Digital Undercurrents

HP has been remarkably quiet since their acquisition of Palm last year, but that might be changing soon – it looks like they will be releasing a new tablet as well as a pair of new phones. It will be interesting to see if the WebOS platform, which was an impressive product doomed by Palm’s atrocious marketing techniques, can gain a foothold in the iOS dominated smartphone and tablet market.

Google has announced that they are adding the capability for purchases from inside of an application to the Android operating system. For example, if a video game company wants to sell additional content to players, that will be doable from inside of the game itself rather than some kludgey additional app download.

I can’t wait to see what the scammers come up with to exploit this idea.

Apple is planning on introducing NFC, or “Near Field Communications”, in the next generation of iDevices. This means that users will be able to pay for purchases at NFC-compliant kiosks using their smart phone as an authentication token.

It will be interesting to see how Apple secures this functionality; I would hope that there is some sort of PIN or other unlocking required. Otherwise, losing a phone would be equivalent to losing a phone and a credit card. In fact, since NFC payment is generally a direct bank account debit rather than a credit transaction, it would be even worse.

Security researchers have developed an application for Android phones that listens to phone calls, and records any credit card numbers or PINs that are spoken or entered on the keypad.

The Android platform does require the user to explicitly allow the application to have access to Phone features at install time, but this is more of a social engineering issue than anything else. Disguising this as another app in a trojan horse scenario would be trivial.