Traditionally, it has been very tough or very unsatisfactory for virus-creating hackers to target the Linux OSes because the field is so fragmented. There are as many distributions as there are stars in the sky... and possibly more.

I was recently wondering about the situation in Android because the field is somewhat unified with limited number of variants. Anyone who writes an application can get entry into the Android market and peddle their apps. This is great for reaffirming the open source and free nature of the Android operating system but is quite a nightmare in terms of security.

And sure enough, I spotted this article:

I am kind of spooked. I try out random apps all the time and I certainly am one of those people who just says yes to the permissions screen. No one, apart from expert hackers can actually tell whether or not an app is going to cause extensive harm just by looking at them in a cursory fashion. But everyone can definitely pay more attention when it comes to what apps they choose to install.

I am going to start a running list of apps I have on my android devices here, I started this for chrome apps a while back but it has fallen into oblivion. I need to revive that as well. Hacking chrome is somewhat tougher but the basic playing ground is the same. I think, for non-hackers, knowledge about the apps they are using is 3/4ths of the battle against the viruses. The other 1/4ths is resisting temptation to download chunks of the whole marketplace willy nilly.

I went to check how much a simple 32 GB micro sdhc memory card was. All these choices and classes tumbled out of the closet.

It blows my mind that someone actually took the time to benchmark all these cards:

Sandisk 16 GB Class 2 Read: 7.5 MB/sec    Write: 5.5 MB/sec    
Samsung 8 GB Class 6 Read: 16.8 MB/sec    Write: 7.6 MB/sec    
Lexar 32 GB Class 10 Read: 20.3 MB/sec    Write: 8.1 MB/sec    

And those numbers don't tell the entire story. Apparently the higher classes have a tendency to burn out faster.

Nothing is simple anymore. I should have known that.

My wacom stylus has started some crazy erratic behaviour. Its eraser-end works but the pen tip does not. I recently found this "cure" on the internet:

You just whack the stylus against a padded surface (for example, your palm) till it starts behaving. The technique works around 70% of the time. For the 30% of the times it doesn't, even if you are tempted to search ebay and random shady websites for replacements, grit your teeth and whack the stylus a few times more. Chances are, the beating you gave it earlier is not sufficient enough to make the errant stylus realize who is the master here.

Wacom. Whack 'em.

NB: I am really not sure how much more whacking the pen can take. Maybe I should get a replacement.

I have to read around 500+ PDFs in the next few weeks or so. I absolutely hate printing on paper and accumulating physical stacks. It inevitably ends in lost notes, lost pages, and lost time.

Reading on the computer screen is nice and all, but I want to be able to interact with the pages like I would with paper. I have a Nexus S and a Nexus One, but the screens are too tiny. I am thinking 10" reading area or more would be a far better idea.

Guess it's time for a tablet. A big generously-size Android tablet. (Apple is out of question). Strongly leaning towards the Le Pan II.

:)


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(e:Paul)'s magic trick is incredibly useful. I just have to burn this into my brain as well. find is indeed incredibly and painfully slow and completely non-specific. Got any other tricks that will transform my i-life? :)

I wouldn't put it past him.

Unlike the band, the million-strong murder of crows that suddenly decided to alight on the tree outside my window are producing a racket that can only grace the soundtrack to the remake of the ghoulies.

The Susan G. Komen foundation just reversed its miscalculated decision to withdraw funding to Planned Parenthood. Whose victory and war was this? I say, it is Twitter's and the internet's victory over powerlessness and voicelessness as a whole.

I think the power of internet in democracy and public opinion has FINALLY arrived and not a minute too late. The mother (freakazoid) teresa approach that Komen seemed to have adopted was made public on Tuesday. It took just THREE days for the voices across the net and social media to speak up and rise to a crescendo against this ridiculously medieval move by Komen.

I sometimes wish that toxic hag teresa's evil, ignorant, petty and insular mind* that wrecked lives for Irish women and made it hell for many women in India were blown to smithereens by public opinion as strong as this.

The reversal of Komen's recent asinine policy in response to social media and public outcry makes me hopeful that not all causes are lost yet. Given the right power and voice women all over the world can better their lot and fight against barriers that sometimes stifling society and always misguided religions place over them.

I am somewhat amused at all these regulatory bodies that have suddenly decided to take affront at the simplified transparent Google privacy policy.

The new privacy policy is clearly written, brief, well-worded, has no legalese and states clearly that all Google products are from... surprise, one company, Google. Every time you log in to use one of their several products, Google will track your online usage to make the Google experience, as a whole, more personalized and better at finding what you are searching for. You can opt out of sharing your data by simple going to your dashboard and turning all data collection off. It makes you aware of the fact that if you don't want your data to be collected ever, use anonymous geographically-remote proxy servers, anonymous names, stay logged out of ALL services (i.e don't ever accept any cookies in your browser) and use incognito mode all the time. All of these are doable but people just don't care that much. But they do have an option. It's not as if Google is taking this freedom away. It's just shaking you up and telling you about it in simple words.

If you are paranoid and believe that ignorance is bliss, you can always use Micro$hit's Bing or Hotmail and ignore their ginormously long, terribly dry, completely dense, loopholes-ridden legal privacy policy and stop using Google. What is the point here? The minute you are online people will collect data about you, like it or not. It is how the internet operates; on collected data, and personalization. (e:Paul) is collecting data about your browser, about your OS and recording your IP as you are reading this. So are ALL the sites you go to. With the IP everyone can pretty much localize where you live if they want to. In addition, your information can also tell (e:paul) and everyone else how long you have been on any particular site, where you came from, which links you are clicking on and what you are doing at this very moment. Are you freaked out about that? If you are on Freakfacebook, it has access to ALL that you and your extended circle of family and friends said, did and/or posted. It's privacy policy is about a zillion pages of no-one-can-understand-this legalese.

Some bring transparency to the process by making it simple for you to understand what data is being collected, some hope you won't read those zillion page legalese tomes and some don't tell you at all.

The reaction of various thick-in-their-heads government agencies to Google's new policy is funny. Because they suddenly seem to have woken up to the basic nature of the internet. And pointing fingers at the one company that is actually taking some pains to make it transparent while conveniently ignoring the really intrusive privacy policies (search for the Apple privacy policy that (e:Paul) posted sometime back*) that are tougher to understand but are probably more invasive than Google will ever resort to. It is clearly another classic example of how all governments are made of morons who probably can't do anything else and have lied their way into slimy politics, and who take the shooting-the-messenger always a bit too far, because they are probably are too dumb to recognize the messenger even.

Well, the people are not as dumb as you, dear government. We have options and we will utilize them, if we want to. Why don't you go and do something more productive that does not involve bringing crap censorship to the internet and fear mongering about online services? I suspect you cannot. Because you don't really know how to help the people you manipulated and coerced into voting for you in the first place.

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• itunes privacy policy: (e:Paul,54481)
• data collection on the internet: (e:paul,54665)