Voylent Blog

More jobs @ Voylent

2006-11-02T17:27:00.000Z

Tired of proudly serving your corporate masters? Then why settle for the lesser evil! We have a new position and we haven't yet filled some old ones, so if you are in London and looking to land a job as a:

- UI designer
- Senior Symbian developer
- VP Marketing

then have a look at our jobs page on how to send us a resume. Call us, email us, we wanna hear from you.

Link

VoIP revolution leaves US behind

2006-10-19T16:47:00.000+01:00

Excellent piece of analysis at The Register about the differences in handset availability in Eurasia and North America.
Mobile operators, who at the time of writing (2006) are still tied to voice revenues and are unable to provide a decent portable email solution, are trying to avoid to make money from SIP/VoIP calls. Either they change business model or their customer will change behavior. So far only Vodafone has licensed a SIP stack for their network but it's not available to users. No work from the others.

Link

Voylent featured on the WSJ

2006-10-14T09:32:00.000+01:00

Voylent was featured this friday on the Wall Street Journal Asia. I Do not have the original article yet but there's a repost in Chinese (Simplified).

UPDATE: A kind reader sent the link to the English version of the article.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Voylent to speak at GSC

2006-10-11T14:00:00.000+01:00

We have just been confirmed as speakers for the Global Security Challenge Conference. Held in London on October 26th, GSC is a defence and homeland security conference organized by the London Business School.

Rodolfo Rosini, Voylent CEO, will be taking part in a panel titled "From idea to IPO: the difficult path of a security startup", alongside Gerry George (London Business School), Matt McCue (Columbia University Technology Ventures) and moderated by Niloo Howe (Paladin Capital Group)

Link to the conference website (link to registration).

Voylent is hiring!

2006-09-26T19:55:00.000+01:00

Just a quickie: we have several open positions waiting to be filled by bright talent in our company in our humble London office. We have all the range from Accountants to Zoomers. Check out our webpage or give us a call.

Voylent featured on SymbianOne

2006-09-25T14:48:00.000+01:00

A new article on Voylent just went live on SymbianOne, a website devoted to the Symbian OS. That was the most difficult interview ever: I was traveling across Europe and Richard (SymbianOne's feature editor) is based in Wellington, NZ.

Link (Thanks, Richard!)

Speaking at Dorkbot

2006-09-22T14:24:00.000+01:00

Dear all,
we have just been confirmed as speakers at Dorkbot #41 in London. For the uninitiated Dorkbot is a meeting of people doing strange things with electricity. Topics covered range from music, art, maps, security, hacking, the occasional hacktivismo project plus a weird guy who plays with lightning bolts. We are going to talk about cellphone privacy (or the non-obvious lack of it).

Pics and slides will be posted here after the event.

Link (Thanks, Saul!)

VX 2.2 is out

2006-09-05T19:27:00.000+01:00

We have released a new updated version of Voylent Communicator, VX 2.2. It has been tested in the past few days and there shouldn't be any major issue.
Mostly stability and connectivity issues fixed in this release (eye candy in the next one, we promise) but let us know what you think.

Voylent sponsors Bellua Cyber Security Asia

2006-08-17T16:58:00.000+01:00

We are proud to be associated as sponsors to the upcoming Bellua Cyber Security Asia conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. We will have a small space as well for demos. Be sure to stop by to say hello if you're there.

Real interception | Digium scores

2006-08-09T16:05:00.000+01:00

Just a roundup of today's news:

- 3 guys have been arrested in London in connection with an eavesdropping scandal involving the British Royal Family. One of them is the correspondent of a shady tabloid known for it unorthodox approaches to scoops. Technical details are sketchy but seems that only voicemails where abused.
Interestingly after I started reading about the monarchy on wikipedia, it turned out that there have been a lot of unexplained leaks in the past (see Squidgygate for more info)

- Digium has raised over 13m USD as their Series A! (first round of venture capital invesment, that is). Holy moly! That means that their backers have serious expectations in terms of returns. But at least have bought the most recognizable brand for open source telephony, regardless of the product (and by the way, they claim to have over 1m users. Impressive.)

Emerging Telephony Conference 2007

2006-07-31T17:54:00.000+01:00

The future is calling. Will you answer?

Just heard that ETel is coming back in 2007. It's an O'Reilly conference about Open Source and telephony, quite exciting, quite nerdy, all interesting.
Call for Papers ends on Sept 26.

Link

CA and F-Secure squabble over mobile threats

2006-07-25T09:30:00.000+01:00

This is interesting: according to ZDNet UK "a spat has erupted between the two security services companies folllowing CA's accusation that antivirus vendor F-Secure was overplaying the threat of mobile malware".

Link (via ISN)

Voda scandal update

2006-07-11T20:30:00.000+01:00

More information about the Greek Vodafone scandal in this article from the Guardian. Apparently it was an inside job.

Link (Thanks, Ollie!)

Voylent featured on Symbianwatch

2006-07-07T16:57:00.001+01:00

More coverage on the way! Symbianwatch is an excellent resource for Symbian OS news and mobile phones applications and recently featured Voylent Communicator on their webpage. Worth having a look.

Link (Thanks Dusan!)

Privacy and phone spying

2006-07-03T20:37:00.000+01:00

Two articles from Red Herring, one about spying of phone conversations in the U.S. and the other about privacy. It's a business / Venture Capital publication, but the articles are quite interesting.

RH: Keying in on Phone Spying
RH: Life After Privacy

The day after the launch

2006-06-22T12:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we went live with the public beta of the Voylent Communicator, so far we made it to

Boing Boing (Thanks, Cory!)
IrishEyes
ISN: InfoSec News mailing list
VoIP Security Alliance
Digg

Pretty cool, considering our marketing "budget". Thanks to everyone who spread the word.

Also, some people tested it on the Cingular network and they had some issues to disable the "Dual Mode" option on their cellphones. If you managed to make it work, let us know!

.

Voylent the joins Symbian Platinum Partner Program

2006-06-20T14:06:00.000+01:00

We have just announced that we've partnered with Symbian. Truth is, we have been partners for a long time.

Let me explain.

There are two kinds of partnerships: those who work and those who don't. There is no surefire way to figure out which one will be when you start, but announcing with a flashy press release it's not going to affect the quality of the relationship. If not it creates high expectations from customers and the market in general.

So in this case we signed with Symbian way back, we worked together and we are now quite happy about it. Today we decided was a nice day to mention it in public. Thanks to everyone at Symbian for their support especially Laura who's our point of contact.

New company name: Voylent

2006-06-15T18:49:00.000+01:00

From today we are rebranding under a different name: Voylent.

When we started we had a few names but nothing we really liked, and since one of the products we were thinking of was a firewall for mobile phones, well, we picked Cellfire.

Fast forward months later we decided that was better to write code and develop products than sitting in feng shui offices doing branding exercises while listening to the singing of whales.
With the release of the beta of our client we got back to our todo lists and the name change was there looming, so we debated until we found a name we liked, that the .com was available and that at the time of this writing there are 240 hits on Google and we're already ranking 1st without even having it as a keyword on the pages. Pretty neat, I say.

Now what's in a name? It sounds like "violent" but it's not why we had it. Being geeks we got it from a SF movie from the '70 (one of my favorites - Rodolfo): Soylent Green. You probably haven't seen it, but there are countless jokes about it on The Simpson and Futurama. Now you know.

SkypeCamp

2006-05-07T13:51:00.000+01:00

BarCamp are informal gatherings of hackers to code, discuss technology and generally eat junk food. Skype is entering the turf with its own SkypeCamp in Las Vegas on June 10-12 2006 (seems that concurrently there's the eBay developers conference). Might be interesting.

Link (via SkypeJournal)

Smartphone growth slows in EMEA

2006-04-28T14:17:00.000+01:00

Canalys has released new research about the Smartphone market in EMEA and Asia. The interesting bit is that the growth actually slowed in the past 12 months in western Europe.

They also provide a breakdown of the handset vendors market share, and Nokia is the 800-pound gorilla here:

"Despite delays in the release of its enterprise-focused E-series smart phones Nokia not only retained its comfortable lead in EMEA in Q1 2006, but increased its market share to 76% from the 67% it had in the same quarter one year ago, according to the Canalys estimates.

Both Nokia and second-placed RIM increased their respective device shipments above the market average of 25%. Qtek (the brand used by HTC on its own devices in EMEA) posted the highest growth among the top five vendors, its 211% rise taking it just above HP and Palm for the first time and so making it the leading Windows Mobile vendor in the quarter.

HP and Palm, along with several others, are feeling the effects of the decline in the handheld market, which their converged device volumes are not yet high enough to completely offset."

I think the trend will not reverse until the introduction of dual core processor for mobile phones, which should reduce the total bill of materials by enough to create a wedge between multimedia and corporate mobile handsets. At that point manufacturers will stop cramming as many features as possible in buggy handsets as they are doing now (RIM aside).

Read more...

Cellfire featured on VoIP security podcast

2006-04-26T19:51:00.000+01:00

This week's Blue Box podcast features an interview with Rodolfo Rosini, Cellfire Security CEO . Neat. (By the way, it's a great show and you should subscribe as well if you're into VoIP!)

Listen here - you can either download it or listen from the webpage.

VoIP encryption

2006-04-07T14:06:00.000+01:00

Excellent blog post from Bruce Schneier on the issue of VoIP security:

This is why encryption for VOIP is so important. VOIP calls are vulnerable to a variety of threats that traditional telephone calls are not. Encryption is one of the essential security technologies for computer data, and it will go a long way toward securing VOIP.

The last time this sort of thing came up, the U.S. government tried to sell us something called "key escrow." Basically, the government likes the idea of everyone using encryption, as long as it has a copy of the key. This is an amazingly insecure idea for a number of reasons, mostly boiling down to the fact that when you provide a means of access into a security system, you greatly weaken its security.

A recent case in Greece demonstrated that perfectly: Criminals used a cell-phone eavesdropping mechanism already in place, designed for the police to listen in on phone calls. Had the call system been designed to be secure in the first place, there never would have been a backdoor for the criminals to exploit.

I strongly recommend reading the full post...

Mobile Security demand fueled by payments

2006-04-06T18:39:00.000+01:00

Interesting piece at Redherring. Paypal launched their mobile version (and another startup, Obopay, just raised 10m USD). In the article security issues are mentioned but no hard details are given

With the emergence of the cell phone as a wallet, companies will spend significant time and expenses on assuring customers their finances will be safe on mobiles.

Mr. [Paypal President Jeff] Jordan pointed out that eBay and PayPal’s already established customer relationships would give the company an edge in the mobile payment industry, which relies on the security of a customer’s finances.

“Our customers have already entrusted their personal and financial information to PayPal,” said Mr. Jordan. “Now, making payments is as easy as sending a text message anytime, from anywhere, for the millions of customers that prefer to use PayPal.”

Users register their cell phone numbers with PayPal, and when purchasing items from the PayPal Mobile service, PayPal will call the customer back to confirm the purchase.

PayPal said it will store customer information on secure servers, not on the mobile telephone, so even if the phone is lost or stolen, the user’s PayPal account remains secure.

Read the complete article...

Nokia is feeling the pain

2006-04-03T15:55:00.000+01:00

There's a report about Nokia having to delay some smartphones due to software issues. This is very interesting:

"The company plans to begin shipping its N91 music phone this week, with the N71 and N80 phones beginning to ship later this month, according to Reuters. The N91 has a 4-gigabyte hard drive for holding thousands of songs."

"The company had hoped to release the N91 by the end of last year, in time for the holiday shopping season, but then pushed back the scheduled release date to the first quarter. It’s a little late on that goal as well."

I'm sure it is the beginning of a trend, where until smartphones start ditching features and specializing for multimedia and business users (and introduce better over-the-air update and management), there will be more announcements like this.

Read the rest of the article...

SC does CCTV in the UK

2006-03-28T18:37:00.000+01:00

Secure Computing Magazine has an article about how companies are ignorant of the risks posed by insecure CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) systems. From the article:

Once purchased they will most likely be installed by a traditional CCTV system installer, who is unlikely to have the same length, depth or breadth of knowledge of any of the services or protocols, or the implications of mis-configuration that most of your network staff have. Nor will they have the same level of recognised network training (a two day course if you are lucky) as your internal network team. With regards to the security of the device maximum control some offer is no more than a password. This is because they are not designed to meet basic security principles. Consisting of multiple components from multiple vendors, some systems have vulnerabilities inherent in their design, but unlike other PC systems no 'patches' or other measures will be available, as we have come to expect with software products.

Sarb at Etheios contributed to the article, read more here...

Voda Greek tapping scandal fallout

2006-03-28T18:24:00.000+01:00

A couple of articles apparead on the Guardian recently:

Nokiaphobia: the fear of Greeks bearing phones

A new phobia has exploded among mobile phone users in Greece. The 'fear of fear' has been brought on by revelations of eavesdropping at Vodafone, the country's biggest mobile operator, say psychoanalysts reporting a boom in patients.

Wrong signals over Greek phone-tapping scandal

'Who is Big Brother?' politicians are asking as Vodafone struggles to exonerate the firm from Greece's 'Watergate'. Helena Smith reports from Athens

NDTV uncovers phone tapping business in India

2006-03-12T10:21:00.000Z

NDTV Correspondent Thursday, March 9, 2006 (New Delhi):

An NDTV undercover operation has revealed that tapping anyone's phone conversations is easy. Detectives are willing to do extensive eavesdropping even on well-known people while arrests and court actions are underway after phones of Amar Singh was tapped.

A detective provided detailed phone conversations of NDTV journalist Burkha Dutt hired by her colleague in the operation. For Rs 30,000 (updated: 670 USD) for three weeks, the private spies were able to give elaborate details of the people Dutt met and spoke with on her Airtel and Hutch phone lines.

Under surveillanceDetectives told the undercover reporter they followed her even to VIP areas, watched her office car park and her home.In a separate operation, a detective agreed to give another NDTV journalist information about her fiancé's bank accounts.
He offered bank statements for a fee of Rs 5,000 (updated: approx 110 USD) and said it is easy to break into records of computerised banks and only nationalised banks are a problem.

Most institutions from phone companies to banks appear to have moles willing to part with private records for just a few thousand rupees.

Read the full article

NSA domestic spying capabilities

2006-02-19T02:46:00.000Z

[click for fullsize]

The ACLU posted a diagram of how the NSA can intercept communications and they have also some interesting comment

How the NSA searches for targets

There are a range of techniques that are probably used by the NSA to sift through the sea of communications it steals from the world's cables and airwaves:

Keywords. In this longstanding technique, the agency maintains a watch list or "dictionary" of key words, individuals, telephone numbers and presumably now computer IP addresses. It uses that list to pick out potentially relevant communications from all the data that it gathers. These keywords are often provided to the NSA by other security agencies, and the NSA passes the resulting intelligence "take" back to the other agencies or officials. According to the law, the NSA must strip out the names and other identifying information of Americans captured inadvertently, a process called "minimization." (According to published reports, those minimization procedures are not being properly observed.) In the 1990s, it was revealed that the NSA had used the word "Greenpeace" and "Amnesty" (as in the human rights group Amnesty International) as keywords as part of its "Echelon" program (see below).

Link analysis. It is believed that another manner in which individuals are now being added to the watch lists is through a process often called "link analysis." Link analysis can work like this: the CIA captures a terrorist's computer on the battlefield and finds a list of phone numbers, including some U.S. numbers. The NSA puts those numbers on their watch list. They add the people that are called from those numbers to their list. They could then in turn add the people called from those numbers to their list. How far they carry that process and what standards if any govern the process is unknown.

Other screening techniques. There may be other techniques that the NSA could be using to pluck out potential targets. One example is voice pattern analysis, in which computers listen for the sound of, say, Osama Bin Laden's voice. No one knows how accurate the NSA's computers may be at such tasks, but if commercial attempts at analogous activities such as face recognition are any guide, they would also be likely to generate enormous numbers of false hits.

Read the essay and dowload the diagram (with nice pop-up goodies).

Computer Security stocks

2006-02-14T20:42:00.000Z

IT Security shares are not performing wonders on the stock exchange, even with different strategies in terms of M&A (Symantec) or organic growth (Checkpoint) they underperform the NASDAQ index.

Greek Govt mobiles tapped for months

2006-02-14T20:28:00.000Z

Interesting piece of news. The Greek government mobile phones have been tapped for months. Victimes include the Greek Prime Minister, cabinet members, even the opposition party. What's interesting is that was discovered accidentally. Read the article at BBC NEWS.

Top Security Trends for 2006

2006-02-03T12:17:00.000Z

Article from a month ago, but still interesting. Red Herring Magazine has a list of top security trends for the year:

Looking forward, security experts see eight major trends in security in 2006. Among them, voice spam is expected to become a growing annoyance as VoIP applications become more widely used. Another concern: cyber-criminals will exploit the low levels of security in mobile communications to gain access to data in laptops and other devices.

Phishing Frenzy
Business Worm’s Rise
Insider Threat
Increasing Network Control
Wireless Security Focus
Increased Security Legislation
Voice Spam Begins
Selling to SMBs

New products with CALEA backdoors

2006-02-01T18:22:00.000Z

Several prominent networking equipment vendors are already building backdoors into their products, Networking Pipeline reports.
A litmus test can be simply performed by googling for "CALEA support", the result are fightening. (CALEA is the law governing electronic surveillance and interception but the important part is that the technical specs have not been finalized yet.)

From the article:

Not only is the mandate not in effect, but the specs for it aren't even yet finalized. But that hasn't stopped Cisco, Juniper, and others from happily embedding wiretap backdoors into their gear.

Read more about it here...

Regardless of everything, having backdoors for wiretaps from a security stanpoint is a bad idea, gives too much advantage to an attacker and is ineffective if the upper layers are encrypted.

Open Rights Group now taking donations

2006-01-16T12:15:00.000Z

Cory at BoingBoing says

The Open Rights Group, a UK technology rights group that I [Cory] helped found, is now able to accept your membership donations. ORG is a charity that uses your donations to fund activist responses to encroachments on personal liberty in the UK...

Link (via BoingBoing and Plasticbag)

CCC camp in Berlin

2005-12-21T22:46:00.000Z

As the year 2005 comes to an end, the Chaos Computer Club organizes its 22nd (!!!) event. Some of us will be there, so if you want to get in touch drop us an email.

Wiretapping by the NSA without a warrant approved by the US President

2005-12-16T18:09:00.000Z

Ok, I missed a lot of updates recently (such as all the recent Blackberry vs. NTP updates) due to travel and other conferences but this is pretty big. Bush actually approved eavesdropping on US citizens without court approval. From the New York Times article:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

Read the rest of this article...

Open Rights Group launches

2005-11-29T23:08:00.000Z

Just came back from the party of the Open Rights Group (wiki). They're a sort of European EFF, in short they're seeking to defend digital rights. A lot was mentioned about Identity 2.0, surveillance, communications with your MP (Member of the British Parliament) and privacy.

The organization is seeking a donation of 5 GBP per month from its members, and there's also a pledgebank (quota reached) that expires on this xmas day.

The event was hosted by 01zero-one (kinda new media training center) which is located in the shadiest part of Soho near the strip joints but also right next to a tiny police office. Totally weird.

Cellfire is a "top 10" European startup!

2005-11-23T23:47:00.000Z

Yesterday we presented our company at the London Business School at the Gate2Growth Venture contest. Out of several hundreds of startups from all over Europe (from both IT and life science industries) we were selected as one of the Top 10. The judges were a mix of investors, advisors and successful entrepreneurs. We're going to issue a press release and I'll make a splashy image for the website as well.
Of course we're happy but humbled as well. Some of the other contenders were really exciting companies and we've been very excited to win.

There was also an interesting presentation from J. Mullins, a professor of entrepreneurship at LBS. It was about the difference between market and industry for a company. He also wrote a book about it called "The New Business Road Test". Worth having a look.

Original Enigma machine

2005-10-31T21:37:00.000Z

This has nothing to do with work. On friday we went to at the Royal Institute to attend a lecture of Simon Singh about cryptography. They let us in despite not wearing a tuxedo and the hot item of the night was his personal Enigma machine. Despite the fact that was built over 60 years ago it was fully functional, except for some lights that didnt' work.
Apparently these boxes worked so well that the UK/US governments gave them away for use to other governments.. without telling them that they broke the code! More info from wiki.
The demo was awesome, too bad there wsan't enough light for a video.

Shiny Wifi cardboard bliss

2005-10-26T19:36:00.000+01:00

Enter the Flatenna! Got one of these in our office and it's supercool (now we'll have to find another excuse to buy Pringles cans on company expenses). It's basically a piece of shiny cardboard but it does wonders for your WiFi connection. I've heard that the designer is a guy who work as a fireman on the river Thames but his product is not famous at all. You can get one at Tritium.

Blackberry shenanigans

2005-10-26T19:03:00.000+01:00

The Guardian reports [registration required] that the BBC has suspended the Blackberry service to 300 of its senior executives, including the CEO. The problem was that they started receiving email intended for other accounts. From the article:
"The BBC BlackBerry service was suspended after some staff began receiving fragments of emails intended for other users.
"It was brought to our attention by a BlackBerry user that they were receiving portions of other people's emails in the body of other emails," a BBC spokesman said. "We immediately suspended the BlackBerry service and it remains suspended." The service will continue to be suspended "until we can receive an absolute guarantee of security from our supplier" a senior BBC insider added.
BBC executives are said to be "alarmed" that private or commercially sensitive information could potentially be sent to the wrong people within the corporation."

Pictured, the now-BBC famous Siemens-Vodafone-Blackberry menace.

This is added to a list of woes for Blackberry. Last week due to patent dispute in the US with a company called NTP, RIM (the owner of Blackberry) was served with a injuction barring the sale of 'berries in the US. As a side note the company was planning to pay NTP around 450m USD for the patent but something (what about "greed"?) caused the deal to go belly up. The Register reports.

Dorkbot London

2005-10-24T21:21:00.000+01:00

Dear all,
in the past few days I've given a speech about Cellfire to the Symbian Expo Investors Conference and to a Dorkbot meeting. A very different kind of audiences but they both liked our tech.
Saw traffic coming from some unknown URL referer and found out that a couple of blogs picked up my presentation [ pixelsumo | strawberryfrog ] and there are even a couple of pics from pixelsumo's flickr account (pic1, pic2). I have also put online the Dorkbot powerpoint for download.

I have also seen a lot of traffic coming from searches related to blackberry security. Will try to post some info about it later.

Blackberry unsicher? Gesundheit!

2005-10-05T18:33:00.000+01:00

N-TV.de is reporting that the aptly named Startseite Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (German Ministry for Information Security) is warning Blackberry users because the device is insecure. Moreover, they are saying say that they prefer 'national solutions' (European? German? North Rhine Westphalian?) but do not elaborate. Anyway here's the article (in German).

SMS denial of service attack

2005-10-05T13:03:00.000+01:00

A new security paper has been published at SMSanalysis about DoSing a cellular network by flooding it with SMS. I do believe that more attacks will come from compromised handsets and from the internal networks of the mobile operators.

Full paper available in PDF.

CELLFIRE is a top50!

2005-10-04T18:54:00.000+01:00

We have been selected as one of the Top 50 startups in Europe by Gate2Growth. We are going to present a their Venture Contest on the 22nd of November in London to compete for a spot on the finals three weeks later in Berlin! W00W00!

New logo

2005-10-02T20:37:00.000+01:00

We've working on a new logo, courtesy of Mike Cupcake. Here's the preview.

Three is a magic number! Jeff joins our board

2005-09-27T16:08:00.000+01:00

Dear all, this week a lot of good news are coming in: Jeff Moss, the CEO of Black Hat and the founder of the largest hacker's conference on the planet is joining our technical advisory team. We're really excited to have Jeff on board. Before founding Black Hat he worked for Secure Computing Corp and Ernst & Young, read his full bio here.

We're also hiring! Check our jobs page for the latest openings.

Beware eBay bearing Skype

2005-09-23T12:08:00.000+01:00

There's an article over at The Register that explores the issues around the sale of Skype, expecially about security. One of the interesting thing is that so far there has not been any rumor of Skype sharing info or replacing users key. More info here.

Symbian Expo

2005-09-22T11:50:00.000+01:00

This year the Symbian Expo is happening on the 11th and 12th of October in London. It has been rebranded as The Smartphone Show and there are more tracks including a senior level and an investors one (were we've been asked to speak). Tickets from our event go for about 700 GBP (1,200 USD or 140,000 JPY) and can be purchased from directly from Symbian registration.

BBC World Service & IT Security

2005-09-16T19:19:00.000+01:00

Dear all,
we just registered a program on the future of computer security, we had a lot of fun and it will be broadcasted by the BBC World Service on the 27th of September, will try to post an audio file when it's available.

Gartner says VOIP is hot..

2005-08-25T16:46:00.000+01:00

.. but only if you fork out 95 USD for their latest research on Emerging Technologies:

Topics of interest to emerging-technology planners include tablet PCs, which are gaining traction in customer-facing situations; MetaCarta's location search capabilities; common perimeter security functions being performed "in the cloud"; and social tagging, which drives metadata creation to users.

They also say that P2P is hot, so VOIP+P2P must be super hot! Geez thanks, without Gartner we would be lost. Really.

NSA gets new secure PDA

2005-08-23T13:16:00.000+01:00

General Dynamics has been contracted by the US National Security Agency to provide a secure PDA for voice and data. There's an article at the IT Observer but it's a bit short on details. Link

Hello Ollie!

2005-08-22T19:33:00.000+01:00

Who said August is slow for news? I'm happy to report that Ollie Whitehouse just joined our technology advisory board! He's currently working as an Architect for Symantec UK and previously worked with @stake. He's a familiar name in the world of wireless/bluetooth/GPRS security research, with several articles (Findarticles.com) and frequent speaking engagements.
He joins our TBA alongside Halvar Flake from Sabre Security and more announcements will follow soon.

Symbian ships 7.8m phones in 2005 so far

2005-08-18T15:11:00.000+01:00

Symbian OS shipments are up, according to a press release from the company, with even more phones in development. Read all about it here.

XCON 2005

2005-08-15T19:11:00.000+01:00

We're going to XCON 2005 in Beijing, if you're in the area drop us a line to say hi! XCON is an information security conference organized by the XFocus Security Team and some of us are giving a talk. Conference site.

AOL buys handset tech firm

2005-08-08T17:37:00.000+01:00

AOL doesn't seem to go on holiday. They just bought a company called Wildseed that does plastic skins with an embedded chip for mobile phones. It's pretty neat, when you buy the plastic skin you also get a whole customized desktop and content on your phone. No financial details on the transaction are reported. (More from The Register)

More Blackberry security news

2005-07-27T14:18:00.000+01:00

A new article on the security issues of a lost or misplaced blackberry and the information an attacker could gather from it. There's also a spin about SOX compliance:

"Some companies suffer only embarrassment from such incidents. But for public companies or financial firms, a lost device could mean violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires strict controls over disclosure of financial information. For doctors and health care companies, the loss of customer data compromises patient confidentiality, protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Potential security breaches are made scarier by the greater reliance on mobile devices. Smart phones, such as the Treo or some BlackBerry models, come with enough memory and high-speed Internet access to function as small computers. In some cases, accompanying memory cards allow users to store even more data, including client lists and contract information."

Read the full article here.

Everyone can read your Blackberry messages

2005-07-24T17:37:00.000+01:00

There's an intriguing article about messages sent between Blackberries. Someone was able to retrieve those for building a case against former employees. Given the small size of the text emails sent by those devices, it's no surprise that you can store everything on some cheap hard disk and then turn them over to whoever asks. Maybe next time they'll use encryption. Full article.

Banking on mobile phones warning

2005-07-22T17:24:00.000+01:00

Applications downloaded on mobile phones could be reversed engineered and malware apps could break into bank accounts, The Register reports. The answer is develop your applications and test them thoroughly, too bad this rarely happens.

Gartner prediction on mobile phones sales

2005-07-20T14:38:00.000+01:00

Gartner is talking about the fact that the mobile phone is going to be the most pervasive personal electronic by 2009 with over 2 billion sold, BBC reports. They don't use tyhe word convergence but with advancement in software some other units could be cannibalized, or maybe even used together via wireless connections like Bluetooth.

In other news the Economist is running a piece (subscription required) that mobile networks in developing countries increase the GDP in a significant way (0.6% if I remeber correctly). Fascinating.

New security mailing list

2005-07-18T20:44:00.000+01:00

There's a new mailing list dedicated to the security of personal wireless devices and software. Here's the ISN announcement and you can subscribe at C2 Security.

Ex -CEO gets 25 years

2005-07-14T03:34:00.000+01:00

Not exactly technology news but Ernie Ebbers, of Worldcom (now MCI) fame, just got 25 years in jail. While he was part of the team who destroyed 180 billion USD of shareholders value and 20.000 jobs, as the BBC article points out, he was also in charge of a company who "sexed up" its Internet traffic report. Worldcom's actions are believed to have contributed to the inflation of the Telecom bubble that lead to overcapacity in the early 2001.

New .mobi domain approved

2005-07-12T22:10:00.000+01:00

A new Top Level Domain has been approved by ICANN. From 2006 you will be able to register yourdomain.mobi so if your website is designed for mobile devices. The management of the TLD has been awarded to a consortium of major mobops and handset manufacturers and will be based in Dublin, with top management from the GSM association.
Currently there is no pressing need or benefit to switch from "wap.yourdomain.com" to "yourdomain.mobi". It would be interesting if this domain will have any other application such as content filtering or restricted approval by the registrar, but details are still sketchy.

More info from the Inquirer.

EU data retention policy

2005-07-09T13:26:00.000+01:00

There's an article on Infoworld about the reaction of the London bombing. Apparently the EU want to act on data retention policies of telecoms, mobops and ISPs, having them store more data and have it available for terrorist investigations. The are no tech details.

"The European Commission intends to accelerate plans to put forward new rules requiring telephone and Internet operators to store data for law enforcement agencies in the wake of the terrorist bombings in London on Thursday, a senior official said Friday. But the new plan would cut the time data had to be stored to a maximum of nine months compared to one year in an earlier proposal."

In other countries the implementation of such measures cut the due process and was very invasive, let's see what happens next.

Read the full article.