Filed under: Apple TV

Apple TV streaming can be hindered by Google DNS

by Kelly Hodgkins (RSS feed) on Dec 20th 2010 at 12:45PM

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If you are experiencing problems with streaming video on your Apple TV, you may want to take a closer look at your DNS settings, according to Mac developer Joe Maller. Maller recently rented an HD video via iTunes and was astonished to discover it would take two hours to download over a reasonably fast 15-20 MBps Internet connection. Maller searched for an explanation and stumbled upon other users who were reporting the same problem while streaming rentals. According to Maller, the problem occurs when you change your DNS settings from your ISP to a third-party like OpenDNS or GoogleDNS. When you revert your DNS setting to your ISP's servers, the problem disappears.

According to Maller's theory, Akamai is able to obtain the correct geography information and accurately route you through the closest server when you use your ISP's DNS settings. If you subvert this process using a third-party DNS service, then the routing from Akamai may be less than optimal. It may even route everyone through the same pipes which causes congestion and slows down streaming. While this intuitively makes sense, Maller only provides anecdotal evidence to support this theory. Until more evidence surfaces, I would not go around telling everyone they need to ditch OpenDNS or GoogleDNS. Nonetheless, this possible DNS effect is something to store in the back of your mind as changing your DNS is potentially a quick and easy solution if you are having difficulties while streaming Apple TV rentals.

[Via ZDNet]

Tags: Akamai, Apple TV, DNS, GoogleDNS, iTunes, OpenDNS, streaming

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For about six months, I've pondered writing this post asking the dreaded Google question. Following yesterday's announcement that the European Union has opened a Google antitrust investigation, I can wait no longer. My life, and perhaps yours, is enmeshed in Google products and services. If there is a devil, a Great Satan of modern technology companies, Google is it. I sold my soul to Google for free services, which are disrupting -- some would say destroying -- businesses that produce valuable content and other intellectual property. In the 1970s, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates warned of the very problem Google is creating today: Making things that are inherently valuable nearly worthless.

The problem is simple: Google's business model is fundamentally about free. Someone else pays to produce content or other valuable intellectual property, around which Google wraps search keywords, adverts and services. The information giant doesn't produce content, but its entire business model is about cannibalizing others' valuable intellectual property. Google's search dominance -- anywhere from 65 percent to 90 percent share, depending on the geography and analyst crunching the numbers -- means that content creators must pay homage to free. The content's base value to the producer is at least the cost of production, but content creators are compelled to give away their stuff for less and often for free. If not, the content becomes invisible to the Internet -- or at least to the majority of people who use Google search and other services.

On my own blog, I write about broader topics than at Betanews. But sometimes there is overlap. In August 2009 I asked: "Can you Charge for News? Ask Google," which I followed up a year ago this Friday at Betanews with "Can there be a free Web if no one makes money?" The August post looked at three organizations -- Advertising Age, GigaOM and Wall Street Journal -- using different paywall mechanisms. While the organizations all charge something, not one puts content behind a true paywall. To do so would prevent Google search bots from indexing the content. In April 2010 I posted to my blog: "The Price You Pay Google for Paywalls," which explains what happens when a site fails to make offerings to the great Google god. The post profiled Reid Reviews, which is nearly invisible to Google search, because the content is behind a paywall.

What's the saying? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Does Reid Reviews exist? You wouldn't know from Google search, which indexes just two pages -- home and index. That's the dark secret behind true paywalls and why there is so much talk about them and so few content creators truly adopting them. I wrote in April:

If your business is content and selling online advertising around it, you must pay homage to the great Google algorithm. As was with previous age's deities, the minions must make their sacrifices before the great Google god. To receive its blessings, they must do Google's bidding -- quite literally on keywords -- and give away all their worldly possessions (e.g., content, for free). But can they give to Lord Google and keep something for themselves, too?…Yes and no. For the true worshippers, those willing to make their offerings to the Google god, the answer is yes...For others, paywalls will come at a price, in terms of traffic, pageviews and incoming links.

Heeding Bill Gates' Warning

One year ago this month, I posted "Google's 'Open Definition': Simply brilliant business, but is it evil?" The post contrasted Google and Microsoft worldviews. Microsoft produces valuable intellectual property for which it expects to be paid. Google profits from others' intellectual property, while producing little valuable content of its own. Google uses "open" to describe its business model, but that's a misnomer. I wrote in December 2009:

This so-called open approach fundamentally opposes longstanding principles of intellectual property ownership. Copyrights are a barrier to Google gaining information that it can monetize. Google takes what it gets for free -- but which someone else may have paid to produce -- gives it away for free but with eventual profit motive.

Google free isn't some altruistic openness but a business model, which its search monopoly anchors. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates laid out a different business, one where people get paid for production, in 1976 "An Open Letter to Software Hobbyists." Gates wrote:

Most of you steal your software...One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

Gates' question "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" is strangely prescient of today's expanding Google free -- supported by advertising -- business model. The question also defines one of the principles behind Microsoft's worldview -- that people (or the businesses they work for) who create something have a fundamental right to profit from it.

Google defenders argue that the Web free model has in television a precedent -- people consuming content for free supported by advertising. That's no comparison at all. Television content distribution is limited by the number of broadcast networks and cable, IPTV or satellite services delivering the content. Broadcast or cable networks don't receive programming for free, they pay someone to create it. Then there are the fees paid by consumers for non-broadcast distribution, like cable or satellite services. The Web is different because there is so much content available, which dramatically reduces advertising value and for which there is more space than advertising can fill. Additionally, Google's search dominance mandates the distribution of valuable content for little or nothing. The models aren't comparable at all. In fact, free is a flop on TV. So-called free or open TV is so-called public access, and who really watches these channels.

Breaking Google's Contract is Hard

Google's search monopoly wouldn't be a problem if not for its pervasive, and often compelling, supporting free services. Seven years ago, when working as a JupiterResearch analyst, I made the same observation as some of my colleagues and peers from other firms -- that Internet users could easily give up Google by typing in another search engine's Web address. At the time, Google was the US search leader but with nowhere near today's usage share. I warned that without sticky products or services, Google couldn't rely on search because users could so easily switch.

Now Google has those sticky products and services, and it has rapidly expanded into new markets, like phone operating systems and Web browsers. Wherever Google goes, free follows. For example, Microsoft licenses Windows Phone 7 for a fee, while Google's Android is available for free. Sure Google collects fees for keyword bids or advertising, but bundled with free search and other services. Google deserves praise for making search sticky, in part by wrapping so many supporting services around it. But is the approach evil, or at least disruptive?

I'm astounded by just how many Google products or services that I use, and ask: How many and which Google services do you use? That's a question for comments. Please respond and generate some debate about Google. What do I use:

• Chrome
• Gmail
• Google Alerts
• Google Analytics
• Google Blog Search
• Google Books
• Google Buzz
• Google Checkout
• Google Docs
• Google Goggles
• Google Earth
• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Reader
• Google Search
• Google Talk
• Google Voice
• Google Webmaster Tools
• YouTube

Until June, when I switched to iPhone 4, Google's Nexus One was my smartphone. So I used Android, and even more Google products and services, just a few months ago. My wife still uses Nexus One, and she loves it. This is a staggering list of Google products and services. From one perspective, Google's success selling me -- and many other Internet users -- testifies to software/services development and distribution excellence. But behind it all is the free economy of search and creating products and services that stick Google users to the search monopoly. I'm here to confess that I've sold my soul to Google, but I want it back.

In the folklore of selling souls the to devil, the contract is seven years. If I count Gmail as the starting point of my first Google non-search product then seven years would be sometime in Spring 2011. I'm baffled seeing where I could replace all the Google stuff used today with something as good for less. What's cheaper than free? But my goal is to cut back something. Facebook is one option that is more attractive because of the new messaging service and some of the search and supporting services provided by Microsoft. But I wonder: Is the devil you know better than the one you don't? Content going into Facebook doesn't easily come out. I could, or you, trade one devil for another.

Bottom line: As I asserted in February, "Google is a dangerous monopoly -- more than Microsoft ever was." The post is a good primer for understanding why the European Union is investigating Google. But that investigation may miss the broader context beyond the search monopoly -- how Google's free worldview and business approach is fundamentally changing the value of content and other intellectual property produced at cost. I'll end with this question: Should people be paid for things they produce?

Quick reminder, I am on sabbatical for most of December as I work on a book project. Posting will be considerably lighter than usual.

Some interesting points but I'm not sure Microsoft is the best contrasting example. While Microsoft spends considerable sums of money to develop software they haven't done so in the best interest of their customers.

Windows is not regarded as a secure platform nor is much of the software which runs on it. Windows Me did nothing to advance the technology.

Vista was released and didn't get a warm reception by users for a variety of reasons then Microsoft released Windows 7 without a reasonably priced upgrade path. The consumer paid twice for what they should have gotten the first time around.

While Google's model of "free" may have repurcusions for other businesses, you can always say "I got what I paid for." I can't tell you the number of times I used Windows and thought "I paid money for these headaches?"

All life on Earth - from microbes to elephants and us - is based on a single genetic model that requires the element phosphorus as one of its six essential components.

This Story

• Second Genesis on Earth?
• Life as we didn't know it
• Watch the video: "NASA Alien Life News: The Real Story from Science Magazine"

But now researchers have uncovered a bacterium that has five of those essential elements but has, in effect, replaced phosphorus with its look-alike but toxic cousin arsenic.

News of the discovery caused a scientific commotion, including calls to NASA from the White House and Congress asking whether a second line of earthly life has been found.

A NASA press conference Thursday and an accompanying article in the journal Science, gave the answer: No, the discovery does not prove the existence of a "second genesis" on Earth. But the discovery very much opens the door to that possibility and to the related existence of a theorized "shadow biosphere" on Earth - life evolved from a different common ancestor than all that we've known so far.

"Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young biochemist who led the effort after being selected as a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow and as a member of the National Astrobiology Institute team at Arizona State University.

"If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected - that breaks the unity of biochemistry - what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?" she said.

The research, funded through NASA and conducted with samples from California's Mono Lake, found that some of the bacteria not only used arsenic to live, but had arsenic embedded into their DNA, RNA and other basic underpinnings.

"This is different from anything we've seen before," said Mary Voytek, senior scientist for NASA's program in astrobiology , the arm of the agency involved specifically in the search for life beyond Earth and for how life began here.

"These bugs haven't just replaced one useful element with another, they have the arsenic in the basic building blocks of their makeup," she said. "We don't know if the arsenic replaced phosphorus or if it was there from the very beginning - in which case it would strongly suggest the existence of a shadow biosphere."

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center at Arizona State and a prolific writer, is a co-author on paper. He had been thinking about the idea for a decade and had written a paper in 2005. So had University of Colorado at Boulder philosopher and astrobiologist Carol Cleland. Both asked why nobody was looking for life with different origins on Earth, and Cleland coined the phrase "shadow biosphere."

At a Beyond Center conference four years ago, Wolfe-Simon, then in her late 20s, proposed a way to search for a possible shadow biosphere, and it involved Mono Lake and its arsenic.

"We were kicking vague ideas around, but she had a very specific proposal and then went out and executed it," Davies said. "It defies logic to think she found the only example of this kind of unusual life. Quite clearly, this is the tip of a huge iceberg."

I started working at Apple during the dot-com boom in 1998, and I left the company in 2007. As much as I loved working at Apple, by 2007 I determined that I now had the financial freedom and opportunity to leave the company and begin working on my own projects.

That was because Apple had been very good to me via the stock market. In the time I worked there, the stock price had gone from less than $10 per share (adjusted for splits) in 1998, to $100-plus per share when I left in 2007 – and it now hovers around $300 per share. And since I still own shares that I bought for less than $10 per share, my investments in Apple have paid off handsomely.

A culture of fandom

At Apple, it's never, "How long did you work for the company?" but rather, "How many times did you work at Apple?" The Apple attitude seems to infect everyone who works closely with the technology -- and, even after leaving the company, we all say that we still "bleed six colors," in reference to the original six-color Apple logo.

While at Apple, I, like many other employees, moved between several different divisions and jobs. I started at the company as a software engineer in the company's WebObjects (web application) consulting division. I then became an inbound marketer for their K-12 school division, where we sold a suite of hardware, called the Apple Learning Hub, to school districts as part of the company's one-to-one initiative to provide one laptop to each student in a district.

I last worked as an engineer at the Apple Online Store -- which was, by far, the most important experience of my time at Apple, since the online store was earning millions of dollars in revenue every day. We would take the store offline before Steve Jobs took the stage to give a keynote speech and update the database with the new products he was introducing. It was always a great learning experience to bring the store back online under the onslaught of Apple fans checking out the new products.

A great working environment

Apple's HR department takes good care of its employees. In my eight years at the company I never once had, or heard of anyone having, pay issues or other administration problems. Working at Apple was mostly a positive experience, with just a few less-than-ideal elements to the job. Here are some highlights:

Can We Talk: At Apple, you could raise issues that weren't appropriate to bring up with your manager to a higher level by posting it to the Can We Talk section of the internal HR website. For example, in Spring 2001, the Apple federal office in Reston, Va., was remodeled to look more like the main campus in Cupertino, Calif. The architect in charge of the remodel removed the large American flag hanging on the lobby wall, since it didn't fit into Apple's design. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Apple promoted a video on their HR website as they unrolled a huge American flag at 1 Infinite Loop. A quick post to the Can We Talk section pointing out the irony immediately fixed the problem, and the American flag was replaced in the Reston office lobby.

Health insurance: The health benefits are very good at Apple. A couple of people in my office had to deal with life-threatening diseases, either directly or for their dependents, and their total out-of-pocket expenses were less than $1,000 for co-pays and prescriptions.

Career path: My biggest complaint about working at Apple was that there was no career path. While working at a field office, in Virginia, or from home in Southern California (all of which I did), may not be the fast track up the corporate ladder, I noticed no difference when I was working at the main headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. This fact is, by no means, a "dirty little secret," however. It's simply the way Apple works, as our HR rep correctly pointed out.

Secrecy: Apple's secrecy is comparable to the U.S. government's in terms of "need to know" and compartmentalization. That sometimes resulted in duplicated efforts within the company. While this secrecy is a necessity to keep Apple ultra-competitive, it would have been more effective if open projects could have been presented to the secret teams to see if there was a fit worth bringing the open projects into the mix.

Blogging: As an Apple employee, you definitely get the feeling that blogging about the company is frowned upon. It goes to the extent that, if you have a personal blog about an unrelated topic, you don't even want to mention that you work for Apple.

Military service: While Apple does not employ many military veterans, they've gone above and beyond what is required. Reservists called up to active duty are put into a military-leave status and they remain Apple employees while Apple makes up the salary difference between their military pay and their Apple pay until they return.

Toys: It almost goes without saying that working at Apple allows you to use many of their latest products on a daily basis. Apple employee discounts usually fall in the 15 to 25 percent range, making it easy to buy the latest "gotta have" Apple product for friends and family. Over the past five years, Apple has frequently given every employee a gift ranging from the iPod shuffle to the iPhone. Also, before Apple recycles a computer, they give employees the opportunity to take it home. I've probably brought home more than a dozen computers over the years.

Caffe Macs: The corporate cafeteria, Caffe Macs, is the place to eat on campus. The food quality and variety is excellent, whether you're looking for pizza and pasta or sushi and salad. What can't be beat is the level of excitement and electricity in the cafe. On a daily basis, you'll see at least one of Apple's top executives in Caffe Macs, including Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, himself, who seems to show up there once a week.

Overall, there seem to be no end to the great things about working at Apple. Steve Jobs takes tremendous pride that Apple is a California company that creates great products. When working at Apple, you definitely feel like you're a part of a group of people who will make a serious dent in the universe. It's a fantastic place to work, and I hope to return one day.

Next: I interviewed at Apple

Tags: apple jobs, steve jobs

Research in Motion CEO Jim Balsillie may still be smarting from the fact that Apple passed it in smartphone market share last quarter. Steve Jobs made a point to rub it in during Apple’s most recent earnings conference call: ““We’ve now past RIM, and I don’t see them catching up to us in the near future.”

Asked what he would say to Jobs if he were present today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Balsillie shot back: “You finally showed up.” The implication being that RIM practically invented the smartphone category and is not going anywhere.

Balsillie went on to contrast the Blackberry approach to Apple’s when it comes to web apps. There may be 300,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad, but the only app you really need is the browser. “You don’t need an app for the Web,” he says, and that is equally true for the mobile Web. The debate over mobile apps versus the mobile Web. Blackberry is betting on the Web, much like Google.

And to usher in the era of a fully browsable mobile Web, RIM is positioning its upcoming PlayBook Blackberry Tablet as super Web-capable. “It will be 3 to 4 times faster than the iPad,” boasts Balsillie.

RIM even put out out this teaser video showing how much faster the PlayBook is at several browsing tasks than the iPad, including its support for Flash. (This is not exactly an independent, unbiased test, but it should be easy enough to replicate once the PlayBook is available in the first quarter of 2011. But even if it is faster, that still might not be enough to make the PlayBook a success.

CrunchBase Information

Research In Motion

Information provided by CrunchBase

To recap... The iPhone launches without any native application support - web only. People screamed "bloody murder!" and Apple relented by opening the platform for developers. Years later and Apple has risen to the top of the mobile phone food chain largely due to the extensive app library.

Now the competition wants to throw the transmission in reverse and say the future of mobile web-only. Um...Apple said that years ago but apparently everyone seems to have forgotten.

Chances are I’m late to the party, given how many Facebook ‘likes’ and retweets this project seems to have garnered already, but I hadn’t yet seen it yet so here goes:

Some folks over at frog design have hacked together A World Of Tweets, a Web-based app that visualizes geo-located tweets from around the globe.

The project, which was started by two frog design employees as a personal experiment with Twitter’s Streaming API and the HTML5 canvas tag, is all about “playing with geography and bits of information”. It’s also pretty cool to look at.

The app shows visitors where people are tweeting /from, in realtime, in the past hour. The more tweets come from a specific region, the “hotter” it becomes.

From frog design’s blog post:

Integrating technology and design, the application was developed in HTML5 deploying the Twitter Streaming API and the Yahoo! Placemaker service to merge geotagged tweets on one single map, processing more than 1.4 million tweets in just 8 days.

Due to the growth of automated geo-tagging via mobile devices, the exceptional tweet locations range from the Sahara Desert to Polar Circle diving to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

You can visualize tweets in the form of a heatmap, with ‘smoky clouds’ and either in map or satellite view. If you have 3D red cyan glasses, you can even dive into the “3D stereo view”.

At the time of this writing, they’re close to processing more than 2 million tweets from 200 countries (they started processing on November 1).

Nifty indeeed.

CrunchBase Information

Twitter

Information provided by CrunchBase

Beach Cities officially named Vitality City

ByMark McDermott | November 4th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

The Beach Cities Health District entered an agreement with Healthways to become the nation's second Vitality City.

The Beach Cities Health District has won its bid to bring the Vitality City program to Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, and Manhattan Beach.

BCHD officially entered into a contract last week with the Healthways/Blue Zone Vitality City project, an innovative public health initiative that began with a National Geographic study of the world’s longest living and healthy regions and seeks to apply lessons from those populations.

“I am so excited for the community,” said BCHD CEO Susan Burden. “So many hands have already been on this, and I think that is just the beginning of all the people that are going to a part of building this positive momentum.”

The Beach Cities emerged as the choice from more than 70 cities nationally that expressed interest in becoming the second Vitality City project. The first, a ten month project in Albert Lea, Minnesota, garnered national attention for the positive strides made in the 18,000-person town. The 3,600 residents who participated lost an average of 2.6 pounds and increased their projected life expectancy by 3.1 years; health care costs of city employees dropped 49 percent, and absenteeism dropped 20 percent.

Joel Spoonheim, Blue Zones director of health initiatives, headed the Albert Lea project and will serve in the same capacity in the Beach Cities. He said both the existing public health infrastructure of the BCHD and the way other public agencies in the area embraced the project were key factors in the selection.

“Why here? The most important thing we saw here was really strong leadership,” Spoonheim said. “We know this can’t work unless there is strong buy-in from businesses, the public sector, and non-profits. We were impressed by the breadth of people that were excited.”

BCHD and Vitality City officials met with 35 elected officials over the past three months. The contract was signed Oct. 22, the day after the Manhattan Beach City Council signaled its willingness to participate, meaning every local city council and school board had agreed to participate. None have a financial commitment but will help implement programs that were successful in the first Vitality City, such as “walking school buses,” improving area “bike-ability” and the creation community gardens.

Burden said she was grateful that the BCHD board of directors embraced the opportunity.

“They stood up and made an investment in our community’s health,” Burden said. “People can be so risk-averse that they just get comfortable about what their jobs are. These folks didn’t do that; they were just concerned about doing the right thing. I am also grateful the other six boards, the three city councils and school boards – everybody came together, and that in itself is pretty remarkable.”

BCHD committed $1.8 million over the three-year life of the project, an amount that will be matched by $3.5 million from Healthways/Blue Zone and will include access to the state-of-the art Gallup Poll Health Index community health measurement tool and give every Beach Cities employer free access to Healthways’ workplace health assessment services.

“I’m so thrilled about this,” Burden said. “Healthways is national leader in employee health. If you are Caterpillar or Apple or any large company and your health insurance is too high, Healthways is who you hire to do employee wellness to get your health insurance rates down. So all employers here will get access to this, free of charge – that is a great value, both for some of our larger employers but also for small employers.”

Gallup has already begun polling residents to create a local Health Index. The results should be ready by Nov. 19, when Vitality City will present the findings at a BHCD strategic planning session. Spoonheim said the next three to four months will essentially be a time to establish a blueprint for how to proceed in the Beach Cities.

“We have to frame how to change the well-being of the community, and the first step is to find out what is going on here,” Spoonheim said. “We want to know what is working well here so we can leverage it and have a greater impact, and also find the gaps – where we need to bring program experts to move well being ahead.”

The initiative will fully launch this spring. As successful as Vitality City was in Minnesota, the ambitions are even greater here, among a larger population over a longer time span. Preventative care is increasingly becoming an essential part of health care reform, and if this project succeeds, it will become a template that is likely to spread to communities across the nation.

“It puts the community on a national stage, this project,” Burden said. “I think everybody believes in preventative health care and knows it’s the right thing, but this really starts the measurements….It will shine a light on these three communities in a very positive way.” ER

Some people say… the iPhone 4 is a piece of junk. The latest episode of the greatest show on television, Top Gear, made mention of the issue that has captured the world’s attention: the shoddy craftsmanship of the iPhone 4. You know a story is huge when Jeremy Clarkson and Co. devote valuable airtime to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Given the amount of criticism that Apple has received for their curated App Store, it should be interesting to see that Google's unmoderated solution for Android is not without its own criticisms. CNet reported on the high potential for abuse in the Android marketplace:

About 20 percent of the 48,000 apps in the Android marketplace allow a third-party application access to sensitive or private information, according to a report released on Tuesday.

While most of these apps are not malicious, spyware is said to be a growing problem. Google denies it being a real issue, however, and points out that users must explicitly allow applications to get access to the data. While true, Jon Johansen disputes the practicality of these checks and also believes that Google's lack of curation is hurting their marketplace:

Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple's App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps.
...
Below are just a few examples of what's wrong with the Android Market. Those 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category. I was not surprised to find that they were being monetized through Google Ads.

Meanwhile, this past week, Google remotely disabled two apps from all Android phones. This so-called "Kill Switch" received a lot of publicity when it was revealed that Apple had the same functionality for the App Store. So far, Apple has not been known to have triggered it. According to Google, the remotely disabled apps were not malicious, but misrepresented themselves in order to encourage downloads:

Recently, we became aware of two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes. These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data -- or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them.

The removed apps were said to be a theoretical demonstration of how to create a "botnet" of hijacked phones.

By cloaking an application capable of "fetching" new exploit code at will in a fake application offering preview pictures of the upcoming "Twilight Eclipse" film, he tricked more than 300 users into downloading the software. The lesson: a less friendly developer could have used that bait and switch to plant malware on users' devices.

I seem to recall something similar with the Banking industry... Strict oversight reduces choice and puts the decision-making into the hands of someone who may not have your best interests in mind.

In contrast, very little oversight increases your choices and allows the consumer to decide. Unfortunately, not being an expert, you are easy prey for someone who may not have your best interests in mind.

The solution? Don't take-on debt and don't buy a smartphone. :)