Silly smartphone security

First, sheer idiocy. A lot of people don't lock their smartphones, a lot of those that do use only a four digit PIN. On my iPhone, I've enabled alphanumeric pass codes. If you're only using four numbers, you've limited your phone to 10,000 possible combinations. I'm assuming Android phones can be set to wipe themselves after X number of failed attempts to enter the correct passcode, but again, that assumes it's enabled. If you take those same four characters and enable alphanumeric passcodes (numbers and letters and punctuation), you greatly increase that number. Using just numbers and letters, not even shifted case, those four characters go from ten raised to the 4th power to 36 raised to the 4th, or 1.68 million combinations. Add in lower case and all of the punctuation symbols on the standard keyboard, and it goes to 96 to the 4th, or 78 million combinations. Add just one digit to your passcode and the number of possible combinations jumps to 7.34 billion.

Motorola wants to simplify that. There's a new tech coming along called Near Field Communications, or NFC. Mostly you see it in these frequent buyer fobs at gas stations where you wave a little piece of plastic at the pump and it charges it to your card. Well, you can do that with certain phones and certain vendors. Motorola has developed a device called the Skip, which you'd clip on to your belt or whatever, and to unlock your phone you'd touch it to the device and *poof*, your phone is unlocked.

So now when you're being robbed, people will also tear random items off of your clothing. And if you're arrested, your fob will be seized and the police will say the phone was unlocked so they had a little stroll, rather than having to get a warrant to search a locked phone.

This is a really stupid idea, and I don't see it lasting long. But I could be wrong. You get three to a set, so they're anticipating you losing them.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/83663

Pairing smartphones to laptops or tablets

I replaced my iPhone a couple of weeks ago, the light sensor had failed and it no longer knew when you were talking on the phone and moved the phone away from your face to use the keyboard. Inconvenient, fortunately I had the extended warranty and the only hassle was driving to El Paso (and having a good Italian dinner and seeing Wolverine) and the time involved in re-syncing it.

One problem came up: we could no longer sync our laptops to my phone.

After the restore was done, the phone configuration was pretty much identical to what it was before, including the phone's WiFi/blue tooth hotspot name. I couldn't figure out why my wife couldn't sync, and started mentally troubleshooting. When you have weird network connectivity problems and you know the wiring is good and you don't think something has changed, you frequently start with flushing caches. In this case, I told my wife's laptop to forget my phone, then I reconnected it. At that point it was fine and had no problems pairing with it.

The issue is something that I wrote about recently: MAC addresses. Even though the name of the phone was the same as far as the laptop that I was trying to connect to it was concerned, the underlying MAC address was different. By telling the laptop to forget my phone, it cleared the cache that maintained that information. When I re-paired it, it saw a phone name that it thought it had never seen before along with a MAC address that it had never seen before, and dutifully added them back in to its cache when I supplied the correct password.

SO. If you ever buy a new smartphone or have to replace one and start having problems pairing your other devices to it, go in to your device's network settings and tell it to forget your original phone, that might be all that you need to do to take care of the problem.