Isn't it strange how all the high-end smartphones with keyboards have disappeared? There isn't a desirable smartphone with a keyboard on the horizon. The original Motorola Droid was the phone that started the Android phenomenon, yet the Droid 5 never materialized.

For years, buying a smartphone with a keyboard has meant settling for less than the latest and greatest technology on the market. There hasn't been a top-tier smartphone with keyboard since the Samsung Epic 4G set the bar in August, 2010. The carriers treat sliders as messaging phones for teens rather than tools of pros, and adjusted their asks and advertising respectively. There's also the myth that there's an Android phone out there for everyone. The differences in Android phones were huge. Slide-out keyboard, small screen, large screen, slim or bulky. Now it seems like phones are all merging into the same basic design principle; slim with a huge screen, leaving a market gap that any competitor could jump into, much the way Android did when the one-size-fits-all iPhone dominated.

When Android came along and smartphones began to take off, handsets with keyboards did very well for Sprint. The Samsung Moment, the EVO Shift, the Epic 4G: "We sold multimillions of those," said Kaufman. When Sprint asked customers whether they'd buy a physical keyboard the next time around - not so long ago - 75 percent of existing QWERTY users said they would. "We went out and built the LG Mach and the Photon Q. It was a big party and nobody came." So much for surveys. "Half of your customers buy the iPhone [...] boom, take them out of the equation." In addition, "the market has moved to everyone buying iconic phones... people see the advertising, they walk in, they want to buy a Galaxy S III."

You might be thinking a slide-out keyboard is old technology, but there are advantages. People can type much faster and error-free on hardware keyboards. Being able to see everything on screen is a huge plus, and playing games is infinitely more enjoyable with tactile, mechanical buttons.

As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.

Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has apologized for security flaws in the malware they pre-install on consumer laptops, and attempted to issue instructions on how to fix a flaw that fatally compromised user security. The company was forced to issue a second set of instructions after security experts said that following its first set would do nothing to patch up the security holes the adware created. But even the second set is "incomplete", according to researchers, and leaves users of the popular Firefox browser vulnerable.

Sadly, while apologizing for the security hole the software opens up, they are standing by their pre-installed malware, saying "this tool was to help enhance our users' shopping experience". The software bombarded affected users with pop-up adverts and injected more ads into Google searches. Security experts say it also left a gaping security hole on every computer, in the form of a self-signed root certificate. That certificate was used by the software to inject adverts even into encrypted websites, but its presence has the side-effect of making affected Lenovo computers trivially easy to hack with a "man in the middle" (MITM) attack, in which a hacker uses the certificate to pretend to be a trusted website, such as a bank or e-commerce site. The "man in the middle" can then steal information passed over the internet, even while the user believes they are safely browsing with encryption turned on. Filippo Valsorda, who created the Badfish tool for determining if a computer is affected by the software, has offered instructions for how to remove it from that browser as well.

In November 2012 the Mozilla Foundation announced "Project Shumway", an effort to create a "web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format." Two-and-a-bit years, and a colossal number of Flash bugs later, Shumway has achieved an important milestone by appearing in a Firefox nightly, a step that suggests it's getting closer to inclusion in the browser.

Shumway's been available as a plugin for some time, and appears entirely capable of handling the SWF files. Few average users know of Shumway's existence, never mind seek it out. So the inclusion of the software in Firefox's nightlies will give it greater exposure. For now the code can only play certain videos hosted on Amazon.com, but developers intend to expand the list of sites from which Shumway will play SWF files. For now, Shumway-in-Firefox-nightlies works only on Windows Vista or later versions of Windows, and OSX. But expanded support is promised.

The New York Times is asking what the primary wireless technology of the future will be: Traditional wireless carriers operate their services primarily with cell towers, but offer Wi-Fi as a secondary option to bear some of the load. Upstarts FreedomPop and Republic Wireless do the opposite. They offer services that rely primarily on Wi-Fi networks, and in areas without Wi-Fi, customers can pull a signal from regular cell towers. "They demonstrate just how disruptive a Wi-Fi-first operator can be, and just how much cost they can take out."

Plenty of budget-conscious consumers want cheaper cellphone bills and do not mind making the leap to a phone service powered primarily by Wi-Fi. The majority of Republic Wireless customers opted for a $10 plan (a traditional wireless contract costs around $100 a month--comparison of family cell phone plan prices) which includes a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular services. In other words, the traditional cellular infrastructure will not go away, but may become the second option, not the first. "There are many, many implications to cellular being relegated to a backup position."

In major cities, the Wi-Fi-first network makes sense. While sitting around offices and apartments, Wi-Fi can handle the job just fine. But once people start moving around, it is not so simple. The benefit of a cell service is that your phone can switch among multiple towers while you are on the go. This process is called handover, which Wi-Fi was not originally designed to handle. Although 802.11r, SyncScan, and other enhancements attempt to address this limitation.

Big players are looking to enter the fray as well: Last month, Cablevision announced a phone service that would be powered entirely by Wi-Fi, for $30 a month, while a traditional wireless contract costs around $100 a month. Google has also been working on a cellphone service that relies heavily on Wi-Fi.

m0n0wall is an embedded firewall distribution based on FreeBSD. It provides a small image which can be put on Compact Flash cards, CD-ROMs, or hard disks, and includes a web-based GUI to control all aspects of the firewall without having to type a single shell command.

The developer of m0n0wall has announced the project is ending, effective immediately. He suggests switching to a m0n0wall-inspired spin-off, such as pfSense, FreeNAS, AskoziaPBX, or OPNsense in particular.

while m0n0wall has made an effort to keep up, there are now better solutions available and under active development. Therefore, today I announce that the m0n0wall project has officially ended. No development will be done anymore, and there will be no further releases. The forums and the mailing list will be frozen at the end of this month. All the contents of the website, repository, downloads, mailing list and forum will be archived in a permanent location on the web so that they remain accessible indefinitely to anyone who might be interested in them.

Nokia's up-and-coming "Here" maps and navigation app, available for free for anyone running Android 4.1 or above, is no longer in "beta" hitting version 1.1, and has added 3-D venue maps and improved routing. It now displays 3D maps for shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries and allows navigating through multiple floors with a sliding bar. Nokia also dialed back the interface in several different areas to preserve the screen real estate for the map content.

Despite being in "beta" for several months, and only becoming available on the Play Store in December, Nokia's Here maps and navigation has grown to be one of the best alternatives to Google Maps on Android. A big part of its popularity is due to including one-click region-wide downloadable offline maps, with turn-by-turn voice navigation, for free. Whether you are on a carrier with patchy coverage, use a cheaper cellular plan and depend on WiFi for data, or just want to be sure you'll get properly rerouted when you miss a turn in an area with little or no coverage, offline maps, points-of-interest and navigation can be a killer feature, which Google does not offer. When you do have data coverage, the Here app also offers reviews for restaurants and traffic information using Nokia's venerable own Navteq traffic information, similarly used by Google Maps and most other navigation services.

Samsung is warning customers about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set. The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature. When the feature is active, such TV sets "listen" to what is said and may share what they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said. Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens. Samsung has issued a statement that emphasized the voice recognition feature is activated using the TV's remote control.

Should Pipedot readers be concerned? What assurance is there that voice control systems which involve uploading voice commands to remote servers (Siri included) couldn't be used for surveillance covertly, as the FBI started doing with OnStar in General Motors vehicles over a decade ago? Samsung is not the first maker of a smart, net-connected TV to run into problems with the data the set collects. In late 2013, a UK IT consultant found his LG TV was gathering information about his viewing habits.

Today, users of Samsung's Smart TVs are also complaining that advertisements are being inserted into their own videos, without their permission. "Every movie I play, 20-30 minutes in it plays the Pepsi ad. It has happened on 6 movies today." In a statement, a Samsung spokesperson said that the ad placement in third-party apps was a mistake, and that the issue only affected customers in Australia.

Today is the deadline for an agreement reached between the Federal Communications Commission and wireless carriers back in 2013. Starting today, once you've paid off your contract or owned a pre-paid phone (or other device, like a tablet) for a year, all major US carriers must unlock your phone for you if you ask. Carriers also have to tell you when your phone is eligible to be unlocked, and they have to unlock phones for deployed military personnel.

Rules around locking and unlocking phones have gone back and forth. For a while, it was illegal to unlock your phone without express consent of your carrier. In 2014, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act made it legal again. And this latest deadline makes it illegal for providers to say no if you ask to unlock a phone you've already paid for. This change gives power back to the people to freely use the phones they already own.

Here's more information on how to unlock your phone on the big four U.S. carriers, including how to verify that your device is eligible, caveats in the fine print, and alternative carriers you can bring your device to. The FCC also has useful information about the process.

For today's Safer Internet Day Google is promoting a "safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones" by giving you a 2 GB Google Drive bonus for checking your security settings. To be eligible for the bonus, go to this page to verify your current account settings to make sure they are up to date. Although the three simple steps only take a few seconds to review, the storage bonus, unfortunately, does not get applied until around February 28th.

Whether or not you actually use their cloud storage service is still up to you (I'm currently using 0 GB of 115 GB) - but keeping an eye on your Google account logins (including any connected Android or iOS devices) is probably a good idea regardless.

Southern California Edison (SCE) is currently in the process of cutting about 500 IT workers at its Irwindale offices and replacing them with cheaper H-1B visa holders working for Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services; two India based IT outsourcing firms. SCE will save about $40,000 per worker, about $16 million a year by replacing American workers with foreigners on an H-1B visa. The layoffs began in August and are expected to be completed by the end of March.

Perhaps it was the fact that SCE is a utility and more in the public eye or perhaps SCE was too flagrant in their swap, but U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) and U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) have both expressed concern over the incident.

"Based on the information currently available, this appears to be an example of precisely what the H-1B visa is not intended to be: a program to simply replace American workers en masse with cheap labor from overseas," Issa said in a statement released late Friday.

A bipartisan group of Senators introduced a bill in January that would nearly double the number of H1-B guest worker visas.