Archive for August 3rd, 2007

Securing Cell Phones

Published by Babar Bhatti on August 3, 2007 under Gadgets, Information Technology, Mobile Phones, Security, iPhone

From Technology Review Magazine. Also see this related posts from the past here.

Last week, researchers from a security company found a flaw in iPhone software that allows it to be remotely controlled. The weak spot was in the Safari Web browser, software that’s also used on Apple’s computers. “It’s a good example of how flaws in PC software show up in a similar guise on cell phones,” says David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cell-phone viruses have been around for nearly a decade, but many experts believe that serious threats could become a serious problem in the next couple of years thanks to the gadgets’ growing computing power and complexity. “I think a large part of this is that cell phones are becoming miniature computers,” Wagner says, “and as a consequence, they are starting to inherit some of the same problems that we face with PCs.”

Many cell phones are scaled-down computers, and they can take advantage of some of the existing efforts to make personal computers more secure, such as using antivirus software. But cell phones have their own set of problems. For instance, mobile devices are easily lost or stolen; they are accessible via a number of methods, including the cellular network, Bluetooth, and, increasingly, Wi-Fi; and they have a limited battery life and constrained processor power. Researchers have only recently started to grapple with the implications of designing cell-phone security systems that encompass these and other challenges.

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Picture of the Month: Flood, Famine and Mobile phones

Published by Babar Bhatti on August 3, 2007 under Digital Divide, Disaster Management, Emerging Markets Telecom, SMS, Telecommunications

floodfaminetech.jpg

Picture from The Economist. Read the accompanying story and see this related post.

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.

As Mr Sokor’s bemused London recipient points out, two worlds were colliding. The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed. It was also a sign that technology need not create a “digital divide”: it can work wonders in some of the world’s remotest, most wretched places.

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