A new-ish application was released a few days ago by Pacific Software Solutions, (at the time of writing this, there is no website, just a coming soon banner) called PhotoVault. The application seems to perform rather well, and seems to also meet a need many users have been asking for - hiding photos from people who just pick up your phone. According to the comments provided on the application, some people seem to be having it force close many times, seems like an “Application Not Responding” force close, so that should be easily fixed. Personally I wasn’t experiencing any of these errors.

Though sadly the protection method is uses is pretty weak. I figured it would be something atleast encrypted with a static password within the program itself. Worse than what I had first assumed, it’s simple stored as a plain text value in a file, more specifically, /data/data/com.android.PhotoVault/shared_prefs/PhotoVaultPassword.xml. Not even that secret with the file name, where they?

So this program isn’t exactly government grade-security, but it should stop nosy family members or other people from snooping around at your pictures. Granted, if you really don’t want people to see those pictures, maybe you shouldn’t have taken them in the first place? Just figured I’d share this with everyone else, hopefully no one gets burned by any false assumption that this program is secure and will protect your files from someone who really wants to get at them. If you want more protection, there was an application I quickly looked at before named “LokPix” which seemed much better than this one.

In a previous article I had posted some information about how it is possible to spoof the Android ID that is returned when calling the Settings.System.Android_ID function. Though I had noted at the end of my post the following;

Note that this will NOT change the android id used by google products since they use one that is linked to your gmail account that the phone is associated with…

This bugged me a little bit because I wanted to know how the google applications where using and getting the android information - did they pull it directly from the hardware? Where they just using private API that was more secure? So after a little research, I found exactly what was going on, and again how it would be possible to spoof the id.

Essentially the google applications use googleapps to store the android id, this is the program on the phone named “com.google.android.googleapps”. This is a very interesting program that sadly developers do not have access to as of yet, though hopefully this will change shortly.

Anyway, this program is also susceptible to being force-fed spoofed values. The method is essentially the same as the previous one, though just performed on a different database. From within adb or the shell, do the following;

$sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.googleapps/databases/accounts.db
update system set value=’deadbeef0000badf00d’ where name=’androidId’;

This program also store in that table the imsi number linked to the phone, for simcard tracking purposes.

Just yesterday I noticed there was an application published to overclock your G1 — it reminded me of a few files that I had seen when browsing system files on my device. At first I thought it must be a scam, or using some feature just hidden into the system, much like the garbage collection method used in memory free pro - but it seems t actually change the value. Whether this really speeds up the G1 without harming it is left unknown right now. Anyway, the file I had previous seen and was watching was “acpu_clk”. It can be found in the /system/debugfs/clk_rate/ folder.

So, essentially to get your current CPU do the following in the terminal or through adb;

$sh
#cat /system/debugfs/clk_rate/acpu_clk

To modify this file to change your clock speed you need to remount your /system to be writeable and then modify the file.

mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
mkdir /system/debugfs
mount /system/debugfs /system/debugfs -t debugfs

This will remount debugfs, the folder to be visible and allow you to edit it. To change the value simple pipe and echo to the file;

echo ‘245760000′ > /system/debugfs/clk_rate/acpu_clk

Afternote:
Just noticed that someone at xda-developers posted nicer shell code than mine, so I’ve just pasted in theirs. Enjoy!