Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Good-Bye, at&t!

I strongly disagrees with at&t on the "Weev" case based on this Wired report (AT&T Hacker 'Weev' Sentenced to 3.5 Years in Prison). If the report is not proven wrong, I am going to say good-bye to at&t.

Maybe for good this time.

Monday, February 25, 2013

At&t 2Wire Gateway

I have to delete a previous post as the rant was off the target: I thought that at&t might be blocking ports entering my home. But the real problem turns out to be in the 2Wire gateway device -- more specifically, in its firewall settings. I forgot to check if my previous setting was changed. But anyway, resetting its firewall to expose the next router as a DMZ device -- which is where my port forwardings are configured -- has solved the problem.

At&t may still be to blame, as the firewall configuration change could not have happened by itself, but could have been the result of firmware upgrade in the gateway, or something like that.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Password? What password?

This morning I mindlessly did an iOS upgrade -- I came into work, plugged my iPhone to charge it; iTunes popped up and prompted me to do some upgrade. I haven't had my morning coffee yet, so I just clicked OK. When I realized it was upgrading my phone, the process was already well under way. So I decided to let it go ahead -- I am now regretting that (non-)decision.

I was working on my PC doing whatever I was supposed to do. Then this screen popped up:


I thought, hmmm.... What does that mean? Was the upgrade completed? Or did it fail?

At that point, it didn't seem that there was anything else I could do. So, I went along. Then I got this:


That made me a bit nervous. If this warning came earlier, I might have stopped the upgrade even not being fully awake. But at this point, what could I do? So I hit Restore and Update.


Now that's strange! I didn't see it doing the backup. So I definitely did not set a password on the backup. I tried my Apple account password, my Windows password, etc. It just kept giving me the same password ... was incorrect message.

So I googled iPhone upgrade backup password. This one came up on top of the result:


To put it mildly, I have never liked Apple products. Now this is pushing my dislike to a level of hatred.