If you’ve ever said that after someone who took a video or photo of you that you’d prefer didn’t leave that camera, you probably felt comfort in watching them delete it in front of you. But what if it wasn’t really gone?

I’ve often felt a little paranoid when I’ve decided to keep a broken phone or buy a used hard drive ro replace one in a laptop I’m selling. I have long held a strict policy of not letting anything that stores files leave my possession when I’m done with it for fear that someone could recover files that could lead to anything from mild embarrassment to identity theft. I may be paranoid, but with good reason.

I bought some SD cards

This week, I bought two auctioned lots of formatted memory cards, but what I found may surprise you. Keep in mind that these were specifically listed as “formatted”, meaning that someone went trough the effort of trying to wipe all the data to protect the privacy of the previous owners, but failed to do it in a secure way. More on that in a minute. First, here’s a breakdown of what I bought:

• 3 Sony Memory Sticks (about 4.5 GB)
• 8 SD cards (about 17 GB)
• 7 MicroSD cards (about 50 GB)

In total, I went through about 70 GB of recovered files in a day.

Thousands of private files uncovered

The goal of this experiment was to figure out what types of files I could uncover from all of these cards, but more specifically, I wanted to know if it was possible to get enough off a card to compromise someone’s online account or steal their identity. After all, hackers don’t care much about that photo of you in your underwear. They want something that can generate a profit. In all, I recovered over 15,000 files. Most of the files were photos with video and audio files making up a large portion of the remainder. In the minority were PDFs, XML, DOC, and system files. Of all these, here’s essentially what was uncovered.

• thousands of photos
• hundreds of videos
• medical documents
• personal information
• plenty of selfies
• strange screenshots
• lots of pet photos!
• photos of documents, lists, and notes

I started with the PDFs and XML, but came up empty-handed with a couple menus, some instructions, and a couple software configuration files. Next, I skimmed the photos for anything that included a computer screen in the background, hand-written notes, or printed materials. Mostly, I found myself sifting through tons of blurry photos and pictures of pets, family events, and what looks like items people were photographing to sell, but I did land on a few interesting items.

On one SD card, I found photos of medical records for a guy I’ll call “Phil” (I changed the name). Those photos included personal medical details and his home address. On the same card were plenty of photos of him and a girl who I imagined must be his girlfriend alongside screenshots from dating applications like Zoosk. There was enough on the card for me to find him on Facebook in under a minute and confirm that they’re still together. It’s creepy how much you can learn about a person with only an old formatted SD card as a starting point.

On another card, a younger gentleman captured a snapshot of the email on his computer that contained his username, password, and the URL to log into a specific site.

A third card included hundreds of photos that mostly just showed a college girl and her friends, her dog and the usual cellphone photo subjects. Looking closely at computer screens and other details in the photos, however, it wasn’t hard to determine her full name, dorm room number classes studied, place of employment, and more.

Less interesting were reminders, shopping lists, a school paper, and one recipe that looked worth trying.

How I recovered deleted files with an undelete program

To understand how files are recovered, it helps to first know a little bit about how they’re stored and deleted. When a file is stored, it’s data is stored in one area of your drive and a file pointer points to the first block of that data. When you click a file to open it, your computer simply references that first block and loads that file. When a file is “deleted”, your computer is really just removing the pointer to that file’s data and marking that space as free, but the data remains in tact. A standard “format” operation on a drive or card just removes all the file pointers, making all the space available for writing.

So-called “undelete” programs take advantage of this by scanning the storage space for any blocks of data that do not have file pointers. Such a program will then collect that data to it’s final block, give it a new file name, and store it in your recovery location, which should always be another storage device. Any parts of the data that were overwritten will be lost, so if you have something to recover, the best idea is to disconnect that drive and use recovery software on another computer to save your lost data.

The program I’ve had for years and which I used for this project is called LSoft Active@ Undelete Professional which currently costs about $45, but the standard version is only 20 bucks. There are other programs out there, but I can’t speak to their usefulness.

How to protect your files

If you’re like me, you’ll just never let that storage media out of your possession, but most people would prefer to sell or donate old hardware or drives that still work. So how to you keep your data safe from prying eyes? The key is to overwrite the data. When you overwrite the data, it makes it much harder for someone to recover it if at all. Your success at eliminating data may depend on the method you use. For example, simply deleting files or formatting the drive will leave your data wide open to anyone who knows how to get it back, but overwriting your data with something less private will make it much harder and using the Department of Defense 5220.22-M method (described more plainly here) will make data recovery virtually impossible.

I learned some things along the way

When I decided to conduct this experiment, I had a fairly narrow goal to see if I could find what a hacker would consider a successful haul of personalized information. Admittedly, I chose memory cards to keep the project cheap, allowing me to get storage media from many people affordably. I had not considered the types of information different devices might yield.

In my case, I procured a mix of SD, MicroSD, and Sony Memory Stick cards. Sony’s cards were popular for gaming and photography. SD Cards are often found in cameras and MicroSD cards have a variety of uses, including cell phone storage, small cameras, web/security cameras, etc. With this in mind, it’s not too surprising that the bulk of recovered files were photos.

This lends itself to the idea that a hacker could narrow his or her search by carefully selecting the storage device to sift through. If high-resolution photos were the goal then purchasing used cards that are specifically designed for high-speed storage would be ideal. In fact, the faster the write time, the more likely that card was purchased by its previous owner for video applications. If, on the other hand, a hacker wanted to get his or her hands on financial documents, spreadsheets or browser cookies and cache, desktop and laptop drives would be ideal. A hacker could even go so far as to target drives known to have been used widely in consumer computers to increase the probability of loosely-secured personal data, or server hard drives in search of corporate bounty.

What’s next

Currently, I’m shopping hard drive auctions and will be looking at other items that store information in internal memory for my next experiment. I’ll post on that soon, but in the meantime, be sure to truly wipe any storage media before sending it back out into the world.

The post I Have Your Deleted Files and Photos and Passwords – Memory Card Edition appeared first on Joe Tech.

A guy named Jeff, an editor for Pink Java Media enjoys playing Pokémon Go so much that he threw a little caution to the wind and poked around with his Tesla until he got it to install the popular game, making the most creative use I’ve seen out of the Tesla’s 14 inch display with GPS and a camera built in. “Itâ€s not perfect,” Jeff said. “The Teslaâ€s display cuts off some of the game; I havenâ€t been able to fix that.” Probably more challenging is that the built-in camera the Tesla provides is a back-up camera, intended for assisting with, well, backing up. This, of course, means that Jeff must put the car in reverse in order to catch Pokémon.

How Did He Do It?
According to Pink Java, Jeff completed this feat with “a little bit of luck, some old-fashioned ingenuity, and an ethernet cable”, but that’s all the detail provided. I guess we’ll have to wait for him to document the process and just catch Pokémon with our phones like regular folk.

What is Pokémon Go?
Pink Java does a great job of summarising the game in their own article about Jeff’s adventure:

Pokemon GO is a smartphone game in which players chase and capture virtual creatures using geolocation. The phoneâ€s camera makes it seem like these fanciful beasts are right there with the player in the real world, with different creatures appearing in different places.

When asked what Jeff had in mind next for his Tesla, he responded, “Tinder,” he said with a smile. “Going to see if I can swipe right with my turn signal.” I’d like to see how that works out. What would you like to see Jeff hack into his Tesla?

The post Turn a Tesla Into a Pokémon Go Machine appeared first on Joe Tech.

What is SMARTECH?
Before I get into my own experience with this vacuum, I want to get into what the “SMARTECH” in this product’s name refers to. In fact, Black+Decker has a whole line of vacuums that share this feature set. Here’s how their site describes SMARTECH:

SMARTECHâ„¢ BATTERYSENSEâ„¢ AUTOSENSEâ„¢ + FILTERSENSEâ„¢ features help you clean smarter, not harder.

BATTERYSENSE shows you how much battery remains, so you know how much longer you can clean before you need to recharge.
FILTERSENSE alerts you when it’s time to clean the filter so you continue to get maximum performance.
AUTOSENSE helps you power through your cleaning by automatically adjusting suction from bare floors to thick carpet.
POWERBOOST gives you added power with the push of a button.

In reality, I’ve come to expect the benefits of battery and filter notifications in any newer products where they would be applicable. I understand that other products may not offer this, so I’m at least appreciative that they exist here. On the other hand, AUTOSENSE and POWERBOOST are the pleasant surprises here, with AUTOSENSE being the headliner. Vacuuming can be such a mundane chore that it can be easy to forget to turn off POWERBOOST when you don’t need it. This can drain the battery faster than necessary and it becomes evident by looking at the BATTERYSENSE indicator. At nearly full charge, all three battery indicator lights are lit with POWERBOOST off. Turn it on and only two battery indicator lights are lit.

With all that said, I’m not sure AUTOSENSE works on – or is designed for – the handheld vacuum and may be more of a feature for the 2-in-1 vacuums that have a stick vacuum add-on. Whether this is the case or not, I was unable to experience AUTOSENSE during my testing.

Of these features, if I could change one thing, it would be the BATTERYSENSE indication lights. Some form of indication of minutes of use remaining would be far more useful to me.

Does it Suck
The lithium battery provides decent suction for typical handheld vacuum tasks like picking up small dirt and debris. There is a noticeable difference with POWERBOOST on and this was very handy when it came to removing cat hair from a cloth couch cover. While testing this, I was able to make a clear X on the couch cover distinguishing the vacuumed X from the untouched portion. I have four cats, which put this product to the test. On carpeted stairs, I had less success, requiring several passes to get all the cat hair up. All other tests with small debris were successful as I had expected them to be.

Pros and Cons
As mentioned above, I had limited success removing lots of cat hair from carpeted stairs and I imagine a more useful indicator of how long I can expect to run the vacuum on the remaining battery. Additionally, I found the air output to have inconvenient placement. The air sucked into the vacuum makes its way through the filters and then back out the bottom of the vacuum. While using it on the floor, air began to push around debris I had not yet vacuumed. Now that I’m aware of this I can be conscious about how I position the vacuum, but it would be better if I didn’t have to think about it.

There are a number of things I like about this little machine, as well. At just over 2 pounds, it’s light without compromising much in the way of power or features. The battery indicator, while not perfect, does differentiate between remaining usage expectations for normal use versus POWERBOOST. The extendable crevice tool helps with getting into tight spaces, but it also helps reach higher places and requires less bending over when cleaning up small messes quickly from the floor. Having only about 15 minutes of run time, the wall-mountable charging cradle can be a big plus. As long as you return it to its cradle when you’re done, it should always be ready for use. The debris compartment is pretty small, but it’s also bagless and very easy to clean by just pressing the release button, pulling out the filter, and then dumping the contents of the compartment into the trash.

Specifications
AIR WATTS 22 Watts
CAPACITY 16.9 oz.
REPLACEMENT FILTERS VBF10
WEIGHT 2.13 lbs

Conclusions
Many companies (including Black+Decker) offer handheld vacuums that are cheaper, but they also have fewer features or may not work as well. This vacuum retails for about $89.99 and is worth the price. It feels comfortable but sturdy and shows promise of working well for a long time, which is worth spending a little more for. My gripes are small and few and I would easily recommend this to anyone shopping for a handheld.

The post Black+Decker SMARTECH Cordless Lithium Hand Vacuum Review appeared first on Joe Tech.

What is a Coin digital credit card?
Before I get too far into my personal observations, I should take a moment to talk about what Coin is. Coin is a smart device, the size of a single credit card, that can store the information of up to eight credit cards and work as any of them when swiped. It has an e-ink display to show which card is selected and the last four digits and expiration and a button to switch between cards. Coin also has the ability to set up a Morse code style password so you can unlock your Coin with a few short and long button presses when your phone is not nearby.

One year with Coin 1.0
While I’ve had Coin for a year, I’ve honestly only used it for a few months total. For starters, it didn’t always work when I would swipe it. Almost half the time, I had to try again and too often, I wound up pulling out the actual bank-issued card to complete the transaction. Coin’s two big selling points for me were convenience and security. Having to try multiple times and eventually use my other cards sometimes eliminates the convenience I would otherwise gain with a single card to carry around. That said, I now only carry my Coin and one major credit card.

As for security, the thought is that I no longer hand over a card to someone who can simply copy the numbers and make purchases online. Additionally, my Coin (and by extension, all my credit cards) become unusable when away from me for more than 7 minutes. I always worry that my server at a restaurant won’t get it swiped in time, but it hasn’t been a problem yet. Of course, the other side of the security argument is that I now have all my credit card information in a device that uses Bluetooth. What if it gets hacked? I use an RFID shielded wallet, so I’m more concerned about someone obtaining access to my phone than I am my Coin.

The several months in between usage can be explained by the fact that I’d get a new phone and have to enter all my cards again. For the sporadic level of swipe success, it sometimes felt like something I didn’t even want to bother with and my Coin would sit in a box on my shelf for a couple months.

Coin 1.0 and 2.0 Compared
Using a coin is pretty simple and basically the same with both versions. When I’m getting ready to pay, I just pull it out and choose the card I want to pay with and hand it off to the cashier or swipe it at a terminal. With both versions, most cashiers are awestruck having never seen something like this before and usually tell me that they think it’s pretty cool. It can be nice, but it also means I usually have to tell them what it is and how it works when they ask. The first incarnation of Coin – despite a long wait that included being envious of west coast beta testers – did not always work. Above all, that has been my biggest complaint. As mentioned above, just under half the time, it would not work on the first attempt. Thankfully, improvements have been made to really cut down on this. While I’ve only had Coin 2.0 a week or so, everywhere I’ve tried it was a success. There was one place it failed on the first try and I immediately reverted to my bank-issued card because there was a long line behind me.

The Morse code security feature hasn’t proven useful for me yet. The one time I left my phone in the car, I completely forgot that I could unlock the Coin without it and just grabbed my phone. Had I remembered the feature, I don’t think I would have remembered the code. For others, this may be an indispensable feature, but to me, it’s just a possible security hole if I lose my card. Luckily, the Coin app will tell me if it can’t see my Coin when the Bluetooth connection drops. This is another great feature for other people, but not as much for me. Having a shielded wallet means that every time I put my Coin back in my wallet, the app thinks I’ve left it behind. This is an acceptable trade-off, I suppose.

Coin comes with an internal battery that will last about two years with “normal” use. Normal use is defined as using your Coin about 5-6 times a day. I’m assuming I’ll get up to 3 years out of mine since I don’t use it nearly that much.

EVT and NFC are concepts new to Coin 2.0. While the new Coin doesn’t have an actual EVT chip, NFC provides a contactless form of EMV payments. It seems that this will only be useful for cards that support EVT. While shopping earlier this week, I attempted to tap to pay with both of my cards and it simply would not work. This was at a single merchant and I have yet to try again. This was one of the key upgrades with Coin 2.0, so I’m hoping it will prove to be a usable feature for me.

Conclusions
Coin is a great little device, but it has found its struggles as the pioneer in an odd little niche product market that seems to have caught on in the last year or so with a few competitors. Despite the challenges, Coin has done well to support those who believed in it by giving free Coin 2.0 upgrades to early adopters, but it will need to work hard to keep up as competitors innovate with new features. Coin 2.0 offers much needed improvements, but unless there’s a feature-rich Coin 3.0, it will probably be the last of its line. At $99 with a two year battery life, you’ll be in for about $50 per year, which is still not bad if you’re able to make the most use of it.

The post Coin and Coin 2.0 – A Year In Review appeared first on Joe Tech.

First Impressions
When I first heard about this thermometer, I took note of all the marketing materials and how they seemed to be geared towards parents. To be honest, I have a digital thermometer that works just fine, so having no children, I’d probably glance at this and forget all about it. Regardless, it did strike me as a great idea for parents and having a way for someone like me to track my symptoms seems like a big plus. The thing that really stood out, however, was the price. At $24.99, the stick falls right into the middle of the pricing range for digital thermometers I’ve seen in the past, but for its feature set, it’s priced very well.

Out of the Box
When my Kinsa Stick arrived, I liked the case that it comes in. My old thermometer is a single piece that has a plastic cap that covers the part meant to go into my mouth. This one has an extension cable, a setup adapter, instructions, and the Kinsa Stick, itself. The extension cord is meant to wrap around the case and the clear platic top keeps it in place. Flipping over the case, I found that the bottom comes off to reveal the setup adapter and instruction booklet. This is well-designed over all, but the cable can be problematic if not wrapped back in place just right.

Using the Kinsa Stick
A couple minutes after heading to the Android App store and searching for Kinsa, I had the app installed and guiding me through the setup process. This consisted of plugging in and unplugging the Stick with and without the setup adapter until finally plugging the Kinsa back in on its own for use. The whole process took just over a minute on my Nexus 6. For those curious about compatibility, the Kinsa Stick will work with quite a few smartphones when running iOS 8.0 or Jelly Bean (v 4.1) and later on Android.

I’m not sure what the setup adapter does, but it seems to be necessary as part of the process getting started. In fact, I had to use it twice on my phone for some reason. Other than that, everything went pretty smoothly. I tried the Stick orally and it read my temperature without having to keep the thing in my mouth for 3 minutes. I decided to also try taking my temperature in my armpit. The first time, I did it through a thin t-shirt just to see what would happen and it was off by 4 degrees. When I tried again under the shirt, it read just about the same as the oral reading, which is what I would expect. Throughout the process, I was guided with video and prompts, which helped everything run smoothly.

For adults, this thermometer adds the ability to set up profiles and keep track of symptoms and readings for each person. While this is handy, the real value seems to be for parents. These same features are useful for the whole family, but there’s also the ability to keep a child entertained by popping bubbles, for example, while the temperature is being read. Being able to read a temperature via the armpit could also be an advantage to parents. The app also offers the option to read a temperature by ear or rectally, though I did not try those features.

Conclusions
As a non-parent, the Kinsa Stick is a convenience, to be sure, but not a necessity. That said, the price point of $24.99 could easily sway a non-parent. For parents, this could be a great device to help make unpleasant times a little easier to deal with. I would imagine this being well worth the small cost for most parents, more so when there are multiple younger children in the house.

The post Kinsa Stick Smart Thermometer Review appeared first on Joe Tech.

I’m still on the fence, so as a software engineer, I decided to throw ones and zeros at the problem and see what stuck. In this case, I decided that the problem I wanted to solve would be to determine which method might be faster for subtracting numbers. The “old way”, as seen on the left in the image below, involves lining up your numbers and borrowing from the next digit to the left as you subtract each digit on the bottom from the one on the top. The new way involves essentially rounding up the number you’re subtracting until it matches the number you’re subtracting from and adding all the numbers you had to use to round up in order to get to the difference. The simplest explanation I saw for this was 9 minutes into this video, in which the teacher describes the process of counting change back to a customer at a cash register.

To solve my problem, I used PHP to try to mimic the process we go through as humans to subtract one number from another. I programmed functions for the old and new ways to solve a subtraction problem and added code to time each and loop lots of times to create a more visible comparison. The Commmon Core math in PHP code is on GitHub for anyone who would like to try it out or improve it and below are some example results.

1,000 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 1000.
Total time for the old way : 0.0071358680725098 seconds
Total time for the new way : 0.01004958152771 seconds

100,000 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 1000.
Total time for the old way : 0.71134495735168 seconds
Total time for the new way : 0.97455978393555 seconds

1,000,000 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 1000.
Total time for the old way : 6.9777636528015 seconds
Total time for the new way : 9.8461444377899 seconds

100 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 10,000,000.
Total time for the old way : 0.00092959403991699 seconds
Total time for the new way : 0.0014877319335938 seconds

100,000 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 10,000,000.
Total time for the old way : 1.0502970218658 seconds
Total time for the new way : 1.6906788349152 seconds

1,000,000 cycles – random numbers between 1 and 10,000,000.
Total time for the old way : 22.028552055359 seconds
Total time for the new way : 34.783274650574 seconds

It’s worth noting that computers and the human brain work in very different ways. This experiment is not intended to prove anything either way, nor is it intended as scientific data in the slightest. It’s merely an experiment on the process and I welcome discussion and open-minded debate in the comments.

The post Common Core Math Vs Old Math In PHP appeared first on Joe Tech.

The Commercial Space Travel Race
In 2007, SpacePort America was announced and is now offering tours and hosting rocket and spaceship launches. The next year, Virgin Galactic announced SpaceShip Two, promising to make space flight commercially available, but that hasn’t been without its troubles. In 2014, SpaceShip Two crashed, killing one of the pilots. Meanwhile, Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have been racing to be the first to launch and land a rocket for re-use. Hours ago, Amazon’s Blue Origin won that race by successfully re-launching New Shepard, which had launched and landed late last year. Musk’s, SpaceX hasn’t been far behind, launching and landing their Falcon 9 rocket just a month after New Shepard.

The Future of Passenger Space Travel
While Virgin Galactic has been pre-booking seats to space for quite some time, the reality is that none of these companies are flying the rest of us normal people into space yet. There’s still a lot to work out in terms of safety and stability. Once the safety issues are completely ironed out, there’s still the matter of cost. Currently, Virgin Galactic requires $250,000 to fly and I’m sure our other options will come in around the same price. As these companies figure out how to fly more people at a time and lower their costs, we should see the prices come down some, but I don’t expect to spend any less than 5 figures for a long time. Still, this re-launch of New Shepard is a big deal. Every subsequent launch reduces the overhead costs to Amazon’s Blue Origin, which we can only hope will lower the cost per seat.

The post Amazon’s New Shepard Launches and Lands Again appeared first on Joe Tech.

A Little History
When I first started this blog in 2006, I had a nine year old web development company and we provided hosting to our clients, but I wanted this to live away from my own servers while I figured out what I wanted it to be. I registered a domain name, found affordable hosting with Aplus.net and began an adventure. As time passed, the blog gained loyal readers and I enjoyed having an off-site dedicated server that I could add more project sites to and maintain as I wanted. In 2009, Aplus became Codero and the reliability and service only improved. From uptime to billing to real-time customer care, I watched Codero get better is my blog grew with it. In 2012, Codero’s new CEO Emil Sayegh was in Phoenix for their new data center and invited me to lunch where we discussed the past and present of Codero and hosting in general over Thai food. It was refreshing and memorable to have a CEO sit down one-on-one over lunch and ask how his company could be what a customer like me needs.

Codero in 2015
Codero was growing pretty steadily before, but 2015 looks to have been a pretty busy year for the company. In June, they announced their acquisition by a group of 32 telecom providers. This not only expands their market reach, but it opens the door to a new array of edge data centers, which should easily speed up that “time to first byte” for a lot of hosting clients. Continuing to focus on speed, the Codero Cloud went 100% SSD-powered just one month later. This is critical when you need to spin up a new instance and scale immediately. Of all the things happening with Codero in 2015, though, I really enjoyed the client stories. The one that stood out to me was the Midtown Comics success story. Although I don’t collect comics, I do collect sports cards which pose similar challenges in terms of cataloging and searching online. I love that they built their own system from the ground up and I recognize how important it is to get the technology stack right for such an endeavor.

What’s Next?
For Codero, it looks like there’s going to be continued focus on the growth of their cloud and the new edge data centers as well as how this will help clients succeed with big data and the Internet of Things, both of which I have heightened curiosity in. As the Codero Cloud evolves, I imagine I will evolve my hosting needs with it. Like Midtown Comics, I’m planning a lofty collectible catalog system build from the ground up and building it in their cloud seems like the only way to spend my 10th year with Codero.

The post A Look Back At Hosting In 2015 appeared first on Joe Tech.