets proved to be most popular during the last three-month period, earning 25.5 percent market share. LG's devices had 20.9 percent share. Motorola, Apple, and RIM rounded out the top five with 14.1 percent, 9.5 percent, and 7.6 percent share, respectively.

I was speaking with an iPhone user today who said that five years from now, almost every single person in America would have a smartphone. That may be a conservative estimate.

One of the most useless blog posts in world history

This is a QR code, which Wikipedia describes as:

(abbreviated from Quick Response code)[, it] is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR readers, smartphones, and, to a less common extent, computers with webcams. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data.

In the interest of experimentation, I generated a QR code for this august journal using Kaywa's free, online service.



If you have a smartphone, you can download and use a QR code reader app for free. Fire up the app and do a quick scan of your laptop/desktop screen to surf to one of the finest blogs in the 939 area code. And remember to bookmark it on your smartphone for a daily panoply of real news, opinion and shiftless frivolity.



Of course, if you're viewing this post on your smartphone, this could be one of the most useless blog posts ever.

Phones getting down to Zoolander-size

At some point, reducing the size of a phone hits the point of diminishing returns.


A smartphone the size of a credit-card appears to be nearing that point.


Unless you're Zoolander.

How Sci-Fi Influences Real World Design

BusinessInsider offers an excellent visual history of the cell phone. I was particularly struck by the following description of the Motorola StarTAC, vintage 1996:

Still shrinking the line of TACs, Motorola unveiled the first clamshell mobile phone with StarTAC. It improved the folding feature by collapsing in half, which is why it's called "clamshell"—because it resembles a clam opening and closing shut... It's said to be inspired by the communicator from the original Star Trek series.

I never knew that, but there's certainly a resemblance.

It truly is amazing how science fiction -- from Arthur C. Clarke's idea of geosynchronous orbit to modern design principles -- has influenced the world in which we live.

Exclusive: Apple Announcement on iPhone Location Tracking

Biff Spackle relays the official Apple announcement on the revelations that its products are tracking the locations of users.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?

Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. It is tracking the location of you, for marketing departments and governments around the world.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?

Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology(including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date. Put simply, you’re too stupid to understand why we’re recording your location at all times, saving that location, and sharing the information with any marketer with enough bucks and any governmental entity with a subpoena.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?

The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Using an on-board GPS and cell-tower triangulation algorithms would never, ever enter our minds. Seriously. We pinky-promise.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?

The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon. We were going to put the word soon in quote marks, but figured that would be too obvious. We can’t commit to a date for engineering, logistical, planning, technical reasons to be named later.

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

No. Not that you know of.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?

The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data. After seven days, we’ll make sure that data just goes to our data center.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?

It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly. Consider the word shortly in quotation marks, too.

We're Apple! You don't like it, buy a freaking Motorola StarTAC! Lusers!