IT’S getting harder to trust what you read on Wikipedia. An army of shadowy fake accounts is manipulating the online encyclopedia’s entries for money and damaging the site’s credibility.

Last month, Wikipedia that it had blocked some 250 “sock puppet” accounts – fake accounts set up by users who are often paid by companies to edit articles in their favour. Now, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and his colleagues have developed a tool that analyses the way articles are written and spots if they are edited by the same person.

One of the big problems for Wikipedia editors trying to uncover such accounts is that the IP addresses of users can only be accessed by a few administrators because of the need for privacy, says Hasan. So editors have to rely on their own experience to determine whether multiple accounts are actually the work of a single individual.

Hasan’s team wanted to know if they could use algorithms to unmask the sock puppets by analysing the language they use. The challenge in spotting similarities in writing styles is that, in Wikipedia editing, as in much of social media writing, the articles are so short that there is little material to work with, says team member .

They looked at the editing notes for . These were used as the training material for an algorithm that scanned some 230 features of the writing, such as grammatical quirks. The team showed the algorithm could predict which accounts were puppet accounts with a 75 per cent accuracy rate – defined as agreeing with the decision of Wikipedia’s investigators ().

“Sock-puppet investigations are incredibly time consuming for Wikipedia editors, so anything that can help reduce the workload should be welcome,” says Hasan.

Mor Naaman at Cornell Tech in New York likes the team’s work, but says the algorithm needs to become more accurate: “The authors mostly relied on syntactic features, and used only a few other linguistic markers, so there is definitely room for improvement.”

The fake accounts problem is just the latest issue to plague Wikipedia. It has been criticised because its editors are predominantly white, Western and 90 per cent male, which skews both the articles it covers and their content.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Unmask the Wiki sock puppets by the way they write”

Video: How mosquitoes fly in the rain

This is one flyweight battle that promises not to be a washout: the mosquito versus the raindrop. The two combatants might be of roughly equal size, but the raindrop weighs in 50 times as heavy. Why then, wondered , a mechanical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, do mosquitoes flourish in humid conditions where downpours are common?

To find out how – or if – mosquitoes can fly in the rain, Hu’s team used high-speed cameras to film the insects flying through a specially constructed “rain box” – a small acrylic container with a mesh roof. Spraying the roof with water simulated a shower, although the water droplets didn’t fall as fast as normal raindrops.

Hu’s team were able to puncture one urban myth: that mosquitoes caught in a shower somehow dodge the drops. “They showed absolutely no sign of trying to avoid them,” says Hu.

Instead, the footage showed the mosquitoes receive glancing blows and direct hits from the water droplets – each of which knocked the insect off course only momentarily before it stabilised.

Mozzie mimics

Next, the team pummelled Styrofoam pellets with the simulated raindrops to calculate how mozzies can stand the rain. The pellets were filled with a variety of liquids to act as mosquito mimics of realistic sizes and masses. Fast-falling droplets hitting these pellets made a good approximation of a raindrop colliding with a mosquito.

Analysis of the impact showed that when the drops hit an object of low inertia, the droplets deformed but didn’t splash – as a result, little momentum was transferred from the water to the “insect”. Hu calculated that a raindrop would lose as little as 2 per cent of its velocity after hitting a mosquito, and the effect of that would not be enough to disrupt the flight of the insect.

A big win for the bloodsuckers, but Hu thinks the work will be most use in the design of micro-sized remote-controlled aircraft. It will be some years before these micro UAVs are as small as mosquitoes, says , a bio-inspired robotics researcher at the University of Bristol, UK. But this study highlights such craft “will only be capable of operating in the rain if they have a mass several times smaller, or several times larger, than a raindrop”, he says.

Reference:

We’ve chosen this project as one of the great engineering milestones of the recent past. Tell us which engineering project you think will have the biggest impact on human life in the next 30 years and win the trip of a lifetime

As revolutions go, it wasn’t an auspicious start. Only two of the five letters that comprised the message were transmitted before the system crashed.

But on 29 October 1969, Charley Kline, a research student at the University of California, Los Angeles, succeeded in communicating with Bill Duval at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, using a new form of computer network.

That network became the core of the vast array of computers that we now call the internet.

Just as access to electricity a century ago changed people’s lives profoundly and created new business opportunities, so too has the internet. It has fomented an information revolution.

The success of that revolution is in no small part due to decisions made decades ago. Back in 1969, Kline and Duval were creating ARPANET, a project funded by the US government through what is now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The motivation was to let the many researchers across the US connect to the few powerful computers then in existence.

One of the project’s innovations was that when computers ‘talked’ on ARPANET they did not do so over a dedicated line, as people did when talking on the telephone.

Instead, each message – a long string of ones and zeros – was chopped up into short sequences. Then, to each sequence was added the address of the destination computer. These ‘packets’ were guided through the network by specialised computers, called routers, sometimes by different paths. Only at the destination was the message reassembled.

This arrangement proved to be much more efficient and flexible than using dedicated lines. If a link between two computers went down, for example, the packets could often find another route to their destination.

By 1973, ARPANET reached from Hawaii, across the US to Norway and thence to London. As it grew it became clear that its control software could not easily cope with connecting lots of other networks.

Two computer scientists, Vint Cerf and Robert Khan, produced a better version. They wrote a suite of rules, or protocols, called TCP/IP, which detailed everything from how computers should identify and locate one another to the detection and fixing of transmission errors and the way application programs, such as those for sending files over ARPANET, should be dealt with.

The protocols went live on ARPANET in 1983. They were designed to be independent of the hardware used, so that networks with different architectures, equipment and communications software could talk to each other using TCP/IP as an intermediary. More importantly, many networks simply adopted the new protocols from scratch.

The most significant of these was created in 1986 by the National Science Foundation, one of the US government’s biggest research funders. Its network for linking five new supercomputer centres, called NSFNET, was to become the backbone to which other regional and academic networks could connect. It provided the evolutionary link between ARPANET and the internet we know today.

The internet protocols were freely available and by sticking to them, any manufacturer could make equipment that would work with anyone else’s. Equally, no single entity was in charge of the internet.

These factors removed many constraints to growth and the net expanded at an immense pace. It also created a vehicle for other innovations: the first electronic mail message arrived in 1972. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web which made it easy to navigate around the internet, and finally brought the net to public attention.

Today, the International Telecommunication Union estimates that the internet is used by around 2 billion people: a third of humanity. It has changed the nature of how we communicate – via email, instant messaging and video conferencing. It has created new communities through social networking and given us the ability to find information on just about anything at the touch of a button.

In less than 25 years it has changed our lives, toppled multi-billion-dollar industries and created new ones. If the pace of innovation continues, the next 25 years should be just as profound.

The new green revolution

We stand on the cusp of a green revolution, says environmental campaigner Jeremy Leggett. The next 20 years will see the UK undergo something of a green metamorphosis, with thousands of new jobs created as the country transforms into a low-carbon economy.

A large part of this will be the transformation of the energy industry, with renewable power ultimately set to displace all fossil fuel energy, says Leggett, who is the founder of London-based solar energy company, Solar Century. The impact of carbon emissions on global temperatures has “ensured there basically won’t be any choice” but to find alternative energy sources, he says. Leggett believes this will happen when electricity produced from renewable sources becomes as cheap or cheaper than that generated from fossil fuels.

The switch-over to renewables will fuel a demand for scientists and engineers, says David Clarke, chief executive of the Loughborough-based Energy Technology Institute. This will include not only those capable of designing and building the necessary physical infrastructure, such as deep-sea wave farms or biofuel processors, but electronics engineers and computer scientists that can build monitoring and management systems. These are needed because most of the infrastructure will need to operate semi-autonomously. Once the facilities are up and running, thousands of jobs will be created to maintain them.

On a more everyday level, the drive for energy efficiency will create a new generation of managers, planners and brokers. These people will advise households and businesses on how to cut their energy bills and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for.

But to be truly green will require a fundamental rethink of how we live our lives. For example, it is widely accepted that electric cars, hybrids and integrated public transport systems are part of the solution, says James Goodman, head of futures at London-based environmental think tank Forum for the Future, “but they are only part of a wider transformation that is needed”. Rethinking energy consumption has to go beyond using an electric car to drive to the supermarket; we have to think about entire supply chains and how we access goods and services, he says.

This chimes with the thinking of Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition movement, which helps communities plan for a life without oil. He says we need to refocus the scale at which we operate and rebuild local economies. In terms of food production, this would involve building farms around urban areas, and local food infrastructure like abattoirs and mills that link to the local food suppliers. To this end, Goodman envisages an army of community planners that can organise services at a local level, such as food delivery and waste management. These groups would ensure that people can get the provisions and services they need using as little energy as possible.

Even relatively mundane changes, such as upgrading existing housing, will see jobs created. For example, the UK government’s Green Deal, which aims to give every home and small business an eco-makeover, is expected to create nearly a quarter of a million jobs by 2030, as properties get fitted out with energy-saving gizmos, from better insulation to smart energy meters.

We will also need people to mitigate our unwavering addiction to shiny new toys. Technicians who can re-extract the vital metals, alloys and minerals from redundant equipment will become ever more important as our need to recycle a greater variety of rare earth metals – such as neodymium, now found in magnets in most electric motors – increases, and the techniques for doing so become more specialised, says Clarke.

One area that makes headlines today but may never quite get off the ground is geoengineering – the large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract global warming. Goodman thinks it is unlikely that anyone’s job description will include seeding clouds with seawater to make them more reflective or fertilising the ocean with iron filings any time soon. “The role of geoengineers will probably be on a scale far smaller than we might assume,” he says. Until our ability to understand the complexities of climate improves, the risks of tinkering with it outweigh the benefits. “And that is before you even get into the political complexities,” he says.

Where the “planet hackers” are likely to find a role is in “low-level climate modulation”. This includes less drastic action, such as understanding how agriculture can be used to affect the local environment, or how natural cooling processes can be introduced into urban environments, including the greater use of plant-covered “green roofs” in cities.

Job titles of the future                     

Eco-home advisor           

Community waste manager            

Micro-power generation engineer           

Urban farmer                  

Hands-off healthcare

A good bedside manner may be cherished as a cornerstone of the medical profession, but its days might well be numbered. In the future, the need for doctors to visit their patients will diminish as it becomes possible to monitor and even treat people without going near them.

One way of achieving this will be to monitor people’s health with a new breed of sensor that they can carry or have implanted, performing a plethora of chemical checks. The sensor would report back through a centralised information system programmed to detect the telltale chemical triggers indicative of early-stage cancer or osteoporosis, for example.

Speaking at the Cambridge Phenomenon Conference in October 2010, Christopher Lowe, a researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, told delegates that microfabrication techniques had already made it possible to build biosensors that could be housed in contact lenses or holographic skin patches.

Another big growth area will be in personal genomics, says John West, former chief executive of Solexa, a genetic sequencing company now owned by San Diego-based company Illumina.

As our ability to understand genetic profiles improves, it will become increasingly possible to use that information for a wide variety of treatments, such as preventative measures for those at risk of developing cardiac disease. “At that point, you are really going to see personal genomics grow rapidly,” West says.

As that happens, it will be accompanied by a burgeoning demand for people who can interpret the results of genetic profiles and explain what they mean to customers, says Rod Falcon, an ethnographic researcher at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, California. Most genetic profiling companies today offer some interpretation with the results, but it is fairly basic stuff, he says. “The role of a genetics counsellor is going to become ever more vital.”

Combining the data from biosensors with the information from a person’s genetic profile, and perhaps then including a behavioural profile that models their exposure to risk, will provide a lot of information that can be used to treat that person, says Luca Cardelli, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Cardelli and his team are investigating how nanoscale biostructures can be incorporated into living cells. Eventually these devices may not only monitor your health, but also take appropriate actions, such as releasing analgesics when pain signals are detected.

In effect, this is a healthcare system that resembles a computer science problem, says Cardelli – you need to comb through a sea of patient data to pick out specific things that interest you, and then automate a response. Computational biology doesn’t mean that biologists’ days are numbered, he says, but it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on the principles of computer science.

But people are not computers. Actually getting people to embrace an information-led approach to healthcare and change their behaviour so that they don’t call their doctor at the first sign of a cold is a big step. One of the most important roles in future healthcare will be identifying those people who understand the power of social networks to facilitate change on a large scale, says Falcon.

Those people, who could be systems designers or behavioural economists, would then be able to shift the focus onto prevention rather than cure.

The number of people 85 and over in the UK is set to soar from 1.3 million in 2008 to 3.3 million by 2033, according to the Office for National Statistics. Dealing with the implications of this ageing population will also require a shake-up of our healthcare system. Noel Sharkey, a roboticist from the University of Sheffield, thinks that robotic systems could play a “considerable” role over the next 20 years. He points out that Japan, the greyest country in the world, has already put substantial funding into robots that care for the elderly and help them regain independence.

In the home, Sharkey envisions robots empowering the elderly by helping them to navigate around the house. “They could also assist care workers in the dull and dirty duties such as heavy lifting, cleaning and feeding,” he says, but they must not replace human contact.

In hospitals, robots controlled remotely by doctors could diagnose patients, enabling someone to see a specialist from a different country and have their family doctor drop in on the conversation. Or robots could help less experienced surgeons carry out procedures when the consultant cannot be present.

Like computers, robots can break down so as well as an IT helpdesk, future hospitals will need a robotics engineering team ready to deal with any glitches, says Sharkey. This is good news for job prospects as it will create “more rather than less human jobs – they will just be different jobs”.

Job titles of the future                    

Computational biologist                   

Robotics maintenance engineer                       

Bio-sensor mechanic             

Data explosion   

Whatever happens in the future, it is going to be data driven, says technology forecaster Paul Saffo. The idea that the internet has transformed human communication is rapidly going to seem very out of date, says Saffo, who is the managing director of foresight for Discern, a think tank based in San Francisco. “Pretty soon, the internet is going to be about machines talking to machines – albeit on our behalf.”

Over the next few decades, the number of robots in our homes, such as web-enabled home security wardens and domestic droids, is set to skyrocket. Each of those will require a permanent web connection, and pretty soon the amount of data being generated by every house is going to dwarf what a large corporation used to produce in a year, Saffo predicts. Therein lies the next big challenge – creating wireless communication technologies that can handle the load and manage it so that only useful information is communicated.

The bad news, at least on the job front, is that the new communication technology looks likely to be lean on the jobs front. “There will be an elite few employed to develop the technology,” says Saffo, but not many supporting it. “The good news is that this new technology will lead to the creation of new industries, and that is where the jobs are.”

One such new industry is “blended reality”. To understand the concept, imagine a group of avatars being monitored as they chase their opponents through a virtual forest, replete with magical creatures and hidden realms. It might sound like the run-of-the-mill video game, but for the computer tracking the players, their actions have just mapped out a better routing plan for delivery trucks in London. Welcome to the world of games at work.

The foundations for this are already being laid down. For example, in autumn 2010, Fate of the World was launched. This is a strategy game in which players attempt to save the world by cutting carbon emissions or let catastrophe ensue by allowing temperatures and populations to soar. The consequences of their actions are based on real-world climate models and input from scientists.

Byron Reeves, a communications researcher at Stanford University in California believes that video games will become essential business tools, applying to everyday life the intense engagement gamers demonstrate while playing. Those that can map problem-solving behaviour – a common feature of many video games – onto real-world problems will be much sought after, he predicts.

“As part of interacting with virtual worlds, we routinely collect data, the likes of which we have never seen in real-world interactions,” says Jeremy Bailenson, a virtual reality researcher also at Stanford. Finding ways to use this data will transform communications and work.

Job titles of the future����������������������������

Business game designer                    

Household robotics engineer                        

Personal data manager                        

Virtual lecturer                          

The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become a shape-shifter, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert in situations where visual and audible cues won’t do.

, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone – – using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.

Pressure plates on the device detect how much force is being applied to the casing, while the motors control the amount of resistance exerted in response. Because the resistance can be tweaked, the degree of squishability can be controlled by some aspect of the phone’s status to provide some basic feedback without demanding the attention of eyes or ears.

For example, after the battery is fully charged, the phone might feel as taut as a glutton’s post-lunch belly, while a gadget running on empty might be as easy to squeeze as a stress ball. Alternatively, the stiffness could convey the number of emails marked as important that have arrived in a user’s inbox.

“You can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status – ring level, messages – without having to look at it,” says Patel.

Squish test

In trials, Patel asked 10 people to test seven different uses of SqueezeBlock. They were able to distinguish up to four levels of squishiness, suggesting it could provide a basic way of checking battery charge, for instance.

The work was presented at the in New York last week.

Shwetak’s team isn’t alone in exploring how a handset’s physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, , a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphone. His phone “inhales” and “exhales” at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.

Hemmert is now exploring how tactile feedback could provide further cues. He has devised mechanisms that enable mobile devices to change their shape and even their weight.

This way

His shape-shifting device uses motors to move the handset’s panels apart, creating a wedge shape. Feeling that one side of the phone is thicker than then other could alert the user that there is additional content available that the screen is too small to show but which can be found in the thicker direction, says Hemmert. For instance, if a user was scrolling horizontally through a photographic slideshow, the phone’s right-hand side would gradually thin and the left-hand side would thicken.

A different handset, meanwhile, houses a weight resting on two perpendicular runners, so that it can be moved in two dimensions. Our hands are remarkably adept at detecting shifts in balance, says Hemmert, so that when used in conjunction with a mapping application, the phone’s centre of balance can move in the direction a user should travel to reach a desired destination. This would allow people to navigate a foreign city without having to actually look at the map – helping them take in the sights while avoiding collisions with the locals. Hemmert is presenting the work at the in Reykjavik, Iceland, this week.

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Innovation is our regular column in which we highlight emerging technologies and predict where they may lead

Computer automation can take jobs away from people but, thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, humans are fighting back. AMT was inspired by the 18th-century inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, who dazzled the Roman empress Maria Theresa with a . His secret: a human chess master hid inside the machine.

In 2005, online retailer Amazon that uses a human workforce “hidden” on the internet to solve problems – for a modest price. Typically, the work undertaken is for organisations that need a little human smarts applied to bulk tasks, such as identifying objects in vast collections of images.

An echo of von Kempelen’s Turk is found in the offices of robot maker , in Menlo Park, California. Some of the firm’s free-roaming robots rely on humans through AMT to help them get their bearings. Whenever one gets lost within the Willow Garage offices, it sends an image to AMT with a request for nearby objects to be identified, using the answers to establish its whereabouts.

Get shorter

At the symposium in New York City this week there are signs that AMT rivals computer automation on some tasks.

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, have developed , an add-on for Microsoft Word that uses AMT workers to check language and grammar. In tests on text from Wikipedia entries, Word’s grammar checker picked up about a third of errors; Soylent spotted two-thirds.

Solyent’s Shortn module tasks the online workers with shortening the text – to meet a word limit, for example. The Word add-on also boasts a macro-writing module, Human Macro, which lets a writer describe how they want to manipulate text – perhaps changing it into the past tense – without the complication of having to code their own set of instructions within Word.

Say what you see

Meanwhile, at the University of Rochester, New York, and colleagues, are using the image-analysis capabilities of AMT workers – predominantly based in the US and India – to help the visually impaired. They have created an iPhone app called that gets AMT workers to interpret objects in the user’s environment – checking the small use-by date on a carton of milk, for example.

The app is able to analyse the iPhone camera’s focal length and lens distortion, and data from the built-in accelerometer, to pick out a target object in sufficient detail before sending it. After identification, the result is read aloud.

However, despite their lack of real brain power, there is one advantage that computers will continue to hold over their AMT rivals: computers don’t charge for their labour.

References: Bernstein’s (pdf); Bigham’s (pdf)

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A new phone app promises to give users a quick and easy way to change what they divulge. Privacy Shake, developed by at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and colleagues, lets users adjust their privacy settings by shaking the phone, an easy way to interact with hand-held gadgets. A sideways shake hides the user’s location, while an up-down shake broadcasts it.

A simple-to-use mechanism could help users get the benefits from geo-location apps, without compromising their privacy, says , a web researcher at the National University of Ireland, Galway. “People often turn on location services for geotagging photos or Twitter updates, or for looking for nearby products and services, but it is all too easy to forget to turn it off,” he says.

Whether Privacy Shake can become the system of choice remains to be seen. In tests, several users reported difficulties in getting the system to respond to their shakes. That’s likely because it had been set up to respond to Jedrzejczyk’s idiosyncratic style of shaking, he says. It would be relatively straightforward to incorporate more sophisticated algorithms for analysing accelerometer data, that make the interface easier to use for a range of people, says Jedrzejczyk.

The work will be presented at the conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in September.

Portable computers, from games machines to smartphones, are now much more hands-on thanks to the proliferation of touchscreen technology. But touchscreens suffer from a debilitating problem: touching them stops you being able to see all the action.

For some time researchers have suggested the answer to this so-called “occlusion problem” is to put controls on the back of the device, but now there are signs that sophisticated rear-mounted controls may be inching towards commercial reality. Last week, gaming website reported that some who have seen the next version of Sony’s PSP portable console say it will sport touch controls on its back.

Sony has refused to be drawn on the rumours, but if they prove correct, it would not be the first tech firm to explore the idea. ��è����Ƶ reported in 2007 on work at Microsoft and Mitsubishi research labs to create LucidTouch, a large, transparent hand-held LCD device with touch-sensitive panels on the rear. Subsequent devices such as the NanoTouch have demonstrated that people can use rear-mounted sensors accurately, even if they can’t see their fingers.

Those prototype gadgets featured relatively simple rear-facing controls. But many of us are so familiar with full keyboards that it may be practical to put them on the rear of hand-held devices.

Touch typing

, a computer interface researcher based at Microsoft Research labs in Cambridge, UK, will present a paper at next month’s conference in Lisbon, Portugal, showing how LucidTouch’s panel sensors have evolved into a mobile device with a qwerty keyboard on the rear.

RearType supports 10-fingered touch typing. There are two rows of four buttons on the front for thumbs; the qwerty keyboard is split in two, as on a split ergonomic keyboard, with each half rotated through 90 degrees. The thumb-controlled front-facing buttons include frequently used keys including shift, delete and enter (see photos, right).

When a key is pressed, a virtual keyboard appears the right way round on the device’s screen, highlighting which key has been pressed.

To test the devices, Scott and his colleagues advertised for volunteers to take part in a typing trial. They were looking for so-called finger typists – people with a moderate ability to type without looking at the keyboard. After an hour’s tuition the 12 volunteers had an average speed of 15 words per minute – far lower than their speeds on a traditional keyboard, but on a par with the sorts of speed users manage with a touchscreen keyboard. With some adjustments to the keyboard layout to make it easier to reach all the keys, the researchers think that typing speeds will increase.

Reference: Scott’s team’s paper is (PDF)

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It’s a common tale in the computing world: once you achieve popularity you become a target for hackers. And so it was for Android, Google’s smartphone operating system.

In the week that the IT analysis company Gartner confirmed US sales of Android were those of Apple’s illustrious iPhone, other reports noted that the system had for the first time been infected by a piece of profit-seeking malware. Online security company warned that Android had been hit by an SMS trojan – a program hiding a piece of code that secretly sends text messages to premium rate numbers owned by crooks.

While those who downloaded the trojan-containing media player may be surprised when their next phone bill hits the mat, this piece of smartphone-based malware will have raised few eyebrows among security researchers. After all, the on-board computing power of today’s smartphones makes them as capable of running malware as they are of playing Scrabble.

The real significance of this attack is that it marks an evolution in mobile malware, says Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer of San Francisco-based smartphone security maker . Instead of writing malware to impress their peers, the authors of this smartphone trojan are after money.

“Malware on the PC has hit three relatively distinct milestones that we could classify as ‘ego’, ‘profit’ and ‘political’. This cycle looks like it will repeat itself for mobile phones, only significantly accelerated,” he says.

Permissive society

The growth of smartphone malware featured prominently at last month’s in Las Vegas, Nevada. There, Lookout’s researchers highlighted programs that were supposed to provide eye-pleasing backgrounds for Android phones but turned out also to surreptitiously harvest contact details and location information. It’s been a small step from hackers demonstrating the system’s weaknesses to those seeking to exploit security holes for profit. Others demonstrated attacks affecting iPhones and Windows-based smartphones.

But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Modern smartphones were supposed to have secure operating systems. For example, Android apps are forced to work with a “permissions” mechanism that restricts the operations that the app can undertake. If an app wants to be able to read location data, it should have to get permission from the user.

As the Lookout researchers have demonstrated, however, users often have a poor grasp of what an app may reasonably need access to and may not routinely deny unreasonable requests.

Trespassing in Apple’s garden

For its part, Apple’s iPhone operates under a strict “walled garden” approach. Apps must go through an approval process before they are available through its store and unless an app has gone through that process, iPhone users can’t download it.

Not even the walled garden can always keep out attacks from a new wave of money-seeking malware, however. Last month a developer called Thuat Nguyen was for what Apple called “fraudulent purchase patterns” that led to an apparent surge in demand for Nguyen’s apps – at one point he occupied 42 of the top 50 apps-by-revenue slots in the book section.

Users determined to escape the Apple garden have the option of “jailbreaking” their mobile devices – which effectively removes the limitations that Apple has placed on what applications the phone can run.

A new website called allows iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users to do this just by visiting the website. The page uses two vulnerabilities in Apple’s mobile-device operating system iOS 4 as a means to break into the system and perform the jailbreak.

But that level of convenience might prove to be a double-edged sword. If iPhones can be compromised by directing users to specific websites, hackers may be able to install other malicious code through websites once the devices’ security has been breached.

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