Tag Archives: google

Extra Adverts showing in Chrome?

For the last few weeks I’ve noticed unusual floating adverts from superfish.com on amazon.co.uk, focalprice.com and other shopping sites but I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. Turns out I’m not the only one to notice them.

superfish floating advert

It was an extension I had installed in Google Chrome. I went through each of the extensions I have installed, checking the options for each. Some didn’t have any options page and only one mentioned adverts at all but it wasn’t the Superfish one. With those checked I disabled each extension one by one, reloading Amazon until the advert went away.

I found it. “Flash Video Downloader” version 2.3.5 (id: ggkfikfcbnpfoicfjammigpnakpogebh) was responsible for the adverts. Authors of software want to be paid but this was very underhand. The extension has no options page and doesn’t mention adding Superfish adverts on the extensions page. It’s also a reminder of how much trust we put into the authors of software with access to our personal and private data. Since finding this I found the CNET download page and reviews for the extension. The latest reviews warn of the added malware:

Pros
Flash Video Downloader used to be an easy & safe product to download flash-based videos embedded into various websites.

Cons
They’ve secretly slipped Adware/Malware into their product (Superfish “Featured Shopper”). Flash Video Downloader obviously tracks your browsing history (that’s how it know’s when there’s a flash video available to download)… who knows where your browsing data is going now that they’ve got AdWare/Malware involved.

Also, Flash Video Downloader recently removed support to download YouTube videos. (I suspect Google/YouTube probably forced that change for copyright purposes.)

Summary
With Adware/Malware added to the product and YouTube support removed removed, I suspect most users will no longer find this product helpful or safe to use.

The extension isn’t on the Chrome Web Store. The last time I went searching I couldn’t find a decent one on there but maybe that has changed since. I don’t want to pirate Youtube videos. Sometimes I just want to watch a gameplay video offline!

Who gets your data after death?

I have to admit that filling in the inactive account settings for my Google account gave me the shivers. There’s not much that would stop me logging into my Google account for more than 3 months. It would have to be one of the following:

  • Trekking through a rainforest pursued by secret agents monitoring all radio communications.
  • Lost on a desert island with only 80’s computer equipment to keep me amused.
  • In a coma after a botched attack by terrorists who are hell bent on killing open source developers.
  • Dead.

None of the above are very appealing options but at least one is as inevitable as, err, taxes, so it must be faced.

I added a trusted contact and was then presented with a popup asking for a subject and email body. Writing that was unsettling but I hope more services do something similar. I’ve heard too many horror stories about Facebook accounts that have been frozen on the death of an account holder.

You can choose what data is or isn’t shared with a contact. Included is Latitude, which has tracked my whereabouts for the last 2 years and will continue to do so. It makes me wonder how my descendants will cope with the deluge of information. It may very well end up as an anonymous zip file on someone’s computer I guess.

The list won’t be frozen in time either. Do I add my siblings? What about my son when he’s older? What age? I should set a calendar reminder for his 18th birthday. I’ll have to warn those trusted contacts because Google sends an email and a text message when the account goes inactive. Like a letter from the grave.

Paddy’s Day through Google Glass

A stereotypical St Patrick’s Day through Google Glass. Call the day Patty’s Day in Ireland and someone will ask you if you want fries and a drink with that burger. It’s Paddy, not Patty!

Aren’t national stereotypes wonderful?

What the video completely fails to show is the bustling crowds, children on their father’s shoulders watching the parades, food stalls, hawkers selling memorabilia and the crush and stress and the “Oy, stop pushing there!” and getting home exhausted. 🙂

The Weakest Link

As a Resistance agent in the game of Ingress it can be frustrating to see your local city or locality covered in green control fields. Blarney where I live is firmly blue but Cork isn’t so lucky. So when a huge control field popped up extending from Blackrock Castle to the City to Cork Airport to Carrigaline I had to find a way to bring it down.

green-fields

On Sunday I did just that. The Old Bridge portal was level 4 or 5 and had at least one level six resonator. I took down some of the resonators easily enough but the final L4 resonator proved tricky as OliverIE recharged it remotely while I attacked! The most worrying part of the capture was the group of 13-15 year old boys crossing the bridge who chanted penis jokes behind me! Idiots. One of the downsides of visiting some locations I guess. Oliver will earn a tidy sum of AP capturing the portal back again too. (You’re welcome!)

Ingress is quite limited as a game but it’s a very interesting experiment. The hack/capture portal gameplay is one where you have to cooperate or at least be mindful of the enemy. If your portals are too strong you’ll have a nice set of virtual points on a map but you won’t level up any time soon. The “winning side” in any area don’t get any points for maintaining a huge control field.
When you first start up the game there’s a quick tutorial where the players runs through missions designed to familiarise them with the game. Unfortunately that’s about as far as directed gameplay goes. Hopefully in the future missions will be added with objectives for players. Having said that, if this is a taste of what “augmented reality” games can be like I’d like more please. It’s a good excuse to get out walking if nothing else.

I still think it’s a devious ploy by Google to collect photos and information about monuments, statues and places of interest. We’re also feeding them very useful walking information connecting those places.

The Resistance in Cork make a come back

What happens when you severely damage a single Ingress portal?

Ingress map of Cork

Ingress map of Cork

From the logs it appears that 18 links were taken down when I destroyed all but one of the resonators in The Cork Vision Centre Ingress portal this afternoon.

Cork Vision Centre Resonator

So close!

Unfortunately the building was closed so I had to stand outside the gates and the single remaining L4 resonator was at the far side of the portal, away from me. I ran out of time to collect more XMP bursters to finish the job. Still, I think I got about 9,000 AP from that one single portal so I am very happy.

Walk around Cork

I also walked almost 12km in two and a half hours as I tried to scavenge supplies – XMP and XM to aid in my task. Even a month ago I couldn’t have imagined walking that distance. It’s not that far really but I had neglected my exercise. Making walking a part of a game certainly helped my motivation!

I did capture a portal today, the Flower Pot Man on Carey’s Lane. The actual statue that portal is based on appears to be gone now but I remember seeing it years ago. I broke through to Level 4 doing that!

It’s nice to see that gap in green in the Ingress map of Cork now. It’ll give the Enlightenment something to do over the coming week. They were probably getting bored recharging those portals all the time..

4:29PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:29PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:29PM donncha destroyed an L4 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:30PM donncha destroyed an L4 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:31PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)

Continue reading “The Resistance in Cork make a come back”

A portal in Blarney

image

The first Ingress portal in Blarney appeared this morning.

It’s on the site of the Blarney Castle Hotel and I was the first to hack it and add resonators. Hopefully some of the sites I submitted as portals get picked soon and we’ll get a field over the village. I’m sure I have confused anyone who comes here now looking for a hotel in Blarney, oops.

No sign of the apocalypse but it is very foggy. The four horsemen could be hiding in it!

Chrome 23 and Flash missing sound for you too?

The latest version of Google’s Chrome browser in Windows reintroduced an old bug where Flash videos were missing all sound. It doesn’t happen to everyone but if you set your speaker configuration to Stereo you should hear sound again.

Click on the Windows Start button > Control Panel > Sound > select the speaker/playback device and click the Configure button > in the Speaker Setup dialog that appears, if you have multiple audio channels listed, please test the Stereo configuration, and let us know what happens.

I already had it set to stereo using the on-board Realtek sound chip in my PC but going through the motions of setting it to stereo and restarting the browser seems to have worked.

There’s a lengthy thread here, there’s a bug open about the issue and it has been fixed. The next stable release will include the fix. Yay!

Google I/O 2012 Skydive

I watched some of the Google I/O presentation yesterday. I love the look of the Nexus 7 and if the Nexus Q was cheaper I’d love to buy that too. Unfortunately I switched off just before the most impressive part. The skydive in a Google Plus Hangout. Well, here it is, and in the second video, they do it again but this time Sergey Brin explains how it was done.

Ice cream Sandwich on my Samsung Galaxy S 2

The Samsung Galaxy S 2 is a great phone, the best phone I’ve ever owned (and I presume I’ll say that about each newer phone I buy too, it’s becoming a familiar mantra) but it’s taken a while for Samsung to release the new Android, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) upgrade for it. I’m a Meteor Mobile user and ICS was released by them late last week.

Unfortunately when I tried to upgrade my rooted Gingerbread phone through KIES it simply upgraded to the latest Gingerbread release (2.3.5) and not ICS. It may have been because my phone was rooted but I had read that it was possible to upgrade rooted phones. I was disappointed but then my phone kept half-reseting. The bootup tune would play every 5 minutes or so and the phone would appear to have reset. It happened too fast for a reboot so I didn’t know what was happening. Quite frustrating though.

So, I backed up my sms texts, backed up aCar and my Podkicker subscriptions and with the help of this page I installed a generic European ICS firmware on to my SGS2. It was painful unfortunately. KIES, the Samsung desktop sync software, is fairly rubbish. I had to plug my phone in and out of my computer, using different USB ports, resetting my phone in between, just so the software would recognise my phone. I eventually had to use ODIN and the same switching USB ports trick again. I think the Samsung USB drivers conflict with the generic Windows drivers which causes the problems but this is a long standing problem with Samsung phones.

The instructions on the page above are fairly straight forward. Just keep trying to get your phone recognised if you have problems. It will work eventually. When your phone is in download mode and ODIN is squirting the firmware over it should only take a few minutes to work. I had to stop the download twice before it worked which got me worried that I might have bricked the phone!

Was it worth upgrading? The new Roboto font in ICS is gorgeous. It’s a huge step up from the default in Gingerbread. I immediately replaced the Samsung TwLauncher with ADWLauncher EX. The phone looks much the same as it was in Gingerbread, the settings page is better, the fonts are better and it does feel snappier. Unfortunately Kids Place doesn’t work but I found another kid’s sandbox app, Famigo that does.

I’m happy I upgraded but wish it had been easier. The upgrade works a lot better for most people, don’t worry if you see the upgrade notice. Just make sure your contacts and other data are backed up before you go down this path! If you upgrade through KIES it won’t delete everything on your phone and the upgrade is a lot less painful.

Oh yeah, in ICS the screenshot function is now Volume Down+Power buttons.

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.