Today, San Francisco-based Zimperium unveiled its zIPS Android app (the “IPS” stands for “intrusion prevention system”), which the company says uses machine learning to watch how your smartphone normally acts and can spot strange changes in its usage, enabling it to detect and prevent attacks, including those that may strike via unprotected Wi-Fi networks.
via App Pays Attention to Phone’s Behavior to Spot New Malware | MIT Technology Review.
In June, Snapchat raised $60 million from investors including Institutional Venture Partners; that round valued the company at $800 million.
Three months later, Snapchat said its usage had nearly doubled, to 350 million messages or “snaps” per day, up from 200 million in June.
via Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook – Digits – WSJ.
As far as anyone on the outside can tell, this is their sole business model: leveraging patents not to build competitive products, but simply to strong-arm others into forking over money when they create something that stumbles into the broadly worded language of the intellectual property protections.
via ‘Patent trolls’ put brakes on S.F. transit app – SFGate.
He was confident the patents in question were bogus, loose legalese describing obvious ideas. Moreover, the service that he received his data from, NextBus, already had a license to use those patents.
Their systems had been made crawl-able by search engines – meaning they show up in search results — and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.
via When ‘Smart Homes’ Get Hacked: I Haunted A Complete Stranger’s House Via The Internet – Forbes.
At some point it will occur to you that keeping 30MB buffers open to display a photo thumbnail is a really bad idea, so you will introduce 6) the buffer that is going to hold a smaller photo suitable for display in the next screen, 7) the buffer that resizes the photo in the background because it is too slow to do it in the foreground. And then you will discover that you really need five different sizes, and thus begins the slow descent into madness. It’s not uncommon to hit memory limits dealing just with a single photograph in a real-world application.
Encrypted calls for Android
RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.
Rambler, created by William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly, is a web app that lets users view their credit and debit card transactions on a map. During the dev process, the team tapped the Foursquare API for locations and the Plaid API to access user spending data.
This is an interesting science project. The security implications however would cause me to steer clear of this app entirely. I don’t understand what benefit anyone would gain from using this app and this is the grand prize winner.
After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet.
If they’re that close to you why not just talk to them the old fashioned way? And my favorite:
A project at our Disrupt Hackathon called “Bar Power” is an app that will remind you to “not be a douchebag.” It’s somewhat of a game, walking you through nice things to do when you enter a bar. For example, the app will suggest that you say “hi” to the bartender and introduce yourself. If you do it and mark it down in the app, you get some karma points.
Perhaps they should consider a little less coding/hacking and a little more focus on requirements. My favorite comment about the above app:
BREAKING: Yahoo just acquired it for $300 million.
The app used the near field communication (NFC) antenna built into the Galaxy SIII phone, a feature available on many phones running Google’s Android operating system. The antenna is normally used to allow two phones to talk to each other.
via Smartphones easily used to skim credit card data – Manitoba – CBC News.
We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button.
It’s a whole new inbox.
via Mailbox – Put Email In Its Place.
Who would have thought a company could arise out of good old email? According to this article this mailbox app has added 1.25 million people while processing 50M messages per day (i.e. ~40 emails per user). I wonder what percentage of that are old fashioned spammers and name squatters?
After a bit of panic, we realized that we could work around this problem by breaking our app into multiple dex files, using the technique described here, which focuses on using secondary dex files for extension modules, not core parts of the app..
via How Facebook dug deep within Android to fix its mobile app | Ars Technica.