True, the closed-source nature limits third party evaluation to sniffing LAN traffic. I'll be interested to hear more as the digging continues. As of now, all I've seen is that there are "references" to CarrierIQ in iOS. Lots of people seem to be making a leap that CarrierIQ's software is running on iOS. It's possible, but it doesn't seem likely for the company that completely shut-down the possibility of carrier-mandated apps on their phones.

You're right and though the discussion was leaning that way, I didn't actually mean to take a position on open versus closed. No, the software in question doesn't technically meet the definition of a rootkit but I maintain that it's "akin" to one. It is not part of Android as released by Google, and although it doesn't alter APIs to hide itself (such as removing itself from process lists or filesystem calls), it's not an application that shows-up in the launcher, nor do users have any meaningful control over it. A backdoor provides a means for bypassing access control... and this software, as it's been seen on many Android devices, is a secret means of accessing data stored on or passed by (even over SSL) potentially PIN-secured, filesystem-encryped devices. It doesn't seem to be remotely initiated so maybe it's not a backdoor so much as a back window. They can't come in but they can stand outside and see everything you do.

Um, by reading the "diagnostic and logging" screen that pops-up during the initial configuration of my phone? By looking at the logged data in the settings menu? The only thing that we've learned today is that the diagnostics and logging system in iOS is vaguely-tied to CarrierIQ. It's not been a secret that it's there and there's no evidence that it does anything more than what it discloses to every new user. Yesterday, it didn't have a name. Today, it does.

Agreed... but you represent maybe a couple percent of total Android users in regard to your ability and will to do that. My son tells me that Android runs great on his first gen iPhone... so I guess Android provides the same benefit to similarly-minded Apple users. The remaining ones are stuck with a "Automatically Send / Don't Send" radio button. What do the other 98% of Android device owners have?

You might want to re-think that after reading the article, including its updates. Ironically, the (closed, walled garden) Apple version appears to send only diagnostic data that could be conceivably used for legitimate troubleshooting of dropped calls and the like whereas the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit, complete with backdoor and key logger.

Uhhhg... When did moderation start taking effect immediately? Maybe posting on my moderated comment will undo my horrific error.

iPhone 3G on iOS 4.0? Been there and it was painful. I missed calls because of the crappy performance. Web pages would take 3 forevers to load... Still, once they did, they scrolled flawlessly in the "you're moving a page with your finger" sense. No choppy animation or pixel by pixel jumping of the page contents. Score one for using the device's GPU to do your UI rendering, huh?

Read the article and have the phone. I've not experienced a six hour drain. Nor has my wife. Nor have three coworkers and two friends. Still, I have no doubt that it happens... just not to the majority of users. For those who do experience it, yeah, six hours probably sucks... but I'm far from being convinced that temporarily having the normal battery life of a 4G Android phone while Apple looks into it is the injustice some are making it out to be.

I fear this day... I'm not sure how I'll operate when everything on my phone operates as it always has except for my unused .me email account and photo synchronization.

And then they went away about the time the media stopped covering it... and without any hardware changes. Hmmm....

Because it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience for a small number of users? Great, your battery drains before the day's over. So what? Charge your phone more frequently for a couple of weeks while Apple looks into the issue. Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.

Inexcusable? Maybe. ...but not at all unexpected. Anyone who's attempted to make use of the Google Voice iOS app over the last ~year that it's been available would think that an app that errors-out at launch is the next evolutionary step. It's had at least three updates but none of them have addressed abysmal performance, hangs, lock-ups, and false "call failed" error messages that were present and widely experienced from the very start.

Remember that not every non-spam email originates from a perfectly-configured self-hosted SMTP server. Many organizations outsource their email, spam filtering, compliance filtering, notice / statement delivery, etc. While it's easy to posit that the IT departments in such organizations have a duty to maintain reverse DNS records for all their partners' servers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that every organization has a fully-staffed, knowledgeable IT department... or an IT department at all.

Have you ever seen SMART perform in a useful way on a mechanical disk? At work and at home, I've gone through a crap-ton of hard disks in the last decade or so that SMART's been prevalent and never have I seen SMART flag a drive as problematic before I already knew I had a serious problem. More often than not, I've had systems slow to a crawl due to massive numbers of read errors and sector reallocations while the drive firmware actively lied to me about the drive's condition. Only looking at the raw SMART stats and watching the counters increase wildly reveals the truth.

Yeah, it's because the IT staffs are inept and brainless, not because IT training, culture, and best practices center around what actually works in business where most of these oppressed students will spend 50 years of their adult lives. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of clueless losers in IT who don't even know what Linux is, but if you're looking at entering any non-tech field and think your college Linux experimentation and personal rebellion against Microsoft's evil empire will offer you any advantage in the business world, you're in for disappointment.