New versions of the BlackBerry mobile device won’t come equipped with BrickBreaker, a simple game that for years was installed on every BlackBerry and at its peak developed a cult following among traders and Wall Street executives. Richard S. Fuld, the former Lehman Brothers chief executive, became so addicted that in 2006 he had his technology department remove the game from his device in an effort to break his habit. Nick Manning, a spokesman for BlackBerry, on Wednesday confirmed the company’s decision to remove the game from new devices. [Dealbook]

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• Informant's Assistance On Insider Trading Case Slightly Undone By Telling “Series” Of Lies To Government

We have discussed the futility of banning cell phones while driving for some time at Techdirt. The evidence keeps pouring in and all of it seems to suggest that a driver capable of driving distracted while on his phone will dutifully seek out other ways to be distracted if the phone is no longer an option. However, it's worth pointing out this continuous deluge of evidence because, for whatever reason, both national and local politicians just seem to love flailing their arms about cell phones mixed with cars.

That's why we'll point out a new study done by MIT researchers which has found, yet again, that people who regularly use cell phones while driving also exhibit other risky driving behaviors, even when no phone is present. If nothing else, the method for this study is interesting:

The study involved 108 people, equally divided into three age groups: 20s, 40s, and 60s. For each person, the researchers correlated answers on a questionnaire with data collected from on-board sensors during a 40-minute test drive up Interstate 93 north of Boston. The drivers commanded a black Volvo SUV tricked out with an eye tracker, heart and skin monitors, video cameras facing out the front and back windows, on-board sensors, and other research gear.

No phones were allowed to be used during the study obviously, and yet researchers found some interesting correlations with the people who admitted regularly talking on their phones while driving: they were more likely to drive faster, to spend more time in the left hand lane, to brake harder, and to change lanes more often. None of these are as drastic as, say, upending the SUV and falling over the rail off a cliff and landing in fiery fashion on a school bus filled with nuns, but the changes do suggest an increased likelihood of danger.

"These are not 'oh-my-god' differences," says study leader Bryan Reimer, a human factors engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "They are subtle clues indicative of more aggressive driving." What's more, he says, other studies have linked these behaviors to an increased rate of crashes. "It's clear [from the scientific literature] that cell phones in and of themselves impair the ability to manage the demands of driving," Reimer says. But "the fundamental problem may be the behavior of the individuals willing to pick up the technology."

In other words, crappy drivers are crappy drivers. If they aren't chattering away on their phones, they'll be singing Carly Rae Jepson with their eyes closed, or putting on their deodorant, or reaching into the backseat for that bag of Cheetohs they left there last weekend. But do we ban cheese snacks in cars? Do we outlaw Old Spice-ing while driving? Should pop music be banned in the car (resist...temptation...to say...yes...)? Of course not, particularly when these studies continue to show that distractable drivers will find another way to run us all over.

At least if they have their cell phone out, it'll be that much easier to dial 911 when they make us roadkill.

The jury in the Samsung/Apple patent fight took nearly everyone by surprise by rushing through its job and finishing it way, way, way before anyone expected. They didn't even ask any questions and with about 700 questions to answer, they breezed through it in no time. It was not a total victory for Apple (apparently the design patent on rounded-edge rectangles wasn't infringed), but it was pretty close. In the end, Samsung was found to infringe an awful lot of things (and sometimes willfully) and the the final bill is a stunning $1.05 billion owed to Apple. There's still a lot to sort through in the details, but this is a massive victory for Apple. Of course, Samsung has probably already written up its appeal (or will ask the judge to set the jury verdict aside or something), so this case is likely to be around for many years, but yet again we see just how ridiculous patent law can be. What the hell is wrong with competing in the marketplace? If Apple thinks Samsungs' phones and tablets are too similar? Well, keep on innovating. It's called competition, and now we'll have less of it...

Minor update: After the rush, the judge came back to point out two problems with the verdict -- including the jury awarding damages in cases where it had not found infringement. While this will be corrected and won't change the results much, it certainly suggests that the jury rushed through this and may not have taken this particularly seriously. When you start talking about the numbers being thrown around in damages here, at some point, it must start to feel like play money. But it's a pretty big indictment of the jury itself that it would make a mistake like this. It raises significant questions about how careful they were in getting to a verdict vs. how quickly they wanted to be done in time for the weekend.

Remember Carrier IQ? This was the company whose software was installed on a ton of phones out there (mainly from Verizon and Sprint), supposedly to record things like if there are dropped calls or problems or whatnot, but which actually appeared to be a rootkit that could track all sorts of info? Then, remember how, rather than respond professionally to this, Carrier IQ threatened researcher Trevor Eckhart with a copyright lawsuit over this? CarrierIQ eventually backed down... and again insisted that the claims of keystroke logging were simply not true.

Yeah. So. Don't piss off a security researcher. Eckhart is back with a video showing how CarrierIQ's software does track keystrokes and sends them to a central server. He demonstrates it recording and sending data, even though Eckhart is logging into something using HTTPS. Of course, when the software is local and tracking keystrokes, HTTPS is meaningless. Dave Kravets at Wired highlights what's really scary about all of this:

By the way, it cannot be turned off without rooting the phone and replacing the operating system. And even if you stop paying for wireless service from your carrier and decide to just use Wi-Fi, your device still reports to Carrier IQ.

It’s not even clear what privacy policy covers this. Is it Carrier IQ’s, your carrier’s or your phone manufacturer’s? And, perhaps, most important, is sending your communications to Carrier IQ a violation of the federal government’s ban on wiretapping?

And even more obvious, Eckhart wonders why aren’t mobile-phone customers informed of this rootkit and given a way to opt out?

I would imagine that lawyers are furiously drawing up a pretty massive class action lawsuit as we speak (if it hasn't already been filed).

For many years, we've heard various stories of how anyone who attends an early movie screening (i.e., before the movie has actually been widely released), should expect to be treated like a total criminal. The usual stories involve being searched carefully and being required to hand over all mobile phones, which will be held until the end of the film. Reader minerat writes in to tell us of his story, which involved going to a 7:30pm showing of Moneyball last week -- just a few hours before the movie was actually being released. Even so... same process. "Security made everyone give up their cell phones and checked all bags." And, it appears that security had their priorities straight from the MPAA:

The better part is after we gave up our phones, another security guard waves a metal detecting wand over us and we had to empty our pockets on any hits. My friend has a license to carry a firearm and was carrying - we thought this would be a problem (it's a center city Philadelphia theater), but no, he didn't care about his loaded handgun. Apparently a cameraphone is the bigger threat to a movie that will be publicly released 2 hours after we step out of the theater. Of course the DVD screener has been available on usenet for 3+ months.

Yet another reminder that, in this day and age, you often don't actually own the products that you've purchased. The latest to make this point is Verizon, who has begun remotely crippling Android smartphones, turning off a feature that let people use the phones as mobile hotspots. The reason? Well, to make you pay more to re-enable the feature you used to have:

Verizon this week began pushing smartphone updates that cripple some devices' innate ability to be used as a mobile hotspot -- for free. Specifically, Verizon pushed an update to the HTC Thunderbolt that blocked the devices embedded hotspot functionality, making the device less valuable and less useful to consumers. Why? Verizon wants to ensure that users have to pay an additional $20 a month mobile hotspot fee.

The company has also received some help from Google, getting the Android maker to remove any tethering apps from the Google marketplace, thereby making it (somewhat) more difficult to workaround this feature-kill. As Karl Bode notes in the post linked above, this seems the opposite of "open", which both Verizon and Google have been pushing when it comes to Android.

We've talked in the past about Apple's quite arbitrary approval process for apps via its walled garden, noting at times that Apple just likes to keep out competitive apps. At least one company is questioning whether or not this is legal. Via Hypebot, we learn that Simfy (often called the Spotify of Germany) has complained to German regulators that Apple has not yet approved its iPad app, despite having submitted it months ago. The company pointed out that Apple has already approved an iPhone app from the company, and it seems strange that it's been stalling so long on the iPad app. Of course, given the timing of the announcement of Apple's new iCloud music service, Simfy certainly seems to feel that this move was anti-competitive. Of course, on the flip side, that's what you get for relying on a mostly closed platform. Time for Simfy to see if it can figure out a way to make an HTML5 web app instead.

In the ongoing silly patent fight between Apple and Samsung, the judge has ordered Samsung to give Apple some pre-release products (found via Copycense). While we've seen similar things before, this kind of order always bothers me, as it just seems wrong to order a competitor to hand over pre-release versions of competitive products. What if it turns out there's no infringement? Apple still gets to play with Samsung's products before they even hit the market? Why is this kind of thing allowed? Apple's -- and the court's -- argument is that this allows Apple to stop any possible infringement before it hits the market, but it also seems like there can be significant harm in sharing still secret info with a direct competitor. Even more bizarre is the basis for the judge's claim: that news reports quoted Samsung execs saying they wanted to change the Galaxy Tab to compete with the iPad 2. So what? In what way is it wrong for a competitor to shift gears once a new product hits the market? That's competition. What doesn't seem fair is Apple getting pre-release access to Samsung's products.

Looks like it may be time to update our patent thicket graphic. Another company that's not actually doing anything in the space is suing everyone who is. A company named H-W Technology apparently holds a patent (7,525,955) on an "Internet protocol (IP) phone with search and advertising capability" and has sued Apple, RIM, Google, Amazon, eBay, HTC, LG, Smasung, Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon and others for violating it. Because, you know, I'm sure no one possibly could have figured out how to put search and ads on a phone without this patent.

A month or so ago, a friend of mine asked if I could do a favor (helping point someone in the right direction for a job) for someone -- a relative of a friend of my friend, so this was pretty distant. There was an email introduction, and a request to talk by phone so I could learn a bit more about this person in order to actually help. I noted that I was busy over the next few days, but had some open time on a Thursday morning or Friday afternoon, expecting, as usually seems to happen in these cases, that they'd come back with some specific times. Instead, the person emailed "great, give me your phone number and I'll call when available." I found myself immediately uninterested. Something in the back of my brain said "if this person doesn't respect my time enough to actually set a specific time, but would prefer to just interrupt me at random, then I'm going to pass on helping here." I don't know if that's a rude response -- perhaps it is -- but it's what I felt. And it was at that point that I realized how rare it is that I'll accept or make unexpected or unplanned phone calls, with the exception of my wife and my parents (and potentially some work-related "emergency.") There are a few very close, long-term friends that I'll call every so often, but I really haven't done that in a while, and I feel a bit awkward about doing it these days. I still talk on the phone for meetings, but always at set times.

Apparently, I'm not the only person who feels this way. Many people are realizing that random phone calls are just not considered polite any more. They're somewhat interruptive and can be annoying. What strikes me as really interesting is that this isn't a case of just the "younger generation" feeling this way -- but it's actually true of many older people as well.

I find this interesting for any number of reasons, including how counterintuitive it may actually be. These days, people have phones with them at all times. In the past, when most people didn't have mobile phones, such random calls were more common. And you might assume that our greater access to telephony would mean greater desire to make calls. Now, obviously, a big part of the reason for making calls has been replaced by (mostly text-based) alternative means, such as email, text messaging and social networks. But, I'd argue that the greater access also makes us more wary in general. For example, I was thinking about calling a friend recently, who I hadn't spoken to in a while, but realized it would be his mobile phone, and what if he was out with his wife and kids, and I didn't want to interrupt that.

It's kind of an interesting phenomenon, which makes me wonder if the idea of personal voice calls was really just a temporary slice of time that is going entirely out of style. Perhaps there will be some sort of quaint revival, like the idea that people have of writing paper letters to each other these days as being more "personal," but the whole phenomenon of the random personal phone call is pretty much becoming a thing of the past.