WhatsApp - Facebook and Telegram messenger as an alternative

With the recent buy of WhatsApp messenger by Facebook (Reuters article), a lot of my friends are concerned by the enormous amount of data that Facebook can lay is hands on in the future.

CREDIT: REUTERS/DADO RUVIC

Some of them are because of privacy concerns not using the Facebook app so that Facebook isn't able to search through your personal data on your mobile.

WhatsApp that is able to access your contacts, dial phone numbers, send SMS, knows your location, can search for other accounts on your device and many more 'features' is quite some value for Facebook and other companies that are interested in that information. Nowadays WhatsApp is free of commercial advertisements, but will that remain in the future? Since Facebook makes money with these ads, probably not. But that is just my speculation. My concern is more in the amount of privacy related data that Facebook is able to gather, knowing that Facebook will use it.

An alternative then? Well, you might look at Telegram (https://telegram.org/). With a lot of features also on security level like message encryption from end-to-end, the ability to 'self destruct' a message on both ends of a device gives a user a lot more control. And no advertisements, just like WhatsApp.

Read for yourself the other nice features of Telegram, decide if you want to switch to it, until Facebook will buy it and we have to look for an alternative again...

Telegram logo from their website.

Disk speed test Linux

Just recently I was wondering what my quickest disk on my laptop was to store some files. I ran across a nice Linux tool that is worth sharing here: hdparm
Accessible as root (or sudo).

There are many options (just run it without any params to see them), but what I used was:

hdparm -tT /dev/sdb1

with this result:

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing cached reads:   12622 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6315.83 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  76 MB in  3.05 seconds =  24.92 MB/sec

The above results are from an USB disk, but I also ran it on my internal disks.

For the fun some results.

USB strick
/dev/sdd:
 Timing cached reads:   10842 MB in  2.00 seconds = 5424.47 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  38 MB in  3.02 seconds =  12.57 MB/sec

USB disk
/dev/sdc1:
 Timing cached reads:   15708 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7860.72 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  74 MB in  3.02 seconds =  24.47 MB/sec

SATA disk
/dev/sda3:
 Timing cached reads:   13126 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6568.08 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 258 MB in  3.01 seconds =  85.83 MB/sec

Android disk size app

Well, here it is. My first Android app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.disksize

Disk Size

Just a small app that shows you what files on your sd card are present, and the size of the files. This sorted from large to small.
Only two options for now. Top 10, or All files.

The app is developed as a learning project, but when you are learning, you might as well make something useful. So improvements will followa when learning new skills for the Android platform!

Google Hangouts permissions

Half May Google swapped my 'Talk' app to the new 'Hangouts' app. No problems there, completely without any user interaction. Ok, not always desirable, but in this case the app rights were the same as for 'Talk'. 

The next step was to update Hangouts in Google Play. What I noticed was that Hangouts needs more permissions to access my phone than Talk. Looking at the possibilities of Hangouts, not strange. But in my opinion a bit too much. 


Some examples:

• YOUR MESSAGES
• READ YOUR TEXT MESSAGES (SMS OR MMS)
  Allows the app to read SMS messages stored on your device or SIM card. This allows the app to read all SMS messages, regardless of content or confidentiality.
  RECEIVE TEXT MESSAGES (SMS)
  Allows the app to receive and process SMS messages. This means the app could monitor or delete messages sent to your device without showing them to you.
  SEND SMS MESSAGES
  Allows the app to send SMS messages. This may result in unexpected charges. Malicious apps may cost you money by sending messages without your confirmation.
  READ INSTANT MESSAGES
  Allows apps to read data from the Google Talk content provider.
  ...
  ...
  YOUR SOCIAL INFORMATION
  

  READ YOUR CONTACTS

  Allows the app to read data about your contacts stored on your device, including the frequency with which you've called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific individuals. This permission allows apps to save your contact data, and malicious apps may share contact data without your knowledge.

  
  

  (source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.talk)

  
  

  So if you thought your SMS/MMS messages were relatively (!) private, with this app in time Google really knows you very well. Especially with the Social Information gathering in the last bullet. 

  
  

  In a way I understand why Google would want to collect this information. Reading the article on Tech Crunch about incorporating a SMS service in Hangouts it even makes more sense. 

  
  

  As with tons of other apps, install it as you wish, but keep in mind that the information on your phone is shared with more companies than you probably want to.

  
  

  Well hopefully the app brings me lots of joy in life or else it moves out of my phone again. 

Google Drive - no upload methods - solved

Google Drive is available for some time now so maybe it is a good moment to test it for a project I am working on.

On a Windows 7 test laptop with Internet Explorer 8 I logged into my Google account and opened the Drive tab. But clicking on the upload image resulted in the message: No upload methods available. Please check your system configuration.

That is strange... So I installed Google Chrome (and as it seems on Linux you can use Chromium as well) and tried it again. And now with a positive result!

Solution: install a Google browser: Chrome or Chromium.

Probably there will be other solutions as well, but it seems rather strange to me that Google Drive does not work on an IE 8 environment out of the box...

FireFox move to new window - rejoin

The current release of FireFox I am using (15.0.1) has this great feature to move a Tab to a new Window: "Move to New Window". What can be achived by right-click on the tab and choose the Move to New Window option.

I use it when I need to switch between two windows a lot with the ALT+TAB keys in stead of the time consuming switching between two Tabs...

But now the question: how to move the New Window back to a Tab again? Until now I did not find any solution for this. Feature request for the next release?

Keep up the good work there at Mozilla!