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.

Share your thoughts and read more at Tarranfx

Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP for SPDY

On the Chromium blog, Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon write about an early-stage research project called SPDY (“speedy”). Unhappy with the performance of the venerable hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), researchers at Google think they can do better.

The main problem with HTTP is that today, it's used in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used. HTTP is very efficient at transferring an individual file. But it wasn’t designed to transfer a large number of small files efficiently, and this is exactly what the protocol is called upon to do with today’s websites. Pages with 60 or more images, CSS files, and external JavaScript are not unusual for high-profile Web destinations. Loading all those individual files mostly takes time because of all the overhead of separately requesting them and waiting for the TCP sessions HTTP runs over to probe the network capacity and ramp up their transmission speed. Browsers can either send requests to the same server over one session, in which case small files can get stuck behind big ones, or set up parallel HTTP/TCP sessions where each must ramp up from minimum speed individually. With all the extra features and cookies, an HTTP request is often almost a kilobyte in size, and takes precious dozens of milliseconds to transmit.

In an attempt to avoid these issues, SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that’s already in progress to terminate. Compressing the requests is helpful in typical ADSL/cable setups, where uplink speed is limited. For good measure, unnecessary and duplicated headers in requests and responses are done away with. SPDY also includes real server push and a “server hint” feature.

On the SPDY white paper page, the Google researchers show a speed increase of up to 50 percent. Read on at Arstechnica.com

Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.

Check out more at Techcrunch.com

Twitter Only Device Called Twitterpeek – Fact or Fiction?

As a “connected gadget guy” I had heard a few rumors that Peek (the company blissfully unaware that people generally do like BlackBerries, and I don’t much care that it’s on Oprah’s list – the future is smartphones and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon) was coming out with a Twitter-only device. I scoffed at most of these comments, as it sounded so… odd. As I stated about the WikiReader last week, in the mobile space converged devices are hands-down beating out single purpose devices.

But I saw a tweet today claiming it’s real, and I did a quick Amazon search, and lo-and-behold – it’s real! But to think that there’s a market out there for a Twitter-only device is just plain puzzling.

Let me break it down a bit:

1. Twitter use is, for the most part, technologists and some celebrities. Both groups have smartphones, primarily iPhones and BlackBerries, which have fairly rich Twitter integration. Neither will purchase a new device that does Twitter only.

2. New-to-Twitter people are still getting warm on the concept (well actually mostly they are just dropping the service), and wouldn’t buy a new gadget.

3. This leaves us to the “if and when Twitter gains mass acceptance” market. Let’s discuss some more at Livedigitally.com

Truly universal phone charger approved

Cellphone chargers, like the one above (which is one of the best I have seen) that claim to be “universal” when in reality they are just “toolboxes” full of different tools, may become extinct soon! A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union ITU, a United Nations body, reports the BBC. Industry body the GSMA predicts that 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers are generated each year. Currently most chargers are product or brand specific, so people tend to change them when they upgrade to a new phone. However, the new energy-efficient chargers can be kept for much longer.

The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes. “This is a significant step in reducing the environmental impact of mobile charging,” said Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau. “Universal chargers are a common-sense solution that I look forward to seeing in other areas. “The charger has a micro-USB port at the connecting end, using similar technology to digital cameras.

It is not compulsory for manufacturers to adopt the new chargers but the ITU says that some have already signed up to it. “We are planning to launch the universal charger internationally during the first half of 2010,” Aldo Liguori, spokesperson for Sony Ericsson told the BBC. “We will roll it out with new products as they launch.”

Sneaky Microsoft plug-in puts Firefox users at risk

An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Mozilla’s Firefox last February leaves the browser open to attack, Microsoft’s security engineers acknowledged earlier this week.

One of the 13 security bulletins Microsoft released Tuesday affects not only Internet Explorer (IE), but also Firefox, thanks to a Microsoft-made plug-in pushed to Firefox users eight months ago in an update delivered via Windows Update.

“While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well,” admitted Microsoft engineers in a post to the company’s Security Research & Defense blog on Tuesday. “The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’ plug-in in Firefox.”

The Microsoft engineers described the possible threat as a “browse-and-get-owned” situation that only requires attackers to lure Firefox users to a rigged Web site.

Read more at COMPUTERWORLD

Microsoft Data Recovery For Sidekick T-mobile Users

Story so far: Users of T-Mobile’s Sidekick have been suffering through a major outage over the past several days that left many without access to the Web or their address books. Read more at CNET.

Next turn of events: T-Mobile and Danger (the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick) has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure. Read more at TECHCRUNCH.

Finally, this is the situation now:

“”Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,

On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into the T-Mobile Sidekick forum at http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.

We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.

Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.

Sincerely,

Roz Ho

Corporate Vice President

Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation

Oct. 15, 2009″”

Sidekick DEMO here.

sidekick 2