Nexus One

originally posted at 73 Wire Business and Technoloy

As I said in the earlier quick review, I give the Nexus One a big thumbs up.
There are many things to like about the Nexus One. The speed of the internet compared to the Pearl I had is like night and day, and it is also a full browser. Also I love the WiFi connection ability, even thopugh the 3G connectivity is pretty fast also. The only problem with the 3G or T-Mobile connectivity is in my house if I am in the basement. But any phone will have problems connecting there, I have not had a phone work that well there anyway.

The iPhone may have more apps in their market, but how many apps can you have. I have many for traveling, such as the DC Metro app for when I am in DC later this year for CPAC. And many others for sports scored, and even one to steam up the screen on the phone. So the Android Marlet has pretty much anything you want. I still have not really tried any of the games, but I am sure there are many good ones there also.

The Phone itself works great as a phone. I can hear clearly the voice on the other line and the best thing it has is the microphone noise cancellation, so the people on the other end can hear better if you are in a loud place. So as just a phone it works as good or better than most other phones.

Pros and Cons:

Pros:
1. The screen is very clear and you have 5 home screens to place all of the apps you want to use to easily find them
2. The great web browser that displays a full website, now using wap. I am sure that some of the other new phones are just as good also
3. With a 5 megapixels camera, the pictures you can take are very good. And if I want a better picture I can always use my digital camera.
4, I can also use WPtogo app to post on the various blogs I post to that use the Word Press platform

Cons:
1: Battery life is not that good. On my old Pearl I did not have to charge it for about 2 days usually, but with all the power and apps on the Nexus One, it is going to use battery life faster.
2: The spealers are on the back of the phone. So it sounds better if you have the phone laying on a table better than holdoing it up. But to listen to musio, it is better to use the ear phones anyway.
3. This is a con for now, but the online keyboard is hard to get use to. But I am sure that eventually it will get easier.

But the Nexus One is an excellent phone for anyone that wants to have a powerful phone for using the internet. Google Maps also is very good on the phone and with the GPS you can find almost anything you want to visit.

I have not gotten paid for any of this review and have no connection to Google or HTC.

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We can use help in all areas, but especially in my area Technology.    Join us and help us bring the news the MSM will not tell, and join with a bunch of other Liberty minded folks wanted to take back the country from the elites in DC .

I know that 2009 was not a good year for us, but we can take back the country from the political hacks in Washington, be they Republican or Democrat, makes no difference.   We are at a cross roads, and do you want our country to be something that you can be proud of in the coming years, or do you want to go down the road of Federal tyranny.

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Eric Odom talks 2010 Tea Party efforts

Google wave

originally posted at 73 Wire Business and Technology

OK now that I have been playing around with Google wave for a while now, I will give my thoughts on it.

Google WAve looks to be a very useful tool for collaborating and Brain storming

Collaboration: Google Wave can be used much easier than regular email. You can have everyone on the same wave and interact in real time, instead of waiting to receive an email. With Gmail or any other email system you have to wait until the email is received in your inbox, but with Wave you can see the others typing in the wave. This makes Collaboration very easy and very fast. Also another great tool or extension for collaboration is the iframe extension. With this you can add a google docs page into the wave and have everyone edit it in real time, instead of sending it back and forth over email

Clicl here for the video showing it in work

You can also use the iframe extension for embedding any website, such as Google.com, a blog or a news site. http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml

Brain Stormimg: Another great extension that you cna use now is the Brain Storm extension. This is good way to collect people’s thoughts on a project: http://www.madin.jp/gadget/index.xml

click here for the video

There are a whole lot of ways you can use Google wave in a collaborative blogging situation, news site situation, educational situation and many more uses.

There are some downfalls as of right now. It is slow at times since it is on a server used by google for everyone. In the future you will be able to host it on your own cloud. There are still some bugs in the system also. Sometimes you can not see if someone is online or not. And the invite only it is hard to get everyone you want on it.

But in all I think it will be a very useful tool for collaboration. education and various other situations in the future.

I will keep on playing around with it some more and probably have some more reviews later on.

Internet Explorer Exploit

Originally posted at 73 Wire Business and Technology

Well, another day and another exploit on Internet Explorer. IF you have an older version of Internet Explorer, you need to update it now. And only go to reputable websites.

A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future. When this happens, attackers will have the ability to insert the exploit into Web sites, infecting potential visitors. For an attacker to launch a successful attack, they must lure victims to their malicious Web page or a Web site they have compromised. In both cases, the attack requires JavaScript to exploit Internet Explorer.

The exploit targets a vulnerability in the way Internet Explorer uses cascading style sheet (CSS) information. CSS is used in many Web pages to define the presentation of the sites’ content. Symantec currently detects the exploit with the Bloodhound.Exploit.129 antivirus signature and is working on new signatures now. Symantec IPS protection also currently detects this exploit with signatures HTTP Microsoft IE Generic Heap Spray BO and HTTP Malicious Javascript Heap Spray BO. A new IPS signature, HTTP IE Style Heap Spray BO, has also been created for this specific exploit. To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft. (Symantec)

Or change your web browser to FireFox, Opera, Chrome or many others that are safer than IE Explorer.

via Slashdot

And on the Drums, Steve

originally posted at 73 Wire Business and Technology

What do you get when you put a whole bunch of engineers together and a drum kit????? Steve

On the Radio- Introducing 73 Wire!

Tonight on Italian Tomatoes, the team from 73 Wire will be on.  Steve Foley, Eric Odom, Dave Hinz andothers will join in the fun.  I might even drop by to say a few words

Tune in tonight at 9PM ET, 8PM Central, at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ItalianTomatoes/2009/11/10/Introducing-73-Wire

First iPhone Worm Targets Jailbroken iPhones [WARNING]

originally posted at 73 Wire Business and technology

via Mashable
Everyone has been “Rick-Rolled” but this is a little much. Sophos has the story about how the new worm changes the user’s lock screen wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley:

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

On each installation, the worm – written by a hacker calling themselves “ikex” – changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message:

ikee is never going to give you up

As with most worms out there, it is mostly a script kid out there just making life a little more chaotic. The worm does not seem to have any real harm other than changing the user’s lock screen wallpaper on the iPhone.

…
The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.

….

The worm’s author appears to have realised that people might be interested to learn why he wrote the worm, and posted this explanation inside the code:
Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn’t anyone RTFM anymore?

Always be careful when unlocking a phone or jailbreaking for the iPhone. Jailbreaking is used to give the iPhone more functionality to the iPhone, but always change he password when you do jailbreak the iPhone, and use a strong password with capital letters, numbers and symbols in it.

This Blog

I may not be posting as much here, due to the fact that I will be the Editor for all things Geeky at 73 Wire’s Business and Tech blog.  So do not be alarmed of the lack of posts here.

Also go on over and check out the Business and Tech blog for 73 Wire.  And check out 73 Wire for news and political views and opinions.

And if you want to write for any of the sections at 73 Wire, either email me or go to 73 Wire or email Eric or Steve from 73 Wire.

Do not worry I will still be doing Fun Fridays and posting my random babbling here also.  I will just have less time to devote to this blog though. I do not think I will be posting as many of the daily cartoons, but I will try and get the best of the day’s cartoons up.

And follow @73Wire on twitter also

73 Wire

I am going to be the Managing Editor for the Tech part of the new 73 Wire news site.   I will be doing stories on all things geeky.  And if anyone oput there wants to post there give me an email or leave a commment.

They are also looking for writers in various subjects.

I do not think it is live yet, but I think either late tonight or tomorrow it will go live.