Category: Technology

Cool things in technology.

Make Life Miserable for Cell Phone Theives

In one sense, this is awesome. The victim gets revenge. In another sense, this is exactly the type of technology that allows providers to remotely eavesdrop on you. Though now days, it seems to be legal for the government to do in any fashion so that almost makes the point moot.

Anyway, here is a nice little read on an emerging product that I’m certain some will take advantage of.

Your mobile phone is stolen. Don’t get mad, get even.

Maverick Secure Mobile has a new product that will make life miserable for the crook. When the bad guy tries to use your phone or changes the SIM (Subscriber Identify Module) card, there are a number of steps you can take to pester him. You can disable the stolen phone remotely, track the phone’s use and retrieve your data.

How? When you install the Maverick Mobile application, you provide the phone number of a second device (called a “receiving device”) on which to receive any information from the stolen phone. When you remotely retrieve your address book contacts or other data, it goes to the receiving device via SMS or text message.

Now here’s where it gets even more interesting. If you call the stolen phone with the “receiving device” it turns on a speaker and microphone on the stolen phone remotely so you can spy on any calls being made. (The thief usually cannot detect this.) And this may be the best part: you can remotely send a piercing alarm to the stolen phone that the crook can only turn off by removing battery. The alarm goes back on when he puts the battery back in. The program, now in beta, is coming soon.

By Ed Baig

[via: USA Today]

Beware: Charter Internet Sucks Balls

I have never, since 1992 seen such horrible service from an Internet Service Provider. If you have any other options for an ISP, I highly suggest you explore those other options. You definitely won’t find a positive review of Charter Pipeline at any respectable consumer information site. I’m not even talking about not receiving the speeds as advertised or you pay for, I’m just talking about availability. Charter’s Internet service is down more than it is up on most occasions. People pay a monthly fee for their unbelievably shitty service, Charter never pro-rates their bill due to outages on their end. And they will rarely admit to the outage being their fault. The best you can do is argue until you get a certain amount off your next bill. That amount never goes above $15 – $20. That is all their lackies are allowed to issue. In the end, if you use Charter, you overpay for a service that you don’t get to benefit from in the slightest.

You should also get in the habit of checking your bill. On numerous occasions we’ve seen billing errors. It is up to you, the consumer to catch Charter’s mistakes, report them, and make sure you receive compensation. Paying your bill is a hassle in itself. I can’t tell you how many hoops I had to jump through just so my wife could pay the bill over the phone (which thankfully isn’t provided by Charter or it wouldn’t work.)

Don’t dare call any of their service representatives unless you are ready to translate thick Indian accents that will absolutely not deviate from the script sitting in front of them. The scripts they read from immediately put the blame on your end. Before you know it, you will be rebooting your machines, unplugging everything, swapping out cables, etc. All this before they will even type a fucking zip code into their machine to see if outages have been reported. And by the way, they don’t even log reported outages as a problem until a minimum of 10 different people/locations have called about the same issue. So there you are, stuck – and awaiting a bill for service you do not get. How this company stays in business is a mystery.

Here’s a report I ran testing out the connectivity through Charter.
Outage report as seen by new jersey USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:48 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period

Outage report as seen by california USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:57 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period

Outage report as seen by san francisco USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:42:58 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6065 minutes)
** You had 39.84% reachability during the period

Speed test history
------------------
2007-08-01 21:20:42 2824/233 kilobits per second down/up

The results speak for themselves. Up to 60% of the time, there is no Internet connection. That’s pitiful and it just gets worse.
You can read my full review from 2007 here.

A.I. Enhanced Graffiti

More cool tech graffiti for your viewing pleasure. We’ve seen projected graffiti before (see posts below.) In my opinion, the AI is what really makes this pop by seemingly avoiding “boundaries” in the sense that it detects collision points. I could easily imagine this being adopted in a place like Las Vegas.
(Sorry for the vimeo)


[via: todo.to.it]

Previous posts on geek graffiti:
Projector Graffiti
Laser Graffiti
Light Graffiti