Worse: it’s the handset manufacturers and the carriers who—in the name of “making your user experience better”—install this software without any way for you to opt-out. This video, recorded by 25-year-old Android developer Trevor Eckhart, shows how it works. This is bad. Really bad.

Fast forward to 9:00 for the damning sequence.

The spying software is developed by a company called Carrier IQ. In their site, the company says they are “the only embedded analytics company to support millions of devices simultaneously, we give Wireless Carriers and Handset Manufacturers unprecedented insight into their customers’ mobile experience.”

It seems like a good goal and, indeed, most manufacturers and carriers agree: according to Eckhart, the spyware is included in most Android phones out there. Carrier IQ software is also included in Blackberry and Nokia smartphones, so it probably works exactly the same in those smartphones as well. It doesn’t even matter if your telephone was purchased free of carrier contracts. As Eckhart shows in this video, it’s always there.

The problem is that it does a lot more than log anonymous generic data. It grabs everything.

How does it work?

Carrier IQ’s software is installed in your phone at the deepest level. You don’t know it’s there. You are never warned this is happening. You can’t opt-in and you certainly can’t opt-out.

The commercial spyware sits between the user and the applications in the phone so, no matter how secure and private your apps are, the spyware intercepts anything you do. From your location to your web browsing addresses and passwords to the content of your text messages.

This even happens using a private Wi-Fi connection instead of the carrier 3G or 4G connection.

The company denied all this in a public statement (PDF):

While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools

But the video clearly demonstrates that this is not true: Keystrokes submit unique key codes to Carrier IQ. Even secure connections are intercepted by the spyware, allowing it to record your moves in the open. These connections to the web are encrypted but, since Carrier IQ’s spyware sits between the browser and the user, it grabs it and sends it in plain text.

The spyware can even log your location, even if the user declines to allow an app to know where it is. The hidden Carrier IQ app ignores your desires, intercepts the data and gets your location anyway.

What can you do to avoid it?

Unfortunately, not much. The hidden spyware is always running, and there’s no option in any of the menus to deactivate it. Unless you’re a grade-A blackbelt hacker, you’re out of luck. Even Eckhart, who is a developer, finds it difficult to remove:

Why is this not opt-in and why is it so hard to fully remove?

It’s an excellent question. One that urgently needs an answer, from Carrier IQ but especially from every handset manufacturer and carrier involved in this situation.

The solution to this problem is not installing a custom ROM. That’s something that shouldn’t be required from consumers, something that normal people will not be willing to do. Products must respect privacy rights out of the box. Consumers must be informed about this the moment they turn on their phones in a clear way. They should have the possibility to opt-in and opt-out whenever they want, with a single click. This matter should be solved now by Carrier IQ, the handset manufacturer and the carriers.

If it isn’t solved as soon as possible, authorities in the US and Europe should nail them with everything they have.

You may have heard rumblings and grumblings about a Senate bill that would “effectively destroy” YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Google+, and any other service that lets people post things on the internet.

If a “directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link” is found to distribute content without permission, the PROTECT IP Act (.pdf) would allow copyright owners or the Attorney General to sue for the deletion of that Internet service from the United States internet, by rendering it unsearchable on search engines and impossible to access with United States DNS servers. (Security experts worry that this will cause Americans who still want to access sites like RapidShare to rely on foreign DNS servers, which would open another can of worms.)

Certain protections are available – for example, the offending site has to be determined not to have significant non-infringing uses, which would appear to cover most of the services listed above. However, that is subject to interpretation. Even though Apple reportedly paid $100 million to the major labels for permission to launch the iCloud music locker, it could easily be argued that the majority of content stored there and on any other “legal” music locker service technically infringes on copyright.

This could be why the Consumer Electronics Association, NetCoalition, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association want to delay the bill to prevent “undue collateral damage.”

One question at stake here is simple, and some thought it was resolved in 1998: Should companies that let people post things on the internet be responsible for what those people post, or should they only have to remove content after being notified? Another question: Should the United States adopt a protectionist stance towards the internet, defending its content industries against overseas piracy the same way totalitarian regimes “defend” their citizens from ideas they deem offensive?

We might put this another way: Do we really want to break the carefully-constructed, end-to-end nature of the internet – the very thing that makes it special and different from, say, television – to take down a few overseas sites facilitating the piracy of content created in the U.S.? Do we really need a precedent that lets the Attorney General break the internet at the behest of certain industries, especially when the internet comes in so handy for so many things?

You can find the remastered Beatles catalog on Rapidshare, but not on Spotify. Would fixing that break the internet?
On the surface, the PROTECT IP Act (“Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property”), whose proponents appear to be ramping up their efforts, might appear to make sense. Services like MegaUpload and RapidShare, which traffic in millions of infringing transactions every day, would go away, allowing legitimately-licensed services to flourish and our country’s copyright creators to earn more money.

The thing is, critics claim, making services preemptively responsible for what people do with their products and starting down the slippery slope of internet filtering would do more harm than good.

For starters, there is no way to block all infringing content from any social media service, other than shutting it down. YouTube and other sites can’t even preemptively take content down when they spot it, because that would give copyright holders a new angle with which to sue them. If YouTube (or any other site) knew about infringing content A and removed it, it arguably should have known about infringing content B and removed that, too.

Internet services can’t perfectly block copyrighted content from appearing. All it would take to foil some content identification systems would be to add a few milliseconds of time or edit a song so that it fades in and out, and an internet service could fail to recognize it by algorithm. There is no 100-percent-perfect content identification system, whether human- or machine-powered. Just ask the tens of thousand of Chinese citizens whose job it is to censor the internet for their fellow citizens, or the makers of the Shazam iPhone app, which, as amazing as it is, fails to recognize songs all the time.

Keep in mind also that every recording ever made is copyrighted, though most people seem only to think that commercially-released media is protected by copyright law. If I shoot a video of my cat, that video and the accompanying audio is copyrighted and I own the copyrights. I might choose to license my cat video under a permissive, Creative Commons-style license or upload it to YouTube with a setting that allows other people to embed it elsewhere, but the fact remains: My cat video is copyrighted, because it was “recorded into a fixed medium.”

Under the PROTECT IP Act, I should have the same right to sue sites or ask to have them removed from the internet that Hollywood studios have. If you thought the patent troll scene was harmful, just wait until the copyright trolls show up.

A world where anyone can sue to have a thing deleted from the formerly “unbreakable” internet every time their cat video is copied, distributed, or viewed without permission would be a very different one indeed, and probably not preferably so.

Our current system is clumsy, because it requires copyright holders to alert services to infringing content, ask them to remove it, and then only sue if they fail to do so. It also allows the world wide web to be world wide.

Citizens have access to stuff in other countries whose governments might do things differently. Sometimes that means someone downloads a song without paying for it. Other times, it means a brutal dictator is toppled by Twittering subjects.

We are going  to give away a  1hr massage to one lucky Geek Monkey Fan!  No we do not do the massage ourselves. Here is all you have to do to qualify!

Go to our face book fan page and click the like button. That’s it. We will pick one luck fan on August 1st! Here are the details on the prize.

A one-hour Signature Massage (regularly $65) from La Navelle Massage & Skincare in Cleveland. Get some much-needed R&R, reduce stress, alleviate toxins, and say good-bye to excessive mental and physical fatigue. Let Teshara Malone and her team treat your body like the temple it is while you focus on something other than making a grocery list or picking up the dry cleaning.

The winner will be notified by Facebook message, and it can claimed at the office or via email. Prize will be valid until October.

The new gesture controls in Apple’s OSX Lion operating system update can take a little getting used to on a MacBook (such as the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs). The reverse “natural” scrolling, for example is one that has its fans and detractors, and we’ve previously shown you how to roll back that particular change.

Potentially more annoying is the change from the tap-to-drag touchpad gesture to a new three-finger-drag gesture. In fact, it’s probably the single most annoying Lion feature we’ve found so far.

Traditionally, one could could do a double tap, then hold on the second tap to drag a window or to highlight and select on-screen text. Now, that’s been replaced by a three-finger gesture. Hover three fingers on the title bar of a window, or over the corner, and drag them along the touchpad to move or resize that window. The same works for selecting a block of text. Tap once with three fingers, then move over the items you wish to highlight. You can also click down on the touchpad with one finger and drag with a second for either of these moves.

But, especially for those of us who bounce between the Mac and Windows worlds on a regular basis, a little consistency goes a long way. If you want to reactivate the classic double-tap-and-drag gesture, it’s possible, but the option is well-hidden. Instead of being in System Preferences under Touchpad, it’s actually under System Preferences>Universal Access>Mouse and Trackpad>Trackpad Options. Click the check box that says “Dragging” and you should be all set. The screenshots below show you the menu pages you’ll need to find.

Both double-tap-to-drag and the three-finger drag can be active at the same time, if you want to acclimate to the new OSX Lion gestures but keep the old ones active in the meantime. What’s driving you crazy so far about OSX Lion? Let us know in the comments section below.

Universal Access is in the upper right corner.

Now click the tab that says ‘Mouse and Trackpad,’ then the button that says ‘Trackpad options.’

Finally, check the checkbox next to ‘Dragging.’

Photo by Alex Schwenke.

This is a pretty controversial topic, as there are a lot of startup-tweaking myths out there. So, we took to the streets (of the internet) and searched for as many easy, well-supported tips as we could find. There may be others, some of which are controversial, but these 10 things are almost sure to get you a faster-booting machine.

10. Tweak Your BIOS

When you first set up your computer, your BIOS is set up to make things a bit more convenient for you, but once you’re all set up, those things can be disabled. If you hold the DEL key when you start up your computer (or whatever key your BIOS tells you to enter setup), you can turn on the “Quick Boot” option and move your hard disk to the top of the boot priority list. The Quick Boot setting will turn off the tests your computer runs when it first turns on, and the boot priority tweak will tell your computer not to look for CDs, thumb drives, or other media when it first starts, which will get you booted into your OS quicker. If you ever need to boot from CD though, you’ll have to go back into the BIOS and change this again before you do.

We don’t live in a vacuum. Neither do our gadgets. From steamy bathrooms to grubby, sweaty hands, little bits of moisture tend to creep into our electronics.

Enter the Bheestie, an airtight plastic pouch that sucks — in a good way. It holds two smaller, porous bags that contain several peppercorn-sized pellets. In theory, these bags act like molecular sieves, absorbing moisture that’s managed to get inside your device. After 24 hours, goes the company claim, the beads will extract almost twice as much water as a cup of uncooked rice — a common DIY method for saving soggy gadgets.

The idea is twofold: Use the bag to demoisturize your gadgets on a semiregular basis for routine maintenance, and keep it on hand for H₂Opacalypses.

Now, the company’s FAQ doesn’t promise miracles. But it does say reviving a phone dropped in the toilet isn’t out of the question. We started by stuffing a damp sponge into the bag and were impressed by how much water came running out only an hour later. So we decided to go big.

So we sacrificed a first-gen Droid — oops! — by letting the phone cannonball from waist high into the bowl. We fished it out, shoved it into a virgin bag, and waited. Within an hour, the bag was giving off noticeable heat— a byproduct of the absorption. Color us optimistic. But after 72 hours, the recommended duration, we cracked the Bheestie and found a dead Droid.

So if you’ve spilled a drink on your phone and can get it into a Bheestie fast enough, you might be OK. But if your device has spent any time completely submerged in water — or worse — you’re out of luck. But you already knew that.

Laptop Mag — To find out your best back-to-school laptop options no matter what your budget, we checked in with Laptop Magazine and Laptopmag.com, who oversee 140+ notebook and netbook reviews every year.

Best Under $400

Acer Aspire One 722

Don’t call it a netbook. The 11.6-inch Acer Aspire One 722 swaps out Intel’s weak-sauce Atom processor for a beefier AMD C series APU. This 3-pound machine is light enough to carry around all day, has HDMI out for watching Netflix or Hulu on your TV, and lasts nearly 7 hours on a charge. Not too shabby for a laptop that costs $120 less than an iPad. [$379, Full Review]

Best Under $600

Dell Inspiron 14R

You don’t have to be stuck with the same design all four semesters. Dell’s Inspiron 14R features a lid that can be removed with the press of a button, and swapped with one of three colors (Peacock Blue, Fire Red, or Lotus Pink) for $29.99, or two artist-designed patterns ($59.99 each). Inside this 5-pound system is a 2.1-GHz Intel Core i3 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 320GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. Or get your game on with optional AMD graphics. [$549; Full Review]

Best Under $800

HP Pavilion dv6t

HP’s Pavilion d6t offers an unbeatable combo of style and substance for $749. This 15.6-inch laptop has a slick metal dark umber finish, plus CoolSense technology for keeping temps down. A 2.3-GHz Intel Core i5-2410M processor and switchable Intel/AMD graphics run the show, and you get 640GB of storage for all of those legally obtained movies. Beats Audio technology ensures strong enough audio to rock the dorm room, while the TrueVision HD webcam will help students stay in touch with the fam. [$749; Full Review]

Best Under $1,000

Apple MacBook Air (11-inch)

Weighing a mere 2.3 pounds and measuring just 0.68 inches at its thickest, the 11-inch MacBook Air is ready to go wherever you do. This ultraportable uses 64GB of flash memory to wake instantly and boots in less than 20 seconds. Despite its small size, the Air has a huge touchpad and spacious keyboard. We wouldn’t pull the trigger just yet, though, as Apple is expected to refresh the Air with Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs this month. You’ll also get the new Mac OS X Lion pre-loaded, which means more multitouch gestures, Mission Control for easier multitasking, and the all-important Auto Save for protecting students’ work. [$999, Full Review]

Best Under $1,500

Alienware M14x

This laptop’s light show is so fun you can probably charge for admission. The Alienware M14x dazzles with its soft-touch finish and customizable backlighting for the keyboard, logo, front grille, and even the ring around the touchpad. When you’re done fiddling around you can get down to some serious playtime with
a 2-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and 1.5 GB Nvidia GeForce GT 555M graphics. The HD+ display (1600 x 900 pixels) is so bright and crisp it will make Duke Nukem Forever look good. [$1,374 (recommended config); Full Review]

You can check out Laptopmag’s entire list of back-to-school notebook picks here.

Laptopmag.com brings you in-depth reviews of the hottest mobile products, the latest tech news, helpful how-to advice, and expert analysis of the latest tech trends.

British tabloid News of the World said today it is closing down over a phone hacking scandal in which workers for the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper allegedly snooped on voice mail messages left on the mobile phones of murder victims, as well as celebrities, politicians, and the British royal family.

If unethical journalists can do it chances are anyone can, right?

To test my theory I called up Kevin Mitnick, who wrote about the hacking and social engineering that landed him in jail in a fascinating book coming out this summer, “Ghost in the Wires,” and who serves as a security consultant, helping clients protect against privacy breaches such as this.

Phone hacking, also known as “phreaking,” is easy to do, Mitnick said, adding that he could demonstrate it on my phone if I wanted proof. So I gave him permission to access my voice mail and told him my mobile phone number.

He called me right back on a conference call so I could hear what was going on. First he dialed a number to a system he uses for such demonstration purposes and entered a PIN. Then he was prompted to enter the area code and phone number that he wanted to call (mine) and the number he wanted to be identified as calling from (again mine). Next thing I know I’m listening to a voice message a friend of mine left me last night that I hadn’t erased.

“See how easy it is?!” Mitnick says as my jaw drops.

He was able to get into my voice mail by tricking my mobile operator’s equipment into registering the call as coming from the handset–basically pretending to be me. To do this, he wrote a script using open-source telecom software and used a voice-over-IP provider that allows him to set caller ID, but there also are online services that provide similar capability that non-hackers could subscribe to. It might be easier or harder to accomplish depending on the mobile operator, he said. (I’m keeping some of the details sketchy to avoid providing a how-to for phreaking.)

“Any 15-year-old that knows how to write a simple script can find a VoIP provider that spoofs caller ID and set this up in about 30 minutes,” Mitnick said. “If you’re not adept at programming, you could use a spoofing service and pay for it.”

This technique, called Caller ID Spoofing, has been used and abused for years. In 2006, a caller ID spoofing account in the name of Paris Hilton was suspended for voicemail hacking, with other celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, allegedly being victims, according to IDG News Service.

The method is more sophisticated than that allegedly used by the British journalists who are accused of using default PINs to access victims’ voicemail accounts, assuming correctly that many people wouldn’t bother to change the PINs. Since the phone hacking scandal first erupted about five years ago, mobile operators in the U.K. have changed their practices and most now require people to set their own PINs for remotely checking voice mail.

If I want to avoid having anyone use Caller ID Spoofing to access my voice mail again, I need to change my phone settings to require a PIN even when checking voice mail from my mobile device. But that doesn’t address the fact that mobile operators don’t authenticate caller ID. “The magic is that my VoIP provider allows me to set any caller ID and the other operators trust it,” Mitnick said. “Caller ID is automatically trusted.”

Mobile phone industry specialist David Rogers suggests on his blog that operators should consider preventing people from accessing mobile voicemails remotely at all.

Meanwhile, the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010, which was signed into law late last year, prohibits anyone intending to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value from knowingly causing any caller ID service to transmit or display misleading or inaccurate caller ID information. This could send the caller spoofing services off shore but likely won’t put an end to the practice.