Archive for November, 2007

Is Apple collecting your iPhone usage data?

It looks like Apple is tracking iPhone users data including IMEI number, IP address and stock quote preferences (amongst other things) through a hidden string in the Weather.app and Stocks.app iPhone applications. This information is sent to “http://iphone-wu.apple.com/dgw?imei=%@&apptype=finance” (IP resolved “17.254.32.16″). See screenshot below for details.
From this information, Apple could build a profile [...]

C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton’s DARPA Chances

In a case of 20/20 hindsight, Princeton DARPA Grand Challenge team member Bryan Cattle reflects on how their code failed to forget obstacles it had passed. It was written in Microsoft’s C#, which isn’t supposed to let you have memory leaks. ‘We kept noticing that the computer would begin to bog down after extended periods [...]

Colossus cracks codes once more

or the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer will be cracking codes at Bletchley Park.
The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.
It will be used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command [...]

Time for an Internet meme

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not [...]

Data Loss Bug In OS X 10.5 Leopard

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.
Read more here

Google Announces Open Mobile OS

Androidâ„¢ will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. On November 12, we will release an early look at the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to build rich mobile applications.
Open
Android was built from the ground-up to enable developers to create compelling mobile [...]

Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits

Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for “green” computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM [...]