To remove or move to your phone's SD card the unwanted Apps you never use and make extra space for Apps you really want. The N762 is cheap but as very little memory so rooting your phone is a nice way to optimize its space. (ie. I do not have a Facebook account or use Google+ on my phone removing those apps freed about 15Mb on my phone.)
To tether the 3G connection over a USB cable or through Wi-Fi. While there are some other options, rooting your phone will allow you to easily share your phone's Interweb connection with your other device.
To customize your phone. Some apps will allow you to customize just about everything on your phone but those require that you have a rooted phone.
Once rooted you will also be able to install ROMs to change/upgrade the version of Android currently on the phone and install apps allowing you to take screenshots or install a firewall to protect your phone.
Read carefully
The risks of rooting your Android phone by bullguard.com [...] 1. You can turn your smartphone into a brick. Well, not literally, but if you goof up the rooting process, meaning the code modifications, your phone software can get so damaged that your phone will basically be as useless as a brick.
2. Your phone warranty turns void. It’s legal to root your phone; however, if you do it, your device gets straight out of warranty. Say you root your phone and some time after that, you experience a phone malfunction – hardware or software related. Because of the Android rooting, the warranty is no longer valid, and the manufacturer will not cover the damages.
3. Malware can easily breach your mobile security. Gaining root access also entails circumventing the security restrictions put in place by the Android operating system. Which means worms, viruses, spyware and Trojans can infect the rooted Android software if it’s not protected by effective mobile antivirus for Android. There are several ways these types of malware get on your phone: drive-by downloads, malicious links, infected apps you download from not so reputable app stores. They take over your phone and make it act behind your back: forward your contact list to cybercrooks, sniff your e-mails, send text messages to premium numbers, racking up your phone, and collect personal data such as passwords, usernames, credit card details that you use while socializing, banking and shopping from your smartphone. [...]
* The Menu button is to the left of the Home button. Some people do press the Home button by mistake. If you did press the wrong button remove your battery and try again. ** If entering "fastboot flash recovery recovery.img" returns "Waiting for device" you most likely haven't plugged-in you phone or installed the driver from the Android SDK folder. *** Once loaded Clockworkmod will be upside down but will work properly.
IMPORTANT!!
"With great power comes great responsibility."
Being Root on a Linux based system is nothing like being the Administrator of a Windows PC by doing something frivolously or executing random commands you could damage your phone or make it completely useless.
Lets prevent some of the future mistake you'll be undoubtedly making.
Set a Password for Root.
In your phone launch the Superuser App and go to the settings,
Enter a new Pin.
Install an Anti-Virus I'm personally using Avast! but there are many options out there.
Back Up your Phone! Install Titanium Backup Root to help you backup then fix the many mistake you'll probably be making in the future.
Read More! Fail Less!
The 10 Best Android Apps that Make Rooting Your Phone Worth the Hassle from LifeHacker.com
I've rooted my phone. Now what? What do I gain from rooting? From stackexchange.com
(Guide) (Beginners) You have rooted your phone, now what can you do. From talkandroid.com
Of course, of this could be said a lot of things, things that could easily turn to racism or bigotry, I just thought it was funny to compare how different group react to the same event.
Highlights
Priority dedicated to the snowstorm on the front page of the Huffington Post in the USA, Canada & Québec.
Huffington Post USA
Huffington Post Canada
Huffington Post Québec
Note that the USA are the only one who found it useful to give this snowstorm a name, ergo #Nemo.
It's also interesting to look at the number of comment on those articles which are by now near the thousands in the USA, at 20 in Canada and none yet in Québec.
*Images: Front page of the Huffington Post (USA, Canada & Québec) on February 08, 2013.
Update [February 8, 12:00]
At 12 O'clock the Canadian edition downgraded the snowstorm.
Since Kijiji as made it its goal to fuck with me here is the fucking ad!
Posted (Attempted to) in Montreal.kijiji.ca because you know I'M in fucking Montreal!
I know it's nobodies fault but, right now, if I was to learn that Kijiji's office had burned down and everyone had been trap inside I would, without shame, do the happy dance. Don't get me wrong I really like Kijiji, I've just never been able to post on the goddamn site. Also they NEVER replied to any email I've sent through their help desk.
*IP Discrimination really is a thing and it's a terrible thing in a virtual world without "border". IP Discrimination is most often linked to racism where entire nations are being block from accessing certain websites. Update! [February 8]
Using ProXPN's VPN I was finally able to publish the ad which doesn't fit with Kijiji's policy that a user's IP must be from the same country has the page he wants to publish on since ProXPN's IP is in the US and not Canada.
"The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Phil. Trans.) is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of London. It was established in 1665,[1] making it the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science, and it has remained in continuous publication ever since, making it the world's longest-running scientific journal. The slightly earlier Journal des sçavans can also lay claim to be the world's first science journal, although it contained a wide variety of non-scientific material as well.[2] The use of the word "philosophical" in the title derives from the phrase "natural philosophy", which was the equivalent of what would now be generically called "science"." - Wikipedia
Swartz indicted for JSTOR theft Digital activist gained access through MIT network drops By Connor Kirschbaum STAFF REPORTER August 3, 2011
"Aaron H. Swartz is an accomplished 24-year-old by anyone’s standards. He co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of three owners of the massively popular social news site Reddit, and recently completed a fellowship at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.
On Jan. 6, 2011, Swartz allegedly entered the basement of MIT’s Building 16, using his white bicycle helmet as a mask to hide his identity from passersby. A federal indictment, unsealed on July 19, describes his entering a restricted network wiring closet, retrieving a laptop and external hard drive he had hidden there under a cardboard box weeks before, and cautiously stepping out of the wiring closet with his makeshift mask in place.
According to the indictment, Swartz’s laptop had been using MIT’s network to rapidly download articles from JSTOR. JSTOR is an archive of academic journals to which many universities, including MIT, pay large amounts of money for access. The indictment describes these events as the final phase of Swartz’s three-month JSTOR downloading operation, bringing his total count of acquired JSTOR articles to 4.8 million. MIT valued that information at $50,000, according to the Cambridge Police incident report.
Swartz’s intention, the indictment claimed, was to upload all of the documents to a peer-to-peer file-sharing site, where anyone could access them for free.
He never got the chance. Within two hours of fleeing Building 16, Swartz was captured by Secret Service Agent Michael Pickett, in what was the culmination of three months of detective work by MIT Information Services & Technology, the MIT and Cambridge Police Departments, and the United States Secret Service."
This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.
Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.
I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.
I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.
On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.
Academic publishing is an odd system—the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.
And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.
As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.
Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.
Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.
Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.
Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.
These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.
The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.
The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.
When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource— where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)
But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.
As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproduction—scanning the documents— created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.
In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives—but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.
All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledge—as their lofty mission statements
suggest—but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.
The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.
If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified—it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.
I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.
I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.
Ok, so I still have a Facebook account, at least until I make sure that I don't need that account to sign into any other site I still enjoy but my Facebook days are over once and for all!
F.Y.I. Facebook makes it pretty fucking hard to remove all of your friends so plan ahead!
Naked on the Schwebebahn from Naked Me on Vimeo.
The intergalactic crusade continues as Naked Me blasts through the sleepy German town of Wuppertal using the most technologically advanced mode of transport known to mankind ... Schwebebahn!
To the extent possible under law, Dmpstrbaby
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
"RIP, Aaron Swartz."
Update: Go read Lessig:
"He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the
source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would
Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a
decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get
proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have
the power of the United States government behind you."
My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I
got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it --
I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was
important to put something public up so that we could talk about it.
Aaron was a public guy.
I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he
co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco
often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an
XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult
supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind
of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and
parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where
your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.
But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white
food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I
suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it
out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the
stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful
because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and
end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the
hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and
sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he
took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me
about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.
I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original
Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in
technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but
he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found
himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of
mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible
standards he held them (and himself) to.
This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root
of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public
denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to
Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for
this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat
down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and
to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by
Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the
disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a
disappointment in himself and the world.
Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the
early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he
was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no
damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and
got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless
and delightful shit-disturber.
The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His
stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20
percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to
their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access.
After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw
they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small
fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public
domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated
him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some
bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.
He also founded a group called DemandProgress,
which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage
victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of
the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that
was only the start of his ambition.
I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother
to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be
used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up
beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote
back:
First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can
do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run
and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns.
It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local
coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your
contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go
down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every
supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list.
Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists
who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited,
it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then
it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the
while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for
all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are
recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out
what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built
into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive,
with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating
the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press
database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because
they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words,
they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great,
witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a
newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a
little different, they bring quite a following; they become events.
And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out
their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting
more people hooked on the game.
He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of
politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about
politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front
you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the
difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you
know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new
whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has
mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the
kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover
up and that only he is going to fix.
(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)
also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for
him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in
the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into
the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the
user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions.
Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free
personality test and then giving them a personality test with your
political ad along the side and asking them some political questions.
(Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really
are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish,
which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't
like, ...) Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you
on the political questions must be most affected by the ad.
Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time
before the election, with careful selection of television show to
maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some
of this... hope you're well
This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron
had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and
intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have
revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still
yet do so.
Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT
and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of
journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and
retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around
MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the
Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part
of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so
it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.
Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the
journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of
theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the
PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing
down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning
in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories.
A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron
would go to jail.
This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself
because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment
is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear
of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps
sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.
But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many
years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with
his friends.
I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a
thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think
about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of
us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of
the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was,
there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on
a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.
Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve
them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved
forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his
friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally
his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was
sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.
Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I
couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never
thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,
seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of
bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope.
Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to
his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant,
magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he
went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially
Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his
comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today
who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he
did it.
