Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 26, 2010 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Hulu to Push a $9.95/month Subscription in May?
There is a rumor that as soon as May 24th Hulu might be moving to a subscription-based service for anyone that wants to watch older episodes of select popular shows, such as Glee or Lost. The most recent five episodes will remain free, but beyond that you’ll have to pay $9.95 per month for access. This isn’t unexpected, but I think people would be more willing to pay for access if they also threw in higher quality videos or faster access to the latest episodes.

The Next iPhone
As all of you probably know by now Gizmodo got a hands-on (using questionable methods) with what will likely be the next generation iPhone. The new phone has a front-facing camera, micro-SIM, flash for the rear-facing camera, larger battery, and a redesign. It goes without saying that this news has been widely covered, and in the last week the main article has drawn in over 8 million views for Gizmodo.

–News in Brief–

Aza Raskin’s Ideas for Firefox Identity Management
Aza takes a look at how the user experience for managing online accounts can be improved

Google Maps Does Search Suggestions
Google has rolled out search suggestions for their Maps service, which will “intelligently” recommend options it thinks you’re looking for.

What’s playing on the Microsoft Store TV Wall?
A look at how Microsoft uses 120 of their 47″ TV’s (a combined resolution of 57000 x 1080) in their store.

iFixit Lets Users Contribute Repair Instructions
iFixit is becoming more like instructables.com in that users can now submit their own guides.

New $100 Bill Harder to Counterfeit
The new $100 bill has even more anti-counterfeit measures in place, including a “3D” security ribbon.

McAfee Update Brings Down XP Machines
A false positive in the McAfee antivirus software inadvertently removes the svchost.exe file on some Windows XP machines, and causes an endless cycle of reboots.

PocketPC Turns 10
About 10 years ago Microsoft unveiled the first Pocket PC, and the funny thing is that I still have my original Pocket PC. In fact I took it out just the other day to see if it still powers up, and it does.

Google Exposes Government Requests
Google maps out how many requests have been made by governments for either turning over data or the removal of content.

BlackBerry OS 6.0 Screenshots
Boy Genius Report breaks down the new features in the next generation BlackBerry OS.

Sign-up for Flash Beta on Android
You can sign-up now to be part of the beta program for Flash on the Android (when it becomes available later this year).

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

1Password for Windows Beta
I’ve been using 1Password for about two years now on my Mac, and it is a great password management utility. I’m happy to see that they are now testing out a Windows version, but keep in mind that in the end this is not a free app. Still, it’s one of the few apps I’ve used that I’ve actually felt is worth purchasing as opposed to using one of the free alternatives.

–Tips in Brief–

Use Office 2010 to Map a Drive Letter to Your SkyDrive Account
You can actually make your SkyDrive appear as a local drive by using Office 2010.

Recovering Form Data in Firefox
This Firefox extension will help you recover data that you were typing into a form… be it from the browser crashing or you accidentally closing the tab.

NoteSync: Take Notes and Sync them to Google Docs
This cross-platform Adobe Air-based app lets you quickly take notes and sync them to your Google Docs account.

Automatically Sync Recent Files to USB Drive
Sync Butler will automatically move recently modified files (from folders you specify) to a USB drive.

Extract the Audio from a Video File
With this free Windows app you can quickly extract the audio used in a video.

Join Multiple MP3 Files Together
Merge any number of MP3 files together into one single file.

Dexpot Virtual Desktops Gets Better Windows 7 Integration
A newer version of Dexpot includes a plugin that uses the Aero Peek for managing up to 20 of your virtual desktops.

–Downloads–

• AIM 7.3.3.6 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 0.8.39 ^Experimental [Homepage] [Mirror]
• FastStone Image Viewer 4.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Gom Player 2.1.25.5015 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Earth 5.1.3534 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• HijackThis 2.0.4 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Maxthon 3.0.9.10 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Opera 10.52.3370 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Paint.NET 3.55.3762 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• RSSOwl 2.0.5 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Sandboxie 3.442 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Ubuntu 10.04 ^RC [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Live transit updates in Google Maps help you plan your romantic bus-catching sprint originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adapted from Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In, © Brian X. Chen, to be published by Da Capo Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, on June 7.

For more discussion of the book, visit the Always On book page on Facebook.

One Saturday afternoon in January 2009, Rose Maltais picked up her granddaughter Natalie in Athol, Massachusetts for a short weekend visit. Just before she drove off, Maltais reportedly told Natalie’s adoptive parents that they would never see the nine-year-old again. But just one night later, police officers found Maltais at a Budget Inn in Virginia and arrested her. They didn’t use the traditional process of tracking down a suspect — interviewing witnesses and following clues — to find Maltais and her grandchild. Instead, they tracked Natalie’s smartphone and used a bit of clever technological sleuthing to follow their trail.

Unbeknownst to Maltais, the Federal Communications Commission has required cellphone carriers since 2005 to provide a way for police to track most phones within a few hundred meters, and the GPS technology embedded in all smartphones has been a crucial tracking tool. To narrow down Maltais’s location, officer Todd Neale of the Athol police department called the child’s cell phone provider, AT&T, which provided approximate GPS coordinates every time Natalie’s smartphone connected with a celltower to get a signal. Then Neale contacted Athol deputy fire chief Thomas Lozier, who had experience using GPS for guiding firefighters through forest fires and finding lost hikers. Lozier plugged the coordinates into Google Maps and used satellite imagery to home in on where Maltais might be hiding. Jiggering around in Google Street View, Lozier saw a road sign for the Budget Inn in Natural Bridge, Virginia. Neale contacted Virginia state police, who arrived at the motel and found Natalie and her grandmother.

This GPS-assisted arrest offers a peek into the future of policing in an “always-on” society, where we are all constantly connected to the internet via incredibly-capable handheld gadgets with access to data everywhere. Smartphones already include a stunning amount of computing power, and an array of advanced sensors, such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, not to mention GPS, cellular, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios. The constant connection these devices offer, and the amount of information they are constantly collecting and transmitting is set to change much of our lives. In law enforcement, that data-driven revolution is already underway.

The information collected and stored on an iPhone can be more revealing than a fingerprint and a face scan, and police officers are already taking advantage of this. Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski regularly teaches forensics courses focused on the iPhone. Police officers learn how to recover sensitive data from the device to help them build cases against suspects. That includes information that a suspect has attempted to destroy — deleted text messages, voicemails, contacts can be recovered with some clever hacks; officers can also learn how to crack pass codes of an iPhone and bypass encryption. Zdziarski admits that from a user’s perspective, it’s unsettling how insecure the iPhone is, but says he’s somewhat “divided on it,” because “at the same time, it’s been useful for investigating criminals.” iPhone forensics techniques have helped officers successfully gather evidence against criminals later convicted of rape, murder, or drug deals, according to Zdziarski.

Of course, it’s possible that some day, someone might clear themselves of a crime using their phone (See, I posted to Twitter from miles away when the crime was committed!). For now, however, these devices are more of a help to cops than suspects.

But what’s good for law enforcement might not be good for our privacy. Just how much information are our smartphones broadcasting about us? To find out, German politician and privacy advocate Malte Spitz sued his phone company, Deutsche Telekom, to get information that the company had about Spitz’s movements. It turns out that between August 2009 and February 2010, the carrier tracked and stored his location 35,000 times. That was enough data for German newspaper Die Zeit to compile a detailed interactive map that showed Spitz’s every move over six months.

Never before had a mobile phone company been shown to have such a detailed log on a single customer. Already, Spitz’s story has created ripples reaching the United States, where congressmen Edward Markey and Joe Bartain have sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile demanding disclosure on their data collection and storage practices. “Location, location, location may be the favored currency of the real estate industry but it is sensitive information for mobile phone users that must be safeguarded,” said Rep. Markey. “Collecting, storing and disclosing a consumer’s exact whereabouts for commercial purposes without their express permission is unacceptable and violates current law.”

Incidentally, federal prosecutors in New Jersey in April 2011 issued subpoenas to makers of multiple iPhone and Android apps, accusing them of transmitting personal customer data such as location, age and other identifiable information to third-party advertisers. The federal investigation stems from an ongoing study by The Wall Street Journal, which tested 101 iPhone apps and found that 56 of them transmitted unique device identifiers (UDID) — a 40-character string of letters and numbers tagged to each iPhone — to third-parties, including advertisers, without the user’s awareness or consent. While an iPhone does not transmit a user’s real name, a company could combine a UDID with other personal information collected from the device, such as location, age and gender data to determine a customer’s real identity.

One target of the subpoena is popular music-streaming service Pandora, which the WSJ found to be sharing UDID, age and gender without user permission. Also, independent programmer Anthony Campiti received a subpoena regarding his app Pumpkin Maker, a kiddy app for carving virtual Jack-O-Lanterns, which the Wall Street Journal found was sharing UDID and location data with advertisers. Notably, neither of these apps ask customers for permission to share this data, and neither of them provides services related to location. “These unique identifiers are permanent social security numbers in your phone in that they’re freely submitted and they can’t change,” says Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy. “You can’t go in there and change your UDID like you could go out and change a cookie [on a PC web browser]. It presents a lot more of a problem.”

“I’m glad this is coming to light, because we’ve seen for a while that with smartphone apps there’s a significant lack of transparency,” says Sharon Nissim, consumer privacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I think consumers are waking up to the tracking that’s going on with a computer, but I think there’s an extreme lack of knowledge about the tracking on your iPhone or your iPad.”

Last month we asked for a “funny pages” display in Google’s next release of Maps that shows a thick dotted line depicting where we’ve traveled, but it appears the folks at El Goog had a different agenda in mind for version 5.5. This time around, we see a few redesigns as well as some streamlined Latitude features. First, check-ins and ratings have now been added to the Places page, giving you one extra point of access; you also now have the option of changing your home or work address within your Latitude Location History, in case you ever move or just like to roam from place to place. Last but not least, Google Maps 5.5 for Android also offers reorganized transit station pages that now list off upcoming departures, transit lines serving that particular station, and links to other stops nearby. Though not a substantial upgrade from previous versions, it’s still impressive that Google pushed it out less than a month after 5.4. The new update is available as a free download in the Android Market.

Google Maps 5.5 for Android cops more Latitude, tweaks Places and transit pages originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on March 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

The Google Android mobile operating system will likely take the mobile industry by storm when it is released. From what I’ve read they are already lining up handset manufacturers who want to run Android when it becomes publicly available, and it’s expected to be available on around a dozen different handsets running it when launched later this year.

The demonstrations last month at Mobile World Congress for Android were less than stellar, and didn’t really show off anything that would leave an impression in your mind. Not to mention that there was no touch screen action thrown in the mix. What Google demonstrated last year was a lot more exciting than those, but even still they didn’t really tinker with the capabilities of the system.

BBC got the chance to meet with Andy Rubin, the main guy behind Android, who was kind enough to show first hand some of the things that can be done on a 300MHz touch screen device (half the speed of the iPhone). I’ve embedded the video below, and here’s an overview of what happens so that you can skip around to the parts that interest you:

• 43 seconds: Webkit-based browser demonstration. Shows panning and zooming around websites, and they make a point to say that it is using the 3G network which the iPhone currently lacks.
• 2 minutes 22 seconds: Non-interactive Quake demonstration showing off the 3D capabilities. Looks rather good from the video, but I wonder if it would look the same if a user was actually playing the game.
• 2 minutes 50 seconds: A Google Street View application is demonstrated. When watching this I thought about how cool it would be if Google tied this into a GPS receiver!

I really like where Android is headed, and the fact that an SDK is widely available to developers will probably make this grow very quickly. We’ll have to see what Apple unveils this week for the iPhone SDK before we make any judgements and comparisons.

BBC: Under the bonnet of Android [via MobileMag]
Thanks to OldManDeath for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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