After the unexpected success of Flappy Bird, creator Dong Nguyen faced intense scrutiny, which led to him eventually pulling his game from the App Store and Google Play.
| The Interface is also quite good |
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| The Character |
Showing posts with label spy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spy. Show all posts
Wednesday, 20 August 2014
Flappy Bird Creator Unveils His Next Game - Swing Copters
MOTO 360 May Be Launched On Sept 4.!!!!
Moto 360 may be launched on Sept 4 2014
As we near the official release of the Moto 360 next week, speculation and parsing of the little information we have has gone rampant. While we don't know a whole lot about the watch — even though we've held it in our own hands — we do know that the big sore spot for many is the so-called "black...
Motorola has been teasing its Moto 360 smartwatch for sometime.It will have a optical heart rate monitor, a pedometer and will be waterproof up to 3.3 meters with for 30 mins. The watch will have a stainless steel casing and a plastic back along with a horween leather band and a metal buckle closure.
| Sleek & Compact |
As we near the official release of the Moto 360 next week, speculation and parsing of the little information we have has gone rampant. While we don't know a whole lot about the watch — even though we've held it in our own hands — we do know that the big sore spot for many is the so-called "black...
Thursday, 7 August 2014
iPhone 6 Is Here...!!! Get To Known IT...!!!!!!!!
So, nearly 8 months on, am I still excited and if so by what new features? Firstly it’s still not clear whether we’ll see both the suspected 4.7in and 5.5in models on launch day but I strongly suspect the larger ‘phablet’ model won’t be available from the outset. It’s likely to be hideously expensive and sales could well suffer as a result.Finally, according to the ever-more aligning rumor mill, Apple is set to launch the iPhone 6 on 9th September, which makes sense given its past record of release dates. This means all will be revealed in a month’s time.
The iPhone 5C’s sales took a hit but for the opposite reason – the iPhone 5S wasn’t much more expensive so it made sense to opt for it instead. Likewise the 4.7in iPhone 6 already offers a larger screen so why go for something what many will feel is obtrusively large?
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The proposed 4.7in and 5.5in versions of the iPhone 6 |
A larger screen
However, the larger screens are very welcome indeed for me and the 4.7in model is most likely the model I will eventually retire my iPhone 5 to own. This is for a number of reasons. Typing is more accurate for one – like it or not, a larger display means a larger keyboard that’s easier to use. I used a 4.7in Android-based smartphone recently and the difference the larger screen made to my iPhone 5 was immediately obvious when typing. I made fewer mistakes and could type faster too.The larger screen also makes viewing everything from websites to videos a much more immersive experience. You don’t have to pinch and zoom as often and setting your device down and watching videos often means plenty of squinting with the iPhone 5, unless you’re holding it to your face.
A wide display and form factor
While many iPhone 5/5s owners like the narrow screen and its ability to be operated fairly completely using just one hand, this aspect ratio doesn’t lend itself particularly well in other areas of ergonomics. The competition has had much wider, fuller screens for many generations and for the large-handed, the iPhone 5S can feel very small and not really up to the task of being a fully-featured smartphone. A wider display and handset could make it easier to use although it’s likely to put an end to one-handed use for most people.
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| The battery inside the iPhone 5 is usually depleted within a day of heavy use. |
Better battery life
The battery in the 4.7in iPhone 6 is also looking likely to be a 2,100mAh model – a higher capacity than has been reported till now. This would mean it has over 45% more capacity over that in the iPhone 5S. Now, the screen in the iPhone 6 will undoubtedly be larger and draw more power as a result but the move from 4in to 4.7in will still mean there’s extra capacity here in addition to what will likely be be a more power-efficient processor.Better battery life is always welcome in a smartphone and Apple’s devices have often languished at the bottom of the pile when it comes to time away from a charger. In fact, I’m actually hoping the renders and cases we’ve seen are actually not a true representation as they do appear exceptionally thin – I’d rather have a bigger battery if I’m honest. Even so, even a 10% increase in battery life would make the iPhone 6 much more competitive.
iOS 8
One reason why Apple has stuck with its screen size for so long is the success of its iOS operating system. Introduced with the original iPhone, it nailed things design-wise at a time when the competition were still using styluses or had horrid touch screens. Now, though, who doesn’t have capacitive touch screens and large app icons?
iOS 8 could represent the biggest shift in OS design since that initial launch, as Apple has to deal with the larger screen real-estate and make all our favourite features work just as well as they do on an iPhone 5S. While iOS obviously runs well on both sizes of iPad, a smartphone puts the magnifying glass on this much more intently. It will be particularly interesting to see how things flow on the larger iPhone 6 too.
Monday, 27 January 2014
Spy agencies tap data streaming from phone apps...!!!!!
When a
smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and
starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in
the background to snatch data revealing the player's location, age, sex
and other personal information, according to secret British
intelligence documents.
In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from the smartphone identification codes of users to where they have been that day.
The NSA and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J Snowden, the former NSA. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, telephone logs and the geographic data embedded in photographs when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other internet services.
The eavesdroppers' pursuit of mobile networks has been outlined in earlier reports, but the secret documents, shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica, offer far more details of their ambitions for smartphones and the apps that run on them. The efforts were part of an initiative called "the mobile surge," according to a 2011 British document, an analogy to the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. An NSA analyst's enthusiasm was evident in the breathless title — "Golden Nugget!" — given to a slide for a top-secret talk in 2010 that described iPhones and Android phones as rich resources, another document noted.
The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents show that the NSA and the British agency routinely obtain information from certain apps, particularly those introduced earliest to cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies have a similar ability, the documents show, but they do not make explicit whether the spies have put that into practice. Some personal data, developed in profiles by advertising companies, could be particularly sensitive: A secret British intelligence document from 2012 said that spies can scrub smartphone apps to collect details like a user's "political alignment" and sexual orientation.
President Obama announced new restrictions this month to better protect the privacy of ordinary Americans and foreigners from government surveillance, including limits on how the NSA can view the metadata of Americans' phone calls —- the routing information, time stamps and other data associated with calls. But he did not address the information that the intelligence agencies get from leaky apps and other smartphone functions.
And while Obama expressed concern about advertising companies that collect information on people to send tailored ads to their mobile phones, he offered no hint that American spies have routinely seized that data. Nothing in the secret reports indicates that the companies cooperated with the spy agencies to share the information; the topic is not addressed.
The agencies have long been intercepting earlier generations of cellphone traffic like text messages and metadata from nearly every segment of the mobile network —- and, more recently, computer traffic running on internet pipelines. Because those same networks carry the rush of data from leaky apps, the agencies have a ready-made way to collect and store this new resource. The documents do not address how many users might be affected, whether they include Americans or how often, with so much information collected automatically, analysts would see personal data.
"NSA does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission," the agency wrote in response to questions about the programme. "Because some data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA's lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process." Similar protections, the agency said, are in place for "innocent foreign citizens."
The British spy agency declined to comment on any specific programme, but said all its activities complied with British law.
Two top-secret flow charts produced by the British agency in 2012 showed incoming streams of information skimmed from smartphone traffic by the Americans and the British. The streams were divided into "traditional telephony" — metadata — and others marked "social apps," "geo apps," "http linking," webmail, MMS and traffic associated with mobile ads, among others. (MMS refers to the mobile system for sending pictures and other multimedia, and http is the protocol for linking to websites.)
In charts showing how information flows from smartphones into the agency's computers, analysts included questions to be answered by the data, like "Where was my target when they did this?" and "Where is my target going?"
As the programme accelerated, the NSA nearly quadrupled its budget in a single year, to $767 million in 2007 from $204 million, according to a top-secret analysis written by Canadian intelligence around the same time.
Even sophisticated users are often unaware of how smartphones offer spies a unique opportunity for one-stop shopping for information. "By having these devices in our pockets and using them more and more," said Philippe Langlois, who has studied the vulnerabilities of mobile phone networks and is the founder of the Paris-based company Priority One Security, "you're somehow becoming a sensor for the world intelligence community."
Smartphones almost seem to make things too easy. Functioning as phones to make calls and send texts and as computers to surf the web and send emails, they both generate and rely on data. One secret report showed that just by updating Android software, a user sent more than 500 lines of data about the phone's history and use onto the network.
Detailed profiles
Such information helps mobile advertising companies, for example, create detailed profiles of people based on how they use their mobile device, where they travel, what apps and websites they open, and other factors. Advertising firms might triangulate web shopping data and browsing history to guess whether someone is wealthy or has children.
The NSA and the British agency busily scoop up this data, mining it for new information and comparing it with their lists of intelligence targets.
One secret British document from 2010 suggested that the agencies collected such a huge volume of "cookies" — the digital traces left on a mobile device or a computer when a target visits a website — that classified computers were having trouble storing it all.
"They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events," the document said.
The two agencies displayed a particular interest in Google Maps, which is accurate to within a few yards or better in some locations. Intelligence agencies collected so much data from the app that "you'll be able to clone Google's database" of global searches for directions, according to a top-secret NSA report from 2007.
"It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system," a secret 2008 report by the British agency said.
(In December, The Washington Post, citing the Snowden documents, reported that the NSA was using metadata to track cellphone locations outside the United States and was using ad cookies to connect internet addresses with physical locations.)
In another example, a secret 20-page British report dated 2012 included the computer code needed for plucking the profiles generated when Android users play Angry Birds. The app was created by Rovio Entertainment, of Finland, and has been downloaded more than a billion times, the company has said.
Rovio drew public criticism in 2012 when researchers claimed that the app was tracking users' locations and gathering other data and passing it to mobile ad companies. In a statement on its website, Rovio says that it may collect its users' personal data, but that it abides by some restrictions. For example, the statement says, "Rovio does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age."
The secret report noted that the profiles vary depending on which of the ad companies — which include Burstly and Google's ad services, two of the largest online advertising businesses -— compiles them. Most profiles contain a string of characters that identifies the phone, along with basic data on the user like age, sex and location. One profile notes whether the user is currently listening to music or making a call, and another has an entry for household income.
Google declined to comment for this article, and Burstly did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Saara Bergstrom, a Rovio spokeswoman, said the company had no knowledge of the intelligence programmes. "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned," Bergstrom said, referring to the NSA and the British spy agency.
Another ad company creates far more intrusive profiles that the agencies can retrieve, the report said. The names of the apps that generate those profiles were not given, but the company was identified as Millennial Media, which has its headquarters in Baltimore.
In securities filings, Millennial documented how it began working with Rovio in 2011 to embed ad services in Angry Birds apps running on iPhones, Android phones and other devices.
According to the report, the profiles created by Millennial contain much of the same information as others, but several categories that are listed as "optional," including ethnicity, marital status and sexual orientation, suggest that much wider sweeps of personal data may take place.
Millennial Media declined to comment for this article.
Possible categories for marital status, the secret report said, include single, married, divorced, engaged and "swinger"; those for sexual orientation are straight, gay, bisexual and "not sure." It is unclear whether the "not sure" category exists because so many phone apps are used by children, or because insufficient data may be available.
There is no explanation of precisely how the ad company defined the categories, whether users volunteered the information or whether the company inferred it by other means. Nor is there any discussion of why all that information would be useful for marketing — or intelligence.
Unwieldy heaps
The agencies have had occasional success, at least by their own reckoning, when they start with something closer to a traditional investigative tip or lead. The spies say that tracking smartphone traffic helped break up a bomb plot by Al Qaeda in Germany in 2007, and the NSA boasted that to crack the plot, it wove together mobile data with emails, logins and web traffic. Similarly, mining smartphone data helped lead to the arrests of members of a drug cartel hit squad in the killing of an American Consulate employee in Mexico in 2010.
But the data, whose volume is soaring as mobile devices have begun to dominate the technological landscape, is a crushing amount of information for the spies to sift through. As smartphone data builds up in NSA and British databases, the agencies sometimes seem a bit at a loss on what to do with it all, the documents show. A few isolated experiments provide hints as to how unwieldy the data can be.
In 2009, the American and British spy agencies each undertook a brute-force analysis of a tiny sliver of their cellphone databases. Crunching just one month of NSA cellphone data, a secret report said, required 120 computers and turned up 8,615,650 "actors" — apparently callers of interest. A similar run using three months of British data came up with 24,760,289 actors.
"Not necessarily straightforward," the report said of the analysis.
The agencies' extensive computer operations had trouble sorting through the slice of data. Analysts were "dealing with immaturity," the report said, encountering computer memory and processing problems. The report made no mention of anything suspicious in the data. -- The Tech Team [abhishekgidde.blogspot.in] [ Src: ToI Tech]
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