Tag: android
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Android WebView security and the mobile advertising marketplace
Freedom to Tinker readers are probably aware of the current controversy over Google’s handling of ongoing security vulnerabilities in its Android WebView component. What sounds at first like a routine security problem turns out to have some deep challenges. Let’s start by filling in some background and build up to the big problem they’re not…
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Striking a balance between advertising and ad blocking
In the news, we have a consortium of French publishers, which somehow includes several major U.S. corporations (Google, Microsoft), attempting to sue AdBlock Plus developer Eyeo, a German firm with developers around the world. I have no idea of the legal basis for their case, but it’s all about the money. AdBlock Plus and the closely…
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Google+Motorola = Software Patent Indictment
Google’s announcement this morning that it had agreed to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5Billion sent MMI’s stock price soaring and set off another conversation about software patents and the smart-phone ecosystem. Larry Page himself emphasized the patent angle of the merger in the corporate blog post: We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple…
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HTC Willfully Violates the GPL in T-Mobile's New G2 Android Phone
[UPDATE (Oct 14, 2010): HTC has released the source code. Evidently 90-120 days was not in fact necessary, given that they managed to do it 7 days after the phone’s official release. It is possible that the considerable pressure from the media, modders, kernel copyright holders, and other kernel hackers contributed to the apparently accelerated…