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The headphone problem with Android 1.5 phones

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Weird problem to have with a phone, and is yet another eye-opener for me. Plugging a headphone into your phone doesn’t somehow automatically make it aware of the headphone; you need software to make it aware, and that software for Android 1.5 phones is now here. Okay, let me now describe the problem a bit more in detail.

I’d got a HTC Hero phone (yes, shamelessly lured by the Android promise) about a couple of months ago. I had been a happy user with lots of applications installed, uninstalled, regularly used, etc. Happy, that is, until my headphones stopped working about a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure when exactly it stopped working, nor am I sure whether it was after installing the last.fm application from Android Market, but stop it did. Until yesterday, I was confident that it was something to do with hardware. (Had my brain worked, though, I shouldn’t have been so confident.) In fact, I remained confident even after a friend casually mentioned that it might be something do with some setting on my phone (this was justified as there isn’t any such setting of course).

However, after calling T-Mobile customer care yesterday and agreeing to send my phone off to repair at a nearby T-Mobile store, I woke up early this morning, unable to sleep further (since I’d hit the sack last night at an unusual hour for me – 8 pm! (Or was it 9? Can’t quite remember!)). Anyway, as I was surfing, I stumbled on to this thread and realised, again, that I – or rather, my phone – was not afflicted with a unique problem (tangentially, here’s a thought: can phones be afflicted with problems, even if they happen to be called Android?). Two things are immediately clear:

This is a widespread-enough problem that a fix should to be included in the Android 2.0 update
There’s a fix available today!

What should also be clear to developers is the extent to which software controls nearly every aspect of the phones that we use, even down to recognising if a headphone has been plugged into those tiny devices that we’ve come to love.

Tags: android, earphone, google, headphone, phone, problems
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Quick GMail Tip

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Do you use GMail? What? You’ve never heard of it? Don’t give me any more lame excuses to not do so, go on over to http://mail.google.com, and create your own account now. I mean, NOW!

For those of you veteran GMail users, the benefits of this webmail service are quite obvious: it’s fast, it’s got terrific spam filters (I’d swear it’s the best I’ve ever seen in a webmail service), the conversation view of emails is an example of superb innovation that the Google guys have become known for and, this tops the list, you can even use the service to read and compose emails when you’re offline (though you have to go online again to send mail)! Yes, Google’s got the offline Gears too, so all you have to do is click on the link (if you use Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox), and install Google Gears (if you use the first-named of the browsers, you don’t need to: it comes pre-installed).

Then, head on over to this excellent tutorial to learn how to create your own Labels. This new feature now comes with colour-coding too, so if you’ve set up filters and labels, you can tell at a glance whether your new emails require your immediate attention. That’s what I call helpful.

Tags: gmail, google, tips
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You’ve slipped, Google

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Oh, how the mighty slip (even if they don’t fall)!

Hype aside, I was taking Google Chrome out for a spin by pointing it to Gmail, and here’s what hit me.

Did you notice the missing images on the page, including the Google Mail logo? I was somewhat amused to see the message, “Some of the elements on this page came from an unverified source and were not displayed.” Google’s browser couldn’t verify the authenticity of the images that were being served from their own servers? I wonder what it was that it couldn’t verify. Quite ironical, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s a rather trivial error – some of the images on the page were coming from an http server rather than the https server that the page itself was being served from, as the image below confirmed.

Tags: google, slip up
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Google Talk Desktop Client – Security Lapse

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

As I exploited a rare server lapse in my office’s network settings, the thought of logging in to GTalk crossed my mind, and I gave in to the temptation. Along came another thought – that of sniffing at the HTTP packets leaving my machine, and I fired up my copy of HTTP Analyzer to do the same. What I found out was not very reassuring.

This is the scene: you have a Google Talk desktop client which you use to log on to Google’s chat service. You type in your username and password, and click on sign-in. You wait a few moments, and find yourself signed in. All nice and fine. What you wouldn’t know is that, unlike your GMail account, login to which happens through a secure sockets layer (SSL) in addition to client-side encryption, the GTalk client sends your login credentials in clear-text, or the HTTP equivalent of clear text, HTML-encoded text. Of course, as any programmer knows, this is trivial to decode. All you need is a scientific calculator which can do hex and / or a quick Javascript program.

I looked through the Google Talk website for a place to report this security hole and, to my chagrin, couldn’t find any. I looked at various Google Groups to see if they have a place where I could report this finding, but I couldn’t locate any. A Google search turned up only this: http://www.nta-monitor.com/posts/2005/08/googletalk.html, which is very closely related to my finding. In fact, I was appalled that such a closely related problem had been left unattended for more than three years!

Should you be worried?

No, not unless you surf the Net from an unreliable or unknown cyber cafe / browsing center. If you’re logging on from home, then you should be worried only if you’re the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack (not very likely, realistically speaking). In that case, your Google Account password would be up for grabs, and it would be time for you to either switch to the GTalk client in GMail, or the Talk gadget, or in the worst case, a new Google ID.

If you’re a Google employee reading this post, and would like more information, you can reach me through my blog. However, my guess is that your colleagues would be able to give you more extensive inside information

Tags: google, google talk, issue, loophole, security
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A novel approach to philanthropy

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

These days, it’s quite fashionable for a corporate entity to announce its philanthropic ventures. Some of them take pride in their ventures even when their actions clearly inform us that such pride is quite undeserved. However, this company that I really admire, Google, takes an off-beat approach to giving, and that’s something that it can’t really help since thinking differently is in its DNA.

Okay, here’s the link.

Tags: google, philanthropy
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Existential Me

Posts Tagged ‘google’