Even more speed, speed, speed

Just two weeks after I upgraded my DSL line to 100/20 Mbps, my employer was nice enough to move our mobiles to a new contract where we finally have LTE/4G included.

116 M down/ 41 M up

Wow... that was from my Nexus 5 this afternoon in Vienna, i.e. I was not looking for an "empty" cell during off-peak hours... pretty good.

Speed, speed, speed

After a chat with a friend (and former colleague of mine) I decided to trust my telco (A1 Telekom) to upgrade to a higher speed, though I only got 12 Mpbs down on my 16Mbps ADSL line because of the age-old copper lines.

I called them, they checked the line and told me that they could guarantee 92Mbps if I go for the 100Mbps option (VDSL).

So I did. Got a new modem (TG 588v), plugged it in and interestingly already for 14Mbps though I only had 12 with the old modem (same line, still ADSL). Then a couple of days later (as announced) they changed my line on the switch/exchange and now I'm running almost 100 down (and 20 up).

With two kids in the house, netflix, two tablets and four smart phones... it was overdue to say the least.

So finally I can work while everyone else is watching Netflix (or the other way round).

MWC 2016 - need to go offline

So, as every year, just after CES the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is starting right now. Time to go offline for a week... or be bored to death with all the new phone, screen, GHz, multicore and VR announcements.

Google Play Services networking error > Phishing?

Last week my son approached me, because his Samsung all of a sudden started to show networking errors for YouTube, the PlayStore and G+ app.  Connectivity was fine, we switched from 4G to Wifi and back, with no change (he would not have asked me for a pure/true connectivity issue). The Youtube app itself worked fine and played videos, he just could not log in with his Google account.
So no wonder this problem exists across several google services/apps, but nothing else.

Opening google.com/youtube.com in the browser also showed no problem, so definitely not a networking, dns, routing... problem.

I did some googling and found (apart from nonsense like "turn on wifi"...) some hints about a broken hosts file.  So I adb'd into the device from my computer, pulled the /system/etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1    localhost
127.127.120.139 android.clients.google.com

With a hint from the ever-helpful stackexchange and the fine coincidence that he (or was it me?) rooted his phone sometime in the past, I was able to shell in, su to root, mount the file system as read-write, comment out that last weird line (for android.clients.google.com) and change the file system back to read only. Check the details on this post on stackexchange.

And then it worked.

This looks suspiciously like a phishing attempt by some malware, that managed to manipulate the hosts file to get the google password. So thirst thing after fixing this, chance the password.

Next thing, find that f*ing app that did this.

That's the downside of having rooted your phone. So finding the phone rooted was not such a coincidence after all.