Wed 27 Jan 2010
RockYou suffered one of the worst data leaks of the year last year with some 32m accounts hacked through its lax security policies. A study of the passwords showed many users were just as lax – the top 5, in order, were: ‘123456’; ‘12345’; ‘123456789’; ‘Password’; and finally the rather heart-warming ‘iloveyou’.
If you recognise one of those, it’s time to update your password…
Wed 20 Jan 2010
According to Gartner’s latest set of predictions, by 2013 more people will be able to access the web from mobile phones than from PCs. The company reckons that there will be 1.78 billion PCs in use that year, outstripped by the 1.82 billion install base of Smartphones and browser-equipped feature phones.
With the user experience challenges of a small screen and with other phones yet to catch the iPhone in terms of web usage, it could still be a while until the majority of the web is consumed on mobile devices, but it’s nonetheless an eye-catching statistic.
The future of the web is looking mobile.
Thu 14 Jan 2010
As Apple passed another milestone in mobile with 3 billion app downloads, Google stepped up its competition in the Smartphone market with the launch of its Nexus One phone. Obviously, this uses Google’s Android operating system, also in use on an increasing number of handsets, including the much hyped Droid phone from Motorola.
The phone is initially sold directly from a Google website, with consumers able to choose their preferred operator for the $529 device (a $179 2 year T-Mobile USA deal is also available, more coming soon including Vodafone in Europe).
But is it an ‘iPhone killer’? It’s certainly close in size and shape to the iPhone and boasts finer screen resolution and a removable battery, plus a number of innovations including free GPS navigation. However, with a still limited Android app store and no bundled ‘iTunes’ equivalent, the iPhone may well still have more of its nine lives to use up…