Cody Taylor

MJackson writes “The Open Rights Group (ORG) has issued a public letter to the Chief Privacy Officers (or the nearest equivalent) for seven of the world’s largest website giants (including Microsoft and Google), asking them to boycott Phorm. The controversial Phorm system works with broadband ISPs to monitor what websites you visit for use in targeted advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has issued a new report slamming the UK government’s plans for a Communications Database. This would be designed to intercept and log every UK ISP user’s e-mail headers, website accesses and telephone history. The report warns that the public are often, ‘neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.'”

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via gizmodo

The iPhone and iPhone OS 3.0 will make a surprisingly competent medical assistant, blazing a healthy trail that all smartphones will surely follow soon.

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes.”

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Although the rules were relaxed each day to make hacking easier, the phones managed to withstand the few attempts that were made to “pwn” them — Internet-gamer slang meaning to conquer or gain ownership

A new survey says that a majority of respondents would avoid a hotel in the future if they had bad cell phone reception. And nearly half would make the same decision for office space, meeting facilities and even hospitals. Is bad cell phone reception driving away customers? What about a lack of Wi-Fi? I say yes.

Apple’s iPhone 3.0 OS and SDK promises much, except the ability to do more than one thing at a time.

theodp writes “While the universal remote has served humanity with distinction, its days are numbered, and your smartphone is to blame. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there’s probably a solution using your phone. Try as it might, the universal remote simply can’t navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can — it’s a lot easier to put the remote’s abilities in the smartphone than vice versa.”

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The beta version is still slow and has a ways to go before it can compete with Apple’s iPhone-ized Safari browser, but these are forgivable shortcomings, given its beta status.No, the real problem with Fennec is that it’s available only for one platform: Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet. Who cares about that device?

By Nicholas Kolakowski Palm has a lot of prestige and funds riding on the success of the Palm Pre smartphone. Advance buzz for the device has reached a fever pitch, but in the face of such enormous expectations, not to mention competition from the …