Read my new article about protecting your Internet privacy from insecure wireless and corporate firewall:

PCI Security Standards Council recently issued press release clarifying position of the Council on mobile payment applications. According to the special “update on PA-DSS and mobile payment acceptance applications”, PCI SSC won’t allow payment applications developed for mobile devices such as iPhone, BlackBerry, Android etc. to be accepted for PA-DSS validation which means that such products won't be able to achieve PCI PA-DSS compliance and therefore used as part of merchant’s PCI DSS compliant environment. This limitation won’t affect applications developed for special devices intended especially for payment processing. PCI SSC does not specify such devices so it is unclear who and how is supposed to classify the hardware and determine whether it is eligible for validation. The Council also promised to further clarify the situation with mobile payments and “produce additional guidance by the end of the year”.
It should be still possible to avoid an issue with the validation of mobile payment application if software installed on mobile device does not store or process sensitive card data because in this case the application would not fall into the definition of payment application as described in PA-DSS, and therefore is not required not pass the validation at all.

According to recent The Code Project survey, Android leads with 29% of mobile phones for personal usage, followed by iPhone with 17% of market share, Windows (both Mobile and 7) on third place (!) with 15%, and Symbian (Nokia's OS which is going to be converted to Windows 7) with 13%. BlackBerry took 5th place with only 5%.  

I just signed up for Diaspora* account to see how “The Anti-Facebook” really looks like. Diaspora* project is still in alpha but there are already several working pods so I used one of them. If you are not familiar with Diaspora* concept: rather than using centralized social networking website like Facebook, they allow users maintaining their own mini websites (they call them “pods”), so in order to enter the Diaspora* network you either need to set up your own website or use one of existing pods hosted by independent providers.
The pod which I randomly selected from the list which I found on wiki (for some reason the official Diaspora* website does not provide any information on how to sign up for the account) claims they are in beta... Doesn’t it sound weird that the product is in alpha but one of its service providers is already in beta? Anyway, eventually I managed to sign up. Discussion about bugs and design is out of scope of this article. Much more important is the idea behind decentralized hosting od social network accounts: privacy. You do not give up your privacy to social network owner such as Facebook which sells information about you to third parties. Sounds very reasonable and promising! However, what happens in reality? If you are not a computer geek, who intends to participate in development of new social network project, I doubt you will have enough time, motivation, technical capabilities, and which is most important - knowledge - to maintain your own pod website. Therefore, in order to join Diaspora* you will have to open account in one of existing pods. Instead of giving your information to at least well known and somehow responsible Facebook, you will have to trust the same data to one of randomly selected unknown hosting providers? Note that Diaspora* is all about open source so there is no any licensing or other controlling mechanism, and literally everyone can set up new Diaspora* pod and start maintaining user accounts which in fact means - owning user information!
The idea of decentralization and “privatization” of social networks is great, but this particular implementation is practically not there yet... So who is next?
By the way, you can find me on Diaspora* at [email protected]