Happy 5th Birthday, Android!!!

Five years ago today, November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance announced their goal of creating a new software platform for mobile devices - including an operating system, middleware, and applications - that would enhance the user experience (for those of us who remember, until then getting a tooth drilled out was about as much fun as using a mobile phone).  The name for the operating system was... wait for it... Android!!!  Yeah - welcome to the world, you cute, green robot!!!

Just shy of a year later, September  23, 2008 to be exact, the first Android devices appeared on the market.  Approximately 700,000 Androids sold from September to December of 2008.  The next two years, you grew up, as the number of Android sold increased an order of magnitude every year, until by the end of 2010 over 78.8 million Android devices had been sold worldwide.

But then, dear Android, you really took off.  In 2011, 243.4 million Android devices sold worldwide, taking yourself from the position of cute underdog to solidly the Top Dog on the mobile market.  Last week, IDC released the numbers for third quarter, 2012.  And you know what?  You did it again, Android, taking 75% of the smart phone market.  That means of the 181.1 million phones shipped from July 1, 2012 to September 30, 2012, 136 million were Android phones.  The runner-up was Apple iPhones, with a decent 15% of the market (26.9 million).

Overall, 658.8 million Android smart phones have sold from that fateful day in 2008 until now - over half a billion devices worldwide!

So congratulations, Android, on your rise to the top.  I hope the next five years are even more entertaining and fun that the past five years have been.

Footnote:  The Open Handset Alliance is made of 84 corporations and institutes related to mobile devices, from carriers to manufacturers to software companies.  Click here for a list of the members.

I got my data from IDC, the International Data Corporation.  The IDC tracks sales statistics to get an accurate picture of the worldwide marketplace.  I've included a tracker from IDC that graphically shows the dominance of Android over the smart phone market.  For more information, please read this article.

The Amazing Apple Maps App! (Not Really)

I am a Google person.  I own an Android phone, an Android pad, and my website is hosted by Google.  So I generally ignore announcements from Apple or news about Apple because they just don't apply to me.

According to Apple Maps, Berlin is actually in Antarctica.
From The Amazing iOS 6 Maps Tumblr Blog

But even I have heard about the very BIG mistake Apple made in iOS 6 with the introduction of their own, homegrown map application. In case you haven't heard, Apple Maps is more likely to lead you astray than to give you either an accurate map or accurate directions.  The maps are wrong in multiple ways that are more amusing then informative.  For instance, in the above picture, Berlin is listed in Antarctica.  But that's better than the fate of Mumbai and Gutenberg, which just don't exist anymore.

Here are some of my favorite mistakes:

Where's the bridge???

The Holy Ghost of Incurables, began in 1895, changed its name. Twice.

Apple Maps offers three routes from the green pin to the red pin.
Only none of the routes actually goes to the red pin.

I pulled all of these images from The Amazing iOS 6 Maps - but there are literally hundreds of more images.  If you visit the blog and listen very carefully, you can hear Google laughing.

Freaky Friday News

Homeland Security is using the threat of a zombie
apocalypse to spread information on how to
prepare for disasters.  Read the full story here.

When I began to write today's post, I realized that several bizarre news stories broke this week.  I tried to pick one that I liked or disliked the most to investigate and write about; then I decided I would tell you about all of them and let you pick which ones you want to learn more about.

First up is the worst way to propose marriage that I've ever hear of.  Alexey Bykov wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Irena Kolokov, but he also wanted to be sure she loved him.  So Alexey hired a film director, stunt men, a make-up artist, and other people, then he staged his own death.  Irena showed up to meet Alexey only to find a supposedly horrible car accident that killed her boyfriend.  Upon seeing his "dead" body, Irena burst into tears.  That's when Alexey recovered and proposed marriage.  Irena, first angry, actually agreed to marry Alexey.

The worst part?  Alexey told Orange News, "I wanted her to realise how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me."

Can you say, "Narcissistic sociopathic control freak"?

The second story rates as bizarre to me, partly because I live in the U.S. and not in Turkey, where women's rights basically don't exist.  A young woman, Nevin Yildirim, shot, killed, and beheaded an older man who raped and impregnated her.  This man, Nurettin Gider, was the 35 year-old husband to her husband's aunt.  You can read the details about the case here, because thinking about what Gider did makes my blood boil.  The reaction of the Turkish government also angers me; instead of giving this woman a medal and allowing her to abort the unwanted child, they put her in jail and are making her carry the baby to term.  But the government and societal norms are the reason this man got away with raping her for months; in Turkey, a rape victim is considered to be dishonorable, not the rapist.  If Nevin reported the rapist, chances are high that her family would stone her to death to restore honor to the family name.  And no one would punish Gider.

There are truly no words to describe how just messed up that situation is.

Moving on, the third story today is about conspiracies, the government, and hacking groups.  On September 3rd, the hackers AntiSec released a statement in which they attached a list of one million Apple UDIDs (unique device identifiers), stating that they got the information off an FBI laptop. Here's the original text:

1. During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by
2. Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action
3. Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the
4. AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files
5. were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of
6. "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS
7. devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device,
8. type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone
9. numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people
10. appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no
11. other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

 
Proving not to be anti-social, the hackers removed the personal information before distributing their version of the list, because they merely wanted to let people know that the government was collecting data.  Today, the FBI released a statement denying any knowledge of the theft, an action that AntiSec predicted would happen.

Who do you believe?

This story segues in the fourth story today.  AntiSec used a well-known Java security hole to access the FBI laptop; in fact, there are several well-known security holes in Java and several well-known programs that use these security holes to access and/or control people's computers.  Let's be honest, Oracle has been battling security holes for a long time.  Last year, they released a patch that fixed 21 security holes, that would be almost two dozen; a behavior that they repeated last week to fix day 0 security holes with Java 7.  You can read the current story of this saga at ZDNet, but security experts are advised people to disable Java in their web browsers.

The last story is either funnier or scarier, it depends on how much pancakes mean to you.  Last week, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FQMSP) announced that over 5,000 tons of maple syrup have been stolen from their warehouses.  The FQMSP fears that the thief or thieves took the syrup to sell, because the U.S. maple syrup industry had a bad year.

Holey syrup, Batman!  What a sticky situation!

That's all for now. Have a great weekend, and I'll be back on Monday with a post about a Chrome extension that makes password management easy.

The Battle Over Digital Content - Who Owns It?

I assume that you've heard the Big News this weekend; Bruce Willis is bringing a lawsuit against Apple for ownership of his music collection.  According to the terms of service, Apple retains ownership on everything and purchasing a song on iTunes merely allows the purchaser listening rights.

When I read about this, my first thought was, "Woohoo!  Go Bruce Willis!", because we need someone with the clout and the money to start the fight.  My second thought was about how much time and money I've put into buying digital content - books and music mostly - and wondering if I own the things I assume I own. Instead of worrying, I checked.

The answer saddens me.  According to the Amazon.com website, books and games sold for the Kindle do not belong to me because, and I quote, "Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider."  Basically, all the books on my Kindle that I assumed I own I don't really own.  They are merely "licensed " to me.

As for the music, I searched through several pages, and I think that I actually own the music.  Yeah, I think.

As for Barnes and Noble, I don't own a Nook, but I check out their website.  I could not find a clear answer, so I chatted with them.  Nook books are also "licensed for use" and not purchased.

Okay, I understand that people need to read the terms of service, but do you know how much time I put into  merely finding the terms of service for these sellers?  As for reading them, iTunes has multiple terms of service per country; Amazon has separate terms of service for each of their digital content offerings; I'm not even certain how many terms of service exist for Barnes and Noble since I read through a few before giving up and going the chat route to find my answer.

And it feels as though all three content providers are attempting to trick the buyers, because on all three websites to get this "licensed" content you press a button labeled "Buy" - even though you are not buying anything, unless you want to word smith their use of buy into license.  I can do that, but I still think it's wrong.

Am I the only one worried about this?  Or do you want to be able to buy and own books, regardless of format?