Smartphones are either too smart, or not smart enough, apparently. It turns out there’s a number of interesting grievous security vulnerabilities in our cellphones lately.

The first to shiver your timbers is that Google’s Android is a lot less secure than – well, I can’t say anyone thought it was, because frankly, I don’t trust the security on any cellphone with a ten foot pole – but certainly less secure than most people could ever imagine their phone being. Research done at North Carolina State University by Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang is pretty clear about “explicit capability leaks” in Android which allows Android app developers to actually bypass the key security defenses built into Android, allowing apps access to personal information such as your GPS coordinates, or to functions such as text messaging or audio recording (yes, that means tapping your texts and phone calls is included in the capabilities), regardless of your security settings, typically caused by manufacturer-supplied “enhancements” to the base Android install.

Using a diagnostic app they call “Woodpecker” that can diagnose which of your security settings are actually compromised, they found these vendor-created vulns in Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung brands. Other brands are certainly possible to be vulnerable as well, but were beyond the scope of their study.

Now, as if that weren’t enough, in highly related news and yet a completely different security hole, security researcher Trevor Eckhart has released some shocking evidence of just such a vendor-installed piece of software that completely and totally compromises the security of your smartphone. (Normally I would embed the video for you, but as requested in the video, I’m instead pointing you to the page itself.) This nasty bit of software, which I quite agree with his estimation that it counts as a rootkit, is called Carrier IQ.

Carrier IQ logs (nearly) every key press and button press that you make, meaning all your passwords are belong to … whoever is collecting that data. Carrier IQ also snoops on your text messages, snooping on them before the phone even manages to display them to you. It even bypasses the encryption meant to be in SSL / HTTPS.

Amongst other nasty things.

And Carrier IQ is not just an Android menace installed by the likes of HTC (on which Eckhart tested). In theory Carrier IQ software can be put onto any smartphone. There’s a version for them all. So is your smartphone affected? Here’s a quick breakdown of the scuttlebutt across various blogs:

Well if it’s Android, obviously there’s that possibility, since Eckhart used an Android phone and its debug tools to find Carrier IQ in the first place. So you’re probably infected.

BlackBerry? This one is a little confusing. It’s been alleged that Carrier IQ is on BlackBerries, and yet Research in Motion is adamant that it does not pre-install Carrier IQ, nor does it authorize its carriers to do so. Of course there’s nothing actually stopping its carriers from installing Carrier IQ anyway. So this would suggest that while RiM may be against using it, that doesn’t mean that your BB is in any way safe from it.

iPhone? Yep. It’s a definite possibility to be installed on your iPhone. Carrier IQ has been on the iPhone since iOS 3, and is still there. Though supposedly now with iOS5 you can disable Carrier IQ by turning off “Diagnostics and Usage” in your settings. (Settings->General->About->Diagnostics and Usage->Don’t Send.) And supposedly it’s a lightweight version of a violation, only reporting your phone number, your carrier, your country, your location, and your active phone calls. Oh … that’s not so bad then? Eh?  Now, Apple is claiming that iOS 5 does not use Carrier IQ.  However, evidence shows that it does, just that it can be turned off.  So believe what you will.  Just because it’s turned off doesn’t mean that it’s removed.

Symbian is a confusing one. There are a lot of reports saying it is so. And yet Nokia claims that Carrier IQ doesn’t even have any Symbian-based products, so it simply can’t be true. Carrier IQ doesn’t list OS compatibility on their website anywhere that I can find, so I really can’t verify this one way or the other.

webOS … This one has even less information on it. It’s claimed, a lot. But often in generalized sweeping statements. I haven’t seen anyone offer definitive proof positive. Nor refute it. Given that it’s kind of a dead OS anyway, sold from Palm off to HP who has now abandoned it, it’s not much of an issue. But if you have proof one way or the other, I’m sure everyone would love to know with certainty.

Windows Phone 7? Strangely enough, so far it seems as if this is the only smartphone OS to be absolutely safe from Carrier IQ. How weird is that?

The key thing to remember with Carrier IQ is that this is not software designed to be pre-installed with the phone’s operating system. It is third-party software. Maybe it is installed by the manufacturer. Maybe it is installed by the carrier.  (As the name suggests.) There are a number of points where Carrier IQ can be installed on your phone. So just because one company refutes that they use Carrier IQ doesn’t mean that your phone hasn’t had it installed by another hand involved.

Hey, those of you interested on running Windows 8 on ARM, guess what!  The cake ARM is a lie.

But as if that we’re bad enough, we now have some more official word on just exactly how ARM will be supported. No, there will be no lightened kernel to run Windows with. Microsoft is not taking a page from Linux in any way. If you install Windows 8 on an ARM processor, you don’t get Windows. You get Phone. That’s it. That’s all that you get.

What does that mean?

That means that you can only install “apps” on Windows 8 ARM, and so far sounding like only through a Microsoft app store no less. Called, imaginatively, the “Windows Store”. There will be no running of full Windows applications, at all, ever, on Windows 8 ARM. (Though I don’t expect it will take long for people to “unlock” their Windows 8 ARM to install their own apps manually at the very least.)

At least as far as I can tell by reading between the lines. Because, frankly, Microsoft is not being very frank and clear with us on this matter. In theory it may be possible that Windows 8 ARM will actually be a full version of Windows, and not just Phone. In theory. In practice however this is of very little value if you cannot install an application onto it because of being locked in to the Windows Store. Further, even if any old application could be recompiled for ARM, there are bound to be bugs and kinks to work out. And that’s even if someone bothers to try, which most software companies will not!

How do we know these things?

Because Windows has been here once before.

Only back then it wasn’t ARM, it was the DEC Alpha. Microsoft made an NT4 compilation of it. And it almost even worked. Except when it didn’t. Because almost no third parties bothered to support it in any way. And in fact even Microsoft kind of didn’t, as their compatibility system, basically an emulator-on-demand as far as I could tell, failed often. Very often. And worse, on things as common as most major installation packaging systems. So just trying to install non-Alpha software often crashed. You couldn’t even get to actually trying to run the software. That was Microsoft’s idea of support. And third parties. It was an absolute failure!

And now Microsoft is doing it all over again with ARM.

So even if Microsoft at some point tries to claim that your x86-compiled applications can be installed and run on Windows 8 ARM, the cake is a lie.  It will never happen if third party software producers don’t likewise port all of their software over as well, which they won’t!

What you are effectively getting if you install Windows 8 ARM on your tablet is … Windows Phone 7+.

Not Windows.

If a software vendor completely ports their application for WinRT then that’ll run on Windows 8 ARM. But most won’t, because that’d be a lot more work than just recompiling for ARM, and most won’t even bother recompiling, let alone porting.

That’s the only truth.

Except that it’s actually worse than that! Because while you should be able to run Windows Phone 7 apps on Windows 8 ARM / Phone (Is there anyone who will be running Windows 8 on a PC that will actually want to run Windows Phone 7 apps?) you will not (if I’m reading things correctly) be able to run Phone (yes, Metro, we went over this in the first Windows 8 rant) apps on your Windows Phone 7 smartphones. They may be similar platforms, but not identical. Windows 8 apps are built on Windows Runtime (WinRT), where as Windows Phone 7 apps are Silverlight and XNA. Windows Phone 8 is backward compatible with Windows Phone 7, but not vice-versa. It is not a forward-compatible design. Sorry all of you Windows Phone app developers. (All two of you.)

It even sounds like Microsoft is taking this a segmentation further, and that Windows 8 will only be for tablets. Phones will be stuck on Windows Phone 7. So it’s not just a matter of backward compatibility, but also about … modem form factor? I mean seriously, what’s the difference between a 3g-capapble 4 inch tablet and a smartphone? Not bloody much!  And far less yet between a 4g tablet!

But so anyone who ever envisioned of running Windows on ARM, sorry, you’re SOL. The tabletard has commanded that “Thou shalt not be productive on ARM.” The most you can do on ARM is still run apps. No soup applications for you!

You can think of Windows 8 ARM then being just another tablet OS like iOS and Android. It might say Windows 8, but it’s not Windows.

And actually, I’m kind of okay with that part. Honestly, what I want is a full-blown Windows smartphone/netbook combo device. You know, a PCphone. A Smarter phone. ARM may be The Next Big Thing, but I’m actually okay with x86 being the processor to make Smarterphones happen. It’s not like Intel and AMD both aren’t trying to make low-power mobile chips for just this purpose. (Why nVidia or even -gack!- Via doesn’t do so though is beyond me.)

Still, it’s very disappointing that Microsoft didn’t take this opportunity to do ARM right by any sense of the imagination. To have actually run a full-blown Windows OS on ARM would have been nice to see. Of course with what that could do to the server world, maybe it was done this way for a reason.

Yes, this is a rant. It’s not politically correct. This one perhaps more so than most of mine. If you want to complain, that’s nice. Send all of your complaints here.

Microsoft is the new tabletard.

Microsoft just released the hounds on the Windows 8 NDAs and I think it’s well and good to finally admit that we have a new word: Tabletard. For those unfamiliar with this word, please see commentard, twittard, celebritard, ad nauseum. And no, I do not mean people who are stupid about tables. I mean people who are stupid about tablets. Of which, now, apparently Microsoft is one of them.

Why do I say that Microsoft is a tabletard? Simple, look at what Windows 8 is. Take Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7, mash them together in the worst possible way, and tada! You now have Windows 8.

When first announced that Windows 8 would have a Metro mode and Windows 7 mode (which within this rant I will refuse to use as a term and will from now on call Phone, because that’s all it is), I rather figured that the Phone part would be something gimmicky that you can on the side. Like how Windows 7 has that Windows XP Compatibility mode. Call me crazy, but I had rather assumed that Microsoft was rational enough to comprehend that PC users use PCs. That Windows was the primary OS people want on their Windows box. That the Phone part is just there to run “apps”.

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t get it.

I guess I can’t entirely blame them. Ubuntu obviously missed the boat on that one as well.  More so than Microsoft, by a mile.

Still, it’s rather ludicrous to suddenly assume that every device you ever install your OS on is now a tablet or phone, and that it has no keyboard or mouse. You’d have to be a flipping moron to make that assumption. I mean you would literally need to be mentally retarded to assume that. Hence why Microsoft now joins Canonical (the folks responsible for Ubuntu) amongst the ranks of tabletards.

I’m already sick and tired of Windows 7’s Start Menu. I didn’t like it any better when it was Windows XP’s. The “Classic” Start Menu is what I vastly prefer, because as someone who actually works for a living, I have a lot of applications which I use. There’s simply not enough room in the psychic ever-failing-to-predict Start Menu that Microsoft has been trying to replace the classic Start Menu with forever. I am constantly using the “All Programs” button any time I can’t have my Classic Start Menu. Which is really freaking annoying.

I do not want my icons hidden.  I do not want my Start Menu shrunk.  I have a lot of icons that I need.  I have a lot of programs that I regularly use.  Stop trying to make me click a lot of extra times to do everyday tasks, Microsoft!

Now enter Windows 8, which replaces the bad Start menu with something even worse: Phone! (Remember, I am not calling it Metro.) Yes, that’s right, now a bunch of tiles make up your Start Menu. Tiles which will mostly lack any and all useful information for people like me who will be using Windows to run applications, not Phone “apps”. It takes up even more room. It’s uglier. And it’s even less useful. Huzzah?

Likewise, you get a schizophrenic experience in Windows 8. If you run a Windows application, it operates just like you’d expect. It’s the Windows experience that you know and love. But if you run a Phone app, it runs fullscreen, and with all of the finger-swiping interactivity that you’d come to expect from apps. Will people be able to figure out what to do when the run an app instead of an application?

And the bigger question is, how well will the dichotomy of application/app … aka app(lication) even work when navigating Windows. So far that’s one that people have been keeping rather quiet on. Will Alt-Tab even work at all? How does Aero handle applications vs. apps? Will navigating from within an app be like apps? Will navigating from within an application be like applications? Frankly, even if these questions are answered right now, until the final binaries hits the silicon, I’m not going to believe for a minute that tweaks and refinements won’t happen, or features of navigation change entirely. It’s a messy messy world that Microsoft is creating by treating apps as apps within Windows.  And it’s a mess the way that Microsoft is cramming Windows Phone 7 into Windows 7 and calling it Windows 8.

Seriously, is it so hard to comprehend that most people are not going to find Phone in any way useful on a desktop PC? Now if you want to enable some goofy Phone interface, as an option, I’m all for that. After all, tablet PCs like my Viliv S5 could very well use some finger-friendlier navigational aid. (Something Viliv tried to accomplish with Cube UI, but failed badly.) But again, Phone should be an option, not forced upon everyone. Not everyone has a touchscreen. Not everyone even owns a smartphone, let alone wants to navigate their PC like it were one, using a mouse instead of a finger no less. In fact most do not! A phone is a phone and a PC is a PC and never the twain shall meet in many people’s minds. So any defaulting to phone behavior or navigation on a PC’s operating system is A Bad Thing! The kind of thing that only a tabletard would design.

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad was meant to revolutionize the tablet market with its stunning new webOS, at least according to HP. Well, it’s certainly something…

But according to reports, what the TouchPad is, is a pile of unsellable crap.

Besides the fact that people are starting to call it the OuchPad instead of the TouchPad (Ha ha! So clever to remove the first letter! Someone must have worked for weeks on that one.) the scuttlebutt is that supposedly Best Buy’s staff are literally tripping over the unsold stock and are begging HP to take some of their unsold TouchPad inventory back. Allegedly only 25,000 of Best Buy’s inventory of 270,000 HP TouchPads have sold, and worse, that 25,000 might even be awfully “charitable”, as it may not be accounting for customer-returned units. So at 9.26% that’s a single-digit percentage of units moved then. OuchPad indeed!

Reports of other retailers being less than impressed with the sales of HP TouchPads abound as well, though none with such numbers to back up those claims.

Of course this could have to do with so many reviews of the HP Touchpad pointing out that performance on the tablet is laggy, slow, underwhelming, etc. when compared to either an Apple iOS or a Google Android OSed tablet.

Worse, because the OuchPad has hardware that is basically comparable to other tablets, it’s easy to make the clear judgment that HP’s problem is not the hardware itself, but that not-so-revolutionary webOS hogging the tablet down.

Oops.

Maybe not such a smart buy after all then.  Or more likely, just not enough effort to keep it up-to-date.  Not like Google and Apple have put into theirs.

But while it might be fun to poke a stick at HP’s dead horse, one has to wonder how much of this is really HP’s failing, and how much of it is simply the inability to move any tablet that isn’t a JoBsIaN FoNdLeSlAb. While Google Android is certainly catching on in the phone market and displacing Apple as the largest growing faction, it seems to be a much harder sell to consumers of tablets, where the iPad is still king of the roost. Which might seem a little odd, until you break down what, exactly, a tablet is.  (Or at least what these tablets are.)

Because at the end of the day, all most of these tablets really are, are just oversized phones … without the phone. They’re effectively just glorified internet browsers with minimal gaming capacity, games which, one could argue, could actually be run entirely on the internet.  If you can even get to the internet on them, as a good number of them don’t even come with 3G modems, so you’re stuck completely on Wi-Fi.

Of course some people try to pretend that tablets are also business devices able to run apps, but let’s face reality here, these tablets seriously lack processing power and have pretty poor usability compared to a desktop PC with a keyboard and a mouse. Their “apps” are hardly stunning or revolutionary by any means.  Most of them are just games or wrappers to a specific web site because the tablet can’t even browse the internet well.  (Heck, Apple’s iPads still don’t even support something as basic to the internet as Flash, and probably never will!) And the only reason that people might even bother trying to use a tablet for business is because their laptop is simply too heavy and/or expensive by comparison, which is a pretty lame excuse because that just indicates poor shopping skills.

The reality is, most people don’t really know how to justify their tablets other than purely for entertainment, which is a hard pill to admit to.  To put tablets in the category of the MP3 player, or worse, the Nintendo Gameboy, is just a jagged little pill. Many people only bought them because they’re the Next Big Thing and because Apple is so leet, and because all of their friends are doing it.  Though they may not be able to admit this to themselves. After all, when you break it down, if you have a modern smartphone, what do you even need a tablet for? A second device to run the same apps, just on a bigger screen? Yippee? If it at least offered more with its larger size… But alas, it doesn’t. And because the phone bits have been lopped, it actually offers less.

At the end of the day, technically speaking, an iPad is really just a really big Gameboy, or an iPod Touch. We know Apple is great at selling mindless entertainment devices like iPods. (But when it comes to computers, Apple isn’t exactly shocking the world, especially now that their hardware is just a PC and their OS is just Unix with a pretty face.) So it’s no surprise that competing tablets (AKA oversized media players / web browsers) just aren’t selling as well.

So then is HP’s failure to sell their TouchPad really a webOS failing? Or an it’s-not-an-iPad failing? Or is HP’s OuchPad so unimpressive simply because HP tried to make it all about being a marvel of portable computing seriousness instead of just a darn good toy?

Well, either way, it’s still an OuchPad that just don’t dance.

And HP agrees.  They’ve just announced that because they suck at selling webOS-based devices like the OuchPad that they’re just getting out of that market entirely.  It was an Epic Fail on their part and cost them lots and lots of money.

The ironic part is, Google is looking to take a royal beating in patent litigation over Android, and they’re pissing on their partners and developers by not protecting them, and Google just bought Motorola Mobility, making them an actual hardware player now and not just a software offering.  So Android’s tremendous growth in the mobile phone market may be taking a massive nose-dive in the future.  (And their tablet growth would … if Apple weren’t still stomping them into the ground in that sector.)  Nokia has already announced that Symbian is dead to them.  (Long live their new partner, Microsoft and Windows Phone 7!)  And speaking of Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 … that flatlined out of the gate and has only pissed off customers with each (attempt at an) update.  Meego is going nowhere and reported to be already dead.  Moblin never even was as far as I can tell.  And Maemo, their twisted offspring, will likely never even see the light of day because no one seems to want to actually make it happen.  Google’s Chrome is frankly just a failboat waiting to sink as it’s based on all the wrong ideas.  So it’s basically Epic Fails all around, and the only clear winner is … Apple and iOS.  Gee, if only someone could have taken an OS already based on mobility, like something from Palm, and have kept it modern so that it could compete…

(Hint, that’s exactly what HP just failed to do.)

Of course the same could actually be said of Nokia and Symbian as well, so let’s not pass up that egg-on-face opportunity either.

So unless someone out there actually bothers to try, and I mean like Apple and Google try, there’s really going to be no one else to dance with.  It’s a market with lots of opportunity and no players.  And if Google stumbles like well it should, that’ll just leave … Apple and their overpriced products.  It’s hard to imagine a future where the King of Disinnovation is the only player, but that’s what the future may shape up to be if something doesn’t change for the better soon.  HP could have turned webOS into that answer, but they dropped the ball, and so now they’re washing their hands of the whole mess as if that dirt weren’t of their own making.

It seems that in today’s “mobile computing” world, no one really knows how to do anything right.

But then considering that 4G isn’t even technically speaking actually 4G yet, is this really a surprise?

It almost makes one pine for the days when phones were just phones, “mobile computing” was a laptop, and everything worked.  It seems the more everyone tries to blur the lines, the more they just get it all horribly wrong.  But at least when Apple gets it horribly wrong, they can still sell you on it, because they’re Apple, and that’s how they roll.  A lesson that HP failed to learn.

I was recently catching up on reading about the Intel Atom architecture, or more specifically, about Moorestown and Medfield, and I have to say that Nokia’s ditching of Intel and Intel’s Moblin (married to Nokia’s Maemo through the new joint venture of MeeGo) for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 almost starts to actually make sense. And this from someone who loves developing software in Qt!

And it all comes down to one simple reason: Intel doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I know. It’s hard to believe. But really, it’s true!

Why do I say that? Because even with Medfield, Intel is still missing the PCI bus in their System on a Chip (SoC). Why is this important, you ask? Because operating systems like Windows still require a PCI bus being present to work. Which means that even though Medfield is bringing the Intel Atom CPU (along with graphics, sound, camera, memory, etc.) to the smartphone / tablet world, it has completely missed the bus (Har har!) of being able to run a full-out real OS like Windows.

Now it remains somewhat unclear to me if Linux can be made to run without the PCI bus. Being Linux, you would think it could. In fact I’m pretty darn sure it can be done.  Honestly, I’m not sure why Windows absolutely needs a PCI bus, frankly.  Maybe just some bad assumptions and Windows is too heavy weight to change?

But then why did Ubuntu Mobile development come to a halt? Why did Nokia ditch working with Intel on MeeGo and switch to befriending Microsoft of all things? Anecdotally, it suggests that Linux, in fact may not be so happy without the PCI bus either. Or that there’s some kind of difficulty involved. Frankly, I’m not sure even I believe this.  It sounds like FUD.  Especially as Linux has been ported to all sorts of small devices with micro kernels.  But one does have to wonder why this keeps happening to mobile-centric versions of Linux, an OS known for being ported to everything and anything.  It is an odd mystery what is up with Linux there.

And will Microsoft address this PCI bus dependency in Windows 8 if they’re already trying to port it to ARM for tablet use?

But so if that’s the reason these Linux variations keep getting abandoned (and that’s a mighty big if, I do admit), then Nokia’s freakout might actually start to almost make some sense. (Beyond simple Microsoftian funding, the almighty dollar.)  What would be the point of bringing x86 to the smartphone if you couldn’t actually run your OS on it so that you can continue to use the same applications that you do at work or at home on your computer? If you’re eternally stuck with just apps instead of real applications, then why bother to deviate from ARM in the first place? Granted, it’s still a true-enough thought process for Windows alone. Maybe Nokia just wasn’t convinced that Linux is any good on a smartphone? (Though after buying Trolltech, I’d find that really hard to believe.)

This could also, by the way, be the whole reason why Intel developed Moblin. Because if their choice to avoid the PCI bus when bringing everything else from an x86 PC into a smartphone prevented them from running an already available OS, then they would pretty much have to create their own operating system to run this deficient x86-almost-PC. That or wait for Google to port Android from ARM to x86-sans-PCI. Or wait even longer for Microsoft to do something.

Or, try to cram all of the separate chips for a full-blown Atom-based PC into a tiny smartphone package, a task not easily done!  Hence the need for a simple (and small!) SoC instead of separate chips.

Okay, so I get that from a power-saving perspective, the PCI bus isn’t ideal. And so it’d eat into a smartphone’s battery life. I get that. To an extent. I mean it’s not like they’re missing from laptops, netbooks, and UMPCs (like the Viliv S5 that can fit in your pocket) which are also run on batteries. Surely someone could think of some nifty power-saving way to put PCI bus support into a smartphone SoC like Medfield … if they had their head on straight.

But, alas, no. That’s what Intel’s Oak Trail is for: Atom in netbooks and tablets. That can run Windows.

Not smartphones though.  Because it’s not one SoC, it’s many chips.

Is anyone else confused?

What in the world is Intel thinking?

How do I even put this in a way that makes sense…

Okay. So Intel’s focus here is on crushing ARM. Intel is tired of missing out on this hugely growing market. Smartphones are the new sugar rush and everyone wants their candy. Intel can’t afford to neglect this market any longer. (Or any longer than they already have done by twiddling their thumbs while testing the waters instead of just boldly going forward and setting trends.)

ARM, a competing processor architecture, is frankly just nowhere near as mature as x86. It may be low power, but it’s also lesser in functionality. This is why your smartphones only run apps instead of full-blown applications. (Well, the main reason anyway. Apple’s strict near-fascist software development regime is another matter entirely and really only applies to their products.) ARM might be great for phones, but not for computers. Not yet at least. Maybe not even ever. Only time will tell there.  Though certainly many would try to debate the point, from both sides.  Honestly, I don’t care either way so long as at the end of the day I have full-blown OS and application software and a compiler to make my own software with.

But so Intel wants into the market that ARM is massively consuming. What do they do? Do they use all of the great versatility and advanced features of their x86 Atom line to show how you can make a smartphone truly smart?

No.

Instead Intel works hard on making a super-low-power x86 Atom-based solution for smartphones so that their answer to ARM has the same (or better) battery life.

That’s it.

That’s all Intel is doing. They have effectively dumbed down the PC to make it as useless as a smartphone. Instead of upping the smartphone to the capabilities of a PC.

So here’s a wild analogy for you: Say you’re a hunter. Say you’re hunting wild boar, a powerful and respected creature in its own right. It may be smaller than man, but it’s fast, agile, and has big sharp tusks. Do you, the hunter, get on your hands and knees and chase around the wild boar tooth-to-tusk? Of course not! You’ll get shredded! That’d be downright daft to fight a wild boar on its own terms. No, you, the hunter, get out your spear, or your bow, or your gun, and you take the wild boar down with your superior technology.

Intel, get off your darned hands and knees, stop trying to out-bite the boar, and pick up a gun already! Or the ARM boar is just going to continue to gore you in the face!