Friday, November 1, 2013

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Google releases KitKat android

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:26 AM PDT

Google has unveiled the newest version of its Android smartphone software.

Dubbed "KitKat" the new version of Android will be able to run on inexpensive, low-end smartphones as well as the most advanced devices.

Sundar Pichai, Google Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Apps said at a press event in San Francisco that it is possible to have one version of the operating system which will run across all versions of Android smartphones.

This means that smartphones which are sold in "emerging markets" can run the newer software.

As far as Google is concerned this means that more users have access to the growing selection of profitable online services. It will also answer those third-party app developers, who have been frustrated by what they call the "fragmented" nature of Android.

More than a third of Android smartphones in operation as of October 2 feature the "Gingerbread" version of the operating system which was introduced in December 2010.

This uses an elderly Web browser and does not support Google Now, a sort of personal digital assistant technology that automatically provides relevant information about a person's  calendar, weather and travel plans.

The new KitKat version of Android integrates Google search technology directly into the phone in various ways. The phone's contact list allows people to find phone numbers of their personal acquaintances as well as of local businesses, such as restaurants and dry cleaners.

The first device to feature the KitKat software will be the Nexus 5 phone built by LG, and will be available in 10 countries without a contract for $349. 

Google sees jump in Google+ membership

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:06 AM PDT

It appears that people are finally using their Google+ accounts.

The search engine outfit is reporting a 58 percent jump in users since May.

Vic Gundotra, head of social notworking at Google, said Google+ has 300 million monthly active users, up from 190 million in May.

It is not just that they have signed up either, Google+ members who have interacted socially with any of Google's services in the past 30 days total 540 million, up from 390 million in May, he added.

Google is also uploading 1.5 billion photos per week, and that number is increasing.

For years Google+ has been Facebook's poor red-headed step sister. It entered the market in 2011 after social notworking was well established. Facebook has more than one billion monthly active users.

The key to developing the site is the fact that Google+ helps the search engine identify and authenticate users across all its services, including search, Gmail and YouTube.

This means that Google can target adverts at punters better. Quite why that would draw more users to the site appears to be the somewhat mixed up view of the Google marketers. After all, few people will go to Google+ because they get a more targeted advert.

However, Gundotra suggested a more plausible explanation – people like to share videos and pictures and Facebook's method really is not up to snuff. 

Facebook wants to track cursor movements

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 02:05 AM PDT

Social notworking site Facebook seems to think that it has not been hitting the headlines enough for invading consumers privacy.

With all this Snowden and Prism stuff, Facebook's invasions of privacy appear to have been forgotten by everyone, other than the relevant department of the European Union.

According to the Wall Street Journal, to remedy the problem, Facebook is testing software which will monitor its users' cursor movements.

Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Facebook may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content. This will mean that it will gather information about long a user's cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user's newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone,.

Captured information would be stored in a data analytics warehouse that will make sure that you get targeted adverts based on what you hover your cursor over the most.

Tests are going on and part of a broader technology testing programme, but Facebook should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business.

New types of data Facebook may collect include "did your cursor hover over that ad ... and was the newsfeed in a viewable area," Rudin said.

Rudin comes from the online game outfit Zynga and his job is to make sure that Facebook uses all the data it can get its paws on.

Shutterstock records literally everything that its users do on the site and uses the open-source Hadoop distributed file system to analyse data such as where visitors to the site place their cursors and how long they hover over an image before they make a purchase.

Facebook is also a big fan of Hadoop and uses a modified version to manage its data.

What will be interesting is if Facebook manages to get away with its cunning plan, particular in the EU where some governments are particularly sensitive about the matter of data storage and personal privacy. 

All Souls Day marks the death of plasma

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:52 AM PDT

Panasonic chose the day of the dead to announce the death of its plasma production.

Unlike other TV outfits, Panasonic has been doing rather well lately thanks to a rigorous regime of restructuring and cold baths.

It had been expected that plasma production was for the chop. While the technology is still good, it needs another wave of investment and most of the future appears to be in other technology. It was also completely eclipsed by LCD.

According to Panasonic public financial statements, the company has lost more than $15 billion in the plasma TV business over the past two years.

Plasma TVs accounted for 40 percent of flat panel sales in 2010. In 2013, they are expected to account for just 2.5 percent.

Panasonic told investors today that its plasma TV business would be over by the end of March 2014 and it will be switching off plasma production lines starting from next month.

According to MarketWatch, Panasonic is in talks to sell one of its three plasma display factory buildings in western Japan with the other two remaining facilities also earmarked for a possible sale. 

Chrome blocks malware automatically

Posted: 01 Nov 2013 01:50 AM PDT

Search giant Google has expanded its Chroman empire by sending its legions into the world of Malware.

Google today announced Chrome is getting an automatic download blocking feature for malware. The new functionality has been shoved under the bonnet of the Chrome version Canary.

According to its bog, all versions of Chrome will soon automatically block downloads and let you know in a message at the bottom of your screen.

You will be able to "dismiss" the message if Google is wrong about the site, but it is not clear if you will be allowed to stop or revert the block.

Google said that criminals regularly try to trick users into installing and running malicious software by bundling it with free and sometimes fake screensavers, video plugins, or even supposed security updates.

In all these cases, Chrome is increasingly being targeted because its usage is growing.

The malicious programs often block your ability to change your settings back and make themselves hard to uninstall, keeping you trapped in an undesired state.

Google says Canary is "the most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds". Bleeding hell.

It looks like Google is serious about getting the feature into the Chrome. The fact that the software giant has actually announced it means that it will be headed there at some point, rather than disappearing as vapourware. 

Cyber terrorism didn't threaten Olympics

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 08:36 AM PDT

Although provisions were in place to prevent it, cyber terrorism was not a major concern at the London 2012 Olympics, according to  BT Security's CEO, Mark Hughes, with the majority of notable events being rudimentary DDOS attempts or financial fraud.

Hughes acknowledged that his company, in partnership with LOCOG, ran through worst-case scenarios for cyber terrorism during the London 2012 Olympics, including putting together provisions for the shutting down of major power networks. In addition, despite the over 200 million malicious incidents reported during the event, just 77 tickets required a human response from analysts.

When asked to define those 212 million events, Hughes described these to us as anything that could be flagged as a potential threat - from a single DDOS attempt to defacement. Necessary defences were built over seven years of preparation, it was asserted, while the London 2012 website was the most visited on the planet during the Games.

Hacktivism - such as loose collective Anonymous - may sit under the same umbrella as cyber terrorism itself, from the perspective of the security industry. Although Hughes referred to hacktivists in his keynote as teenagers trying to change the world from their bedrooms, he recognises that rather than the phenomena being on the wane, there is potentially a shift towards targeting financial institutions. There are different stratums of the 'hacktivist' that vary both in message and technological proficiency - and the first waves of public defacements or DDOS attacks could be planting seeds for something altogether new.

Over the course of the London 2012 Olympic games, there were "quite a few" DDOS attacks as well as unsophisticated DNS amplifications, and it was coming "from everywhere".

"The stuff we had to start dealing with was quite serious," Hughes said, "that potentially would have had service impact if the right controls weren't in place.".

Businesses shouldn't forget that hacktivism still exists. "It's not like that's gone away," Hughes said. "People who are very gifted individuals who want to have a go at something are still doing  that.

"That said, I think recently from some of the stuff we've seen, for example, the targets against the US banks, that's becoming a lot more sophisticated, not just as hacktivism but a lot more concerted," Hughes said. "I think the way I would characterise those attacks is there's becoming more financial motivation, I think there's evidence clearly about criminals becoming more sophisticated in using those types of tools now for financial gain".

Martin Brown, chief security portfolio architect at BT, said there are vastly different levels within hacktivism, from the technically proficient to people who simply want to get involved.

"Some of the hacktivist campaigns that have gone on over the last 18 months or so, and if you follow what's going on on Twitter and IRC, you have the core people who are evangelising their point of view on why they want to carry out their attacks," Brown said. "At the same time, you're seeing them package how-to instructions on installing and running LOIC, people asking how to set it up and if it can be run on Windows. There's different tiers taking place within this. There's different scenarios taking place, some are very capable, some are there to participate but don't know what they're doing".

Hughes distanced BT from culpability if malicious events did run on the company's infrastructure. "We have a huge consumer base in the UK, I'm sure there are people who buy DSL circuits from us with nefarious purposes, but they're the ones who are the motivated criminals - by us supplying services to our customers we enter that contract in good faith with our customers, and it's up to them whether they break the law or not.

Responding to TechWeekEurope's Tom Brewster about BT's collaboration with British spy agency GCHQ, Hughes responded first with an audible gulp, second by saying there are "commercial services that we will supply to any government department".
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