Posts tagged Issue
The Mac Comeback: Analysis Reveals 46% of Companies Issue Macs
Jan 27th
Over six years ago, I rounded up a group of analysts to elicit their opinions on what was then a startling trend: People who purchased iPods were then purchasing Macs. Was it a fluke, I asked? Some said maybe not: Buyers were learning to trust the Apple brand again. But there were too many mitigating factors at that time which could eventually derail the Mac’s comeback, for which the only route to its eventual culmination appeared to be by way of the home entertainment center.
What literally no one foresaw in 2005 was the possibility that an Apple-branded device could become a future year’s most successful and desirable business tool. The iPad bounced the Apple brand right back into the office; and now, results of a survey of 10,000 IT professionals worldwide by Forrester reveal that as CxOs find themselves embracing iPads, their companies end up opening their front doors to Macs.
Sponsor
Among survey respondents in North America and Western Europe, an astounding 46% of the enterprises where IT professionals worked in 2011 were reported to be offering Macs as an option to employees. That does not mean half of employees are choosing them – right now, Forrester’s respondents say only 7% of those respondents are personally using Mac OS X in their workplace. But that’s a lot more than in previous years, and much closer to the peaks set in the late 1980s when the first Mac adopters realized they needed them for laser printers and “desktop publishing.”
The iPad has become the Mac’s re-launch pad in the enterprise. Even those companies that officially don’t want iPads yet (they may have policies against BYOD) have employees who do. Some 27% of respondents said their enterprises presently support the iPad, with another 31% planning to, and yet another 23% actively campaigning to make them support it. That’s important, because while 46% of enterprises offer Macs, only 30% of them support Macs – and that’s a big difference. The hurdle for enterprises wanting to adopt, and maybe even embrace, the Apple brand is integrating them into the network.
One more factor playing into the Mac’s enterprise success, astonishingly… is Android. It’s a strange, backward chain of events that Forrester’s research indicates begins with the inconsistency of that platform – something which the latest version 4.0.x, Ice Cream Sandwich, hopes to eradicate if only it weren’t just one of the fragments in its own right.
As the Forrester report’s principal author, Frank E. Gillett, writes, “Google’s Android platform is selling very well with consumers for smartphones, but the wide variety of devices, features, and software support, plus inconsistency of support for OS upgrades, is fragmenting the Android ecosystem. Meanwhile, Google has yet to dent the iPad’s dominant tablet position, while Amazon’s popular new Android-based Kindle Fire tablet bypasses Google’s app store, Android Market, altogether. In PCs, Google’s Chromebook initiative to replace Windows PCs will take years to gain traction. By comparison, Apple has solid offerings in all three categories, keeps a limited but still highly desired range of models, and creates great consistency and upgradeability across the devices, characteristics that are very attractive to enterprise buyers. Forrester hears from CIOs that they feel protected by Apple’s brand and app store strategy in a way that they don’t with Android products.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Staff Turnover Could Be IT’s Biggest Issue for 2012
Dec 30th
How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT’s biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World’s Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.
Sponsor
This isn’t a completely new problem. I remember when I took my second job, about two years after I was working for a consulting firm in Washington, DC around 1980. At the time my father was not happy about the switch: he was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition: what would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo’ those many years ago.
A CIO quoted in Marsan’s article mentions how turnover is his biggest issue: “knowledge keeps walking out the door.” I was wondering what he is paying his developers as perhaps one of the reasons for the huge turnover, where all of his six-person team has been with him for less than a year. But it turns out his particular issues aren’t so simple. There are several dimensions.
Part of the problem is that loyalty is so over with. Back in my dad’s day, you wanted to amass a retirement portfolio, or get more vacation time, or other benefits from being with a firm for decades. Now, those seem old-fashioned, and there are fewer pension plans and more contract workers. Hypergrowth is what matters. Getting challenged, learning stuff. Layoffs can happen at a moment’s notice, making more of a “what is in it for me” attitude.
The CIO interviewed in Marsan’s article spoke about a very different developer mindset for today’s 20-something coders. “There have been a number of cases where we have had a system that runs into issues, bugs, defects or a major change requirement. We thought it would be a challenge for a developer to own it. But their first reaction is to want to scrap it and start over.” It isn’t just learning the ropes and moving up the ladder slowly but being able to collaborate and work with others, rather than starting from scratch on a clean slate.
Another problem is that we expect instant gratification in our work lives. We can download what we need almost immediately from the Internet. If we don’t get super-fast bandwidth and sub-second response times from our computer we get easily frustrated. If it takes more than a few minutes to understand something, we move on. I have noticed this in my own use of apps recently: I get very impatient when I can’t understand something at first, and tend to drop products that have even a modest learning curve. (This is one of the reasons why Second Life went nowhere: it was a lot to learn at once.)
One often-heard complaint is better workplace flex times. Back when I was in my 20s, I worked day and night sometimes to get projects done. There was no such thing as 9-to-5, telecommuting, or flexible Fridays. Today’s GenY wants it all.
In addition, IT has to do a better job explaining the business context of their code and be engaged in what the company is actually doing with their apps. Coding just for coding’s sake is passé, as it should be. Granted, this was true back in my formative years, but it has gotten more important as IT has become more of a distributed operation, and coders are closer to their departments.
Certainly, it is a delicate balance to train and retain highly technical people. But it does seem as if these times have made it more of a challenge. What has been your experience?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
TRUSTe to Issue Free Privacy Policy Creation Starter Kit for Mobile Developers
Nov 3rd
Internet privacy solutions provider TRUSTe is concerned that mobile apps do not have built-in privacy solutions. TRUSTe claims that 77% of all mobile applications lack privacy policies that can allow users to decide how they want to share data third parties. As such, TRUSTe is coming out with a free privacy policy for mobile developers later this month.
Essentially what TRUSTe is coming out with is a privacy policy wizard or starter kit for mobile developers that do not have policies in place for their apps. Developers are led through a set of questions defining what their apps do and do not do in terms of privacy and at the end of the quiz, TRUSTe gives them a line of code that links to the apps privacy policy. The free version does not give a developer a certified TRUSTe privacy seal and there is potential for abuse of the system by creating a privacy policy with an app that does not follow those guidelines.
Sponsor
Privacy is a definite concern for mobile users. On the flip side, it is almost an afterthought for developers that are looking to harness actionable data for update, advertising and marketing purposes. What it really comes down to is the permissions that an app has (can it read your contacts, access the Internet etc.) and if those permissions are actually what the app is performing.
To that last point, security vendors such as Symantec, Lookout and Norton check an applications code against its permissions when an app is downloaded. If the app is safe and is doing what it says it is doing, it is fine and the security apps will not flag it. If it is not, it prompts the user to remove the app (to varying degrees between each security system).
The TRUSTe policy for developers is an extension of the system that it has already been offering to enterprises building internal apps. When it comes to privacy, users are concerned with how geo-location (remember the iPhone/Android location tracking issue earlier this year?), whether or not an app has permission to use text messaging and/or a users phone number and contacts list, how and where apps transmit data and how users are being tracked by advertisers. These issues touch on a variety of privacy concerns such as identity and location and, perhaps the most important, users bank accounts.
The free TRUSTe privacy policy is more of a creation wizard for developers. It does not actually enforce any of the claims that the could be created within the wizard. Dave Deasy, VP of marketing for TRUSTe, admits that the new tool does not keep insidious developers from creating apps that violate the privacy policies that are created.
“This solution won’t necessarily keep somebody honest but is rather for developers that don’t know where to start in creating a privacy policy,” Deasy said.
That is why developers using the free version of the policy wizard will not get actual TRUSTe certified seals. The TRUSTe seal is reserved for those that pay for the certification service that provides protection to the user.
What it comes down to for users is: protect your privacy on your own. Look either for the official TRUSTe seal (or other privacy vendors) and use security applications to make sure the permissions your app is telling you it performs are actually the actions it performs. When it comes down to security and privacy, a user can have all the tools in the world to protect themselves but that will not protect a user from making bad choices.
Developers – Does TRUSTe’s new policy generator look like something you will use? What is the opportunity for abuse? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Big Question (Answered): “Does the Gmail/Wikileaks Issue Make You Worry About the Privacy of Your Email?”
Oct 11th
We reported yesterday that Google released private data belonging to Jacob Appelbaum, a Wikileaks volunteer, upon request from the U.S. Government. Both his list of contacts and his IP address was given to the U.S. Government. The news that this information was handed over, sans search warrant, has angered many, as you can see from the comments on the post in question.
Are you worried about the privacy of your email?
We asked you earlier today and we culled your responses from Twitter, Facebook and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Confirms Issue Affecting Replies and Mentions
Aug 30th
Engineers at Twitter are busy plugging away at the microblogging service’s latest outage, which appears to be preventing many users from seeing replies and mentions from others.
Twitter’s support team confirmed the issue at 11:42am EST, but have not updated since, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of why they can’t see replies. Among the flustered is American actress Felicia Day, whose tweet about the outage garnered a number of replies that she, ironically enough, cannot see.
Sponsor
People first started complaining about the outage about four hours prior to press time. The issue appeared to still be underway as we published this post, as searches for terms like “mentions” and “replies” on Twitter continued to evoke dozens of complaints from confused users. Twitter has not yet updated its Status Blog, where outages and service problems are normally explained.
A direct message sent to Twitter Support asking for an update was not responded to by the time we published this post. We’ll update this post as we learn more.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Vogue to Offer Every Issue Since 1892 Online
Aug 3rd
Rag trade blog Fashionista reports that Vogue‘s stealth website, currently under development for a December launch, will feature a digital version of every single number published since Arthur Baldwin Turnure started the magazine in the late 19th century.
If you are a fan of fashion, this is huge news. If you’re not, it’s huge news. History is more than big decisions made by bigwigs in big buildings. It’s how we think, eat, buy, sing, move and dress. Vogue is, for better or worse, a prominent lens onto a substantial segment of our cultural mores. Not to mention, it helps to bring history alive when you can picture the details. Now there will be an archive of the sartorial side of those details.
Sponsor
“Vogue has been conspicuously embracing technology and new media lately,” wrote Fashionista’s Cheryl Wischhover. She pointed to editor, and brittle Pez dispenser, Anna Wintour’s Webby’s acceptance speech (“Sometimes, geeks can be chic”); as well as to the soft launch of the publication’s Voguepedia and its “Influencers” blog network.
“According to a reliable source, we’ve learned that this mysterious web property will be a digital archive. That means every single issue since the fashion bible launched in the 1890′s will be available online.”
We sent Vogue questions about the site, the archive and whether access will be free or paid, but they remained unanswered at the time of posting. If we receive a response, we will update.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Responds to Abused DMCA Loophole Issue, Doesn’t Fix System
Apr 29th
Yesterday we reported on a problem that was affecting several Facebook page owners – due to a loophole in Facebook’s process for handling DMCA takedown requests, anyone with an ax to grind and a fake email address could take down any Facebook page by filling out an online form with false information, claiming copyright infringement.
Facebook doesn’t verify the identity of those filing the claim, and more importantly, it doesn’t verify the claim is from a legitimate email address. After a handful of high-profile sites became the victim of this problem, Facebook has stepped in to resolve the problem. Well, sort of. The social networking company says it has restored four pages, but it has not made any changes to its system as of yet.
Sponsor
What Was Happening?
With Facebook’s faulty system, which we detailed here, anyone could get a Facebook page taken down just by filling out an online form with fake information. Because Facebook did not verify the email address of the person doing the reporting, several page owners found themselves without any way to resolve the dispute. In some cases, the fake email addresses the scammer had entered ended up belonging to an uninvolved third-party, who, fortunately for the site owner (Taimur Asad of RedmondPie), was kind enough to contact Facebook on the owner’s behalf to have the claim removed. Others, like Hamard Dar, who owns a site called Rewriting Technology, were not as lucky. His page was down for over a month. He was only able to restore it by performing an investigation on his own to determine who submitted the complaint and then threaten them with criminal charges.
Facebook’s Response
In light of the controversy, Facebook has now responded to these complaints, saying that it has “investigated a number of recent intellectual property cases and have restored four pages as a result.”
Yes, just four.
The spokesperson also added:
Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously. We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices. This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident. Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures.
How Many Others are Out There?
Unfortunately, this response is not good enough for others who are still dealing with the effects of Facebook’s failed system.
According to Hassan Ali, who runs apniisp.com, a popular entertainment website based in Pakistan, his Facebook page with over 44,000 fans was disabled on March 3, 2011, and the email address belonging to the supposedly infringed upon party is not even working – all the emails just bounce back.
This goes to one of the main issues with Facebook’s system – it doesn’t even verify the email address works. In addition, Facebook’s support in this area doesn’t help the affected parties – form letters from what appear to be bots called “Reggie” and “Marissa” are the only “people” who will respond to emails asking for help. And they always say the same thing: Facebook won’t get involved, work it out yourself and get a lawyer.
But in Ali’s case, Facebook isn’t even listening to his legal counsel, he says. In an excerpt from Facebook’s email, the company writes,
“If you believe that this claim has been made under false pretenses, we recommend that you contact a lawyer or your local law enforcement agency and discuss this issue with them.”
But when Ali’s lawyer contacted Facebook on his behalf, Facebook replied:
“We can only correspond with an admin of the removed content.”
Ali says he has been struggling with this issue for 50 days and doesn’t know what do to anymore.
Restoring Pages is a Band-Aid, Not a Solution
While the four site owners affected were glad to see their pages return, the brand reputation they suffered is, in some cases, irreversible. In one instance, a new, fake Facebook page had appeared, offering the newly migrated fans “free iPads,” in what was clearly an online scam.
When asked what Facebook was doing in the future to address this issue, as simply restoring the pages of those bloggers notable enough to have caused a ruckus doesn’t fix the real problem, Facebook told one of the site owners that the issue would be discussed and Facebook will “consider refinements to our system.”
Consider?
How hard is it to implement email validation? What’s to consider? At the very least, the form should verify the email address works before removing pages based on faulty claims. At best, Facebook should make it more challenging for these claims to exist in the first place. A good first step? Stop allowing disposable webmail addresses in the “email” portion of the field.
We expect that this isn’t the last we’ll hear of changes to the DMCA takedown system over at Facebook. In the meantime, can someone besides “Marissa” or “Reggie” please look into Ali’s case?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Apple Finally Responds to iPhone Location Tracking Issue
Apr 27th
It’s been a week since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden published their discovery that the iPhone has been keeping track of users’ locations and storing the data – unencrypted – on the phone as well as any machine with which you sync the device.
Although the news spread like wildfire, Apple has remained silent until now. The company has finally issued a statement on its collection and use of location data. We’ve reprinted the press release in full below.
Apple insists it is not tracking the location of your iPhone. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.” It maintains that what Warden and Allan found was a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and celltowers around your current location, information that will help your iPhone quickly calculate your location when requested.
Sponsor
Despite insisting that it’s innocent of any accusations of tracking users, Apple says it plans to issue a software update soon that will change how much data is stored (just seven days’ worth, which will be encrypted), will end caching this data when the device is synced, and will actually cease if users turn off location services.
In the end, Apple seems to be agreeing with what we first thought of the consolidated.db file: more negligence than nefariousness.
Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.
1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.
3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.
4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).
5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.
6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data–it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.
7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).
8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.
9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).
10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.
Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Feds Go All In Against Online Poker Sites, Seize Domains, Issue Warrants
Apr 19th
If you are an online poker player using PokerStars.com, you would have found the site had been seized Friday and a Department of Justice notice was there in place of your normal access page. While online gambling has been illegal in the United States for five years under the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) that prohibited online gambling sites to operate in the United States and financial institutions from transferring money to or from any online gambling operation, there has been a push to legalize it recently.
Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker were also seized on what bloggers and marketers of online poker services are calling Black Friday,
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
