Australian Technology

AtG: phone JS releases, Allphones FTP openness, X on Android

Takeaway: One Melburnian has got X running on Android; new mobile JavaScript frameworks have appeared; and one phone retailer’s open FTP back-end.

If an SQL injection wasn’t enough security trouble for telecommunications retailer Allphones, it turns out that much of the company’s financials and a database dump were sitting on an open, anonymous FTP server.

The fact that people and organisations persist in using FTP servers in this day and age, when there are many other alternatives out, is not surprising, but it is completely frustrating that it happens. And to have the FTP server open as well is the icing on the cake.

A man from Melbourne called Matt Kwan has been spending his time getting an X server to run Android. The main sticking point is the lack of a window manager in Android, which requires a re-implementation of Xlib — Kwan says that he is not the man for this job. If you want to take a look at the current state of the application, you can find it on the Android Marketplace/Google Playpen here.

For fans of multi-platform mobile JavaScript frameworks, in the past 24 hours, both PhoneGap 1.5 and Sencha Touch 2.0 were released.

Bringing a close to today’s Around the Grounds entry is the below demo of Opera Mobile 12 making use of WebRTC to pipe a phone’s camera to a video element that is played on a canvas element at around 30 frames per second. Very cool, indeed!

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Chris Duckett

About Chris Duckett

Programmer and journalist Chris Duckett is the Editor for TechRepublic Australia.

Chris Duckett

Chris Duckett
Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining the company as a programmer. He left CBS Interactive in 2010 to follow his deep desire to study the snowdrifts and culinary delights of Canada and returned to CBS in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia, determined to meld together his programming and journalistic tendencies once and for all.