Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Last week we had an Open Source notebook computer, this week, it is an open Source, or as they call it, “People Powered” tablet!

The Jolla Tablet IndieGoGo Page

From the Jolla tablet Indiegogo Page – “Jolla Tablet’s Sailfish operating system will be unlike anything you’ve tried before. Once you try it, you’ll never want to go back. Independent and powered by open source, change whatever you like, whenever you like.

At Jolla, we believe in your privacy and respecting our users. That’s why Sailfish OS is totally independent and has been built the way it has. It’s our company policy that we’ll never sell or share your data with anyone. There are no back doors or anything third parties could use for monitoring your activity. Together with the open source community, we’re continuing to strengthen our privacy capabilities at every opportunity.

Multitasking on Sailfish OS shows all your running apps conveniently in one single view. At a glance, you’ll see everything that’s going on, as well as easily switch between apps. You can also control Sailfish OS apps directly from the multitasking view – for example, change your music or play and pause your video stream without opening the app in full.

Sailfish OS works with your natural hand movements via gestures, which makes using the tablet super-fast. You don’t have to push tiny buttons or search your way back home – everything is always under your thumb.

Besides running its own native apps, Sailfish OS has the capability to run Android apps. You can continue using your favourite apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as downloading all the latest ones via the Jolla Store and other Android app marketplaces. If an app doesn’t exist, you can always make it.

We want you to tell us how you want your Jolla Tablet to be. It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ll get your voice heard in our community forum together.jolla.com. It’s here that users can suggest new features for Sailfish OS, as well as discuss ideas with the Jolla Sailors (our development team). Our community votes on whether they’d like to see proposed ideas developed further. Anything that has been voted on by the community is prioritised by the Jolla Sailors.

Our community is a vital part of the process and plays a huge role in making something that is people-made. We already have a solid track record after implementing four out of the eight most voted features to our first product, the Jolla smartphone, during 2014.

With our second product, the Jolla Tablet, we want to involve the community even earlier in the development to make the product you want.”

Watch out! You need to check your Twitter privacy settings, if you don’t want them to know what you are buying via their app!

Twitter is now snooping on the apps you download — but you can opt out

Daily Digest News – By: Dan Taylor – “Watch out before you accept those new terms and conditions from Twitter: that new legal stuff says they can now spy on the other apps you install on your Android or iOS device and report back to the company.

Twitter launched a support page to tell consumers what the new terms and conditions are about, claiming the changes will actually be a benefit to its users — however, it means that Twitter will be able to advertise services and apps to you based on what you’re downloading, according to Forbes.

With this change, Twitter will know what certain people in certain demographics are downloading, allowing for more targeted and profitable advertising. For example, if Twitter knows that you use Uber, it can sell advertising to Lyft in an attempt to get you to switch.

Twitter said in its support page that it would only collect a list of applications installed, and not any of the data within those applications. Most probably won’t be bothered by the change, but for those who consider it an invasion of privacy, there is a way to opt out.

Twitter’s data gathering will mean changes beyond more targeted advertising. It will also affect what Twitter users you’ll be recommended to follow based on your interests, as well push relevant tweets into your timeline.

Android users who want to opt out of this feature need to go into their settings and deselect ‘Tailor Twitter based on my apps.’ For Apple devices, you need to go to settings, and then Twitter, and then privacy and remove ‘Tailor Twitter based on my apps.'”

Can you imagine a customer asking that question in a fitting room? Nordstrom is using eBay’s technology to build fitting rooms in their stores that allow customers to see themselves in the clothing that they’re looking at but also interact with the mirror which doubles as a screen that can be used as a touchscreen.

It is being tested at two Nordstrom locations, one in Seattle, WA, the other in San Jose, CA. From the touchscreen users can see other clothing options, and even ask for salespeople to bring them another item to try.

The idea is to provide an online experience while retaining the in store purchasing experience. By blending these two methods Nordstrom hopes to be able to bring people into their physical locations and provide services that will keep them coming back.

EBay is developing this technology to demonstrate that they’re more than just an e-commerce company, in fact, they desire to demonstrate that they’re willing to partner with anyone in any area of commerce. The combination of the eBay technology and their PayPal payment service is designed to demonstrate that they are an innovative tech company with a desire to provide services in the business arena.

I totally want one of these! The science involved is phenomemal! Watch the videos in their entirtity! Awesome!

Zano Kickstarter Page

Zano Micro-Drone is Tiny, Autonomous, and Equipped with Optical Image Stabilization

PetaPixel – by DL Cade – “Micro-drones are typically thought of as more of a toy rather than a tool. If you want to capture real recreational aerial footage, you buy a bigger, heftier drone, right? Well, not necessarily. ZANO wants to change all that by packing both power and ease of use into a tiny package that measures just 2.5 x 2.5-inches and weighs just over 1.2lbs.

Created by Torquing Group Ltd — a company that has spent years creating micro-drones for military use — the ZANO is being called, ‘the world’s most sophisticated nano drone.’

ZANO wants to be the best of all drone worlds. Easily piloted with an iOS/Android app that anybody could use, autonomous when you want it to be, able to avoid obstacles, featuring decent video and photo features, and even optically stabilized.

Here’s a quick intro to the already full-funded drone from the project’s Kickstarter page:

The uses, as you can see, are vast. You can set it to follow you (it will avoid obstacles along the way), tell it to sit in one spot, have it take your group picture from a distance, control it using your smartphone’s motion sensors and more.

ZANO connects to your smartphone using on-board WiFi, and anything captured will be zapped over to your phone automatically over the airwaves.

The camera on board can capture 5MP images and tops out at 720p video because of bandwidth restrictions, but that number might go up to 1080p at 60fps in a future update. The battery will let you fly the little guy for 10-15 minutes at a time between recharging.

Here’s some more footage of the current prototype in action. The prototype can already hold position, avoid obstacles, capture images and video, and beam them back to the smartphone.

The Kickstarter, which only launched a few days ago, has already raised and impressive £183,475 (approximately $287,000 USD), and is well past its funding goal.

To find out more about the drone, or pick up a ZANO for yourself, head over to the Kickstarter campaign. ZANO is set to go into beta in March 2015 and ship in May 2015 assuming everything goes to plan, and you can reserve your own for a very reasonable £140 (approximately $220 USD) if you snag the super early bird special.

After that, be prepared to drop £150 (~$235 USD) for the early bird deal, or £190 (~$297 USD) once all the early bird slots are gone.”

If you recently upgraded your Android device to Android 5.0, known as the “Lollipop” version, you may be experiencing some strange performance issues after the upgrade if you enable encryption. It appears that the problem is caused by disk encryption of the Android device which can be turned off in the new Nexus devices. It is a “feature” and not a bug! However, users are very upset by the performance hit that this new feature causes. In testing a Motorola Nexus 6 that didn’t have encryption enabled (which is not the way it normally comes) testers at AnanTech discovered that it was, in fact, the disk encryption in the Nexus 6 that slows down the read-write disk speeds… and, unfortunately, you can’t turn it off once enabled.

During tests with a Nexus 6 running without encryption, and another one with it enabled, they saw as much is a 63% decline in read performance and a 50% decline in write performance in the device with encryption enabled. If your math impaired, in terms of understanding those numbers, that’s a big deal!

Now, if you want to turn off your disk encryption in order to see at a performance improvement; you can’t on the Nexus 6 or Nexus 9, at least not at this time.

The geeky folks over at XGA are tinkering with a new boot.img image that will disable the forced encryption, but this is annoying fix for a problem that Google should have already provided a workaround for. We should not have to rely on some hackers to fix their problem!

One would hope that Google will respond to this and give users a way to encrypt their phones and restore performance to reasonable levels!

I totally want one!

Geek – By: Lee Mathews – “Supporters of software freedom and open source have plenty of choices when it comes to apps. When it comes to hardware? Not so much. The Librem 15 laptop is hoping to change that.

Like the clunky old netbook that Richard Stallman bangs on, the Librem 15 is all about FOSS. It’s a beast of a machine that features a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GT840M graphics, and a 15-inch 1080p display. Purism, the company behind the Librem 15, plans to ship a customized version of Trisquel Linux (one of the few distros that gets a thumbs up from the FSF). The Librem 15 certainly looks good. It’s relatively slim at 22mm and not too heavy, weighing in at 4.4 pounds — comparable to similar systems from OEMs like Asus and Dell.

This laptop would eat the last FSF-certified machine we wrote about for lunch. It’s also a huge step up from the DIY Novena, though it’s worth noting that the Novena is genuinely totally free: hardware, firmware, software. That’s why it runs an underpowered Freescale CPU instead of a ballsy Intel Core chip.

A totally free gaming laptop is an interesting — albeit slightly conflicted — device. Even if founder Todd Weaver and Purism manage to get Intel to free up all their closed binary blobs, the games you would likely want to play on a machine like this probably aren’t FOSS.

There’s an ever-growing list of good, free, open source games out there. There are more titles coming to Steam for Linux all the time, too, but the $1,400 Librem 15 is open hardware that wants desperately to play in the closed-source world of PC gaming. It’s a steep hill to climb, to be sure.

Still, if you’re committed to the FOSS movement, the Librem 15 could be the horse you want to back. Companies like Purism can’t achieve their goals without funding, so head on over to Crowd Supply and pledge if you’d to help them succeed.”

If you want one, order it here: Crowd Supply – Librem 15 Laptop

(Cross-posted from the Hand Held Hack) I HATE Malware. I am OK with lining up the perps that write it and shooting them (metaphorically.) I guess.

Malicious Software Said to Spread on Android Phones

Bits Blog – New York Times – By: Nicole Perlroth – “For years security researchers have warned that it was only a matter of time before nasty digital scourges like malicious software and spam would hit smartphones.

Now they say it is has finally happened.

A particularly nasty mobile malware campaign targeting Android users has hit between four million and 4.5 million Americans since January of 2013, according to an estimate by Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security company that has been tracking the malware for about two years.

Lookout first encountered the mobile malware, called NotCompatible, two years ago and has since seen increasingly sophisticated versions. Lookout said it believes, based on attempted infections of its user base of 50 million, that the total number of people who have encountered the malware in the United States exceeds four million.

Criminals infect smartphones primarily by infecting legitimate websites with malicious code. When victims visit the site from their mobile phone, they inadvertently download the code, in what is known as a “drive-by download.”

In other cases, the attackers sent spam from hijacked email accounts to their victims. That technique, Lookout’s researchers say, successfully caused more than 20,000 infections a day. More recently, researchers say, attackers have been tricking their victims into installing the malicious code by disguising it as a ‘security patch’ in an email attachment. In others, spam emails advertised weight loss solutions with a link that served up malware to Android users.

The attackers goal, researchers say, is to infect as many smartphones as possible and turn them into a so-called botnet, a network of infected devices that can be used by attackers for various malicious purposes. Lookout’s researchers say there is evidence that Not Compatible’s authors are renting out control of infected mobile devices to people who have used them to simply send out more spam or buy up event tickets in bulk from from Ticketmaster, Live Nation, EventShopper and Craigslist. Some have used infected devices to try to crack WordPress accounts.

Lookout says the malware, now on its third iteration, allows infected devices to search for and communicate with other infected machines and share intelligence. Attackers also have found a way to encrypt communications between their command and control center and infected devices, which makes it more difficult to detect and decipher.

The latest version, Lookout said, ‘has set a new bar for mobile malware sophistication and operational complexity.’

All this malicious activity can be costly. The criminals are incurring data charges on phones that, ultimately, victims are held responsible for. As if that weren’t annoying enough, researchers say the malware causes tremendous battery drainage.

As with most malware discoveries, Lookout, the company sounding the alarm, has a stake in raising concerns about the security of mobile devices. Its mobile security application, which is available for both Apple’s iOS and Android-powered smartphones, is able to identify the NotCompatible malware and keep it from infecting Android devices that have downloaded the Lookout app.”