Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Hacking Android – HTC Wildfire
You’d be surprised how long it took to get this far!
I’ve been experimenting with hacking Android phones recently, either to extend their functionality, or to circumvent mobile phone companies’ annoying blocks.
This post is really just to detail what I did, with the aim of providing useful reference for others doing something similar. It took ages searching forums and other blogs to find a correct set of steps to do this, so hopeful I can shorten the time it takes the next person.
My first effort with this was with an old HTC Wildfire I’d bought from a friend for about £60 (cheap enough ont to matter too much if I inadvertently turned it into a paperweight), I was to realise that this was not an entry level task.
Normally hacking an Android phone has two basic steps:
1) Find the vulnerability that allows you to become a superuser.
2) Become a superuser (getting root access)
3) Add all the software you want that the manufacturers didn’t necessarily intend.
In many cases, gaining root access is a well-practised function, that some developers have even packed up into a handy piece of software that does step one and two for you. UnRevoked is a good example for a selection of HTC handsets.
S-On / S-Off
Annoyingly HTC have a security setting to prevent you doing this, which leads to the additional step at the start of removing this (S-OFF). Turning it off should normally be simple, again it’s been done so many times that there’s some software which perform all the steps for you, in this case, Revolutionary will do it.
Except it didn’t work for me because the firmware in my phone was too recent and there was no way to hack it to turn S-OFF. I had boot version 1.01.002, and Revolutionary only works with boot version 1.01.001.
So now I had to downgrade the boot software to the earlier, hackable version. This alone was fiddly and time-consuming, and by far the best instructions for doing so are in the Aritrasen blog.
So after all that, only now, was I in a position to begin the superuser process.
Only I then discovered that there was another stumbling block. The superuser exploit only works on Android 2.1 (Eclair) and my Wildfire has already been upgraded to Android 2.2 (Froyo), and I had to downgrade that as well (keep following the Aritrasen guide, don’t skip that step, it is not optional).
OK, now I could finally start at step 1, above! Happily the rest of the process was simple and done for me by the software packaged listed. At this point I chose to use CyanogenMod rather than standard Android as the phone’s operating system because the Wildfire will only support 2.2 (Froyo), but with CyanogenMod 7, it effectively becomes a 2.3 (Gingerbread) device.
Results
It takes a lot longer to boot now than it did (boot screen picture at top of post) and actually pretty much everything about the phone is slower, especially if you want to use Swype, or Opera, but that’s what happens when you start to push the hardware to its limits.
However, I now have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve made my phone do something it shouldn’t really be able to do, I have a more technically capable Wildfire handset than most other people, and it’s my first play with an Android (ish) phone! Smiles all round 
HTC Wildfire running CyanogenMod 7
Why crowd-sourced films are the biggest disruptive force I’ve seen in years
Warning: Severe disruption ahead
Something new for entertainment executives to stress over
Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with a mobile video app called Vyclone.
Check the site, download and play, but I urge you to play with other people who have the app in the same room. It’s really important you do, or you just won’t get it.
If you’ve ever been to a large event, videoed it, and have then been disappointed at the results, you’ll love this app. If you’ve experience of storytelling in video, the possibilities will probably charm you.
If you work for a commercial broadcaster, or in electronic distribution rights for events, it will probably stop you sleeping at night.
Vyclone finds all the other people in the same place as you, recording the same thing, and stitches their videos together into a multi-camera shoot. If you don’t like what it does automatically, you can make your own camera mix.
It’s the most disruptive, fascinating, troubling, creative, delicious, innovation I’ve seen in years. This is a game-changer.
Some perspective: 15 years ago, worried rights-owners would try to ban people bringing video cameras into their events (some still do). They had already sold the TV rights to another company and were obliged to protect that sale.
With mobile phone video, there were too many people to police, but they quickly realised it wasn’t a threat because these individuals made rubbish content. They weren’t organised and had no scale or impact. The individual YouTube stats for the uploaded videos proved that.
These elements have now irrevocably changed. A crowd-source video app offers both organisation and scale, automatically.
Let’s say I’m at Radio 1′s Hackney Weekend music festival. I’m recording Nicki Minaj performing ‘Starships’
(top chune btw). My camera only gets a general view of the stage. But at the front, two other people I don’t even know are recording the left and right sides of the stage. One might have Minaj in full close-up. Yet another person is recording the crowd and their friends further back.
The app stitches all of those shots together into a music video.
If you’re a broadcast professional, I can already hear your say “it still won’t be as good as our planned, directed TV coverage”, and you are absolutely right. But, here’s the kicker:
It’ll be good enough.
YouTube doesn’t amass millions of eyeballs a day because it’s professional. It has content that for the most part, is just good enough for the few minutes those millions want to watch.
Now, take my music festival scenario and imagine instead a riot. Or a war zone. You see how powerful this might be for news gathering?
There’s still a long way to go obviously. For now, you actually have to be recording through an installed application for the auto-mix to work. There’s a limit of 4 other cameras in a single mix. The video quality is, well, from a mobile phone. All these will improve and become less restrictive.
But even now, it’s good enough.
There are fights to come. The technology raises massive issues about whether anyone can “own” the resulting video when anyone is free to remix and share the individual parts.
Given the massive, lucrative sporting event about to engulf my home city of London, I’ll give you one last scenario to imagine the impact of a crowd-sourced, non-owned, multiple camera recording:
I wish the International Olympics Committee a good night’s sleep.
Facebook’s Places Editor – and what’s wrong with it
No sooner than I complained about its disappearance, it’s back!
This is an update to a previous post where I’d found the Places Editor, and then thought I’d lost it again. I’ve now found it and have taken some screen grabs!
You can see what the first page looks like, why I get the choice of Northern Ireland, I have no idea! I chose to tag duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.
Here’s what happens on the next, and it highlights one of the problems with the Places database:
You get a map and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.
The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. Also the tick/cross is confusing. You’d think it was asking you to confirm if this entry was correct or not. It isn’t, it’s asking you to say if you think it’s a duplicate or not.
This mechanism needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong, as well as knowing how much of a difference anything I do here is making to the database.
The most infuriating thing however is the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! You can see here where FB has tagged ‘Paramount’ and where it actually is (in the Centrepoint Tower).
One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.
So, yes I like being able to make edits to the database, but surely it’s important to have the actual locations correct too?
Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away
Places database gets fractionally more accurate, then doesn’t
I’m a Facebooker. I admit it, and I also admit that I’ve read most of the manual and pressed every single link on my page to see what happens. I get notifications delivered to my phone so I know the moment someone tags a photo of me that’s less than wholesome. (Try doing that on Twitter when you have T-Mobile!)
So I was intrigued to find a new icon nestled in my apps navigation yesterday which said Facebook Places editor.
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Update: The edit screen came back! Check out this post with new screengrabs.
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I paraphrase the blurb which said something like ‘You use Places a lot, and you do a lot of tagging, so here’s a tool to help make the database better’.
I was offered a choice of places within the UK, or just places me and my friends checkin, and I could also choose to add additional information, or tag duplicates. I chose the duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.
Then I got a map and a place and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.
The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. It also needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong.
The most infuriating thing however was the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! OK, so the duplicates and the misspellings of the dupes annoy me, but the thing that’s surely most important is that the marker for Heathrow Terminal 1 is actually in the right place!
One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.
Anyway, in case you’re wondering, there are no screen grabs of any of this, because when I logged onto FB this afternoon the Places Editor had gone 
Did they think my corrections were rubbish? Was I mistakenly put into this app and then someone realised and took me out?
Comment if you have the Places Editor, as a basic web search reveals absolutely no info about it whatsoever!
New life into an old phone 2
Getting more useful with age
Old phone + new software = Extended life
So I’ve decided to keep my trusty N95 8GB phone going as long as I can. See the other two posts on how I made that decision and what upgrades and installations I made.
So what are the actual differences?
Browser
I now use Opera Mobile as my day-to-day surfing tool. Currently it’s on version 11, from March 2011, which makes it the newest piece of software on my 3 year old phone.
It displays pages on the web properly and has tabbed browsing – I can open multiple windows at once on my phone! The simple keypad shortcuts make it really easy to move around without a touchscreen.
It can even talk to the onboard GPS so I can use location services on websites like Facebook.
It’s great that Opera are still actively developing for Symbian S60. Nokia are working on a new browser, I bet they’re not bothering about older devices.
Maps
The GPS is much faster to lock on using the assisted GPS function which uses the phone’s data connection to give the GPS receiver an initial hint about where you are. I can now get an accurate fix within 20 seconds. This used to take 2 minutes or more.
Loading maps is simpler now with Ovi Suite.
I’ve chosen to stay with Nokia Maps 2 rather than get the new Ovi Maps because of the change they’ve made to navigation. Version 3.01 of Ovi Maps is prettier, but doesn’t include free navigation (even for walking!) and it nags to remind you this and even though there are menus to buy this additional feature, they don’t work.
Nokia Maps 2 still doesn’t do live navigation (although as a much older app the purchase function still appears to work) but you can create routes and step through them manually turn-by-turn, which works almost as well. You can do this in Ovi Maps, but it’s more fiddly.
Ovi Store
Nokia’s place to download apps. This is not well designed for an N95. It’s slow to move around and takes 3 clicks to do anything where 1 would suffice. It’s far more efficient to look for software on the website and get a link sent to your phone.
N-Gage games
Interestingly while I was still getting used to this feature, the N-Gage system seems to have been merged with Ovi and has stopped working. The N95 is not a great device for gaming, and the games for it are slow and fairly expensive when compared with iTunes and Apple devices which can do far more.
One of the games which caught my eye seems not to have made it over to Ovi (save this video walkthrough) was Dirk Dagger. I can’t find it in the new store and the URL is now dead. Still, you can play it on the web.
Sync
This is a neat app which backs up my contacts, calendar and notes. If something happens to my phone they can be sent back to it, and I can access that data online too, although I haven’t found where the Notes data is. I like not having to worry about my contact book anymore. My phone is absolutely my life and the data on it is extremely precious.
Other Apps I use
This takes the 3G signal in my phone and turns it into a mobile wifi hotspot. This is so useful it’s one of the few times I’ve ever upgraded to the paid version of an app. (Dirty little secret: I have an iPod touch, and with this app, it effectively turns into an iPhone)
I couldn’t live without this now. I have 17 radio programmes (I’m normally can’t watch the screen cos I’m doing something else, like walking) I download regularly. There’s no better feeling than knowing your phone is full of great stuff to listen to.
Just the voice version. Much better over wifi than 3G, although perfectly good for instant messages.
Perfectly optimised for a non-touch screens. You can access most functions via keypad shortcuts. Puts Nokia’s inbuilt app to shame.
I’m getting less use of this than I expected, partly because it’s only for wifi use, I would only use it at home and when I’m at home I use my hard disc recorder. Stuff on there is full broadcast resolution and doesn’t expire after 7 days.
Photo sharing
There are plugins for sending photos to both Flickr and Ovi Share. Flickr is very useful but I can’t think of the use for Ovi Share (and likewise Ovi Mail), no one I know has ever heard of it. It doesn’t seem to integrate to anything. Nokia will probably send it the way of N-Gage.
Various IM apps
There’s Fring and eBuddy if you like those sort of things.
My friend Abdo swears by Whatsapp and continually demands that I download it, however I have unlimited text messages (and I’m pretty sure he does) so I don’t see the point of an app which duplicates that functionality.
It’s probably more useful if you have contacts in other countries, but I use FishText for that as it sends real SMS text messages to foreign networks very cheaply.
Conclusion
So that’s the current state of my phone. It does more and for me it’s more useful now than when I bought it. Plus the N95 is a very good reliable phone, with decent battery life.
I think this refresh should see my N95 8GB still in use in 2012, and assuming the electronics keep working, this could well be my backup phone for sometime after that.
If you’re still using an N95 I’d love to know why and if you have any tips you can share. Let me know in the comments.
Yahoo instant message hijack virus going round
This afternoon, I’ve seen what I assume to be two of my contacts on Yahoo infected by some kind of trojan/worm hijack, and a type I’ve not come across before.
It’s very common on Yahoo IM at least to have random users attempt to add you, if you accept a chat bot will attempt to send you a link to their “webcam” or similar and if you click, you’ll probably get some kind of drive-by download infection.
The attack attempt I saw today is different. The virus hijacks the Yahoo Instant Message client and sends out a chat stream to people you already know on IM. So rather than seeing the obvious chat bot from a random user who’s just added you, it comes from someone you already know. Scary and dangerous.
Here’s a transcript of the chat script … I didn’t realise it wasn’t my friend until the link showed up. I bet many unsuspecting people do click through:
contact: you there?
me: hey
contact: will you do me a quick favor and take an IQ quiz for a project im doing?
me: haha sure
contact: I need to see how many people out of my friends get over a 115.
me: what’s my prize?
contact: just go to http://nastytrojanvirus.com/?invitecode=dxk4infa79 and take the test.. if you do ill owe you big time.
me: yeah, don’t think I’m clicking that somehow
contact: please let me know what score you get. thanks so much
me: rest assured I won’t
contact: im going to go cook while you do it
me: what does a bot cook?
contact: BRB, let me know your score when im back!
me: bot bot bot
The link it sends appears to go to a slightly different domain each time (the first was to iqtestingkoia, the second to iqtestinghiki3)
It’s also interesting that the bot appears to both initiate chat sessions and respond to them. The first time I saw the attack attempt, the chat was initiated by the bot. But the second time I saw it, half and hour later, I initiated the chat session with a friend I just saw come online.
Anyone else seen this?
