Friday, March 29, 2013

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iPhone is the most hackable mobile device

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 03:44 AM PDT

For years, Mac lovers could smugly poke fun at Windows users and their disease ridden PCs. Apple was much safer they claimed, and they were right. However, Apple gear wasn't safer because it was designed to be safer, it just wasn't as popular and hackers couldn't be bothered coming up with exploits for a platform used by a handful of enthusiasts.

After Apple regained its footing, it soon drew the attention of nefarious characters. Apple's iOS boom was closely followed by hackers and as a result the iPhone is now the most hackable mobile device by far.

According to web security outfit Sourcefire, the iPhone is plagued by 210 Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), reports ZDNet. In contrast, Google's Android has just 24, while Windows Phone and Blackberry have 15 and 11 respectively. Coincidentally that is also the number of Windows Phone and Blackberry exclusive apps.

The report found that the vast popularity of iOS devices has a lot to do with the abysmal results.

Researchers also noted that Android received fewer CVEs in 2012 than it did in 2011, despite the fact that its market share is growing faster than the Greek deficit. 

US Navy wants to take out drones with lasers

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 03:24 AM PDT

The US Navy has a long tradition of knocking things out of the sky and ever since the Imperial Japanese Navy decided to engage in mass "tokko" suicide attacks, and it has been thinking about new ways to shoot down anything that doesn't have some stars and stripes on it.

Practically every warship deployed by the US Navy over the past few decades features Phalanx CIWS turrets and a number of point defence missiles, specifically designed to bring down sea skimming anti-ship missiles. However, such systems tend to be quite bulky and expensive. Using an ESSM or RIM-116 missile to shoot down a tiny drone is out of the question, as a single RIM-116 costs $440,000.

In addition, marine units that hit the beach cannot rely on ship borne defences, so they would be exposed to enemy drones, which are difficult to intercept. With that in mind, the Navy is now offering cash to private outfits to develop laser systems, small enough to be fitted on top of a Humvee.

The entire system should weigh less than 2,500 pounds and it will feature a 25 to 50 kilowatt laser, Wired reports. Since most drones are incredibly light and built using materials that don't react well to heat, the idea should work.

However, it is rather ambitious. Powering a 25 kilowatt laser on top of a small truck sounds like a tall order. Wired reports that even small ships have trouble generating enough power for 100 kilowatt lasers. A small system installed on a Humvee would probably need to rely on an external source of power, or it would need at least 20 minutes to recharge between shots.

This means that any enemy with more than one drone has a good chance of penetrating the defences, while marines rush to recharge the laser. 

Sprint catches "reds under the beds"

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 02:08 AM PDT

The new McCarthyism which is infecting Washington at the moment has caused Sprint to dump the Chinese phone making equipment maker Huawei.

Despite the fact that US allies use Huawei and its security appears to be on a par with other telecom gear makers out there, the former British colony of Virginia is trying to get it banned.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Sprint promised him they will not buy telecommunications equipment from the Chinese company Huawei.

Rogers is making a name for himself by claiming that the Chinese government could use Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment maker, to tap into US communications networks and spy on people in the United States.

As we reported yesterday, Rogers has managed to get a ban against Chinese manufacturers getting government contracts, but in this case it looks like he is pressuring even private companies.

The evidence for this is that the company's CEO Ren Zhengfei was once a member of the Chinese military two decades ago.

Rogers said that he had also managed to spoil a deal between SoftBank and Sprint. Softbank uses a lot of Huawei gear in its Clearwire network which Sprint says will be replaced. Federal regulators had been sniffing around the deal and it seems that that the promise to dump Huawei will make them go away.

Rogers added that he was pleased with Sprint's mitigation plans, and he will be continuing to look at ways to improve the government's existing authorities to thoroughly review all the national security aspects of proposed transactions.

In other words he is using "security considerations" to ban everything made which is branded by Chinese companies.

Huawei was tarred and feathered by the US Intelligence Committee after it failed to provide detailed information about their ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Part of the problem was that Huawei does not have any ties to the Chinese Communist Party; in fact its CEO was banned from party membership. Huawei has insisted that the report's claims are baseless.

Bill Plummer, a spokesperson for Huawei, said the company hasn't been involved in the review of the Sprint-Softbank deal. He warned that pressuring Sprint to promise not to partner with Huawei would "set a nasty protectionist precedent that could be used against American companies in other markets".

He pointed out to the Hill that given that all suppliers rely on common global supply chains and are subject to common vulnerabilities, it would seem unlikely that any government would blackball any one supplier because that government would know full well that this would do absolutely nothing to address security concerns.

Plummer added that the US approach was a market-distorting political, protectionist exercise and one that would require American telecommunications carriers and consumers to sacrifice world-leading technology, innovative, competitive and affordable broadband, as well as jobs and inward investment. 

Court reveals how US spooks spy on mobile users

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 01:56 AM PDT

A US court is looking at whether the US government's use of a "Stingray" surveillance device was right.

The case, the United States v. Rigmaiden, is being closely watched and according to the watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation leaves the government with some explaining to do.

"Stingray" is the brand name of an International Mobile Subscriber Identity locator, or "IMSI catcher". It acts as a fake mobile phone tower which sits in a van outside a person's house, allowing the government to route all network traffic to the fake tower.

The EFF does not like Stingray because they can obtain the contents of electronic and wire communications while necessarily sucking down data on scores of innocent people along the way.

Daniel David Rigmaiden is charged with a variety of tax and wire fraud crimes, but the spooks could not pinpoint Rigmaiden's precise location within an apartment building.

The FBI obtained a court order to force Verizon to help the agents pinpoint the physical location of a wireless broadband access card and mobile phone they believed Rigmaiden was using.

However, the government did not just get Verizon to give it the data. It also used a Stingray device to find Rigmaiden, and got its paws on a lot of other data from other electronic devices in the complex as well, which it deleted.

Rigmaiden claimed that the Stingray evidence was a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But the EFF pointed out that the warrant only mentioned Verizon and did not allow for Stingray to be used.

The fact that it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a "general warrant," the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent, the EFF said. 

Apple fanboys lose out in China

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 01:51 AM PDT

Despite an internet campaign to pressure the Chinese government to overlook Apple's dubious warranty practices, it looks like Apple fanboys behind the bamboo curtain will have to be protected from the company after all.

China Central Television ran a story pointing out that Apple operated a policy about the replacement of phones in China which it did not do elsewhere in the world. Basically if a phone broke, Apple would fix it rather than replace it. The warranty period was also much shorter.

Immediately after the story broke, Apple fanboys rushed to the web to attack the programme, mostly over how it marketed itself using celebrity advertising. They were joined by many in the press who reported the fanboy campaign, but not the dodgy warranty claims.

Now it seems all that has come to naught. According to Reuters, Apple has now had a chunk taken out of its iRump by a Chinese marketplace regulator, which called for stronger supervision of the outfit.

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce urged authorities to protect consumers' rights in accordance with the law. The notice mentions Apple but stops short of specifying what exactly they need to go after and how to do so.

While the Apple fanboy campaign was reported in the West, in China other media outlets have since taken up the baton, focusing on the company's warranty policy on Mac laptops, which is much shorter than in other countries.

The Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily, ran an editorial earlier this week attacking Apple for its "unparalleled arrogance".

Apple insists that its warranty policies were roughly the same worldwide with specific adjustments to adhere to Chinese law. However, this is clearly not the case. In Europe, Apple has been fighting to keep its one year warranty in the face of stiff EU criticism. In Italy it has been forced to double the length of its warranty period and it is likely it will have to do so in other European countries. 

Intel needs an extra ARM licence

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 01:49 AM PDT

Chipzilla needs to stop mucking about and get itself an ARM licence so that it can push into the mobile market, claims, er, a co-founder of ARM.

Robin Saxby, a co-founder of ARM, at the GSA Entrepreneurship Conference at the British Museum, channelled the late Kenneth Williams and told Intel to stop messing about.

Years ago, Intel offered StrongARM and Xscale microprocessors based on ARMv4 and ARMv5 instruction-sets, but flogged off that division to Marvell Semiconductor in mid-2006.

At the time Chipzilla thought that ARM architecture was not scalable enough in terms of performance. While it turned out ARM was scalable, its power consumption increased along with performance. Intel did not think that the ARMv8 64-bit architecture will only be insignificantly more power-efficient than comparable x86 offerings based on AMD Jaguar or Intel Silvermont.

Saxby said that AMD recently came to the ARM party and decided to develop server-class system-on-chips based on ARMv8, just like loads of other companies, including Applied Micro, Calxeda, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and many others. But Intel just does not want to be friends with ARM, he moaned.

Talking to Electronics Weekly, he said that ARM had to turn its enemies into friends, the only one it did not manage to turn was Intel.

"I recommend Intel to take an ARM licence and stop messing about," said Saxby. With a nice ARM licence, Intel could start building mobile chips around ARM cores, he added. A few years ago, Tudor Brown, a senior ARM executive, told us that Intel has several licences, something that Intel confirmed.

Of course this implies that Intel's own mobile chips are going nowhere. 

Atari boss said that companies found Jobs too difficult

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 01:43 AM PDT

The former creator of Atari has penned a book called Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent. It sounds like if you see one, cross the street or run away

According to the Mercury, Nolan Bushnell, who made computer games a viable industry, said that it is important for companies to find creative people and restrain themselves from smothering their creativity.

Bushnell hired Steve Jobs, who was 19 and by Bushnell's own definition "not a very pleasant fellow". Jobs could not find work with other companies because he was so unpleasant. Bushnell said that Steve was difficult but valuable. He was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that.

Bushnell is surprised at how well Jobs did and managed to not only become a top executive, but a celebrated technology visionary.

He said that there is something to be learned from a guy who was creative and a tosser.... er "unconventional". He thinks that there are lots of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today but corporate managers don't recognise them. If they do, they push them to conform rather than create.

Jobs aside, some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.

As an example of Jobs genius while working in Atari, after he returned to the company after trying to find himself in India, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in its machines. Jobs knew nothing about circuit board design and made a deal with Steve Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips.

Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, but made a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. Jobs lied to Woz and told him that Atari gave them only $700, instead of the $5,000 he collected, and gave him $350.57. It seems that even Jobs' former employers need to keep the myth alive that he was somehow a creative genius. 

US Homeland Security supremo is an email luddite

Posted: 28 Mar 2013 08:47 AM PDT

The US government's Homeland Security Tsar is so far out of touch with technology that she could be living on another planet in another dimension trying to play chess with Schrodinger's cat.

It is one thing to say, in this day and age, that you can't be bothered using a smartphone or a tablet, it is quite another to say you don't look at email.

According to the new Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, she doesn't use email because it is inefficient and "sucks up time".   She prefers to dial someone on a landline and talk to them for half an hour to pass the same amount of information on.

According to the Hill she thinks it is also super efficient to hire someone to open your email because you are technophobe and tell you what other people are saying.

Avoiding email "allows me to focus on where I need to focus," she growled. We guess that means that cyber-warfare will be off the agenda because if she does not think she needs to focus on her email chances are she will not think that electronic communication is something she needs to see either.

She apparently stopped using email in 2003 when she was the governor of Arizona and managed not to see one when she took over the DHS in 2009. So if you wondered why Homeland Security think it is great security to check your shoes and take your belt off before you board a plane, you know where these wizard ideas come from.

Napolitano said her email-less life also keeps her from being accused of seeing communications that may have come into her inbox.

"I also don't like the process where people could send you an email and then say, 'See, you were told.' Or, 'You know this.' And then it comes back two years later to say, 'Hey you got this email,'" she said.

Funny, in the communication age we call that sort of thing being an informed manager. 

Exynos 5 Octa outpaces Snapdragon 600

Posted: 28 Mar 2013 06:07 AM PDT

Samsung's first 28nm SoC, the Exynos 5 Octa, is apparently capable of outpacing Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 in AnTuTu, Geekbench 2 and Quadrant, the most popular Android benchmarks.

Sam Mobile put the new chip through its paces and came up with some interesting results. It scored 27617 on Antutu and 12726 on Quadrant. The reviewers said they were blown away by the results and frankly they are pretty impressive. The Exynos version seems to be a bit faster than the Snapdragon 600 version, let alone previous generation A9-based SoCs.

It should be noted that the Snapdragon 600 version seems quite competitive in its own right. In Geekbench 2 it scores 3163, ahead of the HTC One with 2687 and LG Nexus 4 with 2040 points. There's a simple explanation though, the Snapdragon 600 in the S4 is clocked at 1.9GHz, which is 200MHz more than in the HTC One. Firmware and OS differences should be taken into account as well.

Although Samsung's first big.LITTLE SoC sounds like a winner, we also need to look at the big picture. Most Galaxy S4s will be shipped with Qualcomm's LTE enabled Snapdragon 600. Samsung's quasi octa-core doesn't have LTE on board and it wasn't ready in time for the S4 launch.

In other words, it might be faster, but many consumers won't be able to get one. 
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