user
Have a look at the 2 pictures below taken at a mall-attached large chain retailer. Not a SINGLE customer in the store. Practically every rack had a red and white sale sign on it. Look at the multiple sizes of each item that have to be made available.
Now consider this.
What is the probability of someone walking through the store to this location, finding an article of clothing that is subjectively pleasing and desirable enough for the person to pick it up and consider the price. Consider if this is a nice to have or need to have item. Further consider the price and whether it is higher or lower than the clearing price — the price at which the user (in that particular user’s mind) thinks it is a good deal and decides to buy it. What is known is the quantity of work needed to inventory, merchandise, display all the products. What is not known very well is the probability of a sale for any or all of the items in the store.
Further consider the redundant inventory of similar (or the same) generic products — redundant because multiple stores attached to the same mall carry pretty much the same generic stuff. Even brand names provide little differentiation or value add. And celebrity designers and endorsers such as Kimora, Cindy, Kathy, or even Jaclyn Smith don’t help. The entire Kimora section was just as deserted as the second photo in this bunch.


Tags: article, brand, brand names, bunch, carry, celebrity, chain, chain retailer, Cindy, clearing, clothing, customer, deal, designers, differentiation, display, endorsers, generic products, inventory, item, Jaclyn, jaclyn smith, Kathy, Kimora, location, look, mall, merchandise, mind, multiple stores, person, photo, Practically, price, probability, quantity, rack, retailer, sale, section, Sign, single, Smith, someone, store, stuff, user, value, Work
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5559357/iphone-vs-android-showdown-which-phone-is-best-for-power-users
The newest iPhone comes out in two weeks; the Android OS continues to deploy on better and better hardware; and both operating systems roll out exciting new features and innovations with each release. So which deserves your hard-earned cash?
A Starting Point
You can evaluate iPhone and Android devices from countless angles,[1] so rather than pretend that we’ve got the One True Comparison, it only seems appropriate to highlight that we’re not necessarily your average user. For more specifics on how we judge these devices, read this footnote.
For our purposes, we’re measuring each phone OS against 20 features we care about most, declaring a winner (or a tie) for each category, and adding it all up. The extent to which our measurements match up with what you most care about may vary, but we suspect that many of you share similar values when it comes to your smartphone.
Note: The table below indicates the device we think “wins” each category. A happy Android means we think Android is better in that category; an Apple means iPhone outperforms Android; categories with both an Android and Apple are ties.
![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] iPhone vs. Android Showdown: Which Phone Is Best for Power Users?](http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/06/500x_iPhone-versus-Android.jpg)
Artwork by Adam Dachis
Below, we’ve broken down the categories above and explained whey we chose the winners as we did.
Ease of Use; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
Android has come a long way in a short time, but from an ease-of-use perspective, the iPhone wins out. You can pick up any iPhone and quickly, easily understand what’s going on. It’s got one main button on the front of the device, and everything you do consists of tapping app icons from the home screen. Android devices have several buttons on the front of the device that perform a variety of functions, and once you unlock the screen (and depending on which Android device you have), you’re confronted with many different possible home screens and ways of doing things from those home screens.
Openness; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
We really like that the Android operating system open source, but what’s more important to most end users is openness in terms of what you can run on these devices. The operating systems themselves are clearly important, but one thing’s abundantly clear: the applications make the phone. And while Google has yet to get in hot water for rejecting apps based on anti-competitive fear or censorship, Apple’s has. A lot.
Battery Life; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
Apple has taken battery life extremely seriously in their careful development of the iPhone, and it’s shown. While Android devices get a kitchen-sink’s worth of features that you may consider to be a fair tradeoff for battery life, there’s little question that the iPhone’s battery life outlasts that of most Android devices. Battery performance definitely varies from Android handset to Android handset (the recently released EVO is taking big hits for its poor battery performance), but the iPhone’s battery performance—particularly the new iPhone’s performance—generally outlasts Android’s.
Multitasking; Tie
![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
It’s a big deal that the iPhone is finally getting some multitasking support in iOS4, and while it’s still not as true of multitasking as Android users enjoy, the tradeoff in terms off battery life improvements is important enough that, overall, we’d consider multitasking to be a wash.
Software Keyboard; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
If you talk to anyone who’s used both the iPhone and Android with some frequency, the general consensus is that the iPhone’s software keyboard is a good deal better than Android’s default keyboard. That’s unfortunate for Android users, but the consolation is that you can install any custom keyboard as your default keyboard on Android, and we’ve seen some solid keyboard alternatives. Still, the advantage, if only by virtue of being better out of the box, goes to the iPhone.
System-Wide Search; Tie
![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
Apple’s implementation of Spotlight on the iPhone searches contacts, media, email, applications, notes, and calendar. Android searches most of that (but notably not email), but also integrates with auto-suggest web searches; it also lets other applications plug into it, so the more supported apps you install, the more robust the universal search becomes.
Notification system; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
This may seem like a silly thing to care too much about, but the iPhone’s modal notification system is particularly user un-friendly, especially for a device as friendly as the iPhone. You have to act on a notification, and you can only see one notification at a time before the next one dismisses the previous one entirely. Android’s brilliant pull-down window shade notification tray, on the other hand, is a beautiful thing that could make any iPhone owner jealous.
Voice-to-Text; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
Nearly every text field on an Android device can be filled with a few words from your mouth, and it works surprisingly well. You can respond to emails by voice, send long text messages by voice while you’re walking around Target, respond to your editor’s IMs while you’re at a graduation ceremony, and so on, as long as you’re comfortable talking to your phone (it is a phone, so you should be). Apart from voice-to-text in third party apps, iOS doesn’t support voice-to-text at all.
Syncing; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
iPhones can be incredible standalone devices, but they’re surprisingly old-fashioned when it comes to syncing, requiring users to plug into their computers and connect to iTunes to do all sorts of syncing and activating that could be more conveniently done wirelessly. Android phones support pretty great over-the-air syncing with your Google account, so much so that if you were to lose your previous Android phone, simply entering your Google account into a new one can get you up and running with a usable phone in a jiffy.
Non-Google Sync; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
Android’s great at syncing seamlessly with Google’s servers, but it’s not so keen on syncing with other popular sources of data—like, say, Outlook, Address Book, or iTunes. If you’re a heavy user of any of those applications, the iPhone is the easiest option.
Tethering; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
The cost of tethering on Android devices varies depending on the provider, but so far the Android tethering situation is better off than what AT&T is offering on the iPhone. In the States, AT&T will charge you $20/month just for the privilege of tethering your iPhone’s data connection to a computer—despite the fact that you’re already paying for a metered data plan. The situation isn’t necessarily much better across the Android-sphere (Sprint is also planning to charge for tethering on the EVO, for example), but currently most Android carriers are sticking with “unlimited” plans, versus AT&T/iPhone’s 2GB limit. It’s still a close race on this point, but Android edges ahead with the ability to turn your handset into a Wi-Fi hotspot that can deliver wireless to you and seven of your closest friends.
Release and Update Consistency; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
These days, your mobile OS is just as important (if not more) than mobile hardware, and Apple has set the consumer expectation to expect that their device will receive new feature updates even if it isn’t the latest phone. To that end, it’s extremely easy to keep track of what’s going on in the iPhone ecosystem. Apple releases one new phone a year, and one major update each year. When an update rolls out, every phone receives the update at the same time (unless it’s particularly old; the original iPhone won’t upgrade to iOS4, for example). In contrast, Android runs on a lot of different devices, and when Google pushes out a new update, there’s no telling when or if it’s going to make its way to your phone. In the future Google is planning to change to yearly Android updates similar to iPhone OS updates, which will likely help this situation, but in the meantime, it’s a source of frustration for Android users.
Apps; Tie
![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
A lot of people may disagree on this assessment, given that Apple’s App Store has around four times the number of applications the Android Market does, but there’s also a lot of crap in the App Store, and at this point, most popular, mission-critical applications have been developed for both the iPhone and Android. What’s more, some potentially very popular applications end up locked out of the App Store for, if we’re being generous, arbitrary reasons. At the end of the day, it may be a big deal that your must-have application X is missing from the Android Market/App Store, and those may end up to be dealbreakers for you, but overall we’d call them pretty even.
Web browsing; Tie
![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
The iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser, while not without its faults, is a very nice, very usable mobile browser. Android’s browser, while not as smooth an operator as Safari, supports (or can support) Flash. The extent to which that matters to you may vary, but it’s big enough that we’re considering it a tie.
Gaming; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
We’re frugal productivity nerds at Lifehacker, so we don’t really care all that much about gaming. And while the number of solid gaming options available in the Android Market continue to grow, it’s still not on par with what’s available for the iPhone.
Music Player; Winner: iPhone ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AppleLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AppleLogoIcon1.png)
Android may do a lot of things well, but one arena where its users regularly voice complaint is with its default media player. Where the iPhone comes with a very solid iPod app, most Android users quickly go looking for alternative players. Google is hyping over-the-internet streaming of all your music from your desktop computer eventually, but until we see something great there, the iPhone still wins out.
Free Turn-by-Turn Navigation; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
After the Google Voice debacle from last year, it’s looking less and less likely that Google will ever develop another new app for the iPhone. Unfortunately, that means that extremely cool applications like Google Maps Navigation, Google’s free turn-by-turn GPS application, will never make it to the iPhone, and so far there isn’t anything as good for the iPhone that’s also free. The iPhone does have its share of solid for-a-price GPS utilities in the App Store (and some decent inexpensive-to-free options), but Maps Navigation is built into Android and outshines the iPhone’s free alternatives.
Integration with Google Apps; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
If you rely on Google tools like Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and the like, Android just does it better. The iPhone’s still no slouch, and can sync over-the-air with Contacts, Calendar, and even does Gmail push for instant new message notifications, but if you’re a serious Google or even just Gmail user, the iPhone doesn’t stack up to Android.
Google Voice; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
It may seem absurd to make this a separate point of comparison from Google Apps, but Voice is a very phone-centric app with potentially huge influence over how you use your phone. Apple had the option to approve a Google Voice app for the iPhone and completely blew it. And since we really love Google Voice, it only makes Android look that much more attractive.
Customizable; Winner: Android ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
You may be able to add a wallpaper to your iPhone desktop when iOS4 rolls out, but beyond that, there’s not much you can do to tweak your iPhone to exactly how you like it—without jailbreaking, that is. In comparison, Android devices are Mr. Potato Heads of customizability.
Overall Score: Android: 13; iPhone: 11 ![Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown] AndroidLogoIcon1 Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? [Showdown]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2010/06/AndroidLogoIcon1.png)
Clearly our scorecard is extremely subjective, so take this evaluation with a grain of salt, and consider how important the features we listed (and maybe those we didn’t list) are to you and come up with your own assessment. If your priorities are similar to ours, you’re likely looking at an Android for your next purchase. Frankly, it feels a little like a draw overall. (My ideal would be Android running on the iPhone 4, which is actually possible, eventually.)
In fact, in our recent poll on the subject, 66 percent of Lifehacker readers said they prefer Android; 30 percent prefer the iPhone, and 4 percent preferred neither. Whichever end of the spectrum you fall on, we’d love to hear more about what’s driving your decision in the comments.
Why just Android and iPhone? The iPhone and Android operating systems are not the only mobile OSes on the block, but they’re what we’re focusing on in this post. It’s cool if you’re really into Windows Mobile/Phone 7 or webOS. For the purpose of this post, we’re focusing on what we consider to be the most popular options among our readers. [
go back up]
How we judge: We consider ourselves power users who care about things like openness, user control, and customizability; we also care about ease of use, high quality design, and quality hardware. For better or worse (usually worse), these qualities often end up at odds with one another in the current smartphone market, but they make up the measuring stick against which we’re evaluating these devices.
It’s also probably worth noting that, Android OS and hardware aside, we’re big fans of several of Google’s services, and so some of those play an important role in some of the categories above. It may not seem fair to Apple and the iPhone to do so, but in most instances (like Google Voice), Apple had the opportunity to accept Google-focused applications to the App Store.
Finally, the state of Android devices can be somewhat confusing because they’re released by different carriers and on lots of different hardware. We tried to strike a balance between acknowledging faults on some of the worst incarnations of Android hardware while also keeping in mind the best. To the extent that older iPhones aren’t up to snuff compared to the new iPhone, we’ve done the same thing in discussing the iPhone. [go back up]
Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker; you can read more of his stuff here at Lifehacker and follow him on Twitter.
Tags: account, amp, android, angles, app, apple, application, Artwork, browser, computer, device, email, end, example, extent, field, footnote, gaming, google, hand, home screens, innovations, iOS, iPhone, lot, market, mdash, measurements, modal, mouth, music, navigation, new features, Notification, number, openness, operating systems, owner, perspective, phone, player, point, power users, Safari, search, shade, short time, situation, specifics, store, system, text, thing, Tie, ties, time, tmpPost, tray, true comparison, update, user, voice, Voice-to, Web, window, Winner, year
Type the following User Agent String according to the screen shots for Chrome and Safari
Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10
For Safari (see screenshots below)
Go to Prefrences -> Advanced Tab
– make sure “Show Develop menu in menu bar” is checked
Go to Develop -> User Agent -> Other
- in the popup window, copy and paste the User Agent string from above and click OK
Log into Gmail — voila
For Chrome
Go to Windows Start Menu -> Run -> Type “cmd” and click enter to get to a command line window
- from your current directory you need to cd (change directory) into the directory where your chrome installation resides; for example C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR NAME]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application>
- once in this directory, you type chrome.exe -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″
- once the application launches, log into Gmail — voila



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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/stats-iphone-os-is-still-king-of-the-mobile-web-space-but-andr/

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn’t be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it’s interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica‘s own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.
Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels originally appeared on Engadget on Mon! , 29 Mar 2010 10:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5501346/law-enforcement-appliance-subverts-ssl
That little lock on your browser window indicating you are communicating securely with your bank or e-mail account may not always mean what you think its means.
Normally when a user visits a secure website, such as Bank of America, Gmail, PayPal or eBay, the browser examines the website’s certificate to verify its authenticity.
At a recent wiretapping convention however, security researcher Chris Soghoian discovered that a small company was marketing internet spying boxes to the feds designed to intercept those communications, without breaking the encryption, by using forged security certificates, instead of the real ones that websites use to verify secure connections. To use the appliance, the government would need to acquire a forged certificate from any one of more than 100 trusted Certificate Authorities.
The attack is a classic man-in-the-middle attack, where Alice thinks she is talking directly to Bob, but instead Mallory found a way to get in the middle and pass the messages back and forth without Alice or Bob knowing she was there.
The existence of a marketed product indicates the vulnerability is likely being exploited by more than just information-hungry governments, according to leading encryption expert Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at University of Pennsylvania.
“If company is selling this to law enforcement and the intelligence community, it is not that large a leap to conclude that other, more malicious people have worked out the details of how to exploit this,” Blaze said.
The company in question is known as Packet Forensics, which advertised its new Man-In-The-Middle capabilities in a brochure handed out at the Intelligent Support Systems (ISS) conference, a Washington DC wiretapping convention that typically bans the press. Soghoian attended the convention, notoriously capturing a Sprint manager bragging about the huge volumes of surveillance requests it processes for the government.
According to the flyer: “Users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate key they obtain (potentially by court order) or they can generate ‘look-alike’ keys designed to give the subject a false sense of confidence in its authenticity.” The product is recommended to government investigators, saying “IP communication dictates the need to examine encrypted traffic at will” and “Your investigative staff will collect its best evidence while users are lulled into a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail or VOIP encryption.”
Packet Forensics doesn’t advertise the product on its website, and when contacted by Wired.com, asked how we found out about it. Company spokesman Ray Saulino initially denied the product performed as advertised, or that anyone used it. But in a follow-up call the next day, Saulino changed his stance.
“The technology we are using in our products has been generally discussed in internet forums and there is nothing special or unique about it,” Saulino said. “Our target community is the law enforcement community.”
Blaze described the vulnerability as an exploitation of the architecture of how SSL is used to encrypt web traffic, rather than an attack on the encryption itself. SSL, which is known to many as HTTPS://, enables browsers to talk to servers using high-grade encryption, so that no one between the browser and a company’s server can eavesdrop on the data. Normal HTTP traffic can be read by anyone in between – your ISP, a wiretap at your ISP, or in the case of an unencrypted WiFi connection, by anyone using a simple packet sniffing tool.
In addition to encrypting the traffic, SSL authenticates that your browser is talking to the website you think it is. To that end, browser makers trust a large number of Certificate Authorities – companies that promise to check a website operator’s credentials and ownership before issuing a certificate. A basic certificate costs less than $50 today, and it sits on a website’s server, guaranteeing that the BankofAmerica.com website is actually owned by Bank of America. Browser makers have accredited more than one hundred Certificate Authorities from around the world, so any certificate issued by any one of those companies is accepted as valid.
To use the Packet Forensics box, a law enforcement or intelligence agency would have to install it inside an ISP, and persuade one of the Certificate Authorities – using money, blackmail or legal process – to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website. Then they could capture your username and password, and be able to see whatever transactions you make online.
Technologists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are working on a proposal to fix this whole problem, say hackers can use similar techniques to steal your money or your passwords. In that case, attackers are more likely to trick a Certificate Authority into issuing a certificate, a point driven home last year when two security researchers demonstrated how they could get certificates for any domain on the internet simply by using a special character in a domain name.
“It is not hard to do these attacks,” said Seth Schoen, an EFF staff technologist. “There is software that is being published for free among security enthusiasts and underground that automate this.”
China, which is known for spying on dissidents and Tibetan activists, could use such an attack to go after users of supposedly secure services, including some Virtual Private Networks, which are commonly used to tunnel past China’s firewall censorship. All they’d need to do is convince a Certificate Authority to issue a fake certificate. When Mozilla added a Chinese company, China Internet Network Information Center, as a trusted Certificate Authority in Firefox this year, it set off a firestorm of debate, sparked by concerns that the Chinese government could convince the company to issue fake certificates to aid government surveillance.
In all, Mozilla’s Firefox has its own list of 144 root authorities. Other browsers rely on a list supplied by the operating system manufacturers, which comes to 264 for Microsoft and 166 for Apple. Those root authorities can also certify secondary authorities, who can certify still more – all of which are equally trusted by the browser.
The list of trusted root authorities includes the United Arab Emirates-based Etilisat, a company which was caught last summer secretly uploading spyware onto 100,000 customers’ Blackberrys.
Soghoian says fake certificates would be a perfect mechanism for countries hoping to steal intellectual property from visiting business travelers. The researcher published a paper (.pdf) on the risks Wednesday, and promises he will soon release a Firefox add-on to notify users when a site’s certificate is issued from an authority in a different country than the last certificate the user’s browser accepted from the site.
EFF’s Schoen, along with fellow staff technologist Peter Eckersley and security expert Chris Palmer, want to take the solution further, using information from around the net so that browsers can eventually tell a user with certainty when they are being attacked by someone using a fake certificate. Currently browsers warn users when they encounter a certificate that doesn’t belong to a site, but many people simply click through the multiple warnings.
“The basic point is that in the status quo there is no double check and no accountability,” Schoen said. “So if Certificate Authorities are doing things that they shouldn’t, no one would know, no one would observe it. We think at the very least there needs to be a double check.”
EFF suggests a regime that relies on a second level of independent notaries to certify each certificate, or an automated mechanism to use anonymous Tor exit nodes to make sure the same certificate is being served from various locations on the internet – in case a user’s local ISP has been compromised, either by a criminal, or a government agency using something like Packet Forensics’ appliance.
One of the most interesting questions raised by Packet Forensics product is how often do governments use such technology and do Certificate Authorities comply. Christine Jones, the general counsel for GoDaddy – one of the net’s largest issuers of SSL certificates – says her company has never gotten such a request from a government in her 8 years at the company. ”I’ve read studies and heard speeches in academic circles that theorize that concept, but we never would issue a ‘fake’ SSL certificate,” Jones said, arguing that would violate the SSL auditing standards and put them at risk of losing their certification. “Theoretically it would work, but the thing is we get requests from law enforcement every day, and in entire time we have been doing this, we have never had a single instance where law enforcement asked us to do something inappropriate.”
VeriSign, the largest Certificate Authority, declined to comment.
Matt Blaze notes that domestic law enforcement can get many records, such as a person’s Amazon purchases, with a simple subpoena, while getting a fake SSL certificate would certainly involve a much higher burden of proof and technical hassles for the same data.
Intelligence agencies would find fake certificates more useful, he adds. If the NSA got a fake certificate for Gmail – which now uses SSL as the default for e-mail sessions in their entirety (not just their logins) – they could install one of Packet Forensics’ boxes surreptitiously at an ISP in, for example, Afghanistan, in order to read all the customer’s Gmail messages. Such an attack, though, could be detected with a little digging, and the NSA would never know if they’d been found out.
Despite the vulnerabilities, experts are pushing more sites to join Gmail in wrapping their entire sessions in SSL.
“I still lock my doors even though I know how to pick the lock,” Blaze said.
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Tags: acco, account, Agency, Alice, America, Anyone, appliance, attack, authenticity, authority, bank, bank of america, being, Bob, browser, case, certificate, certificate authorities, check, China, Chris Palmer, Chris Soghoian, com, communication, community, company, computer, computer science professor, confidence, convention, copy, Court, domain, e mail account, eBay, eff, encryption, enforcement, existence, expert, feds, Firefox, forensics, Gmail, government, ility, information, Intelligence, intelligence community, intercept, Internet, ISP, law, leap, list, lock, Mallory, man in the middle attack, Matt Blaze, mechanism, money, Mozilla, need, new man, order, Packet, PayPal, Pennsylvania, Peter Eckersley, point, Private Networks, Product, professor, Ray Saulino, researcher, root, Science, secure website, security, security certificates, sense, server, Seth Schoen, site, SSL, staff, technologist, Tor, traffic, United Arab Emirates, University, university of pennsylvania, user, vulnerability, Washington, way, Web, website, window, year
If you sum up the total unique user sessions in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, and Jan 2010, you get
Jan 2008 – 285M
Jan 2009 – 337M
Jan 2010 – 413M
That is a year-over-year increase of 18% and 23% respectively. Assuming the population of the world does not change that much year to year, the change in total unique sessions leads to the conclusion that online usage continues to increase noticeably.
The Compete.com chart below shows nearly identical number if unique users monthly — Google at 148M uniques and Yahoo at 132M uniques. And Facebook alone achieved another 134M uniques. So while the unique visitors across these 3 sites are not mutually exclusive, there are 414M unique user sessions in the month of January 2010

Well, this is strange. January 2010 numbers from Nielsen reveal Google has 66.3% of the search market, while Yahoo has 14.5% and Microsoft has 10.9% across its various properties. Google is 4x more than Yahoo and 6x more than Microsoft.

Tags: 6x, Change, chart, com, Compete, conclusion, Facebook, google, increase, January, M
Jan, market, microsoft, month, month of january, Nielsen, number, online, population, population of the world, search, search market, sessions, sum, unique visitors, usage, user, World, Yahoo, year
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/BrVXM_LnhYs/the-nexus-ones-3g-problem-pt-ii-the-damning-data
Google’s Nexus One support forums have been flooded with anecdotes about the phone’s poor 3G connectivity, so one user decided to follow up with some reasonably scientific tests. The conclusion? The Nexus One is kind of terrible at basic cellphonery!
The test was simple and limited, consisting of one dude, user WV, wandering in and out of his house, recording signal strength as measured in dBm and ASU with Android’s built-in metering app. Assuming the Nexus One is supposed to work like a normal cellphones—that is, it connects to 3G networks when they’re available and EDGE only when they’re not—something’s wrong.
![The Damning Data [Nexus One] 500x screencap 2010 01 11 at 9.07.03 am The Damning Data [Nexus One]](http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2010/01/500x_screencap_2010-01-11_at_9.07.03_am.jpg)
Since the phone is obviously finding and receiving the cellular signals just fine, but not handling them as you’d expect, randomly flipping between the two—and evidently preferring EDGE most of the time—no matter how strong its signal is. This points to a software issue, not a hardware issue. That, and this:
OK. I found “Phone Info” screen through “Any Cut”. This looks like a screen not intended for average users. It clearly has settings that should not be messed with. However, it does have a pull down menu that was set to “WCDMA Preferred”. I changed this to “WCDMA Only”. The phone reset, and never a! gain saw the f’ing “E” on the signal indicator- ALL 3G. After about 1/2 hour of speed tests (150k – 800kbps) and google satellite map downloads (all definitely faster), I switched back to “WCDMA Preferred”. Guess what? After a few minutes, I was back on EDGE, even with a good signal. Switched back to “WCDMA Only”, and 3G it remains.
This doesn’t fully solve the problem, because as WV notes, if you fall out of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage area with EDGE disabled, you’re basically boned. But anyway, yes, this appears to be a software bug. Or, if you’re feeling conspiratorial today, like WV, a software feature:
My concern is whether T-mobile is being sneaky about this and purposefully dumbing down the 3G to Edge to reduce cell frequency congestion and/or their back-end network congestion.
I’m not sure I want to draw that nexus (haw?) quite yet, since the issue was first brought to light by comparing the Nexus One’s 3G/EDGE handling to other T-Mobile 3G Android handsets, and those, despite having the same data-sucking potential as the Google Phone, haven’t been throttled in any way. While Google and T-Mobile say they’re “investigating,” the evidence keeps mounting and the question looms larger: what’s really wrong with the Nexus One’s 3G? [Google Nexus One Support Forums]
![The Damning Data [Nexus One] The Damning Data [Nexus One]](http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_pqdH-r0WOb0Ejh4fRJAWi12ffg/0/di)
![The Damning Data [Nexus One] The Damning Data [Nexus One]](http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_pqdH-r0WOb0Ejh4fRJAWi12ffg/1/di)
Tags: 3g coverage area, All, android, anecdotes, app, area, ASU, cellphonery, Cellphones, cellular signals, conclusion, congestion, connectivity, coverage, dBm, dude, EDGE, fine, G Android, G. After, Gain, gawker, google, Guess, hardware, hardware issue, hour, house, indicator, info, issue, kind, map, matter, mdash, menu, Nexus, phone, Preferred, problem, pull, pull down menu, recording, reset, satellite, satellite map, screen, signal, signal strength, software, software bug, software feature, software issue, something, speed, speed tests, strength, support, Switched, T-Mobile, test, time, user, WCDMA, wrong
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9r_RubN-Bbk/youre-saving-the-economy-average-gadget-spending-up-from-160-to-190
Believe it or not, that’s what the latest data shows: The economy is bouncing back, or at least, retail spending is. The trend is clear especially in electronics, where spending has skyrocketed from a little above $160 to almost $190.
That figure is the average spending per user, post-Black friday. The main winners were Best Buy—with a 18.3% year-over-year growth—and Fry’s—with a 12.2%. No only that but, spending in the high end retail has also increased, reverting a negative trend.
Great. Now all those people without a single penny in the bank will be able to be rejoice. [Mint]



Tags: bank, bbk, Believe, best buy, Black, black friday, data, economy, end, figure, friday, Fry, gadget, gawker, Great, growth, mdash, Mint, negative trend, penny, post, retail, retail spending, spending, trend, user