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Sony, hoping to increase sales ahead of the holiday shopping season, has slimmed down its electronic readers and also given them touchscreens.
The three new versions of its “Reader” line also feature an improved screen with better clarity, the manufacturer said on Wednesday.

Sony was first to the market with its Reader in 2006 but has struggled to keep up with rival Amazon.com.

In July, Amazon undercut competitors by offering a £89 wireless Kindle. The crowded e-reader market also includes traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble and electronics giant Apple, whose fast-selling iPad device has e-reader functions.

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit, said the touchscreen was one of the top requests made by consumers, who are willing to pay more for extra functionality.

“Lowering prices to get cheaper and cheaper – that’s not our direction,” Haber said in an interview. “Our plan is not to race to the bottom.”

Haber said the company expected to sell more of its lower-cost pocket version last holiday season, but sales of its higher-priced touchscreen version outsold the cheaper one.

“People stepped up and spent another £66 to buy touchscreen capabilities,” he said.

Sony cut the prices of its last generation of e-readers in July. Prices on the new versions are lower than their predecessors when first launched.

The new pocket version Reader retails for about £125. Sony’s larger 6-inch screen version, which allows for extra memory, costs £149. Users of these two devices must plug in to a computer when it comes time to download content. Both are available immediately.

Sony is also offering a £199 “Daily Edition,” which, like the Kindle, is wireless. It has 3G and a larger screen. The Daily Edition rolls out in November.

Haber said overall sales of its readers are growing at three or four times last year’s levels.

Sony said it is also offering dictionaries in its new Readers and has been adding titles to its e-book store.

It plans to include reader reviews through an integration with social network site GoodReads, and will launch applications later in the year to interface with Apple’s iPhone and Android-based smartphones from Google Inc.

More than 3 million doctors have downloaded a 59p application – invented by Prof Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London – which turns an Apple iPhone into a stethoscope.
Last week Professor Bentley introduced a free version of the app, which is being downloaded by more than 500 users a day.

Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise.

“Everybody is very excited about the potential of the adoption of mobile phone technology into the medical workplace, and rightly so,” said Bentley, who initially developed the app “as a fun toy”.

“Smartphones are incredibly powerful devices packed full of sensors, cameras, high-quality microphones with amazing displays,” he said. “They are capable of saving lives, saving money and improving healthcare in a dramatic fashion – and we carry these massively powerful computers in our pockets.”

Bentley’s iStethoscope Pro application is not the only mobile phone programme lightening doctors’ bags and transforming their practices: there are nearly 6,000 applications related to health in the Apple App Store.

The uptake has been rapid. In late 2009, two-thirds of doctors and 42% of the public were using smartphones – in effect inexpensive handheld computers – for personal and professional reasons. More than 80% of doctors said they expected to own a smartphone by 2012.

However, experts say they are being prevented from exploiting the technology’s opportunities. Bentley says that he is unable to launch a new range of applications because of out-of-date regulations.

“It’s much easier to develop technology than it is to get permission to use it,” he said. “I could create a mobile ultrasound scanner and an application to measure the oxygen content in blood, but the regulations stop me. We’re not allowed to turn the phone itself into a medical device, and what that precisely means is currently a grey area in terms of regulation. That’s the only reason we’re not seeing a flood of these devices yet.”

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – the government body with responsibility for standards of safety, quality and performance in healthcare – recently set up the Medical Device Technology Forum, a group of industry representatives, regulators, users and scientists, to help establish how to regulate novel technologies.

European regulators are also striving to bring their guidelines up to date. A group of regulators from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden and the UK was set up last December to develop guidance for software under the European Medical Device Regulations. They are expected to report at the end of the year.

Playboy, the adult magazine run by Hugh Heffner, has agreed to remove all adult content from its iPad app in order to avoid breaching Apple’s strict content rules.
Anyone paying £3.20 for the digital version of the magazine will have to do without the explicit photo spreads that titillated generations.

The Playmate of the Month, one of the magazine’s most popular photo features, will only appear on the iPad as a tasteful headshot.

Playboy agreed to censor its content in order to secure a place in the App Store, from which any software which Apple considers “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory” is banned.

While Playboy has long trumpeted the strength of its journalism – “I only read it for the articles” is the standard response of men caught with a copy of the magazine by their partners – many iPad users have expressed frustration at the self-censorship.

Apple is almost unique in the technology industry for taking an active stance against pornography. In April Steve Jobs, the chief executive, wrote to a customer who complained about Apple’s self-appointed role as moral arbiter to insist that “we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.”

Android Market, the Google run App Store rival, does not ban adult content.

While the vast majority of malicious programs are designed to attack Windows PCs, there is evidence that some hi-tech criminals are starting to turn their attention to smartphones.
Booby trapped applications for smartphones have been found online and in recent weeks Apple and Google have removed applications from their online stores over fears that they were malicious.

Chris Wysopal, co-founder and technology head at security firm Veracode, which helped the BBC with its project to replicate the apps, said smartphones were now at the point the PC was in 1999.

At that time malicious programs were a nuisance. A decade on and they are big business, he said, with gangs of criminals churning out malware that tries to steal saleable information.

At that time home computers in the form of the BBC Micro, Vic 20 and Sinclair ZX machines were in vogue. The proud owner of a Vic 20 I spent hours laboriously copying line after line of code out of magazines to get games running.

The end result was a program that does not look great but gets the job done. The process has educated me about modern programming and put me on my guard about what goes on my phone.

Mobiles, he said, offered a potentially more tempting target to those criminals.

“Mobile phones are really personal devices,” said Mr Wysopal. “You might have one computer for a family but every family member has a personal device and it is with them all the time.”

Simeon Coney, a spokesman for mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile, said criminals were focused on handsets for one simple reason: money.

“In the PC domain the only way a criminal can generally take money from a user is by having them click on a web link, go to a website, purchase a product and enter their credit card details,” said Mr Coney.

“In a mobile network the device is intrinsically linked to a payment plan, to a user’s credit,” he said. Nothing happens on a mobile network, no call is made or text is sent, without money changing hands.

Criminals have tapped into that revenue stream by getting phone owners to dial or contact premium rate numbers. Now they are turning their attention to applications and the lucrative information they scoop up.

The App Genome project by mobile security firm Lookout was set up to map what applications produced for smartphones do. It tried to find out if they do everything they claim and if they do more than expected.

The project has looked at 300,000 smartphone applications and mapped the internal functions of one-third of them.

It found that about one-third of applications it has studied seek to get at a user’s location and about 10% try to get at contact and address lists. The study also found that a significant proportion of applications included code copied and pasted from other programs.

To get a better understanding of the barriers to creating malicious programs the BBC downloaded a widely used application development kit, learned the basics of programming in Java and gathered some snippets of code already released on the net.

It was possible in a few weeks to put together a crude game that also, out of sight, gathered contacts, copied text messages, logged the phone’s location and sent it to a specially set up e-mail address.

The spyware took up about 250 lines of the 1500 making up the entire program. The code was downloaded to a single handset but was not put on an application store.

All of the information-stealing elements of the spyware program were legitimate functions turned to a nefarious use.

“That’s kind of the scary thing,” said Mr Wysopal from Veracode. “The face of the application, be it a game or a simple application that is for fun, can have behaviour that is not visible at the surface.”

It’s way less effort to hack into someone else’s application, as you do not have to write it yourself”

By contrast, he said, stealing a popular application, packing it with booby-trapped code and offering it for free can reap rewards.

Some application makers have found that 97% of the people using their software are doing so via pirated versions.

Application stores are making efforts to police the programs they offer. So far the number of booby-trapped applications remains low. But many feel the threat is only likely to grow.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10912376

German security statement warns iPhone and iPad users to visit only trustworthy websites and avoid PDFs until Apple releases fix.
Several Apple devices including the iPhone and iPad have two critical security weaknesses for which no patch exists, the German government warned yesterday.

Users of Apple mobile devices should only use websites they deem trustworthy and refrain from opening PDF files until Apple releases a fix, Germany’s federal office for information security said.

“This allows potential attackers access to the complete system, including administrator rights,” the statement warned. “It has to be expected that hackers will soon use the weak spots for attacks.”

Apple said it is investigating reports of vulnerabilities affecting the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone.

The potential security flaw concerns the mobile internet browser Safari, and the way it opens PDF files in Apple’s iOS software. The vulnerability arose over the weekend when US-based hackers launched JailbreakMe, a browser-based service that can unlock Apple devices from restrictions imposed by the manufacturer.

Early reports suggest this system – last week ruled legal in the US, despite opposition from Apple – exploits the same shortcomings highlighted by the German government. The launch of JailbreakMe brought extensive attention to the vulnerability which security experts warn could be exploited for crime.

The warning relates to iPhones using iOS versions 3.1.2-4.0.1, iPads using iOS 3.2-3.2.1 and the iPod Touch using iOS 3.1.2-4.0, though the German federal office said older versions of the mobile operating system could possibly be affected.

There are now more than five billion connections worldwide which means there are more than three times as many phones as personal computers.
More than a billion mobile phone connections have been added to the global tally in just 18 months, according to Wireless Intelligence.

In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, where there is more than one connection per person in the country.

The four billion connections mark was surpassed at the end of 2008, and analysts at Wireless Intelligence predict six billion connections worldwide by the middle of 2012.

The Asia-Pacific region including India and China is the main source of growth, accounting for 47% of of global mobile connections at the end of June 2010, according to the firm.

“This device has become part of the fabric of society, whether a teenage girl taking a Blackberry to bed with her, or a farmer in an African village trying to find out the latest crop prices.”

He added that more than 10 billion phones have been sold worldwide since 1994, with market giant Nokia selling 3.4 billion alone.

“This means that there are 5 billion phones sitting in people’s bottom drawers somewhere,” he said.

In western Europe, mobile phone penetration has reached 130%, which Mr Wood attributed in part to mobile phone operators including in their statistics connections that have been dormant for many months.

“But often people have more than one phone, a home phone and a work phone,” he said.

“The growth of connected devices will also drive this phenomenon, a laptop with a USB dongle, the Apple iPad, and so on.

In rapidly developing eastern Europe, overall penetration is not far behind western Europe, at 123%, according to Wireless Intelligence.

Users and criminals using the Apple iPhone are unwittingly providing police with a wealth of information that could be used against them.
As the communications device grows in popularity, technology experts and US law enforcement agencies are devoting increasing efforts to understanding their potential for forensics investigators.

While police have tracked criminals by locating their position via conventional mobile phone towers, iPhones offer far more information, say experts.

“There are a lot of security issues in the design of the iPhone that lend themselves to retaining more personal information than any other device,” said Jonathan Zdziarski, a former computer hacker who now teaches US law enforcers how to retrieve data from mobile phones.

These devices organise people’s lives and, if you’re doing something criminal, something about it is going to go through that phone.

Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones since the product was launched in 2007.

Mr Zdziarski told The Daily Telegraph he suspected that security had been neglected on the iPhone as it had been intended as a consumer product rather than a business one like rivals such as the Blackberry.

An example was the iPhone’s keyboard logging cache, which was designed to correct spelling but meant that an expert could retrieve anything typed on the keyboard over the past three to 12 months, he said.

In addition, every time an iPhone’s internal mapping system is closed down, the device snaps a screenshot of the phone’s last position and stores it.

Investigators could access “several hundred” such images from the iPhone and so establish its user’s whereabouts at certain times, he said.

In a further design feature that can also help detectives, iPhone photos include so-called “geotags” so that, if posted online, they indicate precisely where a picture was taken and the serial number of the phone that took it.

“Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone,” a mobile phone researcher for US Customs and Border Protection told the Detroit Free Press.

“It may look like everything’s gone but for anybody who’s got a clue, retrieving that information is easy.”

Apple has banned a Vietnamese developer from its app store after he was implicated in fraudulently pushing his titles to their best sellers list.
According to Apple, Thuat Nguyen hacked around 400 iTunes accounts, in order to use their credit card details to boost sales of his comic book apps.

Apple said it had tightened its security as a result of the hack, but it has put fraudulent activity on iTunes into the spotlight.

At one point Mr Nguyen’s apps occupied 42 of the top 50 book apps sold.

In a statement Apple said that the developer and his apps have been removed from the iTunes store “for violating the developer Program License Agreement including fraudulent purchase patterns”.

“The iTunes servers were not compromised. An extremely small percentage of users, 400 of the 150 million iTunes users, were impacted,” it said.

It recommended that people worried that their credit card had been stolen should contact their financial institution and change their account password.

It will now ask users to enter their credit card security code more frequently when making purchases on iTunes.

It is not the first time that users have complained about their iTunes accounts being hacked but it is one of the first that an app bought using compromised accounts has dominated the charts.

Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer of security firm Imperva, believes this was Mr Nguyen’s biggest mistake.

“It was probably a bogus book and it was just a way to take money from one account and put it in another. If he had kept it out of the top 50 the scam may never have been detected,” he said.

“We are seeing a trend for hackers targetting accounts such as iTunes, online poker accounts. You can monetise this kind of account very quickly,” he said.

It is likely the details of iTunes accounts were acquired via a phishing attack or from other compromised accounts such as web mail, said Mr Shulman.

Apple says a fault on its new iPhone 4 is causing it to incorrectly display the phone’s signal- which itself is meeting criticism.
Users who gripped the phone – which went on sale on 24 June – on the lower left-hand side noticed the signal strength and reception fell away.

Apple says the problem relates to an error on how the signal bars are displayed, rather than the signal.

However, some industry experts say that there may be a deeper signal problem than a cosmetic design flaw.

Apple is promising a patch fix “within a few weeks”. Users may also choose to get a full refund within 30 days of purchase, the firm has said.

The theory now is that, once the patch update has been applied, iPhone’s bars will report signal strength “far more accurately” providing users a better indication of the reception in a given area.

“HTC makes metal phones, but they seem to work just fine. Changing the display may make some people feel better, but it doesn’t really fix the problem,” he added.

Apple said the new software to fix this would be released in a few weeks, claiming that as the problem also existed in the original iPhone, it would also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

However, there have been few – if any – complaints about older iPhones losing signal strength when held in a certain way.

Apple’s previous advice for iPhone 4 owners to overcome the problem of the device losing signal was to not place your hand on the lower left corner.

This latest approach is an unusual admission from the company, which has apologised for “any anxiety we may have caused”.

Many new owners reported that signal strength dropped when the phone was held. The casing of Apple’s latest phone is made of stainless steel, and also serves as its antenna.

The problem is thought to be particularly acute for left-handed owners who naturally touch the phone in the sensitive area.

The Apple iPhone, one of the most popular mobile phones in Britain, is not safe from electronic snooping, government security experts have warned MPs.
Ministers in the Coalition have been told that they should not use iPhones for sensitive official communications.

Many ministers and advisers are devoted fans of the fashionable devices. But the touch-screen phones, used by about 4 million people in Britain, have not been approved by information security experts for use in Whitehall.

Whitehall departments have been advised not to issue iPhones to staff because of the risk that they might be vulnerable to hacking or other interference — a suggestion Apple denies.

Instead, ministers and staff have been advised to use BlackBerry devices and other approved phones.