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How often do you click the 'back' or the 'Home' button on your mobile device to exit an application immediately? I believe, several times in a single day because a large number of apps do not have an exit button to directly force-close them instead of going back and back and back until they exit. Sometimes Android users expect the back button to take them back to the back page, but sometimes they really want to exit the app immediately. Often this has severe usability implications when a majority of users are already dealing with their low-performance mobile devices and believe that clicking back button multiple times would kill the app and save memory, but it doesn't. Google has now addressed this issue and silently included a feature within Android 7.1 Nougat that allows users to exit from apps by pressing the 'back' key successively within 0.3 seconds for over four times. Dubbed " Panic Detection Mode ," the feature runs in the background o...

Admit it. Who would not want their firewall maintenance grunt work to go away? For more than 20 years, companies either managed their edge firewall appliances or had service providers rack-and-stack appliances in their data centers and did it for them. This was called a managed firewall — an appliance wrapped with a managed service, often from a carrier or managed security service provider (MSSP). The provider assumed the management of the firewall box, its software, and even its policy and management from the over-burdened IT team. But customers ended up paying for the inefficiency of dealing with appliances (i.e. "grunt work") because the problem just shifted to the provider. A new architecture was needed - a transformation from an appliance form factor to a true cloud service. In a 2016 Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection report , Gartner analyst Jeremy D'Hoinne initiated the emerging category of Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). He defined FWaaS as " ...a fire...

Security researchers have discovered a new method to decrypt satellite phone communications encrypted with the GMR-2 cipher in "real time" -- that too in mere fractions of a second in some cases. The new attack method has been discovered by two Chinese security researchers and is based on previous research by German academicians in 2012, showing that the phone's encryption can be cracked so quickly that attackers can listen in on calls in real time. The research, disclosed in a paper published last week by the security researchers in the International Association for Cryptologic Research, focused on the GMR-2 encryption algorithm that is commonly being used in most modern satellite phones, including British satellite telecom Inmarsat, to encrypt voice calls in order to prevent eavesdropping. Unlike previous 2012 research by German researchers who tried to recover the encryption key with the help of 'plaintext' attacks, the Chinese researchers attempted ...

Personal details of some 120 Million customers have been allegedly exposed on the Internet in probably the biggest breach of personal data ever in India. Last night, an independent website named Magicapk.com went online, offering Reliance Jio customers to search for their identification data (Know Your Customer or KYC) just by typing in their Jio number. Reliance set up the Jio 4G network across the length and breadth of India in September last year and gained more than 50 million subscribers within a span of just 83 days. The company gave seven months of free internet, unlimited calls, unlimited music to its subscribers. Although the website that claimed to have hacked into Jio database is no longer accessible, many users confirmed their personal data showed up on the website, displaying their names, email addresses and most alarmingly, in some cases, Aadhaar numbers. Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every resident of In...

As a punishment announced last October, Google will no longer trust SSL/TLS certificate authorities WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom with the launch of Chrome 61 for not maintaining the "high standards expected of CAs." The move came after Google was notified by GitHub's security team on August 17, 2016, that Chinese Certificate Authority WoSign had issued a base certificate for one of GitHub's domains to an unnamed GitHub user without authorization. After this issue had been reported, Google conducted an investigation in public as a collaboration with Mozilla and the security community, which uncovered several other cases of WoSign misissuance of certificates. As a result, the tech giant last year began limiting its trust of certificates backed by WoSign and StartCom to those issued before October 21st, 2016 and has been removing whitelisted hostnames over the course of several Chrome releases since Chrome 56. Now, in a Google Groups post published ...