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It Is Like Finding Out That Santa and The Easter Bunny Were Both Actually Actually Pablo Escobar In Disguise, And That He Has Personally and Repeatedly Peed In Your Chicken Soup, And That He Told All Your Friends About It, And Also Said That He Would Do It Again

Or, in other words, Apple and Google are both Satan.  If this were a tennis match, the dude on the highchair would now shout "NEW BALLS PLEASE!", but we don't have the luxury.

There are people out there saying this sort of thing:

Eww! Suave high-tech megacorporations are stealing all my personal data; freedom slips one drop at a time through our fingers as we tumble softly into a dystopian nightmare, waa, waa!

And to them I say "Cool it, junior! Why don't you leave all the hard thinking to grownups?"  Either way, we get it.  Google and Apple are both evil.  Boooooring.  Can we have some new news now please?

Seest Thou Yon Dreary Plain

Despite not wanting this to become a wholly Android-related blog, there have been yet more stirrings in this arena worthy of wild unjustified extrapolation.  The base set of data with which one may cavort seems less than sensational - a piece in the Wall Street Journal reports of a Grand Jury investigation of smart phone apps under suspicion of having "illegally obtained or transmitted information about their users without proper disclosures".  Which is bad, but hardly shocking, since theft of personal data by shady web services, while being much reviled, is a well known business model.  What makes it peculiar in this instance is the presence of popular 'net radio provider Pandora amongst the companies under scrutiny; weirdness compounded yet more by the level of skulduggery on Pandora's part described in the WSJ article:

In Pandora’s case, both the Android and iPhone versions of its app transmitted information about a user’s age, gender, and location, as well as unique identifiers for the phone, to various advertising networks. Pandora gathers the age and gender information when a user registers for the service.

This accusation was supported by preliminary investigation carried out by Veracode.  Notice that this applies to both Android and iPhone (although I believe it was not possible for Veracode to confirm the latter given Apple's closed code).  More specifically, and in addition to age and gender, Pandora also sends "android_id, connection status, network information, device brand, model, release revision, and current IP address" to advertisers.  Initial reporting that GPS data ("GPS location, bearing, altitude") was included has proven to be false (because although the app tries to send this data, it does not have access to it), but what is sent would seem to more than cover the famous 33 bits needed to identify a single human amongst 7 billion.

It is not certain that Pandora was actively complicit in this theft, since the code in question comes from "advertisement libraries compiled into the application: AdMarvel, AdMob, comScore (SecureStudies), Google.Ads, and Medialets".  Of those listed, Medialets seems to be the greediest, but all apart from Google are taking more than they should be.  So either Pandora knew and was complicit, or did not know and was negligent. 

Now for the extrapolation.  Simply, if the app of a well trusted brand like Pandora has done this, then a great many other apps are likely to be doing the same.  This conclusion makes various baseless assumptions about how the sample was chosen by the DoJ, but any situation where the best-case scenario involves a trusted service provider ripping off millions of people, it perhaps pays to be pessimistic.

Android devices blast open gateway to Hell, disgorge demon hordes.

Android apps are not safe.  And not just for those of the ilk who think ".exe" is an appropriate extension for funny cat pics - Android apps are potentially unsafe for normal people too...  The problem is that capable ne'er-do-wells are taking legitimate apps, re-engineering them with private-detail-siphoning malware, and then re-releasing them into the Android Marketplace; a process that leaves their trojan apps almost indistinguishable from the originals.  Unless you happen to know that "Screaming Sexy Japanese Girls" or "Hilton Sex Sound" were not originally published by "Myournet", there is no way to tell at face value that these are not perfectly reputable.  Less seedy apps such "Photo Editor" and "Scientific Calculator" were also compromised.

The ars technica piece focuses on the differences this highlights between the Marketplace and the Apple App Store (the photo header lady began her digital life fondling a stack of apples, how droll), and I am sure these are the terms under which people are going to think about this issue.  Will people care more that there iPhone can't use Flash, or that there are seemingly legitimate Android apps out there that can "yank IMEI and IMSI [...] product ID, model, partner (provider?), language, country, and userID [and can also] download more code"?

That is an unfairly loaded question - the larger issue is to do with the user freedom that Android offers versus the increased level of user security that Apple guarantees.  In the same way that security requires restriction, freedom requires responsibility, right?  In that case, to whom does the responsibility belong?  Google stripped all hacked apps out of the Marketplace within five minutes of the issue being reported, so fair play to them, but prior to this over 50000 users had downloaded unsafe code.  There is a limit to how proactive they can be in policing such an open system, and reactive measures are always going to come too late for thousands of users.

It seems like the inevitable conclusion will be for this issue to further polarize Apple/Android device usership along lines of "tech savviness", but even for those unlikely to accidentally gouge out both eyes trying to turn on a pocket calculator, it may be worth reflecting upon the words of legendary pimp John Philpot Curran.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

We all know that the Internet emanates in thick syrupy waves from Al Gore's semi-apocalyptic pleasure palace on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee.  Is it because of this that the world tends to follow the USA's lead in matters of electronic communication legislation?  Some credit may also go to their tendency to kidnap, drug and brainwash foreign heads of state in the sweet way that they do.  In either case, the now-usual European response to seemingly perverse judiciary decisions regarding the future of Old Man Internet may be inappropriate.  Perhaps we should put down the buttery popcorn and soda pop and pay closer attention, since this may also be our future they are fitfully deciding.

From amongst increasingly bizarre news snippets (have fun trying to distinguish fact from fiction) there occasionally spring a few bright rays of hope.  After the epic de-pantsing of HBGary by hippy-anarcho-terrorist cyber-demagogues Anonymous, it is clear that someone out there in Washington has been listening.  Unfortunately the domain of the proposed federal investigation is such as it is because someone out there in Washington had been hiring HBGary in the first place, dirty deeds doubtless not done dirt cheap.  But it has all worked out good in the end, right?

American telco giant AT&T were also under scrutiny this month, immunity from Freedom of Information Act requests denied by the supreme court.  Once again the shine is taken off somewhat, this time by this week's revelation that AT&T were also complicit in the NSA's attempts to spy on everyone everywhere whilst simultaneously hosing users' private Facebook data all over central and eastern Asia, but... well, I mean, at least it's not as if they are cutting throats left right and centre on the way to becoming the single most powerful mobile carrier in the whole of North America.  Are they?  Of course they are.

Sometimes the Atlantic seems not very wide at all.

Big Brother soon to cause urinal stage-fright

Mobile phone reception is variable at best.  I can't even listen to Internet radio on my phone in the bathroom at work because the girders of my building are lined with lead bars and kryptonite egg cartons.  Therefore, welcome one day soon to pervasive base stations.

Which is good, and fun.  But what does it mean?  Let us say that you are going to install one of these things in every EM black spot in every urban centre, in farm houses and pinned onto saguaros and dangling from lianas and wherever else there is money to be made from data transfer.  Are they cheap?  Probably not, but they will be.  Soon it will make sense for there to be recievers in any place that a compatible transmitter (over 0.736 per global capita now) is likely to wander.  Perched above all those occasional capitas, waiting... listening.

If you put that many oft-idle ears out there, people are going to start listening a lot closer.  What are they going to hear is less interesting than who "they" are I suppose, but so long as I can hear the lambent tones of Justin Bieber while I attend to nature, then who cares, right?

Could you take seriously an overlord called "Watson"?

There is a lot of talk about Watson's performance on Jeopardy! in the tech world this week.  Stephen Wolfram wrote a fascinating, respectful (and inevitably biased) comparison of Watson to his own Wolfram|Alpha prior to the 14/16th Feb showmatches.  Now that Watson has so convincingly vanquished the Grandmaster human opposition ($77147 to $24000 and $21600), it is worth returning to the comparison, and considering what the two differing approaches tell us about themselves and the nature of AI.

Whereas Watson threshes masses of text for statistical correllation, W|A instead translates language into an internally defined abstract representation of meaning. This latter is described by its proud parent as representing true "linguistic understanding"... but neither he nor David Ferrucci of IBM would yet go so far as to call their creations true Thinking Machines.  It is still too early for the eager references to John Henry or HAL that journalists also made the last time a computer beat a human at the top of a human game (Deep Blue of course), but the question remains; of the two differing approaches, which is more intelligence-like?

Ok so I am not a Cognitive Scientist.  This is a problem.  But I can at least guess at some possible answers.  One is that each approach represents a different aspect of intelligence, and that in a true AI the two would work together - the brain of course contains many differentiable structures that do just this (and which have also been considered at a higher level of abstraction, if you are concerned that the algorithms Watson and W|A use would be mapped more accurately to these structures).

Another is that intelligence is a more universal term than the above modular explanation suggests.  I dipped a toe per Stephen Wolfram's suggestion into his grandly titled New Kind of Science where his "Principle of Computational Equivalence" seems to imply (in my crude interpretation) that all roads lead to Rome, and that intelligence could potentially be defined as any system that appears to act as such.  Not in the Turing Test sense that has the feel of strongly stated Cultural Relativism (who are we to say that what a computer calls intelligence is not so?), but rather in the sense that all complex manipulations of data are in some way equivalent. That the details of the implementation are irrelevant, not because we should judge by results rather than process, but because no one process is inherently "smarter" (in an abstract sense) than any other.

The only third explanation I can think of is that big-i Intelligence is just beyond our understanding at this time, that we are not subtle enough yet to properly describe it.  This last feels like a cop-out, the second is perhaps neat to the point of triteness and the first implies that the future of AI is in OOP.  None of these are particularly satisfying to me.  I do however feel that whatever it is, if/when it does arrive, it will thankfully be better able to explain itself that I am, and if the events of this week are anything to judge by, it may do so from Oprah's couch.