The NSA doesn't just have the technical capabilities to collect location-based data in bulk. A 24-page NSA white paper shows that the agency has a powerful suite of algorithms, or data sorting tools, that allow it to learn a great deal about how people live their lives.

The cell radio is one of the biggest battery drains on a phone. Every time you send data, no matter how small, the radio is powered on for up for 20-30 seconds. Every decision you make should be based on minimizing the number of times the radio powers up. Battery life can be dramatically improved by changing the way your apps handle data transfers. Users want their data now, the trick is balancing user experience with transferring data and minimizing power usage. A balance is achieved by apps carefully bundling all repeating and intermittent transfers together and then aggressively prefetching the intermittent transfers.

Forty-four per cent of those questioned said they didn't believe the phone would interfere with the plane's instruments, but — perhaps more worryingly — 27 per cent said they couldn't cope without a switched-on phone and nine per cent said they couldn't turn off their phone as being uncontactable was unacceptable (we're assuming they weren't the brightest in the sample). § There's much debate about whether phones really can interfere with instrumentation, with the general feeling that the risk isn't worth taking and that as they generally won't work anyway it's not a big deal to ask flyers to turn them off. Some planes do have in-cabin coverage, but that only gets switched on above 10km to avoid interfering with ground networks.

The Bluebox Security research team – Bluebox Labs – recently discovered a vulnerability in Android’s security model that allows a hacker to modify APK code without breaking an application’s cryptographic signature, to turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan, completely unnoticed by the app store, the phone, or the end user. The implications are huge! This vulnerability, around at least since the release of Android 1.6 (codename: “Donut” ), could affect any Android phone released in the last 4 years – or nearly 900 million devices– and depending on the type of application, a hacker can exploit the vulnerability for anything from data theft to creation of a mobile botnet.

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.

The vast majority of 3G and 4G USB modems handed out by mobile operators to their customers are manufactured by a handful of companies and run insecure software, according to two security researchers from Russia.

An app offering real-time translations is to allow people in Japan to speak to foreigners over the phone with both parties using their native tongue.

NTT Docomo - the country's biggest mobile network - will initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin and Korean, with other languages to follow.

Even though the translations are bound to be hilariously bad sometimes, this may still be useful in some situations.

A new study has shown that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung has actually helped spike sales for the South Korean firm.

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The report argues that the press coverage not only helped Samsung become a recognisable name but the constant comparisons between the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III suggested that the devices were rather similar thus making them a decent option for consumers to consider. A key point to be remembered is that after the verdict in early September, the Galaxy S III outsold the iPhone 4S for the first time ever in the US.

SunVox is a small, fast and powerful modular synthesizer with pattern based sequencer (tracker). It is a tool for those people who like to compose music wherever they are, whenever they wish. On any device. SunVox is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Maemo, Meego, iOS and Android.

The unique IDs that Apple bakes into iOS mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, have long been the subject of criticism by privacy experts. In contrast to the cookies used to track consumers on the web, which can be deleted (at least by those consumers tech-savvy enough to navigate to obscure browser settings), UDIDs cannot be deleted or removed. As long as the consumer uses a particular iPhone, the UDID will stay the same. Unsurprisingly, advertising companies embraced the UDID as a way to effectively track and target users of mobile Apps.