Wednesday 03-02-16

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your Smartphone Knows Who You Are and What You're Doing

 

Your phone knows more about you than you think.
It knows where you’ve been and who you were with, the birthday gift you bought your mother and who you plan to vote for. Sex last night? It knows that too if you’re using one of the applications for couples trying to conceive.
From pre-installed apps that count your steps to saved passwords for banking accounts and social media, smartphones have evolved from devices that make calls into digital repositories for the most intimate details of life.

"You can extract enough information on a typical person’s phone that you can construct a virtual clone of that individual," said Elad Yoran, executive chairman of Koolspan Inc., a communications security company. "They are the windows not just into our personal lives but they are equally the windows into our professional lives."
And, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s battle with Apple Inc. shows, they have become a goldmine for investigators. The agency has won a court order demanding Apple’s help unlocking an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot scores of co-workers at a December office event in San Bernardino, California in December, killing 14.
Apple is fighting the order, mounting a highly public case against what it calls government overreach and in defense of privacy. It warns that anything it does to override the encryption of its smartphones could help hackers.

Kids’ Locations

"There’s probably more information about you on your phone than there is in your house," Apple chief executive Tim Cook told ABC News last week. "Our smartphones are loaded with our intimate conversations, our financial data, our health records. They’re also loaded with the location of our kids in many cases."

The world’s 7.3 billion people now have an estimated 3.4 billion smartphones. That’s expected to climb to 6.4 billion by 2021, according to communications company Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson. The phones are powerful, processing more information faster than the computers NASA used to put humans on the moon.
That’s permitted them to perform a stunning array of functions and collect troves of data.
There’s a record of calls made and received, text messages, photos, contact lists, calendar entries, Internet browsing history and notes, as well as access to e-mail accounts, banking institutions and websites like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix, said Koolspan’s Yoran.

Stored Passwords

Many people instruct their phones to remember passwords for these apps so they can be quickly opened -- which means they are available to anyone who gets into the phone. That reveals your taste in films, shopping habits and relationships.
Some new phones come pre-loaded with a health app that automatically tracks how many steps a user takes. Others can be downloaded to pinpoint a person’s location using GPS coordinates or reveal political leanings and food preferences.

Friend Finder

Navigation programs can serve as a record of places visited. If you use a friend finder app, the phone will know where your friends or family members are or have been.
Moreover, smartphones quietly collect data about a user and share it with others, said Andrew Blaich, lead security analyst for Bluebox Security, which helps secure apps. For example, the phone communicates with its telecommunications service provider and its manufacturer for software updates, while apps talk back to developers, Blaich said.
"Applications in general write a lot of data to their local storage. This data includes user names and passwords and it could include credit card numbers," he said. "If an attacker were to be able to get into your phone and get access to this data they could basically impersonate you. A lot of this information is stored unencrypted on the device."
Other apps distribute information about your use of them to advertisers.

Sharing Data

Most users don’t realize the extent to which their phone is connected to the outside world because accounts stay automatically logged in, said Mike Murray, vice president of security research for mobile security company Lookout Inc.
Phones can reveal company secrets, too. Murray said many Fortune 500 companies have a mobile phone app allowing employees to connect to networks over a virtual private network.
All of that data can be valuable to police. FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers last week that Farook’s phone could help solve the mystery of where he was for 18 minutes after the rampage. Despite scouring security cameras and interviewing witnesses, agents can’t account for where he and his wife went before they were spotted by police in a rented SUV, chased and slain in a gun-battle.
Comey said he is sensitive to the need for privacy.
Yorgen Edholm, chief executive officer of cybersecurity company Accellion Inc., said the ability to track, impersonate and even manipulate someone through a smartphone shows the need to be vigilant about security and cautious of overreach by the government.
"I call it the cyborg device because it’s so connected to us," Edholm said. "If the government wanted a decryption key for me, it would be my smartphone."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-29/your-smartphone-knows-who-you-are-and-what-you-re-doing

Fighting infections with viruses, as antibiotics fail

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Fighting infections with viruses, as antibiotics fail

                                                     

When doctors told Christophe Novou that his leg would have to be amputated at the hip due to a raging bacterial infection, the 47-year-old Frenchman thought about killing himself.

After surviving a crippling traffic accident and dozens of operations to repair the damage, to him life in a wheelchair just did not seem worth living.
That's when an article about a clinic in Georgia offering an obscure treatment for hard-to-treat infections using live virus -- something called phage therapy -- caught his eye. 
Within hours, he was on a plane to Tblisi.
"Without it, I wouldn't be here," Novou told AFP on the sidelines of a conference in Paris about the mostly forgotten therapy, which remains marginal outside a few former Soviet bloc countries. 
The treatment harnesses viruses called phages to attack and kill dangerous bacteria, including "superbugs" which have become progressively resistant to antibiotics.
In Novou's case, it was Staphylococcus, a common bacteria which can cause anything from a simple boil to horrible flesh-eating infections.
Mostly ignored up to now by mainstream medicine, the alternative treatment has started to gain adherents over the last 15 years, especially in France, Belgium and the United States.
The renewed interest is partly driven by a problem which the World Health Organization (WHO) recently described as a "global health crisis": the dramatic rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of deadly pathogens.
WHO chief Margaret Chan warned last November of a "post-antibiotic era" in which common infections will become killers once more.
- Show us the money -
"Phage therapy is especially effective for infections that affect bones and articulation, but can also be used for urinary, pulmonary and eye infections," said Alain Dublanchet, a doctor at the forefront of the movement to resurrect the treatment in France.
Discovered during World War I and developed during the 1920s and 1930s, it has few undesirable side-effects. 
Dublanchet, now retired, claims to have cured at least 15 patients of infections they contracted mainly after road accidents, and for whom antibiotics did not work.
Treatment usually lasts a few weeks, and is generally far less expensive than last-resort antibiotics which can cost tens of thousands of dollars or euros.
Pharmaceutical companies have shown little interest in phage therapy, in large part because viruses cannot be patented, according to participants at the Paris conference.
"The laboratories have turned their back on this because the return on investment is just too small," said Jean Carlet, an expert on infectious diseases and a consultant for the WHO.
A few startups have invested in phage therapy, which the European Union classified as a medicine in 2011. 
But the cycle of drug trials can easily take a decade, so these are long-term -- and perhaps long-shot -- investments.
To date no virus used in phage therapy has been approved as a treatment. "It will take years and a lot of money," said Jean-Paul Pirnay, a doctor at the Reine Astrid military hospital in Brussels, one of few actively researching the technique outside the ex-Soviet bloc.
Because phage therapy is not recognised in France, Dublanchet and other practitioners -- working in a grey zone -- often wind up going to eastern Europe to procure the viruses.
In the United States, the only phages on the market are used in the anti-bacterial treatment of food products.
The EU has launched a clinical trial called "Phagoburn" to test the effectiveness of virus-based treatments on victims of severe burns. Half of a group of 220 participants are to be treated with established techniques, and the other half with phage therapy.

Temporary authorisation for phage therapy may be granted in France "if the products are of sufficient quality and there is a presumption of efficacy," said Caroline Semaille, a spokeswoman for ANSM, the French government agency that monitors drug approval and use.

Novou spent 8,000 euros ($8,700) on going to Tbilisi in 2013 for his treatment, but has no regrets. 

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other French people with similar problems have done the same, said Dublanchet, and most come back in better shape.

"It's not a matter of replacing antibiotics with phage therapy," he said. "They should be complimentary."  

Dublanchet also warned of the possible spread of therapeutic viruses into the environment, saying medical use should be strictly monitored.

http://news.yahoo.com/fighting-infections-viruses-antibiotics-fail-092102629.html