Last week Facebook posted a video of its solar-powered Aquila drone’s inaugural flight. The aircraft’s design is of flying wing type, with a wingspan close to that of Boeing 737, covered with solar panels.
Besides solar panels, the drone is equipped with batteries which serve as a source of energy during nighttime. Pillars hold four electric engines which rotate propellers. There is also an on-board computer that navigates the aircraft through the predefined trajectory and is also responsible for communication with the ground. To contribute to the drone’s lightweight construction, it lacks wheels and take off using a special wheeled platform pushed by a vehicle.
Read moreSundar Pichai isn’t going to have a happy start to his week. The CEO of Google’s Quora account appears to have been hacked by a group called OurMine, which previously broke into Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts earlier this month.
The three-man hacker outfit has been posting messages on Quora through Pichai’s account; it’s also connected to his Twitter account and as a result, OurMine was able to publicize their hack to all 508,000 of his followers. The tweets have now been removed, but experts have got a screenshot. OurMine has been targeting major tech execs of late, including Spotify’s Daniel Ek.
Read moreSecurity researchers have discovered a malicious Android trojan codenamed Android/Trojan.Pawost that's packed inside a stopwatch app but uses Google Talk to initiate phone calls to unregistered numbers.
Pawost begins its malicious behavior after users install it. As soon as this happens, the app shows a Google Talk icon in the smartphone's notifications area. There's no text with this icon, and the notification is a dead giveaway that something is wrong and you should uninstall the app as soon as possible. A few minutes later, the app will start making calls to several unknown numbers, using the Google Talk application.
Read moreGoogle will begin testing an alternative to passwords next month, in a move that could do away with complicated logins for good.
The new feature is called the Trust API, and will initially be tested with “several very large financial institutions” in June. Kaufman is the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where the Trust API was first created under the codename Project Abacus. Introduced last year, Abacus aims to kill passwords not through one super-secure replacement, but by mixing together multiple weaker indicators into one solid piece of evidence that you are who you say you are.
Read moreLegal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by US college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent.
But the students' claims may be derailed by a dispute over whether they should file their cases individually, rather than as a group. On April 29, another 180 filed a separate lawsuit making the same claim: that Google's Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes.
Read moreFive apps on Google Play carry Viking Horde, a new malware family that ropes Android devices into an ad-clicking botnet, but can also make them send out spam, send SMS messages to premium-rate numbers, download additional apps, and even participate in DDoS attacks.
The discovery was made by Check Point researchers, and they have notified Google about it on May 5, but as I’m writing this, the apps are still available on Android’s official app store. The most popular of these is Viking Jump, which was installed by at least 50,000 users, despite the poor ratings and reviews that point to its questionable nature.
Read moreGoogle bust out the data to prove doubters wrong about the quality of Android security. But, according to its second-ever yearly Android security report, issued Tuesday, as many as 420 million active devices are not supported by its patches, leaving a large number open to possible attack.
According to Google’s data, nearly 30 per cent of all active Android phones and tablets are on a version that do not receive patches. Anyone running an Android version below 4.4.4 does not currently receive security updates from the tech titan. Google, for obvious reasons, recommends users run the most up-to-date operating system.
Read moreNest is coming under fire following an announcement that Revolv, a smart home startup it acquired two years ago, would be permanently shutting off its product starting May 15th.
The decision, announced in a quiet note on Revolv's website in February, has gone largely unnoticed and is expected to impact a very small number of consumers. However, it does raise serious questions about the longevity of smart home gadgets. The devices are often costly pieces of hardware made by small startups that may drop support at any point after being scooped up by a larger technology company.
Read moreSecurity researchers have discovered 104 Android apps that exhibit a combination of adware and spyware features, collecting information on users in order to deliver malware to infected victims. The malware family is distributed to its victims as Android apps directly from Google's official Play Store.
Most of these applications are blatant clones of more popular apps and games, and some of them don't even exhibit the functionality with which they were advertised. The apps range from image editing software to live wallpaper apps, and from simplistic games to instant messaging services.
Read moreEric Schmidt will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said.
Carter unveiled the new Defense Innovation Advisory Board with Schmidt during the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco, saying it would give the Pentagon access to "the brightest technical minds focused on innovation." Schmidt, now the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, said the board would help bridge what he called a clear gap between how the U.S. military and the technology industry operate.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland