One Shot Design

High Tech Computer’s first phone using Android has been unveiled to the press on September 23^th; and shippments are due one month later. Although the comparison is often taken for granted, the gPhone is not an all-round product like the iPhone, but rather a collaborative platform between hardware makers, software designers and mobile networks.

The product is backed up by Google, the World’s leading search engine, and it also has a physical kewboard going for it. Overall, the HTC G1 received a mitigated response: reviewers questionned the partnership with T-Mobile for the USA, where it will be released first. Online sales leader Amazon.com entered a partnership to sell DRM-free MP3’s on the device. Reviewers were a bit confused about the product’s target category: is it meant to tackle the “multimedia” slot of Apple Inc.’s iPhone or the “business” slot of RIM’s Blackberry? I guest the effective use of the gPhone will be determined by the top Android applications Google has been awarding money for.

As far as the other players are concerned, Nokia announced the unveiling of its iPhone competitor for October 2^nd; Motorola has been shifting its development towards Android and Palm is still working on its next generation operating system for the last two years.

The mobile phone market is currently the fastest groing one, so there is plenty of room for Android if they get their act right.

Originally published on the 13th of September 2006, this article has been edited, updated and expanded to feature recent Open-Source applications and provide general guidelines on securing digital privacy.

Every week, we hear of laptop computers holding critical information being lost of stolen. Most of us don’t deal with classified government data, but we do own and use on a daily basis devices and storage media that hold a lot of information about us. They could put your privacy at risk if it they got into the wrong hands.

Here are 10 simple golden rules to follow in order to secure your computer and your storage media. Most of those tasks are as mundane as locking your front door or you car, but by combining then you can drastically raise the walls protecting your privacy. All the applications mentioned in this article are open-source, cross platform, and pretty much straightforward (they don’t require a PhD in Computer Science to be used).

Go to the article

“If you’ve got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday.”

Read the article at Wired.com.

With Firefox’s recent download World record and Microsoft working on a beta version of Internet Explorer 8, Google is sending shockwaves in the browser war with the planned release of Chrome, a distant relative of KDE’s Konqueror and Apple Safari, built from scratch with the same WebKit rendering engine.

Google already runs Internet search, it seems the company also wants to run Internet browsing. News about the Web browser leaked when German blogger Philipp Lenssen received the press release, published in the form of a comic strip, two day ahead of schedule. Lenssen scanned the document and made it available online.

Chrome is built for memory optimization and multi-threading of tabs and plugins. Tabs are easier to play with or move around, much like on Opera, and the application keeps track of search forms to allows faster access. Regarding security on Windows Vista, scripts run with restricted privileges and the application cross-checks URL’s against a list of malware or phishing sites.

Released as Open Source, the Chrome browser, the V8 Javascript virtual engine and the URL repository are all made available to the community. It will be interesting to see how they integrate it with Google Documents and Picasa. On paper, Chrome promises to enhance user experience and security, although there might be question about collecting data on web surfers.