Monday, 26 November 2012

With over a million downloads, Microsoft’s Bing translator app comes to Windows Phone 8

One of the most popular and useful mobile apps out there on the Windows Phone platform is the Bing Translator app. This free service combines augmented reality with the phone’s camera and speech & text translation, helping anyone better navigate the world. And now it’s available on the newest version of the Windows mobile operating system.

Starting today, those with Windows Phone 8 devices can download the app from the App Store marketplace and begin translating whatever they want until their heart’s content. The app uses a translator “lens” whenever you launch your camera, which will enable you to access the “camera mode translation functionality” easily. Seven different languages are supported, including German, American English, British English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the app:

There have been over a million downloads of this app before its release to Windows Phone 8 and will surely be added to the slew of new devices coming out on the market as more people (hopefully) use the devices.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

China blocks Google Search, Gmail and Drive

All Google domains locked down

China blocked all Google web domains throughout the country for long periods on Friday, the search giant has said.

Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive and all other web products were largely blacked out and, in a statement to Bloomberg and Reuters, Google said it had "checked and there's nothing wrong on our end."

Google's own Transparency Report website, which shows usage levels around the world, showed a sharp decline to Google sites in China on Friday. The country has censored Google before, during a stand-off in 2010, but has never taken the drastic step of blocking the popular Gmail email service too.The outage left countless users without access to email throughout the nation and could be a watershed moment for the issue of web censorship in China, according to one watchdog.

GreatFire.org posted on Twitter: "One step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet."

Protests

In an article on its own site, the group also wrote: "We've argued before that the authorities didn't dare to fully block Gmail since it has too many users already. Fully blocking Google goes much further. According to Alexa, it's the Top 5 most used website in China.

"Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website. If Google stays blocked, many more people in China will become aware of the extent of censorship. How will they react? Will there be protests?"

GreatFire.org also said that VPN servers (which allow users to circumnavigate in-country restrictions) have also been targeted.

Monday, 5 November 2012

Android 4.2 Comes with Higher Security Features!

When Android 4.2 came out we all raved with excitement. Now that it has been released to certain parties we are finding out even more goodies about the newly updated Jelly Bean! The newest? Android 4.2 has come with stronger security features and they are built right in, and I’m here to give you a breakdown of what it entails.

Jelly Bean’s App Scanner

It would appear that now when you install an app from the Google Play Store it gets scanned for any malware or “malicious code.” Now, even though there is now way to protect from every attack, this is definitely a foot in the right direction. If something malicious is detected, it won’t allow you to install the app. Pretty nifty hey?

Google released the following statements regarding their stance on security:

“We view security as a universal thing. Assuming the user wants this additional insurance policy, we felt like we shouldn’t exclude one source over another.”

“We have a catalog of 700,000 applications in the Play Store, and beyond that, we’re always scanning stuff on the Web in terms of APKs that are appearing. We have a pretty good understanding of the app ecosystem now, whether something’s in the Play Store or not.”

“The server does all the hard work. The device sends only a signature of the APK so that the server can identify it rapidly.”

Malware through Text

This feature will allow users to be prompted when they are about to send a text message. What does it prompt them about? It identifies if they number they are texting is called “premium number,” thus allowing the user to cancel the text if they wish. This could save you some money in the long run! If you’re wondering how, this is the scenario. An app you installed contains malware, the malware then “secretly” sends (without you knowing) “costly” text messages to “short numbers.”

New App Permissions

You can’t have new security features without getting an updated app permissions. Yes, that is right! This new and improved featured will now allow you to monitor the apps you install. Pretty neat feature hey? Gives a user’s a bigger sense of control I would think. As you can see from the images below, it gives you an idea of what Android 4.1 consisted of, and then what Android 4.2 will bring to the table.

ZTE-made Sprint Flash coming soon, packing a 4.5-inch screen, 12MP camera and 1.5GHz dual-core CPU for $130

We can’t blame you for forgetting about the ZTE Flash which we first caught at the end of July. The device is apparently launching soon, offering quite a bang for the buck.

The upcoming phone will be called Sprint Flash (rather than ZTE Flash), featuring a 4.5-inch screen (most likely 720p HD), 12-megapixel camera on the back, while dual-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz will run the show. Moreover, it is said that we should also expect preloaded Ice Cream Sandwich, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a 1,730mAh battery.

When it comes to the release date, the rumor is that Sprint will unveil the Flash during the first half of November, so it’s either next week or the week after that. Stay tuned as we bring you more…

Firefox Forces Secure HTTPS Connections for Some Domains

While HSTS has been supported since Firefox 4, Mozilla is now following Google's lead to implement a preloaded list of websites that are contacted using HTTPS by default:

"Our preload list has been seeded with entries from Chrome’s list of a similar function," wrote Mozilla's David Keeler in a blog post. "To build our preload list, a request is sent to every host. Only if a host responds with a valid HSTS header with an appropriately large max-age value (currently 10886400, which is eighteen weeks) do we include it in our list. We also see if the includeSubdomains value for the entry on Chrome’s list is the same as what we receive in the response header (if they do not match, we use the one we receive)."

The approach is designed to mitigate a potential vulnerability that would allow an attacker to prevent a browser from securely connecting to a site via HSTS. With forced HSTS, the browser will never connect to an included website via an insecure (HTTP) protocol.

Users of Google Chrome can go a step further and control individual sites via the interface at chrome://net-internals/#hsts, which enables users to add or delete HSTS websites.

Bling To Future