[NA]iPod Touch[NA]

Let'sgoflying!

Let'sgoflying!

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Feb 23, 2005
Messages
20,323
Location
west Texas
Display Name
Display name:
Dave Taylor
can't it load Adobe Flash player?
Can't see some websites without it,
get denied when trying to dl AFP
 
Will that fix the problem of...When you click on Google.com it does not display the option of seeing videos, only web/images/news/maps/shopping etc?
 
The iphone/itouch does not have native support for either macromedia flash nor java applets. It does have the ability to launch youtube videos into a youtube app, assuming that the videos have been converted into the proper codec by youtube.

I'm not sure what the itransmogrify thing does, but it seems to be aimed towards ensuring that any embedded youtube videos get properly passed off to the iphone's youtube app. This happens organically for any videos on youtube.com, but this may help you launch youtube videos embedded into other web pages. It does not address the general limitation of a lack of flash support.
-harry
 
mantakos said:
... It does not address the general limitation of a lack of flash support.
-harry
Click to expand...

The limitation of flash support is allegedely due to p*ing match between Stever and Adobe. Being that I get 3 times weekly secuirity updates for Flash and Acrobat on Windows I'm not sure I'd complain too much.
 
The limitation of flash support is allegedely due to p*ing match between Stever and Adobe.
Click to expand...
I've always heard that it's a question of performance, the Macromedia code is just not well optimized to perform on a small, under-powered, device. There's reputedly an effort underway to improve this. That's all just hearsay, though.
-harry
 
New Q. Sometimes I want to lie on my side when reading. The handydandy auto-righting thingy inside doesn't unnerstand this and flips it when I roll. How do I shut that feature off?
Also how to remove programs? (The transmogrified did not work out for me.)
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
New Q. Sometimes I want to lie on my side when reading. The handydandy auto-righting thingy inside doesn't unnerstand this and flips it when I roll. How do I shut that feature off?
Click to expand...

Depends. Some apps have a preference to shut that off, some don't. It's kind of up to the developer.

Also how to remove programs? (The transmogrified did not work out for me.)
Click to expand...

Removing a program is easy - "Tap" its icon but don't let your finger up. After a couple seconds, all your icons will start to wiggle - You can also move them around the screen at this point - and they'll all grow a little X in a circle at their upper left corners. Tap the X, it'll ask you to confirm that you want to delete, and you're done.
 
hmmm
iTransmogrify is a bookmark - easily deleted
but I am pretty sure it installed a program - does the main menu of itouch show all installed programs? I don't see it there with Settings/Clock/Itunes/Youtube etc

The self righting problem usually happens on Safari.. fixable or no?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
The self righting problem usually happens on Safari.. fixable or no?
Click to expand...
It is easily disabled on a jail-broken iPhone or iPod Touch. I don't think it's possible on a normal factory one.
 
The self righting problem usually happens on Safari.. fixable or no?
Click to expand...
Okay, so sit or stand up normally, i.e. vertically.

Hold your iphone/itouch in front of you in the usual orientation, in portrait orientation (tall and narrow), with the big round button on the bottom. The Safari screen should look "right side up", also "tall and narrow".

Now, rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, into landscape orientation (wide and short), so that the big round button is on the right. Note that Safari rotates itself clockwise 90 degrees, to compensate. Safari should again look "right side up" to you.

Now, rotate it another 90 degrees counter-clockwise, so that the big round button is on the top. Note that Safari does _not_ rotate its window. The Safari window should now look rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise from the vertical.

Note that if you were lying on your left side, your head would also be oriented 90 degrees counter-clockwise from the vertical, and the Safari screen would look right side up, to you.
-harry
 
hey, good going. I'll just keep turning it! I figured if I turned it any more, it might start spinning or something!
Also...if they can right themselves...there must be a position sensor. I wonder if there is any aircraft application for that???
 
Also...if they can right themselves...there must be a position sensor. I wonder if there is any aircraft application for that???
Click to expand...
There's an accelerometer inside.

The temptation is to try to make an attitude indicator, or something, out of this, and there is an app store app that does this, but it's a bit of a novelty, because in a coordinated turn, the phone should always think it's upright.

It's like trying to use a weight hanging from the end of a string as a bank indication. It don't work.
-harry
 
mantakos said:
There's an accelerometer inside.

The temptation is to try to make an attitude indicator, or something, out of this, and there is an app store app that does this, but it's a bit of a novelty, because in a coordinated turn, the phone should always think it's upright.

It's like trying to use a weight hanging from the end of a string as a bank indication. It don't work.
-harry
Click to expand...

I think there's a pair of them...so in theory it should work- depended on the accelerometers. Someone showed me an iPhone app that acted like the maze with the holes and a marble.

I got the impression that the accelerometers were inexpensive or there was insufficient filtering of the data to make a decent instrument (but I only looked at it for a couple of minutes)
 
I think there's a pair of them...so in theory it should work...
Click to expand...
The iphone has a 3-axis accelerometer:The problem is that when you're straight and level, you're experiencing 1G "down" (towards the floor of the plane). When you're in a 60 degree bank coordinated turn to the left, you're experiencing 2G "down" (again, towards the floor of the plane), and the same for a comparable turn to the right.

So as you make coordinated turns to the left and right, the accelerometer just sees variation in the magnitude of the "downward" acceleration, without anything to indicate direction of bank.

-harry
 
I don't see on the itouch

antivirus
firewall
popup blocker or settings

are they immune to these things?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I don't see on the itouch

antivirus
firewall
popup blocker or settings

are they immune to these things?
Click to expand...

It's an Apple product. I've been told that
  • Viruses don't exist for apple products
  • My personal experience otherwise, they didn't exist in the past
  • I don't know what I was talking about
So...they are immune:smile:
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I don't see on the itouch

antivirus
firewall
popup blocker or settings

are they immune to these things?
Click to expand...

Pretty much. Technically, it is *possible* to write an iPhone virus, but part of the reason Apple is so picky about the App Store, etc. is to keep those things off your iPhone.

Put it this way, it'd be a LOT easier to get a working virus on a Mac, yet I have no antivirus on the Mac, the firewall is built-in and pretty much idiot-proof, and Safari blocks popups by default. No extras needed. To get viruses and other malware through to the iPhone is quite a bit more difficult.

So, the easy answer to your question is "Pretty much immune, yes."
 
The app store approach to apps is not so much to ensure that they're virus-proof, as to provide "containment", such that an app with a vulnerability would not have the ability to cause much damage outside of the little sandbox set aside for the app itself.

There was a report of a vulnerability among several smartphone brands, including iphone, that came in via a malformed SMS message. This was fixed pretty quickly.

So the potential for viruses certainly exists, and has been proven, but as a practical problem, it hasn't been shown to be an issue for users ... yet.
-harry
 
Did ya'll see FlightAware just realeased an iPhone/iTouch app?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
It was, "Why?"
(What specifically is it about the ipod devices that make them so difficult to infect?) [I recommend layman terms!]
Click to expand...

Well, like any product, there's two things going on: Development and Distribution.

For development - Well, obviously a Windows program isn't going to work on the iPod Touch, or the Mac, or Linux, or vice versa (though there are ways using "virtual machines"... But that's just complicating things). So, the hacks who want to write a virus, or make a window pop up on your screen, or whatever, are going to try to write it for the OS that'll get them the most "hits": Windows.

In addition, there generally has to be a weakness to exploit. There are three main types of "viruses": Trojan Horses, Viruses, and Worms. A Trojan Horse is what you might expect - It's malware that's advertised as being something else. You're fooled into running it, and it does not do what it says it would do, but instead goes and replicates itself, for example by reading your e-mail address book and sending itself as an attachment to all your friends. The weakness here is the user, for clicking it in the first place.

A true virus is a bit of code that attaches itself to an otherwise legit program, and executes itself when you run the legit program to do its dirty deed. In this case, the weakness is at least partially due to the legit program having a way for the virus to attach and execute itself. Some of the worst offenders are Internet Explorer (though other web browsers are also common targets) and MS Office - Office has its built-in scripting language and sadly, I think there are probably more macro viruses than there are legitimate macros!

A worm is the nastiest, and hardest to write, and requires no user intervention whatsoever - It is able to execute and replicate all on its own. The weakness here is generally in the operating system.

Malware generally fits in one of the first two categories. Things like popups could be considered either way I think, depending on how they work. Either way, a trojan or virus needs to be written for a specific OS and in the case of a virus usually also written to exploit a weakness in a particular application like IE. Those wishing to inflict damage are going to go after the OS and application that gives them the most hits (Windows, IE, Office since almost everyone has those), is the easiest to exploit (same list) and is the easiest to learn to exploit (same again).

Part of what "protects" the iPhone/iPod Touch is simply that it's still a fairly small percentage of overall web traffic. Another part is that Apple has really been hanging their hat on security the last few years and makes quite an effort to make sure that their software (both OS X and applications like Safari, etc.) is difficult to exploit. Finally, more people know how to develop applications for Windows than OS X, and for whatever reason the "script kiddies" who write a lot of the malware seem to be Windows users as well, so naturally they develop for Windows.

And, of course, Apple holds the keys to the iPhone/iPod Touch world, and actually has the ability to kill applications on people's devices. So, if someone were to write some sort of a trojan/virus app on the iPod Touch, Apple has the ability to easily squash it, thus rendering the virus developer's efforts useless, so I think that is a big deterrent as well.

From the developer's perspective, even legit apps on the iPhone/iPod Touch have their own "sandbox" where they can operate - For example, if I write a program, and Jesse writes a program, my program cannot touch the files created by Jesse's program and vice versa - The only way that apps can communicate with each other on the iPhone OS is to register to handle certain types of URL's and then have another program call one of those URL's. For example, if Jesse's program registers with the OS that it'll handle Jesse:// URL's, and my program calls a function to open the URL Jesse://do.something/ that's the only way they can communicate. That makes any potential virus a LOT less effective as well.

Hope that all makes sense! :yes:
 
Basically a wide-spread virus is unlikely -- but possible. There is no anti-virus for an iPhone/iTouch and there likely will never be. Just don't worry about it :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top