Yes, the very fast Opera browser on the iPhone proxies all request! In normal language, every webpage you visit from your iPhone with the opera browser is send towards Opera. Thereby, they get al the information from you. If you submit a form, it is send to Opera. If you search in Google, it is send to opera. If you login to a website, your password is send to Opera!

They wil claim the need to do this because of the prorpietary way they handle images and HTML to speed up a website. And it is a speedy browser:

I think part of the speed comes form the fact that they proxy all traffic and some funky stuff with preloading images. However, it is absurd that a browser gets /all/ the data I send, all the websites I visit, all the passwords I submit, all the search queries I do. It might not be spyware but sure gets close to this.

How did I found out?

I visitied Facebook on Opera and got this message from facebook:

Then I visited Facebook form my iMac and saw:

Then I did a test on my own host and grepped the logging:

Ans here is the code:

pimsbb2@newborn:~$ sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i test
[sudo] password for pimsbb2:
94.246.126.161 - - [17/Apr/2010:21:05:24 +0200] "GET /test HTTP/1.1" 404 500 "-" "Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/5.0.0176/764; U; en) Presto/2.4.15"
^C
pimsbb2@newborn:~$ whois 94.246.126.161
% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: This output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to '94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255'

inetnum: 94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255
netname: IPO-OPERA
descr: Opera Software ASA

I am not the first person to finds out about it, see for example pcworld.com. But I am the person to tell you that you should be aware that you send all your data cleartext towards Opera when using the app (https is fine however). And I am the person to tell you I will not use the app anymore. Bad Opera! Bad! No cookie.

For a customer who has a simple list of 10 RSS items that he wants to show on mobile devices, my employer build a website. Most mobile websites are based upon a domain, the user has to visit a different website from his mobile device; often m.example.com instead of (www).example.com. This is not the right way to make a mobile edition of a site IMHO. It is not the user that has to change his behaviour, it should be the site that has to adept basedupon the users preferences.

So for this customer we build a site that looks for the capabilities of the users and changes in form and function based upon the clients possibilities. When you visit example.com in a normal browser you will see a normal template, but when visiting the site from a mobile device, the site changes. Drupal reads the useragent, looks this up in an imported database of 5.000+ devices (WURFL) and based upon the capabilities, delivers a template and HTML structure that is optimized for that specific client.

So when on an iPhone I see the picture above using an iUI template and when on an old nokia, I get for example a CHTML site.

The site should change, not the user. Form follows capabilities.

For helping out Henk ven Ess with "some" Linux problems, I got one of hist products for free, a 3G Juice power block for my iPhone. Despite the "3" in th name it works perfectly fine on my first gen iPhone, iPod Nano and Fat Nano as well as any other iPods.

It is a 5 by 5 centimers block that fits in your iPhone although I had to take my protective case off. It does not extend the battery of the iPhone, but charges the iPhone and therefor you just plug it in when you are running low but are not using the phone. Testso far show that is supercharges your iPhone fast, easy and you can easy double the usage time, a great product.

A full review can be found on CNet. A great add on for a roadmonkey like me that uses his iPhone a couple of hours per day. Thanks Henk!

It also shows that helping peple via twitter comes back to you.

Ik begrijp KPN niet. Ze maken de mooiste reclame campagnes van Nederland, melken het precies ver genoeg uit. Neem bijvoorbeeld de goedemoggel campagne; een hit over heel Nederland!

En toen deze net niet meer kon, werd hij van de buis gehaald. Maar na een paar maanden -precies op tijd- gewoon versie twee:

Ook andere uitingen van KPN zijn altijd goed. Zo rijden er duizenden autos rond van KPN met campagne teksten, hebben ze mooie namen voor diensten ("flexibel") en weet men gewoon al jaren hoe men B2B en B2C marketing moet bedrijven: echte marketeers met verstand!

Wat ik dan niet begrijp is dat er schijnbaar sub afdelingkjes zijn die zelf autonoom wat mogen aankloten in de marge. En dan krijg je dus dit soort advertenties online:

(adwords op Google)

en

(reclame op Amazon)

en op duizenden andere plekken vond je en week of twee geleden anti reclames tegen KPN, want zo zal de gemiddelde cosument het zien. Negatieve reclames worden geassocieerd met de aanbieder, niet met de concurrent.

De iPhone is een fantastisch apparaat, dat kan je niet afzeiken. Als je dat wel doet, dan plas je tegen de wind in terwijl je probeert te mikken op de digital bohemian. Twee keer dom, toppers moet je niet afzeiken, ze bepalen de maat en opmaat. En tegen de wind in plassen, dat maakt dat je raar gaat ruiken (heb ik me laten vertellen :-) )

Dus KPN, niet huilebalken dat je de geweldige iPhone deal niet hebt gekregen, maar gewoon goede dingen doen.

Somehwo I always manage to screw stuff up. The other day I connected my iPhone to my Mac and it fired up -as it should- iTunes. However, iTunes told me that I should "activate my iPhone or that the SIM was damaged". I have a jailbroken iPhone and a fine SIM card, rebooting the iPhone "solved" the problem. However, it triggered something else that I only found out days later; the Youtube application still was not activated and tol me when I started it

You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube

And then the application stopped. It seems that this is "normal" behaviour when you unlock your phone with ziPhone. However, I jailbroke my iPhone with iNdependence and it has been working fine for month.

The solution for ZiPhone users worked for me as well however. Some say that installing a "YouTube fix" program via the installer application will work, it did not for me. But all you have to do is copy three files to your iPhone, even if you do not know anything about UNIX an easy task.

Just download these threefiles. Start a SFTP client on your machine, copy the files in /var/root/Library/Lockdown to your desktop for backup reasons and copy the three files you downloaded to the same location. The userid to do this with is "root", the password "alpine".

Worked for me, I can use the Youtube application again, thanks to macriot!