Mobile

iPhone: Refurbished Device Reveals Customer Data

marco Leave a comment

You always wonder what will happen with your device if you have to return it.

Even more so if the device is an iPhone with a lot of your personal data on it (contacts, documents, web browser data still left in its cache, etc.).

Just found an older post about what the owner of a refurbished iPhone discovered and the data he was able to reconstruct, on zdziarski.com titled

“May 16, 2008: Refurbished iPhone Reveals Customer Data“:

[Photo from Wikipedia. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.]

A few days ago, I posted a discovery in that personal data remains intact (in deleted portions of the file system) following a full iPhone restore. As it turns out, Apple themselves may not have been aware of this. Thank goodness, otherwise identity theft might actually be, like, hard. A detective from the Oregon State Police, whom I’ve verified, notified me this afterrnoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased directly from Apple contained recoverable personal data. This included email, personal photos, and even financial information that he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. Needless to say, the original owner was quite surprised. He informed me that the device had been returned to Apple under a warranty exchange only a few months ago, suggesting that Apple has been using an insecure refurbishing process for the past year.

This shows that you have to treat your iPhone like a desktop computer in case you sell or return it, as the mobile phone more and more gets part of your (digital) lifestyle and holds a lot of valuable data!

Read More

Ping.fm: Keeping your social networks in sync

marco 3 Comments

Ping.fm Logo Ping.fm is currenly in beta and trying to help you with kepping ALL your friends, followers, business contact (etc., etc.,…) up-to-date!
On the website the services describes itself as:

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.

Available social networks and services are: Twitter, jaiku, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Tumblr, Pownce, Brightkite, Xanga, Plurk, Plaxo, Linkedin, Mashable, identi.ca, more coming…

The latest additions of supported services and functionality are mentioned in their recent blog entry entitled More Features, More Awesomeness:

Alas, we bring more gifts from the Ping.fm laboratory. We have added a Yahoo! Messenger bot to our bot arsenal. So, for those Yahoo! users who were without GTalk and AIM, you now have the power of Ping!

Also, we’re proud to announce our custom URL posting capability. Now you can have ping messages delivered directly to your website! This will encourage developers to write incoming-bound scripts that will do cool stuff with your Ping messages. Just another way we’ve put the power in your hands.

Last but not least, we’ve enabled support for picture uploading.

Check them out! Use this beta code to get in: pingbewithyou
Leave a comment if you need a (current) beta code and I will update the post with the latest one.

Read More

Video blogging: Kyte vs Qik vs Flixwagon and Viif

marco 1 Comment

Kyte screenshotThere are many posts out the in the blogosphere talking about the superior service/application from kyte.tv, comparing them to Qik.com or Flixwagon.com. See the Techcrunch post from Robert Scoble: why-kytetv-will-kill-qik-and-flixwagon-in-cell-phone-video-space

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

  1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
  2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
  3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
  4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
  5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
  6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
  7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

and Oliver wrote about them, too:

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

All services have in common that you have to download an application to your phone to use either service. This is a big advantage in terms of control and usability of the app. But still you need to download an application in the first place. The iPhone might leed the way as people are used to buy (select) e.g. mp3’s from iTunes and have them transfered (downloaded) onto their device. We will see if Apple is leading the way, once more.

Wanted to add my 2 cents to this discussion and throw in an approach which is a little different than the one taken by the previously mentioned companies:

Viif phoneWhat do you think about the German start-up in Berlin called Viif (site mostly available in German only, sorry)? Their application enables every 3G cell phone (with video call capability) to record live video, which gets recorded from the Viif video server and than publish to your blog. The service is not allowing love video blogging for now but they could very easily make this into one without the need to download an application!
I don’t want to keep quiet about the little disadvantage you have: No 3G signal = no video call. A local application might be able to record on the internal memory of your phone and upload the content after your signal gets better (is back at full 3G).

Leave a comment if you know of other mobile video applications out there or want to chip in with your commentary! Thanks!

Read More

Are you ready for mobile ads?

marco Leave a comment

There is a very long article today in the WallStreetJournal called Coming Soon to Cellphone Screens — More Ads Than Ever.

Several US Mobile phone operators seem to test how they will be deploying ads on your mobile phone. Yahoo! seems to have a deal already that is placing it on the go2 directory where you find e.g. the nearest restaurant on your phone. In the new search results Yahoo! ads will be placed. Carriers using go2 search and having the links are Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Cingular Wireless.

Read More