Twitter founder Evan Williams gave a TED talk this earlier this month on how Twitter’s growth is driven by unexpected uses. His eight minute talk touched on twittering during dramatic events, political uses, services enabled by their API and the emergence of conventions like @reply and #hashtag.

Macworld reports, in Google blocks paid apps for unlocked G1 users, that Google made a recent change in the capabilities of the unlocked G1 Android phone.

“People who bought an unlocked version of the Android G1 phone are no longer allowed to download new paid applications from the Market, after a change Google made late last week. Google is prohibiting users of the unlocked phones from viewing copy-protected applications, including those that cost to download.”

Gizmodo describes the reason, or a least one very plausible one.

“The problem lies in the phone’s full software permissions. Consumer Android phones download paid content to a private, hidden apps folder, inaccessible to the user. Thing is, as is stands, this normally inaccessible folder is accessible on the dev phones. Not only does this let people flat out copy and redistribute apps—it enables a sort of app laundering scam, in which someone buys an app, copies it to another location, and gets a refund for the app (as per the Marketplace’s 24-hour return policy), only to reinstall the copied version later.”

We purchased an unlocked G1 last month and are using it in several research projects. Not being able to access the paid apps should not be a showstopper, but it would be nice to try some out, so I hope a solution to this problem can be worked out soon.

WindyCitizen.com is “a crowd-powered front page for the Windy City” that “brings Chicagoans the best of the local web by letting them share, rate and discuss their favorite local news, photos, videos and more.”

Their Windy City Twitter Tracker mashup uses Open Calais as a named entity recognizer to track Tweets about candidates in the special election to fill the US House seat for Chicago’s 5th district that that Rahm Emanuel vacated. Calais might be overkill for this, since there is a small set of known candidates, but it’s an impressive semantic mashup nonetheless.

“We’re searching Twitter constantly to keep you up to date with the conversation about the IL-5 special election. The graph above lets you track buzz about the candidates over the last two weeks.”

The Windy City Twitter Tracker is probably written to be easily repurposed, judging from the Web site, which describe it as currently tracking the “Race for the 5th”. The mashup is credited to Whattech.

The Google has flipped out. Starting a few minutes ago when I try to click on any Google search result, I am shown the Google malware page. The one below was the result when I tried to click through to http://google.com/, the first result for searching for “google”. It is obviously an error in Google’s software and one that surely will be fixed shortly, if it has not been fixed already. Since Google is highly distributed, it’s possible that only some of their sites are in error.

Once you get the “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” page, the only way to continue on to the page is by manually selecting the text of the URL from the warning page and pasting it into your browser’s URL field.

Through experimentation, the problem exists for the deafult search service as well as image search but not for searchers over blogs, news, video, scholarly papers or shopping.

I suppose this could be the world’s safest CYA disclaimer, but if so they may as well add Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Update: This seems to have been fixed around 10:15am GMT-5.

Update 2: Here is Google’s post about the problem.

We’ve been working to get the dissertaions of our recent PhD graduates online. The latest one is Olga Ratsimor’s 2007 dissertation on bartering for goods and services in a mobile or pervasive environments. Here is the citation and abstract. You can click through on the title to get a pdf copy of the dissertation.

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Olga Vladi Ratsimor, Opportunistic Bartering of Digital Goods and Services in Pervasive Environments, Ph.D. Dissertation in Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, August 2007.

The vision of mobile personal devices querying peers in their environment for information such as local restaurant recommendations or directions to the closest gas station, or traffic and weather updates has long been a goal of the pervasive research community. However, considering the diversity and the personal nature of devices participating in pervasive environments it is not feasible to assume that these interactions and collaborations will take place with out economically-driven motivating incentives.

This dissertation presents a novel bartering communication model that provides an underlying framework for incentives for collaborations in mobile pervasive environments by supporting opportunistic serendipitous peer-to-peer bartering for digital goods such as ring tones, MP3’s and podcasts.

To demonstrate viability and advantages of this innovative bartering approach, we compare and contrast the performances of two conventional, frequently employed, peer-to-peer interaction approaches namely Altruists and FreeRiders against two collaborative strategies that employ the Double Coincidence of Wants paradigm from the domain of barter exchanges. In particular, we present our communication framework that represents these collaborative strategies through a set of interaction policies that reflect these strategies. Furthermore, we present a set of results from our in-depth simulation studies that compare these strategies.

We examine the operation of the nodes employing our framework and executing these four distinct strategies and specifically, we compare the performances of the nodes executing these strategies in homogeneous and heterogeneous networks of mobile devices. We also examine the effects of adding InfoStations to these networks. For each of the strategies, we observe levels of gains and losses that nodes experience as result of collaborative digital good exchanges. We also evaluate communication overhead that nodes incur while looking for possible collaborative exchange. Furthermore, this dissertation offers an in-depth study of the swarm-like inter-strategy dynamics in heterogeneous networks populated with diverse nodes displaying varying levels of collaborative interaction attitudes. Further, the bartering framework is extended by incorporating value-sensitive bartering models that incorporate digital goods and content valuations into the bartering exchange process. In addition, the bartering model is extended by integration of socially influenced collaborative interaction that exploit role based social relationships between mobile peers that populate dynamic mobile environments.

Taken as a whole, the novel research work presented in this dissertation offers the first comprehensive effort that employs and models opportunistic bartering-based collaborative methodology in the context of serendipitous encounters in dynamic mobile peer-to-peer pervasive environments where mobile entities negotiate and exchange digital goods and content.

Wenjia Li will present his dissertation proposal on ‘A Security Framework to Cope with Node Misbehaviors in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks’ which will be done under the supervision of Professor Anupam Joshi. The presentation will be at 4:00pm Tuesday, January 6, in ITE 325b. Here’s the abstract.

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET), as its name suggests, has no fixed infrastructure, and is generally composed of a dynamic set of cooperative peers, which are willing to share their wireless transmission power with other peers so that indirect communication can be possible between nodes that are not in the radio range of each other . The nature of MANETs, such as node mobility, unreliable transmission medium and restricted battery power, makes them extremely vulnerable to a variety of node misbehaviors. Wireless links, for instance, are generally prone to both passive eavesdropping and active intrusion. Another security concern in ad hoc networks is caused by the cooperative nature of the nodes. Attacks from external adversaries may disturb communications, but the external intruder generally cannot directly participate in the cooperative activities among the nodes, such as routing, because they do not possess the proper secure credentials, such as shared keys. However, compromised nodes, which are taken over by an adversary, are capable of presenting the proper secure credentials, and consequently can interfere with almost all of the network operations, such as route discovery, key management and distribution, and packet forwarding. Hence, it is essential to cope with node misbehaviors so as to secure mobile ad hoc networks.

In this dissertation, we address the question of how to ensure that a MANET will properly operate despite the presence of various node misbehaviors. We propose to build a framework that can cope with various node misbehaviors in a wise and adaptive manner. The main purpose of our proposed framework is to provide a platform so that the components that identify and respond to misbehaviors can better cooperate with each other and quickly adapt to the changes of network context. Therefore, policies are planned to be utilized in our framework in order to make those components correctly function in different network contexts. Besides the policy component, there are three other components, which fulfill the tasks of misbehavior detection, trust and reputation management, and route management, respectively. To validate and evaluate our proposed framework, we plan to implement our framework based on simulator.

In particular, the contributions of this dissertation are (i) Develop a framework to combine the functionalities of surveillance and detection of misbehavior, trust and reputation management, route management, and policy management so as to provide a high-level solution to cope with various misbehaviors in MANETs in an intelligent and adaptive manner (ii) Propose and implement a misbehavior detector based on the gossip-based outlier detection method, which relies on neither any pre-defined threshold nor any training data (iii) Take into account both first-hand information (direct observation) and second-hand information (indirect observation) during both misbehavior detection and trust management processes, in which first-hand information and second-hand information are merged by some intelligent methods (iv) Specify and enforce policies in the proposed framework, which makes the framework promptly adapt to the rapidly changing network context.

Quoted without comment or speculation, from the Linux on the iPhone blog.

“I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.”

My Treo 650 is long in the tooth and I’m anxious to replace it. I’d love an iPhone, but am not ready to switch service providers and am also somewhat wary about its closed nature. So an android based phone is intriguing. Now here is an interesting development: BusinessWeek reports that Motorola Readies Its Own Android Social Smartphone:

“As the wireless world awaits the Oct. 22 debut of the first phone based on the Google-backed Android software, engineers at Motorola (MOT) are hard at work on their own Android handset. Motorola’s version will boast an iPhone-like touch screen, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, and a host of social-network-friendly features, BusinessWeek.com has learned.”

This is a bit of a no-brainer and iPhone is sure to have support for social media and probably well before these Motorola phones will hit the street, which is expected to be in the second quarter of 2010. The BusinessWeek article notes that:

“In the next year, social networking phones are expected to be a hit with the 16- to 34-year-old crowd, analysts say. According to consultancy Informa (INF), the number of mobile social-networking users will rise from 2.3% of global cell-phone users at the end of 2007 to as many as 23% of all mobile users by the end of 2012.”

This Thursday (9am 10/23) UMBC Ph.D. student Jim Parker will defend his dissertation on Observation Techniques for Detecting Malicious Behavior in Ad-hoc Networks. Detecting malicious behaviour in MANETs is a tricky problem on which Jim has made considerable headway. Here’s his abstract.

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless, self-organizing nodes, each capable of routing network traffic and having the ability to be mobile. A MANET has no central authority nor fixed network infrastructure, and the dynamic nature and openness of MANETs lead to potential vulnerabilities. Since there is no guarantee of connection to the wired Internet, accepted security practices involving third party authentication servers becomes an unrealistic expectation. Even with authentication, there is the potential for abuse.

Our research has focused on being the “eyes and ears” for trust evaluation. We have developed an extensive simulation to investigate the viability of detecting malicious and faulty node behavior in MANETs. We first show detection capability at the network layer and introduce two techniques for reacting to malicious behavior. We then demonstrate detection using information from multiple layers of the OSI stack. Finally, we tie everything together by combining the detection techniques with a field communications scenario.

USA Today has a story, Sprint takes wireless service to the max in Baltimore, on Sprint’s new WiMax system for the Baltimore area.

“Monday, Sprint will launch wireless WiMax services in Baltimore, marking the beginning of what could become a new era in mobile broadband. The mobile data network — which will be marketed under the Xohm brand name — is designed to cater to the needs of laptop and home broadband users, not cellphone users.

Prices will start at $10 for a day pass, good for 24 hours of unlimited usage. Monthly service starts at $35. There are no contracts. To use the service, Baltimore customers will have to buy a special WiMax “aircard” or modem, which cost about $45 apiece. There are also special launch discounts, including a $50-a-month plan that offers subscribers unlimited data usage for life.”

Xohm is pronounced “zome”, by the way.

The xohm site has pricing details, which seem to be $35/month for home, $45/month for mobile, and $50/month for both. For home use, they do have a modem that you can hook up to a home router. The $50 fee is good for as long as you are a member, which could be a great deal. I know someone who only pays $5/month for Sprint’s basic all-you-can-eat EDVO service because he was an early adopter.

Speed? They claim that it will be “Comparable to basic DSL and Cable internet service” with a footnote stating “Comparison based on basic DSL and cable plans offering download speeds of 786 kbps (DSL) and 1.5 Mbps (cable) as of September 2008.”

The site says that DC and Chicago are next in line for the service and Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia are in the works.

Of course, there are lots of details to check into (e.g., if I buy service in Baltimore, can I use it when in Chicago), but this looks very interesting. Maybe Sprint can make WiMax work.

The NYT has a short note (Letting Our Fingers Do the Talking ) on a new Nielsen Mobile report on texting use in the US.

“In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly.”

Average Number of Monthly Calls vs. Text Messages Among U.S. Wireless Subscribers
	Calls	Texts
Qtr 1, 2006	198	65
Qtr 2, 2006	216	79
Qtr 3, 2006	221	85
Qtr 4, 2006	213	108
Qtr 1, 2007	208	129
Qtr 2, 2007	228	172
Qtr 3, 2007	226	193
Qtr 4, 2007	213	218
Qtr 1, 2008	207	288
Qtr 2, 2008	204	357
Source: Nielsen Mobile

The article also points out that “Teenagers ages 13 to 17 are by far the most prolific texters, sending or receiving 1,742 messages a month”. The Nielsen data shows that this age group sends two orders of magnitude more data than people over 65.

Average Number of Monthly Calls vs. Text Messages Among U.S. Wireless Subscribers by Age (Q2 2008)
	Calls	Texts
All Subs	204	357
12 & Under	137	428
Ages 13-17	231	1742
Ages 18-24	265	790
Ages 25-34	239	331
Ages 35-44	223	236
Ages 45-54	193	128
Ages 55-64	145	38
Ages 65+	99	14
Source: Nielsen Mobile

Note that texting is more popular than calling for all but the last three age groups.

The US congress is asking the four major mobile phone providers why their charges for text messages have gone up by 100% over the past few years. As Chris Gaylord notes in his blog on the Christian Science Monitor, “text messages cost about $1,310 per megabyte. That seems a tad high.”

“With text-messaging rates doubling over the past three years, Sen. Herb Kohl has started asking questions. The Wisconsin Democrat and head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee sent a letter to the four major cellular companies on Tuesday with some interesting points.

In 2005, the industry charged about 10 cents per text. Now it’s 20 cents. All four carriers upped their rates at about the same time. The number of nationwide competitors slipped from six to four. And the remaining big-timers are gobbling up regional carriers.”

US Senator Herb Kohl’s press release includes the letter to the telecos.

“Today, US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asked the presidents and chief executive officers of the four largest wireless telephone companies to justify sharply rising rates for its customers to send and receive text messages. In a letter, Senator Kohl requested an explanation from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, which collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation’s cellular phone users. The text of Senator Kohl’s letter follows below.”