A quick burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Ignores Your Personal Info - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD
Carrier IQ boss: "We don't read SMS messages. We see them come in. We see the phone numbers attached to them. But we are not storing, analyzing or otherwise processing the contents of those messages."
Apple Stopped Supporting Carrier IQ With iOS 5 >> AllThingsD
Apple says it will remove Carrier IQ in all other devices in the next software update.
European Union Bans Exports to Syria of Systems for Monitoring Web, Phones >> Bloomberg
Canada 'still a BlackBerry nation' >> The Globe and Mail
"About eight million Canadians owned a smartphone in September and 35.8% were using a BlackBerry, said comScore on Wednesday." Ahead of the iPhone, and Android.
How widely installed are various plugins? >> RIAStats
The contrast between the installation penetration of Flash and Silverlight is interesting.
FOI: why does the Home Office use Word for public replies? >> WhatDoTheyKnow
Because it does.
Browse your old tweets >> Twimemachine.com
"Use TwimeMachine to easily browse through your old tweets (max 3200). Read what you said ages ago." Depending how often you tweet. But it does show up Twitter's lack of a good archive.
Apple's CEO responds to a Siri-us matter >> Blog For Choice
So Tim Cook is now doing emails too. He's a bit more talkative but also a bit more formal than Steve Jobs. First Cookmail in the wild?
Google+ as a referral source continues downward trend >> Netmarketshare
"In November, Google+ social media referrals have dropped again. Facebook now has over 1,000 times the amount of referrals as Google+." For reference, Facebook has about 80 times more users than Google+. Might this mean though that people are using Google+ differently - to discuss within the network, rather than following links, rather as happens on Twitter? (In these stats, Twitter has about eight times as many referrals as Google+ - which is about in line with their respective sizes.
Welcome to Emer Coleman >> Government Digital Service
Congratulations to Emer Coleman, who has been working very hard to get open data happening via the Greater London Authority. It will be fascinating to see how she makes it happen inside central government. Watch out, civil service.
You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious
