Access to Google Nexus 4 Secure Element (SE) - nfc

I’m working on technical part of a project for big bank and looking for information about using Secure Element (SE) that is embedded into Google Nexus 4.
What is a process to get access to SE?
I mean how to initiate a process with Google.

You may try to contact them directly, but Google will not give you access to (embedded) SE: they don't want competitors on their wallet application (specially on Android systems).

You can do this, current android version(4.0.4) has enabled access to SE without having support of platform vendor.
Please refere
http://nelenkov.blogspot.sg/2012/08/accessing-embedded-secure-element-in.html

Depends what your ambition is, can you elaborate ? Loading an application of your own onto the secure element will require crypto keys that only Google can provide, and they probably never will, for many reasons.
Alternatively, you should be able to do the same with a SIM. It only takes a few tools to load and configure an application on a test SIM (with test SIM), then you can fit it into a phone and access it through the Open Mobile API (see the SEEK for Android open source project) which is available on many devices.

Related

Detect if request is from a mobile device in asp.net Core API

I'm trying to prevent spam and I want to know:
how can I detect if the request to the API is coming from a mobile device?
Thank you
The only way to check if the request is coming from a mobile device is by checking the user agent sent with each request. The user agent can be found in HttpContext.Request.Headers['User-Agent'].
Then compare the user agent value with a list of mobile browsers found at e.g.: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-browser-user-agent-strings
One option is to write your own user agent parser that figures out if it's a mobile browser or not. That is a HUGE job and one you will have to continually keep expanding as new devices are released. It has all its own problems like you said in the other comment - how do you get a list of the new user agents to include...
Another option is to find some free library written in ASP which will do this work for you. I can't see libraries written in asp.net Core API. If you use one, be making sure that it's regularly updated by the developers and that you keep updating your copy of the library too.
Last option would be to use a user agent parsing API. A good one will give you detailed information about the browser, software and the hardware/software types.
I did a comparison of these for my job a few months ago - https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/api/ looked the best to me - it's platform independent (doesn't matter what language you're writing your system in ASP/C#/Ruby), and is freemium and has an active dev team working on it. also because it's an API, you never have to update your code libraries, it always works on the latest detection of what they have written. We still use it today.

How to move Parse.com database to my own server and still use Parse.com SDK?

I'm using Parse.com SDK services for my Android app.
I've seen that Parse had released their Android SDK as an open source project on Github on this address.
My app is almost finished, and when I'm uploading it to the Play Store, I don't want to be controlled by Parse.com (I mean that I don't want to be blocked someday, or I don't know that), so I want to move my whole database to my own server that hosted on a secure company.
I've checked the open source project on Github and realized that all I need to use it on my own server is to generate an Application ID and a client key.
So I want to ask if someone knows how to generate an Application ID and a client key of Parse to use it on my own server, or that you maybe knows another way of moving it to my server? And one more question: Today I'm using also Facebook SDK with my app. If I will move my database to my own server, will I still be able to use Facebook SDK on my app?
Thanks!
I have write an article about how to migrate parse to a custom server.
https://medium.com/#jcminarro/run-parse-server-on-your-own-server-using-digitalocean-b2a7d66e1205
There's a massive difference between Parse open-sourcing their SDKs compared to revealing their entire backend architecture and its configuration.
The open-sourced SDKs are essentially wrappers for Parse's REST API along with some convenience functions and logic for natively interpreting the JSON data Parse is transmitting.
At a high level, Parse uses MongoDB for its core database and is entirely hosted using AWS (Amazon Web Services). The entire architecture is highly complex and is not something you could just drag and drop onto your own software stack or hardware backend.
To help give you a better idea of how Parse achieves all of their services, here's an interesting presentation their Dev Ops team gave at an AWS convention. Suffice it to say, hosting the backend services for over 180,000 apps requires a complex infrastructure and that is the "secret sauce" so to speak for Parse and is why Facebook purchased them for over $85 million two years ago.

Data synchronization in a Chrome packaged app

In my pursuit to write a Chrome packaged app, I am struggling to get my data synchronized to the app so that it can be used in offline mode.
My data lives on a server and I access it trough a restful service in this case I use.net MVC WebApi
What I have tried: Using Breezejs because of the easy offline capabilities ; the problem is that
window.localStorage
is not available in packaged apps, I did tried switching it out for IndexedDB but no luck.
I tried chrome.storage that worked great with the build in sync but it is not a big truck and that is what I need at least a 10tunner.
So my Question; is there a silver bullet that has some XMLHttpRequest implementations, that makes it easier to get data from a restful service, storing it to IndexedDB so that it can be used offline and when going online syncs the changes, that is compatible with packaged apps.
I know I must probably write my own but if someone already went trough all the hoops and complexities of synchronization that can guide me it will be awesome.
Have you looked at using the syncFileSystem API ?
As long as you are happy to sync your data into Google Drive, this api should meet your needs for not implementing sync code yourself and still working offline.

How to use Windows Azure in Indonesia?

I plan to implement my website (asp.net & sql2008) using windows azure, but I have difficulty to do it because windows azure has not released yet in my location (Indonesia).
Should someone like to share the solution the same with my problem would be appreciated.
The question was asked on MSDN and the answer is that it is not possible. The only solution is to wait for Windows Azure available in your country.
MSDN Forum
Just run your apps on HK or Singapore Windows Azure Public Data Centers, these are the APAC Data Centers for your region.
for testing reasons, I wanted to create an Azure account, and faced the same here in Egypt.
I've made it by remotely logging into one of our U.S-based servers, and registered from there :) If you can't do so, and need this account badly, and don't have such server, try using TOR.
Update: TOR is a proxy-like solution for your internet connection, it will redirect all requests/responses to a node on the TOR network, which consists of volunteers like you and me.
so my solution is simple, we gonna use tor to simulate that you are inside one of the permitted countries, and register your account with ease.
what you gonna need is to install TOR and configure your browser to use it, but my personal recommendation is to install TOR browser bundle, it's TOR+a Browser that is pre-configured to use it.
you gonna find a nice video on the TOR browser bundle page that will give you an overview about it.
give it a try, and tell me what happened.

Azure, Sync Framework and Access Control Service: Are there obvious shortcomings or problems in using this technologies together?

I have a desktop application which uses flat files (some xml and small pictures) as data. I want this data to be available on other PCs which have the desktop application installed and usable by a smartphone client (WP7 at the moment) as well.
The user should have it very easy to synchronize this data. He should be able to use accounts he already possesses (Live-Login, Googlemail, Facebook,...).
I thought about using Azure Blob Storage to save the data in Azure, the Sync Framework to perform the actual synchronization and the Access Control Service to handle authentication.
I have not used any of this technologies before so any advice would be great but I'm searching foremost for errors or shortcomings in this strategy I don't see yet. Is this approach viable at all?
Windows Azure is basically a virtualized datacentre. It is elaborate and complicated and is pitched at corporations who don't want to own their server infrastructure or hardware.
If I understand correctly, what you want is a cloud fileserver, not a whole LAN. Windows SkyDrive fulfils this requirement nicely and offers 25GB of storage per member with no charge for membership.
About Hotmail and Windows Live People often confuse Hotmail and
Windows Live, because when you set up a Hotmail account it uses
Windows Live for authentication and therefore you end up with a
Windows Live account and all the associated facilities, including
SkyDrive. However, it is entirely possible to set up a Windows Live
account using any email address as the username.
If you do this, it is important to be aware that the Windows Live
password associated with a given email address is completely
independent of the password required by the mail server that hosts
mail for the account. This can cause a great deal of user confusion.
For Hotmail (or any other mail server that uses Windows Live for
authentication) they are guaranteed to be the same password.
There is no official Microsoft framework support for SkyDrive. There is an open source project called SkyDriveApiClient, but it only works with the full .NET framework. I tried porting it but the author was a bit of an architecture astronaut, and it is absolutely riddled with [Serializable] which is not available on WP7x.
The WP7 guys have said that the WP7 framework will probably include support for SkyDrive but not in Mango (WP7.1) and given that Microsoft's typical release cycle is 18 months and Mango has yet to hit the streets, I'd say it will be two years before you can count on intrinsic cloud file services for WP7.
Roll-your-own wouldn't be hard, WCF services are dead easy to use from WP7. But that's not really cloud since you have to provide and maintain the server infrastructure yourself. For this reason and given the MS timetable, I have put a great deal of effort into producing my own SkyDrive client for WP7. Core functionality is complete and I am now refactoring, improving robustness and adding performance enhancements like local cacheing of tokens (cookies, essentially). I don't intend to release it; I have a number of apps planned that depend on this functionality and it suits me fine that there is a substantial barrier to competition.
I didn't tell you that to tease you. My point is that I'm so sure SkyDrive is the right answer that I put a lot of work into making it happen.
Cloud file storage is a perfect fit for mobile devices.
Azure is not a good answer for the sort of phone apps individuals want because the data store isn't shared in a way that required indexing or supports high levels of concurrency
I can certainly think of corporate phone apps that would benefit from using SQL Server as storage
Azure can do file services but it represents an ongoing expense. Nobody's going to put up with that when Google and Microsoft both give away web based cloud storage.
I can personally attest that if you're determined, it is possible to use SkyDrive from WP7.
Cloud storage is the only way you're going to get programmatically accessible storage that's shared by your user's mobile device and his computer. One of the things I intend to do that depends on shared storage is write a Silverlight app that lets you prepare map routes with multiple waypoints on a desktop computer and a companion app that uses them on WP7.
The Windows Live team has released what they call support for WP7. They supply a sample project showing you how to instantiate a browser object and load their login pages and manipulate them to log in and use their javascript API to manipulate SkyDrive.
This has one big advantage: browser cookies and cached credentials. The disadvantages are obvious; technical shortcomings notwithstanding the Windows Live team seems to think the only thing people want to do with a phone is tag their photos and fiddle with social media.
I have finished my own libraries. They do not support most of the social media twaddle. I have treated SkyDrive as no more or less than a cloud file system, providing
Authenticate(username, password)
CreateFolder(folderpath[, blocking=false])
Delete(fileOrFolderPath[, blocking=false])
SaveString(filepath, value[, blocking=false])
LoadString(filepath)
I could handle binaries but Convert.ToBase64 makes this unnecessary and strings are convenient for XML. CreateFolder, Delete and SaveString are optionally blocking. LoadString is always blocking because it's a function that returns the loaded string. CreateFolder is recursive so you can create an entire path in one call (eg /folder1/folder2/folder3). Calling CreateFolder on a pre-existing path has no effect, and SaveString uses CreateFolder to ensure the path is valid, making it unnecessary to create a filepath in advance. Authenticate loads the file system (except file content) into memory eliminating server chatter. This is asynchronous and a FileSystemReady event announces when the file system is completely loaded. The model is maintained as you add and remove files and folders.
This was a lot of work and no one reponded to my attempt to make it an open source project so I'm not inclined to give the fruits of my labour away, but provided your plans don't compete with mine I could be persuaded to come to an arrangement.

Resources