Posts by Alex Heath

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The Samsung Galaxy S4 started shipping to customers who preordered over this past weekend. If you ordered the 16GB model, don’t expect to store a bunch of stuff. Geek.com recently discovered that only 8.82GB of memory is available when you take the S4 out of its box.

That means 45% of the S4’s non-board storage is reserved for the Android OS and preinstalled apps you can’t remove. Luckily, you can insert an SD card slot for additional storage.

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That didn’t take long. Google Glass won’t be available to the general public for at least a year, and it’s already been hacked. For Apple’s iOS, “jailbreaking” refers to essentially rooting the OS to gain complete access. Developers can then use that access to create system-level tweaks that Apple won’t let in the App Store.

Android is a little different, because rooting the OS isn’t something Google discourages or combats. Since Google Glass technically runs on Android, it can be “jailbroken.” That’s exactly what Jay Freeman, better known as “saurik” in the iOS jailbreak community, has done. Freeman runs Cydia, the jailbreak app store for Apple devices, and today he turned his attention to cracking his Google Glass prototype.

We told you it was coming, and it’s finally here. Subatomic Studios has released Fieldrunners 2 for Android in the Google Play Store, and it’s priced at $3.

Here’s some of what you can expect:

Comex

Apple’s iOS isn’t customizable like Android. To get to the core of the operating system, very talented hackers have to create what is called a jailbreak. One of the brightest and most prolific minds in the jailbreak scene has been Nicholas Allegra, better known as “comex.” Allegra created JailbreakMe, a web-based jailbreak tool that was used to crack multiple version of iOS throughout the years.

But for the past couple of years, Allegra has been quiet in the hacking community. The reason for his code of silence is the company he’s been working for. Apple hired him as an intern last year, and he left in October after failing to reply to a company email.

Now Allegra is going to bat for the other team. Yesterday he announced plans to intern at Google. He’ll start in a few weeks. One would assume he’ll be working on beefing up security for Android, but he ruled out the possibility on his Twitter. ” I don’t like it enough to ever want to hack it,” he said.

Wavii

Google has allegedly purchased Wavii, a small natural language parsing startup, according to a report on TechCrunch. Wavii ended up going to Google for “more than $30 million” after a bidding war with Apple.

Wavii’s technology and talent will reportedly be integrated in Google Now and the Knowledge Graph, Google’s experimental division that is working on the future of search.

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