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Fragmentation Leads To Android Insecurities
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post writes about how vendor fragmentation leads to security vulnerabilities and other exploits. This situation is '...making the world's most popular mobile operating system more vulnerable than its rivals to hackers, scam artists and a growing universe of malicious software' unlike Apple's iOS which they note has widely available updates several times a year. In light of many companies' Bring Your Own Device initiatives 'You have potentially millions of Androids making their way into the work space, accessing confidential documents,' said Christopher Soghoian, a former Federal Trade Commission technology expert who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union. 'It's like a really dry forest, and it's just waiting for a match.'"
You should be aware of a new feature of Android that hasn't really gotten a lot of press, but is the solution to this problem: the latest upgrade of the "Play store" (market) includes something called "Google Play Services". This new app takes care of upgrading and patching all Google-produced apps (system apps, YouTube, browser, camera, etc.). It is back-ported both to Gingerbread and Froyo. It applies security patches and upgrades without needing user intervention, as I understand it.
TL;DR: You may not be able to upgrade your Gingerbread phone to ICS, but Google still patches known vulns on your system.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
If someone is using an iPhone, at some point it was connected to iTunes to activate it (or it wouldn't be working).
That used to be the case but you can activate and iPhone or iPad without iTunes these days and never ever hook it up to a host computer.