Swappa’s new full service app lets you buy and sell right from your phone

Your next Swappa experience will probably be through this app.

Folks who know how to get the best deal on selling their current phone to pay for their next one already know about Swappa. It’s the best service on the planet for quickly buying or selling phones, and one of the few experiences where the buying and selling process feels safe and friendly. Most of that is due to having a live support team to help deal with problems at all times, but it also helps that Swappa is focused on being a tech reselling service specifically.

Over the years Swappa has grown to support many different kinds of phones and tablets and Chromebooks, and has even acts as a third-party system for buying and selling VR hardware now, but it’s all done through the website. That’s fine if you’re at a desk, and works well enough if you’re using a mobile browser, but the new Swappa app really pulls the whole experience together on your phone.

If you’ve used Swappa before, the app won’t surprise you. Go to the carrier you’re interested in, swipe until you find the hardware configuration you want, and you can either look at existing listings to consider purchasing or create a new listing to see your tech. Creating a listing in the app is just as quick and thorough as it is on the website, making it so you can have your phone out there for people to buy within minutes. It’s simple, straightforward, and makes the case for never really needing to use the website for much anymore.

Grab Swappa from Google Play!

Google Pixel XL first impressions: MrMobile edition

Eight years after the first Android phone hit shelves, the Google Pixel is here to solidify the concept of the “Google phone.” Onboard: upgraded intelligence, heavily optimized software, and a camera that works with the gyroscope to produce insanely steady videos. From what Alex and Daniel are saying, it does a pretty bang-up job of redefining what an Android smartphone can be. But all that promise is wrapped up in a humdrum casing that looks unfinished at best and derivative at worst. What’s more, the $649 price tag means this first-gen product needs to bring the heat if it wants to compete.

My full review in the coming days. In the meantime, join me for some initial impressions following a day on the streets of Shanghai with the Google Pixel XL

While you wait, why not catch up on Android Central’s reviews of the Pixel and Pixel XL:

• Check out AC’s official review of the Pixel XL here
• Check out Andrew Martonik’s review of the Pixel XL for a U.S. perspective
• Check out Daniel Bader thoughts on the smaller Pixel

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Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
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• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
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Why I’m ready to ditch the Nexus 6P for the Pixel XL

When your phone starts acting up, sometimes you have to live with it.

If you follow me on social media, you’ve likely read my complaints about my year-old Nexus 6P. Frankly, my “Really Blue” Pixel XL can’t get here soon enough. I’m ready to throw Google’s last Nexus device out the window. The frequent lag, the touch-input delay, the poor battery life—things seem to have taken a turn for the worse these last six months with the Nexus 6P as my daily driver. Every day with it is a lesson in patience.

The beginning of the end

The Nexus 6P’s performance issues started several months ago, around the time I was covering Google I/O. I remember getting frustrated at how long it took to type anything with the Google Keyboard app. I’d tap a key and then it would take about five seconds for the interface to respond. Eventually, I’d type entire sentences and wait for the interface to catch up with my input. I’d pray the end result was accurate, and for the most part it was, but penning even simple text messages became a chore.

Then I started missing out on photo opportunities. The Nexus 6P’s HDR processing became a slow crawler — a far cry from my first month with the device when it would take a mere second for the camera app to start up with a double-press of the Power button. The HDR was so slow to process that sometimes it would remain stuck and I’d lose the end result.

The HDR was so slow to process that sometimes it would remain stuck and I’d lose the end result.

I don’t always have the luxury of standing around and waiting for the phone to finish what it’s doing, so now I avoid taking photos with it altogether. There’s a reason they call it pointing and shooting, but that’s not something I am confident doing with the Nexus 6P in hand.

The 6P seemed to officially hit its edge after I updated to Nougat. Man, that was a bad idea. The touch input lag became worse, and now there are days where I’ll press down the power button and the phone will take about 30 seconds to turn on the screen. What’s worse: Despite the addition of Google’s souped-up Doze mode, the phone hardly lasts through to the early afternoon without screaming for a charge. This is no way to live life with your smartphone.

Why don’t you just factory reset, Flo?

This past year, I was deep in the throes of a major life event. Resetting my smartphone was simply not an option. I had phone numbers and message threads that had accumulated and I simply couldn’t deal with attempting to backup all of that data. As it stands, Android’s native backup abilities are still a bit half-baked, and I typically try to avoid having to attempt to restore anything precisely because it turns into a major project.

I tried a few other quick fixes instead. First, I cleared the system cache, so that I could remove any extra data leftover from the apps and APKs I had uninstalled. That didn’t help. Then, I removed any memory-intensive applications, like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and an app I absolutely adore, Should I Answer?, which blocks spam callers. That app runs in the background and cross references the phone number calling you with a massive database before it lets the call through. However, uninstalling it didn’t help and I kept accidentally answering spam calls.

You shouldn’t have to reset your phone to fix performance issues.

Finally, I went in and turned off Developer Options. I figured that was the culprit in the first place, but still, the phone suffers from severe slowdowns from time to time. Earlier this week, for instance, I was driving an hour to Sonoma County and the 6P’s screen wouldn’t turn on despite the fact that I had Google Maps in navigation mode. I could hear the turn-by-turn directions dictated through my car’s stereo speakers, but I couldn’t actually see the route ahead. I had to pull over and manually restart the phone by holding down the power and volume up buttons. This is about the third time I’ve done this in six months. It’s really distracting to have your phone acting up while you’re driving.

The time for Pixel is now

No typical smartphone user wants to think about resetting their phone to make it run smoothly—especially after only a year with it as a daily driver. For some users, the mere thought of doing so is incredibly overwhelming.

Earlier this year, I managed to convince my mother to take the Nexus 6P for a test drive while she was overseas. She loved it; she loved the look of stock Android and how much bigger the phone was than her Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. However, I can’t imagine what she’d do if she were having the same problems as me. My mom isn’t savvy enough to do the kind of troubleshooting unless I carefully walked her through it. But frankly, no one should have to do that. This is what Google’s attempting to say with its new line of smartphones. You shouldn’t have to be a developer or a tinkerer to get your smartphone working when it’s throwing a tantrum. It should simply work, even a year after you’ve taken it out of the box.

I still haven’t factory reset the Nexus 6P because, at this point, I’m waiting for my Pixel XL to arrive. When it gets here, I can finally troubleshoot what’s been going on with the 6P these past several months. Then, I’ll do a fresh restart of Android 7.0 Nougat—or, hopefully, 7.1—and see if the phone is functioning any better. I don’t want to write off the Nexus 6P yet because it’s been quite the workhorse, but I am curious to see how Google’s last Nexus device stacks up in the long run.

Your turn

How’s your Nexus 6P holding up a year later? Is it chugging along, or just plain chugging? Let us know in the comments below!

Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
• Pixel + Pixel XL specs
• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
• Join the discussion in the forums!

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NASA finds likely crash site for ESA’s ExoMars probe

Just as we expected, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has detected the potential crash site for the European Space Agency’s missing ExoMars Schiaperelli probe. The MRO located a bright spot and dark patch on the Martian surface near the probe’s planned landing area, which NASA believes to be the remnants of the probe’s parachute and lander module, respectively. While we’ve only got a fairly low-resolution image so far, we should know more next week when the MRO passes over the area again with a higher resolution camera.

The ESA’s ExoMars mission, which aims to search for trace signs of life on the red planet, reached Mars’ orbit on Wednesday following a seven-month journey. After separating itself from its partner ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter, Schiaperelli began transmitting data about the planet’s electric fields as it made its way through the atmosphere. The ESA initially couldn’t confirm if the probe had landed successfully, and later said that it lost contact right before its expected landing.

Jan Woerner, the ESA’s director general, still considers the mission an overall success, despite losing contact with the probe. “This means we will obtain information from a close analysis of the data that Schiaparelli was built for, notably on the performance of elements such as the heat shield, parachute, radar, thrusters and so on,” he wrote on his blog. “This information can subsequently be used to improve the design of the 2020 Exomars mission, since in that mission the survival of the descent module will be of real scientific relevance.”

Via: BBC

Source: NASA

Evidence ties Russia to Podesta and Powell email hacks

Back in March, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta received a frantic-sounding email about his account security and clicked a shortened link that appeared to be from Google. Instead, it redirected to a spoof page that gave hackers access to his password. Half a year later, WikiLeaks started publicly releasing thousands of his emails on October 9th, a month after the seemingly unrelated leak of Gen. Colin Powell’s personal messages. Security firms, journalists and a hive of independent researchers have spent the interim analyzing the digital break-ins and have arrived at the probable culprit behind these and several other hacks: Russia. But definitively attributing it to the country’s intelligence services is difficult, if not impossible.

When WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of emails from DNC accounts back in July, it only took a few days for the FBI to start investigating Russia’s involvement in the hack. On October 7th, the US government made the rare decision to publicly blame Russia for directing “the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions.” The DHS declined to state how they came to that conclusion, notes Motherboard, though they probably have data we can’t see.

That left the media and researchers to connect many dots, but a pair of extensive pieces published yesterday by Motherboard and Esquire all but conclude that Russia is most likely behind the seemingly disparate hacks. The full story is a complex chain explaining the handful of mistakes made by two different groups, nicknamed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. It heavily suggests that their separate efforts breaking into the email accounts of Podesta, Powell, and members of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff were directed by the Russian government.

The first piece of evidence is the shortened URL that Podesta erroneously clicked on that redirected him to a phony Google page where he likely submitted his password, a tactic known as spear-phishing. This truncated link, it turns out, was one of 12,000 created and used by Fancy Bear to target 5,000 individual Google email addresses from March 2015 to May 2016. But those attacks were too broad and voluminous to be done manually. Fancy Bear made a program that automatically generated the attacking links and fed them through the popular URL-shortening service Bit.Ly.

The firm SecureWorks, which has been tracking the hacker group for the last year, found that each of the slim URLs in question were created by a number of Bit.Ly accounts belonging to the hacker group — but Fancy Bear forgot to make two of them private. That let SecureWorks see many links they’d created, and when the firm figured out how to decode the automatically-created URL, they found that each contained the target’s email address. By decoding each Bit.Ly link created by the accounts, they found a list of targets, giving the firm a macro view of the group’s extensive and varied spear-phishing campaigns, which included addresses in Ukraine, the Baltics, the United States, China, and Iran, according to Esquire.

SecureWorks built a target portfolio to see who Fancy Bear was working for. Lo and behold, the addresses attacked included a host of military, political, and government leaders in Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet states. They also sent spear-phishing emails to NATO military attaches, diplomatic and military personnel from the US and Europe, and critics of the Russian government from around the world. The pieces started to fit together as the firm identified more similarities between the previous hacks and those targeting Podesta, other members of Clinton’s campaign staff and the DNC. Namely, the malware and server infrastructure supporting it are unique, acting like calling cards for Fancy Bear, according to SecureWorks’ Senior Security Researcher Tom Finney.

“The link to Fancy Bear is very firm, germane to the structures they used before. We track these groups by the toolsets they use, the malware they use, because they tend to have bespoke sets of malware that’s only used by one group. That tends to be quite discrete, so you can say that if this malware is being used, it’s being used by this group,” said Finney.

From March to May, SecureWorks saw that Fancy Bear was sending more spear-phishing emails to people in the US. Because Bit.Ly tracks when their URLs are clicked, the firm was able to see that of the 108 email addresses targeted at the Clinton campaign from March to May, 20 of the erroneous links had been opened; And of the 16 targeted at the DNC, 4 people had clicked, as Buzzfeed reported last week.

SecureWorks released this information in a June 16th report, stating with “moderate confidence” that Fancy Bear’s attacks were likely directed by Russia. Most of the group’s targets in the previous year were individuals that were enemies of, or people of interest to, the Russian government.

“The 5,000 emails was quite a big data set,” said Finney. “Added together, we can’t really think of who else would be satisfied by the kind of information targeted by this group. So that’s why we think it’s Russia.”

But they weren’t the only ones paying attention. Fellow firm CrowdStrike released its own report on July 15th after the DNC called on them to investigate a breach in their security. Within a week, WikiLeaks publicly released 19,000 DNC emails that they had acquired.

A hacker entity identifying itself as Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit as a lone hacker. But CrowdStrike identified both the Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear hacker groups’ presences on the DNC’s network, recognizing their tradecraft and tactics used to evade detection. While Cozy Bear was content to target whole departments and quietly collect data for years once inside, it was Fancy Bear’s more aggressive research and intrusion activity that tipped off security experts. Thanks to metadata in the released documents and Russian-language settings, security experts dismissed Guccifer 2.0’s claim to be a Romanian national, rather theorizing it to have been a hollow account created by Fancy Bear or those acting with it as a distraction.

Fancy Bear’s failure to keep its Bit.Ly accounts private gave SecureWorks insight into the group’s targets — which is how researchers identified the link Colin Powell clicked on that lead to his email getting hacked. This helped them confirm other compromises, like that of Clinton campaign staffer William Rinehart, as The Smoking Gun reported in August. Other groups have been targeted by similarly-constructed links, like Bellingcat, the journalist organization investigating the destruction over Ukraine of flight MH17, points out Motherboard.

A third group known as the Shadow Brokers, as detailed by Thomas Rid in Esquire, took documents hacking tools from the NSA itself via its elite cyber infiltration unit, Tailored Access Operations. The group either compromised a computer that TAO used to stage its own attacks or acquired the assets the old-fashioned way using a mole. The Shadow Brokers published these tools on Github and elsewhere, and security researchers confirmed their authenticity.

Meanwhile, Cozy Bear had been using some two hundred Microsoft OneNote cloud storage accounts to “exfiltrate” data back to Moscow, according to Rid. Microsoft provided information to US digital spies to help them confidently identify the DNC hackers as Russian.

These data points, combined with the nigh-unprecedented move by the DHS of openly blaming Russia for these and other hacks, strongly suggests that their government orchestrated a multi-armed campaign to gather documents germane to the US presidential election. But when making those stolen emails publicly available on WikiLeaks impacts public opinion, as Rid describes in Esquire, the campaign looks less like espionage and more like an attempt to influence the outcome of the election.

In the digital intrusion trade, hackers are known to plant diversions to misdirect security. These “false flags” might even be patterned after tactics known to be used by other countries’ teams. A presentation by Kaspersky Lab at this year’s Virus Bulletin security conference pointed out how effective this misdirection can be. According to a summary of the talk by Summit Route’s Scott Piper:

“In one case, of an assumed Russian [advanced persistent threat] actor, it identified researcher systems running the first stage malware, so it sent down Chinese APT to the researchers as the second stage to throw them off, while sending down their real second stage to the actual victims.

In a similar case, when Turla (also Russian APT) worried they’d been detected, as they were pulling out their malware, they sent down a rare Chinese malware named Quarian for the IR team to investigate. This both gave them time to cover their own tracks, while at the same time burning China’s toolset.”

Ergo, there’s a chance that security experts and journalists could wrongly attribute cyber attacks, even with good evidence. Remember the Sony megahack, where the US government first didn’t blame North Korea, then they did, and the security community couldn’t decisively agree?

Hence SecureWorks’ “moderate confidence” that Russia is behind these hacks, a level which generally means that “the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” In that middleground, they can’t definitively say that it was Russia, but they can illustrate how ludicrously difficult it would be to frame them by creating a Fancy Bear operation and targeting so many individuals over a year and a half, said SecureWorks’ Finney.

“I base my assessment on the evidence. I go back to the overwhelming evidence, I think, of the targeting of this particular group. So we have 5,000 email accounts that were targeted. That’s very difficult to make a false flag operation, to target 5,000 email accounts to make it look like the Russians,” said Finney.

SecureWorks doesn’t have the means or resources of an intelligence agency to definitively prove that Russia was behind the hacks in a criminal case, said Finney. For their business, they examine circumstantial evidence to arrive at conclusions. That’s the benefit for security firms of doing so much research in order to attribute blame: Now that they know with confidence the attackers’ motivations and tactics, SecureWorks can make recommendations to shore up their clients’ security. Against a spear-phishing campaign like this where attackers dupe targets into giving up email passwords, said Finney, clients can increase their protection by taking steps as simple as turning on two-step authentication.

Via: The Daily Dot

Source: Motherboard, Esquire

New York passes law making it illegal to list short-term rentals on Airbnb

New York governor Andrew Cuomo just signed a bill into law that will make it much harder for Airbnb to operate in the state. New York already prohibits rentals of less than 30 days in a multi-unit building if the tenant is not present — a situation that many Airbnb listings advertise. This new law makes even listing an advertisement for such a situation illegal itself, a tool that some think the state will use to go after Airbnb directly.

Those who violate this new law, which the state assembly and senate voted on in June, will be subject to some heavy fines: $1,000 for your first violation, $5,000 for the second, and $7,500 for the third. According to Business Insider, Airbnb will immediately file a lawsuit against New York City and the state attorney general; the suit will claim the new law violates the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act.

“In typical fashion, Albany back-room dealing rewarded a special interest — the price-gouging hotel industry — and ignored the voices of tens of thousands of New Yorkers,”Josh Meltzer, head of New York Public Policy for Airbnb, said in a statement published by Business Insider. “A majority of New Yorkers have embraced home sharing, and we will continue to fight for a smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful. We are filing a lawsuit in New York this afternoon.”

As for New York, it says that the activities being advertised are already illegal and thus it sees no problem with the new law. “This is an issue that was given careful, deliberate consideration, but ultimately these activities are already expressly prohibited by law,” Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said, according to New York Daily News. “They also compromise efforts to maintain and promote affordable housing by allowing those units to be used as unregulated hotels, and deny communities significant revenue from uncollected taxes, the cost of which is ultimately borne by local taxpayers.”

This comes just a few days after Airbnb announced plans to crack down on hosts with multiple listings in New York and San Francisco. It was an effort to reduce illegal hotel situations and keep people from buying up and then renting multiple listings to turn a big profit. It also felt like an effort to help sway NY’s politicians onto their side, but that obviously hasn’t worked yet.

How this will end up remains to be seen, but it sounds like Airbnb’s going to have a tough time — the existing law that was already on the books seems like it’ll make fighting this new legislation much tougher. We’ve reached out to Airbnb and will update this post with any comment we receive.

Source: New York State Assembly, Business Insider, New York Daily News

Blame the Internet of Things for today’s web blackout

Today’s nation-wide internet outage was enabled thanks to a Mirai botnet that hacked into connected home devices, according to security intelligence company Flashpoint. The distributed denial of service attack targeted Dyn, a large domain name server, and took down Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, The New York Times, Pinterest, PayPal and other major websites.

“Flashpoint has observed Mirai attack commands issued against Dyn infrastructure,” Flashpoint writes. “Analysts are still investigating the potential impact of this activity and it is not yet clear if other botnets are involved.”

Mirai is not a new hacking tool. A massive Mirai attack took down the site of popular security researcher Brian Krebs in late September, peaking at a nearly unprecedented 620 Gbps. Mirai takes advantage of weak security protocols on IoT devices — in the Krebs case, 145,000 devices were infiltrated, including security cameras and DVRs in homes and offices around the world.

The author of the Mirai malware made its code open-source, and security experts have been warning of a possible large-scale attack since this information came to light.

For its part, Dyn is attempting to stem Friday’s attack on its servers. At 3:30PM ET, the company announced the attack had entered its third wave.

“We are actively in the third flank of this attack,” Chief Strategy Officer Kyle Owen said, according to TechCrunch. “It’s a very smart attack. As we mitigate, they react.”

To anyone who is still able to read this story: Congrats. Also, we’re doomed.

MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Customizable iPhone 7 or 7 Plus Case From Casetify

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with Casetify to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a customizable iPhone 7 or 7 Plus case from Casetify, a site that offers a range of customizable and community-designed cases.

Made from a soft polycarbonate, Casetify’s cases are available in clear or black to match all of the different iPhone finishes Apple offers. The cases are matte and feature a soft-touch frame for added grip, while also protecting the iPhone from drops, bumps, and scratches.

Casetify says its cases can survive drops of up to four feet onto concrete from all angles thanks to a 2-layer system with a hard exterior shell and an impact-absorbing interior layer. A lip around the case protects the display when it’s face down, and all ports remain accessible for use when the case is on. Volume and power buttons are also protected.

The best part about Casetify’s cases is the wide range of designs available. You can choose from an artist-created case, with hundreds of choices available ranging from florals to abstract designs to cartoon characters, or create your own.

With the clear cases, many designs leave the design of the iPhone visible while overlaying it with a see-through pattern, and on the black cases, designed for the new Jet Black iPhone, rich, colorful patterns are overlaid on a black background.

If you don’t find a pre-designed case you like, Casetify also offers the option of designing your own case with any image or photograph you’ve captured. You can choose a clear or black case and then use a variety of layouts and templates to create a design.

Casetify’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus cases are normally priced at $40, but 20 MacRumors readers will get one for free. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winners and send the prizes. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.

a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (October 21) at 11:45 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:45 a.m. Pacific Time on October 28. The winners will be chosen randomly on October 28 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.

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