Lock patterns

2 weeks ago
Surprise, your Android lock pattern is just as bad as the combo on your luggage:

More than 10 percent of the ones she collected were fashioned after an alphabetic letter, which often corresponded to the first initial of the subject or of a spouse, child, or other person close to the subject. The discovery is significant, because it means attackers may have a one-in-ten chance of guessing an ALP with no more than about 100 guesses. The number of guesses could be reduced further if the attacker knows the names of the target or of people close to the target.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

10 Comments
Tags: computers, doomed, phones, security

Star Trek Communicator Bluetooth Handset

2 months ago

2 Comments
Tags: phones, retrocomputing, toys, tv

GIF Keyboard

4 months ago
This app is going to make me intolerable:

It's an iOS keyboard that lets you communicate solely in animGIFs.

You have to agree to let it completely sodomize your input stack to install it, though, so I eagerly await the report about how it's phoning home every character you've ever typed.

"Uzani_his_army.gif! Shaka, when the lulz fell!"

Play him off, keyboard made of cats.

Incidentally,

The Unicode Blog: Unicode 9.0 Candidate Emoji:

The Unicode Consortium has accepted 38 emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, scheduled for release in mid-2016. [...] These emoji have been accepted as candidates for Unicode 9.0 for a variety of reasons. They may be needed for compatibility with emoji characters in existing systems. For example, the FACE WITH COWBOY HAT was accepted for compatibility with the emoji used in Yahoo Messenger.

CLOWN FACE
LYING FACE
CALL ME HAND
SELFIE
FACE PALM
CROISSANT
BACON
BATMAN

That all seems just so quaint now, doesn't it?

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

8 Comments
Tags: firstperson, mpegs, perversions, phones, pranks

Tender

4 months ago

3 Comments
Tags: mpegs, parts, perversions, phones, pranks

Unicode character 'REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED' (U+1F595)

4 months ago
Windows 10 gives users the finger with new emojis

Unicode 7.0, standardized last June, added 2,834 new symbols to its lexicon. Around 250 of these were emoji, and operating systems have been updated in the months since to include support for many of these new pictograms.

However, one of the Unicode 7.0 emoji has gone unimplemented: the catchily named "Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended," codepoint U+1F595. Or as it's known in common parlance, the finger.

iOS, OS X, and Android all omit this important and expressive gesture. The emoji obsessives of Emojipedia, however, noticed that Windows 10 bucks the trend and includes support for the one finger salute. As with other emojis representing humans and their body parts, the flip the bird emoji supports Unicode skin color. By default, it uses a non-human tone -- Windows 10 uses grey for this, in contrast to iOS's Simpsonesque yellow -- but it can also be shown with a variety of roughly humanoid skin tones.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

1 Comment
Tags: computers, phones, pranks

Emoji taxonomy:

5 months ago

4 Comments
Tags: computers, monkeys, phones, poop, www
Current Music: Vanbot -- Make Me, Break Me ♬

iOS passcode brute-forcing hardware

6 months ago
MDSec:

We recently became aware of a device known as an IP Box that was being used in the phone repair markets to bruteforce the iOS screenlock. [...]

What is surprising however is that this still works even with the "Erase data after 10 attempts" configuration setting enabled. Our initial analysis indicates that the IP Box is able to bypass this restriction by connecting directly to the iPhone's power source and aggressively cutting the power after each failed PIN attempt, but before the attempt has been synchronized to flash memory. As such, each PIN entry takes approximately 40 seconds, meaning that it would take up to ~111 hours to bruteforce a 4 digit PIN.

4 digits: 4 1/2 days. 5 digits: 45 days. 6 digits: 16 months. 7 digits: 12 years.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

9 Comments
Tags: phones, security

Great news for schizophrenics!

6 months ago
Strangers on the Internet Are Listening to People's Phone Voice Commands

I signed up for CrowdFlower myself and tracked down the post enlisting workers to analyze the voice-to-text examples, for one cent per 10 voice recordings they analyzed. [...]

"Consumers have a certain expectation about what's happening when they interact with a company. People don't like it when they think they're talking to a computer and they're not or vice versa," Soghoian told me.

And as one of the people who did listen to these recordings, I can understand why. There was no personal information or any way to identify the voices in the brief, one-to-five-second snippets. But there's something about hearing a total stranger say "love you. Send." that feels transgressive.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

16 Comments
Tags: computers, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, phones, robots, security
Current Music: A Spectre Is Haunting Europe -- See You Inside ♬

Apparently Apple would prefer that I not activate 2-factor auth.

7 months ago
I was thinking about enabling it on my Apple ID, but that seems to be impossible.

I have no idea what the answers to my "security questions" are -- if I ever filled those out at all, I almost certainly just pounded my fists on the keyboard until the prompt went away -- and the alleged option to reset them using my recovery email address does not exist. Apparently the only recourse at this point, despite having two verified email addresses and a credit card in their system, is to call them on the phone and speak to some flunky like an animal.

So no 2-factor for me, I guess. Well played, Apple. Well played.

Previously.

20 Comments
Tags: computers, firstperson, mac, phones, security

Jesus Fucking Christ, iTunes.

7 months ago

This is a new one. This time it randomly decided that only most of my music is now Other.

Are there any tools that will let me diddle the phone to turn Other back into Audio without deleting and re-syncing it all?

Failing that, I am now accepting suggestions for ways to sync MP3 files from a Mac to an iPhone without going through iTunes or iCloud or any other cloud service, and without jailbreaking. Does that exist? (If you are thinking of suggesting something that does not precisely match all of those criteria, please don't.)

Previously, previously.

16 Comments
Tags: computers, doomed, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, music, phones