Many people use their Android for business uses, but cops are taking it to the next level by using Android OS to help nab potential criminals. The new app available to members of the New York Police Department enables you to look up vast amounts of personal information about citizens. In a new pilot program, over 400 smart phones have been distributed to hundreds of officers around New York.

The cell phones can’t make and receive calls, but they can however use the provided data connection to do extensive searches on individuals. You can look up arrest history, gun ownership status, warrants, and if this person was involved in previous disputes.

You can look up information by address. For instance, a single apartment address will reveal how many people living there own guns, have warrants, or if police were called there in the past. This could even potentially solve new crimes. Say there’s a building with many floors and there are multiple complaints for a particular floor. They could watch that floor more closely than the others in hopes of catching someone in the act.

This new system puts millions of police records right into the hand of every law enforcement officer – right on their Android phone. However, critics say this system may lead to abuse and harassment. They say it could be used to catalogue certain people which may lead to their harassment in the future.

There are many options when choosing IT specialists for your company. Choosing from factors such as cost, quality, and convenience are all things to consider when finding the right people to maintain your computer network. Outsourcing your IT work is the right choice for many businesses, but which option is right for you?

Hiring IT consultants in Washington DC when you live in DC is probably the option that will give you the best quality of service. You can meet face to face with your employees and work out details which can sometimes be difficult to work out over email or smart phone communication. One thing I like about hiring locally is that you can also hire a local contractor permanently if he does an adequate job. An obvious downside to this is you will pay the going rate in your region.

A nice quality IT specialist will keep your network running with ease. Almost everyone has an Android or iPhone these days. A good support specialist will setup a support desk that has a compatible Android application. This makes managing and submitting support tickets easily done with your smart phone. SpiceWorks is a great Android application that is perfect for maintaining your computer network.

Another option is to outsource your IT workers but still hire from within the United States. This is called national outsourcing. This allows you to keep the quality of American workers, but allowing you the flexibility of finding cheaper rates than those in your region. For instance, IT consultants in Rockville, MD are probably cheaper than those in Chicago. This is probably the best option for those who wish to balance the cost of service versus the quality.

Your last option when it comes to outsourcing is hiring foreign workers, or international outsourcing. The most obvious advantage to doing this is cost, employees in India will obviously be cheaper than network experts in Washington DC. Communication is an obvious problem with this type of outsourcing. Aside from the language barrier problem, countries like China and India are on completely different time zones than the United States which makes timely communication a big issue. Privacy is also an issue with outsourcing internationally. Typically IT staff will be privy to sensitive information that you might want to keep with locally hired employees.

I’ve been using HostGator for years and was pretty disturbed to find this bit of news today. A former HostGator employee was arrested for gaining root access to over 2700 servers. The disgruntled employee Eric Gisse now faces charges of breach of computer security, which is a felony.

Gisse was hired as a medium level administrator in September 2011. After he was fired in February of 2012 a process named ‘pcre’ was discovered to be running throughout the HostGator network. This file was later discovered to be a Trojan that allowed him remote root access to thousands of servers around the world.

Pcre is a library commonly used on Unix based systems. It was named this in an effort to disguise the true purpose of the application. According to HostGator the Trojan was found the same week Gisse was terminated and no harm was done.

As a system administrator, he would have had access to a customer’s personal information, but that access should have stopped after he was terminated. Gisse did not leak or use the data he had access to in any malicious ways.

The hack was actually pretty clever. Typically commands like netstat and ps are used to determine if there are any inbound or outbound connections going to that PC. These programs were modified as to hide the trojan’s activity, making it hard for administrators see the trojan’s connections. Hope he has a good criminal defense attorney, with all the personal information at steak, this is a pretty serious crime.

I play a lot of games on my Android, but one that I wish they had was a real money Holdem app. Sure you can play for fun with other various apps, but it’s just not the same. The United States took the fun of online card playing. Other companies have released iPhone and Android apps for countries like Italy, but there will of course never be one for the United States.

Many companies have a real money iPhone application, but of course opted out of giving it to United States users for obvious reasons. Major websites like partypoker have free apps that you can play for fun. It’s always nice to pick up a play money game while taking a break from work.

There are some pretty cool gaming apps available now a days. Some companies combine card playing with social media and make amazing apps. If your Android smart phone has a front facing camera you can add a whole new layer of realism to the game. You can see what other people are doing live – and those people can see you as well.

These new social gaming companies are combining card playing with social media. Live chats, web cams, and more are connecting you to worldwide players like never before. Instead of having a Saturday night game in real life, you can do it virtually with web cams. Invite people worldwide to boost your player count and have weekly tournaments – all over your Android based smart phone!

Technology is improving the way we game incrementally. Taking advantage of Android’s powerful features and mixing in your favorite games, social gaming is definitely the future.

Now, its not only is the PC version of the indie game Minecraft that is crowned with amazing success. The Pocket Edition for Apple iOS and Android sells very well. Since the release last year, the mobile edition of the game has found more than 700,000 buyers.

Minecraft has made the leap successful from PC to mobile devices. Since October, the game has been available for the Android operating system and since November for Apple’s IOS. Since then, the sandbox game has sold over hundereds of thousands of copies. That’s plenty of sales, sure, but not the 4 million sales of the PC-version is approaching, but does prove porting to mobile devices can bring great success.

Mojangs Business Developer Daniel Kaplan says up to 5,000 units sold during the first release day. An update to the Pocket Edition is scheduled for February 8, which was recently announced on the official blog of the developer Mojang. In this update, gamers get the games Survival elements as well as the ability to use custom Minecraft world seeds. The developers also want to integrate new animals and monsters into Minecraft pocket edition. I recommend this version to anyone who already loves Minecraft or is looking for a new mobile gaming challenge.

There have been a lot of rumors floating around that Google is going to offer cloud storage, and those rumors are finally confirmed.  Starting next week in select countries Google Drive will be giving away 5Gb free per user.  This directly competes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Dropbox which currently let you store 25 GB and 2Gb.

Google Drive will be available on all platforms including Android, PC, and Mac.  Many users will switch over from services such as Dropbox because of sheer convenience.  I will not have to register another account to use Google Drive, it will simply be another service linked to my existing Google account.

This announcement comes after Microsoft said they would also be entering the cloud storage market with a service called SkyDrive.  SkyDrive will be directly integrated into Windows 8 and will be linked to your existing Live.com account.  It will be interesting to see how these services compete, SkyDrive already lets users store 25Gb.

Many people fear this is yet another way of Google having access to all your personal data and in many ways it is.  Google has access to pretty much everything you do on a PC and many consider Google having access to all your files putting too many eggs in one basket.