My Last Post…this side of the decade!

Everyone is doing some sort of “best of” article at the moment so let me try to be different just for the LULZ…I tried to remember the things which used to bring so much joy but now considered to be a form of torture and ended up laughing so much that I had to get some glue for my sides: When I tell my 3 Year Old Son that the kids Tv Channel Cbeebies has shut down for the day, he just does not understand it because he replies with one word “iPlayer” This was topped up one day when he said “Daddy, the internet knows everything.” God help us…

So here is a list of some things that my kid may never know about:

• remembering someone’s telephone number
• not knowing who is calling your phone
• Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something
• putting a roll of film in your camera and getting negatives full of fingerprints
• High Speed Dubbing on the twin deck
• not knowing what your friends are doing or thinking at every moment
• Show….you know, A.S.K.
• using matchsticks to regulate the speed of playback on a walkman
• Floppy disks
• counting Kilobytes and wondering if you can afford a RAM upgrade
• Blowing the dust out of a Nintendo cartridge hoping that the game will load this time
• Joysticks
• Having to delete something on your hard drive to get more space
• using the Encyclopedia instead of Wikipedia
• getting from A to B using a Road Atlas commonly called a map
• getting lost and not being able to find your way without help from St.John’s
• banking only when the Bank is open
• finding someones number from the phone book commonly called a Directory
• being able to register a domain name consisting of a real word
• writing a letter and posting it
• writing words without num8er5 in them
• typewriters
• when spam was just a meat product
• public pay phones commonly called phone booth
• Trigonometry and Log tables
• manually locking and unlocking a car
• writing a Cheque
• dictionary…the physical one
• our privacy

Have a Happy New Year 2010 and see you on the other side!

Connecting your iPhone and Bluetooth keyboard? There’s a (jailbroken) app for that

Thanks to a small hack it is now possible to connect an iPhone or iPod touch to a Bluetooth keyboard for some serious typing or convenience for the chubby fingered! The app that enables it is only available for jailbroken devices in the Cydia store for $5. The app is called BTstack Keyboard and is supported on iPhone 3GS but not on the iPhone 2G although there’s a workaround for that too!
It works well over all the applications, although cut, copy and paste are yet to get shortcuts. We can hope for more in future app updates but for now it serves the purpose well.

Read More at Engadget

Works well over all the applications, though, cut, copy, paste is yet to get shortcuts. We can hope for more in future app updates, for the meantime it serves the purpose well.

Goodbye Lightbulbs, Hello Wallpaper OLED

Wallpaper that can glow with light and bendable flat-panel screens are a step closer thanks to research into organic LEDs (OLEDs), which are widely hailed as the next generation of environmentally friendly lighting technology.

OLEDs use very little power to produce light, even compared with modern energy-saving bulbs. The chemicals they are made from can be painted on to thin, flexible surfaces, allowing them potentially to be used to replace traditional lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls, windows or even furniture. Other uses include flexible display screens, whose very low power consumption would mean they could operate without mains power, for example as roadside traffic warning signs powered by small solar panels.

The radically different manufacturing process of OLEDs has many advantages over flat-panel displays made with LCD technology. OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable substrate using an inkjet printer or even screen printing technologies. They can theoretically have a significantly lower cost than LCDs or plasma displays. Printing OLEDs onto flexible substrates opens the door to new applications such as roll-up displays, wallpaper and displays embedded in fabrics or clothing.

We are hoping that in the coming decade we will be able to buy a roll of this stuff from B&Q (or Nakumatt, Mr & Mrs Mwathe:-) and stick it to the wall like wallpaper. Total immersion, whether you fancy a lounge at the bottom of the ocean or on the cliff sides of the Himilayas, its cool stuff.

Read more at The Guardian

SpyPhone App Steals Personal Data from ALL iPhones – Jailbroken or Not!

A Swiss iPhone developer has unveiled a new application that is capable of harvesting huge amounts of personal data from iPhones, including geolocation data, passwords, address book entries and email accounts information, images, Safari Browsing history, youtube, keyboard logger, etc. all this using just the public API exposed by Apple’s SDK.

In oder for this application, SpyPhone,  to work, it does not need any exploits or any jailbreaking/firmware modification attacks in order to access the iPhone’s data. Instead, SpyPhone relies on using the iPhone’s usability and depth of features to its advantage. Once an application is on an iPhone, it has unrestricted access to the large amount of the data and settings available on the device.

Seriot, the application developer, has posted the source code for SpyPhone online and gave a talk detail document on iPhone Privacy at a security conference, earlier this week.

Seriot said: Once on the iPhone, the application begins looking at the stored data that’s available in various other programs, such as the email address book and the keyboard cache, which keeps a record of every keystroke the user enters in a non-password field. This data normally is used for the iPhone’s autocomplete feature, but can be a gold mine of information for an attacker searching for intelligence on the iPhone’s owner. By default, the iPhone will tag any photos taken with the device with the date and location of the pitcure. The user can turn this feature off, but if it’s enabled, SpyPhone can access that data, as well as the log of which WiFi hotspots the device has connected to. All of this gives the attacker a better picture of the iPhone’s owner, his location and his interests, which is valuable data.

Latest Apple iPhone 3GS

The Worst Part: SpyPhone is more like a Trojan sitting in your OS silently and stealing data. All of the SpyPhone’s operations are executed in the background, without the knowledge of the iPhone’s owner, and just like any other Trojan, the application can be set to email reports on each infected phone back to the attacker.

Seriot mentions in his presentation that “Spywares are on the iPhone AppStore” And when this kind of app makes it to AppStore, it becomes a serious issue; who knows if “one of those spyware apps” already has SpyPhone-alike features.

No doubt, Apple has taken utmost efforts to keep strict control over what applications make it to the Appstore (their rejections are the proof), but despite their effort, exposing a lot of core of the Operating system has leaded them to misery.

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