How Too Many SMS Messages Can Shut Down Your Nexus Phone - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD - If you have a Google Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 smartphone, you may want to know about an interesting security story coming out of a conference in Romania today.

The bad news is that the NSA has already rooted your phone and is using it as part of a coordinated attack to harvest data from China.

Labels: security

Two stories that should always be read side by side.

Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, McDonalds spying on nonprofits -- allegedly with former NSA, CIA hackers | VentureBeat | Security | by John Koetsier -

4 Shocking Things From the Secret Service File On Aaron Swartz - PolicyMic -

Labels: security

Here’s Richard Stallman’s letter to Stratfor hacker’s judge demanding lesser sentence | VentureBeat - Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman tried to get Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond’s judge to only hand down a community service sentence.

My favorite part of the article is "erroneously called Linux". I met Stallman once in 1992 and he was handing out these fanged Apple badges. I had mine for a long time, not realizing it might be a collectible one day (like now).

Labels: gnu os, linux

CIA’s Financial Spying Bags Data on Americans - Siobhan Gorman, Devlin Barrett and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries - News - AllThingsD - The Central Intelligence Agency is building a vast database of international money transfers that includes millions of Americans’ financial and personal data, officials familiar with the program say.

The good news is that you have nothing to fear unless you're a criminal.

Labels: CIA, security

Mobile devs: Google will officially translate your Android apps | VentureBeat - Google announced that it would be opening up a translation service at Google I/O and officially released it.

What's good for global revenue is good for both publisher and distributer.

Labels: android

Developers need to start thinking about security now | VentureBeat - The fundamental relationship between security and development is broken. It’s broken because security teams drive security, and development teams let them. There needs to be a re-balancing of this relationship, driven by an awakening in the developer community.

Some thoughts about security and development.

Labels: security, security tools mac

Is a Nexus 5 Phone Running on KitKat Any Sweeter? - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology - AllThingsD - KitKat is also somewhat smoother and faster than its predecessor, Jelly Bean, at least on the Nexus 5. All of these KitKat features worked fine, but none was a huge deal to me.

Sometimes less is more.

Labels: android, ios