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The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.

as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.

The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:

The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.

the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android. 

Apps galore

Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation

The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.

War over the immaterial

Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.

A political analysis of mobile devices

The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.

In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life

In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.

they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.

The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.

But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.

In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.

Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.

In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures

Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.

Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.

The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and  from total submission to a life of labour.  

Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.

Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices

So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive. 

Domestic internet use also rose. According to the ONS, 77% of households now have access to a net connection.

Older users, who the government is particularly keen to get connected, appeared to have been relatively untouched by the phenomenon.

While 71% of 16 to 24-year-old who went online said they used mobile broadband, just 8% of internet users aged over 65 made use of the newer technology.

The ONS survey also found a dramatic rise in the use of wifi hotspots - a seven-fold increase since 2011 - suggesting that the rise of 3G has done little to slow demand for free and paid-for wireless access.

All findings were based on a monthly survey of 1,800 randomly selected adults from across the UK.

But the scale of the threat was highlighted earlier this week when the chairman of China Mobile - the world's largest telecom carrier - said his firm was now more concerned about the challenge posed by Microsoft's Skype and Tencent's WeChat services than it was about competition from China's rival mobile networks.

There are already dozens of Voip apps on the market including lesser-known names such as Tango, Fring, Bria and Zerofone as well as manufacturer's own services including BlackBerry BBM and Apple's Facetime.

The panel, which was set up to advise communications regulator Ofcom about consumers' interests, wants more control for shoppers over their data.

Consumers using their mobile phones can allow businesses to collect data about their location and the products and services they are interested in.

the Information Commissioner raised concerns over people's awareness of data privacy.

"It has never been more important to protect your personal information. Whether you are surfing the net, shopping online or signing up to social networking sites, it is crucial that people are thinking about how their information might be used," said Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner.

From employers looking up potential employees on Facebook to cyber-criminals hacking into unsecured wi-fi networks, not protecting your personal information can cause serious harm and distress."

LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.

But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."

The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)

So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.

Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.

Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.

That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.

Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.

No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.

wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.

the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.

he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.

a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t

o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.

The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained