Computerworld - March 12, 2012

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Carrier IQ Hopes To Allay Users’ Privacy Concerns

PHOTO: ISTOCK

EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

IBM Touts Quantum Computing Advance

SCIEN TISTS AT IBM RESEARCH say they have achieved a major breakthrough in quantum computing that will allow engineers to begin creating a full-scale quantum machine.

The breakthrough reduces data error rates in elementary computations while maintaining the integrity of mechanical properties in quantum bits of data known as qubits.

A quantum computer could have exponentially greater processing power than today’s conventional CPUs, according to Mark Ketchen, a manager at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N. Y.

Quantum machines are still 10 to 15 years
away. But the recent advancement opens the
door to experimentation with new microfab-
rication techniques, IBM said. “We’re finally
to the point where devices are getting good
enough [that] data checking and error correct-
ing [are] possible,” Ketchen said. “There’s a lot
of excitement.”
In contrast to today’s silicon-based semi-
conductors, IBM’s superconducting qubits are
made using established silicon-microfabrication
techniques but are produced on a sapphire
chip. This offers the potential to one day manu-
facture thousands or millions of qubits.

Carrier IQ executives said they hope that customers are once again recognizing the value of the data that their company’s software collects, after some operators disabled the software following a privacy uproar late last year.

The company’s software sends information about a phone’s performance to network operators, which use the data to learn more about performance issues.

“Some of our customers have been using this data for five years. It’s deeply embedded in how they operate,” said Andrew Coward, vice president of marketing and product management at Carrier IQ.

Coward claimed the company didn’t lose any customers following last year’s release of a research report that showed that its software was logging keystrokes, unbeknownst to end users.

He maintained that Carrier IQ’s software isn’t to blame. Rather, some implementations of the software “led to information being written into these files that never should have been,” he said.

Operators have been pushing out
firmware updates to correct any
problems. Accord-
ing to Coward,
Carrier IQ has also
added a qualifica-
tion step to ensure the software is
implemented correctly and that no
private data is left on devices.