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The Reg's review of 2014: Naked JLaw selfies, Uber and monkey madness

Put it on a stick and 'cheesie'

Flappy Bird, spooks and Jihad John

Built by a 28-year-old in Hanoi and released in May 2013 to Apple’s app store, Flappy Bird by February 2014 was topping international games charts and had been downloaded more than 50m times. The game’s creator Dong Nguyen gave Flappy Bird away for free yet reported to be making $50,000 a day. Its combination of Mario-like simplicity and infuriating difficulty saw Flappy Bird earn it the status of his year’s Candy Crush, Farmville and Angry Birds as the year’s most successful smart phone/social-network game for addicted millions.

But in February, Nguyen called it quits, suddenly yanking the game from app stores while tweeting its unexpected success was “ruining his life.” There were reports legal problems, but Nguyen denied his decision stemmed from these.

It was testament to the attraction of Flappy Bird that Nguyen’s kill tweet was retweeted 135,000 times, that in the 22 hours between tweeting and killing Flappy Bird 10m people downloaded the game, and that after its death cyber crooks launched mal-ware rich counterfeit versions in the Apple and Google stores to dupe desperate rubes. Nguyen did resurrect Flappy Bird, as Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV.

Year of encryption - tech firms self protect against NSA

Tech giants were last year caught sans pants after Edward Snowden said the NSA and GCHQ were schlurping huge gulps of personal data from the wires and data centers that make up the internet without the knowledge of those who own and operate them.

The reputational damage to the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google has been massive, feeding into an impact on business, as corporate customers outside the US started sourcing non-American firms based in non-US jurisdictions to host and run their data center and internet operations.

Edward Snowden

Snowden: it's the not knowing

that made things so much less encrypted

A year on and 2014 saw a concerted tech-sector fight back. Many browsers, web sites and social networks had already gone HTTPS by default and this year saw an extension of the practice: Google made all Gmail connections HTTPS in March and mid-year began dishing out favourable search rankings to web sites that use HTTPS to transmit pages and exchange data. Yahoo! celebrated completion of encrypting traffic between its data centers saying it would provide end-to-end encryption for its email users.

Microsoft converted its OneDrive and Outlook.com servers to TLS encryption. Elsewhere Microsoft let itself be held in contempt of court after the firm refused to hand over emails held on one of its servers outside the US, in Ireland - the emails had been sought under a US warrant as part of an investigation and Microsoft contested, to establish a legal principle. Microsoft lost the case in July and planned to appeal but, in the meantime, refused to surrender the data.

Device makers acted, too.

Google announced Android L in September that will automatically encrypt user data and Apple updated iOS to make it impossible to decrypt an iPhone or iPad even if ordered. Apple’s update came wrapped in a updated new privacy policy and letter from CEO Tim Cook. “We have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products and services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will,” he wrote.

Governments take on social networks

Spooks and law enforcement objected to tech firms making handsets harder to crack but it was social networks’ that came under the greatest pressure in 2014.

A power vacuum in Iraq and Syria was filled by the violent and well-equipped jihadist Islamic State, that - mid year – seemed poised to snatch Baghdad.

Jihad John's brutal beheddings compromised

social networks' position

No media simpletons IS, the figure Jihad John’s beheading of captive westerns became a web video staple - his image and actions posted online and tweeted. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram became suspected as serving as means by which IS recruiters contacted western yoofs, who were duly groomed and disappeared from their lives in the west to re-emerge months later in Iraq or Syria married to IS jihadists or brandishing an AK-47 or going up in a suicide vest.

The social networks’ were coming under pressure to act - to censor posts and messages, to report emails and other communications to the authorities.

Traditionally, the networks’ policy has been one of none-to-little intervention - they see themselves in the vein as the phone network or the post office, in that they cannot be held responsible for the messages and content of their members or users. Embodying this was the November 2014 British government report into the murder of off-duty British solider Lee Rigby by Muslim extremists in London the year before. The Intelligence and Security Committee report largely exonerated M15 for not acting to stop Rigby’s attackers while squarely blaming “major US communications services providers” saying the only organization that could have prevented the attack was one such internet-media giant. The report didn’t say who, but Facebook got fingered within hours of the report.

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