Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com – Author: Lawrence Abrams Today, Google announced new security features coming to Android 15 and Google Play Protect that will help block scams, fraud, and malware apps on users’ devices. Announced at Google I/O 2024, the new features are designed not only to help end users but also to warn developers when their apps have been tampered with. “Today, we’re announcing […]

La entrada Android 15, Google Play Protect get new anti-malware and anti-fraud features – Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com – Author: Bill Toulas Apple’s antifraud technology has blocked more than $7 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in four years, the company states in its latest annual fraud prevention analysis. From 2020 through 2023, the company also detected more than 14 million stolen cards and blocked them from transacting on its platform along with […]

La entrada Apple blocked $7 billion in fraudulent App Store purchases in 4 years – Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Enlarge / The Velomobile Bülk, with its hood in place. Note the hood has an anti-fog covering on the visor (which is flipped up). The two bumps near the front of the hood are there to improve clearance for the cyclist's knees. (credit: JOHN TIMMER)

My brain registered that I was clearly cycling. My feet were clipped in to pedals, my legs were turning crank arms, and the arms were linked via a chain to one of the wheels. But pretty much everything else about the experience felt wrong on a fundamental, almost disturbing level.

I could produce a long list of everything my mind was struggling to deal with, but two things stand out as I think back on the experience. The first is that, with the exception of my face, I didn't feel the air flow over me as the machine surged forward down a slight slope. The second, related to the first, is that there was no indication that the surge would ever tail off if I didn't hit the brakes.

Living the dream

My visit with a velomobile was, in some ways, a chance to reconnect with a childhood dream. I've always had a fascination with vehicles that don't require fuel, like bicycles and sailboats. And during my childhood, the popular press was filled with stories about people setting human-powered speed records by putting aerodynamic fiberglass shells on recumbent bicycles. In the wake of the 1970s oil crises, I imagined a time when the roads might be filled with people cycling these pods for their commutes or covering long distances thanks to a cooler filled with drinks and snacks tucked in the back of the shell.

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Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will pay a combined $10.2 million in a settlement with US states that alleged the carriers falsely advertised wireless plans as "unlimited" and phones as "free." The deal was announced yesterday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

"A multistate investigation found that the companies made false claims in advertisements in New York and across the nation, including misrepresentations about 'unlimited' data plans that were in fact limited and had reduced quality and speed after a certain limit was reached by the user," the announcement said.

T-Mobile and Verizon agreed to pay $4.1 million each while AT&T agreed to pay a little over $2 million. The settlement includes AT&T subsidiary Cricket Wireless and Verizon subsidiary TracFone.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

T-Mobile is reportedly close to buying a portion of the regional carrier US Cellular, while Verizon has also held talks about buying some of US Cellular's assets. "T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of the regional carrier for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, according to people familiar with the matter," The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

When contacted by Ars today, T-Mobile said it doesn't "comment on rumors and speculation." US Cellular also said it doesn't "comment on rumors or speculation."

T-Mobile is one of just three major nationwide carriers. There were four until T-Mobile bought Sprint in 2020. T-Mobile also completed an acquisition of prepaid carrier Mint Mobile less than two weeks ago.

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The U.S. has revoked licenses that allowed companies including Intel and Qualcomm to ship chips used for laptops and handsets to sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies, three people familiar with the matter said.

↫ Alexandra Alper, Fanny Potkin, David Shepardson

The timing of this news is very interesting, as despite the massive sanctions the United States levied against Huawei, the company seems to be doing really well, with its smartphone business seeing massive gains in the Chinese market, at the expense of everyone else. This proves that Huawei does not need access to western chips and technologies to be successful, which must definitely sting in the US and Europe.

Strong financial results, using hardware and chips designed not by western companies but by Chinese ones, combined with the only mobile operating system that has any serious potential to at least somewhat threaten Android and iOS. The various sanctions were clearly intended to hurt Huawei and possibly contain it to just China, but it seems they’re not having their desired effect at all.

“The largest wireless carriers in the country were selling our real-time location information to data aggregators, allowing this highly sensitive data to wind up in the hands of bail-bond companies, bounty hunters, and other shady actors,” said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel.

Views of the Illegal Data Sharing Whistleblower

“No one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card ,” Wyden said. “I applaud the FCC for following through on my investigation and holding these companies accountable for putting customers’ lives and privacy at risk.”

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers — including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — for illegally sharing access to customers’ location information without consent.

The fines mark the culmination of a more than four-year investigation into the actions of the major carriers. In February 2020, the FCC put all four wireless providers on notice that their practices of sharing access to customer location data were likely violating the law.

The FCC said it found the carriers each sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to the information to third-party location-based service providers.

“In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” an FCC statement on the action reads. “This initial failure was compounded when, after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access.”

The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers.

The commission said it took action after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the FCC detailing how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.

That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.

The carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, reporting at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how reporters were able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.

Sen. Wyden said no one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card.

“I applaud the FCC for following through on my investigation and holding these companies accountable for putting customers’ lives and privacy at risk,” Wyden said in a statement today.

The FCC fined Sprint and T-Mobile $12 million and $80 million respectively. AT&T was fined more than $57 million, while Verizon received a $47 million penalty. Still, these fines represent a tiny fraction of each carrier’s annual revenues. For example, $47 million is less than one percent of Verizon’s total wireless service revenue in 2023, which was nearly $77 billion.

The fine amounts vary because they were calculated based in part on the number of days that the carriers continued sharing customer location data after being notified that doing so was illegal (the agency also considered the number of active third-party location data sharing agreements). The FCC notes that AT&T and Verizon each took more than 320 days from the publication of the Times story to wind down their data sharing agreements; T-Mobile took 275 days; Sprint kept sharing customer location data for 386 days.

Update, 6:25 p.m. ET: Clarified that the FCC launched its investigation at the request of Sen. Wyden.

Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies.

The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google’s Android software to power its devices.

More recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the top selling device in China’s huge consumer market, displacing rivals such as Apple’s iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, that could pose a bigger threat to Apple sales in the country.

↫ Dan Robinson at The Register

If there is one company that has the capabilities and will to truly offer a third alternative, it’s Huawei with HarmonyOS. This company has the full might of the Chinese state behind it, and it clearly has the drive to prove itself after the various sanctions levied against it in recent years that barred it from using Google’s Android. It’s obviously already experiencing major success in its home market, but now the company intends to go global, country by country, to positino HarmonyOS alongside iOS and Android.

Huawei basically takes a brute-force approach, explaining that they identify the 5000 most popular applications, which they claim cover 99% of users’ time with their smartphones, and port those over first. I’m not entirely sure how they convince developers to port over their applications, but I’m guessing money is involved. Fair play, I would say – it’s not like anything else is going to break the stranglehold Apple and Google have over the mobile application market.

We haven’t really spent much time talking about HarmonyOS in the west in general, and on OSNews in particular, which is a bit of a shame because it has some interesting characteristics. For instance, it has a multi-kernel design, where it uses the Linux kernel on more powerful devices like smartphones and tablets, and the RTOS LiteOS kernel on lower power IoT devices. DSoftBus is another interesting part of the operating system, which allows multiple devices to kind of join together and share data, applications, and control seamlessly.

HarmonyOS supports both Android and true HarmonyOS applications, the latter of which are marked with a little logo in the corner of the application icon, but the unique features of HarmonyOS, like DSoftBus, are only accessible to true HarmonyOS applications. Developing these native applications can be done in DevEco Studio, which is built atop IntelliJ IDEA, using ArkUI. Huawei even went so far as to develop its own browser engine for HarmonyOS, which it recently released as open source, called ArkWeb.

While HarmonyOS currently still supports running Android applications, this will soon no longer be the case as the company is working on HarmonyOS NEXT, which will remove Android compatibility to focus entirely on true HarmonyOS applications instead. NEXT also does away entirely with the multikernel approach, ditching both the Linux and LiteOS kernels for a new HarmonyOS microkernel, and uses Huawei’s own Cangjie programming language for application development. HarmonyOS NEXT is currently being tested on a variety of Huawei devices, with a beta and final release planned for later this year.

It’s just our luck that the only potentially viable competitor to Android and iOS is a party closed-source operating system from China, which will surely bring with it a whole host of security concerns in the west. It’s really difficult at the moment to ascertain just how much of HarmonyOS – and specifically, HarmonyOS NEXT – is available as open source, which is a major bummer. I don’t think I’d ever want to use a (partly) closed source Chinese operating system for anything major in my life, but if it’s open source we could at least see non-Chinese forks that I’d find easier to trust.

The road of iOS and Android competitors is littered with the bodies of failed attempts – Symbian, the various iterations of Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, the GNOME/Plasma attempts that just can’t grow beyond proof of concepts – and there is no way to know if Huawei can pull off outside of China what it did with HarmonyOS inside China. Western markets are incredibly weary of anything related to Huawei, and for all we know, this operating system won’t ever even be allowed inside the US and the EU in the first place.

Regardless of international politics and the CCP’s brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regime, HarmonyOS NEXT seems like a very interesting platform with fresh ideas, and I’d love to at least try it out once it hits international markets with proper localisation into English. I’ll take a problematic Chinese smartphone operating system competitor over no competitor at all – even if I won’t use it myself, it’ll be at least some form of competition both Apple and Google desperately need.

But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and how they paved the way for what we use now.

↫ Cameron Kaiser at Ars Technica

This sure takes me back to my own in-depth Palm retrospective from – checks notes – 11 years ago (!). It turns out all the images from that article no longer load, so I should set aside some time to fix that up.

A couple of years ago, I imported a Japanese-market 4×4 van into the US; a 1996 Mitsubishi Delica. Based on the maps I found in the seat pocket and other clues, it seems to have spent its life at some city dweller’s cabin in the mountains around Fukushima, and only driven occasionally. Despite being over 25 years old, it only had 77,000 km on the odometer.

The van had some interesting old tech installed in it: what appears to be a radar detector labeled “Super Eagle 30” and a Panasonic-brand electronic toll collection device that you can insert a smart card into. One particularly noteworthy accessory that was available in mid-90s Delicas was a built-in karaoke machine for the rear passengers. Sadly, mine didn’t have that feature.

But the most interesting accessory installed in the van was the Avco Maptwin Inter, which I immediately identified as some kind of electronic navigation aid, about which there is very little information available on the English-language internet.

When I first saw the Maptwin, I had thought it might be some kind of proto-GPS that displayed latitude/longitude coordinates that you could look up on a paper map. Alas, it’s not that cool. It was not connected to any kind of antenna, and the electronics inside seem inadequate for the reception of a GPS signal. The Maptwin was, however, wired into an RPM counter that was attached between the transmission and the speedometer cable, presumably to delivery extremely accurate and convenient display of how many kilometers have been traveled since the display was last reset.

What I’ve been able to learn is that the Maptwin is computer that was mostly used for rally race navigation, precursor to devices still available from manufacturers like Terra Trip. Now, the Mitsubishi Delica is about the best 4×4 minivan you can get, but it’s extremely slow and unwieldy at speed, so it would be pretty terrible for rally racing. My best guess is that the owner used this device as a navigation aid for overland exploration, as the name “Maptwin” implies, to augment the utility of a paper map. On the other hand, I found an article that indicates that some kinds of rallies were not high speed affairs, but rather accuracy-based navigation puzzles of sorts, so who knows?

The Maptwin wasn’t working when I got the van, and I don’t know if it’s actually broken or just needs to be wired up correctly. If any OSNews readers have any additional information about any of the devices I’ve mentioned, please enlighten us in the comments. If anyone would like to try to get the Maptwin working and report back, please let me know.