Report: NSA Exploited Heartbleed For Years. NSA: No

Update: An account associated with the NSA tweeted out a quick denial: “Statement: NSA was not aware of the recently identified Heartbleed vulnerability until it was made public.” So, either Bloomberg was misled, misunderstood their information, or the NSA is lying. [A caveat: The Twitter account in question is being treated by the larger world as legitimate, but remains unverified by Twitter itself.]

Update 2: See bottom of post for full NSA statement. Source one, two. 

This afternoon Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) knew about the now infamous Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL, and that it used the weakness to collect intelligence.

It is not clear if the NSA used Heartbleed to collect information regarding citizens in the United States, so this issue may not concern privacy like so many other revelations regarding the agency have. Instead, the idea is that the NSA was reportedly aware of the issue, and chose to exploit the exploit rather than helping the larger technology community quickly.

In short, The NSA essentially decided that its own intelligence efforts were more important than the security of your information.

In the ensuing few days since the Heartbleed weakness has been exposed, companies and services large and small have rushed to patch their systems, change their cryptographic protections, and alert their users to change their passwords. This situation could have been ameliorated, if not avoided altogether.

The NSA’s reputation inside of the technology world has been long-suffering, especially in the wake of efforts to weaken encryption by inserting back doors, and its efforts to tap the cables between data centers of large, popular technology firms. This will not help.

Making the average person understand the extent of the NSA’s actions has been difficult — some don’t get, or simply don’t care, about their digital privacy — but to deliberately ignore a known flaw that could put every member of your family at risk? That’s easier to grasp.

Update 2, continued: 

The Walking Dead: Season One comes to Android, two years late

Kris Carlon 2014-04-09T08:29:06Z8 hours ago

Kris Carlon

Putting down roots in Berlin after six years of traveling is a major step for Kris Carlon, who has spent more time living out of a tent lately than sitting at a desk. Kris comes to the AndroidPIT Editorial Team via a lengthy period spent writing on art and culture in Australia and other places he has lived. He joined the Android community while resurfacing in civilization back in 2010 and has never looked back, using technology to replace his actual presence in other people's lives ever since.

The first season of the five-part The Walking Dead video game series has just arrived in the Play Store for free install. Seasons two through five will cost you via in-app purchase but the first season will give you all the zombie-fleeing action you can handle to see if you want to invest further. You won't be following the characters of the television series, but the action will be much the same as in the comic and television series: run, shoot, live with your choices.

Two years late, but The Walking Dead Season One is finally on Android. / © Telltale Games

The Walking Dead Season One follows Lee Everett, a down on his luck ex-con just trying to make a go of his second chance in a zombie-infested apocalypse. If he doesn't exactly seem like a likable anti-hero to you, never fear, he has a ward to protect called Clementine who is, as you could have probably guessed, an orphan. The action in the first season is actually a precursor to the events that occur to Rick and gang in later seasons of the television series.

Link to Video

The game has been available for a long time on various consoles and PC and iOS users have had it since mid-2012. While the action follows the storyline of the early days of the outbreak in Georgia, player choices will affect character responses and events. Telltale Games monitored the choices players made in earlier episodes which in turn influenced their writing of later seasons and episodes. In the zombie apocalypse, no choice is a minor one. Remember that.

Check out our list of the top 5 free zombie games for Android.

Have you played The Walking Dead Season One on other platforms before? What do you prefer: the comics, TV show, or or other The Walking Dead-style games

Source: Google Play

 Previous

Pocket update brings immersive mode and more language support

 Next

WhatsApp beta update brings new camera function [APK]

View the Original article

Qik Is Shutting Down In April, Three Years After Being Acquired By Skype

Qik, a company that was very early on in the stream-live-video-from-your-phone trend that popped up and then quickly faded around 2008-2009, is being retired by its parent company, Skype. Skype acquired Qik back in 2011 for upwards of $100 million.

Why the shutdown? To be blunt: Skype got what they wanted out of the deal, so Qik is redundant now. While Skype doesn’t make direct use of the phone-to-web broadcasting functionality that Qik focused on, they say they’ve integrated core bits of Qik’s video messaging technology into Skype.

While Qik as a service never got hugely popular (blasting videos to your friends in real-time is only really fun if all of your friends happen to all be free at the same time), the company built some damned cool technology. These guys were doing video recording on the iPhone before the iPhone even officially supported video recording (remember that?).

If you’ve still got any videos lurking on Qik’s servers, you’ll need to get them off by April. Given that Qik pitched itself as a means of sharing things like your kid’s first steps with friends and family in real time, there’s probably quite a few precious moments still tucked away on the service.

[Personal anecdote: Qik was one of the first startups I ever spoke to when I first started writing for TechCrunch. Seeing them fade away is a bit sad, but I'm sure their 100+ million dollar exit lessens the sting for many who worked on it.]