The moment you think you’ve lost your wallet, you get that panicky feeling. All of your cash, your ID, and your credit cards are suddenly gone. Your range of options is dramatically limited. You might be stranded somewhere, unable to get home or into the club where your friends are. You can’t buy food, lodging or transportation. It’s scary, frustrating, maddening, and the clean-up is a mess: you have to contact your bank, your credit card companies, your air travel and other loyalty card providers. You need a new driver’s license and perhaps social security card. What were all of those cards in your wallet? How do you reach all of those providers? Thank god you have your cell phone.

But given the choice between have my wallet or my cell phone stolen, I’d much rather lose the wallet.

My cell phone has all of the email conversations between me and my friends and my clients. There’s also a phone directory of everyone I know, a calendar with my birthday, their birthdays, and everywhere I am planning on being (or have been) for months. It would be easy to impersonate me on the phone, by email, and in all of the online communities in which I participate: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You could ruin my reputation, extort money, and victimize anyone I know.

There’s also confidential client data — presentations and meeting notes, recordings,and photos. All of that is in addition to the thief’s ability to access to my bank, financial institutions, PayPal, investment firm, and Mint.Com.

Cleaning up after having your wallet stolen is a cakewalk compared to the mess you’re in if your phone is compromised. Yet people are way more casual about leaving their phone laying around than their wallet.

Part of the reason for this is that the function of a wallet has remained relatively constant, while the function of a phone has dramatically increased in scope. Even though it’s a now a GPS navigation system, financial terminal, email client, Internet browser, hard drive, camera, media player and social media device, we still call it a “phone.” Our attitude about phones hasn’t kept up with the phone’s increasingly important role.  The truth is, if I had to eliminate one function of my phone, I would do without the part where you talk to people.

Even if you’ve been slow to realize how important your phone is, criminals have not. Antivirus firm McAfee reports that last quarter mobile device malware was up a whopping 46%, while other threats we down overall. The problem is only going to get worse as phone functionality increases. This year near-field communication chips are being added to phones which literally turn them into wallets, meaning you can lose your phone and wallet simultaneously.

Virus attacks on your desktop computer are becoming passe, with most users aware of the threat and using a range of very good free and low-cost AV tools. On your phone, you’ve had fewer options. But that’s changing as phone manufacturers and software developers recognize this threat.

The first line of defense is to use your phone’s built-in password security. Most people don’t turn this feature on because it’s a nuisance to enter a password every time you pick up your phone to use it. Unless your phone is stolen by the NSA, this feature does a great job of protecting information stored in your phone itself, although it does nothing about data or documents stored on your phone’s removable memory card.

To encrypt passwords and other sensitive data that you carry around with you, there are specialized applications like OISafe. Programs like WaveSecure can help you track a missing phone, backup up the data on it, and remote wipe the memory on command.

Those applications are great if you know that your phone has gone missing, but the far greater threat is malware which can steal the data off your phone while you’re using at it. While there hasn’t yet been a wide-reaching virus attach on mobile devices, it’s just a matter of time as tablets and phones replace laptops as people’s primary mobile device. This past year has seen Norton, McAfee, AVG and dozens of smaller companies release smartphone security applications, many of them not very good. (Lookout Mobile Security is a standout, featuring anti-virus, lost phone tracking, remote backup and remote wiping.) Expect to see an arms race on mobile devices play out in a way similar to the way it did on the desktop, only at an accelerated rate. (Hackers and AV companies have, after all, learned a lot from the desktop wars and will be applying it to the battle for mobile security.)

So, you’ve been warned. If you haven’t taken the time to set the lock code on your phone, do it now. And think about installing an anti-virus application and a remote-wipe function. It’s simple to do now, and impossible to do when you realize you really need it.

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1. I Fell in Love with an Android

What is the world’s biggest secret? Perhaps you are thinking “the formula for Coca-Cola”, “who shot Kennedy”,” what happened to the Holy Grail”, or “the location of Atlantis”. All good guesses, but these are merely historical curiosities.

Right now, the biggest secret in the world is the encryption key that unlocks the Wikileaks “insurance” file. In case you haven’t been following the story closely, Wikileaks has only published a small fraction of the massive database of government and commercial secrets which were leaked to them. However, on July 30, in response to strong US government threats, Wikileaks released to the world a 1.4 GB “insurance” file.

The file is encrypted with AES256, the same encryption algorithm used by the government to protect it’s own “Top Secret” files. Although Wikileaks has not made any public statements about the contents of this file, its purpose seems clear: in case something happens to the site or to Julian Assange himself, they made a backup of their secrets and stored it in the one place where it can never be destroyed; everywhere. Speculation is that this information bomb contains the balance of the State Department cables, as well as commercial and military secrets ranging from BP to The Vatican.

Every spy organization in the world and a half-million hackers and computer science students are hard at work analyzing this file. But without the key, they have little chance of success. What does a 256-bit key look like? In hexadecimal, it might be: “496e2031363932203139206d656e20616e642074776f20776f6d656e20″. But such a key is unwieldly.

A binary key is difficult to store and transmit, and it looks like, well, an encryption key.  More than likely, the key hidden in plain sight; a common, publicly available reference (perhaps the first line of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”).  To create a 256-bit key like the one above, you only need 29 characters, so “In 1692 19 men and two women ” would do nicely. Of course, you could also make it be much longer.

One thing is certain: someday we will know the answer. It is highly unlikely that several young people will all carry this secret to their graves, never succumbing to pressure, argument or temptation, and never making a mistake. And once we have the key, we will have everything because the file that it unlocks is readily available. (There are millions of copies of it around the world. You could easily get a copy for yourself.)

Cracking the code through “brute force” methods is far beyond the capabilities of the worlds fastest (and most secret) supercomputers. An entirely new generation of computers, based on quantum physics, may have a chance, but that type of innovation is decades away.

Until then, unless someone screws up or forces Julian Assange’s hand, the Wikileaks insurance file will remain one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world.

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I bought an Android phone just to check it out (’cause that’s what I’m supposed to do; my friends count on me for that.) I bought it in spite of that fact that I hate T-Mobile, in spite of the fact that the Android didn’t support Microsoft Exchange or view PDFs or let me view and edit Microsoft Office documents, and in spite of the fact that T-Mobile wanted to assign me a “ghetto” 510 area code number. None of that mattered. I just wanted to see it. I had 30 days to return it and that’s what I’d do.

Goodbye, Sprint!
What a surprise! After spending 100 hours playing with the phone (downloading software, configuring things, hooking up external devices, even making some phone calls), I had to admit I was in love. Goodbye, Sprint! Nothing else matters.

Why? It’s all about the software. In their attempt to lock you into their platform, brand themselves, and encourage you to buy silly things from them (like ring tones), the carriers all cement a layer of useless bloatware over the phone’s native programming. This junk is always thrown together haphazardly, poorly integrated, and badly designed. Basically, Microsoft and Palm and Sprint each have their own agenda and they are slugging it out in the arena of your phone. (Even now, Sprint is delaying the launch of it’s own Android phone so that Samsung can add a bunch of Sprint crap to the user interface.)

In contrast, the Android is designed to be open. There are hundreds of programs available for it, most of which are free, and they all play well together by design. You can add and remove them at the touch of a button without ever having to deal with your carrier.

Zillions of Programs

Zillions of Programs
“Who needs zillions of programs on their phone?”, you ask. Well, there’s one that can use the camera to take a picture of a book or a CD and find the lowest prices for that item in nearby stores and on the Internet. Take that, William Shatner!

There’s an augmented reality program that uses the camera to display whatever you are looking at on the screen, drawing labels over the picture in real time to identify what you are seeing. It will point out Angel Island, the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, San Quentin, and so forth. A similar program identifies the stars and constellations as you point it around the night sky.

Around the house, you can snap pictures of barcodes as you run out of things and it will put them on your shopping list. There’s a compass and a runner’s log and even an audio editing tool to make your own ring tones. It’s a camera and a GPS and a voice recorder, plus email and a web browser. It has visual voicemail, newsreaders and music and podcast players, Skype and Twitter clients. Oh yeah, and it’s a phone!

Plus, if you ever lose it, you can send it a text and it will tell you where it is. There’s also a bunch of games for it, but I’ve been having too much serious fun to play with them.

Why Android and Why Now?
There’s no end to the creativity people are demonstrating with the Android, but why this platform and why now? Because Google and the Open Handset Alliance found a secret formula for harnessing the creativity of developers.

First of all, they built a device that has all the hardware you need to do interesting things. It has a GPS, a 3-axis accelerometer and a magnetic compass, WiFi, 3G networking, and bluetooth, a touch screen and a keyboard, speaker and a processor with video and music capability. If you can’t have fun with all that, then you shouldn’t be programming. It even has a multi-color LED.

Secondly, they created an operating system that works like a Lego set, making it easy to build programs out of pieces of stuff that you and your friends have done before. Need a map of your current location? Just call one up. Need to play an alarm tone at a certain time? There’s a system service for that.

And last, but not least, they made it easy to get your new software creation into the handsets of thousands of grateful users through the Android marketplace. Even if your first creation is free, you can make a ton of money selling the advanced version for $0.99. And the cost to be a developer is just $25.00 (a paltry sum when compared to other developer programs.)

AND it's a Phone

The Future
The Android platform is still in its infancy, but it’s remarkable how quickly the market is maturing. It seems clear that Android’s operating system is going to break out of the phone and spawn a whole new generation of portable computers that will replace the laptops of today. In short, netbooks are going to fall in love with Android, too. Chip manufacturers are already tooling up and companies like HP are making early announcements.

I think Android as a new computing platform makes perfect sense. After living on the Android for a week, my big, fast Windows machine feels clunky and out of date. If the Android had a little bit bigger keyboard and screen, I’d use it for everything, relegating my Windows machine to really big jobs like video editing, 3D modeling, and first-person shooters.

And what about the iPhone? A beautiful product for sure, and a terrific success story for the company, but once again Apple is headed in the wrong direction by vertically integrating. Silly boys, the future is open!  But that’s a story for another time.

Links:

Silicon Alley Insider, “HP Considering Android for New Netbooks”
Engaget, “Save us from Apple’s groundbreaking, developer-shackling App Store”
New York Times, “T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home”

Related posts:

1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference

Twenty years ago, the Internet was hailed as a great tool for “disintermediating” the public from its news. The big news organizations had too much power, they had too much control over what we said and heard, often slanting it to suit their own purposes. In the future, it was believed, we could “cut out the greedy middlemen,” the reporters and editors and aggregators that colored “the truth,” connecting readers directly to their news sources.

We accomplished the goal, but the result has been less than perfect. We are drowning in a flood of meaningless drivel, with no professionals to place it into context for us. This same flood has washed away most of our great media and news-gathering institutions, bankrupting nearly all of the major newspapers and dismantling the great network news organizations, leaving those who would gladly pay for a little “intermediation” with few choices. (Funny video: “Twouble with Twitters“)

Cheer up, for the pendulum is swinging back. It turns out that we are NOT staring the future in the face, we are just suffering a little market adjustment. The role of the editor is on the rise again, but we don’t call them “editors” anymore, they’re “curators.”

Curation is the new role of media professional; aggregating, sorting and classifying. The pieces aren’t really big enough to edit anymore. They are just sorted, classified and rearranged. This is what bloggers do, and it’s what I’m doing right now.

Links:

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?”

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What’s your phone number? Why should that question mean anything at all?

Phone numbers are a holdover from an era of mechanical rotary switches. Each phone connected to   your central office (all 9999 of you) was assigned a number. When that got full, we put in a new central office with a three digit prefix (255-9999). And when we ran out of those, we assigned area codes, then country codes.

Today phone calls are processed by silicon rather than iron, phones are mostly computers that can also reproduce sound, and the connections between phones are webs of Internet traffic instead of point-to-point copper. And, since every device can potentially talk to every other device, we don’t need phone numbers anymore or, coincidentally, phone companies either.

In case you don’t follow telephony, a relatively new protocol called DUNDi (Distributed Universal Number Discovery) is being rolled out with new phone systems which enables your phone (you@phonesystem.yourdomain.com) to find me (rick@phonesystem.scherle.com) and call me directly over the Internet.

Of course, the people that argue over standards will continue to argue over this one, so the future might not be exactly DUNDi, but the handwriting is on the wall. After 100 years of phone numbers, things will change slowly so don’t get rid of your coveted (415) number that ends in 0000 just yet, but it’s coming.

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