Want to complain about text spam? There's an app for that

Text message spam is a growing annoyance, but -- until now -- you've had to jump through hoops to combat it.

Fighting text spam got easier by leaps and bounds on Wednesday when Android app PrivacyStar added a free-to-use feature, which will help users file formal complaints with the Federal Trade Commission directly from their smartphones. The app provides a simple and easy way to voice discontent with the federal agency, and it requires little more than a single tap to do so.

When it comes to spam, asking the sender to remove you from a list -- whether for phone, text or email -- does not always end with you being removed from said list. And, up until recently, there were few authoritative bodies people could complain to and expect meaningful change.
In 2011, the FTC began a campaign to actively combat spammers, which included a new complaint line. Having a way for consumers to fight spam has become crucial: Text message spam rose by 45% in 2012, totaling more than 4.5 billion text messages, according to PrivacyStar CEO Jeff Stalnaker.
The app is currently available in the Google Play store. While many of its existing features, such as call and text screening and blocking are limited to paid subscribers to PrivacyStar, the ability to file complaints does not require a subscription.

Facebook highlights privacy protection for minors on Graph Search

(CNN) -- As Facebook continues the slow rollout of a tool to let users search out others by using common interests or other personal information, the site emphasized Thursday that minors will get special privacy protections.

Graph Search capitalizes on Facebook's massive bank of data about its users, or "social graph," to seek out friends, or other users who have made their information public, using information about them.

So, for example, you could seek out friends who "like" director Quentin Tarantino to make an invite list to see "Django Unchained" Friday night or remind yourself which of your friends are over 21 and live in Austin, Texas, to do some bar-hopping while you're in town.

But privacy advocates are worried. While Graph Search won't show you any information that you couldn't see otherwise, it does pull all that data together in one place in a way that could have some creepy uses.

Say, searching for the names of girls who attend a certain middle school.

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That's the sort of thing Facebook aims to prevent.

Details including birthday, school, hometown and current city will only be available about users under 18 to their friends and friends of friends. And friends of friends will only be able to see them if they, too, are under 18.

"What we really wanted to do was try to identify things that could be even more sensitive for minors -- that would identify them by their age and location," Nicky Jackson Colaco, Facebook's manager of Privacy & Safety, told CNN Thursday. "Those kind of things are more sensitive and we wanted to really make sure they had an even more restrictive experience."

Of course, she noted, the extra protections only kick in if minors are honest about the age they give to register for the site.

"This is true across Facebook. It's really important to us that minors represent their real age," she said, urging parents to make sure their children are doing so. "If they tell us they're 25, they're not getting these protections and a lot of other protections we offer."

Separate from Graph Search, Facebook already limits some content posted by minors to "Friends of Friends" only, even if the young user has made it public. The site's minimum age is 13.

The tool was announced last month by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The new search feature lets you draw connections between people, their profile information and their interests on Facebook. In theory, it's a good recipe for finding recommendations for doctors, businesses, products, TV shows or bands.

It can also be used to find people that fit a specific profile, such as "men over 30 who live in Cleveland."

Users will be able to seek out people who aren't their Facebook friends using the tool. But the only information they'll see are things that a user has posted as "public" to the site.

Graph Search currently has only been made available to a handful of early testers. But some of them have used it in ways they say raise privacy concerns.

British tech blogger and "gadget geek" Tom Scott created a blog called "Actual Facebook Graph Searches." While some are humorous (people who like both the anti-gay marriage Focus on the Family and openly gay actor Neil Patrick Harris) others suggested something more troubling.

For example, he shows a search for family members of people of Chinese descent who like Falun Gong, the religious movement banned in China. Or one for Islamic men living in Tehran, Iran, who are romantically interested in other men. (Homosexuality is illegal there).

The searches could then be refined to see photos of the users, their friends and places they've worked.

Facebook has emphasized privacy settings to keep such information from being publicly visible and said they're continuing to fine-tune the tool as it rolls out.

In December, Facebook overhauled it's privacy controls, adding a handful of features while simplifying and clarifying how existing features work.

Security flaw allows snoopers to access locked iPhones

CNN) -- The passwords on iPhones can be hacked, giving someone the ability to make calls, listen to your recent messages and tinker with your contact list, according to a new video posted to YouTube.

The apparent security flaw is shown on an iPhone 5 and can be exploited on phones running Apple's iOS 6.1, the most recent version of its mobile operating system, and some earlier versions.

The technique was posted by a Spanish-speaking user with the account name "videosdebarraquito," who has posted other videos that show what appear to be ways to tweak settings on the iPhone. CNN is not linking to the video, which was published January 31 but recently discovered by tech bloggers.

It involves using another phone placed nearby to make a call to the phone, canceling it, then answering with the targeted phone and fiddling with the power button.

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According to the user who posted the video, it can't be used to access other parts of the phone. And he urged anyone who used it to play nice.

Use the bypass "to joke with your friends. To do a magic show. To win a harmless bet among friends in a PUB. Perhaps, to retrieve a phone number in case you don't remember the password, or just to be warned that exists," the user wrote.

"Use it as you want, at your own risk, but... please... use responsibly, do not use this trick to do evil !!!"

The company said Thursday that it's at work on the problem.

"Apple takes user security very seriously," said spokeswoman Trudy Muller. "We are aware of this issue, and will deliver a fix in a future software update."

The folks at tech blog The Verge tried out the technique, and said they were also able to access photos on the phone by attempting to add a photo to a contact. They were able to access an iPhone 5 that was running iOS 6.1 in the UK, they said.

Similar bugs have been pointed out in previous versions of Apple's mobile operating system. Usually, the company issues a quick update to fix the problem.

Android dominated smartphone sales in 2012

CNN) -- Android continues to dominate in the battle to be the top smartphone system in the world, thanks in part to Samsung, which reigned as the top phone manufacturer for 2012.

Android grew its already significant chunk of the smartphone market to 68.8% last year, while Apple's iOS operating system stayed comfortably in second place with 18.8% of smartphone shipments, according to new stats from research firm IDC. Together, the two operating systems accounted for 87.6% of all new smartphones in 2012, leaving struggling competitors BlackBerry and Windows far behind.

It's no surprise that Android has surged so far ahead of iOS. There are are thousands of Android handset models in every size and at every price imaginable, while Apple has released only six versions of the iPhone. Apple sold 130 million smartphones last year, according to Gartner.

"Even with the Apple Maps debacle, iPhone owners were not deterred from purchasing new iPhones," said IDC research manager Ramon Llamas in a statement.

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Apple released one new iOS phone in 2012, the much-anticipated iPhone 5. However, according to Gartner it was previous iPhone models, which dropped in price enough to make them a more appealing option in emerging markets, that accounted for much of Apple's smartphone success. Even though Apple's sales are growing, IDC points out that its year-over-year growth is actually slower when compared with the rest of the smartphone market.

Samsung sold 384.6 million phones in 2012, only 53.5% of which were smartphones, according to Gartner. Chinese phone maker Huawei climbed to the No.3 smartphone vendor spot in the final quarter of 2012. Nokia has been struggling and 2013 will be a key year for the company. Its fate is largely tied to that of Windows Phone 8, which runs on Nokia's latest Lumia phones.

Both BlackBerry and Windows are compteting to win over smartphone customers with their new offerings. BlackBerry just released its long-awaited new smartphone operating system and two new handsets in January, and Microsoft debuted its Windows Phone 8 update at the end of 2012. BlackBerry must persuade its existing users to make the upgrade and win back some large companies, which were previously its biggest customers.

Unlike BlackBerry, Windows Phone 8 unveiled its new products and marketing campaign early enough to make some progress last year. Though it only made up 2.6% of the smartphone market in 2012, it did grow its number of shipments an impressive 98.9%, according to IDC. BlackBerry plummeted 36.4% from the previous year, but we'll have to wait and see how its latest products do in the fresh year.

Overall, the number of phone sales in 2012 actually dropped 1.7% from the previous year, the first drop since 2009.

"Tough economic conditions, shifting consumer preferences and intense market competition weakened the worldwide mobile phone market this year," Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta said in a statement.

Facebook hacked, social media company says

(Reuters) - Facebook said on Friday that it been the target of a series of attacks by an unidentified hacker group, but it had found no evidence that user data was compromised.
"Last month, Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack," the company said in a blog post. "The attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised."
The social network, which says it has more than one billion active users worldwide, added: "Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well."
Facebook's announcement follows recent cyber attacks on other prominent websites. Twitter, the microblogging social network, said this month that it had been hacked, and that approximately 250,000 user accounts were potentially compromised, with attackers gaining access to information including user names and email addresses.
Newspaper websites including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have also been infiltrated, according to the news organizations. Those attacks were attributed by the news organizations to Chinese hackers targeting their coverage of China.

Most Facebook Users Have Taken a Break From the Site, Survey Finds

Facebook is the most popular social network in America — roughly two-thirds of adults in the country use it on a regular basis.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t get sick of it.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center‘s Internet and American Life Project, conducted in December, found that 61 percent of current Facebook users admitted that they had voluntarily taken breaks from the site, for as many as several weeks at a time.
The main reasons for their social media sabbaticals were not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site, and the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time.
About 4 percent cited privacy and security concerns as contributing to their departure. Although those users eventually resumed their regular activity, another 20 percent of Facebook users admitted to deleting their accounts.
Of course, even as some Facebook users pull back on their daily consumption of the service, the vast majority — 92 percent — of all social network users still maintain a profile on the site. But while more than half said that the site was just as important to them as it was a year ago, only 12 percent said the site’s significance increased over the last year — indicating the makings of a much larger social media burnout across the site.
The survey teases out other interesting insights, including the finding that young users are spending less time overall on the site. The report found that 42 percent of Facebook users from the ages of 18 to 29 said that the average time they spent on the site in a typical day had decreased in the last year. A much smaller portion, 23 percent, of older Facebook users, those over 50, reported a drop in Facebook usage over the same period.
Facebook’s biggest challenge revolves around figuring out how to continue to profit from its rich reservoir of one billion users — and a large part of that involves keeping them entertained and returning to the site on a regular basis. Most recently, the company introduced a tool called Graph Search, a research tool that promises to help its users find answers on everything from travel recommendations to potential jobs and even love connections.
Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, which conducted the survey, described the results as a kind of “social reckoning.”
“These data show that people are trying to make new calibrations in their life to accommodate new social tools,” said Mr. Rainie, in an e-mail. Facebook users are beginning to ask themselves, ” ‘What are my friends doing and thinking and how much does that matter to me?,’ ” he said. “They are adding up the pluses and minuses on a kind of networking balance sheet and they are trying to figure out how much they get out of connectivity vs. how much they put into it.”

ASUS Pocket Router – New Age For Personal Routers

If you have ever been somewhere with a group of people and had a single Ethernet connection in the room you were working on, you completely understand the need to share that connection. You can carry around a small switch with you, but then you have to also carry around the associated network cables so that everyone in the room can make a connection. With every mobile device and laptop having WiFi, it makes things much simpler. But carrying around a WiFi Network switch is too large of a device given the shrinking size of devices. Today’s Personal routers are much smaller, but are still large enough to add weight to what you are carrying.
Enter the Asus Pocket Router with a specific name of WL-330NUL and a claim to being the World’s Smallest Router. And given that it is the size of a USB memory stick, they do have an extremely small wireless router. Operating as a USB 2.0 device, it can handle 10/100 Mbps WiFi connections and is perfect for those of us who are truly mobile and have a need to share a connection with others. Or to turn an Ethernet connection into a WiFi connection so you are not tethered to the wall. This small device is going to be a must have for all of us.