CIQ Revisited: Root Your Phones

If there hasn’t been enough reason to root your phone and flash a custom ROM in the past, this whole CarrierIQ mess ought to be the death blow to factory junk. It is a rootkit, and it is ridiculous.

carrierIQ

ciq


What does this thing do? All of this stuff from Verizon’s website:

Verizon Wireless will use the following categories of information:
Mobile Usage Information:

Addresses of websites you visit when using our wireless service. These data strings (or URLs) may include search terms you have used

Location of your device (“Location Information”)

App and device feature usage
Consumer Information:

Information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount
of use)

Demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies, such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner (“Demographics”)

How is this collected? CIQ logs it. In plain text, disregarding https, etc…read this article to be blown away by the degree of privacy infringement.

Moral of the story: root your phone. This garbage is unacceptable.

Conquered it.

Oh? Zelda Twilight Princess? Conquered it.

beating zelda on wii

conquered it.

The hardest part of snapping this pic was avoiding eye contact with Katie, who was on the couch laughing at me. Tradition is tradition.

As I was preparing the shot, I noticed that my phone was picking up the infrared LEDs from the Wii sensor bar…

wii sensor bar infrared

infrared-y

I had pegged the Wii bar as a passive unit…a la IR receivers only. I guess I was wrong, and now have an urge to rip one apart. But I digress.

This game took me ages to complete…feels good to be done with this one. Not quite as fun as Ocarina, but Twilight was a good time. Rumor has it that the new Zelda for Wii is borderline unreal…look for me to post a ‘conquered it’ picture on this site in 2016.

BOC Unboxing

It (still) never rains…

boc woot

crappy woot crap is bag of crappy


The second woot bag of crap is equally as crappy.

…as much as I like refurbished ethernet routers, I think BOC round two wins. Winning being on an inverted scale, whereas less crappy is awarded more points.

I can chop up USB Guard Dog for its infared sensor, and the small Swanson girl will play with the caped monkey. Win win for the win…

Bluetooth Servo Control Redux

The project is wrapped. I have fully shown servo control via bluetooth, via Android, via IOIO. +3 via

usb b gone

no hands

The easiest way to test this, by far, is to snag the app on the Android Market. Here:

servo bluetooth

market-y

This does require a newer version of the IOIO bootloader than is currently shipping from units at Sparkfun, but details can be tracked down at this Google Groups area on how to update. It will work standardly, with a USB cable.

From there, you can take a look at my code on GitHub.

push to git hub

pushed

I haven’t included the IOIO libraries, but that will be part of the Eclipse setup if you decide to start hammering out some code. I can provide some guidance if anyone is in need of any.

Take a look. I bumped the SDK minimum again, in order to ensure that this function is intact. If this causes any hardship, I can relax the requirement.

Anyhow, take a look at the app in action in the previous post. Cheers.

24/7 IT Support

As a dude who makes his living in the software-as-a-solution CRM software world, I appreciate the subtleties of Application Hosting when it is done right. I am in SaaS engineering, or as every “tech” reporter likes to spew, cloud-based services. It is what it is…and often times it is helpful.

One good thing about the whole notion is the upside of not dealing, physically with servers…

24 7 it support

servers schmervers

Hosting, IT support, consulting, troubleshooting, guaranteed uptime…the whole thing becomes a mess when you are attempting to serve basic business needs. Serve some pages, offer some interfaces, transact. It all adds complexity by the bucket-load when taken from a concept to an implementation.

There are serious gains to be had with cloud hosting…take that complexity off of your books. To the cloud!!!!

ComputerSupport.com does what its name implies…namely offer computer support. Instead of paying a team to maintain your back-end, you focus on your interface design and workflows, and let them mash out the details. Guaranteed, and supported. Best of both worlds.

IOIO Servo Controller v2.0

I’m preparing to publish a project utilizing the new bluetooth library for the IOIO. I started horsing around with my IOIO Servo Controller application, and finally got frustrated with the lag that was existing between my slider bar and the servo. I never pulled my improved function from my IOIOSeek work over…it was overdo.

Anyhow, I sort of cleaned house and put together an improved interface, and pushed it to github.

push it

push it

Here is a quick vid of the new app in action:

I pushed a new apk to the Android Market as well. If you have it installed, it should update in the morning. Here is a sneak peek of the updates:

*Optimized code to alleviate lag between slider bar and servo positions.
*Increased minimum version requirements, for future bluetooth connectivity
*Added function to keep slider in an inactive state until IOIO connection made
*Cleaned up code to remedy force close situations
*Remapped PWM pin from 5 to 10 for consistency with my other apps
*Removed text field of slider position / on board LED
*Simplified layout for smaller screens

I pulled some function, but am more than willing to reintroduce the relative readout and/or on-board LED display. I am trying to go simple with this one, and ramp it up once I can figure out the lag that the bluetooth connection will introduce.