Google tightens grip on Android hardware with HTC deal

 

Google is buying its way back into the smartphone business, almost four years after selling its stake in Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. It has acquired the team responsible for its Pixel phones from HTC.

Google is buying its way back into the smartphone business, almost four years after selling its stake in Motorola Mobility to Lenovo.
It's a sign that Google is committed to tighter integration between the Android operating system and specialized smartphone hardware. That could be good news for app developers and Android phone buyers alike: As Apple has shown with the video processing and artificial intelligence features of its iPhone X, there is much to be gained by tightly coupling software and hardware.
Google never entirely quit the hardware business. Since selling Moto, it has continued to release smartphones and tablets under its own brand, but these were designed and manufactured by other companies, including LG and HTC.
Now Google is taking greater control of that design process, paying US$1.1 billion to HTC to acquire the team behind its Pixel devices. It will also receive a non-exclusive license to some HTC intellectual property, the companies said Thursday.

The number of HTC employees affected by the deal is around 2,000, according to Reuters.
The deal won't give Google any manufacturing capabilities: It will still have to outsource that work to others.
And it won't knock HTC out of the smartphone market altogether: It still has a team working on the successor to its U11 flagship, launched earlier this year, and will continue to work on its VIVE virtual reality system.
HTC has been a long-time supporter of Google's Android project. It was the first smartphone manufacturer to build an Android phone, the HTC Dream. Later, it built the Nexus One and the Nexus 9 tablet for Google, following up with the first Pixel smartphone last year.

Google unveiled the Pixel and Pixel XL phones at an event on Oct. 4, 2016, alongside its Google Home digital assistant, Chromecast Ultra video streaming device and Daydream VR headset. It's getting ready to release a second generation of "Made by Google" products on the anniversary of that launch.
Unlike its investment in Motorola, which lasted less than three years, Google is now investing in hardware for the long run, looking five, 10, even 20 years ahead, according to a blog post from Rick Osterloh, formerly president of Motorola and now Google's senior vice president for hardware.

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An Encrypted Internet Is a Basic Human Right (Op-Ed)

Odubanjo Bolarinwa

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Nico Sell is co-founder and co-chairman of Wickr Inc. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. Sell contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
George Washington could have become a king, but instead devoted his life to giving power back to the people. This is why his political heritage remains so strong today, inspiring millions around the world to continue striving for liberty and democracy. One of my favorite U.S. presidents, Washington proved that great leaders rule by empowering the people, not by usurping power.
In the next decade, billions of online citizens will join the Web, making national borders less relevant and the world more connected. Technology, as well as the hopes it fuels, has empowered millions of people across the globe to demand social and political change from some of its most oppressive governments. Yet, the same technology is being used to suppress and surveil more than half of the world's population: those still living under undemocratic regimes and lacking basic rights.

The right to private communication
The establishment of the U.S. Postal Service was one of the most visionary civil liberties events of its time, deeply rooted in Washington's belief that a strong state and society can only exist if every citizen has access to uncensored information and can freely communicate, away from the government's prying eyes. The Postal Act of 1792 that led to the founding of the modern post office established free speech and a right to private communications, going as far as imposing the death penalty for robbing mail service personnel. The newly established post office was envisioned to be the antipode of the crown post operated by the British government, which frequently opened and censored correspondence.
The same commitment to privacy and access to free, uncensored information is the reason we started Wickr. We currently serve millions of private, encrypted Wickr messages each day for users in more than 190 countries. Our vision is to bring this service to billions by making strong, trusted encryption incredibly easy and intuitive for personal or business use. This is only the beginning. [Right to Privacy: Constitutional Rights & Privacy Laws ]
Today, society needs to breathe new life into Washington's idea of an uncensored post office service by providing these basic rights to all 3 billion people already connected to the Web, and to those who will be coming online in the next decade. We need to collectively balance our global Web to ensure the Internet remains a platform for free speech and uncensored information, where privacy and real human connection enable strong social discourse and economic prosperity.
I call that space the private Web.
Away from prying eyes
The public Web has brought us incredible innovations that have improved lives and celebrated human creativity. But as we all move online, it becomes increasingly clear that, just as with any complex and ever-evolving system, the Internet requires a long-overdue fine-tuning.
We, as Web users, are generating millions of pieces of information about the most personal aspects of our lives on a daily basis, creating dangerous treasure troves of detailed and calibrated information. Once that information is in the open, we lose ownership of it, to the point that we do not even know who is collecting it.
Businesses increasingly depend on technology, becoming more and more vulnerable to critical data security breaches. Global financial, transport and security systems are being compromised almost weekly — either through targeted attacks or as a result of poor and outdated safeguards.
To expand the benefits of the Internet, we need to continue building the private Web — through applications, technology, policies and norms — to power innovation, develop ideas, protect our assets and strengthen human rights for all. Although achieving privacy and universal access to free, uncensored information will always be a moving target as technology evolves, our ability to intentionally choose a right mode of communication, private or public, is a critical step toward bringing George Washington's vision closer.
Encryption "back doors" are a risk
Today, it is essential to set the ground rules that will govern our networks and infrastructure systems in the future. Strong encryption is a key component of the private Web. Having trusted encryption without a back door — for either governments or criminals — will enable us to keep out not only the prying eyes of totalitarian regimes but also cyber criminals.
A recent debate around technology backdoors has raised a critical point. Is it possible to weaken encryption in a way that would only allow access to the "good" government and never to criminals or authoritarian regimes? The answer from many prominent technologists has been a loud, resounding "no." [Privacy, Pfft! Why NSA Surveillance Only Bothers Some People ]
Considering that most American Internet companies are operating as global entities that must comply with local laws, we should never adopt a policy that we would not want another government to adopt and exploit. If the U.S. government passes a law that requires a backdoor to operate in America, then what would stop the Chinese and Russian governments from doing the same, requiring U.S. companies to give backdoor access to them as well?
The encrypted future
Many questions remain regarding exactly how to achieve that vision in the hyperconnected, digital world.

If you're a topical expert — researcher, business leader, author or innovator — and would like to contribute an op-ed piece, email us here.

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• How will the private and public Web coexist? 
• What should the standards of data collection be? 
• How can companies that profit today from leveraging our personal and business information innovate around new business models? 
• How do we establish trust with companies we let host our most sensitive and valuable information? 
• How do we verify public promises that companies and governments make about their data retention and usage practices? 
• Who has the duty of care to our children's data, or our health and financial information? 
• How do we promote encryption by default? 

There are many more questions we all need to consider if, as a society, we value the progress we've made and the rights we continue to fight so hard for, both offline and online.
The U.S. Post Office served as a catalyst for building strong political and social discourse. For the first time, citizens were able to engage in political conversations without fear of being persecuted. Speech is only free when we have direct control of our communications — whether public or private — without the need to self-censor or fear that a piece of communication can be used out of context many years after it has been sent.
It is time to invest our energy, creativity and resources into building the Web's private hemisphere to carry on the tradition of private communications, uncensored information and ownership of our assets.
Read more from the Technology Pioneers on their Live Science landing page. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Easy ways to hack a network

Ping The IP address gives the attacker’s Internet address. The numerical address like 212.214.172.81 does not reveal much. You can use PING to convert the address into a domain name in WINDOWS: The Domain Name Service (DNS) protocol reveals the matching domain name.  PING stands for “Packet Internet Groper” and is delivered with practically every Internet compatible system, including all current Windows versions. Make sure you are logged on to the net. Open the DOS shell and enter the following PING command: Ping –a 123.123.12.1 Ping will search the domain name and reveal it. You will often have information on the provider the attacker uses e.g.:  dialup21982.gateway123.provider.com Pinging is normally the first step involved in hacking the target. Ping uses ICMP (Internet Control Messaging Protocol) to determine whether the target host is reachable or not. Ping sends out ICMP Echo packets to the target host, if the target host is alive it would respond back with ICMP Echo reply packets. All the versions of Windows also contain the ping tool. To ping a remote host follow the procedure below. Click Start and then click Run. Now type ping <ip address or hostname> (For example: ping yahoo.com) This means that the attacker logged on using “provider.com”. Unfortunately, there are several IP addresses that cannot be converted into domain names. For more parameter that could be used with the ping command, go to DOS prompt and type ping /?. Ping Sweep If you are undetermined about your target and just want a live system, ping sweep is the solution for you. Ping sweep also uses ICMP to scan for live systems in the specified range of IP addresses. Though Ping sweep is similar to ping but reduces the time involved in pinging a range of IP addresses. Nmap (http://www.insecure.org) also contains an option to perform ping sweeps. Tracert:   Tracert is another interesting tool available to find more interesting information about a remote host. Tracert also uses ICMP. Tracert helps you to find out some information about the systems involved in sending data (packets) from source to destination. To perform a tracert follow the procedure below. Tracer connects to the computer whose IP has been entered and reveals all stations starting from your Internet connection. Both the IP address as well as the domain name (if available) is displayed. If PING cannot reveal a name, Traceroute will possibly deliver the name of the last or second last station to the attacker, which may enable conclusions concerning the name of the provider used by the attacker and the region from which the attacks are coming. Go to DOS prompt and type tracert <destination address>   (For example: tracert yahoo.com). But there are some tools available like Visual Traceroute which help you even to find the geographical location of the routers involved. http://www.visualware.com/visualroute Port Scanning:- After you have determined that your target system is alive the next  important step would be to perform a port scan on the target system. There are a wide range of port scanners available for free. But many of  them uses outdated techniques for port scanning which could be easily recognized by the network administrator. Personally I like to use Nmap (http://www.insecure.org) which has a wide range of options. You can download the NmapWin and its source code from: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/nmapwin. Apart from port scanning Nmap is capable of identifying the Operating system being used, Version numbers of various services running, firewalls being used and a lot more. Common ports: Below is a list of some common ports and the respective services running on the ports. 20 FTP data (File Transfer Protocol) 21 FTP (File Transfer Protocol) 22 SSH 23 Telnet 25 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) 53 DNS (Domain Name Service) 68 DHCP (Dynamic host Configuration Protocol) 79 Finger 80 HTTP 110 POP3 (Post Office Protocol, version 3) 137 NetBIOS-ns 138 NetBIOS-dgm 139 NetBIOS 143 IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) 161 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) 194 IRC (Internet Relay Chat) 220 IMAP3 (Internet Message Access Protocol 3) 389 LDAP 443 SSL (Secure Socket Layer) 445 SMB (NetBIOS over TCP) Besides the above ports they are even some ports known as Trojan ports used by Trojans that allow remote access to that system. Vulnerability Scanning: Every operating system or the services will have some vulnerabilities due to the programming errors. These vulnerabilities are crucial for a successful hack. Bugtraq is an excellent mailing list discussing the vulnerabilities in the various system. The exploit  code writers write exploit codes to exploit these vulnerabilities existing in a system. There are a number of vulnerability scanners available to scan the host for known vulnerabilities. These vulnerability scanners are very important for a network administrator to audit the network security. Some of such vulnerability scanners include Shadow Security Scanner,Stealth HTTP Scanner, Nessus, etc. Visit http://www.securityfocus.com vulnerabilities and exploit codes of various operating systems. Packet storm security (http://www.packetstormsecurity.com) is also a nice pick.

Tools Descriptions: 1. Nmap I think everyone has heard of this one, recently evolved into the 4.x series. Nmap (Network Mapper) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. Nmap runs on most types of computers and both console and graphical versions are available. Nmap is free and open source. Can be used by beginners (-sT) or by pros alike (packet_trace). A very versatile tool, once you fully understand the results. Get Nmap Here - http://www.insecure.org/nmap/download.html 2. Nessus Remote Security Scanner Recently went closed source, but is still essentially free. Works with a client- server framework. Nessus is the worlds most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the worlds largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications. Get Nessus Here - http://www.nessus.org/download/ 3. John the Ripper Yes, JTR 1.7 was recently released! John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches. You can get JTR Here - http://www.openwall.com/john/ 4. Nikto Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3200 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 625 servers, and version specific problems on over 230 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired). Nikto is a good CGI scanner, there are some other tools that go well with Nikto (focus on http fingerprinting or Google hacking/info gathering etc, another article for just those). Get Nikto Here - http://www.cirt.net/code/nikto.shtml 5. SuperScan Powerful TCP port scanner, pinger, resolver. SuperScan 4 is an update of the highly popular Windows port scanning tool, SuperScan. If you need an alternative for nmap on Windows with a decent interface, I suggest you check this out, it’s pretty nice. Get SuperScan Here - http://www.foundstone.com/index.htm subnav=resources/navigation.htm&subcontent=/resources/proddesc/superscan4.htm 6. p0f P0f v2 is a versatile passive OS fingerprinting tool. P0f can identify the operating system on: - machines that connect to your box (SYN mode), - machines you connect to (SYN+ACK mode), - machine you cannot connect to (RST+ mode), - machines whose communications you can observe. Basically it can fingerprint anything, just by listening, it doesn’t make ANY active connections to the target machine. Get p0f Here - http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f/p0f.shtml 7. Wireshark (Formely Ethereal) Wireshark is a GTK+-based network protocol analyzer, or sniffer, that lets you capture and interactively browse the contents of network frames. The goal of the project is to create a commercial-quality analyzer for Unix and to give Wireshark features that are missing from closed-source sniffers. Works great on both Linux and Windows (with a GUI), easy to use and can reconstruct TCP/IP Streams! Will do a tutorial on Wireshark later. Get Wireshark Here - http://www.wireshark.org/ 8. Yersinia Yersinia is a network tool designed to take advantage of some weakeness in different Layer 2 protocols. It pretends to be a solid framework for analyzing and testing the deployed networks and systems. Currently, the following network protocols are implemented: Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), IEEE 802.1q, Inter-Switch Link Protocol (ISL), VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP). The best Layer 2 kit there is. Get Yersinia Here - http://yersinia.sourceforge.net/ 9. Eraser Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS. Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License. An excellent tool for keeping your data really safe, if you’ve deleted it..make sure it’s really gone, you don’t want it hanging around to bite you in the ass. Get Eraser Here - http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php 10. PuTTY PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. A must have for any h4. 0r wanting to telnet or SSH from Windows without having to use the crappy default MS command line clients. Get PuTTY Here. - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ 11. LCP Main purpose of LCP program is user account passwords auditing and recovery in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. Accounts information import, Passwords recovery, Brute force session distribution, Hashes computing. A good free alternative to L0phtcrack. LCP was briefly mentioned in our well read Rainbow Tables and RainbowCrack article. Get LCP Here - http://www.lcpsoft.com/english/download.htm 12. Cain and Abel My personal favourite for password cracking of any kind. Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols. The program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort. Get Cain and Abel Here - http://www.oxid.it/cain.html 13. Kismet Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic. A good wireless tool as long as your card supports rfmon (look for an orinocco gold). Get Kismet Here - http://www.kismetwireless.net/download.shtml 14. NetStumbler Yes a decent wireless tool for Windows! Sadly not as powerful as it’s Linux counterparts, but it’s easy to use and has a nice interface, good for the basics of war-driving. NetStumbler is a tool for Windows that allows you to detect Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) using 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. It has many uses: Verify that your network is set up the way you intended. Find locations with poor coverage in your WLAN. Detect other networks that may be causing interference on your network. Detect unauthorized rogue access points in your workplace. Help aim directional antennas for long-haul WLAN links. Use it recreationally for WarDriving. Get NetStumbler Here - http://www.stumbler.net/ 15. Hping To finish off, something a little more advanced if you want to test your TCP/IP packet monkey skills. hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. The interface is inspired to the ping unix command, but hping isn’t only able to send ICMP echo requests. It supports TCP, UDP, ICMP and RAW-IP protocols, has a traceroute mode, the ability to send files between a covered channel, and many other features. Get hping Here - http://www.hping.org/