Hasta La Gadget!

One of the frustrating things experienced by law enforcement officials and agencies is trying to get into the phone of a suspect. This is because companies such as Apple and Google have made it so that only the users themselves know the passwords to their phones (assuming they use one), so even if they wanted to, they couldn’t unlock devices remotely.

Now it looks like Google has decided to extend that same level of security of Android backups, where they are now encrypting all of your phone’s backup and using your phone’s lockscreen password as the encryption key. This means that should law enforcement officials request data from your backup, Google will not be able to unlock it as the password will only be known by you, and in countries such as the US, there are laws that prevent people from incriminating themselves.

According to Google, “This decryption key is encrypted using the user’s lockscreen PIN/pattern/passcode, which isn’t known by Google. Then, this passcode-protected key material is encrypted to a Titan security chip on our datacenter floor. The Titan chip is configured to only release the backup decryption key when presented with a correct claim derived from the user’s passcode. Because the Titan chip must authorize every access to the decryption key, it can permanently block access after too many incorrect attempts at guessing the user’s passcode, thus mitigating brute force attacks.”

This seems to be an Android Pie feature which means that if your device has already been updated to Android Pie, then your Android backups should be protected by this new feature.

Android Pie Backups Now Encrypted With Your Lock Screen’s Password , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Bronx resident Raymond Deidesheimer saved the sweet feline from a potentially horrible fate.

Trump is supporting an “idol of white supremacy,” said Robert E. Lee IV.

The war for the countertop has begun. Google, Amazon and Facebook all revealed their new smart displays this month. Each hopes to become the center of your Internet of Things-equipped home and a window to your loved ones. The $149 Google Home Hub is a cheap and privacy-safe smart home controller. The $229 Amazon Echo Show 2 gives Alexa a visual complement. And the $199 Facebook Portal and $349 Portal+ offer a Smart Lens that automatically zooms in and out to keep you in frame while you video chat.

For consumers, the biggest questions to consider are how much you care about privacy, whether you really video chat, which smart home ecosystem you’re building around and how much you want to spend.

• For the privacy obsessed, Google’s Home Hub is the only one without a camera and it’s dirt cheap at $149.
• For the privacy agnostic, Facebook’s Portal+ offers the best screen and video chat functionality.
• For the chatty, Amazon Echo Show 2 can do message and video chat over Alexa, call phone numbers and is adding Skype.

If you want to go off-brand, there’s also the Lenovo Smart Display, with stylish hardware in a $249 10-inch 1080p version and a $199 8-inch 720p version. And for the audiophile, there’s the $199 JBL Link View. While those hit the market earlier than the platform-owned versions we’re reviewing here, they’re not likely to benefit from the constant iteration Google, Amazon and Facebook are working on for their tabletop screens.

Here’s a comparison of the top smart displays, including their hardware specs, unique software, killer features and pros and cons:

Yes, Adobe Flash is still around, unfortunately, and that means it’s still used as a way to target unknowing users with malware. As you’d expect, the latest malware to gain attention disguises itself as an update to Flash to trick users into installing malicious software. This time around, the malware is a cryptocurrency mining bot that uses system resources to … Continue reading