path

Former federal CTO Aneesh Chopra joins the show today to talk wireless policy and what the heck happened with SOPA/PIPA; we dish on what really happened with Molly's Galaxy Nexus; and the address book uploading controversy that just won't end. Plus, Into It/Not Into It, and one angry, angry voice mail. Good to be back!

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The revelations about Path's contact list uploading, and the resulting mea culpa's first from Path and now from Apple, might have Path's Android users a bit spooked. In fact, they should have you worried--but over something much more important.

Could this happen on Android is a fairly cut-and-dry question. The answer is no, as in, a snowball's chance. No, nein, nyet, non. Why it can't happen on Android still only hints at the bigger problem.

The future possibility of the Path situation happening on Android can't occur because it already has happened. When you … Read more

What Path did with users' address books was ill-advised, to put it kindly. But thanks to the company's blunder, Apple will finally do what it should have done years ago: enforce its address-book protection policy.

Apple said today that apps that are collecting user contact lists without permission are in violation of its app guidelines, and that a software fix is on the way to keep that from happening.

The practice of rifling through address books is at the core of many social apps.

Apps vendors are running fast, trying to build the best social apps they can. Social … Read more

Apple says that iOS applications that collect user contact data are in violation of the company's guidelines, and that a future software fix will prohibit this behavior.

"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

Controversy erupted earlier this month, when Path… Read more

The complaints started small but rapidly escalated. Management came off as clueless and callous and the critics piled on. Seemingly overnight, a crisis was born.

Try Intel, 1994.

In October of that year, Professor Thomas R. Nicely, then teaching at Lynchburg College in Virginia, discovered a flaw in Intel's chip. He posted his findings on a cyber bulletin board, hoping others might know what was causing the problem. A few weeks later, Intel got first wind of the problem after the trade journal Electronic Engineering Times ran a story prior to Thanksgiving.

It was the beginning of … Read more

This week's failure to communicate, from Path, was hardly a unique event. Companies--especially fast-moving startups--screw up all the time. The issue is how they react to their errors. Can Path recover, as Facebook and Google have from their privacy flaps, or will this flub hurt the company over the long term?

And how can you prepare for your own inevitable, and public, failures, if you're running your own company?

I have two guests today well-versed in the art of failure and graceful recovery:

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… Read more

Microsoft has tablet computers in mind for the next generation of its operating system.

The software giant plans to release a flavor of Windows 8 on ARM chips at the same time it releases one for the so-called x86 chips that power traditional PCs. That was an open question ever since Microsoft previewed Windows 8 in September. And it's important because the ARM version of the new operating system will be the one that powers many of the tablets that Microsoft hopes will compete with Apple's industry-leading iPads.

In a blog post, Windows President Steven Sinofsky said "… Read more

Rafe Needleman and Donald Bell join Brian Tong on the show today to discuss all the new video-streaming options coming down the pipe. We got Amazon, Viacom, HBO, Netflix, Verizon, Redbox, and now possibly another service called Quickflix. Which one will you choose? In other news, the iPad 3 is coming in March, and we investigate who exactly Pinterest appeals to. If you are a guy you most likely have no interest in Pinterest.

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Gawker published this evening an apparently damning story to further the day's drama over Path sucking down contact lists from its iPhone users.

The story says that Morin has misled us in the past about Path's use of personal data and that it is safe to assume that Morin is playing fast and loose with customer data again. The evidence is an e-mail Dave Morin wrote to Ryan Tate at Gawker in 2010, saying:

One of our core principles here is that you must have contact information for someone in order to find them on Path. Usually, you … Read more