Mobile phone security: what you need to know Late last year, alarming reports surfaced that Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a researcher at the Luxembourg University Laboratory of Cryptology and Security, had discovered a way to completely compromise unprotected smartphones. Demonstrating his hack at the Vienna DeepSec conference, he showed how he could listen to conversations, intercept data, and run up huge bills calling and texting premium rate services – all without the alerting the phone’s owner. With the ability to download and run apps, smartphones are now the main focus for a growing number of malicious hackers, and yet most devices are completely unprotected
A Swiss electronics manufacturer reckons it has the solution for taking perfect photos in low light with a mobile phone in the form of a new kind of chip for controlling the LED flash. STMicroelectronics has produced the chip complete with a super-capacitor, claiming that it will allow phone flashes to rival the xenon flashes found in handheld cameras. Most mobile phones use an ‘always-on’ LED flash that can struggle to illuminate its subject
In a new study conducted by the mobile application monitoring company Crittercism, it is noted that iOS application crash more often than their Android counterparts. The results, as you can see in the above and below images, speak for themselves: most applications crash under iOS 5.0.1, while Android apps appear to be rather more stable. iOS vs
Apple has been forced to pull most of its iPad and iPhone ranges from its website in Germany as the result of an injunction enforced by Motorola. It’s all down to one of Motorola’s patents covering wireless communications, which Apple is using but has not licensed from the phone company. The patent in question is over a “method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system”. That old chestnut This means that the Apple iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 have all been pulled from Apple’s German website, as well as the iPad and iPad 2; the iPhone 4S is unaffected by the ban, however





