Dandandin.net

In September, I made a small accounting app for a company. To make it more "safe", instead to save data locally, I opted to save them on the cloud, to have them available on all devices.

I try some homemade solutions, as I liked to have total control over my data. Then, since there were many problems - security, reliability, speed - I chose to use a solution that's already done. I opened an account on

• Parse.com
• Kinvey
• StackMob

and I evaluated all of them. I found them almost the same. At the time, Parse was recently acquired by Facebook, and StackMob was joking on their quality of service, publishing a guide to migrate to their servers. I trusted them, and I wasted some months developing my app over their cloud.

Then, in december, I go on their website and I read a shock news: StackMob is enthusiast to join PayPal!!! This is a disaster!!! PayPal/eBay is known to pay millions to buy companies to cripple them (for example: Stumbleupon) or even just close them!!!

What a pity…

I told myself: "Well, for my next apps, I'll use Parse, for now I gonna keep StackMob"

Then, just randomly, I go to see their website and I see that their service is under immediate closing!!! THEY CLOSE TODAY!!!! Again, a vital service shuts down without sending a fucking email to their customers!!! What the hell!!!

Luckily I managed to export my data, but I have to waste a lot of time to replace every StackMob function with a Parse equivalente.

Assholes.

A few days ago in Google Play appeared iMessage for Android.

It's not a fake app, it actually works: the problem is how it works.

Since Apple doesn't allow chat between other brands' devices, messages are sent to a Mac Mini located in China, and then sent to the final destination.

The app is free and doesn't show any ads. They don't have a way to make money from this app, yet this "Daniel Zweigart" pays at least $100/month to house his Mac Mini in an internet datacenter: how he could pay for it?

There are two ways:

1. he is a philantropist and does it for the glory
2. it's a smart way to steal your Apple ID

Now, if your Apple ID, is "fake" like mine, registered without a credit card just for downloading the free single of the week from iTunes, there are no problems.

If your Apple ID is real, stealing the password leads to problems like those:

• They can buy apps for thousands of dollars, especially if those apps are made by their "friends"
• They can see all your iPhone photos
• They can block your iPhone just for fun, making a nice $600 decoration for your shelf
• They can reset your iPhone, losing all your data
• They can delete all your data from your Mac, as happened to that Wired journalist who lost years of personal photos
• They can see your passwords if you were crazy enough to sync the keychain on the cloud
• They can see your iWork documents, if you saved on the cloud
• They can send spam to your iMessage friends
• They can impersonate yourself and scam your iMessage friends
• and so on...

Ps: works perfectly on BlackBerry 10, but it's not available on BlackBerry World. If you want to download it, connect your Google Play account on barinstall.com

If you are using the Google Chrome, you probably have noticed the new home page, with an huge Google logo, an useless and redundant search bar that just searches in the address bar and the most visited websites reduced to 8 smallish icons at the bottom of the page.

If I wanted google.com as my homepage, I would have just set it up!

In the latest updates, they already hid all the extensions under a submenu (hint: move on the side, you can widen the bar and show them again), now they remove the most used feature in their browser?

Are they trying to ruin it?

Luckily there is a way to restore it to its classical style.

Just go on chrome://flags and search for a setting called "Extended Instant API". Disable it, scroll at the bottom of the page and press save. Chrome will restart and everything would work as before.

You might have read the rumors about a Facebook acquisition of Waze for a billion dollars. But, unfortunately, it looks like Google is near to do it it for 1.3 billion.

Waze is a free GPS navigator that uses users contributions to update maps and give information about traffic and speed traps. It's the most popular free alternative to Google Maps.

If the acquisition won't be forbidden by regulators, in a few months it will be disabled, as it happened for Sparrow, Meebo, BumpTop, Wavii...

What a pity...

This is enough! Again, a vital feature that I use daily gets removed "because nobody used it"!

It was Reader, then the XMPP protocol in Google Talk, this time the Gmail sneak peek lab is gone: when enabled, you could get a preview of the message by simply right-clicking it, saving a lot of time!

The reason it's the useless Gmail redesign, to access quickly to promotions, offers and other Google+ notifications!

Always like this! Every silly decision they take it's for trying to make Google+ more popular!

I think that Google+ is a failure, nobody use it, just accept it and place it on the right place, on a shelf next to Buzz and Wave.

Just take a random article on the Internet, look the comparison between Tweets, Likes, and +1

Google+ has millions of accounts set up, they are flaunting to be the biggest social network, but... nobody is actually using it!

Every attempt to make it become more populare is super stupid, like that idea to force every Android app review to be signed with name, surname real picture and link to the real profile! Why do I need to publish publicly my personal data when I review an Android app??? Maybe someone downloads some "risky" app (something sexual, or about politics, something like that), likes it, makes a review and it GETS SIGNED WITH NAME AND PHOTO, and linked to the actual profile, where more personal details may be available, like work place, address, friends.

For example a neonazi homophobic group could get a list of people to harass by just reading the public Grindr reviews! Or a girl, by simply searching on Google, could discover that her boyfriend, just a few days ago, left a "5 stars, omg this app works great" review on the "Find sex buddies". And I could continue with thousands of examples of why this linking reviews to people is an extremely dumb idea!

Similar approach on YouTube and Blogger.com - they are pushing for Google+ comments! Where is my privacy???

So, I decided to give them an hint: I just deleted myself from Google+.

It's easy and other Google features won't be deleted. (Picasa, Docs, YouTube, ecc...)

You won't miss it at all (how many of you are using it???), and will make Google a bit less the core of your life.

Last week I got another BlackBerry Z10 as a gift. Since I already own one, I put it on sale on a craigslist equivalent for my country.

Just after seven minutes I got an email! With much excitement I open it:

It comes from "g.....a.g.....n.....e...r....[email protected]" (uhm... what's this address? On gmail dots are ignored, it has been edited this way to avoid searching on Google, the real address is [email protected]) and it says "I am interested to that phone, it's still on sale?"

I answer from my disposable email account: "Of course it's still on sale, I posted it less than 10 minutes ago"

I get immediately a response (from a different email, [email protected]) he says he is an Italian but for work reasons he is temporarily located in Abidjan, and he needs my Z10 so badly to happily pay 100 euro more than my asking price, if I can send it immediately via ITALIAN POSTAL SERVICE.

This is the proof that the guy isn't an Italian, otherwise he would have NEVER asked to rely on the ITALIAN POSTAL SERVICE to deliver such an expensive and fragile item!

However, I answer "sure, send money to this email, and I will send the phone immediately"

Just a few seconds later I get a phishing email from [email protected] (I guess PayPal is cutting on budget, can't afford professional email, must use the free yahoo mail) written in bad Italian: money is arrived, if I click and insert my PayPal password, I will receive the money.

Super cool! In this way the scammer gets my phone for free and at the same time he steals my PayPal password, for having a free shopping spree!

So, I click the fake link in the fake email, and I get a fake site where, inserting my fake email with a fake password like "omgimdumb", I see that the fake payment has been credited on my fake account, cool!

I answer "Whoa, that's a fast payment! I send it quickly via italian postal service, it will arrive very fast, I'm sure about it."

Not understanding my irony, he answers me "Thank you! Send it to:

Name: CHANTAL  KOUAKOU
Address: COCODY RUE DES PRINCES LOTTO:748
ZIP code:12 BP 2479
City: ABIDJAN
Country: Ivory Coast
TEL: +225 66751492

I answer him: Wait for it impatiently, will arrive very soon

The other day I installed Collusion, a Firefox extension. It simply tracks your browsing, then make a nice graph to show website correlation. This is what I got after a few hours:

Maybe isn't that clear in my image, but the core of my digital life is Google. And what about your?

If you follow my blog, you might know that I am a Springpad fan.

Unfortunately, for now there is no Springpad app for BlackBerry 10, so I am left without my hundreds of useful notes.

Yes, BlackBerry 10 integrates natively with Evernote, automatically syncing with Evernote text notes, memos and voice notes, but I don't like Evernote.

Luckily, how I wrote in my previous post, you can manually install most Android apps.

This is how Springpad is working on BlackBerry 10:

Unfortunately, it has two limitations:

1. For now "shares" are confined inside the Android subsystem. You can share pages and news to and from other Android apps, like Taptu, but you can't share to and from "native" apps. This limitation should be removed with BlackBerry 10.2, coming in a few months.
2. Push notifications aren't supported:
   

Well... I can live without those functions, if I want to "share" I can manually do it with copy/paste, and I don't use notifications.

If you want to try it, download pre-converted Springpad below and load it on your device by following this guide:

Springpad 4.0.3

Springpad 4.0.4

Springpad 4.0.5 (it's erroneously recognized as a widget and it's not converted correctly)

Yay, a new Firefox version is out, with many, exciting features:

1. Private browsing mode now works as it should, as Chrome was doing back in 2008
2. There is a new download manager

Personally, I hate the new download manager, it's mixed in the Library, with browsing history, bookmarks: I hate it. What to do?A me il nuovo download manager, mischiato con la libreria dei preferiti la cronologia, non piace per niente. Come facciamo?

Easy, I found the solution here:

1. Open a new tab.
2. Type about:config, then press Enter.
3. Paste the following into the search field: browser.download.useToolkitUI
4. Under the Value field, right-click false and then click Toggle. That should set the Value to "true."
5. Restart Firefox.

Look how cool is this "interactive" song:

Brightly - Preflight Nerves

While the music video is shown on the background, the lyrics are shown on the foreground, citating existing tweets.

It's brilliant.