British firm offered spying software to Egyptian regime – documents

Gamma International's Finfisher program would have enabled government spies to monitor activists and censor websites

Egyptian anti-government bloggers work on their laptops from Cairo's Tahrir Square on February 10, 2011 Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

A British company offered to sell a program to the Egyptian security services that experts say could infect computers, hack into web-based email and communications tools such as Skype and even take control of other groups' systems remotely, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
Two Egyptian human rights activists found the documents amid hundreds of batons and torture equipment when they broke into the headquarters of the regime's State Security Investigations service (SSI) last month.
One of the papers, in English and headed Finfisher Proposal: Commercial Offer, contained an offer dated 29 June 2010 to provide "FinSpy" software, hardware, installation and training to the SSI for €287,000 (£255,000). The name on the invoice, dated Tuesday 29 June 2010, was Gamma International UK Limited.
Other documents, written in Arabic and marked "ultimately confidential", state that after being offered a "free trial version" of Gamma's Finfisher software to test its ability to hack into email accounts, the SSI concluded it was "a high-level security system" that could get into email accounts of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, as well as allowing "full control" of the computers of "targeted elements". It went on to describe the software's "success in breaking through personal accounts on Skype network, which is considered the most secure method of communication used by members of the elements of the harmful activity because it is encrypted".
The find throws a spotlight on western companies that provide software to security services and agents of oppressive regimes to spy on, censor and block the websites with which activists communicate. Last month a report by OpenNet Initiative said nine countries across the Middle East and North Africa used US and Canadian technology to impede access to online content, including sites with political, social and religious material.
Mostafa Hussein, a Cairo blogger and physician who took the documents, said they formed important evidence against the SSI's activities. "This proposal was sent to a department well known for torture, for abuse of human rights, for spying on political campaigners. This company, Gamma, should be exposed as collaborators in the crimes of trying to invade our privacy and arrest activists."
Hussein posted the documents online and passed a copy to the Guardian.
A Gamma International website called "Finfisher IT Intrusion" describes its software as allowing "remote monitoring and infection" that can provide "full access to stored information with the ability to take control of the target". It is advertised as capable of "capturing encrypted data and communications" and allowing a "government agency to remotely infect target systems".
The documents found in the SSI HQ, one dated 1 January 2011, said that the proposal from Gamma International had come via a subsidiary company, Modern Communications System. Following a "free" five-month trial, SSI described the software as like "planting a comprehensive spying system in the location where the targeted computer exists". The software could record voice and audio calls, movements through video and audio where the computer was located, and hack into all the computers in the same network.
Rick Ferguson, of internet security company Trend Micro, said: "Our position on commercial spyware is that if the monitoring is being done without the consent of the person being monitored then that would be the theft of information.
"There's certainly an ambiguity of selling that kid of technology to that type of regime. There are a lot of commercial tools to enable you to remotely monitor and manage computers but it's about how those tools are being used and whether those tools are being used covertly."
Amr Gharbeia, an activist who works at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said the Finfisher software referred to in the proposal was "a trojan, a software you implant in someone else's device to control it and possibly get data from it. It puts you in the driver's seat so you can see someone else's email and allows also for identity fraud."
When contacted by the Guardian, Gamma International said in a statement: "Gamma International UK Limited manufactures equipment for dealing with security related threats and it supplies only to governments.
"Gamma International UK Limited has not supplied any of its Finfisher suite of products or related training etc to the Egyptian government."
Gamma said it "complies, in all its dealings, with all relevant UK legislation and regulation".
• This article was amended on 30 April 2011 to correct the spelling of Gamma International in the standfirst.

GUARDIAN

android vs iOs the hard equation

 Left, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller introduces the iPhone 5 on Sept. 12, 2012. Samsung CEO J.K. Shin

brandishes two Galaxy S4 phones at the product launch on March 14, 20

Who’s winning the mobile platform wars, Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android
It’s one of the blogosphere’s favorite tech topics. Every new nugget of competitive information is fodder for an avalanche of coverage. Oftentimes, a story will declare that Android is beating iOS or that iOS is beating Android.
Really, though, it’s silly to obsess over any one data point. If what you’re after is a clear idea of how the world’s two dominant mobile operating systems are doing — rather than an excuse to make bold proclamations and/or cheer for your favorite — you want to consider lots of data points.
So that’s what I’m doing in this post. I’ve rustled up results from a bunch of studies, focusing on information that’s relatively fresh. (In some cases, it dates from the fourth quarter of 2012 — stats for the first quarter of this year are still scarce.)
A few notes on this exercise:
I’m not really going to look at changes over time. Trajectories are important, but there’s a limit to how much I can do in one story.
I won’t do deep analysis of why the numbers look the way they do. I’m collecting rather than interpreting, though I hope that some of you will draw conclusions in the comments.
I’m not going to include specific numbers for anything other than iOS and Android. Sorry, Windows Phone and BlackBerry — I’ll come back to you and how you’re doing at some point, I promise.
I won’t include forecasts and other predictions. I don’t believe in ‘em.
I’m not endorsing any of these studies. That’s dangerous unless you have a thorough knowledge of the methodology behind the numbers. Which I don’t.
Without any further ado, here are some key competitive questions, and the answers as provided by various research firms.

Which platform is selling the most smartphones?

In research conducted from mid-November through mid-February, Kantar Worldpanel Comtech showed sales of all Android phones outpacing the iPhone by a hefty margin: 52.1 percent to 43.5 percent. However, judging from past Kantar studies, these figures may be more of a freeze-frame of the competition at one particular point in time than a permanent reality: last year, Kantar had Android in the lead for a spell, and then it said that iOS had bounced back into first place.


Then there’s Comscore’s MobiLens study, which attempts to measure the smartphone platforms used by everyone in the U.S. over the age of 13 —  not just ones sold recently, but everything. The numbers it released this month are pretty similar to Kantar’s.

That’s the U.S. — how about everywhere else?

Worldwide, all those companies making Android phones sell a lot more units than Apple sells of the iPhone, says IDC. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Android had more than 70 percent share, vs. 21 percent for the iPhone.

And tablets?

Tablet shipment data is harder to come by than data for phones, and the most recent specific numbers by platform I could find were IDC’s full-year estimates for 2012, which it released on December 5 of last year. They had demand for 7″ Android tablets adding up to a decrease in the iPad’s dominance — but iOS still remained the most popular tablet operating system.

Which companies are selling the most smartphones?

Worldwide, according to IDC, Samsung — which deals primarily, but not exclusively in Android models — was the top manufacturer in the fourth quarter of last year, unit-wise. Apple was in second place.

In the U.S., however, Strategy Analytics says that Apple’s iPhone shipments outpaced Samsung. (Strategy Analytics says that its numbers are for “mobile phones,” so they may include plain ol’ flip phones as well as smartphones.)

Who’s making money selling smartphones?

As you might guess from the above two charts, Apple and Samsung are the ones raking in the bucks, says Canaccord Genuity. And Apple is raking in far more of them than Samsung, taking 72 percent of the profit in the last quarter of 2012. Samsung made 29 percent of the industry’s profit — mostly for Android phones, although it also has Windows Phone handsets. Everybody else in the business, including Android-centric makers such as HTC and Motorola, either broke even or lost money — which is why Apple and Samsung’s profits add up to more than 100 percent.

Which platform has the most apps?

After years of obsessing over the sheer quantity of apps available for these two platforms, the numbers seem to be similar, and similarly impressive, on both sides. Both Apple and Google currently claim more than 800,000 third-party programs for their respective platform.

What do the numbers look like for tablet-specific apps?

For iOS, Apple says there are more than 300,000 iPad-optimized programs. For Android: I wish I knew! As far as I know, Google hasn’t disclosed this number. But it’s safe to say that it remains piddling compared to Apple’s figure.

O.K., who has the best apps?

I hesitate to bring this up, because app quality is inherently subjective. But a company called uTest uses a system called Applause to crawl Apple’s App Store and Google’s Google Play, collecting user reviews and rankings. It then turns this data into scores from 1 to 100 for individual apps, and calculates average scores for each platform. In data published in a ReadWrite story in January, it said that the average iOS app, with a score of 68.5, is superior to the average Android app, at 63.3.

Which platform’s users are downloading the most apps?

According to Canalys, just over half of all apps downloaded in the first quarter of this year were for Android. iOS, at about 40 percent share, was the only other big-time player.

Who’s making money from app downloads?

According to Canalys’s data for the first quarter of this year, iOS users are spending much more on apps even if they’re downloading fewer of them overall.

Which platform gets used most on the Internet?

NetMarketShare publishes monthly stats on which browsers and operating systems are being used on the Net. Its report for March 2013 says that among mobile devices, iOS rules with 60.1 percent share. Android is way behind at 24.9 percent. Given that there are more Android devices out there, the data suggests that iOS users are disproportionately active online.
But here’s something weird: StatCounter, which does a similar study, comes up with numbers that are nothing like NetMarketShare’s. Its figures for March show Android usage easily outpacing iOS. Of course, the two organizations’ methodology may be radically different; I’m not sure, for instance, whether both, either or neither of them include the iPad in these numbers. But the disparity is a healthy reminder that it’s risky to draw conclusions from data you don’t know very much about.

Which platform is more widely used in business, iOS or Android?

A Citrix report covering the fourth quarter of 2012 comes as close to addressing this question as any recent study I’ve seen. It covers Citrix customers that “have deployed enterprise mobility management in the cloud,” and shows iOS as trouncing Android and everything else.

So who is winning — iOS or Android?

You had to ask, huh?
On some level, it’s too crude a question to take very seriously. There are just too many ways to define “winning,” and neither platform leads in every area. But here’s the closest thing to an objective answer I can manage.
“Android if you’re talking about market share; iOS if you mean financial success. So far, this is a strikingly different market than the PC business back in the 1990s, when market share translated directly into financial success.”

http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/

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Hands-on with Articles for iPhone: Wikipedia in your palm

Articles for iPhone is a brand new Wikipedia client for the iPhone and iPod touch from Sophiestication Software, maker of the popular Groceries, and Coversutra for the Mac. The app feels a lot like something Apple would create, but does it offer enough to set itself apart in the already crowded space? We decided to find out.

Upon first launch, Articles is nearly indistinguishable from mobile Safari. If it weren’t for the gray search and tool bars, you might think you accidentally activated the wrong application. The app is simple to use, and anyone who has used mobile Safari should have no issues. Articles allows a user to search any of the different language variants of Wikipedia and switch between languages without opening any preferences. A choice is given between searching article content or article titles. You can also search either of those options with realtime search suggestions—impressive, considering there are more than 3 million articles in the English version of Wikipedia.

The software makes compromises in the way that entries are displayed, but these are largely due to the screen size of the device. In particular, we're talking about the way information is commonly displayed on the right hand side of a Wikipedia article page (typically classifications in scientific articles, or birth and death dates in biographies). In Articles, you can access this by touching the information icon, which generally appears under the first image. This loads a secondary screen with the same information you would find on the main Wikipedia page. All the info is formatted in a manner that is attractive and easy to read. The developer cited the lack of a solution with attractive article layout, including the Wikipedia mobile site, as a major reason as to why they pursued this project.

Scrolling through an article isn’t the smoothest experience, but you won't find any blank checkerboard patterns like the ones that constantly appear in mobile Safari. I'll take some less-than-perfect scrolling if it means the information is already loaded and displayed when I do scroll. Articles seem to load a bit slow over WiFi, which I initially assumed was due to the whole page rendering before display, but I'm told that there should be no real difference between the performance of Articles and that of the mobile Wikipedia site in Safari.

For those of you who like to peruse Wikipedia in bed, there is an orientation lock inside the app. The implementation works as you might expect, but turning it on and off isn’t a simple preference. Instead, Articles borrows a page from the Tweetie 2 "refresh timeline" mechanism. To lock the screen orientation, just pull down on the text until the dialog says you have locked or unlocked the screen.

As mentioned earlier, the toolbar at the bottom of the app is identical to the one in mobile Safari, though it does hold some pleasant surprises. The forward and back arrows do what you would expect, while the add button allows you to bookmark an article inside of Articles or mail the link of the article using the device's built-in mail application. Upon touching the open book icon, Articles reveals that it has its own bookmark organization functionality. Here, users can view their article history and organize bookmarks into folders.

The coolest feature is probably "Nearby," which also lives inside of the bookmark screen. Nearby uses your current location and drops pins on a map all around it. Each of these pins represents a Wikipedia article about that particular location. The Nearby feature makes use of the geonames.net API and, although the pin dropping isn't fast, it is pretty cool. There are plans to add a feature in the future that adds a map link to see where certain article topics are on a map.

Finally, Articles has the same page functionality as Safari. I like to think of pages as mini-tabs like those in mobile Safari—you can open links in new pages, allowing you to dive deep into Wikipedia without losing your original place. This functionality was coded from scratch, because Apple doesn't open this feature to developers.

Articles is well made, well thought-out, and feels native. If Wikipedia is your thing, you could do much, much worse. At $2.99, it may be pricier than some alternatives, but the polish and the clever “Nearby” feature justify the price.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/03/review-articles-for-iphone-wikipedia-in-your-palm.ars

Using Facebook To Build Your Wedding Flower Business

You already have a FaceBook account so why not use it to make some money? Social networking is a great way to get the word out that you make the most beautiful wedding bouquets that your Friends have ever seen. Whether you are selling them on Etsy, EBay or just locally, FaceBook can put you in touch with people who want what you have got. You can sell items for free on FaceBook Marketplace.People are always needing things or services and if you find the right people they will want what you have! You can join groups that introduce you to people with similar interests; you might meet someone who is interested in selling your handmade wedding bouquets in their Bridal shop. Social networking can help you make the right connections that can get your talents noticed.What makes FaceBook so great is that your friends also have friends which creates a viral environment. You get introduced to their friends and they may know someone who needs what you have. Word of mouth is a great marketing tool and FaceBook can get the word out that you really make some great bouquets at a great price.You should also make a MySpace page because many people use it too. The concept is the same as FaceBook with a different delivery. Make sure that your pages on both sites portray the image that you want to project and be sure to post some pictures on your profile page so that people can easily see what you can do. Add your business contacts and past customers as friends so that you will have a group that is interested in your business and can vouch for you.After you have your page looking like you want it to, make sure to keep your pages up to date and acknowledge people who write on your wall. Occasionally bring up what you do to others but don’t hard sell or spam them or your friends may disappear.

http:www.articleszoom.com/using-facebook-to-build-your-wedding-flower-business///

Smart Software

One of the blogs that I read is “Right Wing Techie,” from the CEO of Stardock. I didn’t really expect to have much in common, except that he and I are both software entrepreneurs.
Over time, I noticed that our views were remarkably similar. We are both socially on the left and fiscally on the right, a view commonly described as libertarian, despite the fact that we may not actually identify with the Libertarian Party.
I wonder if the software community is more homogeneous than it appears. Although the software industry tends to split evenly into the Republican and Democratic camps, this is only because the common values and interests of the industry are not espoused entirely by either group.

http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/02/software_politi.html