Hasta La Gadget!

Say hello to the version 2.0 of SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which improves over v1.2 and its 3G streaming by adding the high quality video and new program guide features seen in the iPad version. Fortunately, this time Sling hasn’t made any of its older hardware obsolete, while taking advantage of the new HQ streams will require a SOLO or PRO-HD box (and minimum 800 kbps WiFi / 500 kbps 3G connection) older Slingboxes will still work, just with lower quality video. Check the screens for a peek at the new look or just head over to iTunes, grab the new version and let us know how it’s working out.

[Thanks, David]

Slingplayer Mobile for iPhone updated to 2.0 with high quality video streaming and new guide originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  iTunes  | Email this | Comments

The extremely popular iPhone and iPad game Angry Birds has accumulated 50 million users who play it for 200 million minutes a day, according to its maker.

Humongous. How did Angry Birds do it? It hardly seems like luck; if you look at it closely, the game’s success was brilliantly engineered.

The company Rovio hit all the check boxes. Angry Birds has a really sharp style, fits in an accessible game genre and features a physics-based gameplay that creates a ton of different situations to keep the game interesting at various skill levels.

On top of that, it’s priced at an irresistible 99 cents. Plus, the game’s makers regularly add new stages through software updates to keep people talking about Angry Birds (just like Doodle Jump does), which makes it a constant viral sensation. So whenever people buy an iPhone, one of the first apps recommended by friends is Angry Birds. Add that all together and you have a mega hit.

And it’s only going to get bigger. Angry Birds recently soared onto the Android platform, and soon it’s also heading to PCs, Macs, every game console and Facebook, according to Rovio.

From CNET

It’s no secret that Apple’s been keen to monitor the lot of naughty jailbreakers, but it turns out the company has recently shelved iOS 4.0’s jailbreak detection API with no explanation given. While this has little effect on the average user, Network World explains that this is bad news for enterprise IT and MDM (mobile device management) vendors, who will now have one fewer channel for checking whether a user’s iOS device has been jailbroken and thus become vulnerable to attacks. That said, apparently this isn’t a huge loss for the MDM vendors, anyway; but the real question is why drop the API now? Could its presence alone be a threat? We’ll probably never know.

Fear not, though, as some folks have put jailbreaking to good use. The Register reports that come Tuesday, Stefan Esser of Sektion Eins will demonstrate a tool called antid0te, which reportedly adds ASLR (address space layout randomization) onto jailbroken iOS devices. In a nutshell, ASLR randomizes key memory locations to make it more difficult for certain attacks to locate their target data. According to the famed white hat hacker Charlie Miller, this technique is already present on Windows Phone 7 and desktop Windows since Vista, but Apple’s only dabbled with it on OS X and not on iOS. Now, this doesn’t mean that jailbroken devices will be fully safeguarded, but some protection is better than no protection, right?

[Thanks, wooba]

Apple mysteriously kills jailbreak detection API while hacker boosts iOS security, irony restored originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Network World, The Register  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on February 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

BlackBerry’s email service decided to go out for lunch yesterday and didn’t come back. By that we mean there was a major BlackBerry outage yesterday and thousands upon thousands of people were without access to their wireless email.  Given the crowd of people who typically use it (e.g., businessmen and other professionals), there were a lot of unhappy campers (especially given that this is the 2nd major outage in a years time).

So about that BlackBerry outage…  Remember the nickname that has been given to the Blackberry? It’s called the Crackberry because so many people become addicted do the device. What happens to addicts when they’re deprived of what they’re addicted to? They go through withdrawals and that’s exactly what happened to BlackBerry users yesterday. The Associated Press quoted one person saying that everyone was in crisis.  They said:

Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing’s happening. It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that’s quite phenomenal.

Another person, a businessman named Stuart Gold was one of many that was mad about another major outage. He was quoted as saying:

I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares.

It’s actually quite amazing what an impact one device can have on the World. This critical outage also had the opposite effect.  Besides the upset and angry customers, there were those who took the outage as a welcome break. One man who was quoted by Reuters said his life was easier without it because he didn’t have to worry about replying.

While I’m sure it did most everybody some good to step away from the BlackBerry for just a few hours, the underlying thought here is that RIM needs to make sure a major outage like this does not happen again. People want reliability and in a competitive market, people can leave BlackBerry behind for something that might be more reliable than what they’re currently getting like an iPhone or a Palm device. Oh wait, the iPhone experienced an outage not that long ago too back on January 31st! Is any service reliable these days or are we just expecting too much?

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

The New BlackBerry 9000MobileMe and Gmail Outage YesterdayA Glimpse at the BlackBerry ThunderGoogle Shows BlackBerry Love with Calendar Sync ToolGoogle Maps with Voice (Experimental) on Your BlackBerry

My HTC Evo, a traveling journalist’s workhorse, got me busted in open court.

It was the first day of the Xbox modding trial in Los Angeles last week, which I was covering for Wired.com. The reason wasn’t that the phone’s ringer sounded in federal court — I’ve been in too many courtrooms to make that mistake.

Blame it on my Evo’s Wi-Fi hotspot, which prompted U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez to suddenly halt proceedings in the first-of-it’s kind hacking trial.

From the bench, in the afternoon on Day No. 1 of the trial, the judge asked me to rise and state my name. After seeing my hotspot (with the perhaps-suspicious ID of “gethacked”) show up on his computer at the bench, the judge demanded to know whether I was transmitting a signal.

I pleaded guilty.

He ordered me to turn it off, but allowed me to use my MacBook Pro offline for “note taking” purposes, which came in handy the following day when Judge Gutierrez went on a 30-minute tirade bagging on the prosecution’s case, which ultimately was dismissed.

Normally, one must ask permission to use a computer from the gallery. I gambled. The payout was that I learned about one of the Evo’s few flaws: Its blazing-fast, 4G Wi-Fi hotspot cannot be made invisible. Despite that flaw, and after months using an unrooted Evo, my jailbroken iPhone seems so yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a member of the “Cult of Mac.” My Apple fanboyishness includes an iPad, a 13-inch Macbook Pro, a 27-inch iMac, and I’m a heavy iTunes software user.

But consider:

• The Evo, carried by Sprint, is a phone that actually makes and receives clear calls.
• I can use it as a removable storage device as easily as a USB stick.
• It’s big, thick and heavy, just the way a phone should be.
• It’s a data-hog of a mini computer that surfs the internet at amazing speeds.
• The password-protected Wi-Fi signal it emits is killer, and it only takes the press of a button to turn it on.

In my Los Angeles hotel room, the Evo became my media hub last week.

I had a great Wi-Fi signal, thanks to the Evo, to which I attached my MacBook Pro and iPad. There was a crystal-clear Bluetooth connection to my cyborg-like phone earpiece and, again, the call quality was superb. And when I wasn’t on a call, the phone’s speaker was blaring Eminem.

James Merithew, Wired.com’s photo editor, laughed at the mug shot I took of defendant Matthew Crippen using my Evo. (Technically, it’s illegal to take photos in a federal courthouse, so I snapped a few shots in a hurry after hustling Crippen over to a poorly lighted corner.) But with a little touching up, the photo was presentable enough for publication. Take that, Mr. Merithew!

The only thing the Evo didn’t do for me was dispense beer.

Trust me, I had that angle covered.