Read Tim O’Reilly’s thoughts about open source and cloud computing. It’s an insightful look into these two key areas of modern technology

The iPhone is not a “phone” any more than my laptop computer is a phone. The iPhone can make phone calls, but so can my laptop.

AdMob’s iPhone Developer Program carries a price tag of $1.0 million, but that’s not $1.0 million cash. Rather, AdMob will select upto “200 iPhone developers to receive $5,000 in AdMob advertising credit to acquire traffic for their web & native apps”.

This is our final response to what we consider misleading statements by Fortify in their recently released report

Ribbit, the Internet telephony company has been acquired by BT for an amount that we consider to be very cheap.

Several bloggers have already reported on the Open Source Security Study released by Fortify’s Security Research Group (and Larry Suto), but we are yet to see anyone take an in-depht look at the study itself. This is our attempt to take a closer look at the study titled “How Are Open Source Development Communities Embracing Security Best Practices?”. The study which was released as an 11-page report, is free to download from the company’s website.

We’ll analyze some of the statements and conclusions made in the report, and also look at a couple of the “Open Source Development Communities” that the study surveyed.

If you want to undertake a study of a certain group of applications, and given the sweeping and misleading conclusions that the report reached, I think it makes sense to make a comparative study of their closed source equivalents. But, no, Fortify chose to exclude “Freeware projects that are not open source”. And for the open source applications that they studied (see the list above), Fortify found that “few open source projects provide” access to security resources, which the study identified as:

Locify is a location-based service that allows anyone with a supported phone to explore places of interest from “Wikipedia, seek for geocaches, display map where you are (or you want to go), twitter you location, save interesting places from phone or web sync them and even navigate to them”.

An Android polling application from Mastiff Tech, a consulting and development service provider based in Mumbai, India. The polling application is their first for Android.

Koolu will distribute the FreeRunner mobile phone in all of the Americas, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Boaters and Sailors now have their own mobile social network that allows them to interact and share content in very much the same manner that members of other social networks do. The new social network also has its own Internet TV channel on the Moqulus Internet TV network.

The EC caps texting charges across the European Union’s 27 member states at €0.11 (US $0.17).

The nature of our interactions with software applications is changing. We need to understand how this change affects our freedom.