An iPad 1 with a forward facing camera … and with 128 GB memory?

Posted on 2012-03-06 by Jon Leirdal

When I write this the supposedly new iPad 3 might be released in about one day. In honour of that event I would like to share some pictures of another similar device.

Not an iPad 1

I do not buy pirated products, but occasionally I get to see what other people have found out there. This is one of those times. I recently got the opportunity to see a device that supposedly was an iPad 1 with 128 GB memory, a built in camera and what seems to be an SD card reader. “What the …” you say? Where might one find a device like that? Well, China seems to be a safe bet, and in this case it is the truth as well. In the sake of anonymity we will just say that the owner of this device visited China last year and found this device in a market in Beijing. From a distance and while turned off it looked like an iPad and it was cheap. It even was packed in something with a superficial resemblance to the real packaging. Now after the bargain had been struck and he arrived at the hotel to check it out he found a few strange things. It had a separate charger pin input. The regular iPad connector could be refitted with an adapter that made it possible for the device to connect to a regular network cable, an USB cable and (updated, see below) ~~several other cable types~~. All in one adapter! That was kind of neat. Oh and it ran Android!

Not an iPad running Android version 2.2

Android? On an iPad?

Yes …. and no. This is of course no iPad. It might look like one but the there are several things that these images do not tell. Among else it is made of plastic, and feels cheap. Another tell was that it stopped working after a week. Now it only gives you the startup logo and then nothing happens.

But as a curiosity it may now live for a long time on the internet.

Not an iPad with more than one connector

Not an iPad with 128 GB memory

Not an iPad - backside

Not an iPad with a forward facing camera

Update 2012-02-06: I managed to take a few pictures of the included dongle as well. I remembered slightly wrong though, It only has two USB ports and one ethernet port available.

iPad dongle

Posted from Oslo, Oslo, Norway.

Bruce Schneier: How to sell security

Posted on 2008-05-29 by Jon Leirdal

I guess most readers of this blog also check out Bruce Schneier once in a while. One of his latest entries discusses the different aspects of how to sell security. What is worst, the risk for a big loss, or the certainty of a small one? Read his blog post on How to sell security and wonder why we are what we are.

Wish for 2008

Posted on 2008-01-08 by Jon Leirdal

When you read the news from anti-virus companies and security advisors you get convinced that 90% of the software you find on the net is malware, and the last 10% have so many security issues that it turns out the same thing. At the same time a life seems to be worth less than the copyright interests of media companies.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but I feel that the whole world has been overrun by solutions and programs that want to harvest personal information about me. The products that don’t ask for the information grab it anyway.

Trusted computing is a much debated architecture, maybe rightfully so. That kind of architecture might limit the spreading of free/open source software. Microsoft has proven that they can offer this trough their HD-Video support. There they have signed code in all layers, and only approved hardware devices are allowed in the pipe from storage media to screen. I am not saying that it is impossible to bypass this pipe in some way, but the threshold to perform such a hack has been raised a fair bit.

So, when you consider the stack of components needed to display HD-Video, what do you need to have the same security/quality for our computers? Especially when you are connected to the Internet?

The question then is if we maybe should take a look at this “cursed” subject again. Financing solutions in order to secure that open source software can be verified and approved might become a reality. There is one thing that we have learned so far. It is impossible to count all evil. You cannot permit the execution of all software except the bad ones listed in a list. Such a list will never be complete. But you can allow all enumerated good software and block the execution of all other code. Anti-virus software tries to perform this enumeration on our behalf, but still they do not know everything and ask the users what to do when in doubt. When they do, the s**t hits the fan. Users do not know what to do. They do not realize the consequences of their choices.

Again, the driver is the money. It is somewhat of a symptom of the state of the world that it’s more important for Microsoft that a video is not copied than to secure the personal information of a user. If somebody steals all our personal details, all our money from our bank accounts and our identity, that is not as important for Microsoft as a video unlawfully duplicated and distributed.

So what is my wish for 2008?

My wish is that our lives and our identities will become more important to protect on the net than the economic interests of a few.

Bruce Schneier: Security in ten years

Posted on 2007-12-04 by Jon Leirdal

Bruce Schneier have this little gem available on his site today. Bruce and Marcus Ranum are discussing security issues and trying to guess where the field will be in ten years time. I’ve got to say that they are painting a somewhat bleak picture, and I sincerely hope that they are wrong in some of their assumptions, but I fear that they are probably correct.

Encryption and security

Posted on 2007-11-19 by Jon Leirdal

Maybe it’s not as secure as you think. According it this article and the following post on Slashdot, Hushmail has been caught red-handed in backstabbing their own marketing.

"The only way to decrypt or unscramble Hush messages is by using your passphrase when you open up your Hushmail account. Carnivore cannot decrypt your mail, and is therefore, powerless against messages sent between Hush users."

Now it seems that they have handed over the private keys of users to the government, and thus voided their own technology. I would guess that they soon will have a few trust issues with their customers. I am not going to discuss the old saying, "if you are not doing anything wrong, why do you worry about the government reading your email".

At the same time some people within the U.S. government wants to redefine "privacy" so that it doesn’t include anonymity, and that NSA seems to have included a backdoor to a random number generator for use in encryption programs.