New White House efforts help secure your payments
American banks and stores may already be planning to tighten your payment security, but the White House wants to give those efforts a boost. President Obama has signed an Executive Order that will require the federal government to both issue more secure chip-and-PIN (aka EMV) payment cards and upgrade terminals to match. This isn’t just for protecting day-to-day staff expenses — it also means that pensions, Social Security and veteran payments (all of which tend to go through official debit cards) should be safer. There should also be fewer risks when you’re buying from federal locations like national parks and the passport office.
Additional moves should improve protections against identity theft, whether or not you’re on the government’s dime. The order will have federal investigators share more of their evidence with companies when looking into data breaches. It will also refine IdentityTheft.gov to make it easier for you to report (and ideally, recover from) fraud, while partnerships with both Citi and MasterCard will respectively give account holders free monthly credit score updates and identity theft support. There’s only so much these new measures will do, especially when chip-and-PIN security won’t arrive in earnest until 2015, but it’s hard to object to better security.
Via: New York Times
Source: White House
Android 5.0 Lollipop’s “kill switch” only maims, not kill
It’s fairly safe to say that we’ve all got smartphones now. Perhaps more accurately, we can say that if you are reading this, it is very likely you own a smartphone. Though many of us cycle through mobile phones more often than we change wardrobes, we like to be the one to decide when we change phones. There are few things more annoying than being forced into a new phone because of breakage or theft.
Because more and more of our life data is kept on our phones now, thieves are working harder than ever to obtain our precious data. Software developers, phone manufacturers, and carriers should set ‘protecting user data’ near the top of their priority list.
One of the ways in which phones are protected is through the use of a ‘kill switch.’ Kill switches would basically give a phone owner the ability to either brick their phone (completely wipe the data), or lock down their phone at the press of a button. Locking it down would protect the user’s data, but not delete it, in the hopes the phone could be located and retrieved.
Users have been able to encrypt the data on their phones for some time. After going through a fairly lengthy encryption process, the data was protected, but only if a thief turned the phone off. When the phone was turned back on, the thief would need to know the password in order to complete the boot-up process. It’s a great feature, but not very many people turn their phones off before they get stolen, and thieves would just be sure to keep their stolen phones powered-up so they could wipe, reset, and resell them. Yeah, I know you set a 4-digit pass-code on your phone, but really, that’s as easy to crack as your glass screen.
Android 5.0 Lollipop introduced a couple features that will help in the case of theft, but there are some wholes that still need to be filled to protect user data.
- Encryption – As mentioned above, you’ve been able to encrypt your android phone for a while, but it’s been a manual process through the Security settings. With Android 5.0 Lollipop, encryption is turned on by default.
- Kill switch – Android 5.0 Lollipop introduces ‘Factory Reset Protection’ which is supposed to make stolen phones unusable. In this scenario, it would require a unique password (different than your 4-digit pass-code) to unlock the phone. Your data would still be on the phone, but thieves wouldn’t be able to access it, or perform a factory reset.
Users still have the ability to lock or erase their phone remotely using Android Device Manager.
If this isn’t enough to fulfill your security paranoia, there are always Google Play store apps to further protect your precious data.
What features do you think the next version of Android should have to protect user data?
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Here’s every device getting Android 5.0 Lollipop so far
If you’re a die-hard Android fan, you’re probably champing at the bit waiting for that Lollipop upgrade — when will you get it? Are you going to get it? Thankfully for you, a number of companies have already promised to upgrade some of their devices to this candy-flavored OS. Google’s Nexus 4, 5, 7 and 10 models are naturally first in line, as are Android One and Google Play Edition hardware; its outgoing Motorola brand is equally on top of things with plans to patch the Moto E, G and X alongside Verizon’s Droid Mini, Maxx and Ultra. HTC and OnePlus don’t have full details, but they’re both pledging to give their recent flagships a taste of Lollipop within 90 days of receiving finished code. NVIDIA and Sony, meanwhile, are being vague. While they’re respectively teasing plans to update the Shield Tablet and the Xperia Z series, they won’t say when just yet.
As for other manufacturers? Well, don’t hold your breath. LG tells TechRadar that it has nothing to say on “if / when” Lollipop will reach the G3, let alone older gear. The upgrade is likely coming, but the statement is far from reassuring. Mum’s the word from Samsung as well, although leaks show that a Lollipopped version of TouchWiz is in the works. It’s also reasonable to expect that relatively large brands like Acer, ASUS, Huawei and Xiaomi are on deck — just don’t be shocked if their older devices don’t make the cut.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Google, LG, NVIDIA
Via: TechRadar, MobileBurn
Source: HTC (Twitter), Motorola, Sony Mobile Blog
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