Austin Police Planned... Then Postponed Wardriving Plans In An Attempt To Shutdown Open WiFi

from the um,-but-it's-legal dept

Jonathan Rumion alerted us to a plan by the Austin, Texas police department to conduct a massive war drive around the city, looking for open WiFi networks, with the plan to try to find the owners, and tell them to lock up their WiFi networks. We've heard of similar campaigns in the past. Rumion was reasonably concerned about this effort -- and whether it was because of him asking questions, or other reasons, it looks like the Austin police have postponed this effort for the time being.

Either way, it raises lots of questions. Having an open WiFi network is not against the law, so should the police really be going around telling people to lock up their WiFi? It's also not at all clear how they're figuring out who actually owns the open WiFi networks. Rumion was also concerned about what the police might do with the data they collect, though I don't think that should be an issue -- that data is public. Still, it does seem like a questionable effort against something that remains perfectly legal.

Filed Under: austin, open wifi, wifi, wireless

FOIA Info Reveals That BART Shut Down Cell Service With One Email To Telco Partner

from the it's-that-easy dept

Following the astounding and likely illegal decision by BART to shut down mobile phone service in stations in an attempt to block protesters from being able to communicate, Christopher Soghoian and Jacob Appelbaum filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the internal communications concerning this decision. Those communications have now been released and can be seen here (pdf) or embedded below.

The interesting stuff is closer to the end. Basically, someone from BART, Dirk Peters, sent a single email to ForzaTelecom, who must be BART's partner in managing the cell service, saying that they needed it shut off:

Gentlemen,
The BART Police require the M-Line wireless from the Trans Bay Tube Portal to the Balboa Park Station, to be shut down today between 4pm & 8.
Steve , please help to notify all carriers.

The "Steve" in question appears to be Steve Dutto from Forza, who replied and sent an email to various telcos (including Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T and MetroPCS), saying

I have spoken to or left a voicemail for most of you. We have been told that we must shut down the DAS system from the Oakland portal to the Balboa St. Station from 4-8 pm. We do not believe that any of the carriers need to do anything, the nodes will be turned down from the Civic Center Headend and then turned back up when given the ok from the BART police.

The emails also note that beyond cell service, BART also shut down its WiFi service -- also via a single email from a BART representative to the WiFi partner, WiFi Rail, who noted that they were "happy to help in any way." Nice of them.

Filed Under: bart, free speech, mobile phones, protests, wireless

iPhone Developer Creates App Criticizing The iPhone; App Is Quickly Pulled

from the don't-cross-invisible-lines dept

Molleindustria is an app developer who makes a line of controversial and political games. Some of its more well known games include McDonalds Videogame, Operation: Pedopriest, and Oiligarchy. It just recently announced and released its latest game, Phone Story. This particular game takes the player through the cruel world of smart phone production using a series of mini games depicting the mining of coltan from the Congo using child labor, the suicides in the Foxconn factories and, of course, e-waste disposal in third world countries.

On top of all those themes, the game was to be released on the very platform it criticized: the iPhone.

It didn't last long on the platform.

Just hours after being approved, Apple yanked it from the app store for four separate violations.

15.2 Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected

16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected

21.1 Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free

21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS

The key story going around the internet is that Apple is silencing a critic of its platform and business practices, and it's just using the iOS guidelines as a tool to do so.

Let's put that aside and focus on something a little different: Apple's arbitrary code enforcement. According to Molleindustria:

I'm very familiar with the App Store policy, and the game is designed to be compliant with it.

If you check the guidelines, Phone Story doesn't really violate any rule except for the generic 'excessively objectionable and crude content' and maybe the 'depiction of abuse of children'. Yes, there's dark humor and violence but it's cartoonish and stylized - way more mellow than a lot of other games on the App Store.

If Molleindustria took the extra effort to be compliant, how did they end up breaking those above rules? It's hard to say as even Molleindustria doesn't quite know.

Rules 21.1 and 21.2 are the easy ones to counter. Molleindustria did pledge that all proceeds from the app sales will be going to charity, but that is not done in the app itself. That is Molleindustria giving away the 70% of sales it earns to a charity. It was not asking any buyers to donate to a charity in the app or even outside the app. I guess Apple just didn't want to be part of the charitable aspect.

Rule 15.2 might be a sticking point. Molleindustria admits:

a new version of Phone Story that depicts the violence and abuse of children involved in the electronic manufacturing supply chain in a non-crude and non-objectionable way... will be a difficult task

Yet, is depicting near real life conditions of child labor really objectionable? Would a news app reporting on child labor and showing a video of children in the working environment get a pass? Or is the problem that such a depiction is interactive in this case? It isn't like this game is a baby shaker app or anything. The child abuse depicted has an editorial purpose.

Finally, we come to Rule 16.1. Of the four, this rule is probably the most frequently broken by app developers as it is completely subjective by nature. What one app reviewer finds objectionable another would not. In this case, an app reviewer did not find the app objectionable or crude, but someone in Apple's leadership did. How is an app developer supposed to know what people they don't know find objectionable? I know many people who think the various "fart apps" or pimple popping apps on the app store are crude, and many others who think they are funny.

In Apple's case it is a matter of "it knows it when it sees it." Not really the best course of action.

Apple is no stranger to controversy over its arbitrary code enforcement. The first few years of the iPhone's life were rife with stories about apps being banned for doing nothing more than connecting people to content that is freely available online via the Safari browser. For that reason, it really comes as no surprise at all that it would attempt to silence a critic using arbitrary code enforcement.

There is also the possibility that Apple just doesn't think that Molleindustria is a professional satirist. The guidelines actually do have a code in place to allow such "professional satire" to skirt those other rules:

14.2 Professional political satirists and humorists are exempt from the ban on offensive or mean-spirited commentary

So what is it Apple? Is it okay to be mean spirited in our commentary as long as Apple is not the target? I guess so.

Filed Under: apps, iphone, phone story
Companies: apple, molleindustria

Man Claims Apple Investigators Pretended To Be SF Police In Searching For Lost iPhone Prototype [Updated: Or Not]

from the the-iPolice dept

Update: Please read the update at the bottom of the story.

Earlier this week, News.com broke a story of yet another Apple employee losing an iPhone prototype in a bar (stop me if you've heard this one before...). Unlike the last one, this one (as far as we know) did not get sold to some tech website for a few thousand dollars. However, reports are emerging that raise some serious questions about how Apple went about trying to retrieve the phone.

A man in San Francisco, Sergio Calderon, claims that six people showed up at his door claiming to be San Francisco Police Department officers, and that they had badges. They claimed they were looking for a lost phone, but didn't say it was a prototype. The original News.com report had said that police together with Apple investigators went to the guy's house -- but the SFPD says they have no record of SFPD being involved in any such action (which it should have if they were involved). The guy whose house was searched says that no one identified themselves as being from Apple. They also threatened him and his family over their immigration status (even though he says they're all legal). Either way, he was nervous and let them search his house (a mistake) and even check out his computer. They didn't find anything.

The guy who was "leading" the search gave Calderon his phone number, and that number apparently belonged to Anthony Colon, a former San Jose police sergeant, who recently went to work for Apple. After the SF Weekly story about this came out, Colon suddenly deleted his LinkedIn page, but lots of folks have screenshots. The SFPD is apparently concerned about this, and says that if Calderon comes to them, they'll investigate whether or not Apple impersonated SFPD officers, which is a crime that is punishable with up to a year in jail. If the claims of Calderon prove true, this could become a pretty big headache for Apple, perhaps bigger than merely having an employee lose a prototype.

Update: Well this is getting weirder. The same SF Police spokesperson who earlier denied SFPD presence now says that the SFPD did, in fact, "assist" Apple with its internal investigation.

Contradicting past statements that no records exist of police involvement in the search for the lost prototype, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderon, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderon's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and Calderon denies that he ever possessed it.

Of course, this raises other questions about the proper role of the police. If it was a police investigation, then police should have done the search. If it was a private search, then the police should not have been present implying that it was a police search. The latest details certainly makes it sound like these police freelanced, suggested to Calderon that this was a police operation... and then never filed the proper paperwork about the whole thing.

Filed Under: anthony colon, investigation, iphone, police, prototype, sergio calderon, sfpd
Companies: apple

HP Tablet Fire Sale Lets Us Put A Price On The Value Of A Strong Development Community

from the apple-and-orange-sales dept

A couple of weeks ago, HP made the significant decision to get out of the consumer hardware business, simultaneously shutting down their PC business and their mobile device business built around the WebOS purchase that came with Palm, Inc. When they abruptly did so, HP also announced they would be clearing out the supply chain by offering their very capable, $500+ TouchPad tablet for $100 (16GB models).

What followed was a mad rush of purchasing, with people clamoring for a cheap, but powerful tablet. This is by no means a bad device: remember that the WebOS was critically acclaimed, and this tablet had a 9.7" screen, webcam for video chat, lightweight, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and more. These are flagship-grade tablet specs, and although we've learned that UX is more important than specs, good hardware is a definite plus. The biggest problem with the device was the lack of developer support for the ecosystem, so there are "thousands" of apps available according to HP, but not the 'hundreds of thousands' that work with the iPad.

This fire sale has provided a fairly interesting experiment in the market clearing price for non-iPad tablets. The base iPad sells readily for $500, and is often sold out. This is the high-water mark for tablets, which no other has matched. Other vendors have built competitive hardware and tried to sell it in the same price range (Motorola Xoom, Samsung, Playbook) but were rewarded with lackluster sales. Some of those devices, on paper, are arguably better than the iPad, so the most likely reason Apple can extract a premium is the power of their App developer community. An iPad can do much more than a Xoom partly because of what Apple offers, but mostly because of the 'whole product' which includes 400,000+ apps.

Device industry executives must stay up at night wondering how to price their tablet. The HP experiment will prove useful. Now we know that at $500, buyers walk away from the deal. But at $100, they literally rush the store like Walmart on Black Friday. This tells us that the correct price for a good tablet with weak developer support is between $100 and $500. That's a fairly wide range. I wish HP had set the price higher, to provide a better test. Unfortunately, whenever an OEM company sets the price, what we get is their desired price, but not the market value. For that...we have eBay. Many of the buyers at HP's firesale were just arbitrageurs looking to flip the tablet to make a quick buck, and those tablets quickly showed up on the auction site. A look at eBay today reveals a high number of TouchPads on offer, and sold for a market price of ~$250.

If the hardware alone is valued at about $250, how does iPad sell for $500? Well, we'll have to attribute some of the premium to the "cool, sexy" mystique of Apple products. But I wouldn't go too far with that. The Samsung Tab or HP TouchPad are both very slick looking products. A chunk of the premium has to be allocated to Apple's excellent and easy UX. The mass market doesn't want to geek out, they want easy products. But Honeycomb and WebOS aren't so far behind...

No, the dominant reason that iPad can sell out at $500 (even as sales have tipped well beyond the fanboi segment) is the value brought by apps. Apple is making cake because it has the biggest developer community coding around the OS, and the value of that community is currently worth something on the order of $200-250 per tablet. It's going to be tough for any other tablet to breach this market, where Apple already has the supply chain dialed in, the developer community, the innovation lead, and the brand. Android may progress bit by bit, but for now Tablets are Apple's private playground. Competition will heat up if Android tablet versions of the Nook and Kindle go to market around the $325 range (making their profit on books instead). Note that the TouchPad has an estimated $318 Bill of Materials (BoM). In a few years, Moore's Law and steady Android progress will reduce the cost and app advantage iPad now enjoys.

HP will be emptying the supply chain in a couple of weeks with the final production run of TouchPads. I wish they would bump up the price to see if the market would bear $318 direct from the manufacturer (ostensibly, a more desirable seller than eBay members), but it seems that they will keep the current fire sale price.

Filed Under: community, computers, development, price, tablets, value
Companies: apple, hp

Are Any Of The Patents Google Got With Motorola Mobility Any Good?

from the does-it-even-matter? dept

With all of the attention Google bought for buying Motorola Mobility for its patents, one question that not too many people asked was whether or not those patents were any good. Of course, when you're dealing with 17,000 patents and the fact that Google has shown no signs of planning to go on the offensive with patent fights, it seems clear that the point of getting this patent portfolio was very much about quantity over quality -- mainly to ward off lawsuits from other big companies, with the recognition that somewhere in those 17,000 patents was probably something that the other company infringed upon.

Still, the folks at M-CAM decided to put the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio to the test by using a variety of scoring techniques, and believes that the portfolio isn't all that valuable, both in the aggregate and at the specific level. It basically found that about 48% of the patents are probably worthless. At the specific level, the company looked at the 18 patents that Motorola Mobility had asserted against Apple, suggesting that these particular patents may be the "stars" of the bunch -- but, again, found that nine of those patents were "impaired," and were unlikely to be very strong or valuable.

The report notes that buying and maintaining dubious patents probably isn't a particularly good value by itself:

Google is paying $12.5 billion for alleged assets that include a 17,000 patent portfolio, of which close to half appear to serve as deterrent value alone. The cost of maintaining patents of dubious quality will be an ongoing and potentially unnecessary liability to Google and its shareholders. Regrettably, close to half of the portfolio deemed "best" based on previous assertions have substantial weaknesses. Google’s patent stockpiling initiative appears to be focused entirely on deterrent value rather than on acquiring quality assets. Google shareholders may take some small solace in the adoption of a multi pronged defensive strategy, but may want to demand higher quality standards for the assets and liabilities acquired in future transactions.

Of course, if Google's goal is longer term, it's possible that this isn't such a crazy deal. Already, we've seen that this acquisition alone has been a key driving force in getting lots of people (and especially the press) to admit that the patent system is clearly broken. Spending that much to get that kind of widespread awareness may be worth it... if it leads to real reform (which is still a big question mark). On top of that, if the quantity of patents has a deterrent value, no matter the quality of the overall bunch, it's likely that Google will still find it "worth it." However, the fact that it now needs to maintain these 17,000 patents, where approximately half may have no direct commercial value, really demonstrates (yet again) the massive "tax" of bad patents on companies.

Filed Under: bad patents, patents
Companies: google, motorola mobility

Surprise: Justice Department Says AT&T/T-Mobile Merger Would Be Anticompetitive

from the did-not-see-that-coming dept

Wow! Well, this is a bit of a surprise. The US government, who had been rubber stamping various mergers for a while now, especially in the telco/broadband space, may finally have had enough. The Justice Department has officially moved to block the merger, technically filing a lawsuit against it on antitrust grounds. From the beginning, most people had assumed that no one would block the merger, though in the last few weeks there were definite rumblings suggesting that the tides were shifting. Even so, having the DOJ jump in with a lawsuit is a surprise. AT&T insists that the move was a surprise to it as well, which is also a bit odd. Typically, the DOJ tends to telegraph this kind of move, in order to either pre-emptively end the merger attempt or to get much greater concessions. It's not entirely clear what pushed the DOJ off the fence on this one, but AT&T accidentally revealing that it had lied about the key reasons for the merger couldn't have helped...

Filed Under: anticompetitive, antitrust, merger
Companies: at&t, t-mobile

FCC Asked For Declaratory Ruling That BART Shutting Off Mobile Phone Service Was Illegal

from the but-will-they? dept

We'd already noted that the FCC was investigating whether or not BART broke the law when it decided to turn off mobile phone service in an effort to stop some protests (a direct attack on a specific form of speech). Now, some public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the EFF and the Center for Democracy & Technology, have specifically asked the FCC to state that BART broke the law and that local government agencies cannot choose to turn off mobile phone networks:

Current events around the country and the world highlight the urgency and importance of this issue. Growing concern over “flash mob” crimes has led some policymakers to attempt to target communications network for increased scrutiny. In the wake of riots in London, politicians in the United Kingdom have proposed increased governmental surveillance of, access to, and control over social media platforms and other communications media. Such interference with communications has a long history of being used to suppress civil rights protests over a wide variety of traditional and new media, from distributing flyers to television broadcasting.

This tendency, multiplied by the number of state and local agencies willing to exercise control over CMRS, could wreak complete havoc on the reliability of CMRS service by rendering it dependent on the discretion of the most-restrictive authority in any given region. Moreover, inconsistency and unreliability of service would be only two of the many resulting problems. If local government agencies claimed the authority to impede or restrict communications at their own discretion, users’ rights to free speech, just and reasonable access, and emergency services would all be imperiled, subject to local determinations of the relative values of these rights as balanced against the peculiar interests of the restricting authority.

As made plain by the negative ramifications of BART’s alternative proposal, statutes exist – and have been upheld by the courts – to prevent actions like BART’s for good reason. When local and state agencies determine a need to restrict communications, they must work with local public utilities or communications agencies and the Commission pursuant to recognized processes. It is untenable legally and practically to allow the whim of any person or agency that has access to network hardware to dictate who is entitled to access communications services and when.

BART’s past shutdown of CMRS, and its apparent plans for similar shutdowns in the future, raise grave concerns. More troubling, other local agencies may use similar shutdowns of CMRS networks in the future--potentially disrupitng access to communications relating to public safety and protected speech. For the above-mentioned reasons, the Commission should issue a declaratory ruling clarifying that such shutdowns by local governments violate the Act.

Filed Under: bart, fcc, free speech, mobile phones, protests, wireless

BART Bosses Say Phone Shutoff Will Only Be Used In 'Extreme Situations' Going Forward

from the learning-their-lesson? dept

When BART first announced that it had shut off mobile phone service in a station to stop protesters, it was seen as a brief aside by the transit operation. The news reports covering the story buried that part of the story as not very important. Then people began to realize it was a huge deal and perhaps a violation of telecom law and the First Amendment, and quite an uproar ensued. Not surprisingly, the folks at BART are now realizing that perhaps they were a bit hasty. BART held an emergency board meeting solely on this issue and announced that BART will only use such measures "in an extreme case where the public is imminently at risk." Of course, what constitutes such an "extreme case" is not entirely clear. But, at the very least, I would imagine that BART bosses will think about the consequences a bit more next time.

Filed Under: bart, free speech, mobile phones, protests, wireless

FCC Asks AT&T To Explain Discrepancy Over Claimed Need For T-Mobile vs. Internal Discussions

from the oops dept

A few weeks ago, AT&T accidentally revealed that it had a plan to cover 97% of the population with its 4G/LTE service. That's a big deal, because a big part of the rationale for the T-Mobile merger was that it simply could not deliver that kind of coverage without the merger. AT&T has worked furiously since then to basically deny what the filing clearly stated. They've been doing so by trying to change around what basic words mean (which is kind of funny). However, it looks like they haven't convinced one rather important player. The FCC is now asking for evidence that AT&T actually needs T-Mobile as it keeps claiming. It's still pretty likely that this all gets approved, but it definitely has presented pretty clearly how the rationales being given for why this deal is "necessary" are hogwash. No one denies that it will be much easier for AT&T, but that's not the same thing as necessary.

Filed Under: 4g, fcc, merger, wireless
Companies: at&t, t-mobile