Author: Damian

It’s no secret most people love Verizon in the US of A.  It’s red like the flag and their blood.  Through numerous scandals, mergers, acquisitions, and privacy concerns, Verizon remains number one in terms of subscribers at over 150 Million for Q4 2017.

Verizon Wireless knowingly and willfully handed over private subscriber data including call metadata to the NSA, as revealed by Edward Snowden 2013 as part of the then classified PRISM and XKeyscore Programs.  This violated the peoples reasonable expectation of privacy on a telephone call, and violated thier faith that such a massive company would protect their data as it traveled over the Internet using their wireless and wire-line offerings.

Don’t Buy VPN services from a company that sold you out to the US Government only 5 years ago, buy it from somewhere else with some bitcoins.  You wouldn’t ask this guy to be a security guard at the town McDonald’s, so please separate your wireless provider and VPN provider.  It’s a conflict of interest and referred to as a  “Defense in Depth Strategy“.     

Google announced an update to it’s developer policies for the Google Play Store, Mainly targeting the following types of apps, some of which have been targeted unjustly or rightfully so.  The choice should be yours as a consumer to make, so we’ll just present the facts to you now.

1. Cryptocurrency Miners.
2. Apps selling firearms and accessories.
3. Apps that aim to trick children into downloading adult-themed apps.
4. Apps built using automated tools or wizard services, or based on templates.
5. Other apps as Google sees fit.

These apps are can be defined as malware, but some smaller developers use automated tools to make android apps, and now must distribute their .apk files via other means.

Sony has announced it has developed the new IMX586 smartphone camera sensor.  Here’s a few quick tidbits about it.

1. It’s a CMOS based sensor with 4 stacked parts in one package.
2. It measures 8mm diagonally.
3. Like most cameras, end user software implementation will make or break the quality.
4. The extra resolution will be used to help in low light photos, and for long distance shoots.
5. Even when cropped by 400 percent, you’ll still get a 12 megapixel photo, which is fine to most people.

Any Sony smartphone camera or standalone camera will be top notch in a few months time if it wasn’t already, and their imaging software is designed to make the most of their sensors.  If you can find other devices that use the IMX586 sensor, those are good options for picture people.

If you have heard of amazon, surely you have heard of their smart home and voice assistant product, Alexa.

Among other things it can:

1. Search things for you.
2. Play music.
3. Tell you the news, such as local weather and sports.

But now you can ask it to adjust the music using sound equalization presets.  This would mean you could ask Alexa to crank the base, or tune the speakers for a book differently.  It shouldn’t take an audio engineer for you to enjoy music at home, so amazon built one into Alexa for you.

So, this is called DTP for short, but what exactly is it, and why should you care?

1. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter all came together for this.
2. They pledged to make it easier for people to move their information from one respective cloud system to the other, and have more control over who has what.
3. This was a reactionary measure based on the GDPR compliance forced upon Google by the European Union.
4. Users can try out different cloud services and see which works best, and their data follows them and is secured.
5. This means you can try email, social media, pictures, and more from all 4 and move your information to the final destination of your choice.

Note that apple is distinctly absent from this accord, as is Sony.  However, Sony complies with more vendor neutral standards like micro USB, and android than apple.  Apple should be more consumer friendly and become compliant with DTP or they may be fined in the future.

Data Tranfer Project Whitepaper