Home All posts

Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Gmail traffic trickles back into China.

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
13:45

Google's data shows Gmail traffic slowly rising again in China after a four-day outage.

Gmail is starting to see life again in China.

Google's e-mail service has seen a slight uptick in traffic going into the country, according to the company's Transparency Report. The Financial Times (subscription required) was the first to notice that access had returned.

The increase hints at the end of a four-day outage in China, one with no explanation. Greatfire.org, a China-based anticensorship group, suggested the country may have been responsible, Reuters reported.

Google told CNET in an e-mail that there was nothing on its end that caused the outage, while a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told Reuters that she wasn't aware of an issue.

A spokesman from the Consulate General of China's office in New York couldn't be reached for comment about the outage.

Google has had problems operating in China for years, and the country blocked Gmail access to its browsers in June ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A loophole that allowed users to access Gmail through Microsoft's Outlook or Apple's email client had been closed over the past four days. That loophole has once again opened.

Posted by
Read More

NSA Had Trouble Breaking Into These Encryption Tools.

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
13:13


Edward Snowden is now globally known as the man who blew the whistle on U.S. National Security Agency’s spying programs. He leaked a treasure trove of top secret documents detailing vast spying plans over the past year and he’s not stopping now. Der Spiegel has a new report up, backed by documents provided by Snowden, which reveal some of the encryption tools that proved a bit too much for the NSA to break into.

One of the tools that the NSA had “Major Problems” with is the infamous Tor network. It was difficult for the agency to follow users across the global anonymity network. Email messages sent through Zoho, an email provider that promises strong encryption, were troublesome as well. So were files encrypted with TrueCrypt, which was an open source disk-encryption program that was pulled a few months back.

Even if the NSA had problems with some tools this doesn’t mean it wasn’t able to break into many others. Leaked files show that the agency considers decrypting emails sent through Mail.ru, a popular Russian service, “moderate.” Documents also show that the NSA is building capacity to snoop on 20,000 VPN connections per hour, which is alarming to say the least.

The report also reveals how NSA was able to go past the HTTPS system, commonly used to secure connections between web browsers and websites. Documents from late 2012 show that the agency had capacity to capture 10 million HTTPS connections every single day.

Posted by
Read More

Monday, 29 December 2014

High School Student Creates Smart Gun That Only Unlocks With Fingerprints.

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:41


There have been a lot of debate about gun safety over the years, and there have been many suggestions that have come up. For example earlier this year gun manufacturer Armatix came up with a solution which is to pair a gun with a smartwatch, thus allowing it to fire only if the smartwatch is in range. This means that if you don’t have the watch, you can’t fire it, which would hopefully help reduce accidental shootings or gun theft.

Well it looks like we now have another possible contender for smarter guns, thanks to a 17-year old by the name of Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder who won the $50,000 grand prize in the SmartTech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer’s answer to gun safety was to embed a fingerprint sensor on the gun, thus unlocking it only if an authorized fingerprint is detected.
Kloepfer’s creation will also store the fingerprints locally within the gun itself as opposed to in the cloud where it could potentially be hacked. This would also make it ideal for military use. Kloepfer has also suggested that multiple fingerprints could be stored in the database so that guns could be shared amongst authorized users, such as police in a precinct.

The teen has managed to create a prototype with a plastic model of a gun which costs him about $3,000 to put together. The money he won from the challenge is expected to go towards purchasing a 3D printer to create new parts for his prototype and the rest will go towards the integration of the fingerprint scanner.

We should point out that there have been concepts and prototypes of guns with fingerprint security in the past, so safe to say this isn’t the first, but it’s still a worthy effort for the youngster.

Posted by
Read More

Politician's Fingerprint 'cloned from photos' by Hacker...

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:40

Mr. Krissler provided details of his technique at a convention in Hamburg.
A member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hacker network claims to have cloned a thumbprint of a German politician by using commercial software and images taken at a news conference.

Jan Krissler says he replicated the fingerprint of defence minister Ursula von der Leyen using pictures taken with a "standard photo camera".

Mr Krissler had no physical print from Ms. Von der Leyen.

Fingerprint Biometrics are already considered insecure, experts say.

Mr. Krissler, also known as Starbug, was speaking at a convention for members of the CCC, a 31-year-old network that claims to be "Europe's largest association" of hackers.

'Wear gloves'

He told the audience he had obtained a close-up of a photo of Ms von der Leyen's thumb and had also used other pictures taken at different angles during a press event that the minister had spoken at in October.

Mr. Krissler has suggested that "politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public" after hearing about his research.

Fingerprint identification is used as a security measure on both Apple and Samsung devices, and was used to identify voters at polling stations in Brazil's presidential election this year, but it is not considered to be particularly secure, experts say.
German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen's fingerprint was cloned just from photos, the hacker claims.

Living Biometrics

"Biometrics that rely on static information like face recognition or fingerprints - it's not trivial to forge them but most people have accepted that they are not a great form of security because they can be faked," says cybersecurity expert Prof Alan Woodward from Surrey University.

"People are starting to look for things where the biometric is alive - vein recognition in fingers, gait [body motion] analysis - they are also biometrics but they are chosen because the person has to be in possession of them and exhibiting them in real life."

In September this year Barclays bank introduced finger vein recognition for business customers, and the technique is also used at cash machines in Japan and Poland.

Electronics firm Hitachi manufactures a device that reads the unique pattern of veins inside a finger. It only works if the finger is attached to a living person.

Trials in the intensive care unit at Southampton General Hospital in 2013 indicated that vein patterns are not affected by changes to blood pressure.

Posted by
Read More

Apple Now Allows European Customers Up To 14 Days To Return A Digital Purchase 'Without Giving Any Reason,' And That Could Spell Trouble For App Developers.

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:23

iTunesEuropean users will essentially be able to "sample" iTunes content for 14 days.

Apple has a new return and refund policy, and it could spell trouble for app developers.

Thanks to Apple's new 14-day, no questions asked return policy for iTunes and App Store purchases in the EU, it's now incredibly easy for people to get a refund. The new policy could also lead to people "sampling" purchases only to return them shortly after.

Apple used to offer refunds on purchases up "until delivery of the product has started," but Apple's new refund policy in the UK, France, Italy, and Germany allows customers up to 14 days to ask for a refund "without giving any reason," according to 9to5Mac.

Here's the wording of Apple's new return policy, which essentially lets anyone sample an iTunes or App Store purchase and return it two weeks later.

Right of cancellation: If you choose to cancel your order, you may do so within 14 days from when you received your receipt without giving any reason, except iTunes Gifts which cannot be refunded once you have redeemed the code.

So why did Apple make the change?

It looks like Apple is complying with a recent consumer rights directive specific to Europe that requires a "14-day right or withdrawal period" for goods and service sold in the EU.

This two-week return window could become a headache for app developers, however, as customers would be within their rights to download and try an app for thirteen days, only to to return it for a full refund on the fourteenth "without giving any reason."



Posted by
Read More

Samsung Galaxy A7 Leaked!

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:00

The Samsung Galaxy A7, a smartphone that has gone through whatever that the FCC has thrown in its direction, and passed with flying colors, is all set for a release, but before that happens, how about enjoying a leak for one last time? After all, it makes perfect sense in this day and age to see more and more leaks emerge, taking into consideration the kind of hardware that we have that allows us to capture images discreetly. Having said that, the Samsung Galaxy A7 has been spotted in three different model names – and they are the SM-A700S, SM-A700K, and SM-A700L.

Just what else do we know about the Samsung Galaxy A7 before holding one of them officially in our hands? For starters, this handset will run on Android 4.4.4 KitKat, where it comes with a chassis that measures all of just 6.3mm thin, tipping the scales at 140 grams. The Super AMOLED screen itself measures 5.13″ in size at 1080 x 1920 resolution, while it runs on an octa-core 1.5GHz processor which in all probability, would be a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset.

Apart from that, it is tipped to arrive with 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a microSD memory card slot for expansion purposes, a 5MP selfie camera with a 13MP shooter at the back, a 2,500mAh battery, LTE, VoLTE, DMB (Korea-only), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS support.

Posted by
Read More

Samsung Galaxy Grand Max Spotted!

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
14:55

Samsung of South Korea can be said to be extremely adept at rolling out smartphones – plenty of smartphones actually, with a different model for a different need, hoping to suit all budgets at all times. I must say that the company has more or less been successful in this particular aspect, and hence, it is no surprise to hear that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Grand Max has been spotted in the wild, where it does seem to shape up to be a mid-range handset. 

However, if there is one particular aspect of the Samsung Galaxy Grand Max that you ought to consider, it would be this – there is no Android 5.0 Lollipop available right out of the box, but this particular software update should very well be in the pipeline in the near future.

Sporting more plastic than metal which signals a lack of class as opposed to the more premium handsets that are in the market, the Samsung Galaxy Grand Max will feature a 5.24″ screen size at 720p HD resolution, which certainly isn’t going to impress anyone. Then again, this is a mid-range smartphone, so one cannot really expect too much from it, right? Apart from that, it will run on a quad-core 1.2GHz processor, accompanied by 1.5GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a microSD memory card slot, and a thickness of 7.9mm for its chassis.

Posted by
Read More
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )