Thursday, October 05, 2006

Beyond Email: BlackBerry Takes Aim at Applications

I spent Tuesday morning at The Hospital, but I wasn’t poorly. Mainly because this was the recording studio, private members club and meeting place in Covent Garden, called The Hospital, rather than some bacteria infested hell hole. I wasn’t there to record my latest single, and anyone who has ever heard me sing will be grateful for that, nor to sip brandy and smoke cigars with the in-crowd. I wasn’t even there to admire the rather unusual floor to ceiling tiles in the gents loo on the cinema/presentation room floor, although admire them I did. In fact, I took photos of them with my mobile phone as nobody would ever believe me when I explained about the toilet with illustrations from the Kama Sutra otherwise.

Nope, I was there to listen to why there is more to the BlackBerry than email.

Get the message: IM is not secure


A new report by the Aberdeen Group admittedly sponsored by a number of security vendors, has revealed that 91% of companies see virus and malware as either medium or high on the threat rating list, and 86% put spam at the same level, but this drops to just 72% when the external interception of confidential data is in the risk frame. Well, I say ‘just’ but 72% is a fairly big number in the scheme of things, unlike 25% which is the number of those companies that have actually done anything to implement a messaging encryption solution in order to address the threat.

Google Code Search goes live

Google Labs has launched a new search engine just for you, software developers that is. Google Code Search can help all programmers by quickly filtering billions of lines of source code, all from the default and familiar search interface, to reveal reusable code-snippets. Be it a specific programming term or language, or diving headlong into some compressed code on a hunt for very specific features, Google Code Search would seem to have it all.

Go-Go Google Gadgets

Google has announced the availability of more than 1000 ‘Google Gadgets’ that can be run on any web site, differentiating them from the existing desktop gadgets which could only work locally by way of the Google Desktop software or on a personalized Google homepage. These bits of cobbled together HTML and Javascript code that act as dynamic applications when installed on your web page are also different from the Widgets that Yahoo has had available ever since it acquired Konfablator last year. Those 3000+ plus mini-applications only run if you download and install an 11Mb host application first, and then only on a Windows based PC. Apple and Microsoft also have similar requirements, for now. It seems highly unlikely that Google will be allowed to maintain the lead in independent widgetry for long.

Firefox flaw only unfixable because it does not exist

Just days after telling delegates at the ToorCon hacking convention in San Diego that Firefox was critically flawed, and the online reporting hysteria that followed, one of the two coders who gave the damning presentation has now admitted that it was just a joke. Neither Mozilla, nor the reporters and bloggers now busy wiping the egg from their faces, are laughing.

Sony feels the financial heat for those flaming batteries

More than 7 million Sony batteries have now been recalled since the middle of August when Dell made its big 4.1 million battery recall announcement, a figure which has risen to 4.2 million over the weekend interestingly enough. Toshiba has now joined the feeding frenzy by recalling 830,000 laptop batteries; Fujitsu is also doing the recall thing but refuse to comment on numbers. This following the earlier announcement from IBM/Lenovo that it was recalling over half a million Sony batteries, and let’s not forget that Apple has been busy doing the same.