Really angry!

Nothing to do with my new tool store, although work on that did progress more slowly than I expected, mainly because of the weather. I’ll come back to what’s got my back up in a moment after updating my tool store project.

Every morning is starting off cool and misty and today was colder than most of late. The conditions make getting started more difficult and are not nice if you have to be outside, not just because of its being wet and chilly but also because the ground is becoming heavier, stickier and more messy by the day when it sticks to your shoes.

Nevertheless, I did manage to get the doors hung and with most of their fittings in place, the exception being a hook-and-eye on the right hand door, because one of the pair that I picked up from the wretched Brico Depot didn’t have an eye with it. So to match the one I have fitted, that’ll mean another journey all the way over to Trelissac to pick up another.

I had to pick-axe the ground away in front and to either side of the doors to get them to open fully and before it got too dark, I also dropped some paving slabs down to drive my ride-on mower over. Here are some shots that I took at the end of the day.

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Here are a couple of shots with the doors open, the second of which showing a few of the things I’m just chucking in every night before I pack up and go indoors.

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The last shot shows why I needed to build the tool store – no space for wood in my wood store! Admittedly, the stuff in the foreground consists mainly of materials etc that I’ve been using for the tool store, but you can see that half of the wood store, more probably, is being taken up by my cement mixer and other items, which thankfully will soon disappear 😉

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So what is it that’s made me so angry? It’s to do with my new phone. The night before last I was holding it and I noticed that it had begun to download an ‘update’ to an app called Caller ID. What made me suspicious was that I have no such app on my phone and also the download was accompanied by a string of Chinese characters. There’s no way that I know of to stop an app update download, so I just switched the phone off.

This morning it began to behave very strangely and kept rebooting several times and later on it began to display an unending series of ads for goodness knows what, including a whole lot of porn web sites.

Now Android isn’t like your PC operating system, because as I understand it, the only way that Malware can find its way onto your system is via an app that you’ve downloaded and installed. Well goodness knows where this one came from, because the only apps I’ve installed came from ‘respectable’ sources. With one exception. Because the Google App Store no longer has Quick Office, I got it from a third-party site. But that was weeks ago – can its payload have been lying dormant all this time?

But that’s not the worst bit. I cleared everything suspicious off my SD card and will end up having to reinstall the apps that I need for flying, like Memory Map, Metam, things like that. I also deinstalled all of the apps on the ‘installed’ list that I didn’t recognise, but to my horror, that hasn’t fixed the problem.

As soon as I rebooted the phone, the whole nightmare scenario started off all over again. It appears that whoever was responsible for this mayhem has exploited a ‘vulnerability’ in Android and installed the ‘master’ malware as a system app. That means that even when you do a ‘master’ or ‘factory’ reset you can’t get rid of it.

The final result is that unless I can ‘root’ my phone and manually seek out the malware responsible, my phone has more or less had it. That’s unless I’m happy to walk around with a home screen showing a list of porn web site links or with an unending stream of links to useless ‘apps’ that I neither want nor need every time I fire up the screen, or lists of yet more porn web sites.

What on earth do people waste their time doing this sort of thing for and how, for Heaven’s sake, is it possible in the first place for an innocent user’s phone to be ‘reprogrammed’ without their consent? Google have some explaining to do, I think. Is this why people go for i-Phones rather than Android ones?