Google Maps Offline for Android phones

Google maps are now go offline for android smart phones. Also they have introduced new features

Offline Maps

Wish you had a map when your device was offline? With offline maps, you can save and use certain maps when you’re not connected to the Internet. If you have GPS on the device, the blue dot will still work without a data connection so you know where you are. Whether you’re traveling the world or underground, offline maps can help you navigate the offline world.

Indoor Maps

With Google Maps for Android you can now go indoors. Next time you're running through the airport or shopping in a mall, use Google Maps on your mobile phone to find a specific place or get indoor walking directions.

Directions and Navigation

Whether you’re driving, walking, biking or using public transportation, Google Maps is ready to find the best route for you. Turn-by-turn GPS navigation with in-route adjustments will auto-correct your route if you make a wrong turn. Live Traffic keeps you informed in real-time, and you can also plan ahead based on past traffic conditions

You can have more information on Google 

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Self destructing Text Messages

Text messages are great, but they have the annoying property of being out of the sender's control as soon as they're sent. That's resulted in all kinds of fun for the Internet, and it's also presented a big opportunity for a security company to pick up the slack and impose some sanity and privacy on these communications. A new start-up called Wickr is aiming to do just that with a mobile app that enables users to send anonymous, encrypted texts, photos and videos that self-destruct after a set time period and leave no trace for snoops.

Wickr is designed as a way for users to have complete control of not only how their communications are transmitted and stored, but also how long they're available to anyone, even the recipient. The company, which launched its app this week, is the creation of several security experts, including Robert Statica, a professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Kara Coppa, a former defense contractor and network security operator, Christopher Howell, a former computer crime and forensics investigator, and Nico Sell, who is well-known in security circles as one of the key movers behind DEFCON and Black Hat and has been involved as a founder or adviser of several security companies.

The Wickr founders aim to make traceable communications the exception, rather than the norm, and to return control of private communications to the user.

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How Hackers Use Trending Topics like "Olymics 2012" Against You

As July makes its way into August, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London will spend a couple of weeks at center stage. Much of the live action will happen as Americans are at work, and millions of fans will be following the Games online.

A recent survey by SpectorSoft Corporation of Vero Beach, Fla., a maker of computer and mobile-device monitoring and recording software, found that 40 percent of employees plan to follow the Olympics from their workplace computers. Plenty more will be checking out the results on whatever Internet-connected device they have handy.

Big events like the Olympics, presidential elections and the NCAA basketball championships are prime time for cybercriminals because of the scope of interest, drawing the attention of even people who are only casual observers of sports or politics.
But these events only happen periodically, and we know the bad guys don't take a year, or four, off. Instead, online criminals depend on current events and trending topics in order to develop the next wave of social-engineered attacks.
"In the past, we have seen [criminals] leverage the death of a celebrity or a popular event like Black Friday to send phishing emails on that topic, or use black-hat SEO [search engine optimization] techniques and even purchase keywords so their malicious site appears high on search results," explained Brendan Ziolo, VP of marketing at Kindsight, a digital-security company based in Mountain View, Calif.
"Because the user is anxious to see this news or get the latest specials," Ziolo said, "they click on the links without thinking and become infected."



ou would think that after a while, we would become a lot more immune to, or at least more aware of, social-engineered attacks, but the opposite appears to be true.
According to Ziolo and Kindsight's Q2 Malware Report, email that drives users to a malicious website, which then infects visitors with malware via a drive-by download, was the most common attack method in April, May and June of this year.
"The main infection method continues to be email messages luring victims to websites running a variety of exploit kits," Ziolo said. "The victim would typically receive an email message from a business or the government informing them of an issue with their account. This would contain a reasonable-looking link to a website.
"The website would actually host an exploit kit such as Blackhole. This would probe their system and attempt to infect it," Ziolo said.
The use of trending topics to socially engineer an attack needs be successful from the criminal's point of view.
Social-engineering tricks require a lot of time and effort, said Costin Raiu, director of global research and analysis at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow.
"What is standard at the moment is this," Raiu said. "We have automatic bots that scan sites such as Google Trends, Google News and Twitter trends, looking for the topics people like to talk about. Then the bad guys will generate Web pages on the fly on those particular topics and add exploit code into the pages."

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Which Android Smartphones are The Easiest To Modify?

 Android smartphones are pretty dang popular, there’s no denying that. And when something becomes that popular, there are plenty of people who would just love to hack, tweak, and modify everything and anything out of those phones. They’ve been successful too, as people who are active in the Android community hear a lot about rooting phones and installing custom ROMs onto them.

Indeed, Android phones are very tweakable and customizable, even in their stock form without any “hacks”. But for some of us, we don’t care if they’re customizable right when we get them, but instead we want to unlock their complete power to do everything we want them to.

What Is Known as Rooting an Smart Phone?

Almost all Android phones have a way of being rooted. Rooting is the process in which you usually exploit a security hole in the Android operating system or use some brute force attack to gain administrative privileges. Once a person has administrative rights, they can change deep system settings and files — something that is restricted when you first get the phone because the manufacturer and carrier don’t want you to mess up your phone accidently.

However, if you go so far as to root your phone, you’re not doing anything accidently, so no worries there besides a voided warranty. Anyways, if you can change system files and hardware settings (such as the CPUfrequency — that’s why CPU governing apps require root access to run), you can modify just about everything you could possibly want — you now have pure hardware in your hands which you can do whatever you want with.

Why Rooting your Smart Phone?

Some people want to root their phones because they want to be able to use such apps like a CPU governor, and keep the stock operating system on their phones. With root access, some people have been able to install entire Linux distributions onto their phones as an additional operating system while Android is still present, as you can see in the video below.


However, most people who root their phones will tend to install a custom ROM like CyanogenMod. These custom ROMs give the user full control over their phones and enable some advanced features settings to tweak performance and other characteristics. Additionally, they can also use all apps that require root permissions to run, so these people really get everything they want.

Generally speaking, there are plenty of phones which can be rooted and custom ROMs installed. Just look at CyanogenMod’s support devices list — it’s quite massive for comparable projects. However, for some devices you may have to go through more hoops than others, while others simply don’t have enough users to be actively supported. So which phone really is the best one to mess around with?

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Light travel possible through the newely found particle?

Scientists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new particle whose characteristics match those of the Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in physics, which could help unlock some of the universe's deepest secrets.

The potential discovery of the Higgs boson is a gateway to a new era that could see humanity unlock some of the universe’s great mysteries, including dark matter and light-speed travel, scientists have claimed.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled data from the Large Hadron Collider Wednesday “consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson,” an elusive particle thought to help explain why matter has mass.

Announcements by scientists about their analysis of data generated by trillions of particle collisions in the LHC, which is located beneath the Alps, drew avid applause at an eagerly awaited seminar in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday.

Finding the Higgs boson would help explain the origin of mass, one of the open questions in physicists' current understanding of the way the universe works.

The researchers stressed the preliminary nature of the results they were announcing Wednesday.

The U.S.-based scientists outlined their final analysis based on more than 10 years of research and 500 trillion particle collisions using the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab Tevatron collider near Batavia, Illinois, whose budgetary woes shut it down last year.

While finding the Higgs boson won't tell us everything we need to know about how the universe works, it will fill in a huge hole in the Standard Model that has existed for more than 50 years, according to experts.

Details From CNN

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A new Trend of Mobile Virus effective in iOS and Android Platform

This application is called ‘Find and Call’ and can be found in both the iOS Apple App Store and Android’s Google Play. This is a Trojan that uploads a user’s phonebook to remote server. The 'replication' part is done by the server - SMS spam messages with the URL to the application are being sent from the remote server to all the contacts in the user’s address book.

If user launches this application he will be asked to register in the app using his email address and cell phone number (both fields won’t be checked for validity). If user wants to ‘find friends in a phone book’ his phone book data will be secretly (no EULA/ terms of usage/notifications) uploaded to remote server.

Both apps are also able to upload user’s GPS coordinates to the same server but such ‘feature’ is not that new for both malicious and legal apps to be honest.

So, what happens next? User will be able to continue using the application but at the same time the application steals data from the device (phone book and cell phone numbers) which are uploaded to a remote server to be used for SMS spam campaigns. Each phone book entry will receive SMS spam message offering to click on the URL and download this ‘Find and Call’ application. It is worth mentioning that the ‘from’ field contains the user’s cell phone number. In other words, people will receive an SMS spam message from a trusted source.

Small F.A.Q.

• 1. Are these apps malicious?
Yes.

• 2. Why?
Both apps upload user’s phone book to remote server and use it for SMS spam. That’s why we detect them as Trojan.AndroidOS.Fidall.a and Trojan.IphoneOS.Fidall.a

• 3. Who created them?

Good question. There are actually some more interesting details. The website of this app allows you (after logging in to your account) to ‘enter’ your social network accounts, mail accounts (it seems that these details will also be used) and even PayPal (!) to add money to your account.

So be very cautious  when you are downloading apps. Be sure to view the user reviews about the app before you downloading them.

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