Google Tech Talk April 30, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Urs Hengartner Recently, social-networking applications have started to appear on mobile phones. These applications can exploit a phone’s positioning capabilities to facilitate interaction between people. From a privacy point of view, this trend is troublesome because it often results in the provider of a social-networking application having real-time access to users’ location. In turn, a user’s location could reveal information about her activities or interests to the provider. I will outline two solutions that protect a user’s location privacy. The first solution allows a user to become aware of a friend who happens to be nearby without the friend and the user being able to track each other continuously and without a centralized party being able to track either of them. The second solution allows a user to access a location-based service (eg, a service that provides a listing of points of interest close to the user) such that the server cannot distinguish between the user issuing the query and other nearby users. Both of the presented solutions are based on cryptography and have been implemented and evaluated. The prototype implementation of our privacy-protecting application for alerting people of nearby friends is available at crysp.uwaterloo.ca Speaker’s bio: Urs Hengartner is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests …

BeatEd homepage: www.byterapers.com BeatEd is a simple drum machine application for Symbian S60 mobile phones. It was originally developed in couple of nights to get a drum machine and metronome application for personal guitar playing purposes. After getting a lot of new ideas and positive feedback, I decided to improve it a bit and make a decent public release of it. So here it is, have fun! Feature highlights: – Easy to use beat editor, even easier beat player. – Change tempo and volume while playing. – Edit beat on-the-fly while playing. – 16 bit 16 channel audio mixer. – Extremely accurate beat timing (1-999 BPM). – Real-time VU meters. – 16 different drum tracks. – Supports S60 v3.x mobile phones. – Adjusts to different screen layouts. – Random volume variance. – and much more.. Supported devices: – All S60 3rd edition devices (Forum Nokia list) Tested devices: – Nokia 6120 Classic, N82, N91, N93i, N95, E51, E60, E65, E70, E90 Communicator Sorry about the crappy sound quality in the video! It’s due to the camera I used, not the software