DragonI

US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data

The company embroiled in a privacy row has "direct connections" to all major US wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint -- and Canadian cell networks, too.

www.zdnet.com|Zack Whittaker

The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant, according The New York Times. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful surveillance.

Yet little is known about how LocationSmart obtained the real-time location data on millions of Americans, how the required consent from cell user owners was obtained, and who else has access to the data.

Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government.

He called that loophole "one of the biggest gaps in US privacy law."

LocationSmart, a California-based technology company, is one of a handful of so-called data aggregators. It claimed to have "direct connections" to cell carrier networks to obtain real-time cell phone location data from nearby cell towers.

Verizon, one of many cell carriers that sells access to its vast amounts of customer location data, counts LocationSmart as a close partner.

"With these location sources, we are able to locate virtually any US based mobile devices," the company claimed.

LocationSmart also said it allows some customers to obtain "implied" consent, used on a case-by-case basis, when "the nature of the service implies that location will be used."

I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you.

A few months ago I wrote about how you can encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. Well, all the security in the world can’t save you if someone has physical possession of your phone or laptop, and can intimidate you into giving up your password.

medium.freecodecamp.com|Quincy Larson

And a few weeks ago, that’s precisely what happened to a US citizen returning home from abroad.

On January 30th, Sidd Bikkannavar, a US-born scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory flew back to Houston, Texas from Santiago, Chile.

On his way through through the airport, Customs and Border Patrol agents pulled him aside. They searched him, then detained him in a room with a bunch of other people sleeping in cots. They eventually returned and said they’d release him if he told them the password to unlock his phone.

Bikkannavar explained that the phone belonged to NASA and had sensitive information on it, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He eventually yielded and unlocked his phone. The agents left with his phone. Half an hour later, they returned, handed him his phone, and released him.

What’s the worst thing that could happen if the Customs and Border Patrol succeed in getting ahold of your unlocked phone? Well…

• Think of all of the people you’ve ever called or emailed, and all the people you’re connected with on Facebook and LinkedIn. What are the chances that one of them has committed a serious crime, or will do so in the future?
• Have you ever taken a photo at a protest, bought a controversial book on Amazon, or vented about an encounter with a police officer to a loved one? That information is now part of your permanent record, and could be dragged out as evidence against you if you ever end up in court.
• There’s a movement within government to make all data from all departments available to all staff at a local, state, and federal level. The more places your data ends up, the larger a hacker’s “attack surface” is — that is, the more vulnerable your data is. A security breach in a single police station in the middle of nowhere could result in your data ending up in the hands of hackers — and potentially used against you from the shadows — for the rest of your life.

Watch Tufts University and engineer Mike Zimmerman’s battery endure abuse at the hands of David Pogue in this excerpt from NOVA’s “Search for the Super Battery,” airing February 1 at 9/8c on PBS.

Solid electrolytes are a holy grail of batteries, allowing for safer batteries that, in this case, can hold more charge for a given size compared with liquid electrolytes. Zimmerman’s solid plastic electrolyte prevents the formation of what are known as dendrites, or tendrils of lithium that spread from the electrode through the electrolyte and can cause dangerous short-circuits.

• PBS if you’re in the US
• YouTube for everywhere else

• Designing a Safer Battery for Smartphones (That Won’t Catch Fire), NYTimes
• Researchers Create New, High Capacity Battery Technology Without Lithium-Ion's Explosive Risks, Forbes
• New Damage-Proof Battery Has Higher Energy Density, Won’t Explode, PBS
• Michael Zimmerman - Tufts University School of Engineering

6-Month-Old Babies Are Now Using Tablets and Smartphones

time.com

Over a third of children under the age of 1 have used a device like a smartphone or tablet, according to a new study.

The study, which was presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting, showed that by age 2, most kids have used mobile devices. To reach these findings the study authors surveyed 370 parents of kids between the ages of 6 months to 4 years about their exposure to media and electronics.

According to the parents’ responses, 52% of kids under the age of one year had watched TV, 36% had touched or scrolled a screen, 24% had called someone, 15% used apps and 12% played video games. The amount of time the children spent using devices rose as they got older, with 26% of 2 year olds and 38% of 4 year olds using devices for at least an hour.

The survey results also suggest that parents let their children use media or mobile tech as distraction. For instance the study showed 73% of surveyed parents let their kids play with mobile devices while they were doing chores around the house. Sixty percent said they let children use them while running errands, 65% to calm their child and 29% to put their kid to sleep. Just 30% of the parents in the survey said they spoke to their pediatrician about media use.

Ex-Microsoft Designer Explains the Move Away from Metro - Thurrott.com

www.thurrott.com

An ex-Microsoft design lead who actually worked on Windows Phone has gone public and agreed with my assessment of the platform. It had to change.

Now, you can see a more internal view of what happened. And you can read the entire discussion—and some occasionally silly responses to it—in a Reddit AMA called I designed the new version of Office for Windows Phone, AMA. But here are the highlights.

Why is the hamburger menu in the top left of the display? 

It’s hard to reach, etc. I actually argued for top right. The issue with top right is that no one else does [it]. Being a special unique snowflake works for art but not design. Design should be invisible, so people shouldn’t be thinking ‘oh that’s odd. I’ve never seen this button used like this. I wonder if it does the same thing?’ … The industry decided top left. So to go against it you need to earn it. You need to be far, far better or else it just stands out awkwardly.”

But people need to be able to use it with one hand. “What the research is showing is that people aren’t actually as wedded to one handed use as we used to believe they are. Don’t get me wrong, this is clearly a tradeoff. Frequently used things have to be reachable, even one-handed. But hamburgers are not frequently used, and one-handed use is not ironclad. Combine those two factors together and you see why the industry has settled on this standard. It wasn’t random … And, sorry. But the hamburger has some real issues, but ‘I can’t reach uncommon things without adjusting my hand on my massive phone and that annoys me because it reminds me of the dominant OS on earth” [is not one of them].

But the bottom is better. “It turns out bottom is not better. You’d think that something 3 pixels from your palm would be easier to reach than something in the middle of the phone. But nope. The way average people hold phones means the middle of the device is the best location. Both bottom and top require your hand to make a bit of a shift to reach. You don’t use the hamburger very often … You have to design for the 80% case, no matter how much that annoys the other (vocal) 20%  … Here’s the distinction. Holding with your right hand in the average way makes it super easy to tap the bottom left but actually a bit of a context switch to hit the bottom right. So you put super common things on the bottom left, and important but less common things on the bottom right … Reach isn’t actually the biggest problem though. The issue is ‘why the hell is your app so complicated you need a junk drawer to stuff everything into?’ That’s why Apple doesn’t like it, and I agree. But you try designing Office for Mobile, supporting every feature, without a junk drawer  It’s hard!”

Microsoft UX design can be summarized this simply. “Nav on top, actions on bottom. No user consciously thinks that way, of course. And there will still be some actions tucked into the top. But that’s how the design of the system (in many cases) will work. I’ve thought about it across a ton of apps and it works well.” (This was technically true in Windows 8 too, by the way. Moving on.)

Metro is less efficient than the interaction patterns on Android or iOS. “The interaction patterns in Android and iOS are better designed (at least compared to [Windows Phone] 7). Get into the labs and watch people use all three platforms. There’s data here that not everyone is privy to, but that doesn’t make it less true. There are some real weaknesses in the old Metro patterns … Maybe iOS and Android forced everyone to two handed use with shitty design … [But] big screens exploded in popularity. You’re going two handed.”

If you could change just one thing in Windows Phone, what would it be? 

The interaction models, honestly. The pivots and the panoramas are a nightmare in day to day use. They’re as distinct as a Flower Power iMac, but it painted the interaction models into a corner … If Windows Phone had used stronger [interaction design pattern] models, maybe it would have looked too ‘me too’ … Metro had to shock people. It had to look like its own thing. And it did that really well. Pivots, panos, big text, black everywhere, it looked like art. And more than that it looked different … But I think the platform has paid for it ever since. They stood out, they were distinctive, but the interaction design wasn’t where it needed to be. So you have diehards that love it, but you have the mainstream of the market that struggles with it, if they try at all.”

What percent of a smartphone’s price comes from patent royalties? - Android Authority

www.androidauthority.com

The paper, written by WilmerHale intellectual property litigators Joe Mueller and Tim Syrett and Intel Vice President and Associate General Counsel Ann Armstrong, used public information to calculate patent royalty costs. In their book titled The Smartphone Royalty Stack: Surveying Royalty Demands for the Components Within Modern Smartphones, it is noted how a consumer that buys a $400 smartphone will be paying about $120 in patent royalties, or 30% of the total cost.

According to two Apple lawyers and an Intel executive, over one-fourth of the cost of a smartphone is tied directly to patent royalty fees. - Digital Trends

Designing for exponential trends of 2014

blog.learningbyshipping.com

Rather than predict anything that will suddenly appear at the end of 2014, this post offers some trends that are likely to double by some measure this next year.

This will turn out to be an exponential year in many technologies and what seems far-fetched could very easily be trends that are doubling in relatively short periods of time. We humans generally have a tough time modeling things doubling (why so many companies and products did not figure out how to embrace Moore’s law or the rise of mobile).

• WWAN communication tools. WWAN/4G messaging will come to dominate in usage by direct or integrated tools (WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, and more) relative to email and SMS. Email will increasingly be viewed as “fax” and SMS will be used for “official” communications and “form letters” as person to person begins to use much richer and more expressive (fun) tools. This shift contributes to the ability to switch to data-only larger screen devices. Design: Skip email notifications, rely on SMS only when critical (security and verification), and assume heterogeneity for messaging choices. Expect to see more tools building in messaging capabilities with context scoped to the app.
• Cross-platform challenge. This is the year that cross-platform development for the major modern platforms will become increasingly challenging and products will need to be developed with this in mind. It will become increasingly unwieldy to develop for both iOS and Android and natively integrate effectively and competitively with the platform. Visual changes and integration functionality will be such that “cross-platform layers” might appear to be a good choice today only to prove to be short-lived and obstacles to rapid and competitive development. New apps that are cross-platform “today” will see increasing gaps between releases on each platform and will see functionality not quite “right” for platforms. Ultimately, developers will need to pick their lead platforms or have substantial code bases across platforms and face the challenge of keeping functionality in sync. Design: Avoid attempting to abstract platforms as these are moving targets, and assume dual-platform is nearly 2X the work of a single platform for any amount of user experience and platform integration.
• Small screen/big screen divergence. With increasing use of cloud productivity, more products will arrive that are designed exclusively for larger screen devices. Platform creators will increasingly face challenges of maintaining the identical user experience for “phones” and for phablets and larger. Larger screen tablets will be more able to work with keyboard accessories that will further drive a desire for apps tuned along these lines along with changes to underlying platforms to more fully leverage more screen real estate. The converse will be that scenarios around larger screen tablets will shift away from apps designed for small screen phones–thus resetting the way apps are counted and valued. Design: Productivity scenarios should be considering committing to large screen design and leave room for potential of keyboard or other input peripherals.
• Phablets are normal. Today’s phablets seem like a tweener or oddity to some–between a large phone and a small tablet. In practice the desire to have one device serve as both your legacy phone (voice and SMS) as well as your main “goto” device for productivity and communication will become increasingly important. The reduction in the need for legacy communication will fuel the need to pivot closer to a larger screen all the time. Improvements in voice input and collaboration tools will make this scenario even more practical. In the short-term, the ability to pair a larger screen tablet with your phone-sized device for voice or SMS may arise in an effort to always use one device, and similarly smaller tablets will be able to assume phone functionality. Design: Don’t ignore the potential of this screen size combined with full connectivity as the single device, particularly in mobile first markets where this form has early traction.
• Storage quotas go away. While for most any uses today this is true in practice, 2014 will be a year in which any individual will see alternatives for unlimited cloud storage. Email, files, photos, applications, mobile backup and more will be embedded in the price of devices or services with additional capabilities beyond gigabytes. Design: Design for disk space usage in the cloud as you do on a mobile client, which is to say worry much more about battery life and user experience than saving a megabyte.

• Over 400 SKUs have Netflix running on them (TVs and streaming players). You could give every manufacturer an SDK and guidelines and ask them to make things. But most manufacturers don’t want to build experiences themselves and they often have the skills or resources to do so. They prefer a platform.
• Netflix uses HTML5 on Web, Tablet, Mobile, and TV. Have used different WebKit platforms to manage this. On the TV, Netflix ported two instances of WebKit in order to deliver HTML5 solutions (QT and Skia). This allows the same team to build the same way across many devices. WebKit is Netflix’s application platform.
• Why HTML5? Server-driven dynamic UI, Web-style release vs. CE firmware updates, Support A/B Testing, Learn fast/Fail quickly, Chaos otherwise
• Netflix needs a server-driven UI so they can test lots of different variations. The PS3 interface had 16 variations and four experiences that were tested. Trying to manage this testing through certification processes (like those on TV manufacturers) takes way too long.

• Netflix chose a portability layer. But varies user experience across platforms (TV, Web, mobile, tablet).
• Design for mobile first when thinking about multiple platforms as it holds the most constraints. This helps you focus.

• On touch interfaces, you can use less constructs to create the experience, and instead add more content to create the experience. As people get used to the idioms, we’ll be able to do more with content interactions.
• How big should touch targets be: 44 pixels on mobile, tablet, TV. 16 pixels on desktop Web (mouse/cursor) but accurate as 1 pixel.

• Change blindness: our brain expects continuous change. Single page changes sometimes leave things unnoticed because the change is too drastic. This happens with page refreshes on the Web –people don’t notice what changed. So people can loose their context when moving from page to page.
• Overlays can encapsulate alternate workflows without removing context. Flow keeps people engaged in a task. Manage screen transitions carefully. You can minimize them with page slide transitions and other forms of animation. When using transitions, make flow visible.

• Animation is a supporting actor. It should not take center stage. Always question why you are using animations. Occam: what can be done with less is done in vain with more. Consider the least effective difference to communicate change.
• Netflix Web site had a lot of white space in between box shots. The version that took out names, star ratings, buttons, and more performed much better than the version with text, etc. The idea is that content is front and center in the UI. This was directly influenced by the TV interactions.

According to Nielsen’s recent survey of nearly 12,000 connected device owners:

• Seventy percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners said they use their devices while watching television, compared to only 35 percent of eReader owners.
• Sixty-one percent of eReader owners use their device in bed, compared to 57 percent of tablet owners and 51 percent of smartphone owners.