Did you manage to get yourself upgraded to BlackBerry OS 10.3.1 and hate the way you now have to take pictures? In previous versions of BlackBerry 10, you could tap anywhere in the camera app to take a picture but on 10.3.1 that’s no longer possible. You have to tap the dedicated shutter button in order to snap a picture now (or use the spacebar or volume keys) and while the changes were considered a feature improvement, some folks don’t feel that it’s an improvement at all.

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Hand crafted and finished in genuine leather with a soft inner lining, the BlackBerry leather pocket protects against bumps and scratches. It also recognizes settings and preferences, while power saving technology works to help extend battery life of your BlackBerry Q10. Yours today for only $9.95!

Another Sunday means it’s time for another BerryFlow Upstream. If you missed out on tuning in live, you can now catch the replay or download the audio below. This week we discuss the BlackBerry Leap coming to Vodafone for business users, BlackBerry 10 OS 10.3.1.2258, Open SSL Freak vulnerability and the pairing SecuSMART teaming up with Samsung and IBM for Highly Secure Tablet plus more.

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Facebook has revamped the social network’s community standards and guidelines to show what registered accounts can (and more importantly, cannot) share on the service.

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BlackBerry is now offering a new service called the BlackBerry Care Protection Plan. It offers extended hardware coverage for the BlackBerry Passport, the BlackBerry Classic and the new BlackBerry Leap to owners in North America.

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T-Mobile previously announced Data Stash for postpaid plans only, but now the un-carrier is bringing the same feature to prepaid customers too.

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Storing media requires more than just internal memory, especially when SD slots are available on various products. Amazon US currently has a sale under way where you could save up to 47% on SanDisk memory products for today only.

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** Note ** – This article was updated to reflect the release of .2582 which quickly came after post about the .2576 release. We’ve adjusted all links below to reflect the .2582 listings.

While last week saw the release of BlackBerry OS 10.3.1.2558, this week is already starting with a fresh push of OS 10.3.1.2582. The update has started arriving officially on some devices but like all releases these days, you don’t have to wait for the OTA. The files are available for download in the CrackBerry Forums that can be used to update using Sachesi plus, there is now several autoloaders for all devices that have been created.

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Don’t lose your Google info or Gmail archives to a password hack. Set up two-step authentication to protect your most important assets.

When it comes to data you want secured, your email accounts are probably close to the top of the list. Though email is technically an unencrypted medium, the average hacker might not go to too much trouble to grab a single message — but they’d love a peek at your history full of password resets, not to mention getting potential access to your bank accounts or other private information.

Strong passwords can help, but to be as secure as possible, you want to enable two-step authentication.

What is two-step authentication?

Two-step authentication is the most prevalent way to secure your accounts: It asks you to authenticate that you are who you say you are by supplying not only your password, but a unique code supplied from your phone or an external app. It ensures that those accessing your accounts have access to your physical devices as well as your virtual passwords, and makes a simple password crack or social engineering hack a lot more insufficient in actually accessing your personal data.

How to set up your Google account with two-step authentication

Google was one of the first companies to offer two-step authentication for its user accounts; the company even created an option for third parties who want to offer two-step support for their services called Google Authenticator. Companies like Facebook, Tumblr, and Dropbox all use Google’s service, as does Google itself.

As such, Google’s experience with two-step authentication makes it a remarkably simple process to set up. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Visit Google’s 2-Step Verification page and click on Get Started.
2. Enter your Google email and password (or just your password, if you’re already logged in to Google).
3. Click the Start setup button.
4. Add a phone number that Google can send the six-digit verification code to. (For semi-obvious reasons, this shouldn’t be your Google Voice number: If you use that phone number, you might end up locked out of your account.)

   

5. Verify your phone number by entering in the six-digit code Google sent you.

   

6. Choose whether or not to add your current computer as a trusted device.

   

7. Confirm that you wish to turn on two-step verification.

   

And you’re set! Google will now send your phone a six-digit code for any app that uses Google’s web interface to authenticate your account.

How to use Google Authenticator

If you don’t want codes sent via text message, you can also enable Google Authenticator; this allows you to receive a randomly-generated code from programs like Authy or 1Password or Google’s own authenticator.

You can use Google Authenticator for a slew of different services in addition to your Google Account; you just need to make sure they have code generation turned on. Each service has a slightly different way of enabling this, but in general you should find it under the Security section of your preferences.

Here’s the setup screen for your Google accounts:

When you click to enable code generation, you’ll be presented with a barcode; scan this with Authy, 1Password, or Google Authenticator to add the account.

Once you’ve added your account, use the code generated by your app of choice to activate two-step code generation back on the original service.

Enable per-app passwords

Though most third-party Mac apps that hook into Google’s services use the company’s web interface to authenticate your account, support for this on the system level for iOS and OS X isn’t quite there yet — though it is coming in iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3.

In the meantime, you don’t have to sacrifice your two-step security elsewhere until those updates come around: You can use your traditional username and password fields by generating one of Google’s per-app passwords. They’re not as secure as two-step authentication, but it guarantees that if someone breaks into that application, they’ll have a one-time password only good for that program and can’t get into your account on the web.

To access per-app passwords for your Google account, visit your Google account settings, then under the Signing in section, click on 2-Step Verification.

From there, select the App-specific passwords tab and click the Manage application-specific passwords button.

Once you’re in the management section, you can generate a new app-specific password for your application, or revoke passwords for any old applications you no longer use or that may have been compromised.

Although this release has been available since BlackBerry OS 10.3.1.2558 started rolling out, if you’ve not updated to that release or any version higher you can now officially update the BlackBerry Blend app for BlackBerry 10 to v1.1.0.67 from BlackBerry World. Hard to say what has changed though, as it looks like they used the same change log from a previous release.

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