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Tag Archives for " Cell Phone "

iPhone – Make a Mistake… Just shake it

New to iPhone, made a mistake typing, deleting, cutting, or pasting and wondering how to undo it? While you might have already figured this out through unbridled frustration. If you’ve been editing some text and you either typed the wrong thing, deleted more than you intended to, or cut, copy, or pasted yourself into error-land, here’s what you do:

Hold you iPhone firmly in one hand

Shake it (Really)

Tap the Undo button to confim

You’re done!

Apple has built “shake to undo” into the iPhone since iOS 3 and it works really well.

  • 03/25/2013
  • IT

Cell Phone Users Are Gullible

Cell phone users are making really bad decisions compared to their desktop computing counterparts.

The study’s data is reveals the harsh truth. Cell phone users are three times more likely than users of desktop computers to offer up confidential login details to a phishing site, and they are also quicker to respond to phishing scams.

Rather controversially, Trusteer, the research company, claims iPhone users are the most foolish of all, accessing phishing Websites more than BlackBerry users by a factor of eight. This is especially galling bearing in mind BlackBerry is still a market leader in the US, with 36 percent of the smarphone market in October 2010 compared to the iPhone’s 25 percent. In other words, iPhone users appear to be making extra special efforts to be dumb.

Adapted via Yahoo News

  • 01/10/2011
  • IT

Voila! AT&T’s 3G Network Is Now 4G!

“AT&T Inc. flipped a switch and turned on its 4G wireless network Wednesday,” reports the WSJ. “The switch, however, was in the company’s marketing department.” Taking advantage of loose definitions for what qualifies as 4G, AT&T has simply relabeled its existing, and much-maligned, 3G network as 4G.

The International Telecommunications Union hasn’t set a hard definition on 4G, so carriers are going right ahead and calling their networks 4G. AT&T told WSJ that it was okay to do it because consumers won’t notice the difference between their HSP-plus and the new LTE network.

AT&T isn’t the only one, T-mobile did the same last year and then went on an anti-AT&T advertising spree.

Adapted via WSJ

  • 01/07/2011
  • IT

Guard yourself from Firesheep and Wi-Fi snooping

The abundance of free/cheap and open Wi-Fi networks in restaurants, airports, offices and hotels is a great perk to the traveling user; it makes connectivity and remote access much easier than it used to be. But you need to be informed and understand the risks.

Unfortunately, most of those “Open” networks don’t employ WEP or WPA passwords to secure the connection between device and hotspot, every byte and packet that’s transmitted back and forth is visible to all the computers on the wireless LAN, all the time. While certain sites and services use full-time browser encryption (the ones that have URLs beginning with https:// and that show a lock in the browser status bar), many only encrypt the login session to hide your username and password from prying eyes. This, as it turns out, is the digital equivalent of locking the door but leaving the windows wide open.

Firesheep is a Firefox extension which makes it trivially easy to impersonate someone to the websites they log in to while on the same open Wi-Fi network. It kicks in when you login to a website (usually in a secure fashion, via HTTPS) and then the site redirects you to a non-secured page after login. Most sites that operate this way will save your login information in a browser cookie, which can be ‘sniffed’ by someone on the same network segment; that’s what Firesheep does automatically. With the cookie in hand, it’s simple to present it to the remote site and proceed to do bad things with the logged-in account. Bad things could range from sending fake Twitter or Facebook messages all the way up to, potentially, buying things on ecommerce sites.

The solution

USE SSL/HTTPS only if the website supports it — is quite simple: after you connect, the site should keep your session secure using SSL or https. Some sites, including most banking sites, already do this. However, encryption requires more overhead and more server muscle, so many sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) only use it for the actual login. Gmail has an option to require https and has made it the default setting, but you should make sure that it’s enabled if you use Gmail (Google Apps has a similar feature). This also doesn’t necessarily help if you’re using an embedded browser in an iPhone or iPad app, where the URL is hard-coded.

Protecting yourself from Firesheep if you use Firefox or Chrome is possible with extensions like the EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere, Secure Sites or Force-TLS. These work by forcing a redirect to the secure version of a site, if it exists. The obvious problems with these solutions are: a) you have to install one for each browser (and we have not yet found one for Safari), and b) it only works if a secure version of the site exists.

Even better.

A) Don’t use open networks.
B) Use a SOCKS proxy and SSH tunnel.
C) Use a VPN.

adapted via tuaw.com

  • 10/26/2010
  • IT

Your Photos Can Your Reveal Secrets

You can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away.

Security experts and privacy advocates have recently begun warning about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online.

Very few people know about geotag capabilities and the only way you can turn off the function on your smartphone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about.

Indeed, disabling the geotag function generally involves going through several layers of menus until you find the “location” setting, then selecting “off” or “don’t allow.” But doing this can sometimes turn off all GPS capabilities, including mapping, so it can get complicated.

Because of the way photographs are formatted by some sites like Facebook, geotag information is not always retained when an image is uploaded, which provides some protection, albeit incidental. Other sites like Flickr have recently taken steps to block access to geotag data on images taken with smartphones unless a user explicitly allows it.

But experts say the problem goes far beyond social networking and photo sharing Web sites, regardless of whether they offer user privacy settings.

You need to educate yourself and your friends but in the end, you really have no control, protecting your privacy is not just a matter of being aware and personally responsible. A friend may take a geotagged photo at your house and post it.

ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices.

adapted via nytimes.com

  • 08/18/2010
  • OS

How to Protect Your Phone’s Valuable Data

The loss of a smartphone wouldn’t be so bad if it ended with merely a bit of embarrassment. Since many people now use smartphones for online banking, travel reservations, and storing sensitive business documents, however, a great deal of very private data ends up on the device.

Much of this data is safe behind password-protected applications, but a large portion of it dangles out in the open in e-mail messages, text documents, images, and other files.

What are smartphone users doing to protect the precious data in their pricey handsets?

Apparently not much, according to some industry experts. And that’s surprising, given the number of apps and phone features available for safeguarding data. According to experts, you’re 15 times more likely to lose your cell phone than your laptop computer.

Another danger: A lost smartphone may soon be the high-tech equivalent of a lost wallet.

New wireless-transaction services will soon allow a smartphone to replace cash or a credit card at a store’s point of purchase. Though the convenience of cell-phone-enabled purchases may be attractive, the danger of losing a cash-enabled phone to a thief is obvious.

Lost or Stolen?

Phones are often lost by accident, but waves of cell phone thefts are nothing new in major cities. Though crime stats in New York have declined in recent years, cell phones and iPods lead the way among the types of items stolen. Transit authorities now make regular announcements–in addition to posting signs on platforms and in trains–warning riders not to flash electronic gadgets unnecessarily.

Are You Protected?

Locking a smartphone’s screen with a password offers a good first layer of protection–a simple process that, unfortunately, phone owners often fail to undergo.

The next layer could come in the form of an add-on phone-tracking application such as Microsoft’s free My Phone for Windows Mobile or Apple’s Find My iPhone app, which works on iPhones and iPads but requires a $99 annual subscription to Apple’s MobileMe data-syncing and backup service. The $15 Theft Aware for Android is one of several apps that can help you locate your missing Droid.

What else can you do to protect your cell phone’s data?

  1. Don’t store sensitive information in an easily readable form.
  2. If you use a password to encrypt or lock down your phone data, don’t forget the password. Data-protection programs have no “back doors,” and the only recourse you’ll have is to reset your phone–which erases all the data.
  3. Back up your phone data using your carrier’s Web service or an app that lets you back up to a computer. This step will allow you to get up to speed with your replacement handset quickly.
  4. To prevent thefts, be aware of your surroundings. Don’t put your phone down and walk away even a short distance, such as from your table at a coffee shop to the counter where the napkins are.
  5. Cell phone insurance is a good thing, but it replaces only the hardware, not your data.
  6. In summary, treat your cell phone as a trusted friend–keep it close at hand, since so much of your life is in it.

adapted from pcworld.com

  • 08/16/2010
  • IT