Dan's New Blog

First it was Google. Back in January Steve Jobs called the Big G’s “Don’t Be Evil” corporate motto “bull****”. This was yet another episode in the two companies’ long and drawn-out parting of the ways. (Although a couple of months later Steve and Google CEO Eric Schmidt did meet publicly for coffee. Why do the pictures remind me of this?)

Today it was Adobe. Steve decided to “jot down some thoughts” about why Flash will never ever make it on Apple’s mobile devices:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short … New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Boom.

You have to hand it to Steve, though.  He’s all about equal-opportunity. You don’t have to be a big corporate competitor to get the Steve Jobs treatment — all you gotta do is “find” an iPhone and post it on the Web.

And I’ll take any victory whenever and wherever I can: Android has more U.S. Web traffic than the iPhone, according to AdMob.

Security-wise, people are the weakest link, viz:

ITEM 1: John Markoff reports that January’s Chinese Google hack began with one person who clicked when he/she oughtn’t:

“The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. By clicking on a link and connecting to a ‘poisoned’ Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.”

That software, called Gaia, only controls signons to a range of Google services from Gmail to Docs.

ITEM 2: Back in March, Apple software engineer Gray Powell lost a prototype of the next-gen iPhone in a bar not too far from the Apple campus. He was field-testing the device, which was camouflaged to look like your basic, garden-variety iPhone. The phone eventually wound up in the hands of Gizmodo’s Jason Chen — for a mere $5,000 — who publicly dissected it, according to the NY Times, “as if it were an alien from another planet”. Apple politely but firmly asked for it back.

From what I have read about Apple’s security-obsessed culture, right now it sucks to be Gray Powell.

UPDATE, April 27: The authorities have gotten involved.

From today’s iPhone OS4 media event: iPhone OS4, due out this summer (iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd gen only) will feature multi-tasking (more or less) and iBooks.

There, I’m done.

They’re falling like dominoes at the annual Pwn2own event this year in Vancouver. Some really smart scary guys have managed to hijack Windows 7 PCs via Firefox and IE8 (snort) and a MacBook using Safari. Two of ‘em even hacked an iPhone and downloaded its database of SMS messages. (Yoikes!)

Google Chrome is the last browser standing. It’s not perfect, but has proved once again much harder to exploit. Having said that, I do agree with PC World’s article, Security Lessons Learned from Pwn2Own Contest:

“… the browser is the new Achilles heel of security regardless of the hardware or software platform.”

UPDATE, March 26: Nobody even tried to hack Chrome on day 2 of Pwn2own.

Here’s the good news: the Droid took off faster than the iPhone. What I mean to say is that it took the iPhone 74 days after it hit the streets in June 2007 to reach 1 million units sold. Droid sales over the first 74 days of its life were 1.05 million units. Congrats!

Now about the other thing. Um, the Nexus One appears to be a bust — only 135,000 sold in the first 74 days.

Link via Flurry.

Web Domains

Today’s the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration. And no, the registrant wasn’t IBM (March 19, 1986), Apple (February 19, 1987) or even Microsoft (May 2, 1991). It was Boston-area AI firm Symbolics.

According to Wired, only 5 domains were registered in 1985. Once the Web was invented, domain registrations skyrocketed. And a mere 22 years later icanhascheezburger.com was born.

Fandango Mobile Tickets

Airlines have been testing cellphone-based paperless tickets for a couple of years now. Now Fandango’s testing mobile movie tickets in 8 U.S. markets — all of ‘em *not* Philly, btw. (What’s so special about Houston? They were the first city in which mobile airline boarding passes were tested. Now they’re in the first Fandango test group. Sheesh.)

Google vs. Apple

The NY Times gives us a good overview of the deteriorating relationship between Apple and Google. The following quote …

“It’s World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry. This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It’s incendiary.”

… pretty much sums up the tone of the piece. (So does the URL for the story: 14brawl.html.) Anyway, it’s all about the mobile market.

Google vs. China

Not content with merely taking on a company that qualifies as a small country, the Big G has also decided to take on #3 on the world list. I refer to China. After calling them out on spying charges back in January, Google is real close to deciding to pull the plug on Google.cn. That means Chinese users who manage to circumvent the Great Firewall will get unfiltered content. And that makes the Chinese authorities real twitchy.

That’s for the wifi model. The 3G version will hit the street by the end of April. You don’t actually have to camp out at the Apple store — you can preorder online staring March 12.

As I said when the Kindle launched, the iPad doesn’t make economic sense to me. That said, I’d never refuse one if it were offered to me.

Link via NYT.

Last August Mr. Macy (Eric Schmidt of Google) and Mr. Gimbel (Apple’s Steve Jobs) had to part ways. It was ostensibly for antitrust reasons — the 2 competing companies had common board members, including Schmidt himself. Today we found out another reason: Apple has filed suit against mobile handset maker HTC (JC Penny?), who just happens to make many of the Android-based phones that Google’s so fond of.

I’m not thinking Macy’s is gonna want to send customers to Gimbels the way they did before.

MobileCrunch reports that Google claims 60,000 Android handsets are shipped each day. That comes out to 5.4 million devices per quarter (vs. 8.7 million iPhones last quarter).

I’m a happy Android user, but I have to admit that my daughter’s iPhone has a better soft keyboard.