With the starting price of a Surface Pro 3 hovering around the $800.00 mark, it is important to do what you can to protect it. A screen protector is a good start and can be found for a fairly low price.

However, not all screen protectors are equal. They may do some things well, but create issues for you in other areas. The Tech Armor anti-glare screen protector for the Surface Pro 3 is a great example. Upon early investigation, it seemed like a real winner, only to end up having one fatal flaw.

The popular and critically acclaimed puzzle game won the “Grand Prix” prize for best mobile game of 2014 on Tuesday night as part of the 11th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards.

Monument Valley, from the London-based team ustwo, won the prize during a ceremony held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Over 1,000 games were submitted for consideration in the various categories. With the exception of the People’s Choice Award, the winners are selected by a group of judges that come from both the game development and journalism industries.

Here are the other winners in the 11th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards:

• Excellence in Innovation — Bounden
• Best Quickplay Game — Crossy Road
• Guilty Pleasure — 2048
• Best Meaningful Play — Papers, Please
• Excellence in Storytelling — 80 Days
• Excellence in Gameplay — Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
• Best Technical Achievement — Vainglory
• Excellence in Audio Visual Art & Design — Tengami
• Best Multiplayer Game — Soccer Physics
• Best Upcoming Game — Prune
• Honorable Mention — Threes!
• People’s Choice — Vainglory

Source: IMGA

“FREAK Attack” is an SSL/TLS vulnerability disclosed by researchers on March 3, 2015 that can be exploited to force browsers into a weaker encryption state.

Attackers can theoretically use FREAK Attack to intercept what should be a secure HTTPS connection — the one with the lock icon in the address bar — and downgrade the encryption to “export-grade”, which is much easier to crack. Safari, both on OS X and iOS, among other browsers, can be susceptible to FREAK Attacks, but Apple is aware of the exploit and moving swiftly to patch it:

“We have a fix in iOS and OS X,” an Apple spokesperson told iMore, “that will be available in software updates next week.”

FREAK Attack stands for “Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys”. The vulnerability has apparently existed for a decade but was only recently discovered and disclosed by researchers. According to the FREAKAttack.com:

A connection is vulnerable if the server accepts RSA_EXPORT cipher suites and the client either offers an RSA_EXPORT suite or is using a version of OpenSSL that is vulnerable to CVE-2015-0204. Vulnerable clients include many Google and Apple devices (which use unpatched OpenSSL), a large number of embedded systems, and many other software products that use TLS behind the scenes without disabling the vulnerable cryptographic suites.

Here’s what website administrators should do:

If you run a web server, you should disable support for any export suites. However, instead of simply excluding RSA export cipher suites, we encourage administrators to disable support for all known insecure ciphers (e.g., there are export cipher suites protocols other than RSA) and enable forward secrecy.

They also include a list of websites, some of the internet’s largest, known to be vulnerable at the time of the reporting.

The weaker, 512-bit encryption, is called “export-grade” due to a U.S. policy, which ended in the 1990s, that once prohibited the export of strong encryption. It highlights the inherent problem with government demands for lower levels of security and “back doors”: Security is only ever as strong as its weakest point. The Wachington Post:

The [FREAK Attack] problem illuminates the danger of unintended security consequences at a time when top U.S. officials, frustrated by increasingly strong forms of encryption on smartphones, have called for technology companies to provide “doors” into systems to protect the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance.

Matthew D. Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptographer who helped investigate the encryption flaw, said any requirement to weaken security adds complexity that hackers can exploit. “You’re going to add gasoline onto a fire,” said Green. “When we say this is going to make things weaker, we’re saying this for a reason.”

In other words, doors open. It’s what they’re designed to do.

We’ll let everyone know as soon as the iOS and OS X patches are live.

Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom have entered an agreement to push Microsoft’s Lumia devices, as well as the company’s online services like Office 365. The new marketing push will appear across Europe, in all of Deutsche Telekom’s markets, including Austria, Germany, Greece, and Poland.

The Android smartphone will soon be available in all European countries with this newly announced sales expansion.

Developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda Softworks announced plans today to release Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, a stand alone prequel to their acclaimed 2014 first person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order. The game will launch May 5 for the Xbox One, among other platforms, for $19.99.

The Apple Watch is once again being shown off in the pages of a fashion magazine, this time China’s Yoho.

Apple’s upcoming wearable continues its pre-launch media campaign, this time with Apple Watch Sport on the cover and a feature inside the April issue of Yoho.

Other recent Apple Watch appearances include the U.S. and French edition of Vogue and Hong Kong’s East Touch.

Apple is holding a “Spring Forward” event event on March 9, where they are expected to unveil more information about the Apple Watch.

Via: AppleInsider

Your Galaxy S6 won’t have to look like everyone else’s, that is if you can find a theme that fits your style.

Most of the criticism surrounding Samsung’s software is about the looks more than the functionality, but with the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge Samsung is giving users the ability to quickly and easily change the look of TouchWiz. Usually reserved to those who want to root their phones or use various other tricks and third-party apps, theming is now baked into the software on the latest Samsung flagships. It isn’t as complete or tweakable as some may want, but it offers more customization than any previous version of TouchWiz did.

The UK carrier will give consumers a chance to buy the the new 5.5-inch smartphone with a 24 month contract.

The Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL have been announced this week at MWC 2015, and they come with a newer version of Windows Phone 8.1. Other Windows Phone users are probably going to see the new features in an update called Windows Phone 8.1 GDR2. The changes are subtle, but make life a little easier. We’ve noticed the settings page received some changes, including the ability to pin individual settings to the Start screen. Watch our hands-on video to see it in action.