Is Samsung Ditching Android?

Samsung appears to have delivered a huge snuff to Android OS maker Google. Samsung’s new smartwatch Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, the sequels to the poorly reviewed original Galaxy Gear are going to ship without Android.

Instead, the new Gears run Tizen, another open source operating system that Samsung, Intel, and others are working on. It is starting to look like Samsung wants to distance itself from its reliance on Google for software and services.

Samsung’s official reason is that Tizen has better battery life and performance. The new Gears can get up to an extra two days of battery life by running Tizen, even though they have the same size battery. The Galaxy Gear barely made it through a day on one charge.

To be fair Android isn’t optimized to run on wearable devices like smart watches, but Samsung didn’t want to wait around for Google to catch up. It was clearly concerned about beating Apple to market. So far Apple has not shown up.

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Malware Infections On Android Rising

An increasing number of Android phones are infected with mobile malware programs that are capable of turning the handsets into spying devices, according to a report from Kindsight Security Labs, a subsidiary of telecommunications equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent.

The vast majority of mobile devices infected with malware are running the Android operating system and a third of the top 20 malware threats for Android by infection rate fall into the spyware category, Kindsight said in a report released Tuesday that covers the second quarter of 2013.

The Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary sells security appliances to ISPs (Internet service providers) and mobile network operators that can identify known malware threats and infected devices by analyzing the network traffic.

Data collected from its product deployments allows the company to compile statistics about how many devices connected to mobile or broadband networks are infected with malware and determine what are the most commonly detected threats.

The malware infection rate for devices connected to mobile networks is fairly low, averaging at 0.52%, Kindsight said in its report. These infected devices include mobile phones as well as Windows laptops that use a mobile connection through a phone, a 3G USB modem or a mobile hotspot device.

In January the number of infected mobile phones accounted for slightly more than 30% of all infected devices connected to mobile networks, but by June they grew to more than 50%.

The vast majority of infected mobile phones run Android. Those running BlackBerry, iOS and other operating systems represent less than 1% of infected mobile devices, Kindsight said.

When calculated separately, on average more than 1% of Android devices on mobile networks are infected with malware, Kindsight said in its report.

The malware threat most commonly seen on Android devices was an adware Trojan program called Uapush.A that sends SMS messages and steals information, Kindsight said. Uapush.A was responsible for around 53% of the total number of infections detected on Android devices.

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Is Iridium A Friend Of Cellular Phones?

Cellular phones squashed Iridium once, but in its second coming the satellite phone maker and owner of the biggest satellite fleet is relying on them to resurrect their business.

For all their seeming ubiquity, cellular services cover only about 8 percent of the globe, leaving large regions where the only way to communicate is to use a satphone made by Iridium Communications Inc or one of its smaller competitors.

“The need for communication devices and services where terrestrial can’t be there is rising, and as bandwidth needs increase it’s surely helping Iridium,” Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong said.

Investors have taken notice, pushing up the stock of the company nearly 50 percent over the past eight months.

“It’s a different company, with a prudent and successful financial model,” Raymond James analyst Chris Quilty said.

“They’re growing, they have extraordinarily high barriers to entry and some of the end markets and applications they’re targeting are vast and untapped,” he said.

Unlike its competitors, Iridium’s satellite constellation covers the entire globe, including the poles, and its array of 66 satellites dwarfs the fleets of its rivals. Inmarsat Plc has 11; GlobalStar has eight and is aiming to have 32 in orbit by the year-end; Thuraya has three, with one planned.

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Can Hackers Attack A Trains Network?

Security expert Professor Stefan Katzenbeisser of Technische Universität Darmstadt told a security conference in Berlin that the GSM-R which is being installed in train networks makes them vulnerable to hackers.

Katzenbeisser said that the new system was vulnerable to “Denial of Service” attacks and, while trains could not crash, service could be disrupted for quite some time. Speaking to the Chaos Communication Congress he said that Network Rail is currently installing GSM-R across the British railway network.

It uses the similar technical standards to 2G mobile networks and is due to replace older signalling technology in southern England next year, and throughout the whole country in 2014. But train switching systems, which enable trains to be guided from one track to another at a railway junction, have historically been separate from the online world. If they were connected to the internet as they are in GSM-R they could be hit by Denial of Service attacks.

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RIM’s Troubles May Not Be Over

Law firms in the United States and Canada are considering possible consumer lawsuits against Research In Motion Ltd for last week’s BlackBerry outages, which for three days crippled email and messaging for tens of millions of users around the world.

Consumer lawyers say they are investigating whether customers have common claims against the BlackBerry manufacturer and might be able to band together in a single lawsuit.

While the outage did not rise to the level of seriousness comparable to a dangerous medication or tainted food, it inconvenienced and angered customers. Frustrated BlackBerry users, turning to blogs, message boards, Twitter and Facebook, complained about losing important emails and missing meetings last week.

Law firms are considering breach-of-contract or consumer-fraud claims, attorneys said.

A breach-of-contract claim could argue the company failed in its obligations to provide service and could include carriers for BlackBerry service as additional defendants, said attorneys exploring litigation against RIM.

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Mobile Security Threats Continue To Grow

According to industry analysts, mobile device shipments will exceed a billion devices in 2015 and will rapidly outrun PC shipments. That’s great news for end user convenience, mobility, and work-anywhere productivity. But it also means that enterprises must prepare for the fact that the criminals will target these devices with attack exploits, spyware,
and rogue applications.

And while IBM’s IT security research team, X-Force, predicts a modest 33 software exploits targeting mobile devices in the year ahead, that’s roughly twice the number of such attack code released in the past year.

The group also sees a number of other troubling mobile security trends. First, when software flaws do surface, many mobile phone makers do not rapidly deploy software patches to devices; malicious apps are often distributed through third-party app markets. Another troubling trend is that some mobile malware can collect end user’s personal information for use in phishing attacks.

An example of vulnerabilities that would make such attacks possible are the two recent Android security flaws that were reported to affect popular handsets including the AT&T Samsung Galaxy SII and various HTC devices.

The security find announced by security researcher Trevor Eckhart, called HTClogger (logging tools introduced by handset maker HTC) that could leak email account information, user location, phone numbers, and messaging logs.

Handset maker HTC said, in a statement, that it is working to quickly issue an update to its customers. “HTC is working very diligently to quickly release a security update that will resolve the issue on affected devices. Following a short testing period by our carrier partners, the patch will be sent over-the-air to customers, who will be notified to download and install it. We urge all users to install the update promptly,” the company said.

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RIM To Launch Music Service

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is making plans to roll out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices, according to people familiar with the plans.

The new service is likely part of an attempt by RIM to improve its BlackBerry Messenger service as it competes with the mobile media platform strengths of rival Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Android.

RIM is in late-stage negotiations with major labels, including Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Corp’s Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Group. The new service is expected to be announced by Labor Day in the United States, September 5.

RIM has been enhancing its BlackBerry Messenger offering, popularly known as BBM, since announcing its “social platform” at last September’s DevCon event where it unveiled the PlayBook tablet computer.

A RIM spokeswoman declined comment on the report but said BBM is one of the largest mobile social networks in the world.

RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones have been hit by a sharply declining market share in the United States, even as the company has expanded sales in other parts of the world, partly because of BBM’s popularity.

Analyst Matthew Thornton at Avian Securities said he doubted the music service would attract new users but might help the company keep its existing BlackBerry customers interested.

“I just don’t think trying to replicate Apple is really going to change their situation near term,” he said.

“For RIM it’s going to be the new OS 7 product first and foremost … and then it’s about QNX and making that transition.”

RIM has just launched an updated operating system on three new touchscreen devices intended to catch up with the technical specifications of Android and other rivals. The company plans to launch the first BlackBerrys using the QNX software, used on its PlayBook tablet, early next year.

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Mobile Panic Button Coming Soon

The U.S. State Department is putting its money where its mouth is, according to the Daily Mail. It is funding the creation of an application that will allow pro-democracy activists to delete all incriminating evidence on their mobile phones with a single click while sending out an alert to their fellow activists.

The “panic button” will send out a text message to everyone in the user’s address book, then erase both that address book and the phone’s call history. This will be an important tool, given how thoroughly governments go through dissident’s communications devices as a matter of course these days.

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