Over The Counter Culture

I recently sold my old Nokia 5800 on eBay (netting £60) and thanks to an Orange (UK) Pay As You Go customer in my family, was able to get my hands on a brand new ZTE Blade (reviewed here), which Orange sells as the San Francisco for just £85, contract-free, and covered by warranty (which had expired on the old Nokia). In itself, that’s a huge upgrade for hardly any money, but I had no intention of being stuck with Orange, so this post is designed to walk you through getting the deal, liberating the phone from Orange’s clutches, and then really improving the featureset, freedom and reliability of the phone by flashing it (with a new ‘ROM’) to the latest Android version.

1. Getting the offer

You simply get an existing Orange PAYG customer to call up (150 or 0800 079 2000) and say they want the PAYG San Francisco deal. Orange will send the phone and a SIM with £10 (I’ll be using my existing contract on 3UK with the phone; the Orange £10 will be used for Orange Wednesdays 2for1 film or pizza promotions).

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2. Unlocking the phone so you can use it on any network

The next step is to unlock it. You can do this for free and easily on the ZTE Blade, thankfully. Just head to http://arrtoo.x10.mx/unlockBlade.php , enter your IMEI (which you can get by turning the phone on, ignoring as much of the messages as possible, getting to the dialer, and dialing *#06#) and input the unlocking code when asked for it (after turning your phone off, inserting a SIM from a non-Orange provider, and turning it on again); you’ll get prompted for the code given out at the link above.

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3. Flashing the ROM to update the phone

Once unlocked, it’s time to get rid of the Orange pre-loaded crap and update the phone to the very cutting edge. Orange sells these phones with Android 2.1 or 2.2. You can get it to 2.3.4 (plus a few additional fixes) through any number of the tutorials here: http://android.modaco.com/category/453/zte-blade-blade-modaco-com/ ; usual caveats apply: you’re not doing a standard operation, there’s a risk you’ll brick it, void your warranty, etc. Follow any instructions to the letter, read around the topic before you launch into it without understanding what each step does, and search for people asking the same questions you have, either on Google on in the Modaco forums linked to above. And back things up from your old phone, obviously; save your numbers somewhere safe, and save them to your SIM card so you easily move them over to your new phone.

Here’s what I recommend doing:

- determine whether the phone you were supplied with is ‘Gen 1′ or ‘Gen 2′ by installing a tiny app called Mr Pigfish: http://www.appbrain.com/app/ask-mr-pigfish/com.apedroid.pigfish

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- if Gen 1, then download this (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above): http://hotfile.com/dl/124709138/1d6efab/gsf-blade-b15-tpt.zip.html; place it on the SD Card (if you downloaded the file to a computer, not to the phone, then move it over by USB or Bluetooth). This is an all-in-one image for first converting your phone to Gen 2, and then flashing it up to Android 2.3.4. Here are the install instructions courtesy of the maker:

“To install: Unzip the file to the root of your SD card, it will create an ‘image’ folder. Check the integrity of the files you created using AFV (available from android market) to find the nandroid.md5 file in the image directory, then long press on it & verify nandroid backup. Turn off your phone, leave it for at least 30 seconds, then hold menu & volume (up) when you power it on. You should see some green text (may be just a blank screen) then it should reboot & you should see a big android while it is performing it’s first boot (this will take a while). Once it has successfully started up don’t forget to delete the image folder on your SD card, to prevent any accidents.”

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- if Gen 2, then this is the file to download: http://www.filesonic.com/file/1500072091/gsf-blade-b15.zip (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above); this file will be installed through a clever program called ClockworkMod: this can be launched before your phone boots up into the normal phone mode, for doing things like backing up, flashing new ROMs, etc.

The best instructions I’ve seen for installing ClockworkMod and then flashing the file you just downloaded onto the phone, are the instructions here: http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-roms-rom-customisation/329864/22-may-guide-how-to-install-a-custom-rom-on-the-zte-blade-gen1/ - you should read it all, but the instructions you’ll need are in subsections 1 and 2. Section 2 refers to an out of date ROM file; where it says “r12-update-modacocustomrom-blade-kitchen-unsigned.zip” you should instead read “gsf-blade-b9.zip”; and where it says “cb1718841318a63775b020e6c544edfa” you should instead look for an MD5Sum reading of “174ba19a85ec96258727d12177befa66″.

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And there you have it. A cutting edge, high performance phone, covered by warranty, nicely unrestricted, and it’ll cost you about £85, minus whatever you sell your old phone for.

I’m surprised I didn’t catch this in the mainstream press

Stifling bureaucracy is often blamed for discouraging scientists and businesses from participating in the research programmes of the European Commission (EC). But the commission’s notoriously cumbersome procedures and rigid control mechanisms have apparently not prevented a criminal syndicate from conducting a brazen fraud that has siphoned off millions in EC grant funds.

Italian authorities and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) in Brussels, Belgium, have confirmed that they are prosecuting members of a large network accused of pocketing more than €50 million (US$72 million) in EC grants for fake research projects.

Read more here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/full/474265a.html

“Everything about viruses is extreme,” Zimmer began. The number of viruses
on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Small as they are, if
you stacked them all up, the stack would reach 100 million light years. They
are the planet’s most abundant organism by far.

They’re fast. We take decades to reproduce. A flu virus can generate
billions of itself in us within hours. And they evolve
10,000 times faster than us, because they’re creatively sloppy about making
copies of their genomes, and they readily combine genes among varieties when
jointly infecting a cell. Each of us has four trillion viruses on board, in
1,500 all-too-fungible varieties.

Yet they can also be “time stealthy.” You may have a bout of childhood
chickenpox that is over in days, but the viruses may hide in your nervous
system and emerge decades later as shingles. HIV spreads inexorably because
of the lag of months or years between infection and visible symptoms.

The earliest record of a virus in human history is the smallpox marks you
can see on the mummified face of Ramses V, who died in 1145 BCE.
Viruses leave no fossils, but in a sense they ARE fossils, with the ancient
gene sequences of retroviruses buried in the genomes of every creature
they’ve infected over the ages. About 8 percent of our genome—some
100,000 elements—comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for
us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). One French scientist
revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by
deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA.

For billions of years the planet’s life consisted solely of bacteria and
their viruses, the bacteriophages. They became a planet force, and remain
so today, determining the makeup of the atmosphere, among other things. Every
day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages. Some of
the carbon from the bodies sinks to the bottom, some is freed up to
fertilize other life. Ocean viruses cart around and transmit genes for
photosynthesis to previously incapable
microbes—10 percent of oceanic photosynthesis happens that way. If some
day we have to geoengineer the atmosphere to manage climate change, we may
want to employ the viruses that are already doing it.

Virology will be revolutionizing science for decades to come. One body of
investigation suggests that the so-called giant viruses may be a whole
fourth domain of life (added to bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). As the
ultimate parasite, viruses were assumed to come along after life evolved,
but they might an instrument of that evolution. One hypothesis is that
viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the
genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.

–Stewart Brand

The heel dragging is over: just three weeks before the legal deadline for the incorporation of EU changes to online tracking and data protection laws (set out in Directive2009/136/EC) expired, the UK government has finally implemented those changes (too little, too late?). There will be a total of three Statutory Instrument delivering the amendments*; the main one, published very recently, is The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 No. 1208) is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1208/made

What key changes does it make?

•  Personal data breaches will now have to be notified to the Information Commissioner;  
• Stronger enforcement provisions; and  
• Consumers will now have to give their consent for the import of cookies on to their machines

Beyond more obvious data protection provisions, like the definition of a ‘personal data breach’ (and according duty to notify the Information Commissioner and the victim – backed by a £1,000 fine, reduced to £800 if paid within 21 days), they also force service providers to take proportionate measures to protect personal data stored or transmitted against accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss or alteration. If your webmail was deleted, for example, this may give rise to a breach of statutory duty by the service provider. It does away with allowance for implied consents largely throughout communications law insofar as it relates to businesses using user data or monitoring user usage of services (express consent is now king).

Regulation 10 makes provision to allow police and the security services to have access to personal data of users of public electronic communications networks and services. It also makes provision to compel service providers to establish and maintain procedures to allow access to that data.

Fines for noncompliance with the regulations are now considerably more severe, as they now reflect Data Protection Act fines (of up to £500,000 for grave breaches).

* The three implementing statutory instruments to look out for are:

1. The Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Amendment) Order 2011;
2. The Electronic Communications and Wireless Telegraphy Regulations 2011; and
3. The Communications Act 2003 (Maximum Penalty for Contravention of Information Requirements) Order 2011

NB: Be aware that, rather unhelpfully, the UK’s main store of legislation (legislation.gov.uk) does not update the text of secondary legislation (such as these Regulations) when they get amended, so it’s unlikely that when browsing the official register of such laws, you’re actually getting an accurate picture of the law. Just saying.