The Radar Beacon

Mobile Apps Go Hyper-Local - The Kojo Nnamdi Show

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:23:54 -0400

Mobile Apps Go Hyper-Local - The Kojo Nnamdi Show:

I’ll be on the Kojo Nnamdi show on Tuesday, Aug 9, 2011 at 12:06 p.m. The show description is below. Be sure to listen in here: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-08-09/mobile-apps-go-hyper-local

Direct link to player: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio-player

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have changed the way people make friends and network online. Now, a new wave of mobile apps is taking those changes into the “real world.” Apps like FourSquare and Google+ allow you to “check in” with friends and make plans in real-time. Companies like LivingSocial and Groupon are using geolocation data to offer you deals based on where you are. Tech Tuesday explores how new mobile apps are changing the way we shop and socialize.

Guests

Frank Gruber, CEO and Executive Editor, Tech Cocktail

Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs

Pete Erickson, Founder and Director of Innovation, Disruptathon; Founder, MoDevDC

Introducing Tumblr's New API

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:30:20 -0400

Introducing Tumblr's New API: I greatly admire the efforts of the Tumblr staff to bring engineering to the blog.

staff:

Along with a sharp new Engineering Blog and a beautifully organized new Developer Center. Enjoy!

Already upgraded to iOS 5 and can’t find your UDID? Forgot...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:00:00 -0400

Already upgraded to iOS 5 and can’t find your UDID? Forgot to register your iPhone with the developer portal? Don’t worry, just search for the “MobileSync” folder on your Mac or PC, and look in the Backup directory. The backup folders are named the same as your Device UDID!

Full Path: \Users\*your name*\Library\Application Support\MobileSync\Backup\

soupsoup: Sneak peek at Windows 8

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:46:17 -0400

soupsoup:

Sneak peek at Windows 8

soupsoup: The Geosocial Universe (via...

Fri, 20 May 2011 20:57:00 -0400

soupsoup:

The Geosocial Universe (via @lindsaykap/lindsaykap)

Click here to embiggen

Google Shuts Down Newspaper Archive Project

Fri, 20 May 2011 15:24:29 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Google shut down its service to scan, archive and make searchable newspapers’ pre-Internet archives.

According to the Boston Phoenix:

News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers — especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn’t afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives — and a decent bet for Google.

Android Security Hole a Problem for 99% of Users

Wed, 18 May 2011 03:20:00 -0400

Android Security Hole a Problem for 99% of Users:

10 days ago I brought this up in conversation with someone from the Times. I politely suggested they might contract a tech consultant, but I personally thanked them for bringing consumer awareness to the location tracking of mobile phones like the iPhone. It’s clear they are looking at more ‘researchers’ on the subject of mobile security since Locationgate. Apple’s reaction post-print was fast, and Google has re-acted at what feels like a dial-up connection. Google’s Gingerbread is baked, but the people are waiting for their bread. Let them eat cake?

Accenture’s Apps fill out a whole folder now.

Wed, 18 May 2011 03:08:48 -0400

Accenture’s Apps fill out a whole folder now.

"Netflix traffic, be it movies or TV shows streamed over the wires, now accounts for close to 30% of..."

Wed, 18 May 2011 03:07:25 -0400

“Netflix traffic, be it movies or TV shows streamed over the wires, now accounts for close to 30% of Internet activity in U.S. homes in peak evening hours.”

- Netflix Owns The Evening Web | Fast Company (via davemorin)

Top 10 Reasons the iPhone's Location Logging is a Great Thing

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:04:50 -0400

10. Everyone is upset about the iPhone, but EVERY phone is being tracked. Apple just let’s you store it locally on your device. This is exceptional! If someone steals your device and you get it back, you can track where they went. If someone sues you or you are charged with a crime, you can use your phone to prove your innocence. The government has the ability to access these records from the carriers, but now you have the power too. If someone could easily remove it, then they could clear their tracks. It’s good for the good, and bad for the bad.

9. WiFi Location Positioning! GPS does not work indoors, in urban environments, or generally any complex metal area. I am an expert in tracking assets using WiFi 3D Real Time Location Services to compliment GPS and track iPhones inside buildings, but I can’t afford to sell millions of WiFi radios with 3G and 4G connections to millions of test users. Google and Apple have this really figured out. They are creating the databases that make location services work. Love your Foursquare? Then thank Apple for keeping track of everyone’s locations. WSJ

8. “Apple is not harvesting this data from your device. This is data on the device that you as the customer purchased and unless they can show concrete evidence supporting this claim – network traffic analysis of connections to Apple servers – I rebut this claim in full. Through my research in this field and all traffic analysis I have performed, not once have I seen this data traverse a network. As rich of data as this might be, it’s actually illegal under California state law.” Levinson

7. Location Services! if you’ve got Location Services turned on, whenever you request current location data (like via an app), Apple collects info about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. If you happen to be using GPS, it’ll collect the GPS coordinates too. That data’s then transmitted to Apple every 12 hours over “secure” Wi-Fi networks, anonymized with a “random identification number generated every 24 hours by an iOS device,” so neither Apple nor anybody can personally identify you. Buchanan

6. Apple is protecting you! Through several avenues, Apple is attempting to protect your data on these devices. Following simple steps you can treat your phone like a digital fortress and protect the information thats on it. For example, there are simple and easy techniques that you can take to protect your data, including this location information. Levinson

5. Pete Warden made a useful app so we can see our history! Thanks Pete, but I disagree with your point of view. Also, most importantly you did not “make this public” but kudos for scaring people and getting into the headlines. Check out his cool app. Warden.

4. Apple told us nine months ago. Well, not us, but two of our esteemed Congressmen, Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas). Clarke

3. Lock your phone. Everyone After connecting your iPhone to your computer, you can set a “Backup Encryption Password” in iTunes. This does more than just encrypt your backups – it actually encrypts all data that could be retrieved from your phone physically. In the event you loose your phone, this can prevent someone from just downloading all the data off your device. Using a Lock Passcode can also stop anyone from simply viewing data on your phone who might grab it. Levinson

2. Apple isn’t trying to keep a location history at all; that’s just a side-effect of the thoroughness of this cell location caching. The data is NOT your location! There may be individual points in your consolidated.db file that happen to be the exact same as your location at the time. The phone seems to be logging locations of nodes on the wireless cell network, and their presence in the file mean that you MAY have been near them. Clarke The table uses the MCC-MNC-LAC-CI tuple as its primary key. These are the values used to uniquely identify a GSM cell, anywhere in the world. It’s the primary key: it can store only one row for any observed cell. It’s not saying you were in a couple dozen locations all at once; it’s listing off all the visible cells at a particular instant. Westacular

1. Consumer Awareness. “Our personal information has moved from our wallets and home filing cabinets, to the file cabinets of data brokers and online files of behavioral advertisers and now, directly to the Internet ‘cloud’ from our mobile devices. The new challenges and concerns that present themselves with the collection and use of location-based information are particularly disconcerting. Consumers must be made aware of this collection and they must consent to giving it up,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas. Markey

"I think this is Amazon’s first step towards launching their own Amazon-branded (or perhaps..."

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:16:37 -0400

“I think this is Amazon’s first step towards launching their own Amazon-branded (or perhaps Kindle-branded) Android devices, where the Amazon Appstore will be preinstalled, and the devices will ship from Amazon with your Amazon credentials already set up on the device (as with the Kindle hardware today).”

- John Gruber on the Amazon Appstore (via marco)

Amazon is hiring like crazy right now.

Neighborhoodr : Potential Geolocation Goldmine?

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:08:08 -0400

Neighborhoodr : Potential Geolocation Goldmine?:

soupsoup:

Despite the advents of news aggregators and RSS feeds, finding reliable, accurate news can be a chore so arduous that your index finger might break anyday from all that scrolling you do. Enter Neighborhoodr. It’s a fancy, ambitious project that leverages the ease of Tumblr and allows community editors to keep local readers well-informed about what’s happening in their neighborhoods. Today, we were actually remarking about how handy the site was since some ambitious community editors have started city blog for the Libyan capital of Triploli. But this post isn’t about politics. It’s about how such a platform can help make the ambitions of entrepreneurs and marketers easier.

BREAKING NEWS -- BNO News: AT&T To Acquire T-Mobile USA for $39 billion

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:55:34 -0400

This news makes AT&T a big player.

mopostal: via images.fastcompany.com

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:30:26 -0400

mopostal:

via images.fastcompany.com

Wireless CCIE, here I come!

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:30:06 -0400

Wireless CCIE, here I come!:

I’m going to make this blog part of my reading material. Looks like the CCIE Wireless exam isn’t going to be a quick process.

New Attack Cracks Common Wi-Fi Encryption in a Minute

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:29:41 -0400

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service - Thu Aug 27, 2009 2:40AM EDT

Computer scientists in Japan say they’ve developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute.

The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima.

Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. “They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical,” he said.

They Japanese researchers discuss their attack in a paper presented at the Joint Workshop on Information Security, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan earlier this month.

The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

The encryption systems used by wireless routers have a long history of security problems. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) system, introduced in 1997, was cracked just a few years later and is now considered to be completely insecure by security experts.

WPA with TKIP “was developed as kind of an interim encryption method as Wi-Fi security was evolving several years ago,” said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director with the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that certifies Wi-Fi devices. People should now use WPA 2, she said.

Wi-Fi-certified products have had to support WPA 2 since March 2006. “There’s certainly a decent amount of WPA with TKIP out in the installed base today, but a better alternative has been out for a long time,” Davis-Felner said.

Enterprise Wi-Fi networks typically include security software that would detect the type of man-in-the-middle attack described by the Japanese researchers, said Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security. But the development of the first really practical attack against WPA should give people a reason to dump WPA with TKIP, he said. “It’s not as bad as WEP, but it’s also certainly bad.”

Users can change from TKIP to AES encryption using the administrative interface on many WPA routers.

Marco.org: A Verizon reality check

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:25:41 -0400

Marco.org: A Verizon reality check:

It’s easy to glorify Verizon as an iPhone owner, because AT&T is so awful. But Verizon sucks, too — just in different ways, for the most part.

I’ve been a Verizon Wireless customer since 2004: phones for the first 4 years, and data via tethering and EVDO modems for the entire time. I recently…