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BlackBerry Gradually Getting More Spy-Friendly in India

Voices — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:03:10 +0000

Indian officials are reporting a bit of progress today toward their requirement that Research in Motion and the nation’s telecoms make BlackBerry communications accessible to security agencies. Home Secretary G.K. Pillai told Reuters that authorities can now get printouts of BlackBerry Messenger conversations within four or five hours of making the request to RIM. They are hoping to have real-time access by the end of the year, he said. The means to monitor BlackBerry’s encrypted corporate email system remains elusive, however.

Don't Blame Apple for Its Music Monopoly. Blame the Big Labels.

Peter Kafka — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:30:02 +0000

Federal regulators are looking at Apple yet again: This time it’s members of the Department of Justice’s antitrust staff, poking around the company’s longstanding dominance of digital music.

The New York Times, which first reported the inquiries, thinks they’re aimed at Apple’s muscle-flexing this spring, when it reportedly convinced the big music labels to stop giving Amazon exclusives for big releases. People I’ve talked to in the industry aren’t convinced that’s the case, and tell me the chats they’re aware of have been wide-ranging talks about digital music sales in general.

But regardless of what the Feds are looking for, it won’t take much digging for them to figure out that Apple (AAPL) runs the digital music market. If you want to sell songs on the Web and you’re not on iTunes, you’re going to have a very difficult time.

So that answers the first part of the “Does Apple have a problem?” test that antitrust expert Harry First set up for my colleague, John Paczkowski this month: Yes, Apple has a monopoly, or close to it. And the company has had it since 2003, when iTunes started selling music.

Next question: Does Apple maintain its power by stifling competitors?

Tricky. Because the people most responsible for Apple’s market power are the ones who gripe about it most often: The big music labels.

They’re the ones who insisted on locking their songs up with digital rights management technology. Which meant that anyone who bought digital music was forced to choose between Apple’s iTunes/iPod platform or the lousy one promoted by Microsoft (MSFT) and others, which you can’t even recall anymore. Not really a choice at all.

The labels eventually wised up and started selling their stuff as unencrypted MP3s, meaning anyone could sell music that plays on Apple’s devices. But that was years too late. Even Amazon (AMZN), with all of its marketing savvy and clout, has managed to claw out only eight percent of the market in the last three years. Apple still commands 69 percent. UPDATE: New data show Amazon’s share moving up, though not at Apple’s expense.

But here’s the thing: If the labels really want to break Apple’s grip on their business, they could.

All they need to do is license their stuff at dirt-cheap rates to all-you-can-eat subscription services like Spotify and MOG. Sell that stuff at the right price–a buck a month? two bucks?–and everyone buys in, and no one ever thinks about buying songs from iTunes again. Poof!

The labels won’t do that. At least not now. We’re a decade past Napster, but they still prefer to sell compact discs, and failing that, individual songs. And they prefer to put up with Apple’s dominance than risk those sales.

But sales continue to shrink anyway. Even digital downloads seem to have petered out, at least in the U.S. And there’s nothing an antitrust regulator can do about that.

Google Makes Employee Information "Universally Accessible," "Useful" to Data Thieves

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:54:51 +0000

How ironic. The personal data of some Google employees may be as “universally accessible” as the world of information Google claims it is its mission to organize.

Seems the personal data of Googlers hired prior to 2006 were stolen during a May 26 burglary at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, a financially troubled human resources outfit Google (GOOG) once used to administer employee benefits. The data, which astonishingly were not encrypted, thankfully did not include driver’s license, credit card or bank account numbers. It did, however, include employee names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, and addresses–everything an identity thief would need to open a credit card account under another’s name.

It’s unclear how many Googlers are affected by the breach, but it could be quite a few. CBS’s (CBS) CNET Networks was also affected by the burglary, with details from about 6,500 employees stolen.

“We take the security of our employees very seriously and require outside vendors to meet appropriate security standards. We review and update these standards on an ongoing basis,” a Google representative said. “Google is not currently using Colt’s services and had made this decision long before this incident.”

If that’s the case, what was Colt doing with that data in the first place?

Google Makes Employee Information "Universally Accessible," "Useful" to Data Thieves

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:54:51 +0000

How ironic. The personal data of some Google employees may be as “universally accessible” as the world of information Google claims it is its mission to organize.

If that’s the case, what was Colt doing with that data in the first place?

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Is the Best Browser for Web -- For Now

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:01:00 +0000

If you buy a new Windows Vista PC, it comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Internet Explorer 7. If you buy a new Macintosh computer, it comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Safari 3.0. So why would you want or need a different Web browser?

[ See post to watch video ]

That is the question that Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that makes the leading alternative browser, hopes to answer this month when it releases version 3.0 of its Firefox Web browser. In some tech-industry circles, Firefox already is preferred over Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari, but it still isn’t used by most people, and Mozilla is hoping to broaden its appeal.

The new version will be released simultaneously for Windows and the Mac’s OS X operating system, as well as for Linux. While each of the three editions will have the visual style of the operating system on which it runs, all three will have the same features.

I’ve been using prerelease versions of Firefox 3.0 for months, and have recently been testing a near-final version and comparing it closely to IE and to Safari. I have tested it on multiple Windows PCs and Macs, on desktops and laptops, over slow connections and fast ones. I have tried it with well over 100 Web sites.

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user. It can be downloaded, free, at mozilla.com by clicking on “Firefox 3 Sneak Peek.”

This situation may change. Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, scheduled to be unveiled later this year, with some impressive new features. And Apple is always working on new iterations of Safari, though it is secretive and hasn’t disclosed its plans. But for now, in my view, Firefox 3.0 rules on both Windows and Mac.

I couldn’t find any significant downsides to Firefox 3.0. Every page I tried rendered properly and rapidly on both platforms. I ran into only one glitch, in a preference setting. That problem appeared on only one of my four test machines and was fixable with the help of Mozilla, albeit via a geeky method.

In the one or two cases where Firefox lacked a feature I thought important, such as the “auto fill” feature in Safari that can quickly fill out an online form, I was able to find an add-on that did the trick from Mozilla’s vast library of add-ons, which are written by people all over the world. (One caution: Some existing add-ons won’t work with the new version until their authors update them.)

When Firefox first came out, it was the fastest browser, but it lost that title over the years. However, in my tests, this new third version of Firefox regained the speed crown. It beat IE 7 handily on my test Windows computers and edged Safari slightly on my test Macs.

For example, using a new Dell (DELL) XPS One desktop, I opened identical folders containing the same 16 bookmarks on both IE 7 and Firefox 3.0. IE took 37 seconds to completely display the 16 pages, but the new Firefox did it in just 23 seconds. On a new Apple iMac, I did a similar, but more daunting, test — opening identical folders containing 24 bookmarks. Safari rendered all of the pages in 36 seconds, but the new Firefox finished the job in 32 seconds.

The latest Firefox has a number of new and improved features. If you type any word or phrase into its address bar, the browser instantly searches your history and bookmarks for a possible match, to save you from typing or combing through your bookmark list.

The whole process of managing bookmarks has been vastly simplified. Every Web address is accompanied by a star icon at the right. To bookmark the site, you just click the star once. No other action is required. To specify where to file the bookmark, you click the star twice. You also can remove bookmarks by clicking the star. And you can tag bookmarks with key words, to make it easier to find them.

There are also smart bookmark folders, which gather your most visited sites, or most recently bookmarked sites, automatically into folders. You also now can more easily back up and restore your bookmarks, complete with tags.

Security is also improved. The old version of Firefox would warn you when a site you were visiting appeared to be a fake, designed to steal your identity. (IE has a similar feature, though Safari doesn’t.) But Firefox 3.0 now warns you about sites that are known for trying to plant viruses, spyware and other malicious software on your computer, a warning the other big browsers don’t yet provide.

With one click, Firefox 3.0 also provides details about who owns the site you’re visiting, and whether it’s encrypted, if the site owner has adopted a special type of security certificate.

My bottom line: Even though you already have a built-in browser, Firefox 3.0 can improve your Web experience.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.