Adam's Atoms
iBats iPhone App Roundup
26/06/11 18:40
But today, after more than one year and nine months of on-and-off work, the iBats iPhone app is available in the App Store. The app went live in the App Store on June 22, 2010 and was followed by a good amount of news coverage, including:
On a Dark Knight… The batphone app that lets you capture creatures’ ultrasonic calls The Daily Mail
A smart way to save wildlife BBC Nature
Batphone app turns you into Batman TechRadar
Holy Batphone! New app identifies bats by sound California Watch
Scientists create ‘batphone’ app MSN Tech & Gadgets
Batphone App Will Record Ultrasonic Bat Sounds Discovery News
It will be exciting to see what’s ahead for iBats, and I look forward to continuing to help shape this application and help citizen scientists around the world.
What do Ashley Towns, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick have in common?
26/11/09 12:57
Earlier this month, jailbroken iPhones in Australia were hit with the first iPhone-based worm. The so-called Ikee worm changed the wallpaper on infected iPhones to a picture of Rick Astley below the text “ikee is never going to give you up”. This alternative form of Rickrolling [don’t worry, that’s a link to Wikipedia] was perpetrated by a 21-year old Australian hacker who goes by the name Ikee, but whose real name is Ashley Towns.
Towns stated that his motivation for releasing the worm in the wild was to point out the vulnerability of jalibroken iPhones running SSH with the default password unchanged. He urged owners of jailbroken iPhones to change the default password to avoid more dangerous attacks in the future based upon this same technique.
But that’s not the end of the story. News broke today that the 21-year-old author of this worm has now been hired by mogeneration, a company which describes itself as “Australia’s leading iPhone development company.” Reaction to this news has been decidedly negative, with people railing against the fact that Towns is now being rewarded for bad behavior in spite of the fact that he has been unapologetic about the damage caused by his worm and his violation of the “hacker ethic”.
I certainly do not condone Towns releasing his worm into the wild. Certainly he exposed a hole that owners of jailbroken iPhones should be glad to close. However, I am not upset by the fact that Towns has since landed a job doing iPhone development. I would hope that mogeneration is hiring him for his talents as a developer and not for the press that may result from his hiring. More importantly, however, I would much rather see creative and talented developers creating great new applications than wasting their time on malware. Hopefully Towns will do so now.
Reading about Towns reminds me of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who spent time in the 1970s using their own Blue boxes to make prank phone calls (including one to the Pope in Vatican City while pretending to be Henry Kissinger). Wozniak and Jobs of course went on to pioneer the personal computer and Wozniak continues to talk and write about his Blue box and other exploits. I’m also reminded of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker who served time in prison for hacking various computer systems over several years in the 1990s. Mitnick now operates his own security firm and is the author several of books on related topics.
Like Wozniak, Towns has not apologized for his acts. However, unlike Mitnick, Towns does not appear to be directly leveraging his experience with activity deemed criminal to make money. Hopefully we’ll see some positive things from Towns soon, though I do hope he simply fades into the sunset.
Towns stated that his motivation for releasing the worm in the wild was to point out the vulnerability of jalibroken iPhones running SSH with the default password unchanged. He urged owners of jailbroken iPhones to change the default password to avoid more dangerous attacks in the future based upon this same technique.
But that’s not the end of the story. News broke today that the 21-year-old author of this worm has now been hired by mogeneration, a company which describes itself as “Australia’s leading iPhone development company.” Reaction to this news has been decidedly negative, with people railing against the fact that Towns is now being rewarded for bad behavior in spite of the fact that he has been unapologetic about the damage caused by his worm and his violation of the “hacker ethic”.
I certainly do not condone Towns releasing his worm into the wild. Certainly he exposed a hole that owners of jailbroken iPhones should be glad to close. However, I am not upset by the fact that Towns has since landed a job doing iPhone development. I would hope that mogeneration is hiring him for his talents as a developer and not for the press that may result from his hiring. More importantly, however, I would much rather see creative and talented developers creating great new applications than wasting their time on malware. Hopefully Towns will do so now.
Reading about Towns reminds me of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who spent time in the 1970s using their own Blue boxes to make prank phone calls (including one to the Pope in Vatican City while pretending to be Henry Kissinger). Wozniak and Jobs of course went on to pioneer the personal computer and Wozniak continues to talk and write about his Blue box and other exploits. I’m also reminded of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker who served time in prison for hacking various computer systems over several years in the 1990s. Mitnick now operates his own security firm and is the author several of books on related topics.
Like Wozniak, Towns has not apologized for his acts. However, unlike Mitnick, Towns does not appear to be directly leveraging his experience with activity deemed criminal to make money. Hopefully we’ll see some positive things from Towns soon, though I do hope he simply fades into the sunset.
In Praise of Apple's App Store
12/11/09 10:21
It seems that everyone loves to bash Apple's App Store. The latest salvo comes from Joe Hewitt who until recently was the developer behind Facebook's iPhone application. Hewitt announced yesterday that another engineer is taking over development of Facebook's iPhone application so he can move on to a new project. Later in the day, TechCrunch posted that they had contacted Hewitt to learn more about his decision and that he indicated his decision to move away from the iPhone platform "had everything to do with Apple's policies" and he is "philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process." All of this follows Hewitt's blog post in August calling for the complete elimination of this very same review process.
Needless to say the Twitterverse went crazy spreading the news that yet another high-profile developer is abandoning Apple's platform. To adapt a line from Casey at the Bat: There is no joy in iPhone Developerville!
But I have to disagree. Let me make it very clear that the App Store is far from perfect. The review process certainly has to be improved, preferably eliminated, or at the very least made more transparent to developers. Given the large number of applications in the App Store, it's still really hard for customers to find the application they really want. Furthermore, the "rate-it-when-you-hate-it" rating process still absolutely has to be fixed.
All of that being said, I'll go on to say something it seems you don't hear from iPhone developers nowadays:
Needless to say the Twitterverse went crazy spreading the news that yet another high-profile developer is abandoning Apple's platform. To adapt a line from Casey at the Bat: There is no joy in iPhone Developerville!
But I have to disagree. Let me make it very clear that the App Store is far from perfect. The review process certainly has to be improved, preferably eliminated, or at the very least made more transparent to developers. Given the large number of applications in the App Store, it's still really hard for customers to find the application they really want. Furthermore, the "rate-it-when-you-hate-it" rating process still absolutely has to be fixed.
All of that being said, I'll go on to say something it seems you don't hear from iPhone developers nowadays:
I love the App Store.
Why? The App Store is a wonderful ecosystem for developers to get their creations in the hands of customers. Developers are completely isolated from the overhead of managing a software distribution system, serving updates and running an eCommerce site which requires doling out server fees, bandwidth fees, credit card fees. While I would rather see more than 70% of the proceds from the sales of my application go in to my pocket, I would not be developing applications for a living if it weren't for the App Store. With the App Store, I can get my own applications in the hands of customers and work with clients to do the same for their apps. It's truly wonderful.
And I know I'm not the only developer who feels this way, but that won't get the attention of the technology press. Neither will stories about developers who make it through the App Store review process without a problem (yes, there are some who do!). That's not news that will sell ad space.
But the good news about all this bad news is that the problems are hopefully getting Apple's attention. I'm waiting for Apple to address all of these problems, but, until they do, there are still many things to love about being a resident in iPhone Developerville.