One of the most important features of Apple’s next mobile platform is something the company has barely talked about. When iOS 8 comes out  this fall, it will have the ability to randomize an iPhone or iPad’s Wi-Fi media access control (MAC) address, or network ID.

That’s a huge privacy advantage for people who want to leave their devices’ Wi-Fi active without worrying that their information might be gathered by marketers, police, spies or hackers. However, it does nothing to impede iBeacon, Apple’s own Bluetooth-based proximity-marketing service.

Interestingly, Apple barely mentioned MAC randomization at the World Wide Developers Conference last week, during which it announced iOS 8. It was left to UK-based user-interface designer Luis Abreu to tweet an image of a slide from a conference presentation about iOS 8 privacy that described the process.

“In iOS 8, Wi-Fi scanning behavior has changed to use random, locally administrated MAC addresses,” reads the slide, which can be downloaded from Apple’s servers as part of the presentation. “The MAC address used for Wi-Fi scans may not always be the device’s real (universal) address.”

So how would Apple’s MAC randomization work? Each piece of networking hardware on a computer, smartphone or tablet has a unique, permanent MAC address that identifies that specific piece of hardware on a network. A laptop, for example, will have separate MAC addresses for its Ethernet, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections.

MAC addresses are necessary for establishing a network connection and obtaining a temporary Internet Protocol (IP) address to get online, but they’re not so great for privacy, since devices can be identified and tracked by their specific MAC addresses.

If you’re walking through a shopping mall with Wi-Fi enabled on your smartphone, the phone is “scanning,” or simultaneously searching for Wi-Fi networks and broadcasting its MAC address to every Wi-Fi hotspot you pass by, whether or not you intend to connect to any of those hotspots.

Those hotspots are often logging all the MAC addresses they encounter, and marketers can examine those logs to identify repeat shoppers, how long a shopper spent in a store or even potential shoppers who walked by the store many times but didn’t come in.

The phones don’t even have to establish connections to provide their MAC addresses. Just being within range of the store network is enough. If any of those smartphones’ users decide to connect to the store’s Wi-Fi network, then marketers might also be able to assign real names to those harvested MAC addresses. Governments and criminals can set up Wi-Fi hotspots to gather the same information.

All of these practices impinge on people’s privacy, whether desirably or not. To counter the practice of MAC-based tracking, whenever an iOS 8-enabled device scans for Wi-Fi networks, it will use a randomized, temporary MAC address to announce its presence. (If a Wi-Fi connection is established, the iOS 8 device will apparently revert to its real, permanent MAC address.)

This is possible because software can “spoof” a MAC address so that the MAC address presented to a network doesn’t actually correspond to the device presenting it. MAC-address spoofing can be used by malicious hackers use to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks — they can pretend to be both the victim and the Wi-Fi router, positioning themselves to view Internet traffic and capture unencrypted data — but it can also be used to maintain privacy when moving through an environment rich with Wi-Fi networks.

This enhanced-privacy feature won’t stop man-in-the-middle attacks, but it will stop MAC-address-based tracking practiced by marketers — or police departments.

However, it also conveniently removes a competitor to iBeacon, which the company is encouraging retailers to use to target shoppers with hyperlocalized ads beamed to their iPhones. Introduced with iOS 7, iBeacon uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, to track and communicate with iOS devices in a retail establishment.

MAC-address randomization isn’t iOS 8’s only new privacy feature. Mobile Safari users will be given the option to make their default search engine Duck Duck Go, a privacy-centric service that doesn’t store users’ personal information to customize searches. Duck Duck Go also doesn’t tell a Web page which search terms you used to find it, and also connects to the encrypted versions of websites whenever possible.

Source:  Tomsguide.com

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ios-8-mac-address-randomization,news-18937.html

Paying a malware ransom is bad, but telling people to never do it is unhelpful advice

Posted by   Martijn Grooten on   Apr 26, 2016

I’m not usually one to spread panic about security issues, but in the case of the current ransomware plague, I believe that at the very least a sense of great concern is justified. And the threat is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

While there are certainly many things we can do to significantly reduce the risk of us getting infected — from applying all necessary patches and keeping offline backups, to running software that alerts us when files are suddenly being modified en masse — ultimately, ransomware does what we all should be doing: encrypting our files. The subtle but essential difference is that it does so with a key we don’t have.

One reason why ransomware is so successful is that the ransom demanded is usually only a few hundred dollars — affordable to most people (ransomware tends to target users in Western countries) and often cheaper than the (perceived) value of the data that would otherwise be lost. However, security experts regularly tell affected individuals and organizations never to pay the ransom.

I think this is unhelpful advice.

For sure, paying the ransom should always be the last resort. We should help victims, and the jack-of-all-trades sysadmins who are likely going to assist them, find other ways to recover the data. Maybe backups have been kept. Maybe this particular ransomware is one for which a decryption tool is available. And maybe losing the data — which could also have happened because of a physical failure of the hard drive — is an expensive but valuable lesson on the importance of keeping backups.

But sometimes, none of this helps and the only sensible business decision left is to pay the criminals, much as it is bad and much as there is never a 100% guarantee that this will work. Crooks will be crooks, after all.

Of course, if everyone followed the advice never to pay a ransom, ransomware authors would come to find that it wasn’t worth their effort, and the threat would eventually disappear. But this wouldn’t happen instantly, and it really would depend on almost everyone not paying the ransom.

And if security experts suddenly had the power to make everyone follow their advice, maybe we should just tell people to patch instead.

In March of this year, AMD revealed the Radeon Pro Duo, a dual Fiji GPU graphics card with 8GB of HBM memory and capable of delivering up to 16 teraflops of compute performance. The company had said that the card would be released in Q2 2016, and today it is available for purchase.

AMD said the Radeon Pro Duo is meant for VR content creation of all varieties, including game development, VR journalism and medical research and more. The company said the card was designed for heavy workloads that come with VR content creation and that the Radeon Pro Duo’s compute performance will help “bring tomorrow’s VR content to market in record time.”

“With the Radeon Pro Duo, it’s our objective to solve major problems developers face, by reducing latency and accelerating the VR pipeline through close collaboration with the content development community and with AMD LiquidVR technology,” said AMD in its press materials.

AMD is pushing the Radeon Pro Duo as a solution for VR content creation, but there’s nothing stopping you (except maybe the price) from using it as a top-end graphics solution for gaming. The card features two liquid-cooled Fiji GPUs, each paired with 4GB of HBM memory, and AMD said it has support for DX12. (We would love to show you performance numbers, but we haven’t received a sample to test. An AMD representative told Tom’s Hardware that the company has decided not to send samples to enthusiast sites for independent testing.)

The Radeon Pro Duo will sell for the not-insignificant sum of $1,499. AMD said it is available today worldwide, from select partners. Every Radeon Pro Duo graphics card comes bundled with the Liquid VR SDK to help developers and content creators to coax the most performance out of their creations.

 

Source: toms hardware

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-pro-duo-available,31678.html

Whether it’s a waiting room, red light, church, school, hospital, restaurant, gym or park nearly everyone can be seen on their smartphones, either texting, on social media, listening to music or just browsing the web.

Is this newfound means of connection really keeping people disconnected? Has the advancement of technology removed people from real intimacy?

According to Dr. Ioana Shirley, psychiatrist at Psychiatry Consultants LLC., in Birmingham, “It’s not a matter of technology replacing intimacy it’s just a matter of using technology and adjusting to it instead of allowing it to evolve our lives. In some ways I think the actual intimacy can be better, but it can also be worst . . . there is a fine line because smartphones are also very helpful. There is therapy on the phone and information that people otherwise wouldn’t get.”

Smartphones also have a downside for some business owners, said James Lewis, Owner and Chef at Bettola Restaurant in Birmingham.

“Not only are smartphones replacing intimacy it can also cause problems at work, especially when people are addicted to it, they either keep looking at it, using it or playing on it when they’re not supposed to, so there is a constant struggle of that happening within the business,” Lewis said.

Another problem, he said, is when you text “you could be saying one thing but it can come off completely different and that creates a rift that didn’t need to be in the conversation in the first place.”

Some lawyers point to the impact of phones in the legal arena.

“Smartphones and social media have changed the landscape of the evidence that is available in personal injury and divorce cases,” says attorney Patrice Blankenship of Blankenship and Associates, PC. “What you find is that infidelity and inappropriate relations are more easily proven with the new technology, texting and social media. Phones have a major impact on the infidelity grounds for divorce as far as being able to prove it. But it is very hurtful to the other party because they know exactly what their spouse is doing.”

Blankenship admits that she often communicates with her clients via text or email, because it’s more efficient, but when it comes to personal relationships she feels that technology does remove intimacy.

“Even though people use capital letters when texting it’s still not the same as face to face communication,” she said. “I still had to get myself abreast with a lot of the abbreviations, because I didn’t know what they meant, so I had to get one of my nieces or cousins to help me with that . . . I’m still learning it. But it does impact the way we communicate.”

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of U.S adults have a smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011. Their research shows 86 percent of those 18-29 years of age have a smartphone, along with 83 percent of those ages 30-49 and 87 percent of those living in households earning $75,000 and up annually.

Lebaron Marks, of Marks Media Cinematography LLC., in Birmingham, who is in that 30-49 age range admits that he uses his smartphone for everything, but he can’t deny its negative impact when it comes to real human interaction. “It’s a more convenient way to communicate, but it is making things less personable than they use to be,” he said.

Most people — including me — scoffed when former BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins declared in 2013 that the tablet would be dead in five years. Fast forward just two years and his prediction doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous. For the first time ever, tablet sales declined year over year during the fourth quarter, according to IDC. In other words, consumers ignored slates during the critical holiday season in favor of other types of gadgets, like fitness trackers, Chromebooks and drones.

As it turns out, tablets aren’t dying but finding their niche, which is exactly what this category needs to do to survive.

The Big Fall

Here are some sobering numbers. Four of the top five tablet makers posted double-digit declines in Q4, including Apple. Despite the addition of the iPad Air 2 and the warmed-over refresh that was the iPad mini 3 (whoopee, Touch ID!), the company saw negative growth of nearly 18 percent. Samsung posted comparable figures, although Apple still nearly doubles Sammy in market share (28.1 versus 14.5 percent).

While discussing Apple’s otherwise blockbuster quarter — thanks to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus — CEO Tim Cook admitted that the iPad is struggling. “There’s probably some level of cannibalization that’s going on, with the Mac on one side and the phone on the other.” However, Cook remains bullish on the category, especially in regards to the enterprise, where Apple has a strategic partnership in place with IBM.

Speaking of businesses, there may be an iPad Pro on the horizon, which is rumored to offer a larger 12-inch display in addition to better multitasking capabilities in iOS. But according to Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst at IDC, it won’t be able to reverse Apple’s fortunes in this market.

“I think such a device would likely be targeted at the commercial or prosumer space rather than at general consumers,” Ubrani said. “And while the commercial market is expected to grow, it still won’t account for the majority of the whole tablet market, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPad Pro were relegated to being a niche market device.”

Longer Upgrade Cycles, Less Innovation

Of all tablet makers, Amazon is feeling the most pain right now. The company saw its growth implode by 70 percent year over year. Part of me wonders whether the bomb that was the Fire phone rubbed off on the rest of the company’s product line, but Ubrani believes it’s much simpler than that. For a while, Amazon had the lower end of the slate market locked up, but then other vendors such as Acer, Asus, E Fun and RCA muscled into its territory.

But there’s a bigger issue at play here other than collapsing prices. The novelty has worn off. Everyone who wanted a tablet now owns one, and there just isn’t enough of a difference from one generation of tablet to the next to compel shoppers to upgrade. For example, my 10-year-old daughter is perfectly content with her first-generation Amazon Kindle for reading books, playing games and binge-watching old episodes of Full House.

It seems most consumers feel the same way. Newer tablets have moderately faster CPUs, sharper screens and better cameras. So what? As a result, an increasing number of people are perfectly content to hold onto their slates longer. After all, most if not all of the apps and games they want to use continue to work just fine.

Some are blaming the tablet crash on the rise of phablets, or big-screen phones, but IDC’s Ubrani doesn’t believe that to be the primary cause. “I would say that longer replacement cycles are likely the larger factor in the slowdown of the tablet market. Phablets are slowly gaining share but we still do not expect them to account for the majority of smartphone shipments.” However, it’s no coincidence that the share of small tablets is decreasing.

‘Nichification’ to the Rescue

The most exciting tablet of all of 2014 was the Shield Tablet, because Nvidia found a way to turn a slate into a bona fide gaming console. The company harnesses the power inside its K1 chip to offer great Android performance but also to stream the most demanding games from your PC.

The “nichification” of tablets will continue in 2015, with productivity being the biggest theme. Despite some early miscues, 2-in-1 hybrid devices are starting to resonate with tablet buyers. You get a tablet and laptop in one device, sometimes for a very reasonable price. The Asus Transformer Book T200, for instance, delivers a full Windows experience, a detachable 11-inch slate and a full-size keyboard for less than the price of an iPad.

“We’ve seen substantial growth in the 2-in-1 space,” Ubrani said. “Two-in-1s have been growing faster [than traditional tablets] but they are also coming off a small base. For what it’s worth, Intel argues that 2-in-1s should be considered its own category.

On the high end of the market, Microsoft’s Surface line recently surpassed 1 billion in revenue for a single quarter. Ubrani said that the company will likely crack the top 10 once IDC is done calculating its quarterly figures. But despite some clever marketing, I refuse to buy Microsoft’s argument that this tablet can replace your laptop. It’s just still too awkward to use as a clamshell in your lap.

Nevertheless, I’m more optimistic about the 2-in-1 category than I’ve ever been, thanks to a wave of better designs (like the Lenovo Yoga Pro and the Asus Transformer Book Chi) and the promise of Windows 10. Microsoft’s upcoming OS will make switching between laptop and tablet modes more seamless, as well as streamline the entire user experience. The revamped Start menu, Action menu and Settings screens are all steps in the right direction.

Parents who don’t want to hand their kids a smartphone — and pay through the nose for yet another data plan — is another growing tablet niche. Fuhu has done the best job catering to this crowd with its devices, which focus on learning, parent-approved content and games, and earning rewards for doing your chores. The company sells two big-screen devices (at 20 and 24 inches) with all sorts of creative tools for junior, and a 65-inch device that doubles as a TV is next.

However, older kids may be better off with a Chromebook, which are cheap and come with a full keyboard.

Bottom Line

It looks like the tablet market is coming full circle. The original Microsoft Tablet PC platform aimed for the masses but ultimately found a niche with professionals and field workers because the devices served that audience best. The iPad’s launch was a rebirth for the entire category, putting the Web, content and apps right at our fingertips, but now big-screen phones do the same thing. That means tablet makers need to get creative to target more specific segments.

From gaming-focused slates and kids tablets that focus on ease of use and parental controls to big-screen devices optimized for productivity, the tablet isn’t dying. It’s being reinvented for narrower audiences and uses. While the overall market will probably never bounce back to previous levels, the devices that emerge from this upheaval will be more innovative, practical and fun.

Source: Toms guide

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/tablet-dead-as-we-know-it,news-20401.html