Tech blog: Five essential technology stories of the week

I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that

It was heralded by some as the future of smartphone technology, but Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant Siri has come under fire recently for apparently being pro-life. A number of rights groups and individuals have expressed concern over the fact that Siri failed to locate abortion clinics and in some cases, suggested pregnancy advice centres as an alternative. The software, one of the major selling points of the iPhone 4S, is still being developed, and a spokeswoman said: “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone, it simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks.”

Every text you make, they’ll be watching you

An American security researcher has uncovered a hidden application, installed on millions of smartphones, which he claims can log nearly every user activity. Trevor Eckhart came across CarrierIQ whilst running a test to see what applications Android phones were running. CarrierIQ denied that the application was being used to spy on users, insisting that the hard-to-find software was only used as a diagnostic tool to improve the performance of the phones. It’s not the first time smartphones have been accused of ‘spying’ on users; in April of last year, Apple was accused of tracking the locations of users running a certain software. The company denied the accusations, pointing out that the data was used to find wireless networks, and nothing else. But you might want to think twice before sending that text about your boss.

Apps mark the spot

Spotify, the service allowing users to stream music via the internet, is to open itself up to third party applications. In a press event held in New York, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek said that the apps, which are expected to add fuctionality to the service including lyrics and the ability to buy tickets from the artist being listened to would be ‘game-changing’ for music. Mr Ek also believed that the move would attract more users to the growing service. Like Apple, Spotify will have the final say on what apps are made available, but with Apple’s Ping service failing to take off as planned, perhaps Spotify have made their move at a crucial time.

The anti-social network?

If you find Twitter’s 140-character limit for updates too restricting, you might want to have a closer look at Facebook. Facebook’s Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik revealed recently that the social networking site has increased the number of characters in status updates and wall-posts from 5,000 to 63,206. To put this in perspective, Lavrusik helpfully informs us that the average novel is around 500,000 characters and that ‘this could be shared in 9 posts.’ Face ‘book’ indeed.

Kindle goes continental

Following on from the French Kindle store, launched in October, Amazon have announced two more foreign-language Kindle stores. The Spanish and Italian Kindle stores both offer more than 900,000 titles, with 22,000 Spanish-language texts and 16,000 Italian books. Independent authors and publishers will also have the chance to submit their own works in Spanish or Italian for inclusion.

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