Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!

And no, I didn’t put a bid on that Quadra - not quite feeling this flush at the moment.

I recently blogged about Google and Samsung starting to offer regular security patches for their Android devices.

Over on ars technica, Ron Amadeo has an interesting article describing why the current Android ecosystem is not conducive to the quick and widespread distribution of security fixes and why this needs to change, urgently.

At this point in time it seems that in order to be halfway secure, one has to basically root the phone and run well-tested and well supported distribution like CyanogenMod. While I - and presumably most, if not all, readers of this blog - certainly have the technical know how and abilities to root a phone, that’s a poor approach to security because most people either will not or cannot root their phones.

Last night I did something I was adamant I wasn’t going to do, namely rooting my Android phone and installing CyanogenMod on it. Normally I don’t like messing with (smart)phones - they’re tools in the pipe wrench sense to me, they should hopefully not require much in the way of care & feeding apart from charging and the odd app or OS update. Of course, the odd OS update is can already be a problem as no official updates have been available for this phone (a Motorola Droid) for a while and between the provider-installed bloatware that couldn’t be uninstalled and the usual cruft that seems to accumulate on computers over time, the phone was really sluggish, often unresponsive and pretty much permanently complained about running out of memory. So far it appears that updating the OS and only installing a handful of apps that I actually use as opposed to the ones that I supposedly “need” has resulted in a much better user experience.