Smartphones, most of us want one.  The apps.  The ability to not just text, but email.  Music.  Camera.  There’s almost nothing that a good smartphone can’t do.

Including being a security problem.

I’ve already told you how Symbian smartphones have been turned into a mass-mailing zombie network. But let me tell you, that’s only the beginning.

Palm Pre phones are prone to a vulnerability in receiving malicious messages that can compromise them with a backdoor which can allow hackers to record and transmit audio, effectively “bugging” your Palm Pre, as well as the usual theft of stored data.

Also, Apple has only just recently patched critical security holes in its iOS.  One allowed hackers to install malicious apps on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches through poisoned PDF files which, by default, open automatically.

Another let attackers break out of the iOS security “sandbox” to access the root account, allowing unlimited access to the device.  This flaw, by the way, was the one used by jailbreaking software to let your iPhone be used how you want it to be used.  So don’t go thinking that this fix was entirely driven by just security over at Apple.

So there you have it, your smartphone is becoming more and more just another computer for hackers to attack.  They contain the same security risks as any Mac or PC.  Be conscious and use good security practices, even with your cute little phones, or you just might be caught unaware by a nasty ol’ hacker.

In the world of computer viruses and hacking, we tend to think in terms of computers.  There is however a new threat emerging as our other devices become more and more capable of processing power and performing the same tasks as computers.  This is especially true of today’s smart phones.

So it comes as no surprise really, and yet at the same time as a considerable surprise, that we’ve now seen an attack on Symbian smartphones.

According to NetQin, mobile security experts, the Symbian S60 3rd and 5th generation operating systems have been targeted, infecting approximately 100,000 mobile phones with a virus that turns these smart phones into mass mailing zombies in a mobile botnet.

Right now the virus is disguising itself in hot topics such as the World Cup, which worldwide is an easy mark.  It has also been seen however with subjects such as the “most popular blind date TV show.”  So don’t expect it to be so easy to spot.

In fact it’s quite devious in that after it sends its virus emails and SMS texts with URLs linking to malicious websites that infect your Symbian smartphone, it then deletes the sent emails from your mail folders and texts from your SMS log, quite possibly leaving you unaware that any virus-ridden spam had been sent from your device to all of your stored contacts and phone numbers.

Which would explain how it is managing to spread so efficiently in spite of the narrow scope of devices the virus targets.

The NetQin team is, of course, working with mobile operators to block the malicious URLs and prevent the spread of this smartphone virus infection.

Now you just have to do your part.  Antivirus updates and being aware are, of course, suggested.  Now that your phone is capable of doing things that you used to need a PC for, you’re going to be suffering the same security threats as PCs do.  Welcome to the new mobile world.

Now I’m no great expert on developing operating systems, but over the years I’ve used plenty, and have been quite the computer programmer, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve got some notions worth more than the common layman.  And I’ve got to say, I’m really not sure this Google Chrome OS is the right direction to take.

Don’t get me wrong.  It was a brilliant idea … a decade ago.  Or more.

Once upon a time computers were, well, really not so powerful.  So I could see where to make a halfway decent ultra-portable system, you’d have to come up with some neat mechanism for saving these devices from their limited storage capacity and processing power.  Say my old old old Palm PDA.  (Actually a Sony Clie.)  It was fine in theory, but really lacked the storage capacity to be useful in practice.  And the processing power was, well, anything but impressive.  To have made it truly useful to the Office Warrior (or to the common user at home for that matter) it needed something more drastic than what it had.  And Google’s idea to have a web-based system where the internet provides you with what your portable PC is missing, it could very well have filled in that gap.

At that time.

Had there been affordable always-on unlimited-use 3G networks available then.

Do you begin to see how this starts to break down?  How Google’s answer is a solution to an old problem?  A problem which no longer actually exists?

I mean let’s face it.  We have more memory than we know what to do with these days.  Just an SD card alone turns any smartphone into a portable god.  Correction: Micro SD card.  The little buggers are so small.  And there’s certainly room in a smartphone (not to mention a netbook) for something as large as a full-sized SD card.  Heck, a netbook could easily house a USB stick!  Not to mention the obvious: solid state hard drives.  Storage capacity on a small device is by no means a problem in these modern times.

And processing power is equally impressive today.  Intel’s Atom processors are likewise quite capable little power-misers.  I’ve got a fully-fledged Windows XP netbook with touchscreen that’s barely larger than my camera.  It easily fits into a pocket.  And the Viliv S5 is just the beginning of this wonderful new world of usable and affordable Ultra Mobile PCs.

So why then would anyone need an operating system dependent upon constant use of the internet to overcome its now non-existent processing and storage limitations?

It just doesn’t make sense.

Not anymore.

Other than a platform for selling unlimited-usage 3G/4G/whatever network access, I don’t see where the direction of Google’s Chrome OS makes any sense whatsoever.  It’s either a marketing platform that’s a technical limitation instead of a solution, or it’s a technical solution to a problem that’s stopped being a problem in today’s world.

Either way, I just don’t see where Google’s Chrome OS is in any way advantageous to you, the consumer.

It’s either a brilliant solution to an out-of-date problem, or an ingenious solution to the purveyors of a sagging market.  But it’s not something that actually benefits you.

At least as far as I can tell.

You never know.  I could be wrong.  Maybe, somewhere in there lies a benefit to it that I’m just not seeing.  But at the end of the day, I’d rather have a fully functional UMPC, thanks.  And I suspect, if you really get down to it, you would too.  Why would anyone want a technology with such limitations as to force you to be online and to take away your local hard drive?  In a world where storage is becoming King, why would anyone want to abandon local storage entirely?  It just doesn’t add up to brilliance if you ask me.  Even a wristwatch smartphone has plenty of room for a Micro SD card.

It was the sh_tstorm that never really was: The dreaded Y2K bug.  Just because a computer may not be capable of telling the year 2000 from 1900 because some bright spark decided to only use two digits to record the date instead of the proper four, people assumed the world would suddenly end.  Power plants would shut down.  Chaos would rule the streets.  And if you didn’t stock up on portable generators and 15 years of toilet paper you were going to die a horrible death.

Of course that didn’t happen.

Mostly because people realized, der, it was actually a fairly easy thing to fix.  So each and every software company (that were still in operation anyway) fixed their products, and that was that.  No one wanted egg on their faces, so everyone got their butts in gear to solve the problems.

But also there was this great backup called the flexibility of humanity.  If something doesn’t work, you simple do something else until it does again.  Or you just keep doing something else.  And either way, life goes on.

Which was great.  Y2K turned out to be the Fake-ocalypse.  Apart from a lot of embarrassed stockpilers with thousands of tins of beans, life went on smoothly.

Of course, what society didn’t see coming was 2010.

What happened on our fabulous New Year?  Well for starters, about 30 million German bank cards stopped working because the “high-tech” computer chip inside of the cards couldn’t fathom 2010 being a valid year.  A fix to transaction machines and ATMs is, of course, being quickly worked on and deployed.  In the mean time however there are some folks who simply can’t live off of their card anymore.  Oops.

Also in the wonderful world of banking, some Australians are having similar woes because of a bug causing all 2010 dates to actually be seen as 2016, often rendering a purchase past the expiration date of a credit card, for example.

Likewise, this same 2010-to-2016 bug is hitting a lot of Windows smartphones, causing these Windows Mobile users to have some rather weird dates on their texts and such.

And then there’s the rather humiliating bug in Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Manager, which, horribly, was programmed to reject any definition updates dated later than December 31, 2009 11:59pm as “out of date”.  Yikes!  Of course, again, a fix is being worked on.

Apache SpamAssassin was also in the list of 2010 Woes and Dohs!  In this spam filter is a rule which states that any year past 2009 was grossly in the future (whooooo, we’re in the future) and nailed it as spam.  It being the year 2010 of course caused all sorts of problems.  Strangely enough, the bug was actually identified and reported in 2008 and fixed in the repositories.  However for reasons that remain untold, those fixes weren’t backported to 3.2 users.  Until now.

No doubt all sorts of other interesting bad programming bugs relating to the year 2010 will crop up.  And will be fixed when needed.  Because frankly, that’s life.  Sometimes things break.  Sometimes for darn stupid reasons.  But then they get fixed or replaced.  It happens in computer software.  It happens in everything else ever manufactured too.

It’s not often though that you can blame the problem on New Year.

Happy New Year 2010!