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USA security firm has figured out how to turn an Android smartphone into a surveillance device that would make Q, the fictional gadget master in the James Bond movies, proud. The Security Labs of Kindsight, a part of Alcatel-Lucent, has built a proof-of-concept program capable of tracking the user's location, intercepting messages, recording conversations, and taking pictures.
"Effectively, it turns the Android device into a spy phone," Kevin McNamee, lab director for Kindsight, said Friday. McNamee plans to present the espionage
tool at the Black Hat USA conference next month. The program can runs inside any app, the technology, codenamed DroidWhisper, can be hidden as a component within any Android app and run covertly in the background, booting up automatically when the device is turned on.
Once installed, the spyware would receive
instructions from a command-and-control (C&C)
server, which could communicate either over the
Internet or through the phone's Short Message
Service used for text messaging.
From a control panel on
the server, criminals or government spies would be able to control the phone's camera, video and still, and make use of its microphone and recording capabilities. The panel also would be used to collect all the recorded content and images, as well as any personal information on the phone.
Sunday, 30 June 2013
More slides shows light on how the NSA has access to your information on facebook, google, yahoo, etc.
newly released documents below give additional
details about how the program operates, including
the levels of review and supervisory control at
the NSA and FBI. The documents also show how
the program interacts with the Internet companies. These slides, annotated by The Post, represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are redacted.
The new slides in ds post show:
1.How the PRISM system analyzes information collected from private companies
2.How each target is assigned a case notation
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says he's not worried about instagram video
Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo said Wednesday that he's not that worried about Facebook's new foray into video via its Instagram service. The video feature, unveiled last week, directly competes with Twitter's own Vine.
"People can do whatever they want to do," Costolo said during a question-and-answer session at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Twitter, he said, is focused on that goal more than it's worried about other companies taking its lunch.
The social network has a "very specific vision of
where we want to go" with Vine, Costolo said,
which is to make it easy to produce public, widely
distributed videos.
"Other people can replicate that or take pieces of
it if that's what they want to do," Costolo said. "If
we do what we want to do, and go where we want
to go, we don't have to worry about what that guy's
doing over there."
The executive said that he sees Twitter as the
"global town square" and would like to make it
possible for people in every country to access the
network.
"People can do whatever they want to do," Costolo said during a question-and-answer session at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Twitter, he said, is focused on that goal more than it's worried about other companies taking its lunch.
The social network has a "very specific vision of
where we want to go" with Vine, Costolo said,
which is to make it easy to produce public, widely
distributed videos.
"Other people can replicate that or take pieces of
it if that's what they want to do," Costolo said. "If
we do what we want to do, and go where we want
to go, we don't have to worry about what that guy's
doing over there."
The executive said that he sees Twitter as the
"global town square" and would like to make it
possible for people in every country to access the
network.
New technology can make us all see behind walls just like superman(man of steel).
Now a system being developed by Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her graduate student Fadel Adib, could give all of us the ability to spot people in different rooms using low-cost Wi-Fi technology. "We wanted to create a device that is
low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors," Katabi says.
The system, called "Wi-Vi," is based on a concept
similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.
As a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any
humans on the other side. However, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it through to the other
room, with the rest being reflected by the wall, or by other objects. "So we had to come up with a
technology that could cancel out all these other
reflections, and keep only those from the moving
human body," Katabi says.
Motion detector: To do this, the system uses two transmit antennas and a single receiver. The two antennas transmit almost identical signals, except that the signal from the second antenna is the inverse of the first. As a result, the two signals interfere with each other in such a way as to cancel each other out. Since any static objects that the signals hit — including the wall — create identical reflections, they too are cancelled out by this nulling effect.
In this way, only those reflections that change between the two signals, such as those from a moving object, arrive back at the receiver, Adib says. "So, if the person moves behind the wall, all reflections from static objects are cancelled out, and the only thing registered by the device is the moving human."
Once the system has cancelled out all of the
reflections from static objects, it can then
concentrate on tracking the person as he or she
moves around the room. Most previous attempts to
track moving targets through walls have done so using an array of spaced antennas, which each capture the signal reflected off a person moving through the environment. But this would be too expensive and bulky for use in a handheld device.
So instead Wi-Vi uses just one receiver. As the person moves through the room, his or her distance from the receiver changes, meaning the time it takes for the reflected signal to make its way back to the receiver changes too. The system then uses this information to calculate where the person is at any one time.
Possible Uses: In disaster recovery, personal safety,
gaming. Wi-Vi, being presented at the Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong in August, could be used to help search-and-rescue teams to find survivors trapped in rubble after an earthquake, say, or to allow police officers to identify the number and movement of criminals within a building to avoid walking into an ambush. It could also be used as a personal safety device, Katabi says: "If you are walking at night and you have the feeling that someone is following you, then you could use it to check if there is someone behind the fence or behind a corner."
The device can also detect gestures or movements by a person standing behind a wall, such as a wave of the arm, Katabi says. This would allow it to be used as a gesture-based interface for controlling lighting or appliances within the home, such as turning off the lights in another room with a wave of the arm. Venkat Padmanabhan, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says the possibility of using Wi-Vi as a gesture-based interface that does not require a line of sight between the user and the device itself is perhaps its most interesting application of all. "Such an interface could alter the face of gaming," he says. Unlike today's interactive gaming devices, where users must stay in front of the console and its camera at all times, users could still interact with the system while in another room, for example. This could open up the possibility of more complex and interesting games, Katabi says.
Culled from MIT News.
Iphone 5S could be 12weeks away.
First, he assumes that iOS 7 will follow the pattern of iOS 6 and be released exactly 100 days after its announcement (that would be the September 18 date). Then he figures the new iPhone will follow by just two days, just as the iPhone 5 followed two days after iOS 6. Apple does tend to follow these kinds of almost superstitious and numerological habits, so his math makes sense.
A bigger leap based on leaks and rumors concerns the low-cost iPhone 6 (or iPhone Light or whatever) that Smith goes on to predict will be released a week or two later (to avoid excess lines at the Apple stores.)
Assuming the rumors are true and that leaked photos of brightly colored plastic iPhone casings are legit and not just unauthorized Chinese knockoffs, release dates of September 27 or October 4 sound plausible.
These supposedly colorful and inexpensive iPhone will be aimed primarily at the developing markets of China and India, but I think they will prove popular here as well. The preciousness of the standard iPhone casing is not actually a selling point for some users, particularly the young and butter-fingered! Now if they could work some smash-proof glass in there too that would be a real winner.
The other reason for the close coupling of these release dates, again according to Smith, is to make room later in October for another announcement, this time for a new full-size iPad and a retina iPad Mini— and maybe a new Apple TV and/or an iWatch—just in time for Christmas shopping.
The low-cost iPhone could do for Apple's phone line what the iPad Mini has done for its tablet line. The lower price point, rather than the smaller size, is the thing that will convince incremental customers to join the Apple platform. The Apple TV, the iWatch and iOS in the car are the things that will extend that experience and give users ever more things to hook their iPhones up to.
If Apple can do all of this (or even most of it) and tune up the rough edges on iOS 7, the end of 2013 could prove to be a turn-around for Cupertino's fortunes. We'll keep our fingers crossed.
Investors dump blackberry shares
The release of the last quarter sales by Blackberry changed the mind of blackberry investors. Blackberry phones sold below what was expected, they lost 4 million subscribers and had a net loss of $84 million. On friday blackberry shares tumbled by 28 percent. Chief Executive Thorsten Heins has staked the company's future on a new operating system, BlackBerry 10, which it unveiled early this year, and a bevy of phones that run off it. Many investors have bet this turnaround plan could work, sending RIM's shares up 59% in the 12 months before Friday's news.
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Instagram suffers fruit spam attack
An Instagram spokeswoman responded to our request for comment with the following: "Earlier today a small portion of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were posted from their accounts. Our security and spam team quickly took actions to secure the accounts involved, and the posted photos are being deleted." Instagram seems to be auto-recognizing some of this suspicious activity. One affected user I spoke to told me that Instagram sent him a standard password reset email shortly after he noticed the errant activity, and he was automatically logged out of the service. He changed his password and seems to be fine right now. We are still waiting for facebook to explain what's goin on.
Fake BBM app fools lot of android users.
Blackberry hasn't officially announced the release date for BBM on iOS and Android devices.
Apple just can't do without Samsung.
starting in 2014, according to a TSMC executive. Apple is not contended with the quality of chips produced by TSMC because it doesn't seem to meet apple's speed and power standard, TSMC officials said.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone from Etisalat. Enjoy high speed mobile broadband on any of our Easyblaze plans. Visit www.etisalat.com.ng for details.
Microsoft working on phones that can detect your mood and update it on social networks.
Friday, 28 June 2013
Sony 20-megapixel phone pics leaks.
quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of
RAM and a non-removable battery between
2,700 mAh and 3,000 mAh. The smartphone will
also reportedly feature a 20-megapixel rear
camera with a Cybershot CMOS sensor and Carl
Zeiss lens. Release date should be in september.
Blackberry loses market value last quater.
half that of Nokia's Lumia. Blackberry sold just
2.7million blackberry 10 devices. They had $84m net loss and also lost 4 million subscribers. They've now lost about 8 million subscribers in 3 quarters.
Galaxy S4 is the fastest smartphone with the best battery life.
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