#1 thing to protect your Smartphone when Lost or Stolen, Keep it Connected, then find it

I wrote a post on the 5 things to protect your iPhone.  I’ve read some other posts on features like Find My iPhone, Activation Lock, etc.  After reading about the silliness of privacy int’l thinking phones can be track when off, I decided it is better change the order of what to do in a focus on the most important first.

Rule #1 for finding your lost or stolen phone - keep it connected to the network.  If disconnected or off you will not be able to ring it, GPS find it, lock it, or erase it.

On iOS7 disable access to control center from the “access on lock screen” which allows anyone to put your phone in airplane mode, then put it in their pocket.  You can’t ring it, or find it now.

In Android, I can't find a way to get to airplane mode from the lock screen.  

Rule #2 use the OS’s find iPhone activation lock or Android Device Manager

iOS7 use activation lock in Find my iPhone.

Android use Android Device Manager.  I just tried the feature on my Galaxy Note 3 and it rings it even with volume muted. Sweet! 

If your phone is connected then you can find it.  A thief could hard reset your phone which on some devices would turn it off, but on most the phone reboots and it is back on the network.

I hope this helps you out and your friends.  My 12 year old daughter is providing mobile tech support to her friends showing how they turn off “control center” in iOS7.   I’ll see if I can get my son to do the same on his bus which is where this problem started.  If my son had done this, he would probably have his phone, but I would not have figured this out and shared it with many more people in this post.

Facebook keeps score of Serviceability and Operational Efficiency of Data Center Hardware

There is a short post on OCP by Charlie Manese, Facebook Hardware Design team on Serviceability and operational efficiency, so I will just put the whole thing up.

Know the guys at Google have this data, wonder who else does?

Facebook's perspective on serviceability and operational efficiency

Wednesday, October 09, 2013 · Posted by charlie at 8:09 AM

UPDATED - Webinar on October 24, 2013

By Charlie Manese, Facebook Hardware Design team

At Facebook, because of our scale, we require that solutions deployed in our data center be engineered for maximum operational efficiency and serviceability.

The data center team works closely with the hardware design team to ensure this. Our designs incorporate features such as front-of-rack serviceability, toolless repair operations, and simplicity.

We’ve completed time-in-motion studies, streamlined processes for inventory and repair, and have developed scorecards to that help us evaluate and compare different hardware solutions.

Below is a table of the time-to-repair comparison of different kinds of web servers that have been deployed in our environment:

 

If you're interested in learning more about how Facebook thinks about serviceability and operational efficiency, and you missed the original event, I'll be joining a Hyve webinar on October 24, 2013.

For more information on the event, please see  https://synnex.ilinc.com/perl/ilinc/lms/register.pl?activity_id=zvkkfkw&user_id=

Hope to see you there!

 

Tesla's Elon Musk claiming gas cars 5X likely to catch fire misses point, NHTSA TREAD Act haunts Auto industry

Elon Musk claims the Tesla is 5 times safer than gas cars.  I know a few data center folks who have bought a Tesla.

The head of electric car maker Tesla pushed back aggressively against claims that the company’s vehicles are a fire danger, saying that only 3 in 25,000 Teslas havecaught fire and that those incidents were the result of high speed impacts.

“It hurts to see articles that the car is unsafe… nothing could be further from truth,” said Elon Musk, noting that Teslas are five times less likely to catch fire than gas-powered cars, which produce hundreds of fire-related injuries every year.

Thanks to the Infamous Firestone Tread problems, there is the NHTSA TREAD act and just because the Tesla is safer than overall gas fires, doesn’t mean the TREAD act won’t kick in.

Here is a graphic of the process.  for an interactive click on the link.

IBM comments on buying Softlayer

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris has a post on IBM and the acquisition of Softlayer.

On buying SoftLayer for $2 billion

“[W]e bought a company. … I’ve bought 120 companies,” Mills said matter of factly, noting that in this case IBM realized it wasn’t capturing certain segments of the cloud market and wasn’t delivering certain capabilities that customers wanted. You can either build those capabilities or buy them, he added, and “at the end of the day you run out of money [to build everything].”

Mills did defend IBM’s cloud legacy, though, going back to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling IBM in 2006 and asking if it would help set up a web-accessible developer cloud “because we had dynamic provisioning and scheduling technology and they did not.”

Too funny, Privacy Int'l thinks the NSA can track phones that are turned off

Battery life is the main thing that defines the user experience.  In the old days, there may have been phones that used power when off, draining the battery.  In the highly competitive world of smartphones who would drain the battery now?

Arstechnica has a post that Privacy int’l is asking manufacturers how the NSA can track their phones when powered off.  This is funny that someone actually thinks the phones are still connected.

Back in July 2013, The Washington Post reported that nearly a decade ago, the National Security Agency developed a new technique that allowed spooks to “find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this ‘The Find,’ and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.”

Many security researchers scratched their heads trying to figure out how this could be so. The British watchdog group Privacy International took it upon itself to ask eight major mobile phone manufacturers if and how this was possible in August 2013. On Monday, the group published replies from the four firms that have responded thus far: Ericsson, Google, Nokia, and Samsung. (Apple, HTC, Microsoft, and BlackBerry have not yet sent in a response.)

A research officer at the organization, Richard Tynan, wrote that “two themes stood out among the companies that replied: hardware manufacturers claim that they strive to switch off almost all their components while the phone is powered down, and if tracking occurs it is likely due to the installation of malware onto the phone.” Here are a few of the responses:

According to Tynan, Google responded:

When a mobile device running the Android Operating System is powered off, there is no part of the Operating System that remains on or emits a signal. Google has no way to turn on a device remotely.

Samsung Vice President Hyunjoon Kim noted that “without the power source it is not possible to transmit any signal, due to the components being inactive. Thus the powered off devices are not able to be tracked or monitored by any third party.” Meanwhile, Nokia’s Vice President and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Chad Fentress said:

Our devices are designed so that when they are switched off, the radio transceivers within the devices should be powered off. We are not aware of any way they could be re-activated until the user switches the device on again. We believe that this means that the device could not be tracked in the manner suggested in the article you referenced.