Citibank has updated its iPhone banking application to correct a security vulnerability that left user bank account information unprotected.

The update, issued on July 19 through Apple’s iTunes App Store, addresses a programming design flaw that stored personal banking data in a hidden but accessible file on the user’s iPhone.

Citibank notified its mobile banking customers in the U.S. about the problem on July 20, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Citibank did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a company spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that Citibank had no reason to believe that any personal information was compromised as a result of the flaw.

Some consumers remain wary to conduct mobile transactions but perception, reality aren’t in sync
The State of Mobile Security

It’s not clear how long Apple took to approve the update or when Citibank first learned of the flaw.

The app, Citi Mobile, was developed in part using code provided by mFoundry, a mobile banking technology company based in Larkspur, Calif.

Full Story Via InformationWeek

The EVO 4G from Sprint has been a great phone so far during initial testing except for the fact that it sucks power like an air conditioner on a 105 degree day if you let it. I put together a few power saving tweaks that will help preserve your precious EVO 4G go-go juice. You might call it the “ElectroGeek 12 Step Program to Longer EVO 4G battery life.” (Or not))

1. Don’t use  the advanced task killer app. This app will use more power shutting down other apps than it will save you power.
2. Turn off WiFi
3. Turn off location services. GPS & wireless networks.
4. Turn off 4G - This is huge people. 4G sucks the battery with a fierce appetite.
5. Turn off all accounts that you don’t need synced under Accounts & sync.
6. Set your email to send & receive at a 15 minute interval or higher.
7. Turn off Phone Vibrate (Sounds & display)
8. Turn off Haptic Feedback (Sounds & display)
9. Turn off vibrate for all reminders. (Calendar, email, etc.)
10. Use a dark colored wallpaper or scene.
11. Turn off Animation (Sounds & display)
12. Power off your phone completely and charge it all night 1 time.

If you apply the previous battery saving tweaks your Sprint EVO 4G will last twice as long as it does right out of the box. I have been able to run my EVO 4G under heavy use for up to 12 hours or more at a time. It now lasts days when used lightly. Let’s keep in mind that the EVO 4G is more like a computer than a phone and as a result it requires a great deal of power to operate when all services and apps are running.

Only run the power sucking apps and services when you need them. The EVO 4G is one of the best phones I have owned to date and the service from Sprint owns AT&T big time. Hopefully the software will soon catch up to the hardware and make the EVO 4G an even better do all device.

LOS ANGELES - The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.

Computer scientists are developing machines that can teach people simple skills, like household tasks and vocabulary.

The two hit it off quickly - unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism - and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.

“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.

Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.

But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.

Full Story Via nytimes.com

AT&T and Apple have suffered a major privacy breach, exposing the contact information email addresses and ICC-IDs of over 114,000 iPad 3G customers — possibly many more.

According to Gawker the data includes:

a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.

Even worse is the potential security threat this could expose to members of the military that adopted the iPad. On the list are several devices registered to the domain of DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, including William Eldredge, who “commands the largest operational B-1 [strategic bomber] group in the U.S. Air Force.”

Um, yeah. It’s that bad.

Media moguls and celebrities are one thing, but I’m guessing that the government and military users are taking this one pretty seriously too. I’m guessing that Al Qaeda would pay big bucks to have access to Eldridge’s iPad 3G?

According to data furnished to Gawker by the Web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network at least 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it’s possible that confidential information about every U.S. iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed.

The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers’ email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T’s network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber.

AT&T responded by downplaying the impact of the breach:

AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.

New York Times emailed a warning to all of its staff to ”turn off your access to the 3G network on your iPad until further notice” while the newspaper’s engineers and security staff investigate the issue.

All of the gory technical details are on Gawker and Apple has yet to respond. Until they do, I’d also recommend that iPad 3G users turn off 3G until further notice.

Apple needs to respond and respond quickly as I’m about to return my $900 iPad 3G.

If ever there were a reason for Apple to dump AT&T — this is it.

Update 2:10pm ET: Still no response from Apple.

Full Story Via ZDNet.com

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Although Yukyung has not yet offered details about the X10 on its Viliv-brand website, Laptop’s Avram Piltch reported on the Viliv X10 from the Computex show floor in Taiwan. He was particularly impressed with the “gorgeous” 10-inch, 1366 × 768 capacitive touchscreen.

“That’s the highest resolution we’ve seen in a 10-inch tablet and it’s a huge benefit over the 1024 x 768 iPad,” writes Piltch. Because it offers a 16:9 aspect ratio, “you have more than 720p (1280 x 720) you can use to play games and watch movies,” he adds.

Full Story Via Linuxdevices.com

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The operating system codenamed Froyo, which is expected to include tethering capabilities, will be delivered to device makers ‘in the coming weeks.’Most Android phones released this year will receive an upgrade to Android 2.2, code named Froyo, in the second half of the year, HTC has announced.

This includes the Desire and Droid Incredible as well as upcoming phones such as the Evo 4G, the MyTouch slide and other future models. HTC said that all its models released this year will “most likely” be bumped up to Android OS 2.2, but made no mention of models released in 2009.

“We are working closely with Google and our other partners to ensure we have the earliest access to everything we need to provide a complete and solid Sense experience on Froyo,” the company said in a statement.

Google officially unveiled Android OS 2.2 Thursday, but hasn’t finished working on it yet. The company has promised the next version of this operating system will be given to device makers “in the coming weeks.”

Full Story Via InformationWeek

Available Now
The new version of system software for the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is available now on T-Mobile’s website and is free to download.

It needs to be installed through the BlackBerry Desktop Manager.

Full Story Via Brighthand.com

On Tuesday night, Apple released to developers the fourth beta of the upcoming iPhone 4.0 OS. Developers with access to the program started reporting on the various new features they found, most notably, AT&T tethering.

Tethering is a function that lets users hook up their mobile phones and use them as modems in order to share internet connectivity with other devices over a USB or Wi-Fi connection. The iPhone received this feature last summer, with the release of iPhone OS 3.0., but AT&T has not enabled the feature for its U.S. users. Concerns are that it would overwhelm the carrier’s network.

Full Story Via InformationWeek

Ford has finally released EPA-certified fuel economy numbers for the 2011 Fiesta, and as expected they’ve bested the competition. When equipped with its optional six-speed PowerShift dual-clutch automated manual, the Fiesta is rated at 29 mpg city and 40 highway. Equipped with the standard five-speed manual, the ratings are 28/37 mpg. That means the Fiesta tops both the Toyota Yaris’s best rating of 29/36 mpg and Honda Fit’s best of 28/35 mpg.

The official numbers are pretty close to Ford’s earlier predictions of 30/40 mpg with the PowerShift and 29/38 mpg equipped with the manual. Even though it’s a fuel sipper, the Fiesta is still fun to drive, like its Euro forebears.

Full Story Via CarandDriver.com

In the current Journal of Human Evolution, a study tells the story of how they didn’t - and how science checks out extraordinary claims.

“The timing and origin of the earliest human colonization of the Americas has been the subject of great debate over the last 100 years and is still a matter of heated discussion today,” begins the study. Hiking on the dried bed of Mexico’s Valsequillo Lake in the summer of 2003, an archeology team made a discovery they suspected would open a new chapter in the debate.

Crisscrossing the lakebed, they saw tracks, an ash field littered with hundreds of impressions that resembled footprints from adults and children, ” along with birds, cats, dogs and species with cloven feet,” as Nature magazine later reported. The team led by geoarchaeologist Silvia Gonzalez of the United Kingdom’s Liverpool John Moores University, suspected the track’s makers had fled an ancient eruption of the looming Cerro Toluquilla volcano, leaving their tracks in the now-famous “Xalnene Ash.”

Full Story Via USA Today

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