This is way late for yesterday, but I ran into some technical difficulties that will be explained later.
I took my two oldest kids, Connor and Emma, to a “Christian” rock concert in Billings featuring Disciple, Kutless and News Boys at the Shrine Auditorium. Overall it was a great concert and we all had a great time. It was the first concert of that nature that my kids have been to so it was fun to share that experience with them.
I didn’t bring either of my Nikons, thinking that they wouldn’t allow photography, but much to my surprise they didn’t have any problem with it and I saw a number of people with video cameras and DSLRs happily shooting away. To say the least, I was quite disappointed that I seemed to be the only one acting under the assumption that I couldn’t bring a real camera. But, all was not lost because I did have my Droid with its 5 Megapixel camera and I successfully drained the battery taking many blurry concert photos. Thanks to my good friend, Jeremy Sitte’s, excellent ticket choices and willingness to purchase a whole gob of tickets at once, we had excellent seats at the end of the stage catwalk so some of the pictures didn’t turn out too bad considering the situation. So today’s picture is from that concert and is of the News Boys. Their stage set was amazing and they lived up to my expectation as entertainers. At one point during the show, the entire drum set, complete with strapped-in drummer, lifted out of the stage, moved toward the crowd and proceeded to tilt 90° and spin. This enabled us to see the entire drum set as well as the drummer. Let me just say that I was impressed and would definitely see them again in concert.
ISO 107, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/15 sec
Taken with Motorola Droid
As to the “technical problem” I mentioned above, well, during the course of the concert someone decided to take advantage of a vulnerability in the Droid’s Bluetooth stack (drivers) and upload files that appeared to be photos into my phone’s camera folder. I didn’t notice the uploaded files until I was showing pictures of the concert to Sue after we got home from the concert. The pictures were obviously not from the concert and it was my wife that actually came up with a suggestion that lead me to figure out what happened. While I was freaking out trying to figure out where these images could have come from my wife says, “Could someone have ‘beamed’ them to you?” Having not considered that, I searched through the wireless settings on my phone and noticed that there were two devices listed under paired Bluetooth devices that I did not recognize. From there it was a simple Google search that led me to what I believe to be the software that someone used to hack my phone. For security reasons I will not give the name of the software. Be aware that the files that are uploaded to your camera’s folder LOOK like images or videos but are not – instead, they are essentially virus files that are initiated when the image file is viewed in full screen or when the video is played. From what I was able to find, the virus essentially allows the hacker to get personal information off your phone via Bluetooth or wifi. Thankfully, I deleted the files immediately without ever opening them then did a complete scan of my phone. Technology is a truly wonderful thing, but with the blessings come some curses. From now on, I will turn off my phone’s Bluetooth when I don’t need it.