Giddytechblog | home of entertainment: technology

Hot

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

Friday, 29 December 2017

Are Cheap Chinese Phones Providing Better Security And Privacy?

08:24 0
Cheap Chinese Phones: Cheap Android phones have privacy issues and that too when it comes from Chinese brands. We have read many reports regarding the safety issues of Mi or other low-cost Android phones. So, here the question arises that should you blindly trust any unknown or cheap Chinese phones. In The past July, Russian antivirus company, Dr.Web stated that designs marketed in the Leagoo and Nomu brands include malicious software developed directly in the firmware.
After that Amazon refused to sell BLU devices. It happened after the experts told that malicious adware was developed in the devices. However, Amazon again started the selling. According to Graham Cluley, a security menace expert and blogger “If a person purchases a budget Androidphone, then they are in danger of their privacy and safety.” So, you should avoid buying the phones which you are not aware of the brand. You should strictly avoid the $100 unlocked phone instead gather money and purchase a good one.
Are Cheap Chinese Phones Providing Better Security And Privacy
If you buy a low-cost phone, then it can empty your pocket in the future. Although, all budget Chinese phones are nor threatening only in you examine it carefully. Smartphones reliable like Lenovo’s Motorola brand and TCL’s Alcatel (based in China) are available to the US at a reasonable price, but they are not involved in any security issue. The first thing to examine is the customer service of the phone you are buying. Study the brand security and privacy conditions carefully. You must know that all phone like Apple, Google and Samsung are manufactured under the guidance of Chinese company. Xiaomi, OnePlus and Huawei phones are also some reputed smartphones from China. The Huawei backdoor proof smartphone is most selling in online stores.
We are discussing this topic because past December, BLU phones was reported for sending users secret information to Chinese servers. The information included the text messages, contact lists and call logs. The issue is now under control of the firm. Smartphones like Leagoo, Doogee, Oukitel, and Homtom and also not a well-known brand which sells lots of Android phones under $100. We cannot blindly trust these companies as they can send personal information to China server or include severe security flaws which could hack your device.
BLU is an American company in Miami which markets phones between $50 to $170. Kryptowire BLU‘s phones are truly copied versions of Gionee smartphones, a popular smartphone brand. BLU fought with Amazon for refusing the selling of its products, which was expected to have adups spyware issues. It was observed for gathering and sending users device location and deviceinformation like phone number, serial number, SIM card ID and more forms observing. It was by default necessary for regular operating of devices. It cannot be removed by any spyware removal. Now, Amazon believes BLU so they have again started the sales of their smartphone. The company also has a toll-free support number which can connect you to the company for any problem and blu spyware removal.


You can buy phones under $150 from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Alcatel, and LG. You might not get amazing specs but at that price, it’s enough. If you don’t believe in security and privacy issue then you can continue buying phones from unknown brands, They come in best designs and specs at a cheap price but can get you in trouble. We have also reviewed many Chinese smartphones which have great features. You have to think twice before getting them in your pocket.

Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

The ATM Machine Running Windows XP Can Be Hacked

08:21 0
The ATM Machine Running Windows XP Can Be Hacked

ATM Machine: There are many people who are using Microsoft operating system Windows XP. The Operating System is also used in many places and as well as on bulk of ATM machines. The ATM machines using the 16-year-old Windows XP can be hacked easily which is the biggest risk. The system is fixed with the OS and is not updated and it also not installed with security updates.

 We all know that ATM machines need a high security to prevent any type of hacking. A user has managed to get the way to the user interface of the Windows XP OS. The reports from Softpedia, the Russian blogging platform Habrahabr reports that he has got the way to the user interface on the Windows XP operating system which is inserted on the ATM machine.
The full-screen lock limits the way to multiple elements of an ATM Operating System could be avoided by switching on the Sticky Keys. When the operator was expecting a call to be picked, out of indifference after that he pressed the SHIFT key on the ATM keyboard 5 times in a row, and with no doubt, the ATM immediately prompted about the sticky keys feature.
When the SHIFT key is pressed 5 times in a row the users can get the way for many Windowssettings. The Taskbar and Start Menu were able to use Windows Operating system. Here hackers can easily hack many parts of the operating system. This has opened the way through which the wicked activities of hackers can hack the ATM.
The hackers can easily install software and change the boot script. The biggest issue throughout the news is that instead of knowing the Sberbank has not taken any strict action about it. The bank had agreed to the crisis fix for the issue, but, this Windows XP imperfection still worked. The Microsoft has asked the banks to update the latest edition of Windows so that ATMs can get protected and prevent the scams or attacks.
Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Saturday, 23 December 2017

Edward Snowden made an app to protect your laptop

19:59 0


Earlier this year, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden met with Jacqueline Moudeina, the first female lawyer in Chad and a legendary human rights advocate who has worked tirelessly to bring former dictator Hissène Habré to justice. Habré was convicted of human rights abuses — ordering the killing of 40,000 people, sexual slavery, and rape — by a Senegalese jury in 2016.
Snowden told Moudeina that he was working on an app that could turn a mobile device into a kind of motion sensor in order to notify you when your devices are being tampered with. The app could also tell you when someone had entered a room without you knowing, if someone had moved your things, or if someone had stormed into your friend’s house in the middle of the night. Snowden recounted that pivotal conversation in an interview with the Verge. “She got very serious and told me, ‘I need this. I need this now. There’s so many people around us who need this.’”
Haven, announced today, is an app that does just that. Installed on a cheap burner Android device, Haven sends notifications to your personal, main phone in the event that your laptop has been tampered with. If you leave your laptop at home or at an office or in a hotel room, you can place your Haven phone on top of the laptop, and when Haven detects motion, light, or movement — essentially, anything that might be someone messing with your stuff — it logs what happened. It takes photos, records sound, even takes down changes in light or acceleration, and then sends notifications to your main phone. None of this logging is stored in the cloud, and the notifications you receive on your main phone are end-to-end encrypted over Signal.
Snowden hasn’t carried a mobile device since 2013, but in the last couple of years, much of his time has been taken up by prying apart smartphones and poking away at their circuit boards with the aid of fine tweezers and a microscope. In 2016, he collaborated with hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang on Introspection Engine, a phone case that monitors iPhone outputs, alerting you to when your device is sending signals through its antenna.
Snowden is notoriously careful about the technology around him. In the documentary Citizenfour, Snowden is shown taking increasingly extravagant precautions against surveillance, going as far as to drape a pillowcase (his “Magic Mantle of Power,” he says, deadpan) over himself and his computer when he types in a password. Famously, he also asked journalists to place their phones in the hotel fridge, to prevent transmission of any surreptitious recording through their microphones or cameras.
Snowden at least has a pretty understandable reason to be paranoid — and while he doesn’t expect the rest of the world to adopt his somewhat inconvenient lifestyle, he’s been trying to use his uniquely heightened threat model to improve other people’s lives. “I haven’t carried a phone but I can increasingly use phones,” he said. Tinkering with technology to make it acceptable to his own standards gives him insight into how to provide privacy to others.
Edward Snowden holds a smartphone microphone with tweezers next to a USB drive for scale
 Photo by Edward Snowden
“Did you know most mobile phones these days have three microphones?” he asked me. Later he rattled off a list of different kinds of sensors. It wasn’t just audio, motion, and light, an iPhone can also detect acceleration and barometric pressure. He had become intimately familiar with the insides of smartphones while working with Bunnie Huang, and the experience had left him wondering if the powerful capabilities of these increasingly ubiquitous devices could be used to protect, rather than invade, people’s privacy — sousveillance, rather than surveillance.
It was Micah Lee, a security engineer who also writes at the Intercept, who had the first spark of insight. For years, developers with access to signing keys — particularly developers who deal with incredibly sensitive work like the Tor Project — have become fairly paranoid about keeping their laptops in sight at all times. This has much to do with what security researcher Joanna Rutkowska dubbed “the evil maid attack”. Even if you encrypt your hard drive, a malicious actor with physical access to your computer (say, a hotel housekeeper of dubious morals) can compromise your machine. Afterwards, it’s nearly impossible to tell that you’ve been hacked.
Screenshot courtesy of the Guardian Project
Snowden and Lee, who both sit on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, partnered with the Guardian Project, a collective of app developers who focus on privacy and encrypted communications, to create Haven over the last year. Snowden credited Nathan Freitas, the director of the Guardian Project, for writing the bulk of the code.
Though “evil maid” attacks are not a widespread concern — “we’re talking about people who can’t go into the pool without their laptops,” said Snowden, “that’s like nine people in the whole world” — Haven was conceptualized to benefit as many people as possible. Micah Lee points out in his article for The Intercept that victims of domestic abuse can also use Haven to see if their abuser is tampering with their devices. Snowden told me that they had thought very deliberately about intimate partner violence early on.
“You shouldn’t have to be saving the world to benefit from Haven,” said Snowden, but acknowledged that the people most likely to be using Haven were paranoid developers and human rights activists in the global south. Andy Greenberg describes in WIRED how the Guardian Project worked with the Colombian activist group Movilizatario to run a trial of the software earlier this year. Sixty testers from Movilizatario used Haven to safeguard their devices and to provide some kind of record if they should be kidnapped in the middle of the night.
Screenshot courtesy of the Guardian Project
It was this case scenario that sprung to the mind of Jacqueline Moudeina when she spoke with Snowden earlier this year. “In many places around the world, people are disappearing in the night,” he said. For those dissidents, Haven was reassurance that if government agents break into their home and take them away, at least someone would know they were taken. In those cases, Haven can be installed on primary phones, and the app is set to send notifications to a friend.I asked Snowden what it was like to collaborate on a software project while in exile in Russia. It wasn’t that bad, he said. Since he became stranded in Russia in 2013, technology has progressed to the point where it’s much easier to talk to people all over the world in secure ways. The creators of Haven were scattered all over the globe. “Exile is losing its teeth,” he told me.
More than anything, Snowden is hoping that Haven — an open source project that anyone can examine, contribute to, or adapt for their own purposes — spins out into many different directions, addressing threat models of all kinds. There are so many different kinds of sensors in mobile phones that the possibilities were boundless. He wondered, for instance, if a barometer in a smartphone could possibly detect a door opening in a room.
Threat models don’t have to involve authoritarian governments kidnapping and torturing activists. Lex Gill posted on Twitter that her partner had been testing Haven with a spare phone for a month, and she had begun to use it to send “helpful reminders.”
And when Nathan Freitas explained his most recent project to his young children, he discovered yet another use case. “We’re going to use it to catch Santa!” they told him excitedly.
Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Louis CK's canceled film leaks onto torrent sites

05:34 0
Louis CK in I Love You, Daddy
The release of Louis CK's new movie I Love You, Daddy was canceled in early November after CK admitted to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct — something that had been rumored for years. Even before then, many critics, privy to early screenings, openly wondered if the film was a veiled confession or a shameless act of manipulation. Well, now you can decide for yourself because I Love You, Daddy is being aggressively shared on torrents after recently trickling out.
CK's I Love You, Daddy, slated to have been released on November 17th, is an exploration of sexual consent and powerful men accused of taking advantage of vulnerable young women. It’s a storyline that veers uncomfortably close to CK's own transgressions... or accusations against Woody Allen, the apparent target of CK's cinematic troll.
Even though I Love You, Daddy never made it into theaters, 12,000 DVDs were mailed to Hollywood critics and voters ahead of the all-important awards season. But the CM8 piracy group got its hands on one of those "For Your Consideration" DVD screeners and released it onto the internet. CM8 gained notoriety just before Christmas 2015 when it released a batch of blockbusters that were still playing in theaters.
CK was reportedly buying back the distribution rights to I Love You, Daddy, according to Deadline, giving him the option of one day selling it directly on his website to a ready-made fanbase — something he’s done many times before. And let’s face it: nothing is more desirable than something promised, and abruptly taken away under scandalous conditions. But the wide and immediate availability of a pirated version of his film certainly undercuts the potential for CK to profit off a theme of sexual misconduct in the future
Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier

05:18 0
Days after deleting an OKCupid profile that included personal information, Reddit user Drinkscocoaandreads logged onto Facebook to find an unpleasant surprise. “I had like three guys find me on Facebook within two days, screaming at me for leaving mid-conversation/not ever acknowledging their initial message,” the Redditor wrote in a thread about OKCupid. “One of them also added a few of my friends before I figured out what was happening and got him blocked.”
Drinkscocoaandreads is one of many Reddit users reacting to OKCupid’s recent announcement that it will ditch usernames in favor of a real-name policy. “It’s because, like the recent goodbye we said to AIM screen names, it’s time to keep up with the times,” OKCupid explained. “We’ve also heard from many members of our community that they want to maintain the privacy they enjoy with usernames—with this change, we won’t be collecting full names; instead, we encourage our users to go by the name they’d like their dates to call them on OkCupid.”
Via email, a company spokesperson told The Verge that OKCupid won’t require legal names, but the shift is already unpopular with users. Online, the reaction to the news has been overwhelmingly negative, with users either flocking to Reddit to discuss the change, or leaving angry comments on the post itself.
The change isn’t just, as OKCupid’s flippant post suggests, about users no longer going by aliases like “BigDaddyFlash916.” The allure of a place like OKCupid as opposed to, say, Tinder, is that it was a secure place to share more intimate personal details, including sexual preferences. Dating apps made for phones are generally looking for users to find matches based on proximity, age, and gut-instinct attraction to other people’s photos. OKCupid invites users to answer questionnaires, build elaborate profiles, and describe themselves thoughtfully. For users, this is a double-edged sword: you get to know people better, but you also make yourself vulnerable to strangers who can potentially learn a lot about you.
Being online can already feel fraught and dangerous for some people, and it’s even more true for anyone seeking a romantic partner. You’re not just letting someone into your heart, but into your social spaces, your support circles, your home. Part of the process of protecting yourself against potential stalkers or harassers starts with limiting the ways strangers can find you. Information like what school you attended, what you do for a living, or a photo, combined with a correct name, is often all it takes to hunt down a LinkedIn or Facebook page.
Many users have voiced this exact concern about the new policy. “This is a terrible, dangerous idea and I hope all the backlash I’m seeing in the comments section forces you to look at this more closely,” wrote one user in the post’s comments. “It’s unbelievable that you are being so cavalier about exposing users’ identity and privacy this way. A few weeks ago I received a message from someone who told me he’d repeatedly watched me walking down the street and told me the exact location where he kept seeing me. Imagine if this person was unbalanced and had my real name in addition to my general location.” Other commenters point out the dangers of potentially outing gay or bisexual users outside their trusted circles, or exposing people’s open or poly relationships.
The ability to conceal a real name under the cloak of a username isn’t just beneficial for someone trying to keep their identity under wraps. It’s also a stellar indicator of what kind of person is reaching out to you. Some users point out that their usernames contained specific jokes that helped their best matches connect with them. Even getting a message from a user with the word “horny” in their alias tells you what they’re looking for, with no interaction needed.
In an ideal world, the trust and intimacy of allowing a stranger to know your sexual orientation, your religion, or your politics would be a welcome part of finding a potential partner. In reality, it requires more caution than that. OKCupid's decision isn't just ignoring what its users want; it's mocking them while it takes that away. It’s dismantling their ability to stay safe, and it’s doing so with a sneer.
Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

A smart use for Snap's open AR platform is to preview real-sized menu items

05:15 0
Snap publicly launched its Lens Studio this past week, meaning that brands and general people can create their own augmented reality lenses. We figured brands would take advantage of the platform and maybe even pay Snap for promotion of their work. But today, we saw an actually inventive idea for the custom lenses: to preview your food.

Snap employee (and former Verge writer) Ellis Hamburger tweeted that restaurant owners could create their own lenses and share the Snapcode to them on their menu. Customers could then view the food before ordering in AR. The only way to retrieve a friend's lens is by scanning its Snapcode, which essentially works like a QR code in Snapchat. The Snapcode is viable for a year after it’s created, so users can unlock it multiple times.
This is a cool use of the platform, even if zero restaurants take advantage of it. Using AR to preview your food makes just as much sense as checking Instagram tags, which I do all the time. Plus, seeing the food in front of you makes it more appealing, so long as it's a nice image. I'd be into this.
Read More
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: