Informal Brain

Just another sign that IBM really “gets it” when it comes to iPhone security. I happen to work at a Lotus Notes shop and we have been taking a strong look at the iNotes Ultralite application for some time now. You may have seen some of my previous posts about the lack of enterprise level encryption for email on the iPhone. This is a show stopper for our company where we manage complex PHI (Personal Health Information) for our customers. We can’t afford to loose even one device (laptop, smart phone) which is not encrypted.

IBM is always concerned about data security for its customers, and as such they decided to make iNotes Ultralite a web app rather than a native iPhone application. IBM felt it was important to customers to insure that all communications between the iPhone and Lotus Domino server be encrypted, and that no data remain on the device in case it was lost or stolen.

[From iPhone in the Enterprise: Lotus iNotes Ultralite - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

I suspect we will see a native Notes application for the iPhone or a plugin for the native Mail application in the future when encryption is available. Until then, IBM is delivering what we need right now.

Tonchidot: Visual Tagging for the iPhone | The iPhone Blog.

Like something from the future, you have to see this video. If Tonchidot can bring this to market it will revolutionize the way we use our mobile computers to interact with our surroundings. Truly astounding.

Start counting down the days and refreshing your App Store icons starting tomorrow. The long awaited refresh of the Facebook iPhone app is upon us.

Thanks everyone for being patient waiting for me to finish Facebook for iPhone 2.0. The good news is, I plan to submit the update to the iPhone App Store a week from today. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to download it a week from today - Apple reviews every application before making it available, and they can sometimes take up to a week. So, you may get the update as soon as next Wednesday, or as late as October 1st.

[From Facebook | Facebook for iPhone's Notes]

The new photo tagging looks absolutely wild. It looks like it leverages touch services so you can tap the photo after you have taken it on the device and tag it with your contacts on the phone using touch gestures. Brilliant!

Just when you thought you got rid of that incriminating email on your iphone, or removed that suspect web site from your cache you might be surprised to hear that the iPhone captures an image of the application when the “home” button is pressed.

As widely reported, the iPhone takes a screenshot every time the home button is pressed so that the 3D “zoom” effect can be processed when the application zooms in and out, when suspending and resuming applications. These shots are stored, at least temporarily, on the device, presenting potential privacy issues.

[From Keeping Your iPhone From Spying on You - iPhone Atlas]

A forensic analyst can retrieve the images from the phone by mounting the disk and using data recovery tools to reconstruct the images as they are not actually removed from the disk, just the pointers to the files are removed. This continues to demonstrate that the iPhone cannot be treated as a secure device. The iPhone atlas site demonstrates a way to disable the image storage on a jail broken phone. For the average user, be aware that your iPhone is keeping a log of your activity.

I continue to make the argument for encryption. To make that a reality, with good performance, Apple may need to embed a dedicated encryption processor to the device.

So the biggest question in my mind now is:

When will we see SquirrelFish Extreme for the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone?

Apple is already winning the mobile browser wars, and the latest WebKit advancements will only solidify that lead.

The latest iPhone firmware was released today.  Version 2.1.

Here are my day one thoughts:

1. Battery Life is much improved.  I had heavy use today and came out with lots of battery life remaining.
2. Contacts is now useable.
3. The Phone application is now usable.  Lag is gone.
4. Keyboard lag is much improved.
5. Safari appears more stable.
6. SMS loads faster but is still slow.  I don’t understand why it takes so long to launch the application still.
7. Genius playlists are cool.  I like them, and they work very well to discover music you might not be listening to very often.
8. 3G performance appears better.  I had a few strange Edge to 3G and back swaps today where it seemed like I didn’t end up with an internet connection until I did a bunch of refreshes in Safari.  Might have been an anomaly.

What we may see tomorrow:

• 2.1 Firmware — Here’s hoping.  2.0 so far has been a stability and performance disaster.  2.0.2 has made it limp along but we need some major fixes.  I am tired of dropped calls, hangs in the keyboard, and slowness in the phone / contacts / sms applications.
• iTunes 8 — Might be nice.
• HD TV Content — That would be a really nice change for the Apple TV, but it needs a better encoder to go along with it so my apple TV doesn’t need some kind of Terrabyte sized drive to store 5 shows.
• Apple TV refresh — This would be nice.

UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now out. Read my review here.

Since the last time I posted about my favorite iPhone RSS reader, Phatom Fish has made a couple of updates. The introduction of working share, star and “mark all as read” features have made ByLine by far my favorite RSS reader for the iPhone.

Beyond the features of the iPhone application, the killer feature is ByLine’s tight integration with Google Readers auto prioritization feature. Google Reader already surfaces articles to me based on my past reading preference in the “all items stream”. ByLine leverages this stream im the client to provide the most interesting items to me when I have a few momemtns to read RSS content.

In the past couple of days there has been a sudden outcry around the security issue with the iPhone pass code bypass issue. I loved this comment on iPhone Atlas today:

“The iPhone is a computer, just like a desktop computer, and so it can easily be booted in such a way that one can mount the disk and delete or modify the device’s configuration - including the passcode configuration. Cracking the iPhone’s passcode is about as complex as changing the root password on a desktop machine, given physical access.

[From iPhone Security Flaw Is the Tip of the Iceberg - iPhone Atlas]

This is something I have been pointing out for some time now. The iPhone doesn’t have any kind of storage based encryption so as the author of the above quote so readily points out that mounting the iPhone as a disk allows access to the configuration files. This allows easy editing of the PLIST files allowing a hacker to disable the pass code and steal the data.

For some time now I have been calling on Apple to give us encryption as an enterprise feature. I noted in a previous blog post that device encryption was the missing enterprise feature when the 2.0 software was announced. I was in shock when I watched company after company (including the military) laud the iPhone 2.0 software. Did they miss the point that the device can be compromised so easily putting their mobile exchange push data at risk?

We need to pressure Apple to add encryption to the device while fixing these pass code problems. Only encryption will protect the device from being mounted as a disk. Until then I would not store sensitive data on the device using push email from exchange, LDAP or POP3. I would be very careful with webmail solutions. For example, we are asking lots of tough questions to IBM around iNotes for Lotus Notes and how much data it allows in the browser cache.

Ask the tough questions…. and continue to demand encryption.

“They’ve jumped from Generation One to Generation Four or Five. It just looks better, and feels better.” BW also claims that the new model’s price (currently, $359) will hit $299, “or maybe $249,” and could be announced as early as September.

$249 Kindle 2.0 significantly thinner and Frog stylish? - Engadget.

Amazon has the right idea.  They are following the Apple playbook to the T.  Iteratively improving the Kindle reader and lowering the price.  I would say Amazon has a real winner on its hands.  Especially if it can deeply penetrate the educational crowd.  At $249 dollars it is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of most text books.  If the price per text book were lowered comparatively to the print version it would be a slam dunk on campus.