Posts by Steve Evans
2188 posts • joined Tuesday 17th April 2007 15:29 GMT
Page:
Sounds about the same level of hacking as the UK journalists are currently embroiled in.... In that case they accessed telephone voicemail which had been left at a default 4 number pin. usually 0000 or 1234, and they're going after everyone involved in that with relish!
Indeed. Land of the free and home of the brave... These days it's land of the spied upon and home of the scared shitless by endless terrorism hype.
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Me too
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@Miek
I believe he has RTFM'ed. Did you RTFOP? The issue isn't recording audio from the microphone, that's a piece of piss as your links show.
The problem is recording telephone *conversations*. It's very easy to get the audio feed from the Microphone (as per usual), but getting the other side of the conversation is damn tricky.
In some situations the microphone will pick up the audio coming from the ear piece and echoing through the phone internals, but this is not ideal, and subject to the designs of the handset and background noise. It's also completely useless the moment an ear piece is used.
Without a way to tap directly into both sides of the audio, a call recorder as the OP described is not possible.
Checked my DZ too, running stock HTC Gingerbread, no sign of it.
Maybe it's something HTC only dish out with Sense 3, or just to the US market?
@Probing...
You can't have it both ways you know... El Reg goes into iphone rumour meltdown for a month before every new phone launch, gets rather tiresome to be honest. Multiple iphone stories a day isn't uncommon.
If you feed the rumour mill for free product promotion, you can't complain if the wheels keep spinning when your product does something daft.
Best someone checks out ios 5.0 then ;-)
Well I'm only telling you what it it did to me. I might have said "What is the time?" instead of "What time is it?".
It certainly understood what I had said as it showed the correct transcription on the screen and then started moaning about the address.
Interesting mix...
You could forgive some of the smaller countries for maybe be a little bit less organised about it, some of them aren't long freed from the grip of mother Russia, and Poland did lose a big chunk of their government in a plane crash, but that list isn't just the old Eastern block is it, the big (and small) western players are in there too. In fact some of the old Eastern block countries have implemented it successfully.
So which ones are too disorganised to implement it, and which ones are just too top heavy with red tape that they're still trying to slow the bureaucratic oil tanker down before they can make a slight manoeuvre?
The French of course will have their own third category as usual - don't like it, will ignore it.
Still slightly amazed the UK isn't on the list. I guess implementing it in law is one thing, enforcing it is something else entirely.
I tried Siri the other day...
I said (in a clear British accent) "What time is it?"
It replied
"I don't know what the time is at 32 minus 45 moody street"
1) It doesn't matter what the time is in Moody Street, just knowing I'm in the UK would be good enough, and you can work that out from the cells with no need to reference wifi or GPS info.
2) We say "32 to 45" not "32 minus 45" for an address which spans multiple numbers
3) I wasn't anywhere near s*dding moody street!
So overall I wasn't particularly impressed.
Although I did manage to successful sneak a "wake me at 4am" into the phone, which belonged to a friend.... Haven't spoken to him since, so I might be in trouble, then again, this is an iphone alarm, so it might not have gone off yet!
Interesting.
An interesting read. Thanks for that.
Just curious you chose to pick on Kate Bush's 80's samplefest as an example, she wasn't the first name to come to my mind from that era... Try the Art of Noise, 1984, Close to the edit.
Although my favourite wasn't until 1986 - Paranoimia... I can feel a youtube memory trip coming on...
Oh oh okay doors, Swiiiiing....
Ummmm...
Ticking that "post anonymously" is not coming out, that's still hiding!
and even if it did, it would create some drag to create lift... and that will slow the craft down and the orbit will decay. You can't go creating enough lift to raise to a higher orbit without putting a bit more ooph out of the motors to keep the speed up... Otherwise you could throw a paper plane into orbit by hand!
Tut tut....
Repeating the same reporting mistakes...
"In some cases, like Google's apps, Amazon appears to be deliberately excluding them."
Google apps aren't part of Android, they are something which Google "give" away with approved Android. Amazon's fork isn't approved by google (not using the Amazon market place is a good way to fail the approval) so as such, Google don't let you play with their toys.
The same happened with Cyanogenmod. Google issues a cease and desist and the google apps had to be removed from CM. They did however come to an arrangement, and the google apps are available as a separate download.
You can get the Google apps onto the fire, but you need to install them via the backdoor, and remember to install the google framework first or it'll all end in tears.
Too right. Obviously networks don't want someone really taking the piss, so there should be a sensible "Unlimited" definition. 200MB is nothing like it.
3 have an unlimited service (when you can get a signal!), which seems to be pretty good. I pushed their sales staff for a figure and the only one I could get out of them was 80gig, and even then they said they wouldn't cut you off, but you might get a letter expressing "concern". Now that sounds more like a far use limit.
Posted in Woomera: Ghosts of Britain's space past
#6...
No idea about the ID of any of them.
About #6, having looked at it, and finally working out which way round it goes, I can only deduce that it is the world's largest nurf gun dart... Damn that's gonna leave a forehead ring and a half.
"unlimited"
They need to ban carriers and ISPs from using the word "unlimited", it's not just grammatically incorrect, it's an outright lie.
I used to have an Orange account which had "unlimited" (read small print and bill - 500meg a month) connection. Just leaving K9 email client running on my phone for a day would polish off more than 10% of my monthly allowance. A few minutes on facebook would do the same.
So I tend to turn off my mobile data unless I really need it, such as for google maps navigation.
Also the first app I installed on my Android handset was 3G watchdog. Damn useful it is too.
Now does that sound like the behaviour of someone with an "unlimited" connection?
Shoooorly...
Surely any gang member that wishes to advertise his membership via his numberplate should be encouraged?
My thoughts exactly... It was a funny clip though, watching Brian Blessed restricted to non-swear words. IIRC didn't he pick "table" as his word, or was that Fry?
Restarts...
Best way to reduce restarts is to not allow Adobe to install anything on your machine!
@Dan 55
Hi Dan, yes sorry, I did mean the MAC/BSSID, not the user configurable SSID.
Thanks for the link though ;-)
So...
What about all the other mobile devices? If you think that only Google collects this information to enable fast initial location fixing then you are very much mistaken... They just happened to have had cars driving about which could collect it en-mass in the first instance.
SSID Mac...
In theory SSIDs are unique, but I get the impression someone in Canada had changed theirs to the same as mine. For a few months Google maps on my phone would locate me somewhere over there when it couldn't get an GPS fix (in my house for example).
It hasn't happened for a while now, so if it was a clone, he's changed routers and mashed in another random collection of hex digits.
Posted in NEWSFLASH: Chips cheaper than disks
@Andy 115
Actually no. TRIM is required to keep the speed up, and it's a new arrival to every OS I can think of.
Windows 7, OS X 10.7, Linux 2.6.33
Of those three, Windows 7 was actually the first released.
Yes, yes, I know you could have hacked it into earlier versions of OS X (10.6.6 - Still released after Win7) and Linux, but to do that you would have needed to know how to hack it in, and also have heard that it was required! So I'm talking about off-the-shelf support.
Posted in NEWSFLASH: Chips cheaper than disks
Depends on the OS and chipset support. If your OS doesn't support TRIM, then yes, the SSD will start to bog down.
Posted in Go back to the future with Red Dwarf
Well...
The studio audience is a good sign, at least they should get some real laughter instead of that horrible canned crap they used towards the end of the last run.
Assuming it's funny enough of course. If not, then it'll be unfunny - with canned laughter.
So it's the Maya version of Y2K?
Hmm, that'll be a tricky one to spot, Maya is a weird flaky bit of software at the best of times.
It does a bit... Especially given that the Sun will eventually burn out and expand to such an extent it will engulf the inner part of the solar system - which includes Earth.
Don't worry, we've a few million years to either find a fix, and wipe ourselves out first.
Posted in Boozed-up ball-biting mum spared jail
@MrNo
Well I don't know about you MrNo, but I for one am very grateful to El Reg for notifying us males about this woman!
If you want to risk bumping into her, then that's your proclivity, personally I'm glad to now know enough to keep a very safe distance away!
This is new?
Since when is this a discovery? Have they never seen a cuttlefish?
Far more impressive.
History of alcohol problems, short attention span, makes US politics a laughing stock...
There's nothing that'll stop him winning is there.
If history teaches us anything, he'll go for two terms.
Mixed feelings...
It's nice to see a network operator being kicked into the "dumb pipe" gutter where they belong. One of Nokia's failings was that it continually bowed to the operators causing enormous delays to firmware updates for anyone who was stupid enough to buy a phone through a network, or even a country variant as we have in the UK, which even though it ran standard firmware, would still be subject to a random delay thanks to some unknown issuing agency.
Apple never went with that model, they pushed out their firmware updates to everyone, at the same time. Although this did tend to crash their servers, it did mean everyone could be updated within a few days of each other (if they so wished).
However, I don't know if I trust Apple enough to agree to be locked into them... Actually, I do know the answer, and no I don't like it.
I don't know where you live, but I think any country that got the N97 was being used as a test market!
Nah...
Forget the OS, for me it will be a long long time before I trust Nokia enough to get tied into a long contract for any phone they make. Last time I did that they abandoned the phone before I'd finished my contract, and never admitted the list of faults which were regularly reported all over their own forums.
I ended up buying an HTC Android handset just so I didn't have to use the PoS Nokia I was still paying for. First handset I have ever bought outright, and it was to escape a Nokia.
Says it all really.
@atomic jam
You appear to have a Jewish Scotsman doing your countdown!
Posted in Ten... high-end Android tablets
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1... Recommended?
So after mentioning the lack of removable storage, badly placed charge socket, no HDMI, proprietary connectors etc etc, it still gets a recommended?
Weird. You can't really give them plus points for Swype when you can go and download it yourself, for free - 'tis good though, got I put it on my phone.
Companies that insist of daft connectors when there are plenty of nice standard ones which are equally small and neat don't get much of a look-in with me... and no removable storage is just the nail in the coffin.
As you say - copying all the wrong things about the ipad.
I for one...
Welcome our new beer serving overlords :-)
(Hey, where's the Welcome doormat icon gone?)
Not always, they've had some superb failures too... Like mixing up the units for the mars probe, and smashing it into the surface, or did it miss the planet entirely? Can't remember which.
I really have no idea what kind of crazy fool would even think of doing scientific calculations with imperial units, but it appears NASA do/did.
As also recently demonstrated by Blackberry, this is exactly why you should think very carefully before having functions and features offloaded into the ether. You never know what is at the other end doing the hard work, it could have (and both BBM and Siri seem to have) several single points of failure.
Posted in The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out
He missed...
He missed the entire idea of Android widgets from the real time update section. This is especially odd considering he's using an HTC, and sense comes preloaded with a load of widgets which give combined feeds from the likes of facebook, twitter and even flickr.
I can't help but wonder...
I wonder when we'll see Apple awarded a patent for a process which randomly drains the battery in an excessive way.
Too hot?
You must be holding it wrong, try just making contact with the edge of case with your finger tips... That should prevent burning... Oh hang on...
Neat...
I hope that none of the gestures involve a sharp downward chop motion towards the phone, or there's going to be a very gooey "splat" noise (and muffled audio).
Posted in Android voice assistant shootout
Siri is not *that* good at context. Try laying in the gutter after being hit by a car and saying "Call me an ambulance".
Posted in 97% of Three's network traffic is data
Unlimited.
Hardly a surprise given 3 are unique in the UK market for offering a real unlimited data connection, and on a £25 a month tariff. Orange's best is 1gig a month!
I'm on the verge of switching.
@Argies
.fk.u
Don't make as re-commission HMS Conqueror.
Oh gawd...
That's gonna play havoc with the physics model of Angry birds.
Actually, the radio control bands were the Alpha channels, gaps in the US 40 channel range.
Some rigs could get to them, but it wasn't a standard feature.
Although you were still at risk if the rig was close, badly aligned (over modulating), or was running some boots with poor filtering bleeding over into your allotted gap.
Having said all that, IIRC, wasn't 27Mhz usually for ground based RC vehicles with RC aircraft usually found on higher frequencies?
@ThomH
The N8 may indeed be a fine phone, and for those that have bought them, I hope it is, but it was too late to retain me as a customer.
Come to think of it, after the N97, I don't think anything would have retained me as a customer. The whole experience just revealed what can only be described as utter contempt for the end user. Abandoning support for a phone with outstanding bugs that many users are still paying for on excessively long contracts is just disgusting.
