Posts Tagged ‘Mobile’

Richard Stallman explaining Why IPads and Cell Phones are bad for freedom

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

It is a public secret that Mobile Phones which does us very good and generally makes our daily lifes way easier are also a big enemy to our natural ihnibited freedom. Life has become such that it is almost inevitable to do any business or do a daily simple jobs without using Mobile Phone. There is almost none practically today that has wilfully rejected to use the mobile phone on any basis, almost anyone except some strangers like Richard Stallman and probably few others security freaks.

I've been shocked to find out the Father of Free Software (Richard Mathew Stallman), well known in the hacker dome as RMS does not own and didn't use any mobiles. The concerns he pointed are very much logical and rightful. Owning a mobile is a great security hole in personal privacy (mobile phones can be easily sniffed by Mobile Operators) as well as anyone wearing a mobile can be tracked up to 5 to 2 meters to the exact location where he is based on the mobile phone cells to which the mobile is connected.

Many people are not aware actually of the severeness of the issue of constant tracking of people everywhere through this call "goodies". Many mobile operators are already running a software which is building place behaviour patterns of every user of their mobile network. In other words, as we're used to bring and use the mobile everywhere in automated program is creating a map for each number assigned in some of the mobile operators. The gathered data about our location going habits can then be easily used as a indicator for predicting our future behaviour, bying habits (how many times we go to super-market), how many times we go to cinema, what kind of interests we hold etc. etc.
This combined with Google, account monitoring could possibly create a system similar to the old movies Big Brother, where all people goods and even attitudes or desires is monitored, influenced and controlled ….

The severeness of the future implications of this constant "personal surveillance and tracking device" as Stallman use to call it is very dangerous for our freedoms.

I tried to live without a mobile phone, just like Stallman for about months, and to tell you the truth the world around seems completely different when you decide not to use 'em. The time I lived wihtout a mobile, clearly show me we have come to the point we cannot any more live without GSM. We fall the trap of dependanding the little "talk box" communication for absolutely everything, obviously sacrificing privacy and freedom for convenience.
Mobiles are just one side of the coin, as the non-free software which is ruling the software market and the use of computers puts another treat and takes away many foundamential freedoms we used to have in the less technological world.

Apple as a vendor of software and hardware also denies and breaks our freedom very badly, as the company tracks everyone who owns anything created by apple connected to the internet. Besides that non-free software producers, could change the user software with a press of a button giving them the opportunity to decide what is good and bad for us, leaving us at a state of a helpless dependable users.

The topic of technological little-by-little enslavement, we're going through nowdays and the denying freedoms, we experience while being convinced by companies that we became more free by each next mambo-jambo gadget or by owning the latest smart-phone is very huge and complex but unfortunately underseen in society. I don't understand why, is it due to the low technical skills of mass users is it due to a "not-care what will happen in future" attitude, but obviously people openly discussing or protesting the technologization taking away our freedom is almost zero ….

Here is the video I found in youtube in which Stallman is asked few, questions on Ipads (IBADS) and Mobile Phone use. I believe his short explanation synthesizes the problem quite well ;;;;

I just wonder after you check the video, Would you still accept an Ipad as a birthday gift ? :)
Do you still think cell-phones are "good" freedom safe and reliable ?

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How to configure VIVACOM 3g USB ( internet ) modem HUAWEI Mobile broadband E173 on Debian and Ubuntu GNU / Linux

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

I've been given a HUAWEI Mobile Broadband E173 USB 3g model. The USB modem contains a flash USB Storage segment storing a little install program dedicated to make the modem work fine on Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 and probably other M$ OSes. I'm a long time DebianGNU / Linux user and as a free software enthusiast I ofcourse wanted to be able to use Vivacom's 3G USB Modem on my Linux powered notebook.

Thanksfully as I've red on Vivacom's website the modem supports Linux OS :)

For those unaware in Bulgaria there are currently 3 major GSM network providers providing 3G internet this are;;;
 

  • VIVACOM – The ex Government ran national company BTC (Bulgarian Telecommunication Company)
  • M-Tel – The first GSM network provider that entered Bulgaria around year 1995
  • GLOBUL – The 3rd and last GSM mobile and net provider entered last and not so much used by Bulgarians today

Until today I had no experience in running any 3G modems on Linux, neither I had used the 3 networks 3G internet to determine which one is best, however I've been given for temporal use a VIVACOM 3G internet modem today so I proceeded to try installing it on my Debian host.

My Linux system is a bit strangely configured as I use wicd network connection manager -( wicd-gtk ) to manage wireless and LAN connections instead of the standard installed GNOME network manager – available through package ( network-manager-gnome ).

The reason I use wicd is not that it is so much better than GNOME network manger but rather for historical reasons because few years past I had impression it works better in connecting me to wireless networks. Another reason why I choosed wicd back then was the nice looking stats …

I tried plugging in the Vivacom USB 3G modem stick and checked in wicd to see if I can see a possibility to connect to the mobile opeartor 3G network but unfortunately nothing appeared.

Though the 3G adsl modem was unavailable straing in wicd, checking about it in the list of attached USB devices I could see it detected, e.g.:

noah:~# lsusb |grep -i huawei
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 12d1:1c05 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

This was at least a good sign pointing me to the thoughts that the modem is probably gonna work.

I did a quick Google search to see if other people succeded running the device on a Linux host and came across a few blog posts in Bulgarian explaining a "success story" on Ubuntu Linux through using a tweakened shell script – sakis3g. For more on how the script works and script download check out Sakis3g

Here is a quote from sakis3g's website describing the script:
 

It automagically setups your USB or Bluetooth™ modem, and may even detect operator settings.
You should try it when anything else fails!

Sakis3g has different versions designed for for plenty of spacific hware architectures i.e. for (i386, amd64, armv4t, armv5t).
There is also a version of the script which by the way contains a combination of bash shell scripting instruction and some binary exec data.

To run sakis3g on my laptop I did:

1. Download sakis3g

My notebook architecture is 64 bit so I download and used the amd64 version of the script;;;

hipo@noah:~$ mkdir sakis3g
hipo@noah:~$ cd sakis3g
hipo@noah:~/sakis3g$ wget http://www.sakis3g.org/versions/latest/amd64/sakis3g.gz

I've made also a mirror of sakis3g i386, 64 bit and all architecture the mirrors just in case it disappears in future. The mirror versions of sakis3g are here:

a. sakis3g i386 b. sakis3g amd64 c. sakis3g all architectures source

2. Unarchive and make it executable

After downloading it as it is in gzip I had to do the usual de-gzipping and making the file executable;;;

hipo@noah:~/sakis3g$ /bin/gzip -d sakis3g.gz
hipo@noah:~/sakis3g$ chmod +x sakis3g

The script is then ready to run by either clicking twice on it or (as I prefer for debugging reasons to run it in terminal):

hipo@noah:~$ ./sakis3g

Something that I have wondered a bit was the dialog where I had to fill in some data of some variable APN abbreviation for – (Access Point Name)

The APN host for VIVACOM mobile internet is;;;
APN: internet.vivacom.bg

I've used the Windows configuration progrma to gather also the following data that I thought might be important for configuring the 3G adsl modem on the Linux host;;;

Auth: *99#
User: VIVACOM
pass: VIVACOM

Here are all the configuration screenshots I've taken from sakis3g and all the data that I filled in.
Next the following tiny window appeared on screen:

Sakis3g configure usb modem kdialog shot 1 VIVACOM USB Modem Sakis 3g Shot 2 sakis 3g usb modem vivacom connect screenshot 2 vivacom 3g modem linux sakis3g enter pin dialog shot 4 Sending pin screenshot 5 sakis3g APN Dialog sakis3g screenshot 6sakis3g Internet Linux VIVACOM screenshot 7sakis3g Debian GNU Linux VIVACOM 3g Internet screenshot 8sakis3g initializing modem screenshot 9sakis3g successful connect to VIVACOM mobile 3g usb adls modem shot 10

Well that's all folks, now sakis3g succesfully connected to the I_net via an (PPP) VPN connection tunnel here is data from ifconfig command showing the succesful 3G connection to VIVACOM;;;

noah:~# /sbin/ifconfig ppp0
ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:10.58.146.232 P-t-P:10.64.64.64 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2066 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1609 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:2232058 (2.1 MiB) TX bytes:341693 (333.6 KiB)

The internet via the 3G connection is not blazing fast but good enough to check your mail or read some webpages. VIVACOM currently has different (traffic limited packages) for their 3G internet, I'm not sure which package exactly is the 3G USB stick modem but probably the "quick" internet connection that is now would slow down once the traffic limit is reached …
Hope this post helps someone to configure 3G internet on VIVACOM in Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Though I've tested sakis3g on Debian it should work with no hassles on any other GNU Linux distribution that has bash installed.

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Three Ways to Reduce Addiction to Mobile Phone ( GSM ) use

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Mobile Phone Caricature Reduce Mobile Addiction / 3 ways to reduce mobile phone addiction / Use your Mobile less

1.: Don't use a ring tone or use a short landline phone ringtone on incoming calls

In the past, we all had a local stand line phones, most of the landline phones rung using a very specific ring sound which was almost identical on all phones around the world. This ringing tone used was following some telephone standards. The result was everyone could distinguish a ringing phone in a room or closed space and tell for sure, this sound is generated by a phone. Nowdays with the boom of cellular phone ringtones, there is almost noone who uses a standard old-fashioned telephone ringtone as a ring melody.

The consequence of this is in our minds we start loosing the boundary between whether communicating on the phone or communicating without it.
In younger people this boundary between phone line and a physical communication is more evident than in adults (as youngsters has grown in society where mobile was used everywhere). The implication of this is more and more people are starting to perceive mobile communication as so natural as the person to person communication. Spending big part of the day talking over the phone mostly senseless things, not being consciously aware that this is done due to a heavy phone addiction and repeating behaviour trait stored sub-consciously.

Today everyone chooses a custom mobile phone ringtone melody (popular or impopular) song and sets it up to be a standard incoming call signal. As you can guess there are consequences on the mind, as the ringtone set is heard ten times or more a day during each and every phone call. The result is just like with alcoholics or drug addicts, the more you take from a certain "good" the more attached you become to it. Hence the more we listen to a certain song chunk daily on incoming calls, the sub-conscious becomes dependent on hearing this sound at least a number of times daily. If a day passes without no-one calling us and we don't hear the ringtone indicating a call the sub-conscious stored dependency starts popping up and we could start feeling lonely and we feel like calling someone (and we often do). Obviously this is dependency and even if someone might argue me this is a severe addiction which as every other addiction could be very dangerous and hard to fight.

As I prior said due to the fact that the phone use dependency is built in our minds starting with the phone ring melody, we can reduce this dependency by switching off the phone ringtone completely or at least changing it to a unique beep which is not likely to be heard or seen somewhere in your surrounding environment.

By setting the ringtone to some popular song we see on (TV, Radio or Internet on daily basis) this might become a trigger for us to associate hearing this sound with talking on the phone and hence make you increase the time you spend on the phone ,,, so be careful ,,,,

2.:: Stop Mobile Beeps and sounds on menu navigation

All new mobiles sold on the market are configured to have buzzling sounds on events and various beeps on keypad lock / unlock and menu navigation.
This sounds are there mostly to make you more alert and concentrated on using your mobile and often as a consequence whether one uses his mobile his awareness is comletely taken by the phone screen (you're totally "absorbed" by the phone use).
Besides designed to alert you the Managers and CEO's who decided to have a heavy beep sounds on mobiles made it having probably something else on mind? The beeps on keypad navigation makes the user emotionally and sub-consciously attached to the Cell Phone. The idea here is like in popular music streamed on radios and TVs and mostly everywhere …. The more you listen to a song, the higher the mind trait it leaves in you, so later when one hears a music pattern or a whole song, which he / she listened already thousands of times this brings back "good" old memories. It is very simple actually our minds are constructed in a way that the mor certain "information" is heard / saw / smell the bigger the mind influence this leaves on us. Back to the mobile sounds, the more you use the mobile phone with turned on sounds, the more addicted and mind stucked the beep and melodies during use of the cell phone becomes in the mind. For example many people take a look at their mobile automatically (without being consciously aware) and do the activity of (unlock) and (lock) the phone screen not knowing they do it automatic. More or less we all do such an auto-mated learned behaviour because of the subconscious dependency that is built in our minds. Whether we lock and unlock the mobile phone almost robotically, we do it because our sub-conscious mind plays a trick on us and "force" us to do a previous learned activity (association in our mind with the unlock / lock beep sound).

3.::: Use your mobile in different ways

Any modern mobile is quite advanced in functionality and there is more than one way to initiate a phone call. E.g. the mobile has a shortcut buttons assigned to do quick phone calls, quickly evoke SMS menu etc.
Learn them and occasionally use the shortcut buttons instead of the menu navigation. Our minds like changing patterns and doing things different.

Even if you have no chance to do a things via a certain menu, you can always change the position of the phone screen to different distance to eyesight :) You can for example type on the keypad following the menu steps by watching from left or right eye periphery or you can use the menus with your phone screen turned backwards :) If you're used to type on the keypad or touch screen with right hand try doing it with the left hand :)

This will take time but the fun worths it. Plus the most valuable thing in using the mobile in different ways each time is there is no specific inflicting pattern associated in your mind and hence the depepdency set in your sub-conscious mind on phone use is lesser.
Actually there are too many various "hacks" one could come up with on how to use mobile as differently as possible. It is up to your imagination. Though using the mobile "each-time-different" can be sometimes more time-consuming it surely makes your phone use amusing.

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SWITCH OFF your Mobile Phone and TV at night to save energy!!!

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

TURN OFF YOUR MOBILE PHONE AT NIGHT to SAVE ENERGY and MONEY

We’re constantly being said to reduce energy consupmtion, they sell us new bulbs to save energy, new TVs with energy saving. The newer the computer equipment microwaves or whatever home electrical equipment we buy the more it is said to be saving energy.

So far so good it is true we can reduce energy consumption by producing gadgets which consume less. However there are also another approach to the “green problem” which we never are said about.

It is rather simply instead of saving energy on technology base, we can save energy on physical base. One simple thing to do to save energy with no need to spend money on latest advacement gadgets is to simply make it the old school way.

a -= Learn to switch off your lamps and home equipment whenever its not necessery

If you’re about to go to sleep, you can simply switch off the mobile and use a mechanical clock to wake you up on the morning, this way you have 3 benefits.

1; Less energy will be discharged by the mobile in the time you’re not awake, so you don’t need to charge so frequently the battery and therefore you will draw less energy from the Electrical network hence saving energy.

2; You will not be radiated with a bit less radiation produced by the Mobile phone in order to stay connected to the GSM local located cell.

Though the good this does will not be dramatical it for sure will be better for your health than if the mobile is switched on the whole night.

3; You will not be awakened in morning by some crazy person who just decided to call you early in the morning.
Often this morning unexpected and desired phone calls make you jump off the bed rapidly and hence giving a large dose of stress to your organizm.

-=- Of course switching off the mobile has some disadvantages if you can receive a crucial phone calls during all time of day or night you can’t afford to simply switch off the mobile, this is however not true for most people who work in an OFF-ICE.People working in offices can simply wake up at a scheduled time, get a shower do their morning hygiene and jump to a car or bus to the office so the need for having the mobile switched ON at night is not really needed.

Of course thinking in the same direction, it is logical that switching off the computer earlier when not needed, the wireless home router or the TV is another place from where a huge energy savings can be achieved.

If large amount of people re-learn their energy in-efficient habits to be more energy cautios a HUGE amounts of energy can be saved. This of course can have a positive impact on the monthly energy bills and hence can save you money in monthly expenses.

The TV is surely another big energy draining source, many people have the habit to sleep with a Television switched on. Besides this has a negative impact on the conscious since vast amounts of information are being stored and processed by the conscious and unconscious mind, also the lights emitted from the TV screen prevents the persons body to not have a pieceful rest.

Its rather stupid that companies are constantly ranting on how they improve their products to be energy friendly but they don’t invest even a penny to educate the masses that energy saving does not only depend on how good the technology is produced to save energy but also on how much the people are educated how to use the technology with energy saving in mind.Probably there are plenty of other ways a households can change their habits to save energy. I’ll be glad to hear some other suggestions ,,,

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How to increase brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PI22515 notebook with Slackware Linux

Friday, March 9th, 2012

Increase LCD screen brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop with Linux Slackware

A friend of mine has Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop and is full time using his computer with Slackware Linux.

He is quite happy with Slackware Linux 13.37 on the laptop, but unfortunately sometimes his screen brightness lowers. One example when the screen gets darkened is when he switch the computer on without being plugged in the electricity grid. This lowered brightness makes the screen un-user friendly and is quite tiring for the eye …

By default the laptop has the usual function keys and in theory pressing Function (fn) + F8 / F7 – should increase / decrease the brightness with no problems, however on Slackware Linux (and probably on other Linuxes too?), the function keys are not properly recognized and not responding whilst pressed.
I used to have brigtness issues on my Lenovo notebook too and remember how irritating this was.
After a bit of recalling memories on how I solved this brightness issues I remembered the screen brigthness on Linux is tunable through /proc virtual (memory) filesystem.

The laptop (Amilo) Fujitsu Siemens video card is:

lspci |grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)

I took a quick look in /proc and found few files called brightness:
 

  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD05/brightness

cat-ting /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness all shows not supported and therefore, they cannot be used to modify brightness:

bash-4.1# for i in $(/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD0{1,3,4,5}/brightness); do \
cat $i;
done
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>

After a bit of testing I finally succeeded in increasing the brightness.
Increasing the brightness on the notebook Intel GM965 video card model is done, through file:

/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness

To see all the brightness levels the Fujitsu LCD display supports:

bash-4.1# cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
levels: 13 25 38 50 63 75 88 100
current: 25

As you can see the dark screen was caused cause the current: brightness is set to a low value of 25.
To light up the LCD screen and make the screen display fine again, I increased the brightness to the maximum level 100, e.g.:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

Just for the fun, I've written also a two lines script which gradually increases LCDs brightness :)

bash-4.1# echo '13' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness;
bash-4.1# for i in \
$(cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness|grep 'levels'|sed -e 's#levels:##g'); do \
echo $i > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness; sleep 1; \done

fujitsu_siemens_brightness_fun.sh script is fun to observe in changing the LCD screen gradually in one second intervals :)

Here is also a tiny program that reduces and increases the notebook laptop brightness written in C. My friend Dido, coded it in just few minutes just for the fun :)
To permanently solve the issues with darkened screen on boot time it is a good idea to include echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness in /etc/rc.local:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

I've also written another Universal Linux Increase laptop screen brightness Shell script which should be presumable also working for all Laptop models running Linux :)

My maximize_all_linux_laptops_brightness.sh "universal increase Linux brightness" script is here
I'll be glad to hear from people who had tested the script on other laptops and can confirm it works fine for them.
 

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TalkonAut Free Program to use Jabber protocol on Apple IPad (IBad)

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

 

TalkonAut Free Mobile Phones and Apple devices java program logo

I've installed Jabber as a platform for internal company communication for a company. It was a requirement for this jabber server to be accessed from a different type of computers / devices different in size, hardware and OS e.g. (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Ipad, mobile phones etc.)

Happily there is plenty of free software programs which allows access to jabber for free. On the major operating systems GNU / Linux, Mac OS X and Windows the client jabber accounts are working fine with the wonderful free software Pidgin The Universal Chat Client

One of the jabber clients, however was primary had to be used on Apple's proprietary IPad / IBad as Richard Stallman likes to call it ;)

The person who had to have the Jabber protocol working on IPad program was not a proficient user and therefore I had the task to find a program to be able to talk to the Jabber protocol for him.
A quick search in Google for jabber ipad client led me to few programs said to support Jabber on Ipad :
 

 

  • BeejiveIM for IPad
  • Jabba

Jabba was looking quite, nice but unfortunately costs $1.99 and should be purchased in Apple's App Store and it was preferrable not to spend money on a trivial thing as a Jabber client.
I gave BeejiveIM a try but it required some very complex registration, as well as again required to be purchased (if I remember correctly), so it wasn't an option either.

Then thanksfully, I found TalknOut which is free and it is a perfect jabber client for Apple Ipad
Talkonaut is a program also supporting both Jabber (XMPP) and GTalk2VoIP, hence supporting Google Talk and MSN/Live Messanger.
It is written Java and therefore works on any device that has Java installed. Talkonaut supports the following mobile architectures:
 

  • Apple's IPhone and Ipad
  • Google Android Phones
  • Many of the Nokia Symbian's S60 3rd and 5th edition "smart" phones
  • Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x
  • Java J2ME based phones

Installing TalkonAut is a piece of cake from Ipod's Safari you click on the Install link and it gets installed. I will not get into details on how it is configured as this also is pretty easy.
Here is how it looks like on Ipad after configured and the user is logged in Jabber:
TalkonAut Jabber XMPP Mobile client Apple Ipad Screenshot

Something really unique and nice for the program is the way the chat dialogs gets ordered, the idea to place one person's sending on the left side and the replying one on right is innovative and something I've not seen in another chat client ;)

TalkonAut Sender and replier message on different side screenshotTalkonaut should also support VoIP (voice conversations), between mobile users, I'm curious if somebody used the program for VoIP and can share feedback?

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Computers Technology use, Internet, Mobile Phones and all kind of technical screen based equipment alters negatively the human brain

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Computers Internet and Technology evil terminator picture

According to latest scientific research conducted in Stanford University USA .

People who actively use computers and internet has been the object of the research in 2009.

Social Networks, Tablets Smartphones etc. provides more and more possibilities for us to access information.

Most of modern people today tend to loose approximately between 8 and 10 hours a day either using Internet, a PC, Word-excel, their mobile phone or some kind of other mobile gadget like let’s say IPAD.

Most of today’s technologic goods we use to make our lives easier are multitasking.
The brain itself is not adjusted to work in such a multi-tasking mode as a direct consequence of being in contact with this multi-tasking for a long periods of time it gets altered.
Suddenly it starts being multitasking, or in other words starts processing information in parallel.

As the amount of information is constantly increasing online and we’re in contact with more and more information and moreover the altered way of our brains which starts working in multi-tasking the brain-overflows or (information brain overlow) is starting being more and more occuring event.

The consequence of this complexity is starting to impact us seriously as we tend to get addicted to technology usage and day by day it seems that the amount of information our brains are able to process is decreasing.

Logically enough the long-term consequence of a an internet addiction or any kind of technology addiction, plus the tremendous amounts of information we do think over daily is starting to show up the negative consequences on our psyche and (soul)

The brain starts changing the way it gets information as it adapts itself to “not remember”, as the information to be processed daily is so much that it couldn’t really comprehend it.

A good example for multi-tasking which if not all most of the users on the Internet today use daily is one of terriblest things ever created facebook, in my of my previous articles I’ve blogged about why social networks are big evil read it here and it seems this new information about brain altering caused bhy multi-tasking is just another supporting reason on why it’s better not to use social networks like facebook and twitter.

The endless amount of information according to the Stanford University research has prooven that the endless amount of information is pernicioufor our (brains) minds and is in many ways similar to the excessive amount of sugar in the body.

The scientiests which conducted the research does recommend to heavy computer and tech users (like me), to self-control themselves and be on a tech-diet (e.g. not use technology completely for at least 1 or 2 days every week).

Another serious damage which was prooven according to Stanford’s scientiests research was that people’s brains who have a severe exposure to internet or phone usage tend to have very serious problems with contentration and are very easily distracted.
This in a long term surely leads to a chaotic way of living obviously.
Suddenly it seems technology to be slowly becoming even more deadly and destructive than drugs.

Many people would say this kind of research is not true, but I can confirm that for instance many of the proven facts are things I have experiences myself in my daily life, so I believe what the research has prooven is mostly true.

This research was just another one after a month before other scientiests has prooven that Mobile Phone use leads to alteration of the brain chemistry
Apart from all the said negative consequences of use of technology for human brain is the problem with technology today heavily used as a way to spy on personal privacy I wonder be glad to hear in the comments section for other people like me who have problems with concentration and have a very short time memory (I myself have serious problem with that one).

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New critical Adobe Flash Player security flaw allows a malicious attacker to get access to Windows, Linux, Mac OS and BSD

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Flash swf Player artistic logo exploit

A new zero-day exploit for the Adobe Flash Player has been published on http://exploit-db.com .
The exploit published is targetting Windows 7 systems.
Even though the published version of the exploit is said to affect Windows 7 installations, the shellcode with this proof of concept exploit (PoC) could surely be changed to a one that would also take effect in Linux.
Most likely Linux exploitation will be a harder task to achieve, however thesecurity advisory issued http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa11-02.html recommends an immediate update of the flash player.

According to some rumors the 0 day adobe flash vulnerability has been exploited since a long time to get access to confidential U.S. governmental documents.

A classical ways said that malicious hackers uses is by sending a flash (.swf) containing email, by simply opening the email attachment the victim gets exploited.

Adobe officially has reported, there are no official information if attacks has targetted other company software like Adobe Acrobat Reader which supports embedded flashes.
According to Adobe Adobe Reader is not vulnerable to this kind of attacks as it uses a protected mode which would mitigate the attack (though I hardly doubt this claim).

The affected versions of Adobe’s Flash player are:

  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Windows
  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Apple Macintosh
  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Linux and Solaris
  • Flash Player 10.2.156.12 for Android Mobile platform

as well as the Authplay.dll library used by Adobe’s Acrobat Reader

Earlier versions of Flash player are also affected by the critical security vulnerability.
There are already rumors that the exploit is exploited using a crafted (.swf) files embedded into Microsoft Word .doc files.

This new critical vulnerability is another example clearly showing how insecure a user who has flash enabled in their browser is.

According to preliminary information, exploitation of this critical security flaw can be sucessfully achived in most (if not all) browsers …

By so far browsing on Linux was always considered to be a way more secure than on Windows, with this issue rising up this kind of believe is questioned.
Surely many Linux distributions and FreeBSD and BSD derivatives used as Desktops will probably not package timely newer version of the adobe flash (flashplugin-nonfree) package on time

Today the flash player is a de-facto standard and is wide spread among most modern internet connected operating system obviously it’s unificated use, creates unified problems.

The example with this flash security issue is a good example against why non-free technologies should not be set as standards.
If the flash player and standard was free and everybody could create and distribute flash players for free. Such a vulnerability affecting so many operating systems and so many browsers would never come true

To sum it up, this issue will surely create a lot of problems and opens a serious security hole for us the Linux users.

Therefore be sure to update your flash player before someone has exploited you through the web.

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Thanks to God I’m in Arnhem the Netherlands! :)

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

I had 3 days trip with bus with my girl classmate (Ina). We traveled using the union-ivkoni bus lines. As a wholebeing on the road with bus for 3 days in order to reach some destination is pretty killing. We started the historicaltravel from Kavarna to Sofia and then at 2 o'clock we catched the bus Sofia -> Utrecht. There was big delays in the Serbianand the Hungarian borders. On all the other boarders we and our luggage weren't checked. We had a bunch of stops on a oil stations.And I have to note everything in the oil stations in europe is pretty expensive. For example one sanwdich costs somwehere aroundalmost 4EU!. I and Ina came at Utrecht at around 6 o'clock and went to the Utrecht's train station where we took two tickets to Arnhem.At 7 we were at Arnhem and went to the bus station. Originally we expected that there are gonna be welcoming students there and HAN university buses traveling from there to Vivare and the other accommodation places, unfortunately this was not the case. We were absolutely alone at an unknown country again I prayed to God in Jesus name to help me find a way to fix this mess. I went to search for Mobile SIM card, at the end after 20 minutes of walk I asked a police officer near the train station and he told me about a bookstore where I can find mobile SIM cards. I took two of them one for Ina and one for me. I took the T-Mobile mobile. I heard that the prices of conversations between the Bulgarian GSM operator Globul and T-Mobile are cheaper so I decided to give it a try. We called Koko (A College Colleague, who is gonna study HRQM just like me and is going to continue as a 3rd year student in Arnhem Business School, he came instantly in 20 minutes or so with another Bulgarian guy who already studied a year in Arnhem (Drago). Drago didn't helped much with the traveling bags. But Kaloyan helped a lot. Today I feel the grace of God so real. I pray that he keep me and guide me in the same way in the future too. Another thing to note is that the living room that Vivare selected for me or should I say God make it be for me is just perfect. It has a toilet (!big plus!, a terrace, аsink, a nice bed, A Buro, a lamp and a chair. The room number is with ID K. 111. I think 111 stays for the Holy Trinity (The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit) to Whom is and be the Glory the worship and power now and Forever and Ever, Amen!) I forgot to mention that I blocked my mobile telephone while trying to make the T-mobile SIM card work with my Motorola C115, luckily God has thought for this too. It seems Koko has one Mobile apartus he didn't need right now so he gave it on a good will to me. Again what I can say Our Lord is an awesome God. Now I'm pretty tired and I'm going to bed. I have to mention Arnhem is excitingly charmful city and I really like it, also I'm impressed by the Dutch guys with which I had any work until now.Well for final I can only say: " I screamed to the Lord and he heard my prayer and delivered me from evil"! Glory to you Lord of Hosts! Amen !END—–

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