Posts by mickey mouse the fith

Security boffins say music could trigger mobile malware

How about this....

Imagine a scenario where the Chinese insert a bit of code in a commonly used mobile chip at the point of manufacture that lies dorment until a specific audio trigger is heard (tv advert or song on radio etc). Upon hearing the trigger, unpleasentness happens to said devices, crippling a communications channel. Not beyond the realms of imposibillity and pretty damaging to a countrys mobile infrastructure if the chips are embeded far and wide. Come to think of it, a specific rf pulse would also be a good trigger.

/tinfoil hat removed

Oi, butterfingers! Drop your mobe in a pint? Hope it's not an iPhone

"I remember something years ago on the Gadget Show where a smartphone was coated with something that made it very hydrophobic a bit like that Magic Sand. I wonder why we never heard of it again?"

Like this stuff you mean ? http://www.liquipel.com/

$59 to coat a galaxy note, looks like you have to send your phone to them to treat, or buy a precoated one from them though.

Looks like they can treat pretty much any electronic doodaa with their nanocoat as well.

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

Re: Threads

"I bought Threads on DVD about 6 months ago, pretty scary stuff and worse when you think we came pretty close it becoming a reality. Has a young Reese Dinsdale who starred in "I.D." another nutty role in another nutty film!"

The companion documentary to Threads, `Q.E.D - A Guide To Armageddon` narrated by ludvig Kennedy is also worth a watch. It really drives home the fact that in the U.K every single person would be fucked due to population density, landmass and fallout. There wouldnt be a single drop of water or patch of land uncontaminated. The last 5 minutes, where ludvig sums up the situation any survivor, emerging from their bunker would experience is absolutely harrowing. Very sobering documentary.

Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

Re: Thank god I bought VHS

I bought a little black box from one of those dodgy ads in a satellite magazine back in the day. It stripped the macrovision and restored the sync on any copy made betwix 2 connected vcr`s. Was great for pirating rental films, I built up an impressive collection over the years. Pity every single tape is unwatchable now, even the scotch `lifetime guarentee` ones, I wonder if they still honour that guarentee?

Also used to take the rental tape apart (if you could, they got wise to this eventually and stopped using screws) and swap the spools, so I kept the original and the copy went back to the rental shop.

Disclaimer: This was a long, long time ago....

All aboard the patch wagon! Next stop: Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla

Re: Adobe Reader

"The last straw was upgrading to the latest version recently to discover that they've removed the ability to stop PDFs opening in a browser"

I updated mine last night, there was a tickbox to stop it opening pdf`s in a browser on the first dialog that popped up.

BlackBerry and Apple pie this summer. Or BBM-onna-Droid

One problem they face....

On a Blackberry device, it was free to use on a Blackberry tarrif. I imagine thats why it was so popular in the first place. Are they going to negotiate with the providers to make it free on non-blackberry tarrifs? If their not, then it offers nothing over the established android/ios clients apart from communicating with their ever diminishing userbase. I doubt many people will switch tbh.

Review: Samsung Galaxy S4

Re: Buttons

"There's plenty of heart rate monitor apps for Android. They work too"

The one that uses the front camera to measure bloodflow in your face is pretty scifi, and scarily accurate in good lighting conditions as well. It also measures your breathing rate via chest movement.

There are loads that measure heartrate by placing your finger over the camera as well, although they do need a good light source.

I actually thought these apps were fake until i read up on the tech behind them, very cool.

Re: Jedit "On the downside, being a mini-tablet it was too big for most pockets "

"Have you considered a belt clip pouch? Not the quick-release types (HATE them--they come loose at the worst moments) but simple flip cover affairs with magnetic closures."

I have always used a belt clip, much more comfortable than having it weigh down a pocket. Get a waterproof one and your all set for anything the elements throw at you.

Be careful with cheap magnetic closures, in some cases they can bugger up the magnetometer sensor in the phone, leading to dodgy compass readings in apps until you recalibrate. I read somewhere that magnets can perminently damage some phones if exposed for long enough. I used to love the armour plated holster my blackberry storm had, it switched the screen on via a magnet when you removed it, proper space age (the phone was fucking awful in every other respect however).

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

"just look at air-rifles, sure in the UK their fairly low power, but that is by law, not because they can't be made at FAC power levels..."

And you can put a .22 bullet in the silencer and fire a pellet into it. I did this with my trusty webley airpistol back when I was a teen. No idea how accurate it was, but it made one hell of a bang and the barrel/silencer didnt explode.

A lot of the precharged air rifles can be modded easily into something quite deadly. Adding a gas-ram to a common and garden spring powered air rifle can take it way over the legal limit as well.

This 3d gun thing is just a proof of concept, noone in their right mind would go to all the expense and effort to make one for nefarious purposes when there are many easier and cheaper ways of making a gun.

Gun powder can be made by anyone with access to a few common household/gardening products, a basic firearm and makeshift ammunition are easily made at home (see zip gun). Il wager that most people on this forum could fashion a firearm at least as effective as this with just basic tools and materials.

Rules, shmules: Fliers leaving devices switched on in droves

A few theories

I always thought it was something to do with buggering the cell towers handoffs up, as the directional antennas arnt set up for overhead signals, which could blanket many towers from altitude and confuse the fuck out of em. Im probably wrong though.

A few other theories...

Not having passengers annoyed by constant ringtones.

not triggering bombs in the hold or contacting an outside party to do so.

As another poster said, stopping people getting distracted during safety drills.

NEW ITV Player app IS HERE ... for Samsung fandroids only. Ha ha

"Sod a new app. How about increasing the bitrates they offer. They've never been very generous in that regard. Watching ITV Player is like watching iPlayer from ten years ago."

I tried watching something on the thing a while back, twas like watching a cinepak intro from a megacd game circa 1994. Awful, awful quality.

Itv used to have a few good shows, but it really is television for the council estate now, mind numbing, lowest denominator crap.

Spotify spews 'unencrypted' FREE MP3s all over creation

Not a new concept

I wrote a little tool in visual basic a long while back that ripped spotify content. I took the artist/album name from the window title, like this plugin does and recorded the raw audio stream via an audio library (bass.net i think, it was a while ago), detecting the title change to close the current rip and encode to mp3 or whatever. It worked flawlessly and was pretty easy to code. Mine worked on the windows spotify client, i dont think they had a web service when i wrote it, although I imagine it would have done its job via a webbrowser with a little tweaking. I must dig it out and see if it still works, it would be funny if it did.

It ripped shoutcast streams as well, great for recording improv mix tapes for offline listening.

I was going to release it, but yknow, the law.....

YouTube channels at $1.99 per month could launch this week

Re: I'm rather looking forward to this

"A 20 second advert, or 5 seconds to skip longer ones to watch several minutes of content isn't that bad."

No, but having intrusive popups overlayed on the video every few minutes ruins the video as its a major distraction, and fumbling for the close icon takes your concentration away from the atmos of the video. Also, the ads i have seen when using a browser without adblocking are either for products im not interested in or products that arnt even relevent to the u.k. They seem to loop the same ones a lot as well, just to angry up the blood that little bit more.

And as I said, I never click on ads out of principle, and activlely avoid products whose adverts get on my wick, so why should anyone care if i block them?

I would go as far as saying that adverts actually ruin youtube, I just wouldnt bother with it if I couldnt adblock.

Re: I'm rather looking forward to this

"Not seen any YouTube ads? That's amazing. On a standard PC browser they make you watch about 20 seconds of adverts before you can skip to the video. Chome blocks this?"

Yeah, I use firefox + adblock personally, but the chrome extension works just as well. Watching youtube on other peoples machines that dont have adblocking is actually painful. I dont think Id actually bother watching anything with all the popup and inserted adverts, its too distracting.

Cheating creators out of ad revenue?, Couldnt give a fuck tbh, I hate intrusive online advertising in all its forms and I never, ever click on them, so they might as well not be there. The web in general is a much more pleasent experience with adblocking, nothing to ruin the atmos.

Next Xbox won't need always-on internet after all

Re: Weasel words maybe?

"Windows 7 does not require periodic check ins unless you choose to use a corporate licensing scheme that has key (KMS) servers...."

Yup, your right, I just checked. I got confused because a friend of mine without internet got the "your a victim of counterfitting" message after 3 months. So it needs an initial online check to validate, which is also what I suspect the new xbox will require.

Weasel words maybe?

I wonder if it will still require periodic check-ins like windows 7 insists on doing? They say that its not a `permenant` online requirement, but maybe you need to be online when the game is first installed (maybe to lock it to that machine) or it phones home every week or so to check you havnt been a naughty boy and run your disk on multiple machines without paying.

Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness

What does god want with a starship?

I rather enjoyed the reboot, the characters were spot on (apart from scotty, who wasnt well cast) and the effects were pretty sweet. To be honest, it was the best thing to happen to the franchise for a long time.

Original series: still pretty good, especially the remastered versions, with subtle effects updates.

Next generation: Quite a few good episodes among the soap opera style tedium.

Ds9: Eastenders in space, I could never get into it, it was too soapy and boring.

Voyager: Best of the bunch, still pretty watchable.

Enterprise: Aaaargh, that theme song. Some good episodes though. We dont mention the ending.

As for the films,

1: A bit ponderous, but ok.

2: Aces.

3: Awful.

4: Enjoyable.

5: More enjoyable than 4.

6: Was that the awful klingon one?

The next generation ones were all ok, although that sun destroying rocket in the one with kirk got to its target a bit too fast, and the sun darkened too quick from their viewpoint on the planet, but heyho.

Ten ancestors of the netbook

Re: Any HP 320LX love?

"Get yourself another one - they pop up on ebay fairly often."

I probably will at some point.

One thing puzzles me though, all the pictures i can find online of the HP 320LX show it having a green tinted lcd screen, im pretty sure mine had a paperwhite screen and indiglo blue backlight. I think it even boasted about the new, updated white screen on the box. I know it was the one that could be upgraded to the next version of wince via the included cd (the slightly cheaper version Dixons sold couldnt). Did I have a rarer updated unit, or is my memory just crap?

Any HP 320LX love?

I had an HP 320LX running Wince 2.0 back in the day. I used to use it for browsing offline webpages previously downloaded on my desktop machine (I was way to broke to fork out on a modem card) as well as taking notes in the cut down ms word program. I recall it had pretty good c64 and speccy emulators and a wicked infrared interface that you could program to act as a telly remote control. The batterys seemed to last forever compared to modern handhelds. It also had a really nice blue backlight and a nifty docking cradle.

I really regret selling it in the early 2000`s now, it was a great little device for the time.

"I don't think the lack of a Windows option put people off the original Eee as much as the appalling choice of Linux distribution did"

I bet it wasnt as bad as the appalling distro (Linpus) the Acer aspire one ssd version came with.

I recall hitting the `update` button in options and the thing rebooting first to a command prompt, then just hanging on boot, never to work again.

The ssd had such awful write performance that most os`s i tried were a juddery, unreliable, pretty unusable experiences.

If it had a decent ssd, it could run windows 7 quite happily, but it didnt, and it couldnt. Why on earth they hobbled a very capable little machine with such a performance sapping drive il never know.

I put meego on it in the end, which ran like a dream, in fact it still does, pity they discontinued it really.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Re: could this get worse?

"Well your original would have the EXIF data and you could prove creation of photo"

Trouble is, EXIF data is trivial to alter, it would prove nothing. Whats to stop anyone taking your photo and altering the EXIF data to make it look like they originally took the picture? Same with file creation dates or anything else that could verify the original creator. It doesnt matter how much metadata or stenography you apply to the image when its so easy to alter or remove it. How would you prove it wasnt theirs? or more to the point, would it be financially viable for you to do so?

Back when I was creating small websites for people, I used to pinch other peoples images all the time. I used to change the EXIF data to the sites owner or just remove it altogether and change the file creation date to just before the site went live, then run the image through a converter a few times to kill any stenography.

If anyone figured out they wernt my images (they didnt) I was just going to replace them with other pinched images using the same technique.

This new legislation does nothing to stop the above technique, in fact it makes it easier to excuse.

Cook: iPad is a gateway drug which leads to harder Mac addiction

Re: Apple.next

"Bollocks was it. It was broken, buggy and fugly. The damn thing didn't actually work properly. It didn't sell because while it looked cool on paper, it wasn't a finished product.".

I have a first gen Sony smartwatch, it took a lot of effort just to get the thing working properly. Had to ditch all sonys software, which just wasnt reliable enough for everyday use, and use an open source alternative, then run a tasker like app to reconnect the thing to Bluetooth every time it disconnected (which was constantly). Next up was modding the case as you couldn't charge it without removing it from the strap (why would you design it like that?). After all that, it worked pretty well, until the battery dies without warning, thanks to its lying battery gauge.

So yeah, it wasn't great out of the box.

BadNews, fandroids: MILLIONS of Google Play downloads riddled with malware

Re: Android permissions design

"This post on mse forum says different...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4563409"

I notice Apple still havnt taken it down, despite the complaints and the fact all the top reviews state its laced with malware.

Just goes to show that no os is really immune to user installed malware.

Putting ads that dial premium rate numbers in a kids app is a stroke of genius on the app writers part though, I imagine he/she has made a lot of dosh from idiot parents not checking things before giving their brat the phone since it was added.

Re: Android permissions design

"I think there are apps that will do this (restrict permissions for other apps) - although I've not actually encountered one that would cause me to need something like that. The "opt not to install it and find an alternative" method works well enough."

Lbe security master or pdroid let you select which permissions an app is allowed to access. They actually work a bit better than cyanogens block permission function or the permission denied app which usually result in a crash when an app tries to access a blocked permission (as the dev never bothered error checking for this, just assuming all permissions asked for would be available). Lbe and Pdroid can feed apps junk data as well as block outright. For example,they can feed apps randomly generated contact numbers or gps coordinates evertime they run, making any data they harvest absolutely useless. I use Lbe to restrict most permissions and avasts firewall to stop internet access. Combined with adaway to block all ad networks via the hosts file I think im quite safe from anything snooping or sending sneaky texts.

I dont think i have ever seen an advert on my handset using the above combo. Tidy...

Wales slams Amazon over lack of Kindle support

Re: Dos i chwara dy Nain cymru

" but to think that S4C would purposely attack their revenue just to piss off people like you is paranoid in the extreme"

I was sort of joking, although the welsh stuff was quite heavily subsidised and I get the feeling that the people who push welsh programming put the language`s exposure higher than revenue(see the surveys that showed how low/non existent viewing figures are). I have so many memories of friends at school raving about some cool program or film they saw on channel 4 the previous night, but not me, it was either replaced with some utter shite welsh choir/farming/chat/`culture` thing, or broadcast at the most inconvienient time, sometimes weeks later, or sometimes never.

Dos i chwara dy Nain cymru

Im wondering if Amazon worry that the next demand will be Welsh as an option in all the ui dialogs, payment pages etc and are just nipping it in the bud to save the effort in the future.

Having suffered Welsh tv for most of my childhood, I have no love for it really, s4c`s tv output really was shit compared to the proper channel 4, the Welsh always seemed to replace the good English programs with shit Welsh ones (I used to suspect on purpose). Theres only so many eisteddfod`s, awful duel language chat shows and news broadcasts (where the presenter always speaks welsh, but the person being interviewed sometimes answers in english for some bizzare reason) and bloody choirs one can put up with.

Before s4c it was even worse, all the channels were Welsh. I seem to recall English kids programs being dubbed into Welsh on BBC1.

There was a survey done a while back that estimated that some welsh tv shows had no viewers whatsoever, theres a great use of taxpayers money eh?

Anonymous squirts all over NORKS in birthday surprise outrage

Re: Who is going to sort this mess out?

"Good question, since the server admins would probably have been shot by now."

After watching Panorama last night, especially that interview with the doctor who defected stating she would have been taken outside and shot if she dared to ask for funding for medicine to treat her patients, those poor admins are probably in a gulag now because some little tossers thought it would be funny to insult their insane leader for the lulz.

I applaud some of the things anon. have done, but this is just fucking stupid, pointless and probably got people tortured and killed. I really wish people would think about the consequences of their actions before doing idiotic shit like this.

Firefox 'death sentence' threat to TeliaSonera over gov spy claims

Weasel words

So they are basically only selling backdoors in their security product to any government that requires it for " Legal law enforcement"?. Well thats reasuring then, considering its legal for el presedente to do what the fuck he likes because he makes the laws and decides whats legal in his nasty little dictatorship in the first place.

Mozilla are absolutely right in flagging this up, whats the point in having a security certificate that really doesnt secure anything?

Also, backdoors in security products, what could possibly go wrong?

Google's 'power to switch off the lights in Europe' has 'chilling effect' - rivals

Re: Advertisers and shills, who gives a fuck?

"MS had dominance in the Desktop PC market through years of abuse of their position"

Was this a bad thing though?, Without that 95% (of whatever their market share was at its peak) the fragmentation of os`s would have probably held back pc development, acceptance and penetration in the home sector. Remember the old 8 bit days when everything was incompatable with everything else and upgrading ment buying and relearning everything again? Maybe this would have continued with different os`s ebbing and flowing, one never becoming dominent, prices remaining high due to economy of scale, and the confused public not embracing the pc and internet revolution nearly as quickly as they did.

Its also possible that if microsoft hadnt done this, Apple, Atari, Ibm or Commodore probably would have anyway, and one of them would now be the great satan of monopolys instead.

Before you downvote, this is more a question than a personal opinion, although I did think the whole browser integration flap was silly as Microsoft never stopped anyone installing another one once the machine was off the shop floor and into the users hands, and they were all free anyway.

Advertisers and shills, who gives a fuck?

It googles site, they can do what they want, why shouldnt they promote their own services or have they become a charity now?. Theres plenty of other search engines out there for people who dont like it.

And the removal of useless `price comparison` links from the top results is a gift from the gods. Having to scroll through that shit to find proper, relevent links was a pain.

Payday loan companys?, fuckin parasites sucking the life and taking advantage of the poor and vulnerable, theres one advertising on the telly with a 3000+% apr, how is that even legal? I really wont shed a tear if they just dissappeared, not only from google but the entire planet, utter scum.

Oh and streetmaps is crap, id much prefer google`s offering to come top in the search thank you very much.

Movie review: Oblivion

Re: Cruisin

">Appocalyptico?

I could barely contain myself watching this movie..."

It was quite bad wasnt it?, Pretty much everything was wrong historically. The couple that got me were the fact that the Mayans never sacrificed people to the sun god like that (that was more like the Aztecs). Mayans ritulistically sacrificed single or small groups of people occasionally, not on a factory slaughterhouse scale like in the film. They also wouldnt have been suprised by an eclipse, being keen astronomers, they would have already known the exact time and date (which, as you point out, couldnt have happened so soon after a full moon). That pit of bodies with absolutely no animals scavenging the meat is pretty unrealistic as well.

And the bit at the end with the European christians paddling ashore (who actually didnt arrive for hundreds of years after the Mayan civilisation collapsed). I guess Mel just had to get a biblical reference in there somehow.

Its still an enjoyable film, but its entertainment, not a history lesson.

Re: Cruisin

"You've obviously not seen the remake of 'War of the Worlds' then. His terrible acting made me cringe so much I couldn't sit through the whole thing in one go. He was only 'outshone' by the incredibly irritating small child."

I thought the film was a bit of a missed opportunity, it started off well, and the effects were superb, but it turned into a bit of a snoozefest in the second half, too much `drama` and dialog and not enough explosions (the 50`s version had nukes and burning cities ffs). The tripods weapons were a bit uneaven as well, sometimes they blew up bridges and sometimes they just turned individual people into ash. Why wernt they at full, house destroying power all the time? The horn noise they made was aces though. And yes, that Fanning girl was amazingly irritating. I didnt find Cruises acting to be that bad given the stilted dialog he had to work with tbh.

Cruisin

Put aside Cruise`s dodgy belief`s and he`s not really that bad an actor, I cant think of any films he`s been in offhand that make me think `hmmm, good film, would be better if Tom Cruise wasnt in it though`.

I judge a film on its story, effects and acting, not on who`s in it, unless they really cant act to the point it ruins the film (which cruise has never been guilty of).

Its a bit like Mel Gibson really, His films are pretty enjoyable and certainly well made, but he takes huge liberties with history in his works (is there anything resembling actual historic facts in Braveheart, The patriot or Appocalyptico?), his religious beliefs and anti-jew ranting are tiresome and the wife beating allegations paint him as an almighty cock. Doesnt stop me enjoying his films though.

The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME

Re: Bah

Wow!, how awsome, THAT is how to design a sweet looking computer. It looks way cooler than anything Apple`s ever done.

Imagine retrofitting that case with modern components.

Netbooks projected to become EXTINCT by 2015

Re: hmm

"At least netbooks had their day in the sun. Ultrabooks costing over a grand with crappy 1366x768 resolution were DOA. I personal moved to tablets after pissing away close to $400 on a POS Samsung NC10 that failed a few weeks after the short warranty expired due to a crappy video cable internal design flaw (hinges pinching cable). Many people didn't buy a second netbook after seeing how crappily built to fail the first generation was."

My first netbook (acer aspire one) came with a ghastly, half arsed linux os on it that completely fucked up about 30 seconds after hitting the `update os` button and an ssd with a writespeed so slow it was pretty much useless. I ended up putting meego on it, which turned it into a really useful, fast little web browsing machine for slinging in my backpack. It booted in seconds and the really well thought out ui ran amazingly fast. Pity they abandoned meego really, it was really good on the netbook form factor, much better than chrome os.

That little Acer has survived many knocks, drops and misshaps like a trooper and apart from the battery, it still functions like new. The screen has a really nice quality to it as well, much better than the NC10 in my opinion.

So in my case it was well worth the £170 I paid for it almost half a decade ago. I wouldnt use it for anything other than web browsing though, the ssd really is painfully slow writing anything, resulting in a very juddery full windows/linux experience.

Anons torn over naming 'n' shaming of 17yo's gang-rape suspects

Re: @mickey mouse

"No that was in Ohio, two of the boys (according to wiki) were convicted as minors, one got 1 year another got 2, plus an extra year for distributing child porn."

Those sentences are pathetically short considering what they did to that girl, who`s life they have probably ruined. You would probably get more years inside for pirating films or petty drug offences. Nice to see the legal system has its priorities right eh?

I bet these individuals reoffend as well, you would have to be a pretty nasty sociopath to do something like that to another human being.

"If I read an article correctly it is the top man's district in which the crimes were committed. Who is to say they are not protecting family. Would not be the first time someone in power snuffed a horrendous crime."

Yeah, thats what I was thinking.

Is this the same case where the poor girl was taken to several addresses, pretty much unconcious, to be raped by a succesion of partygoers? I seem to remember there was some pretty disturbing cellphone footage of the crime. If there were pictures, and deffinately if it is the same case, then there is a coverup going on.

Windows 7 'security' patch knocks out PCs, knackers antivirus tools

Re: Not the only problem with recent patches

"One (not in this lot) has changed how Windows Explorer sees some of my USB Flash Drives. If I take one drive and plug it into a USB3 port on my laptop the output is shown by file type rather that the 'details' list. If I want to see that I have to right click on the drive, select open as removable media etc. If I take the same drive and plug it into a USB2 port on the same machine it shows the classic 'details' list."

I noticed this behaviour suddenly appear, but didnt attribute it to an update, I just thought it was a random screwup on my windows install. Its really, really irritating, rather like the way Vista used to randomly change the icon sizes in control panel.

My laptop doesnt have usb3 ports, so its not that causing it, but it does change depending on which port the flash drive is plugged into.

Major blow for Apple: 'Bounce back' patent bounced back by USPTO

Re: BWAAAAAAA!!!!!

"@AC - To quote, Steve Jobs who quoted Picasso - "Good artists copy, great artists steal""

So even his quotes have prior art, how very fitting.

I honestly cant believe that trivial, obvious things like bounceback can be patented in the first place. I really hope Apple get hammered over all this, then maybe companies will think twice before trying to pull the same, innovation killing trick in the future.

Firefox: Use new stealth window to satisfy your wife, suggests Mozilla

Re: Well done mozilla

I tried the waterfox 64bit build for a while, Trouble was, The author wasnt too quick pushing out updates, and the very slight performance increases wernt worth the security risk of a browser a month or so behind the current release.

Apple files patent for iPhone with wraparound display

Display under display

I seem to remember that last year Acer demo`d a duel mode tablet/e-reader that had the e-ink screen on top of an amoled one (or below, cant remember) giving either a full colour android tablet mode or a low power b&w e-reader mode depending on which screen was powered up. Not quite the same, but a similar concept to Apples duel screen thing.

And as the poster above me said, im sure Samsung have already played around with the wrap around, bendy screens.

Im really liking where consumer technology is heading, this year is going to be quite exiting with stuff like this coming to market.

Living in the middle of a big city? Your broadband may still be crap

Really?

"Signing up to a fibre service is a sure fire way of speeding up your broadband – and almost two thirds of the country now has this option."

This has got to be a fib, there are still massive holes in the fibre coverage, theres no way 2/3rds of the uk is fibred up. I wonder if they mean 2/3rds of the population?

There is certainly nothing fibre related anywhere near my abode, not even in the bigger towns.

Im sitting on a nice 12mb connection out in the wilds of Devon, it never really fluctuates either, which is nice.

No 3g coverage for miles though and 2g is pretty useless outside the nearest town.

Maybe don't install that groovy pirated Android keyboard

Re: Pretty damn obvious what's going to happen

"Sure, the average person is going to know that they need to do that and also how to do it.

I think it is fair to say that most people with a smartphone are not that technically orientated.

so what's the best way to have fine permission control on your phone that doesn't require rooting it?"

This is the problem, even looking at the permission list before installing isnt going to stop a non tech minded person installing that free ringtone maker. Most non-technical people i know with smartphones just install willy nilly, they dont even understand the concept of permissions, its just a screen of boring text to click through.

The snarky answer is that these people should either take responsibility and educate themselves or suffer the consequences.

Its the same with windows, i see so many machines with no av and with unpatched browsers laden with toolbars. The owners are stumped as to why their £600 machine goes so slow, they have no concept of malware, trojans etc, even after being told many times. To them its just an appliance.

This isnt just about Android either, Apple are no better, they just hide the permission system in a `what you cant see cant hurt you` kind of way. Yes, Apples app store is more locked down and thus potentially `safer`, but Android is where the real inovation and off the wall concepts are happening due to the low barrier`s of entry and lack of restrictions development wise.

I think the only solution is education, i love how open Android is and wouldnt want to see it go down the Apple closed ecosystem route because a load of numpty`s got pwned through their own lazy ignorance.

Maybe some people just shouldnt own smartphones. As a huge believer in the advantages of technology in daily life, that thought really depresses me.

Re: Pretty damn obvious what's going to happen

"Someone who wants to use the keyboard, but isn't given a more fine-grained option to deny certain permissions while proceeding with the rest, so just shrugs and allows everything."

Root and use lbe or pdroid combined with avast and adaway and all permission and snooping related issues are gone.

I rather like the swype beta keyboard, but buried in the smallprint of the terms of service was the fact that it reserved the right to monitor what you were doing for `testing and performance improvement`. Using lbe, I nipped that right in the bud, blocked its internet access and about 10 other snoopy little permissions it grants itself. And pray tell, why would a keyboard need fine (gps) location to do its job of transporting my prose into a textbox?

Dongle smut Twitstorm claims second scalp

Re: PCMCIA dongles?

"Go ahead, try to make it through the whole video."

Christ she waffles on doesnt she?, get to the freekin point woman.

This ones better :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w