More than 80,000 used phones are for sale on eBay on any given day. And while the owners think they've wiped their personal data first, it turns out they haven't.
Avast, a maker of anti-virus software, bought 20 phones to check out.
In looking at the phones, the company found over 40,000 photos, including more than 1,500 images of children, 750 of scantily dressed women and 250 nude selfies of men. It also found several hundred personal emails and text messages. The company even found one completed loan application, as well as personal information about four previous owners.
That means that while the cellphone owners thought they were erasing their data before they put the devices up for sale, much of it was recoverable.
Naturally, Avast has a fix for that problem, and since it's free, we pass it along: It's an Android app called Avast Anti-Theft. Once you set it up, you can securely delete everything on your phone by logging into your Avast account on your computer.
If you don't already have an Avast account, you can open one for free. We've used Avast for years and have recommended it to our readers, so we're confident about its work.
We signed in to our Avast account at my.avast.com, and, once there, we had many commands at our disposal, including the ability to wipe our phone's contents, if we wished, or locate it by its GPS coordinates. There was also a "siren" feature -- and, of course, we couldn't resist trying it out. On came a very loud siren, with a man's voice yelling, "This phone has been lost or stolen," over and over again.
One problem: After installation, Avast Anti-Theft told us it had a few issues to fix before we could use it. It took us awhile to figure out that we could fix them by just tapping each one and then tapping "fix." The company's explanations were very techie and may be a turn-off for some. For instance, we weren't sure what to do about the request to "uninstall T-Mobile's text messaging app," so we just ignored it. In fact, we ignored most of the explanations and everything still worked.
Free Pro Video Editor
VSDC Free Video Editor just came out in a new version. It's very similar to professional video editors. It's free, for Windows XP on up to Windows 8.
Critics have admitted they are in awe of its tools but point out it is difficult to use for novices. We're novices, so we tried it out.
It turns out that some parts of the program are actually easy to use. For instance, you can easily make a slideshow with a video of someone in one corner talking about the slideshow. Just click "add object" to add a photo or video to an existing video clip, or to add music or speech. This is pretty useful; for example, it could be all you need for an instructional video.
During the download, be sure you click "decline" to decline other offers that will appear, unless they sound good to you. Undoubtedly, the company gets paid by companies that want to piggyback on the download process. This is common with free programs, as it's one of the few ways for the programmers to make some money; sometimes they ask for donations instead.
The program is free at videosoftdev.com, and they offer tech support for $10 a year.
Smoking, or not
Text to Quit is a free app to help you quit smoking. You get texts with helpful advice from other quitters, progress updates and other tips.
Type "crave" to get help with cravings and "game" to get a trivia game to distract you from lighting up. Apparently this works. A George Washington University study involving 503 participants using the app over six months found that 11 percent using Text to Quit did quit smoking, compared to 5 percent of the control group.
Bob quit smoking more than 30 years ago when he caught the flu in Philadelphia. Actually, it turned out to be a variant of the so-called Legionnaire's disease, named that because it cropped up for the first time during an American Legion convention in that city. Breathing was so difficult that he couldn't smoke. After the disease passed, he said to heck with it and just didn't start up again.
The lesson in all this: If you get a serious cold, use it to give up smoking. (As a footnote, there is considerable variation in susceptibility to damage. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell chain-smoked five packs per day of unfiltered Pall Malls and died at age 98.)
Re-sizing a Photo
A reader told us he had a photo he wanted to use as his Windows desktop wallpaper, which is the picture that acts as background on your computer screen, but it was way too big.
Here's how to re-size any picture, using the free program Picasa, found at picasa.google.com.
Open the program and click the "File" menu and then "Export Picture to Folder." Experiment with various size changes until you get one that looks right. Choose a folder that you'll be able to find later, perhaps a sub-folder in "Pictures." To make that picture your wallpaper, use your right mouse button to click on your main screen, the "desktop." Then choose "personalize." Put in the picture you want and that's it.
If the picture doesn't look right, click "Personalization" or "Personalize" and then "desktop background." You'll see options like "fit" or "stretch" or "fill" under the words "Picture Position." (For our own desktop wallpaper, we get a new photo every day from Bing.com. It comes in automatically if you get the free download from bing.com/explore/desktop.)
Stuff You Didn't Know About Colleges
Back in the dark days before Google, our favorite search engine was Vivisimo. The founder sold it to IBM and now has a new site, OnlyBoth.com.
OnlyBoth is a search engine for information about colleges. It can search 3,122 colleges and bring up some unusual statistics. We did a search on Bob's alma mater, the University of Chicago, and found that no other college with as many graduate students (nearly 10,000) has so few undergrads (5,600). Joy went to the University of Southern California. Among its alumni are 461 National Football League players, more than any other school except Notre Dame, which has 528. Ohio State is third with 399.
Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at [email protected] and [email protected].
SundayMonday Business on 07/21/2014