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Ebook Skeptic Turned Ebook Lover: The Kindle Oasis Reviewed

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 02 Jun 2020 07:26:20 +0000

I have always been passionate about technology. As a child, I spent a great deal of time taking apart old computers and electronics, trying to understand how it all worked. Technology quickly became a big part of my life, naturally leading me to study information technology, and I have now been working in IT for a little over 5 years. Despite that, there had always been one thing I had trouble imagining any other way than on paper: books.

In spite of my technophile side, I had always been quite skeptical of e-readers; I felt a strange attachment to the smell of paper, its texture and the action of physically turning pages. That was until 2016, where after seeing more and more e-readers around, including in the hands of people I had always pegged for avid paper book proponents, I took the leap: I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, figuring that in the worst case I had 30 days to send it back. Here we are four years later, and I could not be happier with my purchase. So much so, that I decided to upgrade to a Kindle Oasis, mainly to get the adjustable display temperature, physical page turn buttons and a slightly bigger screen (7 inches, compared to 6 for the Paperwhite). Water resistance is a nice touch that could end up saving it one day, but I find it to be more of a gimmick than an actual selling point.

Comparing the lowest display temperature (left) with the highest one (right)

Despite being so convinced of the superiority of paper books, I quickly adopted my e-reader. It turns out I actually find reading on it more comfortable: say goodbye to shadow issues in low light and, most of all, say goodbye to bad fonts, small font sizes and tight line spacings. With an e-reader, I can adjust the font, font size, margins and line spacing to my liking, instead of being at the mercy of the publisher’s tastes.

Despite being so convinced of the superiority of paper books, I quickly adopted my e-reader. Tweet this

The font and layout adjustment options

Another advantage is the possibility of looking up the definition of any word using a long press, even without Internet access. This is useful not only for books in foreign languages, but also for books in your native language. When reading paper books, I rarely look up unknown words because the context often leaves me with a good enough idea of their meaning. With my e-reader, as soon as I come across a new word I pull up its definition.

Looking up a definition

But it does not stop there: every single looked-up word is saved in a tool called the Vocabulary Builder. It comes in the form of a grid of words, which can be grouped by book. When selecting a word, it displays its definition, as well as the sentence(s) in which the word was looked up, allowing you to put it back in its context. The flashcards feature displays words in their context one by one, with a tab to view their definition and a button to mark them as mastered. This feature is amazing to expand your vocabulary.

Vocabulary Builder definition example

Vocabulary Builder usage example

Flashcard example (front)

Flashcard example (back)

In addition to the dictionary, there is also the X-Ray feature, which shows you the first appearance of characters, places or terms which are specific to a book. This is extremely useful for books with a great number of characters and complex family trees, where it is easy to get confused in the beginning. Just as with the dictionary, long pressing a character’s name or a place will let you know all about it. Note that X-Ray is available only on supported books, which have to be bought from Amazon.

X-Ray example

Another feature I use a lot is the ability to highlight passages, with the possibility of exporting all the highlighted passages of a book in PDF format. As soon as I finish a book, I generate a highlights export so I can go back to them easily in the future. It is also possible to add notes to the highlights, which are also included in the exports.

Other advantages include:

Instant book purchases, which means you always have something to read.
Screen lighting, which allows you to read under any conditions.
Being able to read a sample before buying a book.
Being able to get a refund for books up to 7 days after purchase, in case you end up not liking a book after all.
Lower book prices in general compared to their paper counterparts.

The only real disadvantage compared to paper books is image rendering, which can sometimes be an issue given they are displayed in grayscale. It all depends on the contrast of the image, but the rendering is usually acceptable or even good, as you can see in the example below:

You might have noticed the time left indicator at the bottom. This feature is extremely practical, because it allows you to know at a glance whether you have enough time to read that chapter you are so tempted to start. Instead of the time remaining in the current chapter, you can switch it to display the time remaining in the book (which happens automatically for the last chapter), the location in the book or the current page.

It is also possible to flip through a book page by page, 9 pages by 9 pages or chapter by chapter without losing the current page, which can come in handy.

The two page flipping interfaces

One thing some people might take issue with is switching from a book, which obviously has no battery, to an e-reader which has one and therefore presents the theoretical risk of running flat. It could indeed happen, but e-ink screens consume so little energy that e-readers last several weeks on a single charge; you could almost forget they have a battery.

At 188 grams, the Kindle Oasis weighs about the same as the average paperback, while being able to hold thousands of books. This means that no matter where you are, you can always have something to read. Every time I go on a journey that is at least a little long, my Kindle is coming with me. The only disadvantage of Kindles compared to their competitors, such as Kobo readers, is that they cannot read the ePub format. There is however a very simple solution to this problem, which is the magnificent tool that is Calibre, which makes converting between all e-book formats a breeze. This means you are not limited to the Amazon store for your book purchases, even though it probably has everything you may want to read.

It still makes more sense to use paper versions for things like cookbooks, but as far as novels and nonfiction books are concerned, e-readers are a nice evolution I could definitely see everyone adopting.

In terms of versions and prices, the Kindle Oasis comes in an 8 GB Wi-Fi version (£229/$269), a 32 GB Wi-Fi version (£259/$299) and a 32 GB Wi-Fi + free 4G version (£319/$349). The version with free 4G seems of little interest to me since most people can use the 4G from their phones in a pinch, but since it exists I’m assuming there is a market for it. An excellent cheaper alternative to the Kindle Oasis is the Kindle Paperwhite, which comes in an 8 GB Wi-Fi version (£129/$149), a 32 GB Wi-Fi version (£159/$179) and a 32 GB Wi-Fi + free 4G version (£219, EU only). There is also the option of the simple 4 GB Kindle (£79/$109), but keep in mind that it does not have water resistance and has a lower screen resolution (167 ppi vs 300 ppi for the two other models).

I would recommend the entry-level Kindle for limited budgets, the Paperwhite for average budgets and the Oasis for the people who want to treat themselves to what I consider to be the best device in the line-up. Regarding storage capacity, I would recommend the 32 GB versions only if you have the intention of reading a lot of graphic novels or books with a lot of images, since these take up way more storage than simple books.

Stop Procrastinating: You Need a Password Manager

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 29 Jan 2019 17:34:49 +0000

Many people believe they are capable of coming up with secure passwords. While that would be great, the truth is they all overestimate their capabilities. As security expert Troy Hunt aptly puts it, the only secure password is the one you can’t remember.

Fact: humans are terrible password generators¶

In 2013, a Google Apps survey with 2,000 participants revealed the following top 10 of most used passwords:

Pet names
A notable date, such as a wedding anniversary
A family member’s birthday
Your child’s name
Another family member’s name
Your birthplace
A favourite holiday
Something related to your favourite sports team
The name of a significant other
The word “Password”

These all share a common trait: they are easy to guess or obtain.

SplashData is an Internet security firm that publishes a yearly list of most used passwords, based on data extracted from millions of data breaches. You can find the lists, dating all the way back to 2011, on Wikipedia. In the 2016 edition, the 25 most common passwords made up more than 10% of the surveyed passwords, with the most common password of 2016, “123456”, making up 4%. The lesson to learn from this is that we are simply terrible at coming up with secure passwords. Not convinced? Try answering the following questions:

Do you use the same password everywhere?
Do you use a variation of the same password for all your accounts by changing a letter or number, or by adding the name of the service you signed up for?
Do you use a fixed set of a few different passwords, such as one for your “bogus” accounts, one for your “important” accounts, …?
Do you ever forget which usual password you went with, or which variation you opted for when creating your account?
Do you still use extremely simple passwords, such as “123456” or “p@$$w0rd”?
Is your password strategy characterised by the fact that they must be easy to remember?

If you answered positively to either one of these questions, go check HaveIBeenPwned to see if your credentials have been compromised (you can check your email here and your password(s) here). If, by chance, they haven’t been compromised yet, I can guarantee it’s only a matter of time and it might also just be that data breaches containing your data are simply not public knowledge yet. Many leaks and data breaches are only discovered years after they happen.

The only secure password is the one you can't remember. Tweet this

Although having superpowers that allow us to generate and store random passwords comprised of more than 25 characters including letters, numbers and special characters would be wonderful, we are unfortunately still human; we’ll need to extend our brain in some way to generate and store secure passwords for each of our accounts. That’s what it takes for our accounts to be properly secured: each of them being protected by a unique, long, complex and, above all, random password.

Fact: using unique passwords greatly enhances the security of our accounts…¶

…and sometimes the security of other users as well. You might not deem it necessary to have a unique password for each of your accounts, but it vastly improves their security with the added benefit of a certain peace of mind. For instance, if a site on which you have an account gets hacked, or an employee of the service accesses data they shouldn’t have access to, or you fall victim to phishing or something else, the breach remains confined to the affected account. This means you only need to change a single password. It’s like having several houses: if your keys get stolen and all your houses share the same lock, you will need to go through the hassle of changing all your locks. However, if you installed different locks, an incident like this becomes pretty insignificant, since you would only need to change one lock for all your houses to remain secure.

In 2012, 68 million Dropbox users had their accounts compromised due to a single employee reusing their LinkedIn password for their internal Dropbox account. The hacker first targeted LinkedIn, which used to store passwords in a very unsecure way¹; retrieving the password of the aforementioned Dropbox employee as well as those of the 117 million other affected users was therefore a trivial task for the hacker. According to Motherboard, 90% of passwords were found in the 72 hours following the hack.

Once in possession of the employee’s LinkedIn password, the hacker was able to access Dropbox’s internal network, where he was able to steal the user account database. Let that sink in: 68 million people affected because of one reused password. But it gets worse: the hack was only discovered four years after it happened. Later that year, Best Buy accounts were also compromised using credentials obtained through the hacking of other vulnerable websites. This kind of incident happens very frequently, as evidenced by Troy Hunt’s HaveIBeenPwned.

68 million people affected because of one reused password. Tweet this

Using a unique password for each of your accounts is therefore not only about protecting yourself; it can also protect other people. You might think this only applies to employees of large companies, but think again: imagine the myriad of information that can be gathered about you and your loved ones by scouring through your inbox. There is certainly more than enough to greatly facilitate the writing of a credible email to trick your loved ones, not to mention all the other information that can be found in there. This is just one example; hackers certainly have far more use cases for your inbox.

All this is why having unique and secure passwords is highly recommended. Given the ever growing number of accounts we have, it is impossible to create and remember a unique and secure password for each of them. In my case, I would need to create and remember over 400 passwords. Note that before I started using a password manager, I didn’t realise I had so many accounts. Had someone asked at the time, I would probably have guessed around 50.

Fact: the security of the services we use is beyond our reach¶

Another big problem with passwords is the security of the hundreds of services we create accounts for. Ideally, these services should do everything in their power to ensure that a user’s password is known only to them; passwords must never be accessible by anyone else, directly or indirectly, be it the creator of the service, its hosting provider, your Internet service provider or your government.

If, at any time, a service is able to provide you with the password you used on their platform, consider that password compromised. This includes services that send you your password by email when you forget it, instead of asking you to create a new one. A feature like this indicates that your password is stored in a way that allows the service to retrieve it, which is either in clear text, or encrypted if you’re “lucky”. If it’s encrypted, it means the service also holds the decryption key, so they might as well be storing it in clear text as far as security is concerned. Storing passwords encrypted is the equivalent of storing your valuables in a safe with the key taped to the door. The only acceptable way to store passwords is to hash them, which is a mathematical process that generates a fingerprint of the password. Unlike encryption, which is bidirectional, it is impossible to retrieve a password from its fingerprint², much like you cannot figure out the exact recipe used to make a cake. Even though you hold the finished product—the fingerprint—and the way to make cake—the mathematical process—is public knowledge, it’s virtually impossible to create the exact same cake without the exact recipe—the password. Any method of storing passwords other than hashing will allow a malicious person who has or gains access to the servers of a service to retrieve the users’ passwords very easily. This is why there are certain standards to adhere to when storing passwords: they provide a way to store them in the safest possible way, while also guaranteeing their confidentiality.

If, at any time, a service is able to provide you with the password you used on their platform, consider that password compromised. Tweet this

Solution: the password manager¶

Although it is impossible to protect ourselves from improper password storage or the inevitable leaks of our credentials, it is however possible to limit the extent of the damage these cause by making our passwords:

Strong so they cannot be guessed, by either a human or a machine.
Unique so that one compromised account does not automatically lead to other accounts being compromised.

You guessed it: the easiest and most secure way to achieve this is to use a password manager. The way they work is pretty straightforward: a password database, encrypted using a Master Password known only to you. This means you only need to remember one long and secure password. Some people argue that storing all your passwords behind a single passphrase represents a single point of failure, since anyone with that passphrase gets instant access to all your accounts. The important thing to keep in mind is that the biggest threat to your passwords doesn’t lie on your physical machine, but rather on all the platforms, networks and databases your passwords sail through. In short, the vast majority of risks are distant and not local. From a hacker’s point of view, they would have to choose between:

Hacking a random user, which may net them a few hundred accounts that are all linked to a single user.
Hacking into a centralised system, which will net them anywhere from a few thousand to a few million accounts, which can then be sold in bulk and used to look for accounts on other platforms (this widespread practice is called credential stuffing).

I don’t know about you, but if I were the hacker my choice would be pretty clear cut.

The biggest threat to your passwords doesn't lie on your physical machine, but rather on all the platforms, networks and databases your passwords sail through. Tweet this

In a nutshell, using a password manager allows you to greatly improve the security of your accounts. Usually, it will also allow you to store credit cards, secure notes, bank accounts, Wi-Fi passwords, license keys, … In addition to all this, many of them offer additional features. Here are some examples from mine:

Two-factor authentication integration, which requires you to enter a unique temporary code in addition to your password on supported sites.
Detection of accounts for which two-factor authentication is available but not enabled.
Detection of reused passwords.
Detection of accounts for which the URL is using HTTP when the associated website is available over HTTPS.
An integration with HaveIBeenPwned, which allows you to easily get an idea of which accounts or passwords have appeared in a leak, without revealing any of your credentials.

To pick your password manager, head over to my comparative.

For more technical readers, an unsalted SHA1. ↩
It is possible to find the password, just not directly from the fingerprint. The process involves generating random passwords or using a list of known passwords, which are then hashed to compare the resulting fingerprints with the one of the targeted password. A good password hashing algorithm is deliberately slow so as to make this kind of attack extremely expensive, or so slow that there is basically no point in trying. ↩

Choosing a Password Manager

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 12 Jul 2018 07:05:34 +0000

Note: this post presents the results of my research and has not been sponsored by anyone in any way. It’s a long read, but the length is necessary to clarify certain things and explain my reasoning. Choosing a password manager is something that needs to be taken seriously, given the sensitivity of the data it stores.

To maximise the security of your online accounts, you need to use complex and unique passwords, coupled with two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible. The latter requires you to enter a temporary code each time you login on a new device. Most of the time, this code is generated using a mobile application such as Google Authenticator or Authy, but it is occasionally also sent via text. This last option should be avoided as much as possible, because text messages are not a secure channel. Two-factor authentication adds an additional layer of security to your account, by asking you for something you own (your 2FA code) in addition to something you know (your password) to authenticate you. Regarding the necessity of having unique and complex passwords, there’s really no secret to it: you need a password manager. In addition to your passwords, password managers also allow you to manage your two-factor codes, which makes securing your accounts that much easier.

To maximise the security of your online accounts, you need to use complex and unique passwords, coupled with two-factor authentication. Tweet this

I have been using 1Password for a little over 2 years, so I figured it was time to take another look at the market to see if it’s still the best option out there. This led me to write this post, for which I compared the four big actors of password management: 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass and KeePass.

Dashlane, LastPass and 1Password all offer synchronisation via their servers. While this may sound scary at first, note that your Master Password is never sent to their servers; the only thing they store is your encrypted password database. It is downloaded and decrypted locally using your Master Password, and sometimes an additional key, depending on the manager.

To briefly get into the technical side of things, the key used to decrypt your password database isn’t exactly your Master Password, but a key derived from it using a key derivation function. The functions chosen by each manager were conceived to be deliberately slow in order to hinder any attempts at brute forcing your Master Password.

Without further ado, here’s a table comparing the features of 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass and KeyPass. For lines containing only text (with no cross or checkmark), the bold options are the better ones. If none of them are in bold, it means all options are equivalent. A green cross means the absence of the feature in question is a good thing. I omitted features that are supported natively by all password managers, which include form filling, password generation, two-factor authentication, etc.

	1Password	Dashlane	LastPass	KeePass
Launch	2006	2009	2008	2003
Encryption	AES-256-GCM using the Master Password and a secret key	AES-256-CBC using the Master Password	AES-256-CBC using the Master Password	AES-256-CBC using the Master Password and a key file
Key derivation functions	PBKDF2	PBKDF2	Argon2d PBKDF2	Argon2 AES-KDF
Global shortcut to open the app		Not really
Global form filling shortcut
Max. generated password length	64	40	100	64
Two-factor code generation				using a plugin
Compromised account detection		per service¹		using a plugin
Automated password change		through their servers (!)	locally
Bug bounty
Open source
Automatic synchronisation		(paid version)
Master Password reset without data loss	only for shared vaults		under certain conditions
Auto-lock when inactive		disabled by default	disabled by default
Price	$35.88/year or $3.99/month for one user $59.88/year or $4.99/month for 5 users	Free (single device) €39.99/year for one user (with sync)	Free (with sync) Premium for $24/year for one user Premium for $48/year for 6 users	Free
Payable per month	+$1/month for one user +$2/month for 5 users			N/A
Others	First 30 days are free	30 days of premium for free	30 days of premium for free	N/A
Website	1Password.com	Dashlane.com	LastPass.com	KeePass.info KeePassXC.org KeePassX.org

1Password and KeyPass both use a secret key in addition to the Master Password to encrypt user data. Specifically, a second key is derived from this secret key and combined with the one derived from the Master Password to obtain the decryption key. Here’s some pseudo-code representing the calculation of a decryption key. The first version is the way it’s done in 1Password with a secret key and the other version is how it could be done without a secret key, where PBKDF2 and HKDF are key derivation functions:

# With a secret key (1Password version)
derived_master_password_key = PBKDF2(master_password, 
                                     HKDF(salt, version, email, 32),
                                     100000)
derived_secret_key_key = HKDF(secret_key, 
                              account_id, 
                              version, 
                              norm(derived_master_password_key))
decryption_key = XOR(derived_master_password_key, derived_secret_key_key)

# Without a secret key
decryption_key = PBKDF2(master_password, 
                        HKDF(salt, version, email, 32), 
                        100000)

As you can see, the version with an additional secret key generates a longer decryption key, therefore increasing the overall security, given the secret key never leaves the local machine. This means that even with a weak Master Password, password data is safe when stored in the cloud, thanks to the secret key. However, this isn’t a reason to neglect the security of your Master Password, because you also need to protect the data on your machine. In a nutshell, the purpose of the secret key is to protect data against remote attacks, while the Master Password is used to protect it against local attacks.

Regarding the presence of global shortcuts, Dashlane doesn’t offer any on Windows, and on macOS you have to activate Dashlane in your accessibility preferences to get a splendid ⇧ + ^ + ⌥ + ⌘ + D that can’t be reassigned, which is so horrible that it might as well not be there. KeePass only has a global shortcut to fill forms, while 1Password has both a shortcut to open 1Password Mini and a shortcut to either fill forms or open 1Password mini if it doesn’t find anything to fill.

All managers fare pretty well with regards to the maximum length of their generated passwords and they all offer support for two-factor code generation, even if a plugin is required to add the feature to KeePass. Compromised account detection is where things start to get interesting. Dashlane and LastPass only notify you that a service for which you have an account has been breached, whereas 1Password and KeePass both use the APIs of HaveIBeenPwned to check if any of your passwords have been compromised (KeePass requires a plugin for this).

Dashlane and LastPass are the only ones to offer automated password changing, but they don’t do it in the same way. The only acceptable way to do this is the LastPass way, because it does it locally on the user’s machine. Dashlane’s implementation however, presents one huge security risk, by doing the change through their servers, meaning your passwords transit through them and end up in clear text at one point or another. If you want more information on this, I encourage you to read my post on the subject. To quote my post:

The best way for a service to guarantee the secrecy of data is to ensure they never have access to it in the first place. Tweet this

This is quite a pity, because everything was going well for Dashlane until I wondered why 1Password didn’t have a password changer, which made me stumble upon this answer on their forums. I checked their allegations, and the results of my research can be found the aforementioned post, with some other absurdities I came across as well. In the end, the password manager I thought I would be presenting as a viable alternative to 1Password ended up being a manager I strongly recommend people stop trusting. The issues outlined in my post clearly show they’d rather have a “wow-effect” instead of guaranteeing the security of their users’ data 120%, which is unacceptable for a password manager. I really hope Dashlane will fix these problems in the future so that I can recommend them.

With that being said, I know what you’re thinking: “What about KeePass/LastPass/1Password’s compromised password detection?” Well, this one does abide by the security by design principles, because they never send your password or anything that could allow to identify it to the servers of HaveIBeenPwned, which is the service used for the verification. It works by hashing your password locally (see below) and sending the first 5 characters of this hash to HaveIBeenPwned, which responds with all known password hashes that start with the partial hash that was sent. The password manager then checks the previously generated hash against this list; if it is found, it means the password was leaked in a breach at some point. The design of this API is just beautiful, because it’s simple and secure at the same time. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Troy Hunt.

What’s a Hash?¶

A hash is a fingerprint obtained by passing a piece of data through a hashing function. The hashing function does various mathematical operations on the data to get its fingerprint—or hash—, which often has a fixed length, in such a way that the same data will always yield the same hash, and that any change to the data causes its hash to change. Finding the input value of a secure² hash is infeasible; the only way to do “find” the input value of a hash is to compute hashes of random data until you find the right one. As an example, here are the hashes of “test”, “Test” and “antidisestablishmentarianism”:

                        sha1('test')  # a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3
                        sha1('Test')  # 640ab2bae07bedc4c163f679a746f7ab7fb5d1fa
sha1('antidisestablishmentarianism')  # 3fb02f5916ca73ae2d95e9d45d7bffaf62bd9b42

KeePass is the only open source manager, but the three others are regularly audited by independent entities to verify that their implementation reflects what is described in their respective whitepapers³. With that being said, it is undeniable that being open source presents a huge advantage for KeePass, because anyone can audit its code, which theoretically guarantees its security. This is also why it isn’t really a problem for KeePass to not have a bug bounty⁴, which is a program that offers monetary compensation for the disclosure of vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, KeePass is plagued by the issue that plagues many open source products, which is the lack of ergonomics of its interface. In addition to that, you have to juggle different applications depending on the platforms you use, as well as handle the synchronisation yourself, which I find impractical. For these reasons, I cannot see myself using KeePass for now, because it requires too much manual configuration for things that other managers offer from the get go, in clear and beautiful interfaces. However, I totally understand why certain people would be drawn to this type of solution; I just think it does not suit everyone.

Then comes what happens if you forget your Master Password. 1Password only allows you to restore access to shared vaults, provided the people you shared it with haven’t all forgotten their Master Passwords. It’s a bit like losing the key to your house: if another person still has a key, they can come open the door for you; otherwise, you’ll have to call a locksmith. The difference here is that the locksmith can’t help you either.

The only manager that truly allows you to get your data back if you forget your Master Password is LastPass. This may sound nice, but don’t be fooled: this is actually a bad thing. Basically, your vault has a second decryption key, which is itself encrypted using a recovery key that never leaves your machine. This encrypted decryption key is sent to their servers, waiting to be used. When you request a reset of your Master Password, you receive a code by email or text to activate the reset procedure. Once activated, LastPass fetches the encrypted key from the server, decrypts it locally using the recovery key, uses it to decrypt your password database and finally asks you to choose a new Master Password. Given the recovery key never leaves your machine, it only works on a machine where you have already used LastPass, and for some reason only via the browser extension.

Even if it doesn’t look like it could allow LastPass to access any of your data, it still poses a security threat. If a person were to gain access to your unlocked computer, they would most probably also have access to your emails (and maybe your phone if you left it on your desk as well), which means they can start the recovery procedure. Once the procedure is started, they don’t even have to complete it. Once LastPass has decrypted your data, it doesn’t force you to enter a new Master Password, which means they can just skip this step and freely browse the unlocked LastPass library. All that remains is to delete the emails and you will be none the wiser. Note that it’s possible to deactivate this feature, but the fact that it’s active by default presents a security risk. Thankfully, if you have two-factor authentication enabled for your account, access cannot be restored with a 2FA code. The risk of this happening is pretty small, but it’s still ridiculous to have a default configuration that isn’t 100% secure.

Regarding auto-lock features, they are disabled by default for Dashlane and LastPass, including if you quit them, which is also an absurd default configuration. This means that once they are unlocked, they will remain so until you manually lock them, even if you quit the application.

Regardless of the issues mentioned above, I find 1Password clearly outweighs Dashlane and LastPass on many points:

Better encryption by using a combination of the Master Password with a secret key;
Detection of compromised accounts¹;
Global form filling shortcut;
Ability to pay per month for an additional dollar;
Global shortcut to open the application (only in regards to Dashlane);
Great maximum password length (only in regards to Dashlane);
Price (only in regards to Dashlane).

The first big point is encryption. As I explained above, for identical Master Passwords, 1Password will always be more difficult to crack, given the 34-character secret key that’s added to the Master Password. It makes the storage on their servers significantly more secure, given the security isn’t directly related to the quality of the Master Password anymore. Detecting compromised accounts is extremely handy; much more than being able to change passwords automatically, which is the only “missing” feature. As long as a password is secure, the only reason to change it is a suspicion that it has been discovered by someone or something that shouldn’t have. The only password managers that enable you to check this are 1Password and KeePass.

Dashlane and LastPass are also missing a global form filling shortcut; this is definitely not essential, but I use 1Password’s so often that I just couldn’t imagine not having it. Dashlane is also missing a proper global shortcut to open it, which is really a pity. The length of passwords generated by Dashlane also leaves much to be desired, as mentioned above.

Looking at their prices, Dashlane is 24% more expensive than 1Password, with LastPass being tough to beat given their free offer. However, I much prefer paying less than the price of a sandwich each month for total peace of mind and a password manager which meets my requirements 200%. 1Password is also the only one to allow users to pay per month, which could suit some people better, even if it costs 33% more.

As you have probably guessed by now, my final recommendation is 1Password for people who want something that works out of the box with excellent ergonomics and a beautiful interface, or KeePass for those who absolutely want to have an open source manager, even if that means they will have to handle more things manually. All that remains is for you to create a strong Master Password!

Creating a Strong Master Password¶

The ideal choice for a Master Password is a passphrase composed of multiple words separated by spaces, with an invented password somewhere in between; something like “dog table KJ3L9!NGoWB; server jacuzzi nebula”. This makes for a long, secure password that is easy enough to remember but hard to crack. A great way to obtain your words is to use Diceware, which is a list of 7,776 numbered words that allows you to choose each word by throwing 5 dice. Using dice makes this totally random, which in turn makes it secure. It is important to use actual dice and not an electronic dice in order to guarantee randomness. Let’s imagine you get 3—5—4—5—1 with your first dice roll: your first word will then be “knob”, as can be seen in the list below:

35446 knit
35451 knob  
35452 knock
35453 knoll

All you have to do is repeat the process to get the 4 remaining words. After that, you can throw a single dice to determine where to place the invented password: a 1 would put it at the start, while a 6 would put it at the end, a 3 after the second word, etc. Note that there are also translated versions of the word list.

Stateless Password Managers¶

Stateless password managers have been left out of this comparative deliberately, as they are inherently less secure. They work by deriving a key from your Master Password, which is then fed into a deterministic function, which in turn generates a password based on the derived key and the site name you supplied. Since the function is deterministic, the same site name and Master Password will always generate the same password. This makes security rely very heavily on the strength of your Master Password, as a hacker only needs to guess your Master Password and the site name you used to obtain your password. With a traditional password manager that uses an encrypted database, a hacker needs to steal the database, guess your Master Password and, in the case of 1Password and LastPass, guess an additional secret key. In short, database-based password managers require the hacker to steal a database in addition to guessing your passwords, which is one hell of a lot more complicated.

Dashlane’s detection doesn’t happen at the account level. Instead, they just detect when a service for which you have an account has been breached. ↩↩
SHA1 and MD5 are not secure hashing functions. The best option for secure hashing is to use specialised password hashing functions such as bcrypt, PBKDF2, etc. ↩
I do have to note that I had to go through Google to find the one for LastPass, which is odd, because I would expect it to be available directly on their homepage. ↩
The European Union allocated a 71,000 € bug bounty to KeePass from January 15 until July 31, 2019. Bug bounties have also been allocated to 14 other open source projects. ↩

Why Dashlane Cannot Be Trusted

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 10 Jul 2018 07:00:51 +0000

Initially, this post should have been a comparative of password managers. However, while doing my research, I stumbled upon some concerning design choices regarding Dashlane, which pushed me to write and publish this post first.

Specifically, I take serious issue with two of Dashlane’s features, both in the way they are designed and in the way they are presented. The first feature does not respect basic security by design principles, to which any application or organisation should automatically adhere when handling sensitive data. The main principle Dashlane tramples is the minimisation of their attack surface, as their design choices make them unable to guarantee that they will never have access to their users’ passwords without knowing their Master Passwords. This is something that every Password Manager must guarantee.

Dashlane's design choices make them unable to guarantee that they will never have access to their users' passwords. Tweet this

Dashlane’s Password Changer¶

The main problematic feature is their Password Changer; it may look awesome, but it represents a serious security issue. Rather than doing everything locally on the user’s machine, which is what another password manager with this feature does, Dashlane does it via their servers. Their FAQ mentions the following (emphasis mine):

A “suspicious log-in attempt” notification may appear when signing in to a site after using Password Changer, because your passwords are changed through our servers when using the Password Changer feature. This is why a site may detect that you are signing in from another location and display a warning. Password Changer uses our servers to actually connect to the sites in order to update your passwords there.

You read that right: when using Dashlane’s Password Changer feature, both your old and your new password transit through Dashlane’s servers, where they will be in plain text at one point or another, since they need to be able to fill them on the website they are changing the password for. They even mention this explicitly in their help pages on the Password Changer:

When using the Password Changer, your passwords are always generated locally by the Dashlane application, then encrypted and transmitted securely to our servers.

Note that the Password Changer requires that your old and new passwords be briefly unencrypted on our servers. This process uses a secure, dedicated server infrastructure, and the information is immediately removed once the process is complete.

This is the exact opposite of security by design. The best way for a service to guarantee the secrecy of data is to ensure they never have access to it in the first place.

The best way for a service to guarantee the secrecy of data is to ensure they never have access to it in the first place. Tweet this

This led me to contact Dashlane to see how they intended to justify this. Their first-level support basically told me it’s secure because “information is removed from Random Access Memory right after our servers send the result back to the application, which is 45 seconds in [sic] average to change a password, or after five minutes if our servers cannot reach your application anymore”. This was in the middle of a big smoke screen on how passwords are encrypted before being sent to the server (thank goodness) and that all passwords stored in Dashlane are only known by the user and never by Dashlane. With the way they put things and the amount of technical jargon used, their replies could have easily fooled people who are not technologically inclined (the whole email thread is included at the end of this post).

The worst thing is how they continuously play with words. They told me the transmitted passwords “are only used to update your new password there, and they are not stored anywhere on [their] servers”, which is outright false since it’s stored in memory for 45 seconds to 5 minutes. What this means is any hacker or malicious employee with access to the code or servers responsible for changing passwords can easily put something in place to save transmitted passwords somewhere.

But that’s not all: they certainly have logging systems in place to keep a trace of all requests made to their servers for bookkeeping, debugging, etc. All that needs to happen is for a single employee to commit a small mistake, and all passwords end up in these logs, which is what recently happened to Twitter. This is why security by design is so important when creating a password manager: designing things in such a way that the design itself makes security threats like this virtually non-existent.

The worst part in all of this is that the design of the Password Changer goes against their own security principles:

Do not trust anything or anyone: We believe that good security architecture should never trust any server, code, or user it interacts with, including Dashlane’s servers. Even if we do everything we can to ensure our servers’ safety, we always work with the assumption that our servers could become the next target of a cyber criminal at any time; our architectural choices must ensure that such an event, however unlikely it may be, does not break our security model.

They say a good security architecture should never trust any server, code or user it interacts with, including Dashlane’s servers, yet trusting their servers and code is exactly what they’re doing here.

The design of the Password Changer goes against their own security principles. Tweet this

My suggestion is they simply remove this feature while they work on creating a version that works entirely locally. However, I do wonder if it’s even relevant to keep such a feature because its only real purpose is to cause a “wow-effect”. It is indeed not that useful, given there are only two reasons to change a password:

If you suspect the password has been discovered by someone or something that shouldn’t have;
If your password is insecure (or in other words, if it was generated with something other than a password manager).

If you’re already using a password manager, the second point is never going to be an issue. Regarding the first, I would say this doesn’t happen often enough to justify having a tool to change them automatically. The only case where this can really come in handy is when you start using a password manager for the first time, meaning you’ll have to change all your passwords. With that being said, you will need to add your accounts one by one anyway, so you can just change your passwords at the same time. Moreover, Password Changer only supports a limited number of websites and the vast majority of big players seem to be missing: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, GitHub, Spotify, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Steam, CloudFlare, Uber and PayPal are all absent from the list of supported websites. The only known websites I saw are Netflix, IMDb, Indeed, ProtonMail, Reddit, Vimeo, Yelp and some press websites. All the others were small websites, most of which I have never heard of. In short, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Do note that I doubt the lack of support for Google and others is Dashlane’s fault; it’s probably due to their security preventing automated password changes in one way or another, but it does make the Password Changer all the more useless and demonstrates its purely commercial nature.

Dashlane’s reluctance to recognise this issue does not help their case; I had to insist quite a lot to eventually get redirected to their second level support, which finally acknowledged the issue, telling me they tried to do it locally, but it ended up being too slow so they chose to do it via their servers. The mistake here was to go with an intermediate solution instead of waiting until they manage to create something that works entirely locally. This really looks like upper management strong-arming a reluctant technical team that is dissatisfied with their solution, under the pretext that “they’re not going to throw away working code” and that “hacks and malicious employees only happen to others anyway”.

July 2019 update: I’m happy to see that the issues with the documentation on Password Sharing have been fixed. The original content of this section remains below for archiving purposes.

Original content of this section¶

Dashlane also offers a feature that allows its users to share passwords. This password sharing has two modes: one which allegedly only permits someone to use the password (limited rights), while the other one allows them to use it, see it, modify it, share it further or even revoke the access of other users who have access to it, including the person who shared it with them (unlimited rights). Aside from that last rather strange point, the issue is that their FAQ tries to have you believe the limited mode makes it impossible to view the password, which is flat out false.

Can other people see the password I shared with them?

Yes, depending on which permission settings are chosen when sharing an item. There are two different permission settings for password sharing:

Limited Rights: The recipient can only use this item.

Full Rights: The recipient can use, view, edit, and share this item. They can also edit sharing rights and revoke sharing rights of other users who were shared this item, including yours.

Be sure to choose Full Rights if you require the users to be able to view and edit the contents of these items.

It is impossible to guarantee that a person cannot view a password they can use, because accessing it is trivial using the inspector of their browser to:

Modify the password field so it becomes a text field, before filling it with Dashlane;
Inspect the login request that was sent, by using the network tab.

The first vulnerability can be fixed by preventing Dashlane from filling passwords in anything other than password fields, but the second one is simply unfixable. This is why I suggest Dashlane simply allow people to view passwords that were shared with limited rights, so as to avoid any ambiguity and false sense of security. At the very least, they need to correct their FAQ to clarify this.

On top of that, note that this issue was already communicated to them more than a year ago, yet they still haven’t fixed it. I took this up with their second-level support and was told my feedback would be transmitted to the team to make sure they are aware of the risks I mentioned and see what can be done. Given the whole honesty situation, go figure if this was an honest answer or just an attempt at damage control…

Conclusion¶

The issues laid out above clearly show that Dashlane prefers generating a “wow-effect” instead of guaranteeing the security of their users’ data 120%. The fact that they go against their very own security principles is also deeply concerning. I really hope Dashlane will change their minds on this someday, because without the aforementioned issues, Dashlane would have been a viable choice.

With that being said, even if they end up fixing these issues, I doubt I would be able to trust them, given the misalignment between the interests of their management and the interests of their users. It’s either bad management directly or incompetence on a technical level, but in the end, their management would be at fault for both of these, because a bad technical team doesn’t just magically appear. Most of all, this is really concerning, because the end result is a password manager whose basic design has flaws, with dubious help pages and incompetent first level support, which both try to muddy the waters.

Below, you will find the complete, commented email thread between me and Dashlane, which is really worth a read. If you’re a Dashlane user and don’t know which password manager to turn to, or if you’re not using one yet, check out my post comparing the major players on the market.

Emails Exchanged with Dashlane¶

Hi,

I have recently started comparing password managers to see which one is currently the best on the market. While looking into Dashlane, I stumbled upon your Password Changer feature. Intrigued by it, I dug a little deeper, which is when I found this in your FAQ: “Password Changer uses our servers to actually connect to the sites in order to update your passwords there.”

This means that both the old and the new password are in clear text on your servers at one point or another, since you need to be able to fill them in the forms on the website you’re changing the password for. Would you mind explaining how I should trust the Dashlane team if they think that this is secure? This seems to be the exact opposite of security by design and just begs to be hacked or accessed by a malicious employee.

Best regards,

Pierre-Louis

The first reply came in ten hours later:

Hi Pierre,

Thank you for contacting us and I hope you are doing well!
This is Alex from Dashlane’s Support team and I will be assisting you with your inquiries.

Please allow me to explain how Dashlane’s Password Changer works.

The passwords being generated by the Password Changer are always generated locally by the Dashlane application, and they are always transmitted securely or encrypted when updating your passwords on Web sites. All information transmitted to Web pages (including security questions and Two-Factor Authentication codes if required by a site) is done securely, just as if you were logging into individual websites yourself and changing passwords manually.

Note that your passwords – exclusively when using Password Changer – are securely encrypted and transmitted to our servers. They are only used to update your new password there, and they are not stored anywhere on our servers. Only Password Changer works like this. All your account data is encrypted using your master password and made unreadable to anyone, even by us.

Additionally, any sensitive information on our servers (e.g. logins and passwords when signing to sites) is only used temporarily in Random Access Memory. Random Access Memory is a volatile type of memory used as a working space and constantly overwritten with other data – their state is also lost or reset when power is removed from the system. All information is removed from Random Access Memory right after our servers send the result back to the application, which is 45 seconds in average to change a password, or after five minutes if our servers cannot reach your application anymore and confirm that the password was changed during the process. This information is never stored on our servers.

Only you know your passwords. They are only saved in your Dashlane account, which is protected using your master password and secure AES-256 encryption. No one has access to your data in your Dashlane account except you - not even us at Dashlane!

You can also refer to this article which gives advanced explanations on How Password Changer works.

If you would like me to clarify anything else, please let me know. I’m happy to help in any way I can.

Have a great day!
Kind regards,

Alex
Dashlane Customer Support

The language in this email really tries to muddy the waters by putting buzzwords everywhere and speaking of secure parts of the application that are not related to the Password Changer in any way. I found this really concerning, so when I received an email asking to rate the support I received, I let them know I was unhappy with their response. A few minutes later, I received this:

Hi Pierre,

It’s me again, Alex from Dashlane Support Team! I just want to check on you. How’s it going? Do you need any further assistance?

I was able to receive your response using our satisfaction rating tool, and it seems like you are still needed our assistance.

I’m sorry to hear that you don’t find my explanation clear and helpful. Please allow me to explain again how Dashlane’s Password Changer works.

This is how it works: When you request to use the Password Changer, Dashlane is logging in directly to these sites then generate a strong and unique randomly generated password for you and change the password the site on your behalf locally.

All passwords being sent over to our servers are all encrypted using your master password and secure AES-256 encryption - a Military Grade Encryption. No one has access to your data in your Dashlane account except you - not even us at Dashlane!

Additionally, any sensitive information sent over to our servers (e.g. logins and passwords when signing to sites) are encrypted and stored temporarily.

To my understanding with your feedback is, you do see a problem with this process. Do you mind providing with us with additional details?

Thank you very much in advance for your response! I look forward to further assisting you.

Please feel free to get back to me for any question or clarification.

Kind regards,

Alex
Dashlane Customer Support

As is the case in their FAQ, he uses dubious language that would have you think passwords are changed locally, when in fact that isn’t the case, as he mentions himself later. In addition to that, he’s still swinging buzzwords such as “Military Grade Encryption” around, and even asks me to explain why I see a problem with their way of doing things, which I already did in my first email. This really annoyed me, so I replied this:

Hi Alex,

Well yes, I am dissatisfied with your response and this one unfortunately fed my dissatisfaction even further. You are, yet again, throwing all kinds of buzzwords around and speaking of unrelated things. I’m well aware that Dashlane’s password databases are encrypted using AES-256 encryption and that this makes user passwords stored in Dashlane inaccessible to Dashlane, but that’s not the point.

The point is that when using the Password Changer, user passwords are at some point accessible to Dashlane and anyone who has access to the servers that handle the password change in itself, be it employees or a potential hacker. The password is only encrypted en-route to the server, whereas when it is temporarily stored in RAM while it’s being changed, it is necessarily unencrypted, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to fill it into the forms on the website. This is a huge security risk, because it makes the probability of someone accessing a user’s password because of Dashlane non-zero, while it should be… well… zero. This is the opposite of security by design, which is what a password manager should always adhere to.

Best regards,

Pierre-Louis

15 minutes later, I got this response:

Hi Pierre,

Thanks for writing back and for your feedback.

To better assist you with your inquiry, I will be escalating your concern to a higher level of support.

Kindly wait for the email that you will receive from them.

I appreciate your patience about this inquiry, rest assured that we will do our best to meet your expectations.

Still, have a great weekend! Best regards,

Alex
Dashlane Customer Support

At last, some hope of getting a decent response. I did have to wait three days, but I ultimately got a more sensible and moderate reply:

Hello,

Thank you for your patience. I am Edgar from the Dashlane technical support team and I am here to help you.

I can confirm that the passwords that are changed using Password Changer are indeed updated using our servers and not locally by the application.

The reason why we designed this is to enable multiple passwords to be changed in seconds, which would be less reliable if your computer had to do it, considering many of our users also use mobile devices or may have a bad Internet connection.

Our team is aware that it would be much better to do everything locally, and we plan to work on improving Password Changer in the future to offer a reliable and quick way to change all your passwords locally in seconds.

Unfortunately, the tests we ran for this were not satisfactory enough in terms of performance and reliability and this is why we chose this intermediary solution, which is using one of our servers and working on offering the best security.

Because of this, I can confirm that the Dashlane servers have temporarily access to your current password and the newly password to sign in to the site and change the password there using Password Changer.

We designed this feature with security in mind, and detailed in our documentation on Password Changer, this information is securely transmitted and use a separate server infrastructure, as well as dedicated instances and distinct security groups.

Any sensitive information on our servers is only used temporarily and removed right after our servers sent the result back to the application, which is 45 seconds in average to change a password. Your passwords are never stored on our servers.

I understand your concerns and I have passed your feedback along to the rest of the team.

If you have any other questions related to this feature or would like me to clarify anything else, please let me know.

Kind regards,

Edgar
Dashlane Customer Support

I was happy to see that they finally acknowledged the issue, as well as knowing that they are trying to change things to do this locally. However, I still take issue with the fact that they delivered something that doesn’t guarantee the security of their users 120%. This is when I suggested they disable the Password Changer while they work on a solution to make this work locally, while also mentioning the issues with their password sharing. Here’s my response:

Hi Edgar,

Thank you so much for this email, which finally acknowledges the issue. The thing I still have an issue with is that your management still chose to go with a feature that isn’t 120% secure. You should just have gone without a password changer while you took the time to find a way to make it work locally. I definitely understand that you tried to design this in such a way that it would be hard for any leaks to happen, but you’re still making a 0% probability a non-zero probability, which is an issue for a company handling sensitive data. This is bound to go wrong at some point or another. I would suggest disabling Password Changer while you find a solution that works locally. At the very least, the documentation on Password Changer should be updated so that the part for “normal” users acknowledges the fact that the passwords are changed through your servers, because the language there is a quite misleading and to me it almost feels like it’s on purpose. Most people won’t read the part for advanced users, so they won’t necessarily know it’s done via your servers and have a false sense of security.

I also believe part of your password sharing feature needs changing. The FAQ tries to make people believe that if they grant limited rights, the person the password is shared with cannot view it under any circumstances, but that’s completely false and misleading. All the person needs to do is go to the website the password was shared for, open their inspector, log in and check out the password in the network tab. They can also just change the password field into a text field and view it directly in there. Given this, my first suggestion is to change the FAQ to make this clear to your users while you work on my second suggestion, which is allowing people to view passwords even if they were shared with limited rights, in order to avoid any ambiguity. I also think your full-rights sharing needs tweaking, because it just seems weird to me that a person with whom a password was shared would be able to revoke the access of the person who shared it with them, no matter their rights. The only case where this would be normal is a password transfer, so perhaps you could implement something that allows people to transfer passwords to another user directly and remove that part from the password sharer.

Best regards,

Pierre-Louis

I got a reply the next day:

Hello Pierre-Louis,

Thank you for your reply.

I have read and understand you point of view. I will pass on your feedback on to the team for them to be aware of the risks you mention with the Password Changer and Sharing features and see what can be done.

Please do not hesitate to get back to me if you have other questions.

Kind regards,

Edgar
Dashlane Customer Support

Whether this is an honest reply or just damage control remains yet to be seen.

The Best Browser Extensions of 2018

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 22 Jun 2018 07:28:27 +0000

Your web browser is certainly nice, but it could be way better with the right extensions! This is why I compiled this list of browser extensions I find the most useful in my day-to-day browsing.

Each extension has download links for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and sometimes Edge and Safari. For the ones which aren’t available for a given browser, I tried to find alternatives, but I couldn’t always find one. If I missed any, let me know and I’ll add them! Do note that Opera has an extension to allow it to install Chrome extensions.

uBlock Origin¶

uBlock Origin is an extension that blocks both ads and trackers. It intercepts requests and blocks them before they even get executed if they match the loaded filters, which saves bandwidth and reduces loading times. uBlock also removes ad containers from the website, which makes for a cleaner browsing experience and avoids having large empty blocks on the page where ads used to be. Unlike another controverted ad blocker, all ads are blocked by default.

The filters are entirely configurable and its also possible to manually remove elements from a page, either temporarily or permanently.

uBlock and its configuration

uBlock Origin is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Privacy Badger¶

Privacy Badger is an extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It also aims to block trackers, however, unlike uBlock, Privacy Badger doesn’t use any predefined lists; instead, it keeps a log of all requests made to third-party domains on the various websites you visit. It then checks if these domains are tracking you, be it through cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc. If it finds a domain to be tracking you across at least three different websites, all subsequent requests to this domain will be automatically blocked. If the data fetched from those domains is vital for the website (maps, images, CSS, …), Privacy Badger will allow the connection but block cookies.

Privacy Badger also replaces the various social buttons with static versions that don’t track you (if you don’t click them, obviously).

Privacy Badger is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

HTTPS Everywhere¶

HTTP Everywhere is an extension that enables HTTPS on all websites that support it but don’t do it themselves. This ensures that all your connections are encrypted whenever possible, greatly enhancing the security and privacy of your browsing. To encrypt your traffic even on websites that do not support HTTPS (which are becoming increasingly rare), your only bet is to use a VPN.

HTTPS Everywhere is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

Wayback Machine¶

The Wayback Machine is a beautiful tool offered by the Internet Archive. For those unfamiliar with the Internet Archive, it’s a non-profit that aims to archive all versions of anything that has ever existed on the Internet. This means they store a humongous quantity of websites (332 billion pages), but also books, software, recordings, concerts, videos and images. The Wayback Machine is what makes it possible to browse through all those archived websites.

The extension makes it so that whenever you reach a page that doesn’t exist anymore, it displays a popup that allows you to browse previously saved versions in the Wayback Machine.

Wayback Machine is available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Save to Pocket¶

Pocket is a service that allows you to save articles offline to read them later, be it on your computer or your phone. Apart from the fact articles become available offline, another advantage is that instead of saving the whole page, Pocket saves only the text and the images, which allows for an optimised and configurable display. You can choose the background (white, black or sepia), the font size and whether you want serifs or not.

The extension is simply a button that allows you to add a page to Pocket with a click. It’s also possible to add tags to the saved page directly in order to organise your list.

Save to Pocket is available for Chrome, Opera, Edge and Safari, while being integrated natively into Firefox. Before using it, you’ll have to create an account.

Trello¶

The concept behind Trello is simple: boards, composed of lists, themselves composed of cards that can be drag-and-dropped between the different lists. In its simplest form, a card contains only a title. You can then add a description, attach files and images to it, assign tags, … It can be used to organise basically anything. If you’re ever lacking inspiration, you can visit their aptly named inspiration page to get some.

Here are a few examples taken from my boards:

A Books board with three columns: “To Read”, “Reading” and “Done”
A Recipes board with three columns: “To Try”, “To Refine” and “Approved”, with unapproved recipes getting sent to the archive
A Money board with two columns: “Owed By” and “Owed To”

The extensions allows you to create a card in a given list, attaching the current page if you wish. I often use it to add cards to my recipe board.

The Trello extension is only available for Chrome. I was unfortunately unable to find alternatives for other browsers.

Keepa¶

The Keepa extension adds a historical price graph to any product page on Amazon. This comes in really handy to avoid paying too much for a product when waiting a bit could land you a better deal. Here’s an example with a Crucial SSD on Amazon.fr, which has price variations of €19 from one day to the next:

There’s also a panel with the minimum, average (90 and 180 days) and maximum price. In addition to all this, you can also instantly check if the product you’re viewing is cheaper on another Amazon website by hitting the Compare Amazon prices button.

Ticking the box at the bottom of this view will display the same information directly on the standard view, allowing you to have everything available at a glance, as you can see below. The price comparison widget also includes direct links to the reviews on other Amazon sites.

Keepa’s prices are kept up-to-date by the extension itself, which sends the prices of the items you check to their servers. This can be disabled in the settings.

Keepa is available for Chrome et Firefox, Edge and Safari.

Tab Wrangler¶

If you’re anything like me, chances are you quickly end up with a huge amount of open tabs, even though half of them have no real use anymore. In that case, this extension should interest you; its purpose is to close tabs that have been inactive for a certain amount of time, while still allowing you to get them back if needed. Just set the duration before a tab is deemed inactive, the minimum number of tabs to activate the extension and the maximum number of closed tabs to keep a record of and you’re all set. All tabs which stay inactive for too long will then be sent to the extension’s Tab Corral, where you can search for them by title or address and reopen them with one click if necessary.

Tab Wrangler is available for Chrome et Firefox.

xTab¶

xTab allows you to define a maximum number of open tabs and decide what happens when you try to open a new tab once you have reached your limit. You get to choose from the following options:

Prevent the tab from opening, forcing you to close a tab manually
Close the least recently used tab
Close the least accessed tab
Close the oldest tab

xTab is only available for Chrome.

Alternative for Firefox: Max Tabs (only sets a limit, without any auto-closing options).

Clutter Free¶

Continuing the theme of new-tab disease, Clutter Free is an extension that prevents you from opening two tabs with the same address. This means that if you click a link that leads to a page you already have a tab for, the extension will just switch to the existing tab. In the event you really wish to duplicate a tab, you can do so through the extension’s menu or via a keyboard shortcut. In addition, Clutter Free allows you to search for a tab by title or address.

Clutter Free is only available for Chrome.

Alternative for Firefox: Duplicate Tabs Closer.

OneTab¶

If you ever wanted to be able to save and close your current tabs so you can start from scratch, while still being able to restore your tabs later, OneTab is the extension for you. One click on the extension’s button and all your tabs (except pinned ones) get sent to a new group in the OneTab tab.

You can then restore tabs one by one or restore a whole group whenever you see fit. It’s also possible to name your groups, lock them so they don’t get deleted when they are restored or star them so they always display on top. You can also generate a link that allows you to share a particular group with anyone.

OneTab is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

WikiWand¶

Note from July 1st, 2021: I stopped using WikiWand due to concerns regarding their privacy policy. It’s a real shame, because it was a really great extension.

WikiWand is an improved version of Wikipedia with a much more modern interface.

Aside from the cosmetic changes, there are some nice additional features as well, including:

A permanent table of contents on the left side of the screen
Settings to adjust font size, paragraph width and to choose if you want a font with or without serifs
An improved search that searches in all languages simultaneously
A dark mode
Keyboard shortcuts
…

The extension simply redirects all Wikipedia links to WikiWand automatically.

WikiWand is available for Chrome and Firefox.

Enhancer for YouTube¶

Enhancer for YouTube is an extension which, as you probably guessed from its name, enhances your YouTube experience. Here are its most notable features:

Ad-blocking, with the ability to whitelist channels if desired
A cinema mode that darkens everything around the video
A mini-version of the player that gets pinned in a corner when scrolling down the page
Volume control by scrolling over the video
Automatic deactivation of annotations
Defining a preferred quality with three fallbacks
Multiple dark themes
…

Dark theme example

Cinema mode

Pinned player when scrolling down

Enhancer for YouTube is available for Chrome Firefox, Opera and Edge.

Awesome Screenshot¶

Awesome Screenshot is an extension which, unsurprisingly, allows you to take screenshots of websites. You can choose between the visible part, the entire page or a zone you select. It can also record your screen, but that feature is limited to 30 seconds with the free version.

Awesome Screenshot is available for Chrome, Firefox (which isn’t that useful given the latest versions have integrated screenshot features) and Opera.

Alternative for Safari: Awesome Screenshot (same name, different extension).

1Password¶

1Password is a well-known paid password manager which combines an amazing user experience with excellent security. The extension allows you to save your login information, credit cards, etc. with a single click so you can then log in using a single keyboard shortcut. It doesn’t prefill fields to avoid any security issues and is only a way for your browser to interact with the main application; the extension itself doesn’t store anything.

Password managers will be the subject of a future post, so don’t hesitate to subscribe if you want to be the first to know when it’s published.

The 1Password extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Safari.

Don’t hesitate to share your favourite extensions in the comments!

Mana: Powdered Meals With a Great Neutral Taste

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 15 Oct 2017 19:03:37 +0000

Mana is a powdered meal replacement (just like Queal) that was brought to my attention a few months ago. Having heard some really good things about it, I wanted to try it out, so I reached out to Mana and they were kind enough to provide me with two bags of the powdered version, a shaker, a measuring scoop, as well as two bottles of their premixed version, which was everything I needed for this review.

Given the scepticism that often surrounds meal replacement powders, I’ll reiterate what I stated in my review of Queal: I don’t see products like these as a way to replace my whole diet. I see them more as a healthier alternative to the junk food I might order when I’m feeling lazy or the frozen pizza I might throw in the oven when I’m in a hurry. That doesn’t mean you can’t replace your whole diet with it; you probably can, but I would strongly recommend checking for any health implications this might have, as I’m not educated enough on this exact matter to provide a real opinion.

With that being said, the Czech company behind Mana seems to be taking their product very seriously. All their ingredients are listed on their website, complete with links to their lab analysis, as well as—in some cases—links to clinical studies. The ingredient list goes as follows:

Lipids from sea algae, coconut, flaxseed, sunflower and canola
Isolated protein from soy
Disaccharide from white beet
Beta-glucans from oat
Lecithin from soy
Oligosaccharides from corn
Sap of acacia
HMB, which is short for beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyric acid (yep, that’s a mouthful)

As you may have noticed, there aren’t any animal products in Mana, making it suitable for everyone and probably a bit easier to digest.

For the powdered version, preparation is fairly easy, with the added bonus of having a nice little chart to help you prepare the meal you want, instead of expecting you to have 3 meals with a single bag. Mana should really consider printing this chart directly on their bag; it would make preparation even easier.

As shown in the chart, just add the required amounts of powder and oil to your water, shake, and you’re done. The resulting drink is really smooth, which actually surprised me given there isn’t anything mechanical to break up potential clusters of powder that may form.

The powdered version tastes really great; something like vanilla porridge. It’s a really subtle taste that isn’t overpowering, without making Mana bland either. This means you can easily throw some fruit in there, as they suggest on their website. I wish I had a blender to try that out, but that’s something that’s still missing in my kitchen.

I expected the premixed version to taste the same as the powdered one, given it has all of the same ingredients, minus the acacia sap and the HMB; it really didn’t. I’ll just quote my tasting notes here: “sort of like crab mixed with scallops with nutty hints and a subtle salty finish”. I’m not sure why it tastes so different, but what’s certain is that I had trouble finishing up, whereas with the powdered version I couldn’t get enough of it. I gave it another go a few days later, this time straight from the fridge instead of at room temperature; it somehow reversed the flavour intensities, having a nutty taste with some hints of crab and scallops, which made it slightly better, but it still tasted pretty bad to me.

I’ve talked about the taste, but I haven’t addressed Mana’s main role yet, which is being a meal. Mana gives me a nice feeling of fullness, without the big energy dip I often feel right after eating, which is really great. There is a bit of an energy dip, but it’s not nearly as much as what I get from regular meals. Regarding quantities, the standard 400 kcal size seems to be a perfect match for me.

Other than that, their shaker is pretty great and easy to clean thanks to its large opening, but the cap needs some improvements. The band keeping it linked to the bottle makes it annoying, as it often swings in your face while you drink, unless you hold it in place. They could just get rid of the band, or perhaps make the cap one of those you can drink from directly, which would be even better.

At €1.42 per meal, I will definitely be ordering more Mana in the future; just not the premixed kind… Maybe I should have accepted Mana’s initial proposal, which was to send me a full starter kit of 35 meals.

If you want to check out Mana for yourself, have a look at their website (this link gives you a €5 discount).

Queal: 4.0 Recipe Update and WundrBar

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 03 Aug 2017 18:13:39 +0000

At the start of this year, Queal contacted me to ask if I was interested in reviewing the fourth iteration of Queal, as well as their new product, the WundrBar. I immediately accepted. If you haven’t read my previous post about Queal yet, I would suggest you do so before continuing.

Table of Contents

Queal 4.0
WundrBar

Queal 4.0¶

In order to get an idea of the changes the new recipe brings, I figured what I would need at the very least is bags of my favourite and least favourite flavours, along with a bag that was somewhere in the middle. I ended up receiving three bags in the mail: my favourite, Awesome Apple Pie; my least favourite, Funky Forest Fruit and a bag of Cool Chocolate.

The new Queal 4.0 recipe is a really nice improvement over the previous iteration. The first thing I noticed is that the shakes are smoother; whereas they used to have clusters of powder here and there, it now feels as if I’m drinking an actual milkshake. The flavour also seems to be less sweet than it used to be, which I find to be a good thing.

I started by tasting the new Funky Forest Fruit, thinking I should just get it over with, but I was in fact pleasantly surprised; it was actually awesome. The terrible vegetal aftertaste I experienced with the previous version is gone; now it actually tastes like a fruity cereal bar. I previously rated it 3 out of 10, but I would now rate it a solid 9.

The new Awesome Apple Pie is still as awesome; it tastes like they blended an actual apple pie. I believe they added some cinnamon to the recipe, as I don’t recall tasting it in the previous version, which makes it even greater—if you like cinnamon, that is. Since I previously rated this one 10 out of 10, I have no choice but to give it an 11 this time.

Regarding the Cool Chocolate flavour, I feel the taste of the previous version was better. In addition to the chocolate, I find there’s some kind of strange taste that reminds me of… red meat. I can’t quite describe it in any other way. Because of that, what was previously an 8 is now a mediocre 6.5…

One weird thing with this updated recipe is that it seems to be less nourishing than the previous version. With Queal 3.0, the recommended servings were too much for me, so I made smaller shakes and it was perfect. Because of this, I asked for the 1,800 kcal version for this test, thinking it would be perfect. This time, I used the recommended serving size, but found I was hungry a few hours after drinking my shake. I’m not sure whether this is due to the new recipe or the fact I chose the Lite version, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Along with the new recipe, Queal updated their pouches and the shaker. The pouches now have nutritional information as well as preparation instructions on the back. The shaker is narrower than before and has a more practical cap; you just need to twist it 90 degrees instead of popping it open like with the previous shaker, which would easily cause spills if you weren’t careful.

All things considered, I think it’s safe to say Queal’s 4.0 update is rather convincing. The taste and texture have definitely improved and the new pouch design is also great, providing us with useful information.

WundrBar¶

WundrBar is Queal’s new product. The idea behind it is the same as their shakes, just in bar form. The concept is interesting: it’s easier to carry around and gives you something to actually chew on.

Texture wise, the bars are rather soft, with some added crunch here and there to improve the experience, which is great. However, one issue I had was that each bite made my throat sting more and more, which is also what I get when I eat (way) too much white chocolate. After eating a little less than a third of the bar, I just couldn’t go on. Since the first flavour I tried was the white chocolate variant, I thought this would not be the case with the dark chocolate one; sadly, I got the same results, managing to eat just over a third of the bar before being unable to eat any more.

Regarding the taste, I would say it’s pretty okay and close to what you would expect. The White Chocolate Vanilla flavour tends to be overwhelming, though, so I prefer Dark Chocolate Hazelnut.

In the end, taste doesn’t really matter though, as the product as a whole proved pretty unpalatable to me… I really wish this product were great, as it seemed like an awesome idea. However, in its current state, I just can’t get behind it. Let’s hope they find a solution to this issue and release an improved version somewhere down the line.

This Could be the Future of Fast Food

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 01 Jan 2016 14:57:02 +0000

Note: The product tested in this review was sent to me by Queal on my request, free of charge, in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

In the world we live in, we tend to optimise everything as much as possible. However, until recently, there’s one area that was left rather untouched: food. Food has always been a rather sensitive subject; just look at what happens when someone tells their friends they are going vegetarian, or vegan: they all suddenly have a nutritionist degree. In the end, everyone is forgetting the primary utility of food, which is getting your body the nutrients it needs. This can be done in a number of different ways: with or without meat, with or without any actual eating, etc.

What would happen if you were to create a product that holds 100% of the daily amount of essential nutrients, as set out by EU regulations? That’s exactly what the people at Queal set out to discover. Queal is yet another variant of the popular US-based Soylent. The idea is to replace your meals with healthy shakes, which contain everything your body needs.

While the idea of drinking shakes instead of eating ‘normal’ meals may sound strange or even unattractive, some people don’t especially enjoy eating food, and sometimes you’re just lacking the time (or will) to cook yourself a proper meal. To me, this is exactly where Queal comes in; as a healthy replacement to the good old pizza or other take-out. Moreover, if you think about it, humans have already done this for quite some time, just… not for humans. That’s right, I’m talking about cat food (or dog food, if you’re more of a dog person). After all, if it’s possible for our pets, why wouldn’t it be for us?

That’s exactly why meal substitutes like Queal have intrigued me for quite some time. I just had to try it for myself. So, one night, I decided to order Queal’s Taste Tester package. Just as I was about to place my order, I figured I could try to ask them for a free sample in exchange for an honest review, which I told them would hopefully be positive, but I clearly pointed out that wasn’t in any way guaranteed. The CEO responded the next day before noon, asking me for a shipping address and some other information. I received my package on Tuesday, which was pretty quick.

Each bag contains a day's worth of meals.

Let’s start with the composition of the standard version of Queal:

All those ingredients are sourced from the European Union. Queal is also compatible with a vegetarian lifestyle and contains no GMOs. It is not vegan, however, since it contains Whey Protein, which is a byproduct of the cheese-making process.

While Queal contains maltodextrin, the overall glycemic index (GI) of Queal is below 70, which is the glycemic index of whole wheat bread, or raw banana. This means it is not absorbed by the body too quickly, giving you plenty of energy throughout the day. For anyone interested, the full nutrients table is available on their website.

Queal comes in eight different flavours:

Funky Forest Fruit
Cool Chocolate
Awesome Apple Pie
Banana Mania
Crazy Chocolate Peanut
Super Strawberry
Smooth Vanilla
Morning Macchiato

It’s interesting to note that all flavourings are 100% natural. This means the Cool Chocolate flavour comes from added cocoa, the Super Strawberry one from dried strawberry powder, etc. What follows is a detailed description of all the tastes I tried, which is all of them except Morning Macchiato, since this last one joined the party only a few weeks ago, which means it’s not in the Taste Tester yet.

Funky Forest Fruit¶

Smell (powder)	Cereal bars with fruit
Smell (mixed)	Reminded me of some medicine I had when I was a kid
Taste	The first taste you get is wheat, followed by the forest fruits. After that, you get a quite vegetal taste that resembles alfalfa germs, which I find to be quite an awful finish.
Rating	3/10

Cool Chocolate¶

Smell (powder)	Cocoa powder
Smell (mixed)	Chocolate milk
Taste	A mix of wheat and chocolate that also has a sort of alfalfa sprout finish, but significantly less noticeable than with the Funky Forest Fruit flavour.
Rating	8/10

Awesome Apple Pie¶

Smell (powder)	Cereal bar with apple
Smell (mixed)	Cereal bar with apple
Taste	Just like a cereal bar with apple, from start to finish.
Rating	10/10

Banana Mania¶

Smell (powder)	Banana
Smell (mixed)	Banana
Taste	Banana from start to finish, which is a pretty standard taste for a shake.
Rating	8.5/10

Crazy Chocolate Peanut¶

Smell (powder)	Cocoa powder with a hint of peanut
Smell (mixed)	Something close to M&M's
Taste	Something close to M&M's
Rating	9/10

Super Strawberry¶

Smell (powder)	Neutral
Smell (mixed)	Strawberry
Taste	Strawberry from start to finish, which is once again a pretty standard taste.
Rating	8.5/10

Smooth Vanilla¶

Smell (powder)	Mostly neutral; just a light vanilla smell
Smell (mixed)	Vanilla
Taste	Exactly like baby pap with a vanilla flavour
Rating	10/10

Those ratings are obviously subjective; other people’s experience might differ. My girlfriend, for instance, tasted Crazy Chocolate Peanut first and, while it was a taste I enjoyed, she didn’t like it at all and ended up buying herself a sandwich.

With the taste out of the way, let’s get to what it’s actually like to drink Queal. Let’s start with the preparation, which is quick — a must, since ‘Queal’ is a contraction of ‘quick’ and ‘meal’ — and easy.

Preparing Queal is as simple as filling the shaker with 300 to 400 millilitres of water, adding about 3 scoops of powder using the provided measuring scoop, dropping in the mixing coil, closing the shaker and shaking it vigorously for about 30 seconds. It can then be drank straight away or put in the fridge for later use.

Since I generally tend to eat smaller quantities than most, I only use 200 to 300 millilitres of water and 2 scoops of Queal for my shakes, which turns out to be the perfect quantity for me.

The inside of a bag of Funky Forest Fruit.

The shaker, filled with 300 to 400 millilitres of water and about 3 scoops of Queal.

Queal floating on top of the water.

The mixed product, ready to drink.

After drinking Queal, you definitely feel full, but not the bad kind of full. You’re not suddenly tired because your digestion is starting to kick in, as is common with regular meals. Thirty minutes after finishing your shake, you feel energised — and I mean really energised; I felt as if I had consumed some kind of energy drink, which was of course not the case.

One shake is enough to provide you with a feeling of satiety and energy for several hours; more than enough to last the morning or afternoon without any cravings, which often isn’t the case for me with a normal meal. As an example, one day I drank my shake around 1.30 PM and lasted effortlessly until 8 PM without any other food intake.

I also tried a day entirely on Queal, which was really great. Again, I had no cravings whatsoever and had plenty of energy throughout the day. Queal also didn’t seem to disturb my digestive system at all, which was something I dreaded a bit. It also seems that I tend to sleep better than usual when drinking Queal at night.

All in all, this test was a really positive experience. Queal will definitely replace some of those pizzas and other frozen foods I would use when I’m too lazy or tired to cook for myself. It won’t always replace them, of course, since sometimes there’s just nothing like a good old pizza. In a way, Queal might also encourage me to pay a bit more attention to my food, now that I know how amazing it feels to have a balanced diet.

One last thing that was left out until now is the price, which is rather low, with a mere €2.10 per meal. Queal definitely fulfils its goal of providing quick, healthy and wallet-friendly meals.

For anyone interested, following this link will get you a 5% discount. I’ve also managed to get an extra 5% discount code, making the total discount 10%; just use the code QRF03139BF3 at checkout.

Update: since publishing this review, Queal improved their recipe and came up with a new product. You can read all about it in my update review.

The OnePlus 2 — An Amazing Smartphone at a Reasonable Price

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 07 Sep 2015 22:31:42 +0000

After a little more than three weeks with the OnePlus 2 as my daily driver, the time has come to publish my review.

Table of Contents

First Impressions
Ordering the Phone
Packaging & Contents
Specifications
Look & Feel
Display
Performance
Battery Life
Camera
- Comparison with the OnePlus One
Oxygen OS
Speakers and Audio Quality
Fingerprint Scanner
Alert Slider
Dual SIM
Conclusion

First Impressions¶

The first thing I noticed when getting the phone out of the box was the build quality, which is really excellent. The phone has a very premium feel to it, which is in part due to the magnesium alloy frame. Just like with the OnePlus One, the sandstone cover gives the phone that signature feel. Speaking of the back, the StyleSwap covers are really easy to change, which wasn’t the case with the OnePlus One. As you will see in the pictures below, I went with rosewood, which I find gives the phone a nice personal touch.

Regarding the backlight of the capacitive buttons, they are brighter than they used to be on the OnePlus One, which many people have found to be too dim.

On the software side of things, setting up the phone was a breeze: It only took me a minute or two. One of the first things I did was unlock the bootloader in order to root when I feel the need to, since rooting doesn’t void the warranty of this phone. It was as simple as typing fastboot oem unlock in my terminal with the phone connected in Fastboot mode.

The size of the phone is pretty standard for modern phones, although it tends to be on the smaller side for 5.5-inch phones. It’s a tiny bit smaller than its big brother, the OnePlus One.

Performance wise, the phone is pretty snappy and responsive overall, although there seem to be some slowdowns when launching non-cached applications. The battery on the phone easily gets me through the day with 3 to 4 hours of screen-on time on a full charge.

Ordering the Phone¶

Ordering the OnePlus 2 is a pretty straightforward process. Once you get your invite, you can claim it on your account and start placing your order. You can then select whether you want the 64 GB or the 16 GB version, as well as which StyleSwap covers you wish to add to your order. You can add up to 4 different StyleSwap covers, choosing between bamboo, Kevlar®, black apricot and rosewood. I went with rosewood. Once all your options are selected, it’s time to choose between standard and express shipping. In my case, express shipping was only €5 more expensive, so I went with that. Here’s the timeline of my order for anyone interested:

August 11, evening – Order placed
August 13, morning – Order status changed to processing
August 13, evening – DHL tracking number received
August 14, morning – Phone delivered

As you can see, my phone arrived pretty quickly after I placed my order.

Packaging & Contents¶

The packaging of the phone is nice and simple. The unboxing experience is pretty classic, as opposed to the OnePlus One, which had a rather unique unboxing experience. Here are some pictures of my unboxing:

The contents of the package are pretty standard too:

The OnePlus 2
A charging brick
A 105-centimetre USB type-C cable (reversible on both ends)
A warranty booklet
A quick start guide

The phone has a plastic screen protector pre-applied, which was a really pleasant surprise. It’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, though, but it’s still better than having none and having to wait for yours to arrive. Shipping phones with screen protectors should be an industry standard.

Specifications¶

Just like its big brother, the OnePlus 2 comes with a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display manufactured by JDI. It packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC, which has a quad-core ARM Cortex A57 clocked at 1.82 GHz, as well as a quad-core ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.56 GHz. The GPU is an Adreno 430, clocked at 630 MHz. The processor is backed by 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and a 3,300 mAh non-removable Li-Po battery for the version with 64 GB of eMMC 5.0 storage. For the 16 GB version, which hasn’t been released yet, the phone “only” comes with 3 GB of RAM and a 3,100 mAh battery. Just like last year, OnePlus opted not to include a microSD card reader. The phone also features a fingerprint scanner and dual SIM, with dual SIM dual standby support, which means both SIM cards are active at the same time.

On the software side of things, the OnePlus 2 ships with Oxygen OS, which is a custom version of Android 5.1.1 developed in-house by OnePlus. Despite being a custom version, it offers a mostly near-stock experience, but more on that later.

Regarding the dimensions of the phone, it measures 151.8 x 74.9 x 9.85 mm, which is almost as small as it gets for a 5.5” screen. The phone falls in the heavier category, with 175 grams, but the weight gives it a nice sturdy feeling in the hand.

Look & Feel¶

As mentioned above, the build quality of the OnePlus 2 is excellent; It feels like an expensive phone from the second you get it out of the box. One strange thing about it is the position of the volume buttons: They are on the right side instead of the left, which was a bit confusing at first. OnePlus didn’t move those without a valid reason though, since you’ll find the alert slider right where you would usually have your volume buttons. As with the OnePlus One, the power button is at the perfect spot to rest under my thumb. The buttons feel sturdy and have a nice click to them, and the alert slider is hard enough to avoid changing notification modes in your pocket.

The much hyped alert slider

The power and volume buttons

The camera module, with the dual LED flash and the laser autofocus

The top of the phone with the headphone jack

A closer look at the fingerprint sensor

The phone comes with a USB type-C port for charging and data transfers

Display¶

As stated in the specifications, the OnePlus 2 comes with a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display, which makes for a 401 PPI density. OnePlus opted not to go with a Quad HD display, which is in my opinion a sensible design choice. Except if you constantly use your phone for VR, anything over 1080p is overkill on a phone this size; It would just run hotter and have a shorter battery life. As MKBHD also rightfully pointed out, low-end Quad HD displays tend to have worse quality than high-end 1080p displays, and you can’t expect a high-end Quad HD display in a phone starting at €339.

The display looks really great and has insane viewing angles. Remembering the yellow tint issues on the OnePlus One, I naturally checked my phone for any kind of yellowing, and I’m happy to report there isn’t anything of that sort. If I really pay attention, I can see there is a bit of a dark gradient at the bottom of the phone — which is where the LEDs are located —, but it goes totally unnoticed when you use the phone.

The brightness of the screen is pretty great, even in direct sunlight. It does seem a tiny bit dimmer than the OnePlus One, but it still works perfectly fine for me in most conditions.

Performance¶

The performance of the OnePlus 2 is pretty great. However, as I mentioned, there are sometimes some slowness issues when opening non-cached apps. Once open, the apps are pretty snappy though, so it’s not that big of an issue. I’m pretty sure this will be fixed in a future update. I’m not really a phone gamer, so I didn’t try gaming on the phone, but my guess is it would be pretty good. The phone scored a ridiculously high 63,335 in AnTuTu:

AnTuTu score

The OnePlus 2 also scored 24,348 points in GPU benchmark 3D (normalized score: 50,487), averaging at 77.81 FPS:

GPU Benchmark 3D score

Speaking of performance, it’s time to talk about the Snapdragon 810 chip used in the OnePlus 2. As opposed to most phones which come with this chipset, the OnePlus 2 doesn’t seem to be overheating. It does get a little warm from time to time, but nothing alarming. When running AnTuTu, the phone got to around 40 °C. GPU benchmark 3D, which is known to be rather intensive, raised the temperature from around 30 °C (idle), to approximately 48 °C after two consecutive runs. The phone didn’t really feel hot; just a bit warm.

Battery Life¶

Battery life on this phone has been pretty great so far, although I feel it could still be improved a little bit. Not that it’s really needed, but it would still be appreciated. The OnePlus 2 easily gets me through the day, which is all that matters to me.

Battery life

Charging the phone takes about two hours, which I find to be pretty quick, although many people seem to want quick charge technology.

Camera¶

The camera of the OnePlus 2 uses a 6-lens Omnivision PureCel-S™ OV13860 sensor with an f/2.0 aperture and a 13-megapixel resolution. Although the resolution of the sensor is the same as the one used in the OnePlus One, it is bigger, which makes for a bigger pixel size, meaning better low-light performance and generally less noisy pictures.

The camera module also has a dual-LED flash and optical image stabilisation, which is a quite welcome addition. Last but not least is laser focus, which allows the camera to focus a lot faster and easier, especially in low-light situations. The camera app in itself is pretty basic for now, but it gets the job done. One thing I don’t like about the camera is the HDR mode, which I find to be overly aggressive in most situations. RAW support is already planned for a future update (I’m hoping the mid-september one).

Anyway, enough talking; I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Orchids (automatic)

Flowers (automatic)

Flower and bee (automatic)

Snail (clear image)

Snail (automatic)

Wood (automatic)

Elephants (automatic)

Bell (automatic)

Wood (automatic)

Wooden mask (automatic)

Sleepy cat (automatic)

Tree (Automatic — focus on the tree)

Tree (Automatic — focus on the sky)

Ladybug in a vine (automatic)

Grape (automatic)

Cloudy night (automatic)

Brussels Town Hall (automatic)

King's House, Brussels (automatic)

Grand-Place of Brussels (automatic)

Gardens (automatic)

Sleepy cat (automatic)

Cat's ear (automatic)

Sleepy cat (automatic)

Cloudy gardens (automatic)

Wet leaves (automatic)

Wet stalk (automatic)

Wet vines (automatic)

Wet hollyhock (automatic)

Eye close-up (automatic)

Note that I never made a particular effort to hold still when taking my pictures; I just did standard point-and-shoot (I did use tap-to-focus when needed, of course). The only exception is the picture with the moon, where I rested the phone on a solid surface. I did move a little when taking the picture, but that didn’t affect the resulting picture. Here are some 100% crops from the shots above:

Comparison with the OnePlus One¶

Before selling my OnePlus One, I took the time to take quite a bit of pictures in order to compare the two sensors. The pictures on the left were taken with the OnePlus 2, and the ones on the right with the OnePlus One.

Marigolds (automatic)

Flowers (automatic)

Apple (automatic)

Flower (automatic)

Tree (automatic)

Tree (HDR)

Buttercup (automatic)

Pear (automatic)

Tree (Automatic — focus on the bottom)

Tree (Automatic — focus on the middle)

Tree (Automatic — focus on the leaves)

Plant (automatic)

Apples (automatic)

Apple tree (automatic)

Flower (automatic — didn't see my finger there) (automatic)

Leaves (Automatic — focus on the sky)

Leaves (Automatic — focus on the leaves)

Field (automatic)

Field (HDR)

Swing chair (HDR)

Swing chair (automatic)

Catalpa tree (automatic)

Catalpa tree (HDR)

Rose (automatic)

Plant (automatic)

Pine tree (automatic)

Flowers (automatic)

Weeping willow (automatic)

Swing clamp (automatic)

Ladybug (automatic)

Flowers (automatic)

Shell (automatic)

Globe and shell (automatic)

Birds sconce (automatic)

Easter eggs (automatic)

Here are some 100% crops from the comparison:

I was pleasantly surprised by the improvement; I didn’t expect it to be that noticeable, especially since both sensors have the same resolution. The optical image stabilisation and the larger sensor really seem to make a substantial difference. Laser focus often allowed me to focus much faster too, but that was to be expected. The OnePlus 2 tends to have better white balance and more true-to-life colour reproduction compared to the OnePlus One. The shots also tend to be less noisy overall.

Oxygen OS¶

In my first impressions, I marked Oxygen OS as being one of the low points of the phone. I’m happy to say I don’t see things that way anymore, given the speedy updates we’re getting. The first update fixed all the issues I had, except for the speed issue when opening apps, which I mentioned above. However, there’s already a big update planned for mid-September, so I’m hoping that one will fix it.

Having used CyanogenMod on all of my phones, there are naturally some features I’m missing in Oxygen OS, namely:

Profiles (with location awareness via Wi-Fi, like on CyanogenMod)
Better location quick settings (the current setting is either on or off, instead of being able to choose between battery saving and high accuracy)
A quick setting for performance profiles, so I can activate battery saving mode easily if needed
A quick setting to enable/disable LTE
A setting to change the DPI, since the default one makes everything look ridiculously huge (although I ended up getting used to that)

Given the speed at which updates are getting rolled out, I’m confident at least some of those will get implemented eventually.

Speakers and Audio Quality¶

The quality of the speakers on the phone is pretty great, if you disable MaxxAudio that is. The first time my alarm went off, I found the sound quality of the speakers really terrible. I went to take a look in the Audio Tuner app and found out the default settings had way too much bass (for me, at least). After turning MaxxAudio completely off, the audio quality went from terrible to great, which is a bit ironic, but at least the phone can sound great.

The volume of the speakers is pretty nice, too. I compared it to the volume of my 13” mid-2010 MacBook Pro and it seems to be a tiny bit louder, which is pretty nice. The speaker also sounds a bit better than the ones on the MacBook, from my experience at least. The audio quality through headphones is also excellent.

Fingerprint Scanner¶

The fingerprint reader on the OnePlus 2 is a really nice addition. At first, I didn’t think it would be that useful, but it ended up being one of the features I enjoy the most. It makes the process of unlocking your phone significantly easier. A fingerprint sensor is now something I would definitely look for when buying a new phone.

One small thing, however, is that OnePlus stated it was quicker than the iPhone, which it isn’t, at least if we’re speaking strictly about the sensors. It’s maybe as fast, but not quicker. From the user experience, you do get to your home screen faster, since the iPhone simply has more animations to get there.

The sensor can be a bit hit and miss, though, even if that seems to have improved quite a bit with the latest update. It very rarely still fails to recognize my print, forcing me to draw my pattern instead, but that issue has been happening less and less often. Those little issues are still a bit annoying though, especially since a fingerprint scanner is supposed to speed up the process of unlocking your phone. Future updates will certainly continue to improve this.

Alert Slider¶

Just like the fingerprint scanner, the alert slider is not something I expected to enjoy that much. I was once again pleasantly surprised. I flick the switch to priority mode when I arrive at work, or to ‘alarms only’ when I get in a meeting or go to sleep at night. It’s incredibly handy to be able to switch between notification modes by simply flicking a switch.

One little thing I don’t like about the switch is the order: ‘alarms only’ mode is on the top, while ‘all notifications’ mode is on the bottom. It would make more sense to silence the phone by sliding the switch down rather than up. I wish OnePlus would add an option to configure this so I can invert it.

Dual SIM¶

I haven’t used the dual SIM capabilities of the phone just yet, since it has no use to me for now. Nevertheless, I can definitely see this becoming useful once I get a phone subscription from my employer. I find it better to have separate numbers for personal matters and work matters, which is now possible without having to carry two phones with me, thanks to the dual SIM feature.

Conclusion¶

After more than three weeks with the phone, I can say I would definitely recommend the OnePlus 2. It’s an amazing phone with top of the line specs, promising software support, a really great camera and some unique features. Whether it’s a worthy upgrade from the OnePlu One is really a matter of personal preference. If you need dual SIM support or want a fingerprint scanner, an alert slider or an amazing camera, the upgrade is definitely worth it.

The phone can be a bit tough to get your hands on due to the invite system, but more and more invites are going out each week at a pace that is definitely faster than last year’s OnePlus One invites.

What’s your favourite feature of the OnePlus 2? Share your thoughts in the comments.

OnePlus 2 — First Impressions

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 19 Aug 2015 22:18:21 +0000

Last Tuesday, late in the afternoon, I managed to grab an invite for the OnePlus 2. I immediately ordered the device and opted for express delivery (which only was €5 more expensive than standard, at €24.99). My order started processing on Thursday morning and I had my tracking number by the end of the day. My new phone was delivered at work the next morning around 10 AM. I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised by the time it took for this phone to reach me.

After a few days with the device, it seems like a good time to give my first impressions.

Table of Contents

What’s in the box?
Build quality
Camera
Oxygen OS
Snapdragon 810
Fingerprint reader
Conclusion

What’s in the box?¶

The contents of the box are pretty standard:

The OnePlus 2
A charging brick
A 1-meter USB-C cable (reversible on both ends)
A warranty booklet
A quick start guide

The phone has a plastic screen protector pre-applied, which was a really pleasant surprise. It seems to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet, though, but it’s still better than having none and having to wait for yours to arrive. Shipping phones with screen protectors should seriously be an industry standard.

Build quality¶

The first thing I noticed when getting the phone out of the box was the build quality, which is really excellent. The phone has a very premium feel to it. The magnesium frame looks really great and the buttons are nice and clicky. Just like with the OnePlus One, the sandstone cover gives that signature feel to the back of the phone. Speaking of the back, the StyleSwap covers are really easy to change, which really wasn’t the case with the OnePlus One. As you saw in the pictures above, I went with rosewood, which really gives a nice personal touch to the phone.

Regarding the backlight of the capacitive buttons, they are brighter than they used to be on the OnePlus One, which many people have found to be too dim.

Camera¶

The 13 MP camera on the OnePlus 2 is really great. It’s the same resolution as the OnePlus One, but it has a bigger sensor, which makes for better low-light performance. The addition of optical image stabilisation is also quite welcome. Last but not least is laser focus, which makes the phone focus a lot faster and easier, especially in low-light situations. The camera app in itself is pretty basic for now, but it gets the job done. I’d like to see RAW support in particular (which I believe is planned), as well as tweaks to HDR, which I find overly aggressive.

Anyway, enough talking; I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Orchids, automatic

Flowers, automatic

Flower and bee, automatic

Snail, clear image

Snail, automatic

Wood, automatic

Elephants, automatic

Bell, automatic (without any physical support)

Wood, automatic

Wooden mask, automatic

Oxygen OS¶

Oxygen OS is where the OnePlus 2 really leaves me wanting more. Even though this is version 2.0, it still feels like it can be improved quite a bit. I’ve observed a couple of speed issues from time to time, such as apps taking longer than usual to open (around 1-2 seconds). There are also some really annoying problems with the theme: It makes the detailed weather view of Weather Timeline crash (it’s the only crash I’ve noticed), and makes the theme of some other apps buggy (see examples for AquaMail and Textra below) I’m happy to report this was fixed in the OTA that rolled out on August 21.

Textra in dark mode (which is completely white) and the black navigation drawer in AquaMail.

The developers are already aware of the issues, so I’m hoping the coming update will fix all these problems. One last quirk I had was with MaxxAudio. The first time my alarm went off, I found the sound quality of the speakers really terrible. I went to take a look in the Audio Tuner app and found out the default settings put way too much bass. I ended up just turning MaxxAudio off and audio quality is now great, which is a bit ironic.

In addition to these issues, there are also some quite handy features missing, namely:

Profiles (with location awareness via Wi-Fi, like on CyanogenMod)
Better location quick settings (the current setting is either on or off, instead of being able to choose between battery saving and high accuracy)
A quick setting for the performance profile, so I can activate battery saving mode easily if needed
A quick setting to enable/disable LTE
A setting to change the DPI, since the default one makes everything look ridiculously huge

Snapdragon 810¶

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 has had a lot of bad press due to overheating. I haven’t found the phone to become exceptionally hot during my time with it. Even after running AnTuTu twice (which by the way scored just under 60k — 58,188 to be precise), my phone was only at 40 °C, which is really decent.

Fingerprint reader¶

The fingerprint reader on the OnePlus 2 is a really nice addition. I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I do. It really makes the process of unlocking your phone significantly easier. However, they said it was quicker than the iPhone, which it isn’t, at least if we’re speaking strictly about the sensors. From the user experience, you do get to your homescreen quicker, since the iPhone needs to do all its fancy animations.

The sensor is a bit hit and miss, though. Sometimes it just fails to recognize my print, so I end up having to draw my pattern in order to unlock my phone. This is a bit annoying, especially since this is supposed to speed up the process of unlocking your phone, but I’m hoping this will be fixed in a future update.

Conclusion¶

Based on the first few days of use, I’ll say the OnePlus 2 is an amazing device with pretty basic software. OnePlus really needs to improve in the software department, but I’m confident they will. This phone really has the potential to be amazing; the current software is just failing to do justice to the device. As things are right now, I’m flashing CyanogenMod the second the nightlies are out. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

I will post a more elaborate review of the phone once I will have spent some more time with it, so be sure to subscribe below if you want to be notified as soon as it’s online.

How Meditation Changed My Life

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 04 Apr 2015 21:28:03 +0000

In this busy world we live in, there’s one essential thing people don’t make time for anymore: doing nothing. Not thinking about what happened yesterday, or what’s planned for tomorrow. No Facebook, no YouTube, no texting. Nothing. Just being present; in the here and now. That’s what I’ve been doing for 15 minutes a day over the past six months.

No Facebook, no YouTube, no texting. Nothing. Tweet this

Six months ago, while wandering around the Play Store, I came across an app promising to demystify meditation, making it accessible to anyone willing to start. Having been curious about meditation for quite a while, I immediately installed the app. What could have been just another app on my phone would later turn out to be so much more.

The first thing the app offers is a series called Take10, comprised of ten 10-minute sessions. At first, my practice was a bit erratic: I did around two sessions a week, with no real commitment. After reaching the fifth session, I noticed the app wasn’t as free as it looked like: only the Take10 series was available for non-paying users. This disappointed me a little; at least initially.

The app displays a timeline showing all the series you have already done.

In spite of my disappointment, I continued the series and committed myself to practising a little more regularly. When I eventually reached the end of the tenth session, I didn’t hesitate one bit: I pulled out my credit card and got a one-year subscription. That’s something I would have never imagined myself doing just a week or two earlier. What convinced me are simply the effects of those ten meditation sessions. It’s a little hard to describe, but you just feel amazing after completing a session; I’ll get back to this in more detail later on. Regarding the price (€5.99/month for a year, reduced to €4.74/month via a voucher received by email), it may seem expensive at first, but it’s actually not that much. The price of a sandwich or two per month seems perfectly reasonable for what the app does for you.

When I eventually reached the end of the tenth session, I didn't hesitate one bit. Tweet this

Having unlocked the rest of the first pack — called the Foundation Pack —, I finished the two remaining series composing it. As its name indicates, the goal of this first pack is to lay a foundation to build the rest on. The three series in the Foundation Pack are each comprised of 10 sessions of 10, 15 and 20 minutes, respectively. Once I had acquired the basics, I gained access to the rest of the content, divided into six main packs:

Health, addressing topics such as stress, anxiety, sleep and self-esteem
Brave, addressing topic such as regret, anger and restlessness
Happiness, addressing different aspects of it, such as appreciation, acceptance and patience
Work & performance, addressing themes such as creativity and concentration
Sport, addressing themes such as motivation and focus
Students, addressing themes such as leaving home and distractions
The Pro pack, meant to deepen your practice

At this time, the app offers 650 sessions, divided into 41 packs (twelve 30-session packs and twenty-nine 10-session packs). This represents between 108 and 216 hours of content, depending on the chosen session duration.

You just feel amazing after completing a session. Tweet this

Single sessions — sessions that aren’t part of any particular pack — are also available for specific situations, such as falling asleep, cooking, commuting, fear of flying, etc. There are also six 3-minute S.O.S. sessions to use when you’re having a bit of a meltdown, as well as mini sessions ranging from 1 to 3 minutes, to use throughout your day. There are over 45 different singles available.

The founder of the company behind the app, Andy Puddicombe, gave an excellent TED talk on meditation:

Note: What follows may sound a tad cliché, but it is absolutely true.

Ever since I’ve been meditating daily, I sleep better, need less sleep, am generally less stressed, have a better concentration and can deal with stressful situations significantly better than I used to. In short, I just feel considerably better than before — not that I was feeling bad back then, but I just feel better. After a meditation session, I feel energized and have a sense of clarity in my thoughts; a feeling of knowing where I’m going.

I didn’t meditate daily at first, but that’s something which changed overnight. One morning, I was woken up an hour before my alarm clock by a noisy neighbour. After turning around in my bed over and over again for half an hour, I decided to do something productive with my time. You guessed it: I got up and did a meditation session. I got through the day without any feeling of tiredness, despite the fact I was lacking around two hours of sleep , due to the joys of getting lost on the Internet in the evening.

The app offers various statistics about your practice.

After that day, I did some research and found the Sleep vs. meditation post on the Headspace forums, confirming my experience. What Andy says in his answer makes sense: while sleeping, we don’t control the state of our mind; this is why some nights can sometimes feel so restless, for instance. Meditation, among other things, allows you to control that pretty well, which is why it makes up for the sleep time ‘lost’ from getting up earlier. Ever since that day, my alarm clock has been going off 20 minutes sooner every day, just so I can meditate. It’s one of the best decisions I took in 2014, if not in my entire life.

If you're persistent, you'll earn badges and vouchers for a certain amount of days to give to your friends (30 after 15 and 30 days, then 90 after 90, 180 and 365 days).

A few months ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. After a couple of phone interviews, I visited their London office to attend my final interviews. While those interviews didn’t lead to an offer, I still consider them a positive experience. I am convinced I would have never gotten that far in the recruitment process, had I not started meditating six months ago.

It's one of the best decisions I took in 2014, if not in my entire life. Tweet this

If you want to try meditation, the Headspace app is available on Android, iOS and in your browser. Here’s the video presentation:

Note that this is not a sponsored post; it’s simply an experience I wanted to share.

OnePlus One Review

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 18 Jul 2014 17:11:45 +0000

I have been waiting for this phone for quite some time and am now lucky to be among the few owners of the device. As promised, here’s my review.

Table of Contents

Specifications
Ordering the Phone
Packaging & Contents
First Impressions
Look & Feel
Display
Performance
Battery Life
Camera
CyanogenMod
Speakers and Audio Quality
Other
Conclusion

Specifications¶

The OnePlus One comes with a 5.5” 1080p IPS display. It packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor clocked at 2.5 GHz, an Adreno 330 GPU and a whopping 3 GB of RAM, which will satisfy even the most heavy multitaskers. To get you through the day with these amazing specs, the phone has a 3100 mAh non-removable Li-Po battery.

Storage wise, it comes with either 16 or 64 GB of internal storage and has no slot for a microSD card. Note that only the 64 GB version is available at the time this review was written.

On the software side, the phone comes with CyanogenMod 11S, which is a version developed specifically for the One by Cyanogen and OnePlus.

Regarding the dimensions of the phone itself (152.9 x 75.9 x 8.9 mm), they are pretty similar to the ones of the Galaxy Note 3. It’s just a tiny bit taller and a bit narrower.

Oh, did I mention the 64 GB version costs €299? Also, the 16 GB version will cost €269.

Ordering the Phone¶

Ordering the phone is pretty easy, once you get an invite that is. For people that don’t know, this phone is on an invitation-only basis for now. That means you need an invitation to be able to buy the phone. This is due to the fact that OnePlus is a start-up releasing their first smartphone, so they want to be able to control the number of devices out there so as to iron out potential problems before ramping up production.

You can obtain an invitation either by being on the forums, participating in contests or getting one from a friend who has the phone. The good news is more and more invitations have been handed out each day for the past couple of weeks. Later this quarter, OnePlus will set up a pre-order system in parallel with the invite system. The date for general availability is currently unknown.

The checkout on the website was pretty straightforward, nothing complicated there. Here’s the full history of my order for those interested:

July 4, 22:18 – Order placed
July 9, morning – Order status changed to ‘Processing’
July 10, 18:29 – Received shipping information from DPD
July 11, 04:55 – Order status changed to ‘Complete’, received the shipping email from OnePlus saying my screen protector was shipped separately through Deutsche Post
July 11, 05:54 – Package is on its way to Belgium, ETA July 15
July 14, 07:45 – “Your parcel is on the vehicle for delivery”, ETA 9:45-13:00
July 14, 12:14 – Phone delivery completed
July 17, morning – OnePlus screen protector delivered

My order took some time to start processing, but note that orders that were placed a little later all processed way faster than mine. There have been reports of people having their phone in their hands only a couple of days after ordering.

Packaging & Contents¶

The packaging of the One is really beautiful and feels very premium. As many have said before me, the unboxing is an experience on its own. I would even dare to say it is better than Apple packaging, which isn’t easy to beat in my opinion. Here are some pictures of my unboxing:

Size comparison with my Nexus S

As you can see, the packaging is very minimalist and contains only the phone, a SIM ejection tool and a USB cable. The charger is provided in a separate box. No manual here, but who honestly still cares about those?

First Impressions¶

The first thing I noticed, apart from the size, is the unique back cover. I really love the feel of the material used. I think what would describe it best is rough cloth. Setting up the phone was a breeze and only took a minute or two.

Once configured, I immediately rooted the phone so I could restore all my apps and their data through Titanium Backup (I followed the steps outlined here to root, which was a piece of cake). A good thing to know, by the way, is that rooting the OnePlus One does not void its warranty (source & source).

Now, on to that size I was talking about. One thing I’d like to point out is that I have always been very sceptical regarding large phones. Naturally, I was afraid the 5.5-inch display would be too big for me. Well, good news: it isn’t! I was used to it after a couple of minutes. Also, the phone doesn’t annoy me at all when it’s in my pocket. It’s a little harder to put in your pocket than your average phone, but that’s really not something to be concerned about.

One thing that should be noted though is that the phone is definitely not invisible when it’s in your pocket; quite the contrary actually. I feel like I’m holding a huge sign stating “Hey, guys, there’s a big phone in my pocket!”. Other than that, as I said, I got no problem at all with the size. One-handed use isn’t too complicated, however when reaching for the other end of the screen with my thumb, the part of my palm under my thumb often touches the right end, which messes up the detection. I can reach the top and the bottom of the screen without much trouble though. Do keep in mind that I am using the software buttons; this would be more of a problem if I was using the hardware ones, since they are obviously situated a little lower.

Regarding performance, the phone is really fast and responsive, as expected. My phone came with a 45% charge, which lasted easily for 7 hours and 51 minutes, with 2 hours and 15 minutes of screen-on time, after which there were only 6% left and I decided to plug it in. This is definitely a big improvement coming from my Nexus S, which had trouble getting me more than an hour of screen-on time on a full charge.

Look & Feel¶

I’ll start with one simple thing: this phone is really beautiful and certainly does not feel like a €300 device. It feels like a €700 one, or even better if that €700 one is a Samsung phone (that was the first and last time I will be trolling Samsung in this review). One thing I noticed at first is that the volume and power buttons aren’t really sticking out much. It was a bit strange in the beginning, but I quickly got used to it. Also, speaking of those buttons, they did a good job on their placement: they’re just at the right height for me. Regarding the weight of the device, I would say it’s perfect relative to the size of the phone.

One strange thing I noticed is a plastic noise I hear every now and then when the vibration goes off for haptic feedback while typing for instance. I think the noise it sounds the most like is the one you get when you move a piece of relatively soft plastic against another plastic surface with quite a bit of pressure.

Display¶

As stated in the specifications, the phone comes with a 5.5” 1080p IPS display, which makes for a 401 ppi pixel density. The display is really beautiful and has crazy viewing angles. Some users have reported having issues with a yellow tint at the bottom of the screen. I’ve looked at my One from all possible angles and have no yellowing whatsoever. Apparently, this could be due to OnePlus shipping out recently manufactured phones. The problem when they do this is that, sometimes, the glue of the IPS panel hasn’t had the time to fully cure yet, resulting in a yellow tint at the bottom of the screen (in this case). It also seems that most phones received in July didn’t have the issue.

The brightness of the screen is perfect, I never had any trouble seeing what was displayed, even in direct sunlight.

One interesting design choice is that the screen is raised from the bezel a little (around 0.75 mm I’d say). I think it’s really beautiful and definitely adds to the style of this phone. What many reviewers haven’t noticed is the additional tiny black plastic frame around the screen that is just a bit higher than the screen itself. This will keep the screen from directly touching the surface the phone is resting on if you put it somewhere face down, potentially avoiding scratches. I wouldn’t take any chances with scratches though, which is why I have applied a tempered glass screen protector. After searching a little, I found a two-pack on Amazon for about €12, which is a really nice price. The quality of the protectors is amazing, you wouldn’t think they were so cheap.

Performance¶

The performance of this phone is just crazy. I have not had a single lag since I received the device, even when doing some heavy multitasking. I’ve tried opening multiple tabs on Chrome, then opening a load of apps and going back; the browser didn’t need to reload the pages, they were still cached.

I don’t really believe in benchmarks, simply because it’s public knowledge that companies cheat them, but in case anyone is interested, my One scored 37,554 in AnTuTu:

AnTuTu score

Battery Life¶

Battery life on this phone is outstanding. It will get you through the day with no problem at all. You easily get more than 5 hours of screen-on time. My current best on one charge is 1 day, 9 hours and 26 minutes, with 5 hours and 25 minutes of screen-on time. I could have gotten better results though, since the flashlight turned on in my pocket for a while (more on that later).

Battery usage

Charging the phone takes about two hours. As with most phones, the beginning is pretty fast and it slows down at the end. As an example, I plugged it in at 20:35 with a 5% charge; it was at 64% after one hour and fully charged after two hours and ten minutes.

Camera¶

The camera on this phone uses a 6-lens Sony Exmor IMX214 sensor with an f/2.0 aperture and a dual-LED flash, which are not dual-tone LEDs as seen on the iPhone. The device is capable of capturing 13-megapixel pictures. After playing around with it for a while, I have to say I am really amazed when I look at some of the pictures. I’m actually under the impression that this phone competes with some DSLRs quality-wise, except for night shots where there is a lot of RGB noise, but that was to be expected. Shutter speed will never be as fast as on a DSLR, but it is still pretty fast.

This phone definitely out-performs the average digital camera. Even the pictures of my unboxing, taken with a Sony Cyber-shot with a 10.1 megapixels sensor, look worse than the pictures taken with my One. Pretty ironic, but great! It’s also interesting to note that I haven’t made any particular effort to hold still when taking my pictures (except for the slow shutter ones, of course, where the OnePlus One was sitting on a steady surface). Enough talk, I’ll let the pics speak for themselves:

Flowers, auto

Flowers, HDR

Garden, auto

Garden, HDR

Night shot, auto

Night shot, slow shutter

Evening shot (21:00), slow shutter

Night shot, auto

Night shot, slow shutter

Night shot, auto

Night shot, slow shutter

My guitar, auto

Chilli Beef Lettuce Wraps, auto

Pork Chops with Sweet and Sour Peppers, auto

Bee, auto with macro

Bumblebee, auto with macro

Butterfly, auto

Flower, auto

Strawberry, auto

Here are some 100% crops from the pictures above (those of the bees are really amazing):

Auto

HDR

Auto

HDR

Slow shutter

Auto

HDR

Auto, macro

Auto

The Gallery app developed by Cyanogen is really beautiful and regroups pictures by period:

The Gallery app

Regarding the 5-megapixel front facing camera, it has a pretty wide angle. I would say you can easily fit three to four people in there for a selfie without having to over-extend your arm.

One strange thing with the camera, or more precisely the flash, is that the latter is somewhat greenish. However, I don’t really notice it on pictures and certainly wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t told about it, so I don’t consider this an issue.

I’ve also had an issue with the Camera app force closing quite often if I took an HDR picture that wasn’t the first picture taken after opening the app. I submitted a bug report on Cyanogen’s JIRA and someone was already assigned and looking into the bug an hour later. That being said, I haven’t had this bug since, despite the fact that no OTA was pushed.

I’m not much of a video guy, so I can’t really report on that, but I quickly tried shooting both 4K UHD and 1080p videos and didn’t have any lag while recording. The videos also turned out great. A nice feature to note is that you can snap a picture while filming 1080p video (doesn’t work with 4K).

CyanogenMod¶

I’ve been using CyanogenMod on all the phones I’ve had and I really love the fact that this phone comes with CyanogenMod out of the box. The installed version is CyanogenMod 11S, which is custom built by Cyanogen specifically for the One. Here are some things I really love about CyanogenMod:

Reverse Lookup: this feature tries to find information about the person calling you when an unknown number calls (this avoided me some advertising calls over the years)
Privacy Guard: controls which apps can access your location, contacts, text messages, etc. You can ask it to display a confirmation pop-up for each request (with an option to remember your choice)
WhisperPush: seamless SMS encryption between CyanogenMod users
The ability to change the order of software buttons (I’ve put the back button on the right because it was just a little too hard to reach on the left side)
Customizable Quick Settings, as well as the option to pull down the Quick Settings by swiping down from the far-right (or left, this is configurable) of the status bar
Screen-off gestures: there’s a set of gestures you can draw on the screen while it is off to execute different actions:
- Double-tap: turns on the display
- Draw a circle: open the Camera app
- Draw a ‘V’: toggle the flashlight
- Draw a ‘>’: next track
- Draw a ‘<’: previous track
- Swipe down with two fingers: play/pause

The CyanogenMod lock screen

Regarding the lock screen gestures, there have just been a couple of problems with the flashlight and the play/pause gesture toggling in my pocket. It has only happened once for each, but the flashlight cost me 19% of my battery usage during my battery test (which still was amazing despite this little hiccup). Anyway, Cyanogen is already working on a fix for the next OTA, which will use the proximity sensor to detect if the phone is in your pocket.

To conclude on CyanogenMod, I would say it is basically stock Android on steroids.

Speakers and Audio Quality¶

The speakers are crazy loud. By crazy loud I mean I tested them on maximum volume and my ears hurt a little, which I would never have expected at all from phone speakers. The audio quality is also pretty nice and the sound is pretty detailed. However, despite what they originally advertised, the speakers are not stereo speakers. There are still two speakers, but they both output mono. I’m aware that real stereo is impossible with speakers that are so close, but having each channel in its respective speaker would still bump the quality up a little. Maybe this can be added in a software update, but I’m not sure about that. It all depends on how it is wired.

One thing I would say though is that the placement of the speakers can be a bit strange when playing games or doing other things in landscape mode, since all the sound then comes from only one side.

The audio quality through headphones is excellent. It definitely sounds better than on my Nexus S. Sound is clearer and there’s also more bass. The AudioFX app is pretty nice and very easy to use, although I have never been a big user of equalizers.

Other¶

I haven’t talked about the GPS yet, but that’s simply because there isn’t much to say. It locks on to satellites in a matter of seconds and follows you around with a great accuracy, not lagging behind or anything. It even works inside, which wasn’t the case with my Nexus S.

I’ve also discovered that the alarm clock goes off even when the phone is powered off completely (with or without Quick Boot activated). I have taken the habit of switching on airplane mode at night, but I think this might interest some people.

One thing I find quite nice is that the charger doesn’t have any annoying hissing sound. Many readers probably won’t know what I’m talking about here, but others definitely will. All Samsung chargers I’ve come across emit a really annoying ultrasound once the phone is fully charged or when it’s not plugged into the charger (so, basically, when the charger isn’t charging anything). Not everyone hears this, but I sure do and it really annoyed me. Fortunately, as I said, the OnePlus charger doesn’t emit any sound at any time, at least for the EU version, which is really nice.

Regarding the USB cable provided with the phone, it’s a little too short; an extra 40 centimetres or so would certainly have been nice.

Regarding the lack of a microSD slot, I really couldn’t care less. I would even say this is a good thing for three simple reasons: firstly, it allows for more space for the battery and other hardware; secondly, having a microSD card slows the device down a little, unless you pay the price for a fast microSD card and finally, there’s 64 GB of storage, so I don’t really think it is needed.

Conclusion¶

To conclude, the first thing I will say is this: no wonder it’s codenamed “bacon”. This phone really exceeded my expectations. It has an unprecedented bang for your buck. It’s a €300 phone that looks, feels and performs like a €700 flagship. I think the ‘Flagship Killer’ title is perfectly accurate. The only problem is the availability though, since it’s a bit hard to obtain an invitation to buy the phone at the moment. However, I definitely think it is worth the wait. Let’s wrap up this review with the pros and cons (trust me when I say I looked hard for cons):

Pros	Cons
Very attractive price Build quality Display quality Amazing camera Best specs available Battery life Comes with CyanogenMod	It can be tough to get an invitation to buy the phone Can be a bit hard to use if you want to use capacitive buttons

If I missed anything or if there’s something you want to know about in particular, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.

Given the OnePlus 2 is out now, you may be interested to read my review of this great successor to the OnePlus One.

Web of Trust: a Handy Browser Extension to Identify Which Websites You Can Trust

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 09 Jun 2014 12:40:02 +0000

Update: avoid this extension like the plague. It has been removed from the various stores for privacy reasons. It turns out they were selling the navigation data of their users.

A couple of years ago, I discovered the Web of Trust browser extension. This extension enables you to easily identify fraudulent websites.

Once installed, it displays a small circle next to each link you’ll find on the Internet. This circle will have one of the four following colors:

Red: untrustworthy website
Orange: suspicious website (be cautious)
Green: trustworthy website
Gray: unrated website

Here’s an example of a Facebook post:

The extension also shows a warning when you enter a website that has a bad rating:

Any user of the extension can rate websites he comes across, contributing to the database. It’s also possible to add a comment when you rate a website. All this can then be found on a dedicated page. For instance, for the Facebook post above, the page is visible here: https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/steam-cards.com.

This extension allowed me to dodge quite a lot of strange websites posted to Facebook, like those videos that were like automatically. Given the number of people that take the bait each time, I think this can help quite a lot of people.

Web of Trust is available on all major browsers and can be downloaded from the official website.

Open Letter to Proximus

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 19 Apr 2014 17:19:24 +0000

Dear Sir,
Dear Madam,

Former client of your company, I was called by a person of the latter on April 8 2014 to sell me your services, once again. Several people in my family and friends have also been contacted for the same reasons.

The person I had on the line repeatedly stated that your rates had changed and that they are unbeatable. Well informed on this matter, having a post online comparing the different data plans of belgian providers, I expressed my objections to your employee. However, she kept arguing that your rates had changed. At some point, I considered the fact that you might have changed your rates without me knowing about it. So I asked your employee for details about those new rates. She didn’t want to give me any, despite my insistence, telling me it’s ‘not her role’.

After ending the call, I went and took a look at your rates. Nothing changed. You are not the cheapest provider and your rates are certainly not unbeatable. Worse, you’re the most expensive provider in the country, resting on your laurels as the original operator.

In addition to that, I was called again two days later by another employee, to whom I expressed my frustration regarding the nonsense her colleague told me in the last call. She proceeded to tell me the rates were changed ‘a couple of days ago’. Yet, to this date, your website remains unchanged.

This practice is commonly known as false advertising, and I find your policy to be simply unacceptable. Your constant solicitation, may it be by phone, at store exits or elsewhere, shows just how much you’re lacking ideas. Welcome to the world of competition. You see your customers go and you have no clue what to do to keep them. Want to know the trick? Make your rates really interesting and stop lying to people. It works, seriously.

Sincerely,

A jaded consumer

Update: I’ve been notified on July 23, 2014 that this is still going on (rates haven’t changed, of course).

Using Subversion with Eclipse on OS X

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 23 Mar 2014 15:54:50 +0000

I recently had to install Subclipse for one of my course projects, and I’ve had some trouble making it work. That’s why I decided to make a quick tutorial to help people do this. If you happen to come across other problems, don’t hesitate to tell me in the comments. We’ll look for a solution together, which will help me improve this tutorial.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install another version of Subversion, since the one that comes with OS X doesn’t provide the JavaHL library we need. To do this, you have to install Homebrew, so open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type the following command:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

Enter your root password when asked. Now, you can install Subversion (replace subversion18 by subversion17 for Subversion 1.7.x or by subversion16 for Subversion 1.6.x):

brew install --with-java subversion18

If everything goes well, you’ll see that Homebrew requests that you execute two commands, which should be the following two (if they’re different, enter the ones displayed in your Terminal, obviously):

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Java/Extensions
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libsvnjavahl-1.dylib /Library/Java/Extensions/libsvnjavahl-1.dylib

Now, to use Subversion with Eclipse, you need to install Subclipse. To do that:

Open Eclipse
In the menu, go to Help > Install New Software…
In the Work with field, enter one of the following URLs:
- http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.10.x if you installed Subversion 1.8.x
- http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.8.x if you installed Subversion 1.7.x
- http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x if you installed Subversion 1.6.x
Check Subclipse and SVNKit and click on Next
Leave everything checked and click Next
Accept the license agreements and click on Finish
Wait until the download and the installation finishes
Restart Eclipse when asked

Once all this is done, you can start using SVN with Eclipse. Here’s how:

Window > Open Perspective > Other > SVN Repository Exploring
Do a right-click in the left part of the window, then go to New > Repository Location
In the Url field, enter the URL of your repository
Enter your credentials if asked
Do a right-click on the repository that appeared and click Checkout
In the window that opens, leave everything by default and verify the option Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard is checked
Click Finish and answer Yes to the prompt that appears
Choose Java Project and click Next
Finally, give your project a name and click Finish

I hope this tutorial helped you. As I said before, don’t hesitate to report problems or ask questions in the comments. Happy coding :-)

Google Lifts the Curtain on Project Tango, a Phone that Senses the World Around Us

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 23 Feb 2014 15:43:50 +0000

This Thursday, the people from the Advanced Technology And Project (ATAP) group at Google unveiled a new project that looks rather interesting.

The project, named ‘Project Tango’, aims to change the way smartphones perceive the world around us. Currently, the world as our smartphones see it stops at the boundaries of the screen. Your phone is generally not aware of what’s outside the view of its camera, which also is a 2D view. We use our eyes to observe the size and shape of objects around us. We memorize their positions and layout almost effortlessly. This awareness of the world around us is what enables us to interact with our environment.

The objective of Project Tango is to bring this capacity to our smartphones. To make this happen, the team behind the project worked closely with universities, research labs and other partners in nine different countries around the world in order to gather all the research about computer vision in one place. After one year of development, they’re ready to send prototypes to developers.

The possibilities of this kind of technology are huge. You could map the inside of buildings with it, help blind people navigate in unknown environments, etc. This technology has the power to completely transform augmented reality as we know it. You could also scan your whole house before going out to buy furniture, for instance, so you can check if that beautiful piece of furniture you’re checking out fits where you would like to place it. You get the idea, this has a huge potential.

The current prototype has a sensor capable of making over 250,000 3D measures per second, all while creating a tridimensional map of what’s around you, in real-time. The phone uses Android and includes multiple APIs to make the sensor’s data usable by third party applications.

I find this project to be very interesting and can’t wait to see what application developers will come up with. However, I can’t help but think about the privacy issue this kind of technology inevitably raises… Wait and see.

Finally, here’s the video presentation of the project:

Sources: Google ATAP

Find'Em Tracking: the Card That Warns You If You Forget It Somewhere

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 13 Feb 2014 19:13:58 +0000

Find’Em Tracking is a handy little gadget I stumbled upon recently. It’s a device the size of a credit card that has an integrated Bluetooth 4.0 chip. This device, once combined with your smartphone, will warn you if you forget it somewhere. “What’s the point?”, you ask? Never forgetting your valuables somewhere again.

Imagine you forget your wallet somewhere (with the card in it, of course). Once you’re more than 6, 9 or 12 meters away from it, your phone will warn you. There are lots of other possibilities:

You can put it in your luggage, which will protect them against theft at the airport.
With the card in your luggage, you can then be warned when it arrives on the conveyor belt at the arrival.
You can put it in your bag to avoid forgetting it on the train.

As you can see, there are a lot of possibilities. In case you lose the card, the associated smartphone app has a hot and cold radar that will help you find the card (and thus the object it is in). The card also has a buzzer so you can find it more easily. Concerning the range, it is about 45 meters.

In terms of battery capacity, it should last about 18 months and is user replaceable. The battery in question is a CR2016 battery, which costs only a few euros. You’re probably wondering about your smartphone’s battery life due to the continuous use of Bluetooth. Well, since it’s Bluetooth 4.0, which is also called Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE), it’s not a problem since it consumes very little battery.

Shipping is scheduled for March 2014. The Find’Em Tracking card is available for pre-order in black or white at the price of $24.99 (+ $15 shipping if you’re outside the US). I’m talking about pre-orders because the final price will be $34.99. At the moment, it’s possible to order two cards for $44.99. In euros, this makes it around €30 for one card and €44 for two (shipping included). Here’s the presentation video:

I find the concept really interesting. I think this could come in pretty handy for some people. Moreover, they did a nice move by allowing the user to replace the battery. It seems stupid, but they could’ve done what most (too many) companies do and force us to buy a new card.

Let’s not forget the link to the website: http://www.findemtracking.com/.

What’s your opinion about this card?

Sources: Find’Em Tracking

Flattr: Support Your Favorite Authors Without Going Broke

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 09 Feb 2014 15:08:20 +0000

Some of you may have noticed the Flattr button that appeared at the bottom of my posts a couple of months ago. I added this button after starting the experiment proposed by Ploum. The experiment he suggests, which I also suggest you try, is to pay €2 each month for the content you consume on the Internet: blog posts, YouTube videos, music, etc.

It’s not about making the content accessible for a fee, it’s about making it payable, which is a huge difference. The difference is that you choose which content you want to reward the author for. It’s like going to the movies and, when the movie ends, deciding if the movie was good enough for you to pay the ticket.

The way Flattr works is pretty straightforward: you create your account, you put money on it using your credit card, Sofort or a bank transfer, and then you choose a monthly budget (€2, €3, €5, … all the way up to €250). Once that’s done, you can start flattring content you like by simply clicking the Flattr button if there is one. It’s also possible to subscribe to a certain author or thing to flattr this author or thing automatically each month.

If the content has no Flattr button, don’t hesitate to contact the author to raise his awareness about the platform and tell him to add a button ;-)

There’s also a browser extension for Flattr, which will save you the trouble of looking for the button on web pages. If it is possible to flattr the content, the button will appear in your address bar.

Flattr also integrates with different websites, such as YouTube for instance, where it is possible to automatically flattr authors of videos you liked. Sometimes, it’s also possible to flattr content that has no Flattr button. The flattr is then put on hold and will be debited when the creator of the content registers on Flattr.

At the end of each month, your monthly budget is debited from your available funds. It is then split among all the authors you flattred during the last month. Note that Flattr takes 10% on each donation you make (hey, they needed a business model somewhere; I find 10% to be reasonable). Here’s an example: you have a monthly budget of €3 and flattred 3 authors one time and one author 2 times the last month. Flattr will take their €0.30 cut and divide the remaining €2.70 by 5, which is your total number of Flattrs this month. The first three authors will then receive €0.54 and the other one will receive €1.08, since you flattred two of his creations.

If you are curious, I invite you to try it out. Like Ploum says, in the worst case, you’ll have spent €24, of which €21.6 will have gone directly to creators whose content you liked. If you want, you can even limit the experiment to 6 months by transferring only €12. Furthermore, if you’re a content creator like me, don’t hesitate to add a Flattr button to your website to allow your readers to support you if they want to.

I personally started the experiment a month and a half ago and I have to say I really like it. I love being able to support the authors of the good content I consume daily on the Internet, all without going broke :-)

Happy New Year 2014!

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 01 Jan 2014 00:00:03 +0000

2013 has been a year full of new discoveries and gadgets. Among what I shared here, I mainly remember the release of the Leap, the announcement of Phonebloks, the shutdown of Google Reader and the release of the Android Device Manager.

Wait, someone’s telling me in my earpiece that I forgot something… Oh, of course! The whole Snowden case! The major event of 2013. Edward Snowden, the man that, at 29 years old, sacrificed everything for what is, in his opinion (and mine), a good cause. His life will never be the same again; he’ll spend the rest of it hiding and looking over his shoulder. The press can say whatever they want, I think it’s obvious that Edward Snowden is the person of the year for 2013. There’s one thing anyone can do to help him: react. Ensure that he didn’t do what he did for nothing, which is his biggest fear.

The greatest fear that I have, regarding the outcome for America, of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media, all of these disclosures; they’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over american society and global society. But, they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. And, the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. Edward Snowden

2013 is also:

29 posts published, including 11 news, 6 tutorials, 3 apps and 10 in the ‘other’ category,
25,779 words written on these pages in English, as well as 36,927 in French, which totals to 62,706 words,
26,675 views, which is 2,223 views per month on average,
€14.51 AdSense revenue,
€2 of donations.

Without you, this wouldn’t have been possible, so thank you very much.

I wish you all a happy New Year’s Eve and a happy new year 2014, full of surprises and happiness.

Everyone Has Something to Hide

Pierre-Louis Peeters — 26 Dec 2013 18:42:01 +0000

This post was inspired by a presentation made by Numendil at PSES2013 in June. If you happen to be fluent enough in French, you can watch the presentation on YouTube.

Before anything else, let’s start by defining what a persons’ privacy is exactly. Here’s how the Oxford dictionary defines ‘privacy’:

The state of being free from public attention Oxford Dictionaries

I don’t find this definition to be crystal clear. A perfect definition of privacy doesn’t exist, but Numendil came up with a pretty nice one, at least in my opinion:

One’s privacy is a set of elements, that are tangible, or not, and which have some confidential nature. Those elements are different depending on each person’s education, their work, etc. This makes the existence of a universal definition of privacy impossible, because there are almost as much definitions as there are people on Earth.

If we analyse this definition, we can conclude that each person who thinks she has a privacy (or intimacy) has something he doesn’t want to be known by a random person. In other words, a person who has a private life has, by definition, something to hide.

Some things aren't anyone else's business; private life isn't necessarily bad, it's just private. Tweet this

Governments and other instances often invoke reasons that seem legitimate to invade people’s private lives. In the United States, for instance, they tend to use the fight against terrorism as an excuse to monitor everything and everyone.

Tolerating this surveillance is somehow encouraging the gradual progression towards a police state. It starts with “we’re watching all of you to find the terrorists hidden among you” and then it escalades slowly to something like “we arrest everyone who browses this particular illegal website” and then you end up at “we arrest everyone that doesn’t agree with our ideology”. In short, it allows governments to set up a system that can be very easily used for an entirely different purpose. Let’s have a look at the motto the British government used to reassure it’s citizens regarding the installation of their CCTV cameras: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. I think a more accurate version would be “If you’re not hiding anything, you’ve got nothing to fear, for now…”.

What isn't again the law today, may be against the law tomorrow. Tweet this

Let’s also add that, for society to progress and change, laws must be broken. Not so long ago, being homosexual was considered a crime. It would still be the case if groups for sexual equality couldn’t have formed because of surveillance as we have today. As Falkvinge says it:

"It is an absolute necessity to be able to break unjust laws for society to progress and question its own values, in order to learn from mistakes and move on as a society." Tweet this

The problem is that, generally, most people don’t realize how similar the digital world is to the real world. Most citizens won’t bat an eye if they hear their government is monitoring their online communications, often invoking the good old “I don’t have anything to hide”. Just wait until you tell them cameras are going to be installed in every single room of their home to keep an eye on them, just in case they would do something bad. It wouldn’t take long for people to massively take to the streets. Yet, it’s exactly the same thing.

Accepting this surveillance is just like authorizing a police officer to live in our living rooms. The surveillance of our communications, however, has just one little advantage: it is less perceptible than a police officer. It’s easier to submit to a threat that we do not see, compared to the clearly visible threat of a police agent watching over us constantly.

Any surveillance must be regarded in terms of how it can be abused by a worse power than today's. Tweet this

It’s also important to realize the danger represented by data aggregation. The information you obtain when you aggregate data rarely reflects the whole reality. Two separate pieces of data may have no particular meaning or link between them, but sometimes, you can get to false conclusions by regrouping this data.

Here’s Numendil’s example: imagine that you’re a writer, writing a novel telling the story of a meth cook. In order to write a high quality story, you decide to buy a certain number of books about methamphetamine. A couple of weeks later, you decide to build a house, so you buy a whole lot of chemicals, tools, etc. Seeing your trailer full with all that stuff, you decide to take a picture of it and you post it to Twitter. Imagine that among the chemicals you’ve bought, some of them can be used to cook meth. By aggregating all the preceding data, the first thing people will think is that you’re a meth cook, while this isn’t necessarily the case.

In other words, even if those surveillance programs harvest a lot of data, they rarely know the full story. Of course, after investigating you, people will see their mistake and you’ll be cleared. However, everyone knows how investigations generally do quite a lot of damage, both psychological and social, or even physical.

Numendil also gives an example using a software called Maltego, which is used to aggregate data and can be downloaded for free (read “surveillance programs have software that is way more sophisticated and has access to much larger amounts of data”). By looking himself up, instead of finding his Facebook profile (which is not publicly visible), the software finds the Facebook profile of someone with the same name that posts and says a lot of racist things. Therefore, according to Maltego, he’s a racist person. In short, data aggregation doesn’t rarely gives us exact information.

Let’s also not forget that, since all this surveillance is carried out secretly, people don’t know which data is collected and don’t have any chance to correct possible misinterpretations. Another important thing to remember is that what we know (the NSA, Prism, etc.) is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of which, we recently discovered France was basically doing the same thing.

You're not the one who determines if you're guilty; the ones who are watching you are. Tweet this

In short, it’s not because some people are against government surveillance that they have something to hide; it’s just that they think some things aren’t anyone else’s business.

Here are some posts you may want to read where I got some inspiration for this post:

I’ll finish this post with the following quote:

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. Benjamin Franklin

PLPeeters.com

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Oxygen OS¶

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Alert Slider¶

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