TechCrunch
Android Is The New Windows
A flexible, customizable operating system that’s farmed out to third-party hardware makers and dominates market share but not profits? You’re not the only one experiencing déjà vu. The parallels of Android and Windows are striking. But can that which is unique about Android save it from the fate befalling Microsoft’s stumbling OS?
Let’s look at the similarities between the Android of today and the Windows 95 of … ’95:
- Android is a growing platform with endless form-factor diversity (or fragmentation, depending on how you look at it) and strong OEM support, just like Windows has had and still enjoys.
- Android’s flexibility for users and developers created an explosion in app variety, but also an unruly app store with a growing issue with malware. The same was true of Windows during the early days of the Internet.
- Android, like Windows before it, followed Apple into its market by leaning on third-party hardware firms. The plan helped both to surpass Apple’s hardware shipments. Android tablets currently outsell the iPad globally more than two to one.
- OEMs looking to boost per-device profit tweak the Android operating system and often cut at its daily functionality by over-skinning the platform among other similar issues. Windows PCs still suffer from the same issue, as OEMs pump them full of crappy bloatware before delivering them to consumers.
- Android devices are often cheaper than iOS units, but at the same time can compete at the higher price and quality tiers. Just as it has long been simple to pick up a cheap laptop that runs Windows, you can also spend untold sums on a gaming or media machine that can handle anything you throw at it if you want. That wasn’t true with Mac, and it isn’t true now with iOS. But if you want to buy a massive-screened Android you can.
Perhaps the most important point of the Android and Windows comparison is that of longevity. Windows has been in business since 1985. Hardware-based operating systems last.
Just as computers have changed since 1985, so has Windows. And smartphones and tablets will change, too. But we still have PCs, and we’ll still have smartphones and tablets in a decade. Android is currently using a similar strategy to Microsoft’s Windows play to take over the hottest two segments in hardware and software.
People now say that, while Android has huge market share, it’s iOS that is beloved and profitable. But if history repeats itself, the smartphone wars will be decided less by short-term profits and app figures, and more by who will control the smartphone world in five, 10 and 15 years. That’s increasingly looking like Android.
And it’s firmly ironic that Microsoft is currently working to build tablet and smartphone market share against Android, which is using its old playbook against it. If only Microsoft had taken its own advice sooner.
Bradley Manning Found Not Guilty Of ‘Aiding The Enemy'
Today Jude Denise Lind announced her verdict in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the young solider under prosecution for his alleged leaking of classified documents to the Wikileaks organization: not guilty of ‘aiding the enemy.’ Manning was found guilty on lesser counts.
The information that Manning is generally accepted to have handed to the controversial journalism outfit included a film clip now known under the moniker “Collateral Murder.” That video contains footage that includes the killing of innocents. The government, during the trial, chose to describe the clip as instead “actions and experiences of service members conducting a wartime mission.” Sometimes the odor of a situation is exacerbated by the sterility of the language used to describe it.
The trial of Manning has been part of a larger conversation on government secrecy and the right of the public to understand the workings of their elected and unelected officials. Regarding Manning specifically, the question of whether or not he “aided the enemy” by leaking military information has troubled many, as its implications may be far-reaching. If a whistleblower leaks information, and it is published, it is all but certain that the “enemy” will have access to it. Given that, the leaking of any classified information regarding any topic near to national security could lead to painfully oppressive prison terms under the above precedent.
This would discourage others from stepping forward, when it was appropriate to do so.
Top Image Credit: Patrick Slattery
Mozilla Launches Minion Automated Security Testing Platform, Collaborates With BlackBerry To Secure Browsers
Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser and other open source projects, today announced the launch of Minion, a new automated security testing platform. The platform is intended to be flexible and easy to use, deploy and extend so that developers can be integrated into virtually any development workflow. In addition, Mozilla also announced a partnership with BlackBerry to enable the open source Peach fuzzing framework for testing browsers.
Minion
The Minion project, Mozilla says, started about a year ago and is still very much under active development. Today’s announcement of version 0.3 marks the tools first major public outing, though the company has previously talked about it and development of the tool happened in public.
The idea behind Minion is to enable developers to log into the tool and immediately start scans against their web applications. Currently, the tool features three working extensions (a port scanner, web fuzzer and a penetration testing tool), but the team is working to extend the number of plugins and developers, of course, can also write their own.
It’s worth noting that the Mozilla team is explicitly positioning Minion as a platform and not a security tool. All of the testing features are implemented as plugins and Mozilla itself wants to focus on “providing strong abstractions and a reliable, extensible platform without binding the platform to a specific suite of tools.”
Fuzzing With BlackBerry
Mozilla’s collaboration with Blackberry on the Peach open source fuzzing framework is pretty straightforward. The idea here is to work together “to advance the Peach fuzzing software for testing Web browsers.” The fuzzing framework throws invalid (and often random) data at a program (in this case, the browser) and looks for crashes that could indicate security issues and memory leaks.
Mozilla says it has already used Peach to perform fuzz tests against some HTML5 features in its browsers and that BlackBerry’s experience in using fuzzers to test its platforms will allow it to plug “directly into BlackBerry’s existing security processes and infrastructure.”
Contact Syncing App Sync.ME Launches ME Card, Another Attempt To Create A Unified Contact Card
It’s been tried many times before. A way to keep all of your contact details up-to-date and have any changes automatically pushed to everyone in your address book, instead of having to email them or send an SMS and hope they ‘got the memo’. The problem with any solution that I can think of, however, is that it requires all of your contacts to be signed up to the same service for it to work. That creates a chicken and egg problem — those thorny network effects — where the solution only becomes useful once enough people commit to using it.
However, with 7 million users since launch (up from 5 million last November), perhaps Sync.ME‘s social contact app for iOS and Android has a shot.
Today the company is talking up the official launch of a new feature it’s calling the ME Card, which acts as a single place within the app to edit all of your contact details and decide which changes you want synced with other Sync.ME users you’re connected with. Soft-launched a week ago, Sync.ME says it’s already seen over a million updated ME Cards.
Available via Sync.ME for iOS, Android and a Facebook app, the ME Card is being described as a “universal contact card format” and is the next logical step in Sync.ME’s rather ambitious mission to become a standard for contact syncing across mobile and social platforms.
As we’ve previous reported, to fund that mission the Israeli startup raised a $4 million funding round from undisclosed private investors last November. At the time it was available on iOS only, but launched on Android the following month.
Competing with a host of other iOS address book replacement apps — including Cobook, a bootstrapped startup from Latvia, Addappt, Plaxo, Brewster and Xobni’s Smartr, among others — along with those 7 million users, Sync.ME says it’s currently syncing over a billion contacts every week. The app is particularly popular in Japan, apparently.
The initial draw for users is Sync.ME’s social integration. Similar to many attempts at creating a ‘social address book’, such as those by handset maker HTC with its ‘Sense’ customisation, or the late Palm’s ‘Synergy’, Sync.ME integrates with Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a phone’s existing contacts, and essentially merges or ‘syncs’ that contact data into a single entry for each contact.
This not only enables those details to be kept up-to-date more easily, but means Sync.ME can do interesting things like display the latest profile picture and status update when a contact is calling (or being called). Again, not an original idea, but one where the company claims its tech is more up to the job where others have failed in their execution.
Specifically, Sync.ME says that its proprietary algorithm can identify and match contacts in spite of potential misspellings and slight text variations between the user’s phonebook and the way it appears on Facebook for example, thus creating less ‘dirty data’ or mismatches, which in my experience can be a common problem with social contact syncing services in general.
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