|
Operators
Blogroll Me!
Join Paul's mail list
|
|
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
|
|
|
|
Saturday, July 31, 2004
|
|
| |
@ Location privacy...
When teaching or discussing the principles and uses of location-based services, I am often asked about privacy and legal implications. I usually give anecdotal answers based on what I perceive to be operator approaches, which I assume to be best practise and legally valid. However, I did manage to track down the actual legal position in terms of rights to privacy enshrined within European Law.
Article 9 of the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive requires that location data may only be used with the consent of the subscriber. Moreover, it should remain possible for subscribers and users even if they have subscribed to a location based service, to temporarily block the tracing facility.
12:33:09 PM 
|
|
|
|
|
Thursday, April 29, 2004
|
|
| |
:: So much for interference in the cabin ::
"Image you fly in an aircraft - your secretary calls you on your mobile to tell you that your PowerPoint presentation was changed by your boss. You switch on your laptop, connect wirelessly to your company intranet, and download the file.
An illusion? Not in two years time.."
So says the Wireless Cabin project, a European consortium, which means GSM gets priority - quite rightly too, but not without WiFi and Bluetooth also included. Interesting stuff. No community WiFi though - hard nosed profit-making stuff licensed from operator partners who own the spectrum, even inside airplanes apparently.
12:42:09 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Sunday, August 03, 2003
|
|
| |
:: Mobile browsing security threats ::
Mobile users should be careful about responding to messages (i.e. WAP push) that take them to wap sites. They may just be fake.
In my forthcoming book, I've just started writing about securing HTTP and WAP connections. When I started thinking about the vulnerabilities of authentication, it occurred to me that mobile sites are perhaps a lot less safe then their desktop counterparts.
One way to gain a password from a user is to spoof a server. Pretend to be a particular website and then ask your users to log in. Voila! If they bite, then you have their username and password. This has been done on numerous occasions with famous websites and is an ongoing threat. In fact, regular users of sites like Ebay should learn to become vigilant against these types of spook attacks. With mobile sites it appears to be even easier.
Firstly, on most mobile browsers, to save real estate, the URL display box is not displayed, or there simply isn't one. This means a user typically has NO idea what website they are actually on in terms of its web address - surfing on mobile sites is sometimes an eerie experience, like walking in the dark. If a user is directed to a spoof website, they would have little or no idea.
Secondly, due to sparse interfaces, it takes little effort to mimic a mobile website, perhaps just by copying a logo at the top of the screen.
WAP push will soon start to become more widespread. It has been slow to catch on, but with the increasing number of picture-messaging phones, the necessary inclusion of the WAP browser means that more and more mobile users can access mobile sites, whether they know it or not. However, they don't need to know it to respond to a WAP push message - the phone itself will take care of accessing the embedded URL in the message if the user chooses to respond.
The other weakness is with the WAP push mechanism itself. It uses text messaging as the transport mechanism. With text messaging it is easy to change the sender's address in the message. In fact, many text-messaging bureaus offer this service to their bulk-messaging customers. This has some interesting and legitimate uses, but can also be malignant. It is easy to spoof the sender in order to make the message look legitimate, thus adding to the bait used to lure an unsuspecting user onto a spoof site.
Mobile users should be educated in the dangers of responding to WAP push messages.
1:23:19 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Sunday, June 22, 2003
|
|
| |
:: Usability ? ::
 Using the Vodafone Live service, I was sent a message that told me to switch my phone off and on again, as the menus needed to be updated. I did that. I then looked to see what had changed, but couldn't see anything obvious. There should have been an indication as to the new features, as the prospect of new things to do on the phone obviously gives one a sense of anticipation.
Anyhow, I had a surf around the Vodafone Live site and entered a link called "Messages" as I was curious what messages were being stored there. One further option was called "Vodafone Messenger", so I thought to try it, only to be delivered the message shown in the screen shot here. Interesting that I'm surfing the site as a registered Vodafone customer, able to interface with the site via WAP, but I'm required to go elsewhere (i.e. a PC) to register?? Seems a tiny bit odd to me. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation in the mind of someone at Voda.
10:27:29 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
|
|
|
|
Sunday, May 11, 2003
|
|
| |
:: Service creation platforms ::
The problem looming is that with all these different potential services - foneblogs, picture galleries, email etc, it would be a shame to have lots of different sites to access. Operator portals are an obvious place to coalesce these services and operators need to think about integration of 3rd party services at the portal level. In my mind, there is a product opportunity for someone to supply operators with a decent service-creation portal that can enable any combination of useful applications to be brought together on a targetted user-group level. Just like community sites like Ecademy site are built using Drupal (or something like Plone - cool if you like Python), wireless portals should be possible using a similar concept, but the difference would be a charging concept that would enable the 3rd party to share revenue.
This idea is what we (Magic E) had originally intended with Zingo when we created the world's first wireless portal as a demonstrator for Lucent's 3G capabilities (a long time back!). We should have stuck to our guns as I think the time is right for this! Any takers??
5:12:01 PM
|
|
|
|
© Copyright
2005
Paul Golding.
Last update:
3/26/2005; 8:58:33 PM.
|
|
| March 2005 |
| Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
| |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
| 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
| 20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
| 27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
|
|
| Feb Apr |
Sign up to my email list
- Send me email
Visit my personal website to find out more about me.
Consult my booklist
on Amazon
Blogroll:
|
