Spamming conquers iMessage system

The iMessage system that was introduced by Apple is a great way to send texts from one apple device to another without ever the paying fees to your mobile carrier. But over the past year, it has evolve into something of a nuisance. The iMessage has been polluted by spam message. It’s a cheap and easy way for luxury goods spammers to get their junk messages front-and-center on your phone.

A year ago, Tom Landesman—who works for security and anti-spam company Cloudmark—had never seen an iMessage spam. But he and his company now say that, thanks to one particularly aggressive campaign from a junk mailer, it accounts for more than 30 percent of all mobile spam messages.

These kinds of spam campaigns come and go. Cloudmark spotted its first one late last year, when the scammers were flogging imitation designer handbags. Lately, the spammers have been pushing deals on knock-off Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses.

Apple’s iMessage system spans across the iPad, iPhone, and Apple’s laptop and desktop systems. That fusion of the desktop and mobile world makes it particularly easy for scammers to write a Mac OS script that can send messages to all types of devices just as fast as Apple will allow. “It’s almost like a spammer’s dream,” says Landesman. “With four lines of code, using Apple scripts, you can tell your Mac machine to send message to whoever they want.”

Most of the time, the spammer will need a phone number to deliver the iMessage spam, but if you’ve added your email address to iMessage, the spammers can get you using that address too. (On your phone, you can see which addresses and phone numbers are associated with your iMessage account by visiting: Settings –> Messages –> Send and Receive)

Apple’s desktop client instantly tells you whether or not the number you’ve entered is registered with the iMessage network, so scammers could use this feature to generate a list of verified iMessages users. As an added bonus, iMessage notifies the scammer whether the message they’ve sent out has been read or not.

It’s very easy for spammers to register an iMessage account. All you need is an email address. We’ve seen spam sent from accounts registered to Microsoft’s hotmail.com system and to Chinese webmail providers such as Yeah.net. “In 10 minutes, if you have a whole bunch of accounts, you’d be able to send a huge volume of messages,” Landesman says.

Because the spam is all traveling on Apple’s network, your mobile carrier can’t do anything about it. That makes the clean-up job an Apple problem. Reached Monday, an Apple spokeswoman didn’t have any immediate comment for this story. But the company has taken some steps.

2015 Civic Type R Spied in Nurburgring

Honda Type R fans just have to wait a bit longer. Honda has not been seeing any true performance cars in a while, ever since they dropped the S2000 in 2009. The favourable FD2R was axed a year later in 2010, while the CR-Z was a car produce to stay in line with the current trend. What you’re seeing here is the European version of the CIvic Type R, still under going numerous testing.

Unlike the concept shown at this year’s Geneva Motor Show, the production version of the upcoming Civic Type R will be toned down quite a lot, as evident in the photos. Although it has been toned down quite a lot, certain go-fast bits are still evident, like the quad-pipe exhaust, bigger sized rims, a rear diffuser and fatter wheel arches. Also notice the front mounted intercooler.

As we mentioned earlier, the new Type R is poised to go against the likes of the Volkswagen Golf R and Ford Focus ST. Honda will drop their tried and tested K20A block due to emission regulations, and will adopt a turbocharged engine. This puts the Civic Type R on the same ground as the Focus ST, but not the Golf R, since the Golf R comes equipped with VW’s 4Motion system. Power of the new Civic Type R is rumoured to be above 276 hp, with about 400 NM of torque on tap.

Honda is also eyeing to dethrone Renault Megane RS as the fastest front wheel drive production car around the Green Hell.

Toyota reveals the all new FT-1

Toyota have caught the automotive community attention when they unveiled the FT-1 concept at the Detroit Auto Show last January. Coming from the same people who gave us the Lexus LFA, Scion FR-S and Toyota Supra, the FT-1 concept looked striking in its bright red livery. But the Japanese automaker isn't quite done with it yet.

We don't have the production announcement to share at the moment, but Toyota has revealed two new versions of the FT-1 concept that cast it in different light. Most notable is the graphite version pictured above. Replacing the bright red paintjob and two-tone red and black interior of the original concept, this second iteration – presented in the metal at McCall's Motorworks Revival in Monterey, CA – goes for a more upscale and refined graphite exterior and a tan leather interior with exposed metal elements.

Both versions of the virtually road-going FT-1 concept will be playable in Gran Turismo 6, but at the same time Toyota also revealed (in digital form, at least) a virtual racing version of the concept called the FT-1 Vision Gran Turismo. Looking like the original concept was prepared for Japan's Super GT series, the FT-1 Vision GT is retuned for racing, with wider fenders, more extreme aero, competition-spec alloys on slicks and the like.

VW with another recall of 189,000 Tiguan

Volkswagen AG is recalling 189,490 Tiguan small SUVs in North America for potential stalling issues.

The company said gas bubbles may form in the fuel system in the affected vehicles from model years 2009-14 when winterized fuel with high vapor pressures is used in warmer areas or during months with higher temperatures.

That could lead to reduced fuel pump performance and pressure, potentially resulting in vehicle stalling and could lead to an accident.

VW said no accident or injuries related to the issue have been reported.

Dealers will install revised electronic control module software on all affected vehicles at no cost. The recall is expected to begin later this month, a spokeswoman said.

Of the affected vehicles, 151,389 were sold in the United States and 38,101 in Canada, a spokeswoman said. No other markets are affected by the recall, she said.

3 time champs kills young racer in a racing horror show

Tony Stewart is not currently facing criminal charges over the on-track incident during a sprint car race that resulted in the death of a fellow racer Kevin Ward Jr.

Ontario County Sheriff Phillip C Provero told a media conference on Sunday that an initial examination of available evidence does not support the accident being considered a criminal matter.

"At this moment there are no facts or evidence that would support a criminal charge or criminal intent," he said.

"This is, right now, being investigated as an on-track crash, and I don't want to infer that there are criminal charges pending.

"When the investigation is completed we will sit down with the District Attorney and review it, but I want to make it very clear that there are no criminal charges pending at this time."

Stewart has been cooperating with authorities in the investigation and was described by Provero as "visibly shaken" by what had happened on Saturday night.

The incident began when Ward and Stewart made contact during a race at Canandaigua Motorsports Park, an hour from Watkins Glen, where the NASCAR Sprint Cup was racing last weekend.

Ward spun out, climbed from his car, and walked down the track gesturing at Stewart as the three-time Cup champion looped back around. 

Stewart's car fishtailed as it passed the 20-year-old, hitting him with its right-rear wheel and flinging him to the side of the track. He was pronounced dead at nearby FF Thompson Hospital.

A statement from Ward's family read: "We appreciate the prayers and support we are receiving from the community, but we need time to grieve and wrap our heads around all of this."

Next Gen of the LEXUS LFA Supercar

The next generation of the Lexus LFA is already in the works. It is a known fact since 2012 that Lexus is already working on the next generation of the LFA. Now it is being confirmed by Mark Templin, the Executive Vice President of Lexus.

As with all of the new performance-focused products coming out of Toyota these days, the LFA II has the support of company CEO Akio Toyoda. “Akio believes that every generation deserves to have a car like an LFA” said Templin, “so we’re building an LFA for the generation we have today.”

Templin went on to comment that there may even be plans for a car after that.The LFA was introduced in 2010, featuring a carbon fiber chassis, a 552 hp V10 engine and a price tag of $375,000. Just 500 LFAs were made.

Lexus is currently in the midst of a strong product push, having just launched the new NX crossover with the RC and RC F models set to arrive later this year. Rumors have indicated the Toyota luxury division is also planning to launch a version of its LF-LC concept car with a choice of either a hybrid engine or a twin-turbo V8.

Initial D: Takumi finally found his match

At last, this super hero driver in Takumi Fujiwara in his Toyota AE86 finally met his match. It was a grudge match but of course in the, Takumi just have the edge. Enjoyed this one. One of the few Initial D series that does not make me doze off half way.

Read this before you download your next app!

Those exciting and sometimes cool apps you download on your smartphone may be free or very - very cheap, but there is usually a hidden price that you should be aware of: the loss of privacy and data piracy.

The vast majority of the most popular iOS and Android mobile apps collect a variety of personal data from users, including location details, address book contacts and calendar information, according to a just-released survey by Appthority, a company that advises businesses on security.

The report does offer some significant good news. Appthority found that very few of the apps it analyzed carried malware.

Appthority, which says it has a catalog of around two million apps, analyzed a total of 400 of the most popular mobile apps available (based on downloads) in Apple's App Store and Google Play. When it comes to free apps, there was essentially no difference between the two platforms.

However, "paid iOS apps surprisingly collect more data and share that information with more third parties than Android paid apps, making iOS slightly more risky than Android. On the whole, free apps remain the most risky category, exhibiting the greatest number of risky behaviors across both platforms," according to Appthority.

Here's a breakdown of the most frequently collected data:

82 percent of the top Android free apps and 49 percent of the top Android paid apps track user location
50 percent of the top iOS free apps and 24 percent of the top iOS paid apps track user location
You might not expect a flashlight app or a calculator to track your location, but many do.

"One of the main reasons app developers initiate app tracking is to generate supplementary revenue by sharing app user data with advertising networks and analytics companies. In some cases, particularly with free apps, developers are paid based on the amount of data they collect and share about users," explains Appthority.

30 percent of the top Android free apps and 14 percent of the top Android paid apps access user address books
26 percent of the top iOS free apps and 8 percent of the top iOS paid apps access user address books
App developers often transmit users' contacts or even full address books. One reason why is to increase the viral or network effects of the app. In other words, developers want to use owners' contacts to expand their customer bases. However, only a small percentage of the apps Appthority analyzed grabbed calendar or meeting invites.

88 percent of the top Android free apps and 65 percent of the top Android paid apps access IMEI/UDIDs
57 percent of the top iOS free apps and 28 percent of the top iOS paid apps access IMEI/UDIDs
IMEIs and UDIDs are unique serial numbers embedded in mobile phones. Appthority explained the risk associated with IMEI/UDIDs:

"Access to UDIDs is a concern because with a unique device identifier, developers can correlate user behavior across multiple apps (even if they have different usernames and passwords for each of the apps) and then match them to a unique user. While Apple has prohibited iOS developers from using UDIDs as a means to track and identify users, Appthority discovered that the new rule is only enforced on devices which are running the latest version of iOS."

New Self Destructing Photo App on the rise

A new mobile application called Phantom is offering a way to post personal photos and videos to blogs and social media sites, like Facebook or Twitter, which “self-destruct” like they do in Snapchat, while also offering controls that limit the number of people who can view the content, and more.

The idea to allow for ephemeral sharing on Facebook and other sites is interesting, though the number of controls Phantom offers makes it a bit more cumbersome to share that content in the first place.

The app, available on both iOS and Android, lets you snap a photo or record a video, or select an item from your smartphone’s gallery, then mark it up with commenting and drawing tools that are very similar to those found in Snapchat. But instead of just offering a timer function to control how long the image or video is visible to a friend after it’s shared, Phantom also lets you configure how long the content will live, period, as well as how many viewers it can have.

That way, you can set the content to expire after a certain amount of time, no matter how many people have seen it or not. And by limiting the number of viewers, you have more control over how widely a piece of content spreads.

Of course, Snapchat does this too, in its own way – by sending your photo or video just to a selection of contacts, you’re already indicating how many people should see the content you’re sharing. But Phantom big difference is that it’s designed to work with more public networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, WordPress and Blogger. And via a “More” option, you can also share to Tumblr, Pinterest, Whatsapp, LINE, Telegram, Movable Type, iMessage/SMS or email.

However, because of the many settings Phantom offers, there’s a learning curve to using the app, and that can slow things down. The uploading process of saving the media to Phantom’s servers is a little slower than I’d prefer to see, too.

Recipients are given a link along with a mosaic image preview. But to open the image, they have to use the Phantom iOS or Android application.

Take A Screenshot, Get Banned

“It’ll be impossible to copy or save the image, because those functions will be disabled while viewing, and user has to keep touching the screen while viewing the image,” explains Phantom’s creator Osamu Date of Phantom’s privacy settings. “Furthermore, the screenshot function will be disabled on an Android devices while view is in progress.”

Phantom also takes a harder line against taking screenshots of other users’ images. Those who do will be automatically banned from Phantom, and will be reported to the user whose privacy was violated.

The idea for Phantom comes from “LinX Corporation,” a big name for what’s really a one-person, bootstrapped startup out of Tokyo, run by founder Date.



The app was actually launched a few months ago, but hasn’t really done much press it seems.

My guess is that they’re having a hard time reaching the international audience, thanks to language barriers and other communication differences. The website is in Japanese. And the email I received suggested I contact Date, “Representative Director of LinX Corporation,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a startup. But I decided to reach out anyway, because I was interested in this idea of controlling the exposure of your content before publishing to big-name social media.

PC will never extinct

A Gartner report produced in July shows that he personal computing market will experience a “relative revival” this year.
By “relative revival” Gartner means the PC market will continue to decline in 2014, just not as much as it did in 2013 (slowing 2.9% versus 9.5%, respectively.) The real revival may happen in 2015; that’s when Gartner sees PC sales actually increasing again – jumping 5.3 per cent.
Yahoo Finance contributor Henry Blodget said, “This is far from a revival. We’re talking about a market that was the entire computing market fewer than 10 years ago.”
The latest in wearable technology? The smartshoe
Still, Blodget said that as long as people need to go to work every day, personal computers will live on. “Lots of CEOs talk about, ‘Hey, I run the whole company on my smartphone,’” he said. “It’s because they don’t actually have to do any work.”
The smartphone may be fine for a CEO who is delegating work, but someone who is creating and using spreadsheets or typing and emailing all day still needs a computer and will for some time, in Blodget’s view.
“For a long time [to come] we are going to use a keyboard and a big screen at work,” says Blodget. “So, the idea that the PC is dead is crazy.”
It may be that one day soon, your “PC” will be powered by a smartphone or a tablet, but that’s a long way off.
For now, tablet growth is slowing. Gartner does predict tablet sales will continue to grow in 2014 with shipments expected to increase 23.9%. It is a testament to just how explosive the growth of the tablet has been that Gartner is characterizing that as a “slowdown.”
But “slowdown” actually may not be a strong enough word. Best Buy (BBY) CEO Hubert Joly recently told news site Re/Code that tablet sales are “crashing.”
According to Joly, the problem facing tablets is innovation. “Once you have a tablet of a certain generation, it’s not clear that you have to move on to the next generation,” he told Re/Code.
Tablets 'to overtake PCs by 2015'
It’s actually the same problem that once faced PCs. Joly credits a large part of the PC resurgence at Best Buy to the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting old versions of Windows, which drove people to upgrade.
So far, the shifting PC versus mobile landscape has spelled good news for some of the biggest names in tech – regardless of whether they’re betting on hardware, software, PC or mobile.
Take hardware-maker Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). The company recently saw revenue grow in its PC unit for the first time in years. The shift was so inspiring it led CEO Meg Whitman to declare the company would double down on hardware. HP stock is up about 30 per cent year-to-date.
On the software side, no one is benefitting more than Google (GOOGL). The company’s Android software remains the undisputed king of mobile computing. The number of shipped devices running Android will jump 30 per cent in 2014.
Microsoft sues Samsung alleging contract breach
Even the oft-maligned Microsoft (MSFT) may have finally caught a break. According to Gartner, “Windows phones will exhibit strong growth from a low base in 2014, and are projected to reach a 10% market share by 2018 — up from 4 per cent in 2014."
And of course – there’s Apple (AAPL). The company – which integrates hardware and software to a level no other company has yet mastered – is still seeing growth. Shipments of devices running iOS will jump 15 per cent in 2014.
So with all of this in the mix – it’s hard to predict what exactly the future of “personal computing” will look like. According to Blodget, “The jury is still out,” and it may be a while before we get a verdict.

Xiomi comes clean on spying allegations

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi is reassuring users by opening up the truth about its server operations in the wake of spying allegations last month.

Xiaomi's global vice president Hugo Barra told The Wall Street Journal that users’ personal information is not stored on the server in Beijing that sparked cyberspying rumors last month, and that Xiaomi only stores personal information on different servers with users’ permission.

The rumors had begun when a user posted online in mid-July that his RedMi Note smartphone was “secretly” connecting to a server in Beijing, although he had turned off the data backup functions. The server was connecting to his phone’s media storage application, so he believed his photos and other data were being sent to Beijing. With consumers already wary in general about data privacy, the allegations took off across the Internet.

Xiaomi reacted quickly. Chinese and U.S. tech firms have been on tenterhooks over cyberspying allegations in the past year, as their governments battle out what some have likened to a “digital cold war.”

Barra, who left Google for Xiaomi in 2013, told the Journal that the server in question in Beijing stores no user data and only connects to users’ phones for services such as downloading themes and apps. If users choose to back up their data with Xiaomi’s cloud service, their data is encrypted and stored in different servers located in China and other countries, he said.

“The Xiaomi servers the device was connecting to in this post are part of our infrastructure used for push services and downloading of static application data – and not Mi Cloud servers (which have a different IP address),” he wrote in an emailed response. Mi Cloud is Xiaomi’s cloud data backup service.


Barra also posted a less-detailed Q&A last week saying the user’s post was “severely misinterpreted” and that Xiaomi did not upload personal information without the permission of its users.

Regarding allegations that the Beijing server was automatically connecting to a user’s smartphone media storage application, Barra said the server was not connecting to photos and other data, but to the device’s download manager.  The download manager runs in the media server system process and accesses the media storage data base to store downloaded files, he said.

“The Media Storage application also handles photos, which incorrectly led to the impression that photos are being uploaded, which is not the case,” Barra wrote. “The connection to the IP address shown in the post is only being used for the Download Manager push service.”

2008 Accord is near re-call status

United States transportation safety regulators have upgraded the investigation of an estimated 335,195 Honda Accord sedans a step closer to a recall after receiving almost 300 complaints that airbags can deploy when the car door is shut with too much force.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents filed online on Friday that it was upgrading the investigation to an "engineering analysis" from a "preliminary evaluation" of the 2008 four-door models made by Honda Motor Co.




An engineering analysis is a step that can lead to a recall if regulators determine that the manufacturer needs to address a safety problem.

NHTSA said it had identified 293 incidents of alleged inadvertent deployment of driver or passenger side airbags. Fourteen people were injured because of the problem, according to the agency's documents.

In some cases, the side seat-mounted torso airbag can deploy as well, NHTSA said.

NHTSA said it was investigating the risk of airbag deployment injuries to occupants in vulnerable positions. Regulators opened the initial preliminary evaluation in late January.

Honda officials were not immediately available for comment.

In June 2008, near the end of 2008 model-year Accord production, Honda changed the crash parameter for door-closing force in the electronic control unit's software code to reduce the incidents of inadvertent side airbag deployments, NHTSA said. Regulators found the number of inadvertent airbag deployments had fallen significantly after that.

Honda said the two-door Accord used a different software crash parameter than the four-door model, according to NHTSA.

In one incident last fall, an owner said he had stopped at a gas station so his fiancée could purchase a drink. When she closed the door, the passenger-side curtain airbag deployed, striking their 9-year-old son, according to a complaint filed with NHTSA.