Mess up your pictures with Mosaic Wallpaper

Have a picture that's too ugly to use as a wallpaper on your phone, but you want to use it anyway? Then Mosaic Wallpaper is for you.

Mosaic Wallpaper has plenty of image effects to alter your pictures beyond recognition. Circles, stripes, spirals, or just cut it up in little tiles like Antoni Gaudí used to do. You can use the results as a background for your phone, or for anything else.

The image from the screenshot comes from Vladstudio, a great site to grab backgrounds for your homescreens and desktops. I wonder if Vlad would recognise the picture without sneaking a peek at the original image first.

• Mosaic Wallpaper (Android Market)
• Vladstudio

Even more evil: WiFiKill lets you kidnap your victims to your IP address

How to be an obnoxious little brat?

WiFiKill turns your phone into a rogue WiFi access point. It drops the packets of every computer, phone, tablet or other device that you choose to block, so if you want to keep your boss, kids, neighbours, or everyone else around you offline then WiFiKill is your weapon. You can kill all wireless networks that you can connect to, no matter if they're encrypted or not.

More evil

The latest update lets you be even more evil. You can still make your victims think the network is broken, but now you can also redirect unsuspecting surfers to any IP address you like. Virus servers, spam sites, fake login screens, or just an innocent "pwn3d! ur internets are belong to us" page, anything goes. If you want to be an annoying teenage douchebag nothing can stop you, no matter how old you are.

Well, something can stop you. WiFiKill doesn't spoof your MAC address (not yet, but who knows what the next update will bring?) so you may get caught, kicked from the network, lose your job, or get shot at dawn. If you have a brain, switch it on before you switch on WiFiKill. If you don't have a brain then go buy an iPhone.

Another new feature: WiFiKill checks for updates on launch. You can't switch it off, but if you're really paranoid (and you should be!) you can block the update URL in your Android hosts file. You can either edit your hosts file with a text editor, or just use the blacklist option of AdAway. Even easier: block WiFiKill with DroidWall. This disables the update check, but you can still use the app to kill the internet of those around you.

Bad advice

Redirecting traffic to your IP needs a bit of digging in the dirt. Fire up the settings screen, scroll down to the killing rules, switch "use iptables" on, choose the "drop + redirect" method, and then set the IP address to which you want to redirect your friends (soon to be your enemies).

WiFiKill loads a long list of hardware vendors so you can see who made the devices connected to the network. This is real slow, so disable the vendor list if you don't want to wait. You'll only see MAC addresses, not device types, so switch the vendor list back on if you want to kick all iPhones offline without touching the Androids. And keep in mind that WiFiKill also kills your battery because it turns your phone into a bad router. Your phone and your battery will get hammered by every device that connects to you.

You need a rooted phone to play evil games with WiFiKill. Needless to say, Google booted the app off its market real quick so you have to download the APK from somewhere else. The free version has ads, but it's easy to kill them.

• There are different versions of WiFiKill. To find out which version suits you check out this new story on the new (and old) WiFiKill.

LBE Privacy Guard adds data management and DroidWall functions

Too permissive

A major design flaw in Android is the way it handles permissions for apps. When you install an app it asks for permissions to go online, read your private data, get your location, and lots of other scary stuff.

The problem is that your choice is limited to all or nothing. You can either grant an app each and every permission it asks for, or you can choose not to install the app at all. There's nothing in between, and for preinstalled apps you don't get any choice at all. Give 'em a finger and they take the whole hand.

That's why there are apps to fill the gap. None of the permissions managers, firewalls and ad blockers works without root access, so there's yet another good reason to root your phone.

Just say no

Permissions Denied is an app to revoke permissions. Recent versions of CyanogenMod 7 have a built-in permissions manager. Unfortunately those apps really deny permissions, which crashes apps that don't know how to behave when they hear the word "no."

LBE Privacy Guard thinks different. It doesn't deny permissions outright, it simply makes apps believe they still have the permissions that you took away from them. For example, when an app wants to read your contacts list against your will, LBE Privacy Guard feeds the app an empty list. It uses the same trick to protect your messages, location, phone number, IMEI, email, phone bill, etc.

Totally new

The latest update of LBE Privacy Guard is so new that you can't update the old version. Version 2 gets installed as a new app that won't coexist with LBE 1, and your old settings won't carry over either. Upgrading means that your old copy gets bumped off your phone and you'll have to reapply all your granted and denied permissions.

But upgrading is worth it. The new LBE is faster, eats less battery and memory, has a cleaner interface, and comes with new features. Good news for CyanogenMod users: LBE now works on CM7 too.

The main new feature in LBE Privacy Guard is a DroidWall-like firewall which can keep apps away from WiFi, mobile data, or both. It doesn't have the custom rules and blacklist/whitelist options of DroidWall itself, so you may want to keep DroidWall together with LBE.

LBE 2 can also monitor your data usage, and warn you when you're about to go over a preset limit. That might be useful for some, but there are better data managers out there.

Totally old

Some things didn't change. For most permissions you get three choices: permit, deny, or ask me everytime. The exception to the rule is the Phone ID permission (to keep your IMEI, IMSI, and phone number away from spammers). Phone ID permission can be either on or off, but the "ask me" option is missing. Its default setting is "allow."

LBE Privacy Guard won't let you protect its settings with a password, but there are apps out there that can lock down other apps if you need to put a lock on LBE.

Of course LBE Privacy Guard asks for a lot of permissions itself. It needs most of them to do its job, but it doesn't need internet permission. You can take LBE out of your list of trusted apps and tell it not to go online, or blacklist it in DroidWall. So far I didn't detect any unsollicited internet access, but for apps with root access you never know. What would happen on a level playing field where one app with root access (LBE) is kept offline by another app with root access (DroidWall)?

• LBE Privacy Guard (Android Market)

Other apps to keep your phone safe:

• Permissions Denied
• DroidWall
• AdAway (better than AdFree)
• Wi-Fi Ruler
• Flash privacy settings

FileSlick: Android file manager with an eye on looks

There are a couple of good file managers for Android, and a few bad ones too. ES File Explorer is a good file manager, X-plore is pretty good but has a horrible user interface.

Looks and roots

FileSlick is a new file manager which cares a lot about its looks. The first entry in its settings screen is a theme browser, which should give you an idea of its vanity. You can give it a makeover with those themes, and you should because the default theme (text on an image of stones) is a bit of a distraction when you're out to play with your files and folders.

The last entry on the settings screen lets you disable FileSlicks ads without paying. A nice touch, but if you run an app like AdAway or AdFree it doesn't really matter. When you switch off the ads FileSlick pops up a screen asking for a donation (and again everytime you open the settings screen). Whether you put some coins in the tip jar or not is up to you.

Speaking of tip jars: there used to be a time when playing with your system files and folders required paying for Root Explorer. Those days are long gone, because now there are plenty of free file managers with root access. FileSlick is no exception. Tap "root access" in the "Places" menu and you go straight into the guts of your phone. Unfortunately the method to mount files and folders to do something with them is quite counterintuitive, and it doesn't always work. When I tried to rename the files in system/media/audio FileSlick claimed success in a but didn't do anything. You'd expect better from the maker of z4root.

Files and swipes

FileSlick couldn't find any apps to play my mp3s and movies, even though my phone has media players aplenty. As for other file formats, it couldn't find an app to open PDFs (even though I've got Adobe Reader and OfficeSuite Pro on my phone). DOC and XLS worked, PPT did not. Finding out which app can open what format is a hit and miss affair.

FileSlick is not all about looks. Feel counts too, with an emphasis on swiping. Tapping files and folders selects them, opening them requires a swipe, long-tapping doesn't do anything. You'll probably find yourself tapping files and folders and then find them highlighted instead of opened, at least until you get used to the FileSlick way. There's no way to customise the behaviour of taps, long-taps and swipes. I would set swipe to select, tap to open, long-tap to launch the actions menu. You would probably choose something different, so a bit more choice in the settings would be welcome. Maybe in a next version?

In addition to managing files on your phone, FileSlick talks to FTP servers and Samba shares. It also lets you share files over bluetooth, but receiving them is another story. FileSlick is not as full featured as ES File Explorer or FileExpert, but it looks a lot better. Looks are not everything, though. Especially when it's your job to manage files. For all practical purposes FileSlick is still a beta test version with rough edges, but with some extra features and more ways to customise the behaviour of the app it might mature into something useful.

• FileSlick (Android Market)
• FileSlick (xda forum)

The competition:
• ES File Explorer
• X-plore
• File Expert (Android Market)