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Facebook Home launched in Google Play earlier today, but it’s only available on the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S 4, HTC One, and HTC One X+. Later, an APK of Facebook home was made available for people outside the U.S., and most people assumed you could use it on any device. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case since the APK checks the device you’re installing it on. If you don’t own one of the above phones, it won’t work unless you are rooted, which gives you the ability to edit the build.prop file and add your current phone. Since most people aren’t rooted, it left a lot of folks out in the cold. Well it’s time to get back inside where it’s warm because Paul O’Brien at MoDaCo posted the patched version of Facebook Home, which removes the device check.

You will need to uninstall your existing Facebook and Messenger applications since you will need patched versions of those as well. Once you’ve done that, just download and install APKs for the patched Facebook main app (katana), the patched Messenger app (orca) and the patched Facebook Home app. Then log into the main Facebook app, and Bingo…you will now have Facebook Home.

Download – Facebook (katana) / Messenger (orca) / Facebook Home

source: MoDaCo

Come comment on this article: Facebook Home now available for everyone with patched APK

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With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Reviews

Ice Rage [Sports]

Apps

Zeptolab teases upcoming Cut the Rope: Time Travel [Video]

Facebook Messenger adds chat heads to Android app

Facebook Home Now Live in Google Play

Facebook Home now available for everyone with patched APK

New Twitter Music app sort of released today

Dungeon Hunter 4 trailer released, Android version pending

Carriers

Verizon Details Changes to Their Upgrade Plan

New training materials implying Verizon will implement a new device payment plan?

Google TV

ASUS Qube to finally launch on April 23

Hardware

NVIDIA Demos Kepler Mobile Chip, Closest Yet To PC-Level Graphics

Phones

HTC Teams Up With Funny Or Die To Promote The One

Tablets

Toshiba AT10-A could be the first tablet with the NVIDIA Tegra 4

Updates

Verizon DROID Bionic smartphone finally gets official with Jelly Bean, tastes sweet buttery glory in the process

Miscellaneous

NYPD uses Android as a tool of its trade

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for April 12, 2013

Today Gameloft released a new trailer for their Dungeon Hunter 4 game that continues the franchise. The title has been released for iOS devices, but Gameloft is still working out some bugs with the Android version. No additional information is available with regard to how much longer it may be until the Android version is available. If you are a fan of dungeon-crawling RPG action, hit the break to check out the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: Dungeon Hunter 4 trailer released, Android version pending

We know that folks in the top tier of Verizon offices are paying close attention to revamping the whole idea of wireless contracts, but it appears that the first preliminary steps in changing the notion is beginning sooner than we could have ever imagined. A leaked document has surfaced highlighting some Verizon training materials overtly offering a “payment plan for full retail cost” specifically for “want the latest cutting edge device or are just not satisfied with a working device”. There is speculation as to what this means exactly… especially for the minority of you out there with those coveted Unlimited data packages still, but you can bet this is a potentially exciting scenario for most, if not all Verizon customers out there.

We’ll be sure to keep our eyes and ears open for any further developments regarding this developing story.

source: Droid Life

Come comment on this article: New training materials implying Verizon will implement a new device payment plan?

It’s certainly long overdue, but Motorola has finally started the initial rollout of the coveted Jelly Bean update to the DROID Bionic smartphone. The update will bring the software build to 98.72.22.XT875 and the Android software to version 4.1.2. Owners of the device will be treated to the usual JB goodies like Project Butter, Google Now and a smoother UI. Additionally, Motorola/Verizon have tossed in Visual Voicemail and an enhanced mobile hotspot capability.

While the initial rollout is official, Verizon will start pushing out the update in phases from Monday, so owners will need to be patient for just a wee bit.

source: Verizon Wireless

Come comment on this article: Verizon DROID Bionic smartphone finally gets official with Jelly Bean, tastes sweet buttery glory in the process

President Barack Obama examines the helmet given to him by the United States Naval Academy football team during the ceremony to present the Commander-in-Chief Trophy to the team in the East Room of the White House, April 12, 2013.

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

The Navy Midshipmen were at the White House today, marking eight visits in ten years that the U.S. Naval Academy's football team has won the Commander-in-Chief Trophy against the other service academies. Last year, Vice President Biden was there to award the Trophy when the Midshipmen triumphed in the 113th annual Army-Navy game to win the title. 

In his remarks, President Obama highlighted the team's excellent record, but he talked more about their ethic of teamwork and discipline and unselfishness, and praised their focus on academics — the Naval Academy’s graduation rate has been in the top 10 of the NCAA for the eighth straight year. But most of all, the President paid tribute to the work these champions will be doing in the future, on behalf of this country:

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Already well known for its easy-to-use iOS and Android photo editing apps, Fotor has just entered the desktop market with the release of the free Fotor 1.0.0 for Desktop and Mac.

And while the program is relatively simple, oriented more to quick optimizations rather than complex edits, it’s also very easy to use, and has more than enough functionality to justify a download.

If a picture has lighting issues, for instance, you don’t have to start playing around with brightness, contrast, colors or anything else. Just choose the conditions which applied when the photo was taken — “Backlit”, “Cloudy”, “Sunset” and so on — and the program will automatically optimise the image for you.

If the lighting is fine, but you’d just like it to look a little more interesting, then Fotor has 60+ colour and lighting effects which could help. Again, it’s all very easy. Choose a category from the list (“Classic”, “Lomo”, B&W”, “Vignette”, “Art”), and thumbnails will show you how the current picture will look for every available effect. And if you see something you like, simply click it for a closer look.

It’s just as easy to add a border to your image (and there are 30 available).

A very configurable Tilt-Shift effect allows you to fully customise the strength and position of the blur.

If you prefer more practical options, then there are also tools to rotate or straighten your image; sharpen or blur it; tweak exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature and tint; crop your photo, and view its EXIF data.

And when you’re ready, there are tools to quickly share your images on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

If there’s a small problem here, it’s that the Fotor interface still feels more like an app than a Windows application. You can’t open multiple images at once, for instance. There’s no edit menu here, no right-click options. There are no single letter shortcuts for menu items (you can’t press Alt+F, O to open a file, say), and other standard hotkeys — like F1, for instance — aren’t supported at all.

Still, once you’ve got used to this, Fotor does prove to be very quick and easy to use. Some of its tools are very capable (there’s an excellent Crop function, for instance), and on balance it’s a simple but effective way to optimise and share your latest photos.

Say, do you use WordPress? Button down the hatches and check your patches. A new brute-force attack is underway across the Internet. We know from first-hand experience. BetaNews took some heavy fire earlier today. Hackers use a botnet to hit blogs with fast-fire log-in attempts, seeking to snag passwords. The initial objective is to add more numbers to the botnet.

Brute-force attempts aren’t all that uncommon, but this one is generating a fair bit of attention, with some reports that the core botnet is 90,000 computers and growing and an escalating number of attempted logins, too. It’s all a guessing game really. Attempt enough logins and some will succeed, revealing passwords.

Daniel Cid, Sucuri CTO, took a look at his company’s server logs to assess if reports of increased brute-force attacks might be true. He explains:

We were seeing 30 to 40 thousand attacks per day the last few months. In April 2013, it increased to 77,000 per day on average, reaching more than 100,000 attempts per day in the last few days. That means that the number of brute force attempts more than tripled. This sharp increase would lead us to believe that there is some reality to these reports.

Sucuri secures and also cleans up websites, including those running WordPress.

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Price observes: “One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack. These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic”.

CloudFlare offers services for improving a website’s performance, reach and security, and like Sucuri, is in a unique front-line position to observe the brute-force attacks.

Hostgator’s Sean Valant says that 90,000 PCs make up the botnet attacking WordPress sites. “Symptoms of this attack are a very slow backend on your WordPress site, or an inability to login. In some instances your site could even intermittently go down for short periods”.

Default account “Admin” is the target, and Valant rightly advises to “change the password to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website“.

The Webhost for my personal domains has posted no support docs about the log-in attempts. But we have first-hand experience here at BetaNews.

Eric Steil, BetaNews server administrator, describes what happened today:

Around 5:30 AM (ET) this morning, I got the nagios alert that one of the servers wasn’t responding to HTTP.  I logged in to the server and saw that although the load was really high, there wasn’t actually much odd about the open connections or database (as usually is the case when something stops responding to HTTP).

I checked out the access logs and saw a large number of POST requests to wp-login.php from numerous IPs, without a corresponding GET requests (you normally GET the form the POST it when it submits).  On a hunch, I blocked access to the file and system load went down and Apache started responding again, so I went back to sleep.

This morning I did some searches and saw it was a widespread problem, not just localized to our servers. We still have it blocked, and the bots still poke it occasionally to see if it’s back.

The attempts failed here. You might not be so lucky. At the least, change your passwords.

Now.

Photo Credit: Gunnar Assmy/Shutterstock