More google auto updates with out asking...

Googles doing me wrong again... A while back I complained about google auto-mounting a disk image and then updating software with out letting me know or asking my permission. Well, they've done it again. Yesterday, hardware growler reported that "GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup_1.0.5.634" was mounted and unmounted. So looks like the GoogleTalk feature of Gmail was updated. Thats a good thing, updates are welcomed. Not asking me first is not. And in this case, I don't even see a preference to disable this feature. So GoogleTalk is phoning home, downloading updates and installing them, all with out a single notification.

What to know some more scary stuff? How about this:

Jan 20 20:36:23 rwhiffen-macbook installer[10817]: Package Authoring Warning: GoogleVoiceandVideo.pkg authorization level is AdminAuthorization but was promoted to RootAuthorization for compatibility, ensure authorization level is sufficient to install.

Jan 20 20:36:23 rwhiffen-macbook installer[10817]: Package Authoring Warning: GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg authorization level is NoAuthorization but was promoted to RootAuthorization for compatibility, ensure authorization level is sufficient to install.

 

And if you look in /private/tmp you will see that, yes indeed, google did stuff as root:

 

rwhiffen-macbook:~ rwhiffen$ ls -ld /private/tmp/GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg.10817E8zL7g/

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jan 20 20:36 /private/tmp/GoogleVoiceAndVideo.mpkg.10817E8zL7g/

rwhiffen-macbook:~ rwhiffen$

 

So not only is it secretly phoning home, downloading an update, it's doing it as root. Now I explicitly authorized root access upon install. So the update having root ability is by design and I authorized it by typing in my password when I installed the software the first time. But I did not authorize subsequent use of that authorization. It's scary to think what trouble this could lead to. I'm assuming google has some kind of cryptographic controllers to test for legit updates before snagging them, but what if they don't? What if an ISP gets it's DNS hacked and they set up a fake update? It'll run as root with out anyone knowing. I guess I wouldn't have such an issue with it if I had an option to opt-in or opt-out.

So today I'm going to sign up for the google groups and use some "ALL CAPS" language and see if I can get any kind of response. Probably not, but it's worth a try.

 

Lots of Syncing contacts.. (G1 saga continues)

So in the past, I used to sync my contacts via bluetooth to my phone. Well because Android is half-baked, it has no such ability on the T-Mobile G1. But, as an alternative they have a periodic OTA sync feature with your google/Gmail contacts. This, it turns out, really hurts your battery life. It's not a push from Google. Your phone wakes up every 5 minutes (from what I gather from forum postings) and pulls contacts, calendar and gmail changes from google. If your away from WiFi it's done over G3/Edge. So I turned that off and force a manual sync on demand, just like I used to do with my Nokia phone over bluetooth.

First order of business, get the google calendar into iCal easily. You could already subscribe (read only) to your google calendar, but you had to go into your google calendar to add events. Well they added calDAV ability to google calendars which overcomes this. This gets me where I wanted to be a long time ago. I wanted the google calendar to be my primary calendar but didn't want to have to depend on web access to update.

So to get my Macbook Pro contacts to google I had to first enable google syncing. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, this feature is available to you. If you do not have one of those, no worries, there's a hack to enable it, which I did. I even had a old ipod entry to hack to make it work (my 30Gb 5th gen ipod was stolen).

It works great, but the merge of the google (and yahoo in my case) contacts with your address book is terrible. Basically you end up with a ton of duplicates and contact entries for every 'suggested contact' email address you email too. Bleh! Because I have both Yahoo and Google sync enabled those email address-only and duplicate addresses went to yahoo too (why yahoo? because I can...). YIKES! To make matters worse, a lot of contacts were missing critical information, like phone numbers, address or email addresses. It seems the 'merge' didn't work at all. The fix was to delete all the yahoo and gmail contact entries, and then within iSync (which doesn't really make sense because iSync is only used to sync to phones) reset all sync history.

Then I manually cleaned up my Macbook Pro contacts (painful, but not the end of the world). Then I ran sync from the menu bar again.

Presto! Data in three places. Then I manually sync the G1 (settings -> Data Syncronization, press the menu button, 'Sync Now') and the same data is now on the phone. Data now flows in all directions effortlessly. Eventually I'll figure out how to put a 'sync now' shortcut on the phone so I don't have to drill into the menu.

But there's always a catch. In this case, the catch is Instant Messenger. Well, it turns out (and I think it warns you) that if you delete a contact who is also an IM contact in either service, it deletes them from your IM. DOH! So now I don't have any of my gtalk or Yahoo IM contacts. Fortunately most of my IM is MSN or AIM. But still, not fun. Now I have to go back through my address book and look for yahoo and gtalk people, like Siva, Tariq or Dayton and re-add them to the corresponding client. If I had it all to do over, I would log into the native clients and try to export my IM contact list. Then again, maybe it's a good thing. I had a contact who I can't for the life of me remember why it's there. Well it's not there anymore...

Testing blogging from my g1

In the google market place (which needs improvement) there is an app called wpToGo which is supposed to allow blogging from your android handset. So I thought I'd give it a shot. The keyboard on the G1 is pretty bad for the kind of stuff, esp with my big thumbs.

Not sure I'll ever use it again, but its nice to have. It will even let you upload a picture, which could be fun. The picture I posted is of Renee at the nation building museum with her classmates.