Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange has warned, “You’re all screwed,” when it comes to smartphone and gadget monitoring and surveillance.
Users of the Iphone, Blackberry and Gmail are among those who are supposedly ‘screwed’ because more than 150 organisations can monitor data on mobile devices. Assange made the statement at a press conference while unveiling the Wikileaks ‘Spy Files’ project.
Wikileaks said, “Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.”
“It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ‘political opponents’ are a reality.”
Assange said, “Who here has an iPhone? Who here has a BlackBerry? Who here uses Gmail? Well, you’re all screwed.”
“The reality is, intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all those products.”
The organisations apparently have the ability to track devices, intercept messages and listen to phone calls, according to The Press Association.
It might sound like a complete invasion of privacy but the goings on are legal according to Assange and are leading to a “totalitarian surveillance state”.
He said the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and Canada are all developing “spying systems”, and the data is collected and sold on to “dictators and democracies alike”.
The publication of the ‘Spy Files’ consisting of 287 documents in collaboration with the web site spyfiles.org is a “mass attack on this mass surveillance industry,” added Assange. µ
Source: The Inquirer
- In: Market | Telecom News
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- Samsung Electronics Co overtook Apple Inc as the world’s top smartphone maker in the July-September period with a 44 percent jump in shipments, and forecast strong sales in the current quarter in a clear warning to its rivals.
- In the handset division, Samsung has no real rival models to challenge its products except for the iPhone 4S. Apple and Samsung will continue to dominate the market in the fourth quarter,” Reuters quoted Kim Hyun-joong, a fund manager at Midas Asset Management, which owns Samsung shares as saying.
- Profits from the South Korean firm’s telecoms division, announced on Friday, more than doubled from a year ago to a record 2.5 trillion won ($2.2 billion) and accounted for 60 percent of Samsung’s total profit, offsetting a plunge in earnings from its bread-and-butter memory chips.
- Shipments of smartphones jumped 44 percent from the preceding quarter to 27.8 million units, up nearly four times from a year ago, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. Apple’s iPhone sales shrank by 16 percent to 17.1 million units in the third quarter. Samsung had 23.8 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, 9 points higher than Apple. Samsung’s flagship Galaxy line of products is powered by Google’s Android software.
- Apple on Monday said that it has sold over four million of its new iPhone 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14.
- It said that more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system and the device is available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and will be available in 22 more countries on October 28 and more than 70 countries by the end of the year.
- iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend—the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “iPhone 4S is a hit with customers around the world, and together with iOS 5 and iCloud, is the best iPhone ever.
- Blackberry smartphones are losing ground to the combined strength of iPhone and Android smartphones, as far as their use at the workplace is concerned, according to a survey of 1,681 U.S.-based workers released Thursday by Forrester Research.
- That finding amplifies what many have known for a while about the entrenched workplace smartphone veteran: the BlackBerry faces trouble from its competitors.
- The BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion, still leads among U.S. workers, with 42%, the survey said, with Apple”s iPhone accounting for 22% and Android devices, 26%.
- The survey also found that nearly half, or 48% of the group, said that they chose the primary smartphone used for their work without considering what their company supports. Only 29% said they chose the smartphone from a list of phones the company supports, while 23% said they had no choice in the matter.
- Often, corporate IT shops will choose BlackBerry smartphones when requiring a worker to use a specific smartphone, partly because of the perceived security benefits, many analysts, including at Forrester, have found. The growth in Android phones and the iPhone — many of them brought to workplaces by workers independently — are forcing IT shops to rethink that decision
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