In Battle Against Fraud in Free Phone Service, the Poor Might Pay the Price

“If it weren’t for my free phone, there were a few times I wouldn’t have made it to the hospital,” said Ms. James, who is unemployed because of chronic health problems and has no other telephone or Internet connection in her home. She is among the 15.3 million people in the United States who receive the Lifeline telephone service because they meet income guidelines or are enrolled in programs like Medicaid or food stamps.

But the fundamental feature of the program on which Ms. James relies — 250 minutes of free wireless service a month — is at the center of a legal battle linked to a new tactic to reduce fraud in the program. The outcome could have far-reaching consequences for the telecommunications industry and for millions of impoverished Americans.

Alarmed by accounts of households that have more than one subsidized phone — a breach of federal guidelines — and other allegations of fraud, the Georgia Public Service Commission voted this year to make this state the first to require phone companies to collect a fee of at least $5 a month from Lifeline users.

As an alternative, in an effort to force the service providers to better police phone usage, the commission also said that the companies could, for the same compensation they already receive from the government, offer participants 500 minutes a month. But the companies denounced that option.

Georgia regulators made their move about three years after the Government Accountability Office reported that officials from 21 states “indicated that they were somewhat or very concerned about consumer fraud in the Lifeline program.”

Georgia’s mandate, which had been scheduled to take effect in January before a judge in Atlanta granted an injunction last week, prompted outrage from some advocates for the poor, and a legal challenge from a trade group that represents cellphone companies. The group argued that Georgia was circumventing federal law to set rates.

But the author of the regulation has argued that the fee’s benefits outweigh the risks, and that it would do much to reduce Georgia’s share of fraud in the Lifeline program, which began in 1985 and was expanded to include wireless coverage two decades later.

“There’s always going to be collateral damage when you’re having a war, and we’re having a war with fraud and abuse,” Commissioner H. Doug Everett told WABE Radio in October.

Stan Wise, one of two public service commissioners who voted against the new regulation, conceded that the Lifeline program has been rife with misconduct, but warned that the fee would be ineffective and damaging.

“What it really does is harm those in the most need and the ones that the program was designed to help,” Mr. Wise said. “If you have three Lifelines and it’s important to you to have the three phones, what’s $15 to you if you’re promoting fraud?”

The program’s troubles have received widespread attention. Aware of the criticisms, the Federal Communications Commission, which cited the potential for “a significant burden on some classes of Lifeline consumers” when it turned back a plan in 2012 to impose monthly fees across the country, has started a campaign to clean up the program, including the introduction of new national databases tracking eligibility and participation.

But if Georgia’s new policy can survive in court, it could be replicated elsewhere by anxious state regulators.

“These sorts of cases are relatively unusual,” said James B. Speta, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in telecommunications law. “So in a second state or a third state, they will certainly look at what happened in Georgia.”

As the legal battle plays out, Georgia residents who have Lifeline phones are beginning to contemplate what they will do if the fee is put in effect.

Ms. James, who has a monthly budget of about $350, said she was likely to have to choose between her phone and one of the six prescription medications she takes every day.

“I’ve got medicines I’ve got to buy with $5,” said Ms. James, 47, who lives just northwest of Atlanta and said she has medical debts well into six figures after numerous hospitalizations and health issues that include chronic bronchitis and gastrointestinal ailments.

Others who have the Lifeline phones, including Brenda Florence, said they would immediately return them.

“They’re supposed to be free,” said Ms. Florence, 60, who pays for a home landline and cell service but also participates in Lifeline because she receives Medicaid benefits. “I’m going to put it in the box and mail it back.”

In Georgia, where nearly 721,000 people use Lifeline, the debate has also exposed a fissure among those who work to aid people in poverty.

At the Christian Aid Mission Partnership, which provides food and clothing to the region’s poor and sometimes hosts phone providers offering their wares, officials said they endorsed the state’s new effort to stem fraud.

“I think there should be some skin in the game,” said Linda Oviatt, the organization’s outreach director. But she added that she generally supported the Lifeline program because it was “a godsend” for many of her clients.

Other advocates for the poor, though, have been sharply critical of Georgia’s plan.

“The proposed fee simply serves as a penalty on the poor,” the Rainbow PUSH Coalition wrote in an October letter to commissioners. “It is, in essence, a tax being arbitrarily applied to those who can least afford it and an incursion by the P.S.C. on the free market business practices of private companies.”

Back on Lot 54, Ms. James, whose kitchen on a recent day was cluttered with boxed and canned foods, said she thought the debate should focus less on complex legal arguments. She merely wants to keep her aging flip phone.

“It’s so hard on someone who is on a fixed, fixed income,” she said. “It was just an honor to get something that is going to help me.”

Bits Blog: Updating Android, Google Announces New Nexus Phone

Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers

Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the Internet, because cookies don’t work on mobile devices.

Privacy advocates fear that consumers do not realize just how much of their private information is on their phones and how much is made vulnerable simply by downloading and using apps, searching the mobile Web or even just going about daily life with a phone in your pocket. And this new focus on tracking users through their devices and online habits comes against the backdrop of a spirited public debate on privacy and government surveillance.

On Wednesday, the National Security Agency confirmed it had collected data from cellphone towers in 2010 and 2011 to locate Americans’ cellphones, though it said it never used the information.

“People don’t understand tracking, whether it’s on the browser or mobile device, and don’t have any visibility into the practices going on,” said Jennifer King, who studies privacy at the University of California, Berkeley and has advised the Federal Trade Commission on mobile tracking. “Even as a tech professional, it’s often hard to disentangle what’s happening.”

Drawbridge is one of several start-ups that have figured out how to follow people without cookies, and to determine that a cellphone, work computer, home computer and tablet belong to the same person, even if the devices are in no way connected. Before, logging onto a new device presented advertisers with a clean slate.

“We’re observing your behaviors and connecting your profile to mobile devices,” said Eric Rosenblum, chief operating officer at Drawbridge. But don’t call it tracking. “Tracking is a dirty word,” he said.

Drawbridge, founded by a former Google data scientist, says it has matched 1.5 billion devices this way, allowing it to deliver mobile ads based on Web sites the person has visited on a computer. If you research a Hawaiian vacation on your work desktop, you could see a Hawaii ad that night on your personal cellphone.

For advertisers, intimate knowledge of users has long been the promise of mobile phones. But only now are numerous mobile advertising services that most people have never heard of — like Drawbridge, Flurry, Velti and SessionM — exploiting that knowledge, largely based on monitoring the apps we use and the places we go. This makes it ever harder for mobile users to escape the gaze of private companies, whether insurance firms or shoemakers.

Ultimately, the tech giants, whose principal business is selling advertising, stand to gain. Advertisers using the new mobile tracking methods include Ford Motor, American Express, Fidelity, Expedia, Quiznos and Groupon.

“In the old days of ad targeting, we give them a list of sites and we’d say, ‘Women 25 to 45,’ “ said David Katz, the former general manager of mobile at Groupon and now at Fanatics, the sports merchandise online retailer. “In the new age, we basically say, ‘Go get us users.’ “

In those old days — just last year — digital advertisers relied mostly on cookies. But cookies do not attach to apps, which is why they do not work well on mobile phones and tablets. Cookies generally do work on mobile browsers, but do not follow people from a phone browser to a computer browser. The iPhone’s mobile Safari browser blocks third-party cookies altogether.

Even on PCs, cookies have lost much of their usefulness to advertisers, largely because of cookie blockers.

Responding to this problem, the Interactive Advertising Bureau started a group to explore the future of the cookie and alternatives, calling current online advertising “a lose-lose-lose situation for advertisers, consumers, publishers and platforms.” Most recently, Google began considering creating an anonymous identifier tied to its Chrome browser that could help target ads based on user Web browsing history.

For many advertisers, cookies are becoming irrelevant anyway because they want to reach people on their mobile devices.

Yet advertising on phones has its limits.

Step Away From the Phone!

Brandon Holley, the former editor of Lucky magazine, had trouble ditching her iPhone when she got home from work. So about six months ago, she began tossing her phone into a vintage milk tin the moment she walked in. It remains there until after dinner.

And Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, didn’t want to sleep next to a beeping gizmo. So he banned digital devices from his bedroom, a house rule he shared with audiences during a recent screening of “Disconnect,” a film that dramatizes how technology has alienated people from one other.

As smartphones continue to burrow their way into our lives, and wearable devices like Google Glass threaten to erode our personal space even further, overtaxed users are carving out their own device-free zones with ad hoc tricks and life hacks.

Whether it’s a physical barrier (no iPads at the dinner table) or a conceptual one (turn off devices by 11 p.m.), users say these weaning techniques are improving their relationships — and their sanity.

“Disconnecting is a luxury that we all need,” said Lesley M. M. Blume, a New York writer who keeps her phone away from the dinner table at home. “The expectation that we must always be available to employers, colleagues, family: it creates a real obstacle in trying to set aside private time. But that private time is more important than ever.”

Much of the digital detoxing is centered on the home, where urgent e-mails from co-workers, texts from friends, Instagram photos from acquaintances and YOLO updates on Facebook conspire to upend domestic tranquillity.

A popular tactic is to designate a kind of cellphone lockbox, like the milk tin that Ms. Holley uses. “If my phone is buzzing or lighting up, it’s still a distraction, so it goes in the box,” said Ms. Holley, who lives in a row house in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with her son, Smith, and husband, John. “It’s not something I want my kid to see.”

An empty fishbowl, which sits on a dining room credenza, serves a similar function for Jaime David, a publicist at the Starworks Group in New York, except there are consequences for violators. “If someone picks up the phone between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. without a really good reason, they are tasked with getting our son to bed,” said Ms. David, who lives in Maplewood, N.J., with her husband, Jon, and two sons, Milo, 4, and Jack, 10 months.

Others assign a digital curfew. “No screens after 11 p.m.,” said Ari Melber, a host of MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” who lives in a walk-up apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with his fiancée, Drew Grant, a pop culture reporter at The New York Observer. The rule was instituted in January, after a vacation in Honduras where the couple found themselves without Internet access and ultimately happy about it.

“We found the evenings were more relaxing, and we were sleeping better,” Mr. Melber said.

Sleep is a big factor, which is why some, like Mr. Jacobs, draw the gadget-free line at the bedroom. “I don’t want to sleep next to something that is a charged ball of information with photos and e-mails,” said Peter Som, the fashion designer, who keeps his phone plugged in in the living room overnight. “It definitely is a head-clearer and delineates daytime and sleep time.”

Households with young children are especially mindful about being overconnected, with parents sensitive to how children may imitate bad habits.

Rebecca Minkoff, a fashion designer, makes a point of turning off the ringers and leaving her two phones on the opposite end of her Dumbo apartment when she plays with her 2-year-old son, Luca. “It isn’t easy, but I do my best to make the few hours I have with my son cellphone-free until he goes to sleep,” Ms. Minkoff said.

Bits Blog: A New BlackBerry Phone, but Maybe Too Late

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Japanese Phone Firm Sees Export Market in Older Users

Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche — older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple’s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series.

In partnership with Orange, formerly France Télécom, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or “easy easy.”

The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones.

“We believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,” said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu.

In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year.

Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere.

While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show.

“If you’re a smaller vendor and maybe haven’t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,” said André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. “It’s an underserved market.”

The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too — at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now.

“We see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,” said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange’s device portfolio.

While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in.

At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen “buttons” on the phone’s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing.

Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight.

There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone’s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones.

“The younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,” Mr. Becquet said.

While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users.

Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said Jérôme Arnaud, the chief executive of the company.

While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said.

The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing.

As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain.

“For Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,” said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, “but this technology does meet a demand.”

App City: Lose Your Keys? Use Your Phone

KeyMe allows you to scan digital keys into the cloud with an iPhone, to be retrieved whenever one goes missing. Rather than waiting around for a locksmith to change the locks, or overpaying a landlord for a new set, you can take the digital specifications to any place that makes and sells keys.

The app’s creator, Greg Marsh, came up with the idea about two years ago, after several trying episodes involving locksmiths at his Lower East Side apartment.

“The more I found out about keys and how they worked, the more it seemed like a digital storage program would work really well,” he said.

The KeyMe app gathers crucial information, including a key’s type (SC1, for instance) and the height of and distance between the key’s teeth. Any locksmith who has that information should be able to replicate your key.

Of the five keys I tried to scan, two were normal-size cut keys, one for my apartment and the other for my parents’ house. Another was the small key to my mailbox. The last two were more heavy duty: the keys to my bike lock and a black-jacketed Mul-T-Lock key to my apartment building.

But KeyMe is unable to scan bike keys and “do not duplicate” security keys, bringing my virtual key ring down to three. And scanning those three was a struggle. KeyMe’s scanning system requires the user to hold a phone completely still for about 15 seconds — a difficult prospect, particularly if you decide to scan keys after your morning coffee. Eventually though, the three keys that could be were scanned.

After that, there were additional delays. None of the keys I had scanned made it to the key-ring display, which indicates that a key’s specifications have been stored.

Mr. Marsh explained that there was often a bit of a delay between scanning a key in and having its measurements available. “The last thing we want is to give someone a faulty key, so we’ve got strict thresholds about when a result is returned,” he said.

Two of the three keys that I had scanned in were added to my key ring after a couple of hours. But the tiny key to my mailbox didn’t make it, probably because it was one of several key types that KeyMe has yet to support.

With my two virtual keys, I strode proudly to my local locksmith. When I got there, I learned that to retrieve each key’s measurements, I would have to pay a $9.99 fee to KeyMe, a cost that is not apparent when you download the free app. And that was in addition to the $10 my locksmith charged me for making a key from specifications (normal key copies are only $1.50; at the hardware store down the street, they’re a quarter). I decided to have just one key made, to my apartment. (It worked.)

From the five I had originally planned to scan, I ended up with only one $20 key. Anyone who had the foresight to scan keys with an app could have accomplished the same end merely by copying the keys at a hardware store for significantly less money. KeyMe is a good idea, but the app has quite a few doors to unlock before it becomes a viable alternative to simply being prepared.

Have a favorite New York City app? Send us a tip by e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @Jonesieman.

Q&A: Fitting More on a DVD and Finding the Perfect Phone

Q. When I burn a DVD, I have room for about two hours of recorded video on the disc. However, I recently bought a DVD recording of the opera “Carmen” that is more than three hours long. How can this much video fit on a DVD and why can’t I do it, too?

A. Digital videodiscs can store different amounts of information, depending on the number of data layers available. A DVD with a single layer for storing data can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes. A DVD with a double layer for storage (also called a “dual-layer” DVD) can store up to 8.5 gigabytes of data.

So the amount of recorded video you can fit on a disc varies based on the type of DVD you use (and what your recorder can handle), as well as the quality of your recording. Some DVD burners and recording programs also offer different video-quality modes, where the lower the quality, the more video you can squeeze onto a disc.

Your DVD recorder is probably using single-layer discs. Most commercial DVDs, like those for Hollywood movies or opera performance recordings, use the dual-layer discs to hold a greater amount of video at a higher quality — and still have room for things like bonus features. If you have ever watched a movie on DVD and noticed a slight pause or stutter about halfway into the film, you are most likely seeing the DVD player shift from one data layer to the next on the disc inside.

Finding the Perfect Phone

Q. I will soon have to replace my ancient 10-year-old cellphone with a smartphone — but which one? I have not been able to find up-to-date substantive details comparing the major Apple and Android smartphones. Do you have any advice on where to find such information?

A. The amount of smartphone choices out there can be overwhelming, but there are a few factors to consider when beginning your search for the device that suits you best. Your wireless carrier won’t carry all models, so unless you plan to change companies, you may want to start with the handsets your carrier supports. The company’s Web site should list the models it sells and you can find reviews of those phones on sites like CNet and PCMag.com.

If you don’t have a wireless contract or loyalty to your carrier, be sure to check that the mobile company you choose has adequate coverage in your area. You can find coverage maps on the carrier Web sites.

One way to approach the phone search is to make a list of features you want — like a good camera, a big screen, a particular hardware brand — and then see what smartphone meets your wish list. Comparison sites like WhistleOut, FindTheBest and PhoneArena give you a screen full of options to check off and whittle down your choices to specific phone models.

TIP OF THE WEEK Google Plus can automatically back up pictures taken with Android phones and tablets, but Google’s social network has a few other friendly features as well — like photo-editing right in the Web browser. When in your Google Plus Photos collection, click a picture to open it. On the next screen, click the Edit button to get to a set of tools you can use to crop, rotate and resize the image right in your Web browser.

On the editing screen, you can also adjust the photo’s exposure and color balance manually — or click the Auto-Fix button to have Google Plus automatically enhance the shot for you. You can also add filters, text and other elements to jazz up the picture.

NBC Buying Web Service to Stream Phone Video

Those images, usually found by frantic producers on Twitter and Facebook, represented “the first generation of user-generated content for news,” said Vivian Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News. The network is betting that the next generation involves live video, streamed straight to its control rooms in New York from the cellphones of witnesses.

On Monday, NBC News, a unit of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, will announce its acquisition of Stringwire, an early stage Web service that enables just that. Ms. Schiller imagined using Stringwire for coverage of all-consuming protests like those that occurred in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

“You could get 30 people all feeding video, holding up their smartphones, and then we could look at that,” she said in an interview by phone. “We’ll be able to publish and broadcast some of them.”

Such a vision fits neatly into the future many academics predict. That future has fewer professional news-gatherers but many more unpaid eyes and ears contributing to news coverage.

Stringwire is embryonic. What NBC is really acquiring is Phil Groman, who developed the technology while a graduate student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

Such “acqui-hiring,” in which a start-up is bought primarily for its talent, is normally associated with technology companies like Google and Apple, not television networks like NBC. But that is partly the point of Monday’s announcement, Ms. Schiller said: to send a message that the network news division wants more entrepreneurs like Mr. Groman.

Mr. Groman, who graduated from N.Y.U. in May, will become a product lead, based at the NBC News Digital Group’s office in San Francisco, where he will finish building Stringwire. The service works by tapping into the multitudes of people who send Twitter messages when they witness a news event. Those people will receive a Twitter post that asks them to click a link and point their camera at what they are seeing. Without any special app, the service will start streaming live video to NBC. The video submissions will be vetted just like any other material the network uses, Ms. Schiller said.

“Wherever you see a swarm of eyewitnesses on Twitter, that’s the sweet spot for Stringwire,” she said, citing the July 6 crash-landing of an Asiana jet in San Francisco. That day, photos from a passenger and a short YouTube video from the terminal were the primary images on television until a local news helicopter arrived.

Ms. Schiller said Stringwire could have also helped coverage of the hunt for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, when the movements of reporters were restricted. Several times during NBC’s coverage in April, local residents were interviewed via Skype from neighborhoods that had been cordoned off.

Generally, during news events, “we might have reporters there, but they may not be in the right places,” Ms. Schiller said. “They may not have the kind of access that eyewitnesses do.”

Clay Shirky, the N.Y.U. professor who introduced Ms. Schiller to Mr. Groman, said that by having reporters reach out to witnesses, “you don’t get the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot, but you get real information about life on the ground.” He said Mr. Groman’s insight was in applying “multiple sources and editorial judgment.”

The acquisition is the first by NBC News since its Web joint venture with Microsoft was dissolved last year. Their joint Web site, msnbc.com, has become NBCNews.com. The strategy now involves “building things in-house and placing a lot of bets,” Ms. Schiller said.

While Stringwire will initially be used by the news division, she said she thought the service had “great commercial opportunities,” suggesting that it could be licensed to others, creating a new source of revenue for NBC.

Senate Panel Presses N.S.A. on Phone Logs

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the chairman, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, accused Obama administration officials of overstating the success of the domestic call log program. He said he had been shown a classified list of “terrorist events” detected through surveillance, and it did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted by the domestic program.

“If this program is not effective it has to end. So far, I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen,” Mr. Leahy said, citing the “massive privacy implications” of keeping records of every American’s domestic calls.

At the start of the hearing, the Obama administration released previously classified documents outlining the rules for how the domestic phone records may be accessed and used by intelligence analysts. And as senators debated the program, The Guardian published on its Web site a still-classified 32-page presentation, apparently downloaded by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that describes a separate surveillance activity by the agency.

Called the XKeyscore program, it apparently gives N.S.A. analysts access to virtually any Internet browsing activity around the world, data that is being vacuumed up from 150 foreign sites.

Together, the new disclosures provided additional details on the scope of the United States government’s secret surveillance programs, which have been dragged into public view and public debate by leaks from Mr. Snowden, who remains stranded in a Moscow airport.

The hearing came a week after the House voted narrowly to defeat an amendment to shut down the N.S.A.’s domestic phone record tracking program. The 217-to-205 vote was far closer than expected, and it — along with shifting poll numbers — suggested that momentum against the domestic program was building. In recent days even some of the most outspoken supporters of the program have said they are open to adjusting it.

The Obama administration has been trying to build public support for its surveillance programs, which trace back to the Bush administration, by arguing that they are subject to strict safeguards and court oversight and that they have helped thwart as many as 54 terrorist events. That figure, Mr. Leahy emphasized, relies upon conflating another program that allows surveillance targeted at noncitizens abroad, which has apparently been quite valuable, with the domestic one.

Still, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she supported overhauling the program but keeping it in place because it generates information that might prevent attacks.

John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the N.S.A., said there had been 13 investigations in which the domestic call tracking program made a “contribution.” He cited two discoveries: that several men in San Diego were sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia, and that a suspect who was already under scrutiny in a subway bomb plot was using a different phone.

Robert S. Litt, the top lawyer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, testified that the Obama administration was also “open to re-evaluating this program” to create greater public confidence that it protects privacy while “preserving the essence of the program.” Administration officials have emphasized that the program collects only so-called metadata, and not the contents of phone calls.

Still, the top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, asked skeptical questions about the legal basis for the program while criticizing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, for making inaccurate statements to Congress about it in March. Mr. Clapper has since apologized.

“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance,” Mr. Grassley said.

A series of slides describing XKeyscore, dated 2008, make it clear that the security agency system is collecting a huge amount of data on Internet activity around the globe, from chats on social networks to browsing of Web sites and searches on Google Maps. The volume of data is so vast that most of it is stored for only three days, although metadata — information showing logins and server activity, but not content — is stored for a month. Several of the pages were redacted by The Guardian.

Some of the servers the agency uses are run by foreign intelligence services of friendly nations, including Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but other servers may be on the soil of countries unaware the agency is mining Internet “pipes” on their soil. Some of the harvesting of data takes place on the coasts of the United States, and along the Mexican border. Most sites are in Europe, the Middle East, and along the borders of India, Pakistan, and China.

Bits: I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet

A truly mobile wallet — one that would let you easily pay for restaurant meals, subway rides or beers at a bar with a quick wave of your cellphone — has long been described as imminent. But it remains elusive. Some innovations have begun to bridge the gap, but most have been a disappointment or have not yet worked well enough for mainstream adoption.

In 2012, Square, which makes a credit card reader that can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, worked on a credit-cardless system that let people pay for goods without ever pulling out their wallets or phones. When Square users walk into a store in its network, a Square-enabled register shows pictures of their faces, which are used as authentication for payment. But the app can be awkward to use.

Last summer, Apple introduced Passbook, a digital system for storing boarding passes, movie tickets, loyalty cards and gift cards on the iPhone. But it doesn’t do much beyond that, at least not yet. Google worked with major credit card companies and banks to create its Wallet app, which lets people pay for items at some stores by waving their phones but is available only for Android devices. Visa offers two digital wallets, payWave and V.me, but I’ve never seen anyone use them or signed up myself.  And the major mobile carriers in the United States banded together to form Isis, a mobile payments network, which has yet to roll out nationally.

Starbucks has arguably had the most success with the pay-by-phone idea in the United States. The company has persuaded millions of people to download an application that can be used to pay for their lattes. It works like a digital gift card — but only at Starbucks, obviously, so it’s limiting. (The company also invested $25 million in Square and is incorporating Square’s technology in its stores.)

When I complain to friends and colleagues about the inconvenience of fumbling around for my wallet when I’m shopping — and say I wish I could just use my phone instead — they often give me bewildered looks.

Apparently, that’s because paying with a phone today is rarely easier than paying with a credit card. Paying via phone often involves a series of awkward swipes and taps to start the transaction, and the process can be disrupted by spotty wireless connections, low batteries or other electronic hiccups.

“No one wants to be the guy holding up the grocery line at 6 p.m.,” said Joshua Reich, one of the founders of Simple, a banking start-up company that gives people free checking accounts and offers them data-rich analyses of their spending and saving habits. “You don’t want to look like that dork, the guy riding a Segway.”

Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum who covers the mobile industry, agreed.

“Mobile payments are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for most people,” he said. “You don’t hear people moaning about how hard it is to pay with their credit cards or debit cards.”

The biggest problem for paying by cellphone is that so many kinds of businesses are competing to offer services. Companies as varied as phone carriers, banks, credit card companies and technology start-ups have had plans to get into the mobile payment business, but many are locking horns over who can profit the most, Mr. Dawson said.

“Everyone wants to be the primary payments provider,” he said.

Wireless carriers, desperate to bolster their revenue, are reluctant to hand over potentially lucrative streams to companies like Apple and Google, which already make billions from devices and the software that runs on them. Banks and credit card companies are also rolling out mobile checking services and applications, both to impress their younger users and to keep a hand in a game where billions of dollars are at stake annually, largely from the endless parade of small fees racked up with each purchase. And industry heavyweights like PayPal and Groupon are also scrambling to get their own offerings into the market.

It’s tough to persuade major retailers to spend money to work with Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, for example, when so many other options are still on the table. And what is popular today might be outdated in a few months.

Part of the reason that Starbucks’ own app works so well is that the company invested significantly to build out the infrastructure in its stores — sleek phone-scanning kiosks and mobile apps that work reliably and efficiently.

“There is a lot of reluctance in installing a lot of technology, especially if they aren’t sure it’ll take off,” said Rob von Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an “infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry,” he said.

Mr. von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team’s original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realized that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent.

A large portion of shopping begins on cellphones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age “in an era where there wasn’t network connectivity,” making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programs, Mr. von Behren said.

He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with cellphones was a “tremendous juggling act.” He added, “It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t.”

BUT a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of pay-by-cellphone systems will arrive eventually. Braintree recently acquired Venmo, a company that lets people send money to one another via simple text messages. In addition, some promising newcomers say they are working on more complete alternatives.

Clinkle, a start-up, has persuaded a notable roster of venture capitalists to funnel $25 million into its mysterious and forthcoming mobile payment services. And a new company, Lemon, is working on its own digital wallet.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see. For now, I’ve come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver’s license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it’s not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.

New Jersey Supreme Court Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data

The ruling puts the state at the forefront of efforts to define the boundaries around a law enforcement practice that a national survey last year showed was routine, and typically done without court oversight or public awareness. With lower courts divided on the use of cellphone tracking data, legal experts say, the issue is likely to end up before the United States Supreme Court.

The New Jersey decision also underscores the extent of the battles over government intrusion into personal data in a quickly advancing digital age, from small town police departments to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of e-mail and cellphone conversations.

Several states and Congress are considering legislation to require that warrants based on probable cause be obtained before investigators can get cellphone data. Montana recently became the first state to pass such a measure into law. The California Legislature approved a similar bill in 2012, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, saying it did not “strike the right balance” between the needs of law enforcement and the rights of citizens.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in May that the police could seize a cellphone without a warrant, but needed a warrant to search it. And a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., is weighing whether investigators acted legally when they got a court order, but not a warrant, to obtain 221 days of cellphone location data for suspects in an armed robbery case in Maryland.

“This type of issue will play out in many jurisdictions for the simple reason that cellphones are so prevalent in daily life,” said Peter G. Verniero, a former New Jersey attorney general and State Supreme Court justice. “The decision affects just about everybody.”

“Law enforcement is trying to keep up with technology, as well they should,” he added. “It’s very legitimate for law enforcement to use technology, but this court decision is a strong reminder that constitutional standards still apply. The courts have to adapt, and law enforcement has to adapt.”

The ruling involved a case that began with a string of burglaries in homes in Middletown, N.J. A court ordered the tracing of a cellphone that had been stolen from one home, which led to a man in a bar in nearby Asbury Park, who said his cousin had sold him the phone, and had been involved in burglaries. The police then used data they got from T-Mobile to locate the suspect, Thomas W. Earls, at three points on a subsequent evening, tracking him to a motel room where he was found with a television and suitcases full of stolen goods.

In a unanimous decision, the State Supreme Court said that when people entered cellphone contracts, “they can reasonably expect that their personal information will remain private.”

The justices recognized that this departed somewhat from federal case law. But they relied in part on a United States Supreme Court decision last year that the police could not attach a Global Positioning System to a suspect’s car without a warrant. A cellphone, the New Jersey justices said, was like a GPS device.

“Using a cellphone to determine the location of its owner can be far more revealing than acquiring toll billing, bank, or Internet subscriber records,” said the opinion, written by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. “Details about the location of a cellphone can provide an intimate picture of one’s daily life and reveal not just where people go — which doctors, religious services and stores they visit — but also the people and groups they choose to affiliate with. That information cuts across a broad range of personal ties with family, friends, political groups, health care providers and others.”

Besides establishing a firmer legal bar for the police to obtain cellphone data, the Supreme Court also remanded the case to the appeals court to determine whether the evidence collected using the cellphone records could be admitted in court under an “emergency aid exception” to the requirement for a warrant.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reviewed records from more than 200 local police departments, large and small, and found that they were aggressively using cellphone tracking data, so much so that some cellphone companies were marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments, to track suspects or even to download text messages sent to a phone that had been turned off. Departments were using the information for emergency and nonemergency cases.

Some departments had manuals advising officers not to reveal the practice to the public. Others defended its use. The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, had used a cellphone locator to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

The law has been slow to keep up. The Florida decision in May rejected the reasoning of a lower court that had based its approval of cellphone tracking on a 1973 United States Supreme Court case that allowed heroin found in a suspect’s cigarette pack to be introduced as evidence. “Attempting to correlate a crumpled package of cigarettes to the cellphones of today is like comparing a one-cell organism to a human being,” the decision said.

Nationally, court decisions about cellphone tracking have considered whether it comports with the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the justices in New Jersey based their decision on the State Constitution, which affords greater privacy protection. The state court has previously ruled in favor of electronic privacy. In 2008, it said that police had to obtain a subpoena from a grand jury to obtain Internet provider records.

“The inescapable logic of this decision should be influential beyond New Jersey because it makes complete sense as to an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” said Rubin Sinins, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Gadgetwise: A Waterproof Phone With Battery Stamina

The Sony Xperia Z phone is tougher than it looks.

The phone is waterproof — in water up to three feet deep for a half-hour, according to Sony — but it looks like a standard smartphone, lacking the macho armoring of most devices built to withstand the elements.

The phone uses an Android operating system and is powered by a quad core Snapdragon chip, which, at least on paper, isn’t as fast as the chips in some competing phones. But the chip is snappy nonetheless.

The device is on the larger side, with a 5-inch, 1920 x 1080p HD screen. Sony makes much of its access to Bravia TV technology, but the screen is not definitively better than an Apple Retina or Samsung Amoled screen.

The phone also has a 13-megapixel camera with High Dynamic Range capability, which means that in a sunlit room, it should capture details from the shadows without having the window look like a glowing rectangle. In practice, its photos weren’t clearly better than those from the aforementioned competitors.

The Z has NFC capability, so it can trade information with other NFC devices with a touch. Sony has cleverly marked the NFC spot on the back of the phone, so you’re not reduced to rubbing your phone all over some other device hoping to connect, as is often required with NFC.

A battery “stamina” mode shuts down background operations while the phone is sleeping. You can designate which apps should keep running, so you can still get alerts.

With the Android Jellybean 4.2 operating system, it of course connects to the full suite of Google goodies, including Web backup to contacts and your calendar, as well as easy access to Google Plus, Google Maps, YouTube and the Chrome browser.

The Xperia Z is available through T-Mobile for $100 upfront with 24 monthly payments of $20, for a total of $580.

Bits Blog: Following Public Dots to a Missing Phone

In retrospect, I should have checked the cab seat when I got out. I should have taken the receipt. And maybe I should have had more empathy for those people, like my daughters, who have lost their smartphones.

Because there I was, at 1 a.m. on a recent night, just back from the airport with a sinking feeling that I’d left my iPhone in the taxi.

No immediate solution appeared, so after a fitful few hours of sleep, I began my quest to find my phone. Along the way, I was reminded, in this time of debate about how much personal information the government secretly keeps about us, just how much information is already publicly available.

My hunt started with a trip to the Apple store to get into my iCloud account (I didn’t know my password) and use the Find My iPhone service that I had turned on for my iPhone. I learned just how critical it is to have the program activated, although there were still several caveats.

A screen shot of the Find My iPhone app showing location of the writer’s iPhone on Thursday.

Because of that feature, locating the phone was the easy step. The trick was getting it back.

The tracker showed the phone at a house at the entrance to a cul-de-sac a little east of Queens in Nassau County. But I didn’t have the house number. The police there told me they could assist me if I showed up at the location, but that they wouldn’t go to the house on their own. I needed to talk to someone in that house.

I initially didn’t have much luck searching online for a free reverse directory, and a librarian at a nearby branch would not give out resident information if they could find it in their reverse directories. But Zillow.com, the real estate site, let me identify the house number, which gave me enough information to look up county records. Those told a lot about the property — Colonial, two-family home, built in 1962, 2,150 square feet, last sold in 2004 for $430,00 — but had no owner information. A call to the assessor’s office turned up the homeowner’s name, and the white pages provided the phone number. It went to a generic voicemail.

While I waited for a call back, I searched the Open Data service on NYC.gov for a taxi driver with the resident’s name. One seemed to show up, though the first name started with a different letter. That gave me a taxi license for that driver, though not the coveted medallion number.

To triangulate, I turned to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. I wasn’t expecting much here, since when I called the night before I heard the after-hours recording, which made it clear that the commission has lots of drivers and lots of lost property reports, and that you have to fill out a form online. I got through to a helpful employee who was soon digging into the case. She took the license number and within a couple minutes had the driver on the line. But the person she had on the phone was not the right one — it was a woman, not a man. So the records showing a slightly different first name were indeed accurate.

But there was another option: because I paid with a credit card, the staffer told me, the medallion number of the driver would show up in that transaction. But it hadn’t yet been fully processed and there was no medallion number, according to my online statement and my credit union. But we did have the amount, $36.43, and the pick up and drop-off locations, so the staffer was going to see what she could do.

In the meantime, I called the house again and a man picked up. Though he wasn’t my driver, he said a taxi driver did live there and he gave me a cellphone number.

When I called that number, a man picked up and he said he had my phone. I got his name and medallion number and called the clerk at the taxi commission. She, too, had come up with a medallion number. They matched.

Less than 24 hours since his cab drove off with my phone on the back seat, the driver was outside our apartment again.

It is said that the chances of getting a phone back are not so good after someone hops into the cab you exited. As a tractor-trailer honked behind the cabby and I gave him $30 bucks for the effort and he handed me the phone, he told me we had been his last passengers after that airport run.

So in the end, it helped to have a little bit of luck, and a lot of data, on my side.

In Increasing Sales of Its Lumia Phone, a Rare Bright Spot for Nokia

The company, based in Espoo, Finland, on Thursday announced a 24 percent decline in its second-quarter sales, to 5.7 billion euros, though it narrowed its second-quarter losses to 227 million euros, or $298 million, compared with a loss of 1.4 billion euros a year earlier.

The losses were lower than analysts’ estimates.

It is the eighth time in the last 10 quarters that Nokia has reported a net loss. The company saw a glimmer of light in the doubling of sales of its Lumia smartphone line. But Nokia, once the world’s largest cellphone maker, now ranks third behind Samsung and Apple and faces mounting competition from cheap devices made in emerging markets like China and India.

“When you are going through a difficult transition, you have to stay focused,” Nokia’s chief executive, Stephen A. Elop, said in an interview. “It’s hard work, but we’ve got a lot of positive things happening.”

Investors, however, disagreed, sending the company’s share price down 2.7 percent in trading in Europe on Thursday.

While Nokia remains one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cellphones, the company now relies heavily on its cheaper, low-end models, which are primarily sold in developing economies.

These devices represented almost 88 percent of the 61.1 million handsets that Nokia sold in the second quarter. They have fewer features than high-end smartphones, which are much more profitable to sell. Growing competition from rivals in emerging markets, many of which use Google’s Android software, is eating into Nokia’s earnings.

In total, the company’s non-smartphone division reported a 27 percent drop in the number of units sold, to 53.7 million, compared with the same period last year. That is almost half the number of phones that Nokia reported at the end of 2011.

In countries like China, where a growing middle-class population is clamoring for new phones, the number of devices sold by Nokia fell almost 50 percent versus the second quarter of 2012.

“There’s no good news at the lower end of the market,” said Roberta Cozza, a research director at Gartner in London. “The problem is that there are so many local emerging market players looking to build up market share.” Nokia also said on Thursday that it would cut up to 440 additional jobs from the division.

Faced with cutthroat rivals for its cheaper phones, Nokia also is trying to gain traction in the high-end smartphone market through its partnership with Microsoft. The strategy is proving difficult to execute.

Smartphones running Windows software hold less than a 4 percent market share, compared with 74 percent that use the Android operating system, according to Gartner.

Yet, in a sign of some growing customer interest, Nokia reported sales of its Lumia line of smartphones almost doubled to 7.4 million units during the three months through June 30 compared with the same period last year.

The figure represents the largest number of Lumia phones sold in a quarter by Nokia since their introduction in 2011. Last week, the company announced a new Lumia phone with a camera that has a 41-megapixel sensor.

Analysts welcomed the rising number of Lumia sales. But they raised concerns that the average price of Nokia’s smartphones fell almost 18 percent, to 157 euros, in the second quarter.

“The market would have liked to see more phones sold, but it’s a strong figure for smartphones,” said Janardan Menon, an analyst at Liberum Capital in London. “The more worrying trend is around Nokia’s average phone price. They have to bring that figure up.”

The main cause for the reduced average price was related to consumers’ continued preference for the company’s less advanced smartphones, instead of its top-of-the-range devices.

Nokia said that it expected its third-quarter phone sales to outpace those for the period just ended.

Gadgetwise Blog: A New Leef for Sharing Files to Your Phone

The Leef Bridge, a USB thumb drive, proposes to transfer files easily between computers and phones.

Transferring files from your computer to your phone can be a big hassle, especially when they don’t use the same operating system. With so many Android phones out there, it’s an annoyance a lot of people face.

The Leef Bridge, a USB thumb drive, takes a stab at the problem, and it’s a step in the right direction, even if it’s not quite there yet.

The Leef Bridge has two plugs, an standard USB on one side and a Micro USB on the other. The idea is you plug the standard side into a computer, load up the files you want. Then move the Bridge to your phone and plug in the micro USB.

It seems simple enough, but the fault in the Bridge lies not with Leef, but with the Android. Various phones handle the external drive differently and none I tried were easy, although the Samsung Galaxy S4 was easiest.

First, before you can use the Bridge, your phone (or tablet) has to run on Android’s Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system or a newer one, and the device has to accommodate the USB OTG (On-The-Go) standard. On top of that, you may need a file management software; Leef suggests Astro File Manager.

With help from Leef, I was able to use the file manager on an HTC One; the trick is not to open the manager until after you plug in the Bridge. A Samsung Galaxy S4 recognized the drive without additional software, which made the transfer easier. Using a Motorola RAZR, I was unable on my own to figure out how make a transfer, even with the file management software.

So, is this easier than using software like DoubleTwist that connects your computer and phone ? I’d say they are about equal. Both are manageable once you are over the considerable learning curve.

You may be wondering if you can do the same thing with any thumb drive and an adapter cable, like this $1.50 one from Monoprice. You can. But it still doesn’t solve the complexity of the file management system.

The Bridge might become more sensible when more phones recognize drives the way the Galaxy S4 does, or if someone were to make some smart, simple file manager. Maybe one to go specifically with the Leef (are you listening, Leef?).

In the meantime, the company said a 16GB Bridge will be available for $18, a 32 GB Bridge for $29.

Bits Blog: BlackBerry Posts Loss, Despite New Phone

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Paying Extra for Phone Freedom

What is the advantage of getting an unlocked cellphone?

Wireless carriers typically subsidize the cost of a new mobile phone by requiring you to sign a two-year contract for service on their networks – in effect, “locking” the phone to the network. This subsidy can lower the price of a new smartphone to about $200 from around $600, but it basically means you cannot legally use the phone with any other company’s network without permission from your carrier.

Modifications earlier this year to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually made unlocking your phone without your carrier’s permission illegal. A Congressional bill, the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013, was recently introduced to change the current law.

You can still buy an unlocked phone outright, though, and one big advantage to doing so is that you can use it freely on other carrier networks — especially if you buy a handset that works on the G.S.M. networks used around the world. Traveling with an unlocked G.S.M. phone means you can buy local inexpensive service plans, and S.I.M. cards, in the countries you visit and not worry about exorbitant roaming charges from a company back home.

App Smart: Phone Timer Apps Help You Stay on Schedule

You know that awful moment, while watching television, when you suddenly remember you left something on the stove? I know it well because I’m terrible at remembering things I need to do in, say, four or five minutes. But with a timer app on my phone, I could avoid burning dinner and keep track of any number of other events at the same time.

One of the most elegant timers on Apple’s iOS platform is Timeless, priced at $1. Its interface has large panels with clear typography and straightforward control icons. The main countdown timer screen, for example, is dominated by big white numerals in the center of a large blue display above a small icon bar.

Timeless is controlled by screen gestures. The first time you start it, the app explains how to swipe the screen or rotate the phone to switch displays. For example, swiping left and right on the main timer screen calls up different timers you have set, or lets you create a new one.

Setting up a new timer is simple: the app displays two columns of numerals, one for hours and one for minutes. Swipe these columns up and down to select the time interval you want, then start the countdown by tapping on the play icon in the icon bar. A bell icon selects which audio alarm is associated with the countdown.

The app can run numerous timers simultaneously; to see them, either swipe the timers one by one or turn the phone sideways to view them all in a list. You can even add a label to each timer so you know exactly what it’s for — like “boiled egg” or “important phone call.”

The app can also run multiple stopwatch timers that count up rather than down. You start a stopwatch by setting a new timer to 00:00 and pressing “play.”

The app does have some limitations. For example, the countdown timers count only whole hours and minutes — not seconds — and the stopwatch function has no option for split-timing laps.

An equivalent app for Android devices with similarly high design values is the $1 app Timer. The app is simple to use: to set a new countdown timer, you tap the little “+” icon, and up pops a setting for hours, minutes and seconds.

To set the seconds, you move your finger around a circular dial, then tap on hours or minutes if you need them. You can start the countdown straightaway or save it for easy access later.

Many timers can run concurrently — handy if, for example, you are cooking several dishes for a dinner party — and the app has clear controls for pausing, ending or deleting timers.

One slight irritation with this app is its method for setting labels on timers: you have to “long press” them in the list of running or saved timers, and that can be easy to forget.

You also cannot set different reminder tones for different timers — which means that if you have a group of timers running concurrently, you will have to check your phone to see which one the alarm is referring to.

Simpler timing needs may be met with the Ovo Timer, a free app on Android. Its clever design reduces countdown timing to a minimum.

The app’s screen is dominated by the time you have set, which is done by tapping on the screen and circling your finger clockwise or counterclockwise. There is also an option to have the time you want spoken.

The countdown begins automatically; you can pause it by touching the numerals. A colorful arc surrounds the countdown, disappearing gradually as the time ticks away. The app is simple and it’s free, but it can run only one timer at a time and cannot handle countdowns longer than an hour.

If you are interested in stopwatch timing rather than countdown timing, you may find it simpler to use a dedicated stopwatch app. Apple’s iOS has a useful stopwatch built into the Clock app.

You can also try the Stopwatch+ app, $1 on iTunes, a slightly more sophisticated timer that records lap events in detail and even lets you e-mail your list of times. The Ultimate Stopwatch app on Android features a clean and easy-to-use design, and includes all the basic stopwatch features. And it’s free.

And that smoke from your kitchen probably means you burned the toast while reading this.

Quick Call

The popular book Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America has been turned into a “pocket” edition app for iOS. Called Peterson Birds Pocket Edition, it is just $1, and comes with illustrations, data and bird song recordings to help identify birds you’ve heard, if not seen.

Phone Records of Journalists of The Associated Press Seized by U.S.

Dissecting the A.P. Phone Log Seizure: The Times’s Charlie Savage breaks down the government’s subpoenas of phone records of Associated Press journalists.