The Straits Times Android tablet app had a bug previously where it allowed free access to premium content – for both the ‘Tablet Edition’ and ‘PDF Edition’. This bug was patched after the app was updated (sometime in Aug 2014, if I am not wrong). That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is another workaround to access the premium content again for free.
Do you know that you can make your Android phone dial a number directly from the ADB shell? I am not sure if this trick will have any practical use, but this tutorial will show you how this can be done. No rooting is required.
WhatsApp uses a customised version of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) as the communication protocol. Upon installation, it creates a user account using one’s phone number (with country code prefix) as the username (Jabber ID: [phone number]@s.whatsapp.net). A password is generated using an unknown algorithm on the server end and sent to the client. Previously the password was derived from the phone’s IMEI or the WiFi MAC address.
The Android backup file created using the ADB command is a compressed tar file. Compression is done using the zlib compression library and the DEFLATE compression algorithm. If a password is entered during the backup process, the file is encrypted, else it is only compressed. In this article, we will learn how to perform ADB backups, extract ADB backups and restore or repack ADB backups.
I had recently encountered delayed push notifications on my Android phone whenever the phone was logged onto my home WiFi network. There were no delays observed when the phone is logged onto the 3G or LTE mobile network or other WiFi networks. I decided to investigate.
On Android, WhatsApp stores encrypted copies of the chat messages onto the SD card. These encrypted copies are denoted by the .crypt, .crypt5, .crypt6 and .crypt7 file extensions. They are generated from the master database file stored in the following location:
WhatsApp has once again changed the algorithm to encrypt all the chat history messages saved on the SD card. This new encryption method is denoted by the .crypt7 filename extension.
A couple of weeks back, WhatsApp introduced a new way of encrypting the backup messages saved on the SD card. The article that I wrote last month on decrypting the WhatsApp messages will no longer work on the new crypt5 files.
An Android phone that has its bootloader unlocked means that the warranty is void. This is the case with most, if not all of the Android mobile phone manufacturers like Samsung and HTC. Sony is no exception. Motorola has recently announced some developer friendly changes to their policies – warranty will not be void for their Developer Edition devices that are bootloader unlocked.
WhatsApp does a backup of the messages at 4am (local time) every day to the SD card. On Android, this backup is an encrypted copy of the SQLite database containing all of the WhatsApp messages. If you want to read the messages on a computer, you will need to decrypt the file.
