They've had this technology for 3 years, yet it won't be set on all phones until June 2015?! So they could have made every phone private or encrypted, yet we had to go through some hoops to get it? When I looked all throughout their website, none of this was mentioned, yet after apple announced they will not allow police to break into phones, they said "yeah us too! We've had this technology years ago and you guys get it in about a year"
no, it says every phone had it, it just wasn't a default setting. No hoop to jump through, just a setting change.
That's how I read it. But they are following Apple's lead. Also, there is no specific android version. The damned android market is fragmented by OS version. Not sure if all those versions support it. It also demonstrates a pretty weak adoption rate for their latest and greatest software - or that the software isn't supported except on the latest and greatest phones. Not only is the market fragmented by version, it's fragmented by manufacturer. Something close to 90% of Apple users are running the latest version of iOS. I've created multiple apps for mobile devices and iOS has been a breeze. If the code works on an Apple device, ship it, it's good to go. If it works on one android device, it may not work on any of the others. It's a constant battle to fix bugs caused by the different OS versions on top of bugs introduced by the manufacturers. FWIW.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/15/..._campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full&cps=gravity Apps that use your smartphone's microphone need to ask permission, but the motion sensors? No say-so needed. That might not sound like a big deal, but security researchers from Stanford University and defense firm Rafael have discovered a way to turn Android phone gyroscopes into crude microphones. They call their app "Gyrophone" and here's how it works: the tiny gyros in your phone that measure orientation do so using vibrating pressure plates. As it turns out, they can also pick up air vibrations from sounds, and many Android devices can do it in the 80 to 250 hertz range -- exactly the frequency of a human voice. By contrast, the iPhone's sensor only uses frequencies below 100Hz, and is therefore useless for tapping conversations. Though the researchers' system can only pick up the odd word or the speaker's gender, they said that voice recognition experts could no doubt make it work better. They'll be delivering a paper next week at the Usenix Security conference, but luckily, Google is already up on the research. "This early, academic work should allow us to provide defenses before there is any likelihood of real exploitation."
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-icloud-problems-before-nude-celebrity-photo-hack-2014-9 This above tell you all you need to know about how much better Google security was than Apple... (and likely still is, but Tim Cook is definitely making all the right noises to ensure that it is no longer ignored at Apple - so hopefully it will not be the case going forward). I will go again to my opinion that this was not a technical issue, it was a management issue - not giving security the proper emphasis it requires. For those of you running OSX - you are also possibly open to the Bash security hack - http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/25/bash-flaw-os-x/ http://mac-how-to.wonderhowto.com/h...lshock-bash-exploit-heres-patch-os-x-0157606/ The 2nd link provides info how to check if your computer is not secure. If you are a Windows user, this is not a concern unless you installed something like the MKS tools - but I suspect that this is something people have stopped doing years and years ago.
