Friday 27 December 2013

Smartphone Apps for Boaters (29)

No matter which genre of smartphone you own or are thinking to buy. The apps that are available will have an influence on how happy you are with the phone. There are plenty of top quality apps that you can download. However for me There's always a remarkable sub-selection of apps that are totally free. 

The wonderfully named 'Android' phone seems to have cornered the market in the same way that VHS did with tape systems. Android's open source strategy is the main factor for its success. Being a free platform has expanded the Android device install base, which in turn has driven growth in the number of third party multi-platform and mobile operator apps available.

If you are reading this posting the chances are that you do a bit of blog reading/creating and have a smartphone. I use a laptop on the boat, I use a PC when we are at home and now I have started to use a Blogger app for the smartphone everywhere else.

Your mobile phone has several different security applications in place depending on the version of phone in use. 2G, 3G and now 4G have sequentially upped the strength in the type of security employed. 

However, there is a constant weak link in the chain and that is you!

Currently several journalists in England are on trial for hacking the voicemail messages of  politicians to murdered schoolchildren. I'm not going to get into the morality or legality of such actions. That will be for the courts to decide and I don't intend to second guess the motives for the need to hack phones.
However, there are serious lessons to be learned from what has taken place. The phone hacking methods employed were low tech but they worked. It was achieved by smooth-talking employees of mobile-phone companies. Convincing the employees into handing over the four digit pass codes that protect their customers' voice mail accounts. 
But more worryingly, the hackers simply guessed them. By betting that the phone owners either hadn't changed them from default settings or if they had, they then chose easy to remember numbers such as 1,2,3,4.
It highly unlikely that your phone is going to be hacked any-time soon. But what if you lost your phone or had it stolen. Then any personal data stored in your phone could be compromised. If you haven't done so already - change your pass code number - and do it now!

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