Xiaomi Redmi ticks all the boxes

Xiaomi Redmi ticks all the boxes

So after a few weeks use of the Xiaomi Redmi 5.5-inch phone, which cost me about 6,500 baht shipped, for the price this seems an excellent product. It has a removable battery, supports a Micro SD card up to 64GB and comes with a 13MP camera. It supports 4G and connects quite well to Wi-Fi networks. It has a 720 x 1280 pixel screen which gives a pixel density of about 267, so it is not as sharp as units three times the price but still works well. Battery life is quite good, supporting all day use driving Android 4.4. With a quad core CPU it is snappy enough for most tasks. GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct round out the functionality with even FM support included. The price-per-function ratio is therefore very high for a 4G device. For the majority, this kind of phone will be fine for making calls and usual smartphone functionality. Best of all it uses a non Samsung-ed version of Android minus all those add-ons I find annoying. As usual shop around and make up your own mind.

The newest Samsung TVs respond to your spoken commands. I assume this functionality, apart from assisting the disabled, is for those too lazy to pick up a remote. What you may not know is that anything you say while the technology is active can potentially be sent to third parties. This means not only recognised commands but anything you might say in front of your TV.

People sensitive to these things in the UK have found the official Samsung position in the privacy policy for the Smart TV range. "To provide you the voice recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the voice recognition features to you," it states. So far so good until you get to: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition."

So if, for example, you are using your TV to browse your Swiss bank account and you say the access code out loud, a third party may be capturing that. Samsung goes on to assure users that this information is encrypted and can only be accessed by "authorised parties". This is, of course, just like all other large organisations that have been hacked in the past with very similar policies in place e.g. Sony. Samsung also denies that the TV is listening to everything you say.

These days most people have heard of denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where a server is inundated with requests to try and bring it down. You may also remember the discussion on bandwidth I wrote about recently. Combine this with an unintended version of the former and you have the latest Australian NBN Co's satellite downloads problem. Their solution is to restrict downloads to 50GB per month or less for some, despite the plan you might be on. This is a big departure from the 100GB and even 500GB plans that were offered last year. This could also have an impact on schools, hospitals and businesses in the country, especially those relying heavily on the internet.

The push for smart homes over the years has manifested itself in various forms. Recently HP's Fortify on Demand security service did some testing on the top 10 home security devices and the results were disturbing. Every system tested had vulnerabilities which means that if you can monitor and control what's happening in your home then others can as well. The more people push for remote monitoring the more holes become available. According to the Gartner Group, there will be 4.9 billion things connected this year and for the most part they will not be as secure as the manufacturers claim. Regulations around this area are still somewhat light.

The latest Patch Tuesday from Microsoft includes a fix to a fundamental design issue in Windows that has taken Redmond a year to resolve. The really bad news is that this is unfixable on Server 2003. The hole allows attackers to completely take over a domain-configured Windows system if it is connected to a malicious network. Given that most work PCs are configured to join a corporate-controlled domain, this is a real issue. So consider the business traveller connected to a wireless network in a restaurant where someone could take over the device with full access rights. The problem covers Server 2008, 2012, versions of Windows 7 and 8, including RT. The solution required Microsoft to re-engineer the core aspects of the operating systems, resulting in a long fix time. Server 2003 users will need to make sure their VPN is handling all the protection. Apply the patches.


James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com

James Hein

IT professional

An IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. He has a column in Bangkok Post tech pages and has been writing without skipping a beat every week all these years.

Email : jclhein@gmail.com

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