Hasta La Gadget!

Android users who go outside the official Android Market must be careful which apps they install. Photo (of an HTC Droid Eris) by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Android enthusiasts have long championed Google’s “open” philosophy towards the smartphone platform. The recent appearance of a new Trojan horse in unofficial Android app venues, however, may cause users to think twice about how open they want the platform to be.

The app in question, Android.Walkinwat, appears to be a free, pirated version of another app, “Walk and Text.” The real version is available for purchase in Google’s official Android Market for a low price ($1.54).

If you download the fake app (from unofficial markets for Android apps) and install it, it redirects you to the actual app on the Android marketplace — but in the background, it sends the following embarrassing SMS message to your entire phone book:

Hey,just downlaoded [sic] a pirated app off the internet, Walk and Text for Android. Im stupid and cheap, it costed only 1 buck. Dont steal like I did!

Egregious spelling and grammatical errors aside, the text message serves as a reminder of the risks to those willing to go outside of the official Market for apps.

“Someone downloaded the app, inserted their malware, and uploaded it onto other non-official marketplaces,” Symantec mobile team product manager John Engels told Wired.com in an interview.

In other words, if you go outside the official Market, things may not be what they seem, and there’s no guarantee that what you download is what you actually want.

Google maintains clear content policies on all apps that are uploaded to the official Android Market, and developers know well enough in advance what those policies are, and how not to break them. Whenever an app in clear violation of Google’s policies shows up in the Market — like, say, a piece of malware — Google’s Android engineers are often quick to quash it.

But if you’re not one for pesky rules and regulations and want to see what the non-Google-sanctioned markets have to offer, all it takes to access them on an Android device is for you to uncheck a box on a settings page, allowing your phone to install apps from “unknown sources.”

To a certain degree, this isn’t a huge issue for the novice user. Many outside applications are hosted on file sharing websites that users like your grandmother probably aren’t frequenting. And unless they’ve tried to install these outside applications by sideloading them, they’ve probably never unchecked the unknown source’s permissions box to begin with.

But last week’s debut of Amazon’s new App Store may have changed that. In order to install Amazon’s App Store on an Android device, you first must uncheck that permissions box. While there may be no immediate risks associated with downloading apps from Amazon’s App Store, it opens the door for users to allow other unofficial — and therefore riskier — apps to be installed on their devices, from other sources.

“As soon as you flip that switch and go away from the Android Market, which is the one place where most people go, then you are putting yourself at some risk,” security researcher Charlie Miller told Wired in a previous interview.

“The threat will persist so long as people continue to download pirated software from peer-to-peer networks,” Webroot threat research analysts Armando Orozco and Andrew Brandt told Wired.com.

They say sticking to the Android Market is your safest bet, but if you’re still compelled to go outside the official box for your apps, whether it be to Amazon’s App Store or another unofficial market, you should “scrutinize the permissions the App requests, and don’t install it if it wants access to certain functions (like the ability to send SMS messages) that the app shouldn’t need to access.”

But doesn’t staying within the confines of the Android Market defeat the purpose of choosing a platform with such an “open” philosophy? If you want a stricter, closed system with stringent regulation on its apps via a review process, you might as well buy an iPhone.

“Android users enabling sideloading doesn’t necessarily lead to piracy or installation of apps from unsafe sources,” says Alicia diVittorio, a spokewoman for Lookout Mobile Security. “In fact, it’s great to have another source for consumers to download apps from a reputable brand like Amazon.”

Indeed, Amazon’s Appstore isn’t a great deal different from Apple’s App Store: Both companies require an intense review and approval process before making any developer’s submitted applications available for purchase.

Essentially, there’s an inherent risk that comes with downloading apps for a device with an attitude of openness like the Android. Even the official Market is susceptible to infiltration by malware, as evidenced by the swath of malicious apps pulled from the store earlier this month.

But in a relatively free and open domain such as Android’s, the risk remains the price of admission.

See Also:

• Google Launches Android Market Web Store, Improves Payment System …
• Google Pulls PlayStation Emulator From Android Market
• Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won’t Support Android Market
• Google Removes Flash App From Android Market
• Android Market Apps Hit With Malware
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market

If your foremost dream is to jack into a dystopian cyberpunk reality where hackers play with human brains (and you also happen to love Japanese anime), you’d best book your flight to Tokyo right now — a Shibuya department store has set up a basic cyberspace simulator straight out of Ghost in the Shell. That’s the film Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society, to be precise, which just got a stereoscopic 3D re-release in Japan this week, and in its honor creative services company Kayac set about constructing a high-quality Kinect hack. Microsoft’s depth camera tracks the lean of your body, while the honeyed virtual reality is projected onto a pair of nearby walls, and it’s your objective to slap the Tachikoma tank silly without falling over yourself. Get a peek at what it’s like to play with in the video above.

Kinect dives into anime cyberspace, dares you to catch cute robot tanks (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse of the future, a machete-shooting crossbow will be as practical and everyday as a Leatherman is today. But right now, it is possibly the most dangerous contraption I have ever seen.

Made by Jörg Sprave, who runs The Slingshot Channel on YouTube, the Machete Slingshot consists of a standard head-lopping machete with a notch cut in the blade near the tip. This notch hooks onto the rubber bands on the crossbow, and the machete is held back, cocked, by a slotted wooden block that stops the handle from moving forward. The trigger lifts the handle over this block, and chaos ensues.

As you’ll see when you watch Jörg’s video, this isn’t something you should try at home. During the testing phase he wore nothing more protective than a T-shirt, and he has the livid, bloody gash on his Popeye-like forearm to prove it. Jörg, I think you’ll have to agree, is completely bad-ass.

Keep watching for the bonus video, and the chance to see someone even tougher than Jörg himself: Jörg’s cat. Any animal that hangs around when homemade catapults are being tested deserves our undying respect.

Shooting Machetes with the Slingshot [YouTube via CrunchGear]

See Also:

• Story of Danny Trejo's 'Brisk Machete' Spot Unfolds at SXSW …
• The Apocalypse is Coming: What You Need to Pack
• Unbreakable Fighting Umbrella Splits Watermelons, Defends …
• Crazy Fighting Umbrella with Knuckle-Duster Handle
• Million-Volt Zap Cane Is Like Real-World Lightsaber

Banana TV enables an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to stream photos and video to a Mac.

One of the coolest gimmicks of iOS is AirPlay, a button you press on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to stream photos, videos and audio to a huge display connected to an Apple TV. Problem is, you can’t normally use this nifty feature without your Apple TV (or an AirPort Express, if all you want is audio).

Enter Banana TV, a Mac app that allows you to use AirPlay to beam your videos and photos from an iOS device to a Mac. This way, you can enjoy streaming your media onto a bigger screen even if you don’t own an Apple TV.

The best part about Banana TV is it’s seamless. Launch the app and it’s ready to go, so long as your iOS device and Mac are on the same Wi-Fi network. On your iOS device, open any AirPlay-compatible video or photo, and an icon will appear to stream it via AirPlay. Hit the AirPlay icon and boom, the picture is displayed on your Mac.

This will come useful in many scenarios. Say you’re visiting relatives who have a 27-inch iMac, and you want to share photos of your family vacation, stored on your iPhone. Just load Banana TV on their iMac and stream it from your iPhone with AirPlay.

Or let’s say  you give presentations at work, and the PDFs are stored on your iPhone. Just connect your Mac to the projector, run Banana TV, open the PDFs on your iPhone and hit the AirPlay button. Voila — the image will be showing on the projector, and you can swipe the screen to move between PDFs while you’re giving the presentation.

Created by prolific programmer Erica Sadun, Banana TV cost $8 over at BananaTV.net. It’s not available in the Mac App Store, probably because Apple wasn’t cool with people reverse-engineering the AirPlay code, according to Sadun.

“There’s never been anything Apple’s built that I haven’t wanted to reverse engineer somehow,” Sadun said. “I’m sure there’s probably medication for that, maybe therapy.”

Wired.com previously covered Banana TV, which was formerly called AirPlayer, when it was still a work in progress. The near-final version of Banana TV released last week is snappy and fast, as if it came straight from Apple headquarters. It’s a must-have app for any Mac customer with an iOS device.

Smart Cover on iPad 1 — It’s all done with magnets. And Glue

One of the coolest features of the iPad 2 is Apple’s Smart Cover, that giant fridge-magnet which snaps instantly into place on the front of the iPad and works as both screen protector and stand. Sadly the symbiotic nature of the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover means that it won’t work on the original iPad. Or will it?

The solution is to add your own magnets to that ugly old iPad you can barely stand to look at any more. Over at the The Russians Used a Pencil blog, Dan Provost did just that, and even shot a video of the results.

To line everything up properly, our intrepid hacker took four rare-earth magnets and almost tossed them at the cover’s hinge. There they stuck, twisting themselves until they sat in place. Next, Dan used masking tape to measure where they should sit on the iPad’s left edge, and then stuck them to the flat surface with superglue.

Thus equipped, the Smart Cover can hide the shame that is your big, old, slow first-gen iPad. You can use it as a cover, and as a stand. The one thing is won’t do is to lock and unlock the screen, because the iPad 1 lacks the internal magnet that is needed to detect the cover.

If you’re going to actually glue something to your iPad, I guess you could skip the magnets altogether and just stick the Smart Cover itself straight to the side. On the other hand, this hack means you won’t actually have to buy the new iPad just to get the clever cover, which means you just saved at least $500, just by reading this post. You’re welcome.

Smart Cover for iPad 1 [The Russians Used a Pencil]

See Also:

• Smart Cover
• Speck PixelSkin HD Apes Smart Cover Design
• IFixit Smart Cover Teardown: Contains Magnets. Lots of Magnets …
• iPad 2 Cover Is Smart, All Right — If You're Steve Jobs