Niantic to slash ban spoof-traded Pokemon in Pokemon Go?

INFORMATION TO BE UPDATED WITH CLEARER DETAILS AS MORE BECOMES KNOWN

An interesting new field has appeared in the network traffic of Pokemon Go which may yet again change the landscape of the game - so much so that I decided it would warrant a new blog post - my first in over 2 years.

(some information removed as I'm not sure how uniquely identifiable it may be!)

Although it does not appear to be being used at present, it would seem that - at least in theory - Niantic fully intend to use this new field to identify Pokemon which have been caught using illegitimate measures such as spoofing/sniping.

What is not yet known is how Niantic might implement this, and why they are not using the existing is_bad field.

A potential outcome could be similar to when a "slash ban" was introduced in 2016, where Pokemon from "botted" accounts were rendered useless for anything other than a Pokedex entry, as below:

It is yet to be seen whether such a slash (or otherwise) will appear before the trade on the original account, or on the account to which the Pokemon was traded - and whether or not this effect will show up immediately or take several days/weeks to appear.

I would like to think that the receiving accounts will not be penalised for the actions of their trading partners, however as we know Niantic have been ruthless in the past - could this be another 7 day ban type?

The new field is a very welcome addition to the game. Since trading was announced the tactics of spoofers have drastically changed - many people will now not risk their main account, and instead use a "spare" or "throw away" account to spoof and catch rare Pokemon, which they then trade back to themselves on their main legitimate account.

Niantic are likely fully aware of the spoof-to-trade tactics we are now seeing and I can see something being implemented in an update to the game very soon. 

Alternatives to TrustPilot - how to collect feedback online

If you're reading this post then you'll have already heard of TrustPilot and know that it is basically an online system for collecting genuine customer reviews - displaying these to the public and sometimes attaching "star ratings" to your website in search engine results pages.

The benefits of such a system to anyone - not just those who trade online - are enormous. Your company is able to demonstrate an element of trust to potential new customers by showing that you are highly rated amongst your existing customers, and your reviews are supplied by genuine people who have used your business via a third party and so have real integrity.

Being self employed in the IT sector I naturally come across customers requiring a feedback system such as the one offered by TrustPilot, but there is always one problem - the price. Unsurprisingly TrustPilot list no prices online, but you're looking anywhere from a few hundred pound a month for a basic plan right up to several thousand per month for a corporate/enterprise level.

This cost almost immediately rules out the majority of small UK businesses to the point where they try to convince themselves that they "don't need a feedback system". Unfortunately it's the year 2016 ladies and gentlement; if you aren't collecting feedback via a third party then you need to start now before you get left behind.

So what cheaper alternatives are there to TrustPilot for seamlessly collecting reviews from your customers and thus increasing your profits?

Feefo

The Feefo offering is not as complete as TrustPilot, but the underlying fundamental system is still there. Unfortunately pricing does vary and you won't save much on the smaller basic plans compared to TrustPilot, however if you are collecting a large volume of reviews and need one of the more advanced plans then you could potentially save thousands by switching to Feefo. 

The system still integrates with a variety of software (although not as many of the higher end packages) and you get the addition of easy-to-integrate features for your website, some of which TrustPilot do not offer. Your feedback is displayed on a dedicated Feefo hosted web page with your company branding, and can also be shown on your own website via an IFRAME widget. A selection of "live" star rating images are available to use for email campaigns or similar.

You can expect to pay around £100 plus VAT for the basic plan which allows you to send up to 200 feedback requests per month.
Visit www.feefo.com

eKomi

You may have heard of eKomi before, as they became one of the more prominent third party feedback systems before the dominant rise of TrustPilot. They operate internationally and have built up a sizable following, mainly concentrated in the US.

Just like Feefo and TrustPilot there are no prices listed online. I wasn't able to obtain a free trial or online sales demo and therefore cannot comment on the exact level of service you'll get, but pricing for the basic package is around £85 plus VAT per month. For this you'll bag yourself a nice feedback system, but disappointingly there's not much you can boast about on your own website other than a round green and black circular image which says "We use eKomi - the feedback company".

Internal reporting appears good if you are wanting to collect feedback for customer service purposes, but if you really want to show off your amazing 5 star rating then you'd probably be better looking at other alternatives.
Visit www.ekomi.co.uk

Working Feedback

The hidden gem of them all appears to be a company called Working Feedback. They solely operate in the UK and offer the best pricing amongst all other providers that I was able to find. There are no secrets here as all pricing is revealed on their website, including a very respectable £50 per month price tag. 

There is very little information on the site to say exactly what you'll get for your money, but I was fortunate enough to get a free online demo and a 7 day trial to try out the service, which I highly recommend. 

Unlike Feefo and TrustPilot there is no minimum contract or commitment, you can just cancel with 30 days notice, so this is ideal if you want to try it out and see if it'll work for you. TrustPilot require you to sign up to a minimum of 12 months, for comparison.

Integration with software seems impressive (particularly if you are a dentist or care home), and the service allows practically unlimited feedback requests either via email or SMS (apparently there is a fair usage policy, however). The list of online features for your website is unrivaled.

As part of the service you'll also get a premium listing on a site called The Disc Directory, which I'm told gets over a million hits each year and is similar to Yellow Pages in the UK, although this is just a thrown-in freebie.

The service is definitely worth a look at, especially at such a low price and without any real commitment.
Visit www.workingfeedback.co.uk

Other Players

There are many other big players in the feedback world, such as BazaarVoice. These companies are very promising and offer above and beyond the complete package, with features that you may never require. They are primarily aimed at large corporate entities and not usually suitable for smaller companies, and their price reflects this. Their services are superior and you will not find anything better, however their 5 digit price tag writes them out of the market for our purposes.

Conclusion

It looks like the going rate for a basic feedback package is around £100, which decreases to around half that for some of the lesser known providers. The catch with many of these services is that you are limited to the number of feedback requests that you can send.

TrustPilot's entry plan for example, allows you to send 300 email feedback requests in a single calendar month. What we are not told, however, is that the response rate can be as high as 60% and as low as 5%! This means that if you send out 300 feedback requests then you might only get 15 reviews that month. It may therefore take you a while to build up a solid reputation based on these figures. Only eKomi and Working Feedback appear to offer an (unlimited) number of requests, although as with everything this is most likely subject to fair use.

All providers reviewed had very similar functionality. They all allow collection of feedback via email or similar methods, and they all integrate with existing software in one form or another. Each of these providers will help boost sales - both online and offline - and will enhance your SEO naturally so that you can rank higher in search engine results. The only real difference between them is the price, and the amount of features you can use to show off your star rating.

In our case, Working Feedback wins the battle and I will be recommending them to my own clients when they ask me for advice on collecting feedback and growing their business.

Disclaimer

All information provided on the above services has been obtained either by a sales call, by visting the respective website, or a combination of both. All pricing is correct at time of publication and is subject to change.

The providers listed here are just a few of those available - if you know of any others leave a comment and I will check them out!

Signalex Bluetooth Driver Download (Poundland)

FILE DOWNLOAD IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

I recently purchased a Signalex USB Bluetooth dongle from Poundland for - you guessed it - just £1. Windows automatically picks up the dongle and installs basic drivers which only allow for discovering devices, pairing, and sending/receiving files.

I had purchased the dongle because my new sofa has a built-in media bay and Bluetooth speakers. Since I have a media center PC, I wanted to be able to remote control that PC and output the sound direct to the sofa speakers via Bluetooth. The built-in drivers did not allow for this as I required the A2DP Bluetooth profile.

After three hours of searching the most obscure places on the internet, and trawling through numerous forums where I could only find incompatible drivers or dead links, I struck gold. My HTPC now plays sound through to my sofa, and I can play/pause/rewind and volume control the PC from the buttons on my armrest. Sweet!

I always like to post my finds so that people can get easier access, so I have created an entire driver bundle for the Signalex devices, combining all the files and information I obtained from the internet, to enable all the features.

Bundle includes:

• Filter driver, if your dongle was not automatically detected
• A2DP Profile (Advanced Audio Distribution)
• AVRCP Profile (Audio/Video Remote Control)
• DUN Profile (Dial-up Networking)
• FTP Profile (File Transfer)
• HID Profile (Human Interface Device)
• HSP Profile (Headset)
• LAN Profile (LAN/Networking Access)
• OBEX Profile (Object Exchange / Legacy File Transfer)
• PAN Profile (Personal Area Network)

... which is pretty much everything you would want to do with one of these cheap devices. Note that they aren't the fastest thing in the world - file transfer is painfully slow for example - but what do you expect from such a cheap device? This isn't Bluetooth 4.0 :)

Includes 32 and 64 bit drivers compatible with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 8.

Direct link here: http://www.crayden-group.co.uk/signalex_csr_bluetooth.zip
SHA256: 1b6749b0d1cd14490428ca9d2900086837bba5f62bfc737f8975be5805a1813c

Please feel free to share and mirror this file. It would be great if you could link to this page rather than the file direct as the link could change at any time :)

-----

UPDATE 29/.09/2015:
The latest version of Google Chrome is suggesting that this file is "not commonly downloaded" and therefore may be dangerous. These are just warnings and are not virus detections, you can still download the file by choosing "allow" instead of "discard". There is nothing to worry about.

I have included the SHA256 hash under the link above and also ran both the URL and the contents of the file through VirusTotal to prove that the download is safe and genuine.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/ade61d666a07c97754f8af184398d4045393392571b13d02abde73682deb317d/analysis/1443515260/

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/1b6749b0d1cd14490428ca9d2900086837bba5f62bfc737f8975be5805a1813c/analysis/1443515266/

Toshiba L300 wireless card replacement issues

Yet another post about the terrible Toshiba L3xx series of laptop - this time regarding the problems I encountered when trying to replace the internal PCI-Express Wireless (WLAN) card and how I overcame them.

This model (well, mine at least) ships by default with a Realtek RTL8187B card. This is an awful card, for many reasons which I will not go in to.

I wanted to upgrade this card to one that supported Wireless N. There were 2 reasons for this:

1. The internal card had receiving issues after a period of time, and;
2. My router supports Wireless N and I wanted to make full use of it.

I purchased a basic card from eBay - it was a generic unbranded card, which appeared to be about £3 cheaper than some of the other "branded" ones. At the end of the day, the reliability of the card is determined by the chipset used, and mine used a RALink chip, so I was content with that.

The problems started occuring however when I tried to replace the card. Firstly, the L300 would not POST with the new card at all. The fan was spinning, all lights were on, but nobody was at home. I realized that I had a very early generation Toshiba which had a BIOS whitelist for the WLAN card, preventing me from using anything other than the original. I got around this by putting the original card back in and updating the BIOS to the latest version - this removed the whitelist (I suppose Toshiba had a change of heart).

Despite this, all was not well. The laptop would now POST and boot in to Windows with my replacement card fitted, but it was simply not detected. Cutting a long story short, the reason is...

The Toshiba L3XX series of laptop does not fully implement the PCI-Express specification.

To be exact, Toshiba had been really tight here and have only actually provided the circuitry to use a PCI-Express card that has USB functionality! 

PCI-Express has 4 pins which can be used to provide a simple USB port. Power, Gnd, TX and RX. The original card provided by Toshiba was simply a USB Wireless Dongle in PCI-Express form factor!

Looking closer at the motherboard you can see that only 6 lines have traces on the PCI-Express connector. I believe that 4 of them are for USB, and the other 2 are used for toggling the wireless on/off using the front chassis switch.

This is appalling. I later purchased a ridiculously cheap, very nasty Wireless N card which only had the USB functionality of it and did not rely on the rest of the PCI-Express specification. This worked first time and after installing the drivers I am now writing this post using Wireless N on my new WLAN card! :)

The moral of the story?
The Toshiba L300 is a "put it together as cheaply as you can" jobbie - in other words, it is a nasty piece of crap which is not even suitable to be part of the budget laptop market.

Galaxy Note ADB drivers without Samsung Kies

Further to my previous post here: http://liamcrayden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/samsung-galaxy-note-n7000-adb-usb.html

I am most disgusted at having to install Samsung Kies just to have the drivers available for my Samsung Galaxy Note. When connecting my phone to a system without Kies, even if I just want to use it as a mass storage device, I have to repeatedly click through dialog boxes to get rid of drivers that Windows can't find.

CDC Serial
SAMSUNG_Android
ADB etc etc.

Installing Samsung Kies does indeed install these drivers and get rid of those driver installation prompts every time I plug in my phone, but its also over 200MB in size (and thats just the compressed download!) and is full of bloatware which seriously impacts the performance and startup time of my PC.

For those of you in my position, here are the drivers that you need. You can use these without Kies.

FOR ADVANCED USERS (install these through Device Manager manually) 4MB: http://www.crayden-group.co.uk/secure/galaxy_note_drivers.zip
UPDATE 27/06/2014: New link here - http://www.purplerooster.co.uk/galaxy_note_drivers.zip
UPDATE 29/09/2015: New link here - http://www.crayden-group.co.uk/galaxy_note_drivers.zip

 FOR ALL OTHER USERS (includes a simple install wizard) 23MB: http://secure.tinyserve.com/SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe
UPDATE 27/06/2014: This file is no longer available. Please use the above link instead.

If these have helped you, please comment below or +1 this page so that others can find them too. Also please do not directly link to the above files. Help me spread the word across all your favourite forums and blogs by spreading the link to this blog post please.

Samsung Galaxy Note (N7000) ADB / USB Drivers

I am in the business of software development, and it really annoyed me to discover that in order to use my new Samsung Galaxy note as a development device I had to download a ~200MB file from the Samsung website and install several hundred megabytes of bloatware called 'Samsung Kies'.

All I am interested in is the USB drivers which will allow me to connect to my phone to develop android applications. Some people also need these files if they want to root their device. As Samsung Kies is IMO a piece of junk, I have seperated out the USB driver package and present it here as a single, unmodified, 23MB download for both 32 and 64 bit Windows systems. Note that the package actually includes several drivers for various Samsung phones, hence the (larger than necessary) file size.

Click here for Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 ADB / USB Drivers
UPDATE 27/06/2014: Link is now dead :( See my newer post for an updated link and method here: http://liamcrayden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/galaxy-note-adb-drivers-without-samsung.html

Please comment or +1 if these drivers were of any help to you. If I get round to it in the near future I will post the Galaxy-only drivers instead which should be approx 300KB instead of 23MB! Enjoy (and dont waste your valuable time and bandwidth downloading the Kies software ever again)

Toshiba L300 Series Continuous Faulty Hard Disk Drive

"I have absolutely no doubt that something causes drives fitted in Toshiba L300 series laptops to fail almost out of the box."

Recently I have been keeping a record of the Toshiba L300 series laptops that have come through my hands for repair purposes. Over the last 6 months I have seen a total of 27 L300 series laptops, 25 of them having the same fault - a faulty hard disk drive - and the remaining 2 having basic issues such as broken screens or keyboards. This equates to an average of 4 laptops (of the same make and model series) per month having the same issue.

The drive supplied from the factory is a standard 120GB SATA drive manufactured by Toshiba Storage Co., so there's nothing unusual about that, and if a hard disk drive is faulty then you simply replace it right? This is what I had thought, but it seems to be a little trickier than that.

I have tried fitting every make of 160GB SATA drive that I can lay my hands on. Hitachi, Western Digital, Samsung, MDT and Seagate. All these drives failed again within 48 hours. I use 3 different branded enterprise-ready diagnostic testing software packages and all 3 fail the drive on READ, WRITE and SMART EXTENDED tests.

At first I thought it was the drives I had been using, so I changed brand. To rule out a faulty batch of drives (and a heavy-handed postman) I even changed supplier. I tried 4 different suppliers and 5 brands of drive in total. The MDT drive I expected to fail anyway - they are just refurbished drives from other manufacturers sold as new with a slightly less capacity - but for all these drives to fail from all these different suppliers did not make sense. I even checked that they from different batches and tried to mix old and new stock to give an accurate result.

I find it extremely rare that these drives would fail within a 48 hour period, and consistently produce the same result. Keep in mind that this is over a 6 month period too.

I considered the possibility that my diagnostic software wasn't compatible with the controller, or that there were other factors that could be affecting the test result. With this in mind I tried testing the drives BEFORE and AFTER in another machine with a known consistently accurate test result. Before the drives were fitted inside the laptops they were fine, and after they were re-tested 48 hours later they had failed. This now ruled out incompatible software running on the test Toshiba machine.

The drives were literally unusable in other machines and even as USB storage devices when housed in top-brand USB enclosures. They clicked, clunked and sometimes even power cycled for no apparent reason. I have absolutely no doubt that something causes drives fitted in Toshiba L300 series laptops to fail almost out of the box.

As a second experiment I purchased a brand new Toshiba Satellite L300 and gave it to a friend to use as any regular person would for exactly 30 days. I tested the drive immediately after opening the box and it passed all tests without even a sign of potential failure. After 1 month I re-tested the drive. The drive failed the SMART EXTENDED test, but passed the READ and WRITE tests. It did not click or power-cycle.

I'm not really sure what to conclude from this. It would appear that something (and I wouldn't even like to attempt to guess) causes drives to fail when being used in this model/series of laptop. This appears to affect all lines, including Satellite and Equium. To make matters worse I had also started looking at Toshiba Satellite 405D laptops and these are starting to show signs of the same thing. It's too early to say for certain, but I wanted to bring this into the public light and see if anybody responded with any comments on their own experience on these.

As of now I have stopped fitting new drives into any Toshiba L3xx and L4xx series laptops as I cannot deal with the amount of warranty returns and extra workload that this introduces. I would like to point out that Toshiba as a manufacturer are generally pretty reliable and will obviously resolve any issues that you have under warranty within the first year of purchase. I deal with several hundred laptops a month and no other make, model or series presents the problem for me.