Tool Created To Hack BlackBerry Passwords

A Russian security firm has upgraded a phone-password cracking software with the ability to figure out the master device password for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.

Elcomsoft said on Thursday that before it developed the product, it was believed that there was no way to uncover a device password on a BlackBerry smartphone or PlayBook tablet. BlackBerry smartphones are configured to wipe all data on the phone if a password is typed incorrectly 10 times in a row, the company said.

Elcomsoft said it figured a way around the problem using a BlackBerry’s removable media card, but only if a user has configured their smartphone in a specific way. In order for Elcomsoft’s software to be successful, a user must have enabled the feature to encrypt data on the media card.

The feature is disabled by default, but Elcomsoft said around 30% of BlackBerry users have it enabled for extra security.

The company’s software can then analyze the encrypted media card and use a brute-force method to figure out a password, which involves trying millions of possible password combinations per second until one works.

Elcomsoft said it can recover a seven-character password in less than an hour if the password is all lower-case or all capital letters. The software does not need access to the actual BlackBerry device but just the encrypted media card.

Read More..

Verizon Sides With Samsung Not Apple

Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile operator, has taken a legal stand against Apple Inc’s request to prohibit the sale of some Samsung Electronics models in the United States.

“The requested injunction of certain Samsung products will harm Verizon Wireless and U.S. consumers,” Verizon said in a court filing dated September 23.

“It also has the possibility of slowing the deployment of next-generation networks — such as Verizon Wireless’s — contrary to the stated goals of the U.S. government,” it said.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Plc.

Read More…

BlackBerry Falls Behind In Workplace

More workers use iPhone and Android smartphones combined than BlackBerry devices, according to a survey of 1,681 U.S.-based workers released today by Forrester Research.

That finding highlights what many have known for a while about the entrenched workplace smartphone veteran: the BlackBerry faces trouble from its competitors.

The BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion, still leads among U.S. workers, with 42%, the survey said, with Apple’s iPhone accounting for 22% and Android devices, 26%.

The survey also found that nearly half, or 48% of the group, said that they chose the primary smartphone used for their work without considering what their company supports. Only 29% said they chose the smartphone from a list of phones the company supports, while 23% said they had no choice in the matter.

Often, corporate IT shops will choose BlackBerry smartphones when requiring a worker to use a specific smartphone, partly because of the perceived security benefits, many analysts, including at Forrester, have found. The growth in Android phones and the iPhone — many of them brought to workplaces by workers independently — are forcing IT shops to rethink that decision, however.

Ted Schadler, a Forrester analyst, said the survey points to two major trends. The first is that more workers than ever are bringing consumer-focused devices, such as Android and iPhone smartphones, to use for work, and more companies are supporting those devices.

Read More…..

Samsung’s New Chip Line To Boost Flash Memory

Samsung Electronics, the world’s No.1 memory chip maker, said it began mass production at a new $10 billion chip line, as it seeks to raise its profile in the booming flash memory chip market fueled by robust demand growth in mobile products.

Samsung’s new production line, its first in about five years, will help the company sharply lower production costs of the chips and could exacerbate oversupply in the market, stifling smaller rivals.

Apple Inc, the maker of popular iPhones and iPads, and Sony, which joined the crowded tablet market last month with two new devices, buy flash memory chips from Samsung.

The cost-competitive facility will make it difficult for its major customers to shift away to other suppliers.

Apple, Samsung’s biggest customer locked in a series of patent legal battles with the South Korean firm, is trying to reduce sourcing from the emerging competitor.

“The new line won’t have any immediate impact on the supply side, as it will take some nine months to fully raise capacity run rates, but it shows Samsung’s attempt to take more share in the flash chip market,” said Song Myung-sup, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities.

Read More…

Flash Player 11 Launched With 3D Gaming

Adobe Systems announced Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 software Wednesday to assist developers in building more sophisticated applications with dozens of new features across smartphones and tablets as well as desktop computers.

The releases are Adobe’s biggest in two years, and will be available free of charge in early October, said Anup Murarka, Adobe’s director of product marketing. The related tools, Flash Builder and Flex, will support new features in Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 by the end of the year.

The releases will enable delivery of 2D and 3D games over the Internet to various devices, Murarka said. Developers of enterprise applications will also find the 3D capabilities popular for data-centric apps. Enterprises, for example, will be able to build application dashboards to “visualize complex data sets” with 3D images, he said.

Developers will also be able to use the tools to more deeply integrate business software like Excel and Outlook in devices and to access hardware programming interfaces for functions such as Near-Field Communication being used more widely in smartphones, Murarka said.

The new versions will also help developers build more secure applications with the ability to leverage cryptographically secure random number generation, he said.

Read More…..

PayPal Unveils New Payment System

PayPal has unveiled a mobile payment product for customers that doesn’t require near-field communication (NFC) technology inside smartphones.

The system relies instead on using smartphones and other mobile devices to scan product bar codes and to authorize payments through PayPal mobile accounts. Shoppers will also be able to use credit-card scanning terminals commonly seen in grocery stores: The user inputs a phone number and PIN on the terminal’s keypad instead of swiping a credit or debit card.

PayPal President Scott Thompson laid out the basics of the plan in a blog posted Wednesday. In the blog, he also took a swipe at competitors, including Google, MasterCard, Visa and others, who are working with NFC in smartphones for a mobile wallet.

“Let’s be clear about something — we’re not just shoving a credit card on a phone,” Thompson said in his blog.

PayPal is already a major global force in online payments, with 100 million customers. While PayPal’s new payment technologies don’t rely on NFC, they do propose making in-store payments possible from any device and support GPS-based offers, according to Thompson’s blog. PayPal will even allow for customers to set up payments on credit after they’ve checked out.

Dozens of merchants got a sneak peak of the technology Wednesday at an event PayPal sponsored. The event was covered by All Things D, which was not allowed to take photographs, but posted a story. In addition to the payment methods shown in the PayPal video, that story said PayPal will allow customers to continue using plastic cards, issued by PayPal, for payment.

In an interview posted on AllThingsD, Thompson said the PayPal approach doesn’t require merchants to install new terminals, nor does it require customers to buy a new smartphone.

Read more here….

RIM’s Woes Continue

PlayBook shipments dropped in half for Research In Motion during its second quarter, which also saw revenue continue its steep decline.

RIM shipped just 200,000 PlayBooks in the second quarter, down from 500,000 last quarter, when it started offering the tablet device.

Revenue was US$4.2 billion, hitting the low end of the company’s expectation and down 10 percent from the same quarter last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected $4.47 billion.

RIM’s net income was $329 million, or $0.63 per share. Adjusted net income was $419 million, or $0.80 per share. Analysts were expecting better: Those polled by Thomson predicted $0.87 per share.

RIM shipped 10.6 million smartphones during the second quarter. In June, RIM warned that the second quarter might be weak because of delays in shipping new phones. The delays meant RIM would miss the back-to-school sales period, negatively impacting sales, it said at the time.

Executives who spoke during a conference call to discuss the results put a positive spin on phone sales, however. The company only began launching phones running the new BlackBerry 7 software within the past few weeks, and so far it’s the “largest and most successful launch in our history,” Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, said during the call.

Read More…

Intel Previews Android Tablet On Atom Chip

For the first time on Tuesday, Intel unveiled working prototypes of tablets computers with Google’s Android OS and the chip maker’s upcoming Atom low-power chip, code-named Medfield.

The tablet was about 8.9 millimeters (0.3 inches) thick and had a 10.1-inch screen, and was on display during a briefing at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco. The tablets ran on Android 3.0, code-named Honeycomb, and alpha software developed jointly by Google and Intel.

Earlier on Tuesday, Intel and Google announced they would ally on developing future releases of Android for smartphones and tablets. Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off a Medfield smartphone running on Android 2.3, code-named Gingerbread.

The Medfield tablet is a reference design for device makers who want to launch tablets, said Steve Smith, vice president at Intel. Smith didn’t say when Medfield tablets would be released, but said Intel is currently optimizing the chips for tablets to balance power and performance.

Intel is banking on Medfield tablets to prove it is improving on power consumption with its tablet and smartphone chips.

Intel already offers tablet chips code-named Oak Trail and Moorestown, which haven’t been successful. Only a few companies such as Cisco and Fujitsu have adopted the chips for business tablets.

Read More….

Nokia Puts Free M$ Apps On Symbian Phones

Several of Microsoft’s business productivity applications will be available free of charge on Nokia’s latest Symbian Belle smartphones later this year, Nokia stated Thursday.

The move comes at the same time Nokia is developing its first smartphone on the Windows “Mango” Phone platform. That phone is rumored to be scheduled for a November debut.

The free apps will run on Symbian Belle smartphones announced in August; they’re designed to keep customers buying Nokia products while Nokia ramps up to Windows Phone smartphones.

The free apps for Symbian Belle phones will include: Microsoft PowerPoint Broadcast for broadcasting presentations from a desktop to a smartphone;Microsoft OneNote for taking notes with images by syncing with Microsoft SkyDrive;And Microsoft Document Connection, which provides a single view of documents stored on a smartphone including email attachments and documents on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites.

Early next year, Nokia said it will provide OneNote synchronization with SharePoint and will add Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications for the first time outside the Windows platform.

Some critics of Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft wonder how successful Windows Phone Mango (version 7.5) will be and said the addition of Microsoft apps to Nokia’s older Symbian line is a way for Nokia to hedge its bets if the Microsoft partnership doesn’t pay off quickly.

The free productivity apps could also be a way to introduce a large number of Symbian users to Microsoft software. There are many more Symbian users outside the U.S. than inside and Symbian until this year had been the world’s largest smartphone platform.

Making the free apps available on the Symbian Belle phones doesn’t cost either company much and the Belle phone users “get something to sweeten the deal to stay with symbian,” Gold said.

Read More….

Sprint Sues To Stop AT&T-T-Mobile merger

Sprint on Tuesday announced it has initiated a lawsuit against AT&T and Deutsche Telekom to block the two companies from merging “as a violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.” Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act bars any person from acquiring “the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital” that would “substantially … lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.” In its suit, Sprint argues that the proposed merger would violate this act because it would lead to AT&T and Verizon’s controlling 75% of the wireless market while taking in 90% of the profits.

Sprint’s antitrust suit comes less than a week after the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against the merger with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In its suit, the DOJ similarly argued that the proposed merger would significantly damage competition in the wireless industry, especially since T-Mobile has historically offered low-cost wireless voice and data services for customers. The DOJ also contended that any efficiencies gained by combining AT&T and T-Mobile spectrum would not be enough to offset the damage done to U.S. consumers by further consolidation of the wireless industry.

Read More….

« Previous Page — Next Page »