Boot up: Bitcoin chasers, Nexus vulns, better spreadsheeting, going viral, and more

Plus developing on Android, mobile tablet sales, MotoX woes, details from the Nokia v HTC judgement, and more
businessman looking at a spreadsheet
Spreadsheets: too many times, the flaws are hidden because you can't see the logic flow. Photograph: Alamy


Nexus phones carry SMS crash bug vuln >> The Register

A Dutch security researcher has published a vulnerability that allows someone to crash a remote Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 phone – by sending them a crafted "Class 0" text message.

Instead of falling into a user's inbox and waiting for someone to read the message, a Class 0 or "flash message" pops up immediately as a message window that the user is supposed to decide whether or not to save.

On the Nexus phones, according to Levi9's Bogdan Alecu, the flash message is displayed above all active windows, with a semi-transparent overlay dimming them.

The bug that turns this into a vulnerability is this: Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 don't give audio notifications of incoming flash messages. So an attacker can pile message upon message on a victim until the phone begins to misbehave.

In this presentation to DefCamp 2013, Alecu identified various impacts of an attack in which more than 30 messages are sent to a target: either the messaging application crashes, or the phone reboots, or Internet access collapses.

He says Google has known of the vulnerability for a year without fixing it.

Slate: easily visualise spreadsheets >> Kickstarter

Fraser Atkins:

We are building Slate because we have personally experienced the frustration of debugging and interpreting complex and poorly documented spreadsheets.

Excel is an incredibly powerful tool. It is great at creating complex models out of simple calculations. However, it is all too easy for models to become overly complicated and almost impossible to interpret.

Worse still, when you inherit someone else's spreadsheet, problems can be amplified.

Slate allows you to visualise your spreadsheets in a quick and simple way.

With Slate, mistakes are much more obvious and resolving errors is as simple as following the trail of calculations back to the source.

What it really lets you do is visualise the connections between cells in your spreadsheets - which can be the difference between getting it right and getting it very, very wrong.

xperia z1 touchscreen problems >> Sony Support forum

When scrolling down randomly zoom in or highlighting!?? When playing games after few minutes unable to move or aim. It does register single touch but when i try to draw a line, after few cm cuts off. This is very annoying!!!

Surprising number of people reporting this problem.

Building Android-first >> Christina Cacioppo

Compatibility between different versions of Android 4, for the most part, isn't hard because of the backwards-compatibility built into newer OSs and open-source projects that bridge gaps.

This isn't to say Android works well all the time, because it doesn't. The worst breaks happen when hardware manufacturers modify the version of Android they're using without leaving any documentation. In effect, they're breaking the Android APIs, and they do so on a device-by-device, sometimes telecom-by-telecom basis. [5] In our experience, it's most common when the software tries to control the hardware, as device manufacturers often have to implement those software methods. The undocumented hodgepodge of implementations is hugely discouraging for developers (like us!) who want to use device hardware (the camera, GPS location, accelerometer, etc.) in apps.

Right now, that probably means fewer Android developers use hardware functions in their apps, and some Android apps don't stack up to their iOS counterparts. Longer term, I suspect Android developers will become savvier about developing for a subset of Android phones.

A fascinating blogpost where the footnotes are at least as informative as the main post.

Why everyone will totally read this column >>

Farhad Manjoo:

[Neetzan] Zimmerman gets to his computer at around 7:30 every morning and begins scanning a feed of more than 1,000 sites that he has identified as highlighting viral content. He scrolls through the feed quickly, spending just a few seconds assessing each item. He looks at the subject of the story and the major themes it might elicit: Is it cute, outrageous, heartwarming, hilarious, anger-inducing? He scans the "metrics" on the post—the number of Facebook likes or Twitter mentions—which are often a sign of incipient virality.

Because he's constantly scrutinizing his traffic to figure out why certain posts do well and others don't, Mr. Zimmerman also keeps a running list of "hot" themes in his head. "It might be that right now, people don't care about stories about cats that much, and instead, sloths are more popular," he says. "So I'll have a rule—cats are out, sloths are in, focus on sloths because that's going to be your meal ticket."

The whole process happens very quickly. "Within 15 seconds, I know whether an item is going to work," Mr. Zimmerman says. He usually has a headline ready to go a few seconds after that. "It's a biological algorithm," he says. "I've put myself into the system—I've sort of become the system—so that when I see something I'm instantly thinking of how well it it's going to do."

I just chased him through a bitcoin tumbler, and when he came out with 96,000 BTC, I was waiting for him... : >> SheepMarketplace

It's not cyberspace-coining William Gibson, though he might feel envious, but a user trying to track the thief who emptied a Bitcoin exchange:

I've been a very busy boy. All day, we've been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind "Tomas".
He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I "666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.


He was tumbling our stolen bitcoins a second time, and a tumbler is unbeatable....

Unless you guess which one it is, nearly all the coins belong to the person you're tracking, jump in with him, and get jumbled up through the same wallets using the same algorithm.

Black Friday mobile PC trends and long term impacts >> DisplaySearch Blog

Early holiday buying indications support our forecasts that call for nearly 66% of second half tablet PC shipments to have screen sizes smaller than 9in. We expect small sized tablet PCs to continue to account for the major share of the market through 2017. We also expect ASPs [average selling prices] to continue to drop from $341 for 2013 to $279 by 2017.

Though foot traffic in the notebook PC sections of the stores we visited were high, sell through was modest. The twist for notebook PCs was that touch panels were more heavily promoted on notebook PCs this year as compared to last year with small signs indicating touch capability. The majority of notebook PCs had touch panels with only a handful of models having "mouse" interfaces.

Though touch is being better promoted this year versus last year, we are expecting adoption to be modest for the second half of the year with a penetration rate of around 10% for the second half of 2013 with the penetration rate for the full year reaching 11%, or 19.8m units.

Moto Maker tool still offline as Motorola swings and misses with its Cyber Monday sale (Updated) >> Android Beat

From Monday:

Motorola had big plans today — it was going to take Cyber Monday by storm with an incredible deal on its Moto X handset. The thundering opening to its handset sales quickly fizzled out when Motorola's website went down under what was likely a crushing load of eager customers.

Starting at 9AM EST, Motorola started selling its off-contract Moto X handset for a mere $349, allowing people to customize the handset via its online Moto Maker tool. Shortly after sales kicked off, Motorola's Maker website went belly up, and the company had to suspend sales of its custom handset.

Proof, if it were needed, that Motorola isn't that closely integrated into Google.

HTC Corporation v Nokia Corporation [2013] EWHC 3778 (Pat) (03 December 2013) >> Bailii

Fascinating what stuff you can find in commercial judgements:

The relevant market in the present case is the UK smartphone market. This market is both valuable and growing rapidly. It was worth about $7 billion to device vendors in 2012, and is projected to be worth $9 billion in year ending 31 December 2013. The market is presently dominated by Apple (which has 39% of the market) and Samsung (which has 33% of the market). Both Nokia and HTC are relatively small players: Nokia has 6% of the market and HTC has 3% of the market…

The UK is HTC's largest market in Europe. HTC's current flagship model is the HTC One. The HTC One, One Mini and One Max currently account for approximately 70% of HTC's sales in the UK. The other phones currently being sold by HTC in the UK are the 8S and the Desire 500. In December 2013 HTC will begin selling the Desire 300 and Desire 601. The One, One Mini, One Max, 8S and Desire 601 all contain infringing chips. It is not clear whether the Desire 300 does or not.

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