Last Monday, in his WWDC keynote speech, Steve Jobs singled out an RSS reader as a demonstration of a great new app for the iPad. On Tuesday, it got pulled from the App Store. Now, it's back again.
The $3.99 app, called Pulse, is a visual RSS reader for news headlines, which renders stories from multiple sources on a clean movable mosaic. It was created by Alphonso Labs  - founded by two Stanford graduate students - in five weeks flat.

But it seems that the Times Company news organisation wasn't glad, and complained to Apple, which punctually pulled it from the store. Its complaint was based on the fact that the app was using the Nytimes.com and Boston.com free RSS feeds, reframing the content, and then charging a fee.

"We want to be clear that we are willing to work with Pulse, but only under our terms of use," Robert Christie, a spokesman for the Times Company, said in the New York Times. 

But the app is now back, with no explanation from Apple, even though there are a few theories. CNET  claims it was a mistake; All Things D says it's a new version which extracts the New York Times as a default feed.

 
Today Jeff Bertolucci has written, on PC World blog, a review about Google's Wi-Fi and individual privacy rights where he claims that it seems, after Google revealed Friday that its Street View cars, in addition to snapping photos of the world's roadways, have also been collecting sensitive personal information from unencrypted wireless networks.


It was no secret that Google's cars had already been collecting publicly broadcast SSID information (Wi-Fi network names) and MAC addresses (unique numbers for devices like Wi-Fi routers). But this techie data, which is used for location-based services such as Google Maps, didn't include any "payload data," or personal information sent over the network.


Or so "Big Brother" Google claimed on April 27. But yesterday the search behemoth 'fussed up to a security gaffe of Orwellian proportions. Due to a piece of code written in 2006 by an engineer for an experimental Wi-Fi project, Google had in fact been collecting those private bits after all:


"But it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products," wrote Alan Eustace, Google senior VP, engineering & research.


Google was smart to open up about the spying incident. An attempted cover-up would have proven disastrous, particularly when numerous consumer and government agencies worldwide have criticized the search company's seemingly insatiable appetite for personal information, a quest that critics say infringes on individual privacy rights.


There's little doubt the Wi-Fi spying incident won't fade away quietly. In fact, the Electronic Frontiers Association (EFA) and Australia Privacy Foundation (APF) have joined forces to question potential security mishaps by Google's Street View, according to a report by Computerworld Australia.


The latest Street View controversy is sweet fodder for conspiracy theorists. As someone said to him responding to the news: "Imagine, Google driving around in vans, taking pictures of  EVERYTHING, and gobbling up Wi-Fi signals like some new-age techno CIA." .


If nothing else, Google's security gaffe should serve as a wake-up call to clueless folk who've yet to encrypt their home Wi-Fi networks. Do you get it now? Anybody may be snooping on you.

 
Flash Will it be the Achilles heel of Apple iPad? Roundly criticized by Steve Jobs himself, who refuses to integrate the iPad format, Adobe has released at least one video showing the future HP Tablet Slate ran it perfectly on this technology.


85% of websites and 75% of Internet videos using Flash. With Flash Player, HP Tablet Slate provides access to the entire Web, "says Alan Tam, head of marketing at Adobe Flash, which features examples of video sites, games, video clips, d 'photo albums or digital newspaper exploiting this technology.






Adobe is not the only publisher to parasitize the launch of the iPad, the marketing must begin April 3 in the United States. The U.S. webzine Engadget, for example, aired earlier this week a mysterious video revealing Courier, a concept of dual screen tablet Microsoft, close to the Booklet already announced by the Redmond company, the future Asus Eee Reader or the Nintendo DS XL.According to Engadget, this double slate could adopt the same operating system as the Zune and especially Silverlight competitor to Flash by Microsoft, whose mobile version will be unveiled in late March at the MIX conference organized by the publisher.


Despite the false start of Tablet PCs and other Smart Display, Microsoft and its partners seem in any case, determined to win the segment of touch pads, a market that could also invest in Google or Sony in the coming months ...