US Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators

The U.S. military has no shortage of devices that could restore connectivity to a restive populace cut off from the outside world by its rulers.

Silent Circle: Easy encryption for mobile devices

Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments' feathers with a surveillance-proof smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it's just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.

How to share files between mobile devices

Here's a video tutorial on how to share files from Android Phones or Tablets over a WiFi network using FrostWire:

Has Apple caused trouble for Microsoft with the mini?

Steve Jobs was not a fan of smaller-sized tablets, but it appears that his judgement was off in this regard. In domestic settings, the mini seems to work better.

Matt Baxter-Reynolds writes:

I had planned to keep both the iPad mini and my normal, full-sized iPad. In fact, I sold my full-sized iPad within a day of taking delivery of the mini. The mini just seemed to fit what I needed it for perfectly, whereas the full-sized iPad in comparison immediately felt faintly ridiculous.

It's telling that on the one hand a lot of products that seem to sell well in competition with the iPad are already on a "mini" scale:

• Nexus 7 is a popular Android tablet with 7" screen.
• The Kindle Fire tablets are each about that size.
• Samsung has pre-announced an 8" Galaxy Note.

At the same time, it's also telling that smartphones not made by Apple tend to be getting bigger:

• The Lumia 920, is a huge smartphone with a 4.5" screen.
• The Galaxy S III has a 4.8" screen.
• The Galaxy Note II has a 5.6" screen.

As ZDNet points out, there seems to be drift in screen sizes towards devices with screens that are -- for the sake of argument -- around 6" for a smartphone and around 8" for a tablet:

If the iPad mini is selling really well, it may have redefined the "natural" size of a domestic-use tablet as being a smaller device. Apple might have validated the previous decisions by Google to make the Nexus 7 small, and Amazon in making the Kindle Fire tablets small, even though I suspect those previous decisions had more to with the bill of materials than any sense as to the desires of the customer.

Microsoft may have a problem here. The smallest Windows 8 or Windows RT tablet that you can buy is "big tablet" sized and no one is making a small Windows 8 tablet. The problem with Microsoft's positioning of Windows in a post-PC world is its (understandable) obsession with Office and with keyboards. This makes life really difficult for an OEM trying to make a small tablet as you'd need to make a very small keyboard to go with it. You're then looking at something more like the now relatively ancient Toshiba Libretto, which might be a tough sell as today that looks an awful lot like a netbook.

Unless one of the OEMs does something amazingly bold, Windows tablets look like they're stuck in a 10" or greater world. That would mean that Microsoft has managed to accidentally entirely miss what seems like an obvious and logically-defensible market shift to smaller tablets in the domestic-use space.