Hasta La Gadget!

It’s hard out there for a prez, you know? Hardly anyone knows better than one Barack Obama, who sat down this morning on ABC’s The View in order to talk smack with a few ladies who undoubtedly helped put him in office. If you’ll recall, Obama fought hard early on for the privilege of maintaining his prized BlackBerry, and while he eventually won out, we learned today that a grand total of ten individuals are authorized to ping it. Yeah, ten. Needless to say, he described that depressing fact as “no fun,” and even the folks that are cleared to make contact with it won’t send over anything juicy. Why? They know that messages sent to it “will probably be subject to the presidential records act,” so those lucky enough to have the digits are also smart enough to divert their ramblings to Texts From Last Night. But hey, at least hanging in there despite the limitations grants you early access to BlackBerry OS 6, right? Right?

Obama says presidential BlackBerry ownership is ‘no fun,’ should’ve gone with the Sectera Edge originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Copy protection has always been a concern in the Android Market, primarily because applications can be sideloaded onto phones without a root or other modification from the end user. In a brief announcement made today, Eric Chu has made clear that a new method for protecting the work of paid app creators will be implemented long-term, with the plan being to “replace the current Android Market copy-protection mechanism over the next few months.” This new “licensing service” is available now for those that want in, providing developers with a secure mechanism that can ping a Market License Server upon launch in order to see if a particular app was indeed purchased legitimately. It’s hard to say how exactly this will affect usability (specifically in offline scenarios), but it’s certainly an interesting twist to the whole situation. Expect to hear lots of growling on both sides as more and more apps opt to take advantage.

[Thanks, Jonathan]

New ‘licensing service’ replacing existing copy protection method in Android Market originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yeah, we know that the Prez was once seen rocking a Verizon-branded BlackBerry 8830, but just bend your mind a bit and bear with us. Shortly after lighting up Wall Street with an exceedingly excellent quarterly earnings report, AT&T has announced an Encrypted Mobile Voice service that’ll hit later in the year. Assuming Obama actually does own an AT&T-branded ‘Berry, he’ll soon be able to enjoy what AT&T calls “the first mobile-to-mobile voice encryption solution using two-factor authentication offered by a US operator.” Said service is expected to provide a higher level of security for calls across the AT&T wireless network, and naturally, it’ll be shopped to government agencies, law enforcement organizations, financial services institutions and international businesses, all of which will pay far too much for what’s likely a false sense of security. We mean, haven’t these guys ever seen 24?

AT&T Encrypted Mobile Voice to bring extra security to Obama’s BlackBerry calls originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cisco and company, you’ve got approximately seven days before a security researcher rains down exploits on your web-based home router parade. Seismic’s Craig Heffner claims he’s got a tool that can hack “millions” of gateways using a new spin on the age-old DNS rebinding vulnerability, and plans to release it into the wild at the Black Hat 2010 conference next week. He’s already tested his hack on thirty different models, of which more than half were vulnerable, including two versions of the ubiquitous Linksys WRT54G (pictured above) and devices running certain DD-WRT and OpenWRT Linux-based firmware. To combat the hack, the usual precautions apply — for the love of Mitnick, change your default password! — but Heffner believes the only real fix will come by prodding manufacturers into action. See a list of easily compromised routers at the more coverage link.

Researcher will enable hackers to take over millions of home routers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do you trust your government? Do you just support it like an obedient Britney Spears, steadfast to your faith that it will do the right thing? Your answer to those questions will almost certainly predict your response to a Wall Street Journal exposé of a classified US government program provocatively dubbed, “Perfect Citizen.” Why not just call it “Big Brother,” for crissake! Oh wait, according to an internal Raytheon email seen by the WSJ, “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother,” adding, “The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security.”

Histrionics aside, according to the WSJ, the “expansive” program is meant to detect assaults on private companies and government agencies deemed critical to the national infrastructure. In other words, utilities like the electricity grid, air-traffic control networks, subway systems, nuclear power plants, and presumably MTV. A set of sensors deployed in computer networks will alert the NSA of a possible cyber attack, with Raytheon winning a classified, $100 million early stage contract for the surveillance effort. Now, before you start getting overly political, keep in mind that the program is being expanded under Obama with funding from the Bush-era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. The WSJ also notes that companies won’t be forced to install the sensors. Instead, companies might choose to opt-in because they find the additional monitoring helpful in the event of cyber attack — think of Google’s recent run-in with Chinese hackers as a potent example.

Like most citizens, we have mixed emotions about this. On one hand, we cherish our civil liberties and prefer to keep the government out of our personal affairs. On the other, we can barely function when Twitter goes down, let alone the national power grid.

Filed under: Internet

Perfect Citizen: secret NSA surveillance program revealed by WSJ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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