NSA Whistleblower Snowden Launches Mobile App For Paranoid People

Famed NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden has just launched Haven, an app for people to transform any Android smartphone into a high-tech security system for detecting intrusions.

Snowden, while currently on the run from the CIA, hiding somewhere in Moscow until 2020, has found enough time to launch his new mobile security app last Friday for the sufficiently paranoid person (e.g. activists, dissidents, journalists, & etc).

"When the lead developer explained the project to his young children, they found another use for it: "We’re going to catch Santa!" " https://t.co/Beangjk90g

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 23, 2017

Haven is designed to be installed on any Android smartphone, particularly inexpensive and older devices. It operates like a home surveillance system, leveraging on-device sensors to provide surveillance of physical areas. Sensors within the Android phone monitor motion, sound, vibration and light, watching for unwanted guests to notify a user. Combining Haven with an array of sensors in any smartphone, coupled with the most secure communications technologies like Signal and Tor, the app is providing Snowden and other activists around the world with a mobile security system.

The app was developed by Freedom of the Press Foundation, Guardian Project, and Snowden. According to the Guardian Project, the app’s prototype funding was provided by FoPF, and donations to support continuing work can be contributed through their site: https://freedom.press/donate-support-haven-open-source-project/.

According to the Guardian Project, this is how the app works,

Haven only saves images and sound when triggered by motion or volume, and stores everything locally on the device. You can position the device’s camera to capture visible motion, or set your phone somewhere discreet to just listen for noises. Get secure notifications of intrusion events instantly and access the logs remotely or anytime later.

On-device sensors monitor for disturbance, and then logs the data:

• Accelerometer: phone’s motion and vibration


• Camera: motion in the phone’s visible surroundings from front or back camera


• Microphone: noises in the environment


• Light: change in light from ambient light sensor


• Power: detect device being unplugged or power loss

Further, the group explains why Haven is well suited for Android devices and does make the claim, a version for the iPhone is on the horizon.

While we hope to support a version of Haven that runs directly on iOS devices in the future, iPhone users can still benefit from Haven today. You can purchase an inexpensive Android phone for less than $100, and use that as your “Haven Device”, that you leave behind, while you keep your iPhone with you. If you run Signal on your iPhone, you can configure Haven on Android to send encrypted notifications, with photos and audio, directly to you. If you enable the “Tor Onion Service” feature in Haven (requires installing “Orbot” app as well), you can remotely access all Haven log data from your iPhone, using the Onion Browser app. So, no, iPhone users we didn’t forget about you, and hope you’ll pick up an Android burner today for a few bucks!

If one of the sensors was triggered, a notification would be sent to one of the following platforms:

• SMS: a message is sent to the number specified when monitoring started


• Signal: if configured, can send end-to-end encryption notifications via Signal

 

My partner has been testing Haven for a few months with a spare phone. Every time you open the closet, it sends a picture by Signal. In addition to impressive intrusion detection capabilities, you can also use it to send helpful reminders! ? https://t.co/FHi1bjFsLP pic.twitter.com/IS58HzDVha

— lex.txt (@lex_is) December 22, 2017

As for Snowden, he remains in an asylum somewhere in Moscow until 2020 when his residence permit expires.

With the launch of Haven, it seems as Snowden is attempting to change the calculus of risk for when US authorities come hunting for him once more.

If all else fails, Snowden might have just invented a baby monitor for the broke millennial. 

Qualcomm Files Lawsuit Seeking To Ban Sale And Manufacture Of iPhones In China

Apple experienced a sudden air pocket dip (which was promptly bought) after a Bloomberg report that Qualcomm has filed lawsuits in China seeking to "ban the sale and manufacture of iPhones in the country," a move which is the chipmaker’s biggest shot at Apple so far in a bitter legal fight between the two companies.

San Diego-based Qualcomm filed the suits in a Beijing intellectual property court claiming patent infringement and seeking injunctive relief, according to Christine Trimble, a company spokeswoman, and hopes to inflict pain on Apple in the world’s largest market for smartphones, cutting off production in a country where most iPhones are made.  Greater China accounted for 22.5% of Apple’s $215.6 billion sales in fiscal 2016.

"Apple employs technologies invented by Qualcomm without paying for them," Trimble said.

The two companies have lobbed legal shots and lawsuits at each other for years, and are currently months into a legal dispute that centers on Qualcomm’s technology licensing business. While Qualcomm gets the majority of its sales from making phone chips, it pulls in most of its profit from charging fees for patents that cover the fundamentals of all modern phone systems. The suits come at a sensitive time for Apple, which just introduced iPhone 8 and X models which aim at "reasserting leadership in a market that’s steeped in competition from fast-growing Chinese makers."

Suppliers and assemblers in China are rushing to churn out as many new iPhones as possible ahead of the key holiday season, so any disruptions would likely be costly. As reported yesterday, the iPhone X is already suffering major problems involving its facial recognition technology, which if unresolved could lead to product launch delays.

Some more details from Bloomberg on the latest litigation:

The legal battle started earlier this year when Apple filed an antitrust suit against Qualcomm arguing that the chipmaker’s licensing practices are unfair, and that it abused its position as the biggest supplier of chips in phones. Qualcomm charges a percentage of the price of each handset regardless of whether it includes a chip from the company, and Apple issick of paying those fees.

Qualcomm has countered with a patent suit and argued that Cupertino, California-based Apple encouraged regulators from South Korea to the U.S. to take action against it based on false testimony. Earlier this week, Qualcomm was fined a record NT$23.4 billion ($773 million) by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission, a ruling the company is appealing. Qualcomm is also asking U.S. authoriti

While on the surface the latest legal salvo may sound serious, the market"s reaction - to this as well as to everything else - has been largely negligible, as BTFD algos rushedin to quickly fill the gap created by triggerhappy sellers.

Apple Censors US-Drone-Strike-Tracking App

Authored by James Holbrooks via TheAntiMedia.org,

“At its core was a question: do we want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our smartphones? My hypothesis was no. Americans don’t care about the drone war because it is largely hidden from view.”

That’s how Josh Begley, writing for The Intercept on Tuesday, described the concept behind an app he created five years ago. The app, he says, was a simple one. It merely sent users an alert every time a U.S. drone strike was reported in the news.

Apple rejected the app three times on the grounds that it was “excessively objectionable or crude content,” but Begley didn’t give up on the project.

“Over the years, I would occasionally resubmit the app, changing its name from Drones+ to Metadata+,” he wrote. “I was curious to see if Apple might change its mind. The app didn’t include graphic images or video of any kind — it simply aggregated news about covert war.”

He went on to tell how, after five rejections, Apple finally accepted the app in 2014. It remained in the App Store for a year and was downloaded by over 50,000 people. But then, the following September, Apple removed the app, once again citing “excessively objectionable or crude content.”

Begley persisted. The reason he was writing the post this week, in fact, was because that day — March 28, 2017 — Apple had once again accepted the app. He wasn’t writing to talk about his ordeal with Apple, though. He was writing about the issue that motivated him to create the app in the first place:

“As an artist who works with data, I think the story of this app is about more than a petty conflict with Apple. It is about what can be seen — or obscured — about the geography of our covert wars.”

He pointed out that over the past 15 years, people have worked tirelessly to document what’s happening on the ground where these drone campaigns are being waged. And that work is certainly praiseworthy. But Begley went further, pointing out what he calls the “difficult truth” of drone warfare — that at the end of the day, we don’t really know who these missiles are killing.

Again, rather than focusing on his spat with Apple, Begley stayed with the issue that inspired him and talked about the end product of that inspiration:

“Because the particulars of drone wars are scant, we only have ‘metadata’ about most of these strikes—perhaps a date, the name of a province, maybe a body count. Absent documentary evidence or first-person testimony, there isn’t much narrative to speak of.

“The name ‘Metadata’ has a double meaning: the app both contains metadata about English-language news reports, and it refers to the basis on which most drone strikes are carried out.”

The only time Begley questioned Apple’s earlier decisions to refuse his app was in his summation.

“Smartphones have connected us more intimately to all sorts of data,” he wrote. “Yet information about drone strikes — in Apple’s universe — had somehow been deemed beyond the pale.”

He used the past tense, of course, because Apple had, that very day, re-accepted Metadata. But as it turned out, the party was short-lived. Hours after Begley’s post ran at The Intercept, Apple pulled his app once more.

Highlighting the suddenness of Apple’s move, here’s how Reason opened its coverage of the news on Tuesday:

“This was supposed to be a post about how anybody who wants to easily keep track of U.S. drone strikes overseas can do so through an app on their iPhone. But never mind. They can’t anymore.”

Josh Begley chose not to go after Apple in his article when he easily could have. He took the high road and stuck to the far greater issues — the nature of drone warfare itself and how we, as a society, are responding to it in an age of instant communication.

This writer will follow Begley’s lead and not speculate on the myriad possibilities of why Apple seems afraid of his app. That’s the far less important aspect of what’s happening here. It all goes back to the core of the Metadata project and the question that drove Begley to get started: Given the option, would we really want to be as connected to U.S. foreign policy as we are to our smartphones?

Or, in other words, would we really want constant updates on all the killing?

Apple Stock Soars Above Record Closing High

Despite declining earnings expectations, AAPL"s share price just broke above its record closing high (from Feb 2015).

As WSJ notes, the tech giant’s shares–among the most widely held and actively traded in the world–hit $133.42 moments ago, trading above their record close of $133 from February 2015. And they’re inches away from their all-time intraday high of $134.54, set in April 2015.

Shares of the $700 billion company are up about 41% in the past 12 months, and more than 9% since Apple pulled back the curtain on its latest earnings report on Jan. 31 to reveal an end to a three-quarter streak of declining revenue.

As the stock prices has soared, volume has slid...

Monday’s trading is the capstone of a recovery in the shares after a prolonged downturn from July 2015 to May 2016, when the stock fell 30% as investor concern mounted over the pace of iPhone sales, soft demand from China, and speculation about whether the company will ever again come up with a product with even a fraction of the impact of the iPhone. In that span, the Apple Watch failed to catch on as quickly as some had hoped, and sales of the company’s iPad tablet swooned.

Near the end of that stretch, Apple momentarily lost its crown as the world’s largest company by market capitalization to Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Apple regained the mantle, and the gap between the two began to widen again when Warren Buffett"s Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it had taken a stake worth nearly $1 billion in Apple.

But earnings expectations have done anything but rise...

But don"t let that worry you...