I have to thank my sister in law for this tip. It turns out smartphones embed gps data into every picture they take. Once you post this online that information is easily accessible and points to the EXACT location of where that picture was taken. The site icanstalkyou.com gives information on how to disable geotagging of pictures. Andriod phones are the easiest to kill only camera geotagging whle iphone/ipods are the most difficult.
On my Driod based phone store location was already off..:)
I had a Deacon at my church today ask me about getting audio streams from emergency scanners onto his phone. I said no problem and that I would take a look at it. I fired up blackberry app world. After I had the Deacon enter his password it asked for permission to load an update. I said no to this as Blackberry Curves are not the most stable phones in the world. The phone locked up when loading the app world. Upon rebooting the phone I got a jvm error 102 error. Google research showed this to be a corrupted file on the phone. After following a few more links I figured out the file that was corrupted was a critical system file that could not be deleted. I talked with my wife who manages nearly 100 of these 8330′s and found this file corruption is not uncommon when they reach 1.5 years or higher. I installed the Backberry Dekstop software as well as the jl_cmdr software. After an hour i could not get the phone to reveal it’s filesystem. I finally told the Deacon I had to hard reset the phone. He agreed. 10 minutes later…no dice. The only option is a full wipe from jl_cmdr. The Deacon reluctantly agreed. After the wipe was done I got an error 502 which means no OS. I connected the phone to my laptop and loaded the latest version of BB OS available for his phone 4.5.x. nearly an hour later..the phone was back with his documents, e-mail settings, phone registration, pictures and video intact. Address book was empty though. I then installed his apps(that were still there on the phone just not installed). The phone had at least been returned to operational condition without loosing absolutely everything. While he does have to re-customize his phone and try to rebuild his contacts his phone is at least operational. three hours of work proved to be very very worth it. One, I got the Deacon’s phone operating without him having to replace it out of contract and two, I gained very valuable experience “hacking” these minuscule computers called smartphones.
