Hasta La Gadget!

Robocalls are a big problem in the United States and people are increasingly calling on the stakeholders involved to take concrete steps against them. AT&T and Comcast are taking a step in the right direction by announcing a partnership to combat robocalls. AT&T says that this partnership will strive to ensure an exchange of authenticated calls between the two providers’ voice networks, adding that this may be the first partnership of its kind in the country.

As a result of this partnership, AT&T and Comcast will be able to offer authentication on calls between networks to their customers later this year. This leaves the door open for customers to start seeing verified calls not only from those who use the same provider but also from other participating providers.

Tests have already conducted by these two providers between the AT&T Phone digital home service and Comcast’s Xfinity Voice home phone service. The tests were conducted on consumer networks and not in a lab on special equipment.

The system was able to successfully authenticate and verify calls using the SHAKEN/STIR protocol. It lets consumers know that an incoming call really is coming from the number that they see on the caller ID display. This will help prevent people from being tricked into picking up robocalls from spoofed numbers. It won’t end robocalls entirely but it’s a start.

AT&T And Comcast Team Up To Fight Robocalls , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

WhatsApp Business is not a part of the main app. It’s actually a separate version of WhatsApp that’s meant for businesses who want to communicate with their clients directly. It has already been available on Android for quite some time and is now being rolled out for iOS. A beta was first released for iOS devices last month.

According to WABetaInfo, the app was first spotted on the Mexican App Store and that reports have now come in from users in markets like France and Brazil who have been able to download WhatsApp Business for iOS on their devices and use it.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp first released its separate app aimed at businesses for Android devices in January 2018. The app allows businesses to reply to customers directly and also offers them additional tailored features which include greeting and away messages as well as being able to list opening times and addresses.

WhatsApp Business is also an important revenue stream for the company. Businesses can respond to customers for free within 24 hours of receiving a message but if they go beyond that limit, they have to pay. General users will also begin to see ads in the app’s Status feature in the not too distant future, as confirmed by a WhatsApp executive last year.

WhatsApp Business Now Rolling Out For iOS , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Facebook has more than a billion users across the globe and as you can imagine, ensuring the security of users’ personal information should be of paramount importance to a platform of its size. So you may not be thrilled to hear that the company stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plain text for years. They were searchable by thousands of Facebook employees, going as far back as 2012, according to KrebsOnSecurity. Facebook says an investigation is ongoing and so far it hasn’t seen any indications of employees abusing access to the data.

So how did this happen? The report mentions that a string of security failures took place in which employees develops applications which logged unencrypted password data for users and stored that in plain text files on internal servers. It quotes a senior Facebook employee who is familiar with the ongoing investigation.

The source added that the investigation indicates that between 200 million and 600 million users may have had their passwords stored in plain text. They were searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. Facebook is reportedly still trying to figure out how many passwords were exposed and for how long. Access logs show that around 2,000 engineers or developers made nearly nine million internal queries for data elements which contained plain text user passwords.

Scott Renfro, a Facebook software engineer, told the scribe that the company isn’t ready to give specific numbers about the number of users affected and the employees who could have accessed the data. Facebook does plan on alerting affected users but added that no password reset would be required.

“In this situation what we’ve found is these passwords were inadvertently logged but that there was no actual risk that’s come from this,” Renfro said. That doesn’t negate the point that many of the affected users will nevertheless not be thrilled that their passwords were so blatantly left unsecured.

Facebook Stored Hundreds Of Millions Of Passwords In Plain Text For Years , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

People in the United States really want the Federal Communications Commission and mobile carriers to do something about robocalls. They have become a nuisance with one report suggested that more than 26 billion robocalls are now being placed in the country annually. So it may be entirely unsurprising to see that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson got a robocall during a live interview.

Stephenson was at an Economic Club event in Washington yesterday when he received a robocall in front of dozens of audience members. Whether he actually did get robocalled or the entire episode was staged to highlight that AT&T is likely the first carrier to take an important step to combat robocalls, it just goes to show that no one is safe from such calls, not even the person who runs the country’s second largest mobile carrier.

The clip posted below shows Stephenson pausing during a discussion to look at his Apple watch which was notifying him about an incoming call. He told the audience “I’m getting a robocall, too… It’s literally a robocall.”

The timing is obviously suspect given that AT&T has announced a claimed first in the nation partnership with Comcast to make it harder for robocalls to spoof numbers. They expect the system to go live before the end of this year. It does drive the point home, though, something surely has to be done to better prevent robocalls from making people want to pull their hair out.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson gets a robocall while onstage at @TheEconomicClub. pic.twitter.com/i5llHj6hz2

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 20, 2019

AT&T CEO Got A Robocall During A Live Interview , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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