Google Glass “unlocked”

Yesterday there were some rumors about the Google Glass which has been shipped earlier this month to the “Explorers”, the chosen people who paid 1500$ to be among the first to try the Google Glass.

Rooting Glass is easy and the founder of the Cydia Jailbreak store Jay Freeman tweeted this. Shortly after that the Technical Lead of Glass posted on his Google Plus Page. “We intentionally left the device unlocked … I mean, FFS, you paid $1500 for it…” If you want to follow the discussion that is going on, a stop would the following reddit threads.

• Technical Lead of Glass: “We intentionally left the device unlocked… FFS you paid $1500 for it
• Hackers confirm Google Glass “root is easy”, let the modding begin

The Samsung S4 Sales startet

As of this week the Samsung S4 is now available. If you live in Switzerland and want to get one, a possibility is digitec.ch. They have quite a few Samsung I9505 Galaxy S 4 – 16 GB – 4G – White Frost on stock. You can even get one with a Swisscom, Orange or Sunrise contract. If your two year contract is up you can extend it there aswell and get the S4. The S4 shipping date on the Swisscom homepage is for example set for the middle of may.

If you’re interested in some reviews you can stop by at cnet or techcrunch. Both criticize the plastic fabric of the case.

Papers.ch News

We recently launched our new Services Page where you can get a detailed look at our Services and request an offer. We will update our homepage soon with a responsive design, to improve the mobile view. And we’re working hard on a new App which will be realeased first on Android, more information will follow soon.

Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays!

I was always struggling with copying files onto iPhones since I had my first one. Apples concept of limiting the access to your own phone was never a favorite view of mine. With every mp3 player or “smarter” phones I had before, like the Nokia N-Gage (which probably not many of you know but I had really fun with both version of it), you could usually just copy the files you wanted especially music with drag and drop onto the device.

iTunes.. was and still is sometimes a curse for me as a Windows user. It seems like every time I start it, there is another update. Oh and don’t forget the crashes and freezes. Yes, it got better since then, but I’m still not a big fan.

If I wanted to listen to some music on my iPhone, I had the music already on my computer and didn’t buy it through the iTunes Store, you had to undergo quite the challenge. Letting iTunes detect the folder, renaming the albums and music files properly so they were detected right and an album cover would show up, connect your iPhone with your computer and choose which songs you want then finally copy it. Sometimes the covers wouldn’t appear on the iPod App or they were all of a sudden duplicated. But enough of this, I wasn’t the only one who had those problems.

Around a year ago, Lukas showed me Spotify on his Phone. And I was really blown away, that was what I was looking for! I tried out Grooveshark, Internet Radios and other streaming solutions before but there was always the platform limitation which I didn’t really like. One major thing that I didn’t like from the beginning about Spotify was the Facebook only login ut I had to see past that, I’m really not a big friend of Facebook but that’s another story.

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a cloud based streaming services with a huge library containing millions of songs, I couldn’t find only a few songs. If you like a song you can star (favorite) and/or add it to your own playlist. You can share every song or playlist with your friends or even subscribe to playlists from complete strangers. You only need your login and you can access your music from everywhere. I’m currently using Spotify on my iPhone, Computer, MacBook and my BoxeeBox. If you buy their premium you can use some more features like making your playlist available offline or streaming on your phone.

Spotify comes also with own Apps which you can use at the moment on the Windows and Mac Client. For example the interactive music station Sounddrop App, where you can join a channel of the music genre you like and vote for the next songs and chat with people that have the same taste like you. This is something I particularly like.

Let me sum up my personal pros and cons for Spotify:

Pros:

• No need to copy any files
• Access on any platform you like
• Access to milions of titels everywhere
• Sharings songs and playlists
• Spotify Radio based on genre, playlists or songs
• Spotify Apps like Sounddrop

Cons:

• Standalone Client required on PC and Mac
• Album management not that good
• A lot of ads with the free version

As you can see I’m quite the fan of Spotify and I got myself Spotify Premium. I’m okay to pay 13 CHF.- per month if I can access my music everywhere I want to. You can try out 30 days of Spotify Premium.

Spotify Feature Overview

I’m very happy to announce that Auto Bluetooth won an award. A German print magazine rated the app with 4 out of 5 stars. You can find the review on page 37 in the issue #4 of magazine “Android Apps“. The conclusion is:

German: Die App macht nicht viel, aber sie hilft effektiv, den Akku zu schonen.

English: The app doesn’t do much, but it effectively helps to save  battery power

And honestly, that’s what Auto Bluetooth is about. We were really happy when we received the email last week, for sure we directly went to the next newspapers store and bought the latest edition. Take a look at our new award:

Since it was published,  the download counter instantly increased from a daily average of 400 to 600:

We also want to say thankyou to Android Mania, they made a review of Auto Bluetooth as well:

You can read it over here.

It’s nice to see that our effort is always rewarded in the end. Therefore we want to say thank you for your great support. We will keep working on Auto Bluetooth, a new version is comming very soon!

Since I was always interested in IT security related questions, I did some research in the last days about the current hot topic “Whatsapp security holes”. There are a lot of interviews with different security experts and they always confirm that WhatsApp has security issues, but they don’t give specific advises how to avoid them.

This is why I want to explain the basic issue and give you some advises how to prevent them.

The security problem

WhatsApp was originally developed to be used as easy as possible. I assume therefore they decided to push it to the market without any registration. For sure they did a registration in the background (else you woud just need to have the phonenumber), but this was just a mechanism in the background. This would be a nice solution, if they would give you the possiblity to change the password! As soon as someones got the combination between phonenumber (which is quite easy to get -> just ask the person) and this automatic generated password, they can read your messages and even send them in your name.

How the mechanism works:

On Android

Long time this mechanism was a secret. Till Sam Granger reverse engineered it for Android and published the result to his blog. Basically it just takes your IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identitiy), reverses it and calculates the md5 checksum from the string:

On iOS

Six days later, Eizo Amodio did the same for iOS. There it’s even worse (I explain you later why), since iOS doesn’t allow you to read the device IMEI number, they take the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the wifi adapter instead:

How to avoid the problem:

On Android

The Android guys are in the better situation than iPhone users. The IMEI is the unique device id, which is not published anywhere compared to the MAC address. Still, there are some things you should keep in mind:

•  Avoid apps which requests the following permissions in combination:

• android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE
• android.permission.INTERNET

• Don’t throw away your phone packaging, usually the IMEI number is printed on it.

On iOS

• Be careful which apps you install, especially if  you download apps from the cydia store
• Just connect to Wifi networks you can trust or where you are anonymous

Possible solutions:

The solution is quite easy, if the user would have the possiblity to change the password, Whatsapp would be way more secure than it is at the moment. The disatvantages for the WhatsApp company are obvious:

• The user experience is worse, the users have to go through a registration process first
• The API would be open for everyone (well it is already anyway )

Opportunities

Well, we already did some experiments in the last weeks. Since the API is basically open to everyone, you can use it for whatever you want.  For example you could build a Twitter to Whatsapp client or a webclient for WhatsApp (there are already some projects going into this direction). Maybe you can follow us on WhatsApp in the near future