Author: Brian Carnell

Screen Crop – Quick Settings Tile for Android is an excellent app that solves a major frustration with Android–the process of taking a screenshot and then cropping it for sharing is cumbersome. Screen Crop adds a Quick Settings tile that you can click on to take a screenshot that will let you easily crop the area you want in the screenshot.

One problem with this sort of app–which is no fault of the developer–is that phone manufacturers insist on modifying stock Android settings for things like adding Quick Settings Tiles.

The developer provides instructions to pull down the Quick Settings area and click on the pencil icon. On my Samsung Galaxy Note 9, however, there is no pencil icon.

Instead, users have to pull down the Notifications shade twice to show the Quick Settings area. Then, they need to click on the menu icon which is three vertically stacked dots. Then, they need to select the Button Order option. This will then show buttons that can be added at the top. Simply drag and drop whatever button you want, like the Screen Crop one, onto the list of active buttons and press Done when you are finished.

I’m sure by the time the Note 10 comes out, Samsung will have had to change this again.

Hackers were able to obtain access to Microsoft-managed email systems by compromising a support technician’s credentials. According to a TechCrunch story about the breach,

Microsoft has confirmed to TechCrunch that a certain “limited” number of people who use web email services managed by Microsoft — which cover services like @msn.com and @hotmail.com — had their accounts compromised.

“We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in an email.

According to an email Microsoft has sent out to affected users (the reader who tipped us off got his late Friday evening), malicious hackers were potentially able to access an affected user’s e-mail address, folder names, the subject lines of e-mails, and the names of other e-mail addresses the user communicates with — “but not the content of any e-mails or attachments,” nor — it seems — login credentials like passwords.

The Wikimedia Foundation issued a press release a few days ago reporting that it had taken down part of Wikipedia article’s revision history after a German court ordered it to do so.

Three months ago, a German court ruled that part of a Wikipedia article—found to be defamatory in a previous court decision—had to be removed from both the article and its associated revision tracker, known as a “history” page.

. . .

The ruling stems from a previous lawsuit against the Foundation, originally filed in mid-2018. It asserted that a Wikipedia article’s claim about an academic professor was untrue and defamatory, even though it was backed by a citation to a reliable source.

A German court ruled in September of last year that the content was in fact defamatory, largely because the source in question had been taken offline—what we call “link rot.” German volunteers quickly removed the text in question from the article but the article’s corresponding history page retained the statements. This is a common practice on Wikimedia projects.

According to the anti-Wikpedia site The Wiki Cabal, the case involves a German-born professor whose work on computerized speech recognition and translation was allegedly funded by the United States and used by the National Security Agency as part of its illegal mass data collection.

Claims to that effect appeared in German newspapers, which Wikipedia then summarized and cited in its article on the researcher. The newspapers later withdrew their claims under legal threat and Wikipedia removed the claims, but Wikipedia did not remove the old revisions of the article that still contained the information.

Some folks online have pointed out that the professor’s name appears on slide presentations and as a co-author on papers related to his speech recognition software being used by US troops in Iraq, as well as the fact that the professor has openly served as an adviser with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

But those are a long way from being funded by and collaborating directly with the National Security Agency on its various data collection efforts.

OMG, I’m thinking of all of the . . . uh . . . Linux ISOs I could store on the 5 petabytes worth of storage the black hole imaging projected used.

According to Motherboard,

The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn’t be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled.

After Cloudflare announced its upcoming Warp VPN, I reinstalled and enabled its 1.1.1.1 secure DNS app. Boy was that a mistake.

While the 1.1.1.1 app was installed, Google Play updates ground to a halt on my phone, and push notifications were delayed by hours (and in some cases by more than a full day).

I have no idea if this is Cloudflare or Android’s issue, but at a minimum an app designed to enhance security shouldn’t actually degrade device security by preventing or delaying import app updates.

This is such a bizarre story.

More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition to spare the lives of two dogs after a biting incident that left a 4-year-old boy with an amputated arm.

Authorities said the child was in the yard of a home in Layton, Utah, on Sunday when he reached through a vinyl fence and into a neighbor’s yard where the two dogs were.

Layton Fire Battalion Chief Jason Cook told NBC News that the child had a sock on his arm and that one of the dogs bit him so severely it cut off a part of his arm.

. . .

Following the incident, a woman who says she is a friend of the dogs’ owner created a petition on Care2 asking for the dogs to be saved.

“This situation is unfortunate on both sides,” the petition reads. “There are fears that Bear might be put down and he doesn’t deserve to be put down for this freak accident.”

First, the family disputes the notion that the 4-year old boy had a sock on his arm, and insists that the dog dug under a fence separating the yards in order to attack the boy. According to a follow-up story,

The husky injured the boy near 1100 North and 3600 West in Layton on March 3. The child’s hand was not recovered and was believed to have been ingested by the dog.

It was originally reported that the boy may have been playing with the dog by sticking his hand under the fence where the dog was corralled. But the boy’s mother, Hope Brown, later posted on social media that it was the dog who “went under our fence and bit Austin’s hand and then attempted to pull him back under the fence.

“Our baby lost his arm from the elbow down because it was ingested by the dog. He has multiple other bites as well as severe bruising on his face and jaw, and a black eye.”

. . .

“It was an unprovoked attack. His daddy had eyes on him the entire time and the moment Austin was pulled, John was right there. He ran right over. Austin never lost consciousness during the attack,” she wrote. “When we asked Austin what happened that first few seconds he said, ‘I saw a puppy nose! I touched the puppy nose and it bit my fingers and pulled me.’

“It only took a second for one of those dogs to dig under the fence just enough to get his snout and part of his head under.”

Second, the petition amazingly reached 180,000 people. Who knew there were that many people who have no problem with dangerous animals being allowed in communities with children.

The owners of the dogs were forced to surrender them to animal control authorities, but the animals are not being euthanized which is simply bizarre.