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Eric Butler, a software developer.
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Read 13 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 10 years.
Latest posts
30 Under 30
I’m honored to have been named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list along side an array of amazing and inspirational people. Huge thanks to everyone who supported me!
GeekWire Radio: NSA Spying Revelations
I was guest on the October 5th GeekWire Radio show talking about the NSA spying revelations. This is the second GeekWire show I’ve participated in along with my friend Dave Peck from Cloak and Christopher Budd from TrendMicro . The previous show was back in April discussing digital security and privacy more generally.
The Secret Life of SIM Cards
Last year I worked with a group of people to set up a GSM cell network at the second Toorcamp , a hacker camping conference on the Washington coast. My responsibilty was to procure SIM cards that would allow phones to connect with our network. While researching SIM cards, I learned that small apps (“applets”) can be loaded onto the cards and executed separately from the phone’s processor and OS.…
Android Libraries with Gradle and Android Studio
The new Gradle-based build system for Android apps is a huge improvement over older eclipse, ant, and maven-based approaches. It has a simple declarative syntax and makes building different variants of your app (e.g. staging vs. production) very easy. Gradle is also the default build system for the new Android Studio IDE , so there are lots of good reasons to migrate your apps over. The new system…
Busdrone
In the late 90s researchers at the University of Washington created Busview , a Java applet that displayed Seattle bus locations on a map in real-time. It was ahead of its time and unfortunately was largely forgotten without ever seeing mainstream use. This changed in 2008 when Brian Ferris, another UW researcher, created OneBusAway . Brian used the data BusView had been silently aggregating for…
FareBot & Transit Card Privacy In The News
I was recently interviewed about my work on FareBot for a couple articles discussing the privacy of transit card systems: The Bay Citizen: Clipper cards reveal travelers’ whereabouts to police, lawyers, apps (San Francisco Bay Area; October 2012) Crosscut: Smart card: What your ORCA never forgets (Seattle-area; February 2013) The Daily: Researchers question U-PASS security (University of…
Android Play Store Privacy
News of a “massive” privacy issue with the Google Android Play Store was reported today by several popular news sites and blogs including Reddit , Daring Fireball , ZDNet , and news.com.au . The controversy is around how Google automatically shares detailed personal information of everyone who purchases a paid app with the app’s developer. I first noticed this back in July 2012: I wonder if most…
TapChat UI Updates
A new version of the TapChat IRC Client for Android is now available in the Play Store ! This release contains a bunch of UI improvements based on user feedback. A dark theme is now available and can be enabled in Preferences: Sequential joins/parts/quits are now grouped together saving screen space. Other changes include: Indication of highlighted messages. Day change indicator. Faster and more…
Configuring a usable Android emulator
Here’s what the Android emulator looks like by default: The most obvious problem looking at this screenshot is that it’s ugly . The emulator window takes up a huge amount of space on the screen and has an on-screen keyboard for no reason. What’s not obvious if you havent tried this yourself is that it’s also unusably slow . The emulator pictured above took 5 minutes just to start up, and barely…