http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/16/santander_cookie_risk/
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Kernel Crimps Make Windows 8 A Hacker Hassle
Link
Discovery Channel Crashes a Jet Plane — on Purpose: To study how to make air travel safer, scientists crashed a Boeing 727 jet in the Mexican desert for a Discovery Channel documentary.
Link
Vintage tech makes modern music
Link
Staying dry in room full of rain
Link
Samsung Galaxy SIII
As my phone contract with Orange was nearing it’s completion, I decided that I would upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy SIII.
It’s a pretty good phone, running Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, 16GB internal memory, Samsung Exynos 4 Quad SoC based on a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, so it’s not slow! The UI (TouchWiz) is pretty responsive, but a bit different to what I’m used to with HTC Sense – such as the customisable number of home screens. Admittedly, I do miss some of the things that the HTC Desire had – such as a widget to enable the hotspot mode, but there are so many really nice things with this phone – including the availability of Google Chrome :)
The S3 is also my first device which includes an NFC (Near Field Communication) reader, and I’ve found that I can read a number of different things somewhat unexpectedly, including both my bus pass and my passport – I’m hoping I’ll have some chance to play with that technology in the future, especially since I have some NFC tags on order :)
There has also been a bit of a problem with these phones – it was discovered by some researchers that on opening a URL using the “tel” scheme will automatically open the dialler and pre-fill in the number. For example, a link such as the example below will open the dialler and dial 012345:
<a href="tel:012345">click me!</a>
However, some special numbers (called USSD codes) will automatically detect as these special numbers and automatically start something – most phones can be made to show their IMEI number by dialling *#06#. If, by clicking a link such as this your phone shows it’s IMEI, it’s vulnerable to attack. The Galaxy SIII has a special code in it which can be used to run a factory reset without confirmation and without possibility of cancelling it. This could be started simply by clicking a link in a web page. Thankfully, my phone doesn’t appear to be affected by this, but a large number of Galaxy SIIIs out there are vulnerable.
Overall, it’s a brilliant phone, and I’m really glad I got it :)
School Productions – What do they get wrong? – Theatre Tech Geek
Link
http://theatretechgeek.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/school-productions-what-do-they-get-wrong/