As smartphone users wake up to the dangers of apps snaffling data they would rather not share, researchers at Microsoft have come up with a neat solution to the problem that could be used to bake a balance of content personalisation and privacy into its Windows Phone operating system.

Many of today's most popular smartphone apps reliant on harvesting information about users to deliver a personalised service, according to Ben Livshits of Microsoft Research. 

But unless users are aware of the extent of this information, they risk handing over more data than they bargained for, as app makers harvest user data and transmit it to their own datacentres.

A case in point is photo-sharing service Path, which caused a furore earlier this year after users realised the app had sent the contents of their address book back to the firm while Apple and Google where also caught up in the issue.

So Livshits and his colleague Drew Davidson of the University of Wisconsin developed MoRePriv.

It designed to be used with the Windows Phone system to build up a picture of the user, and defines the level of data sharing allowed on the phone according to a set of pre-established roles, such as technophile or business user.

“MoRePriv advocates leaving user data on the mobile device, under the control of the user,” they said.

This change in perspective means users retain control of their data and cloud providers will not fall foul of data protection or privacy laws.

MoRePriv analyses the use applications such as email, SMS and Facebook to establish a persona for the user – this persona is not intended to exactly match the user, but provides a means to establish rules for data sharing based on their profile.

“The use of personas limits the potential for user tracking: while persona information can be shared by apps to perform server-based personalisation, for instance, it is not enough to link the user across multiple interactions,” the researchers said.

The researchers then used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to establish how these different categories of user would have to sharing data in various circumstances before testing the system using a Windows Phone running the Mango version of the operating system.

They found that the system was able to reduce the permissions given to 73 per cent of apps that wanted some access to data, providing the user with greater privacy without crippling the apps that they want to use.

It remains to be seen if the tool could be extended to other systems, but it could be a key step on the road to providing device owners with more control over how their data is stored and secured, and kept away from organisations with unknown motives.

The original designs for iPhones and Android devices looked quite different from what we know today. Fortunately, none of them actually hit the market.

Gone would be the giant touch screens and virtual keyboards we currently use. In its place, we would have been typing with Blackberry-esque physical keyboards and spinning classic iPod click wheels.

The blueprints for the original Android device concepts emerged during the ongoing Oracle trial. According to reports from the courts, the "Google Phone" would have been outfitted with a physical keyboard, a 200MHz processor, a 2-megapixel camera and QVGA display.

The people at Apple, meanwhile, considered an iPhone with a similar design to the classic iPod. Former Apple Senior Vice President Tony Fadell recently said the company had considered launching the iPhones with click wheels and a physical keyboard.

"The biggest problem with the 'iPod+phone' was we had a little screen and this huge hardware wheel," Fadell explained on an episode of the On the Verge podcast.

The time of the click wheel has long passed but it is interesting to imagine a world where the virtual keyboard never took off. Without touch screens we most likely would have never seen the giant and high definition displays we're used to.

So next time your writing an email on your iPhone or Android device just remember your experience could have been quite different.

Google is disputing the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) claim of obstruction in its Street View service case.

The company wrote a letter to the FCC claiming it would have been of little help to give government officials access to the engineer who wrote the computer program that let its Street View cars collect private data from people's personal wireless networks.

"The fact that the engineer was legally unavailable did not leave any significant factual questions unanswered," Google wrote in a letter to the FCC.

The fine stemmed from an earler case in which Google was charged with collecting private data from Wi-Fi hotspots without permission. Google was eventually cleared of the charges on the grounds that they were unaware of such wrong doing.

The FCC, however, fined Google $25,000 because they felt that the tech giant impeded the investigation. The fine primarily dealt with Google's inability to produce the engineer responsible for the code that led to the scandal. Google says they were unable to get that witness because he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The FCC has yet to provide a response to the letter.

Forget 15 minutes of fame, researchers at Google have concluded today's stars don't dim quite so quickly, thanks to sites likes Twitter.

A group of researchers from Google, eBay and Berkeley University have been studying the famous and wanted to know how fame had changed over the past two and a half centuries.

They suspected that thanks to social media and 24-hour rolling news, fame today would be far more fleeting.

But how to set about measuring fame? The researchers, led by Alex Fabrikant of Google Research, alighted upon a pair of measurements: the likelihood a reader might read a news article at random and find their name mentioned in it; and the period around which that name continues to appear in news stories.

They also accounted for those that appeared genuinely famous – either by a large volume of mentions or a long-lasting series of mentions. Luckily for them, to help with this they had access to Google's digitised news archive, which stretches back 250 years.

The researchers then set about using tools to pick out people's names from this vast archive – some of which is stored as digital content, while a huge proportion is generated from optical character recognition tools being applied to microfilm.

Up until the 1940s, the researchers predictions appeared to be correct: there was a gradual decline in the length of time people stayed in the news.

But following the Second World War, the researchers detected a complete volte face.

“Over the course of 70 years, through a world war, a global depression, a two order of magnitude growth in (available) media volume, and a technological curve moving from party-line telephones to satellites and Twitter, both of our fame duration metrics showed that neither the typical person in the news, nor the most famous, experienced any statistically significant decrease in fame durations," the report explained.

What's more, after 1940, those people that were famous appeared to stay famous for a longer time than previously.

Which is great news for Peter Andre, but probably bad news for humanity.

Forget data mining, Google's bosses seem to have set their sights on far loftier goals – asteroid mining. Well, that at least, is the assumption.

Later this April, a new company called Planetary Resources, is set to reveal its purpose to an eagerly-awaiting public. The firm is backed by a host of star names, including Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, along with film director and aquatic explorer James Cameron and former Microsoft bigwig Charles Simonyi.

The details of what Planetary Resources will attempt are at this stage pretty sketchy – an invitation to the company launch – spotted by MIT's Tech Review – promises to “unveil a new space venture with a mission to ensure humanity's prosperity".

"The company will overlay two critical sectors - space exploration and natural resources - to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP."

Those details are enough to convince many that what's being proposed is an asteroid mining operation. And perhaps with good reason.

Planetary Resources is led by Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize foundation, which offered a $10m prize private-sector manned spaceflight. 

Also on board is renowned space entrepreneur Eric Anderson. In 2010, Anderson gave a speech at the TEDGlobal 2010 conference promoting the idea that asteroid mining could be used to make commercial space travel profitable.

More recently, Diamandis has been giving his own TED talk. Earlier this year, he took to the stage promising his audience that mankind's future was one blessed with an abundance of resources – perhaps hinting at his ideas for where else we might look for precious minerals.

Keep watching the skies...

Just how good is the protection afforded by the pattern-lock technique Google designed to prevent unauthorised access to some Android-based smartphones?

Good enough to apparently defeat the entire technical brainpower of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Regional Computer Forensics Labs (RCFL) in Southern California.

A recently released affidavit, discovered by security researcher Christopher Soghoian of Indiana University, revealed that the FBI went cap-in-hand to a judge, seeking a warrant that would force Google to help them unlock the phone.

The phone in question had been seized during the arrest of a notorious gang member and pimp in January.

In his warrant application, special agent Jonathan Cupina explained how the RCFL technicians made several attempts to unlock the phone, but ended up just triggering the lock-out mechanism, which requires a Gmail login and password to override. It was these details that the FBI wanted Google to hand over.

As Soghoian points out, it seems slightly perverse for a computer forensics lab to resort to obtaining search warrants for Google, when there are tried and tested commercial products and hardware hacks that would have enabled the FBI to access the phone's data.

Sure, the FBI may have needed a warrant to legally access the phone's data, but surely it could have done that rather than going direct to Google? It certainly doesn't paint the FBI's computer forensic team in a flattering light.

Who wouldn't be tempted by a $1m cash pot for spotting flaws in Google's flagship Chrome browser? Well, the answer – according to some – is the very computer scientists with the necessary hacking skills to crack the browser that Google is hoping to attract.

This pointed barb was chucked Google's way after it admitted that it had withdrawn its offer of sponsorship for the infamous Pwn2Own browser hacking contest, which takes place at the CanSecWest conference on

Google it seems was unhappy that some entrants might be able to make off with the Pwn2Own booty, without having to divulge the secrets of the exploits that succeeded against its browser.

Instead, Google has set up its own Chrome-hacking competition, complete with $1m in cash prizes to hand out – with top prizes of $60,000 for full Chrome exploits.

But the organisers of the Pwn2Own contest have hit back at what they see as a misrepresentation of their contest.

In a blog post, the Zero Day Initiative team point out that the Pwn2Own competition has a long history of handing out rewards for the disclosure of so-called code execution vulnerabilities.

The organisers also demand that teams also demonstrate any so-called sandbox escapes they use in the competition – but they are not required to provide full disclosure of these types of exploit.

These second type of exploit are both rare – and potentially very lucrative for hackers, the organisers wrote:

“We strongly believe that those considering participating in Pwn2Own would not do so without a considerable reward [for sandbox escapes].”

They also had some harsh words about Google's alternative competition.

“It is fair to say that a sophisticated sandbox-escape exploit could certainly wreak more than $60,000 worth of damage in the enterprise space,” they wrote.

“That is why such an exploit against Chrome will never see the light of day at CanSecWest. Instead, the grand Google prize will go unclaimed and the great takeaway from Pwnium will be that Google Chrome is unhackable.”

Google's hubris could actually be a set back the browser security, they added.

One commentator tweeted:

@thezdi I agree with your blog post 110%. To bad Googs self interest blinded fact and logic. Everyone loses in the end esp. browser security

— Kris Lamb (@krislamb) February 29, 2012

When Google announced its decision to splash out $12.5bn on Motorola there was immediate speculation that the deal could alienate other Android manufactures, chiefly HTC and Samsung.

At the time Google went to great lengths to reassure those firms, and the market in general, that the deal would not upset the Android apple cart, with Motorola receiving no preferential treatment despite being a part of Google.

Executive chairman Eric Schmidt even said during a visit to South Korea, the home of Samsung, that Motorola would remain an independent business unit.

His words at the time: "We're not going to change in any material way the way we operate."

However, in an all-too-predicatable twist, the firm is now said to be on the verge of booting out current chief executive Sanjay Jha and replacing him with the Google man who oversaw the deal, Dennis Woodside, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg.

Google has not responded to a request for comment on that report.

This looks like a clear contradition - after all parachuting in your own man to replace the leader of a firm you are buying seems to present a pretty substantial material change. How independent can Motorola be if headed up by a Google executive?

No doubt those at Samsung, HTC and the rest of the Android collective will note this development with interest and reconsider what Google is up to.

The rumours will also be of great interest to Microsoft, which will be hoping to entice any concerned Android vendors to its Windows Phone operating system, particularly as the platform continues to garner positive reviews.

The relationship between Google and Microsoft have reached an all-time low, and so the folks at Redmond are probably considering how best to further stir the waters of the Android community - although V3 hopes it doesn't involve anything as awful as this video that hit the web this week: