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Watch out for these FBI honeypot phones if you like to do crimes
This modified Pixel 4a is a narc phone. An Android policeman, you might say
Criminals use cell phones. And because police agencies know this, they tend to be a little more cautious about said phones than regular users. Cautious enough to, say, buy a special fully-encrypted phone that purports to be 100% untraceable, and use the completely hack-proof messaging app contained within. Some of those criminals came to regret it as they discovered their super-secret phones and messaging service were, in fact, provided by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and other police forces around the world.
Google Drive tests feature that may let users encrypt files offline
Screenshots of the feature were posted to Twitter
Storing files in Google Drive might be good for saving space on your computer, but it's never been the most secure option, since Drive doesn't support encrypting individual files. It looks like that might be changing in the future, though, as a teardown of the latest app update reveals work towards adding support for encryption.
Google automatically backs up some of your phone's data, like SMS messages (Nexus/Pixel only) and call history, to the cloud. That way, if you need to wipe your device or it gets lost/stolen, you're not completely out of luck. Android Pie includes changes to how these backups are stored, so not even Google can read your data.
Google Drive on the web received the ability to read password-protected Microsoft Office files a while ago - well over a year ago, in fact. This capability is finally rolling out to Drive on Android, and we've got the APK if you need it.
Signal is one of the best end-to-end encrypted messaging services, available for both Android and iPhone. Earlier this year, support for video and audio calls began to roll out. Now the team is working on something a bit more basic - profile pictures and names.
There are plenty of messenger applications with support for end-to-end-encryption, so only you and the person you're talking to can read the conversation. But Briar is a bit different - it uses the Tor network to send and receive messages. The app has now entered beta, and you can download it from the Play Store.
Google Drive is usually pretty good at previewing non-Docs files. You can open Microsoft Office documents, OpenDocument files, PDFs, images, compressed archives, and more. But previewing encrypted Office Documents hasn't been possible - until now.
Synology is a Taiwanese company that specializes in hardware and software for network attached storage. It's not particularly known as a security company, but with the American government publicly demanding access to more or less all data on the planet, and other countries and less polite entities taking it without asking, the market is ripe to sell security products to wary consumers. Hence MailPlus, yet another secure and encrypted email system, this time independently hosted from a customer's Synology-branded NAS hardware.
Since the Snowden leaks began back in 2013, there has been a justifiable increase in public scrutiny of the US federal government's attitudes towards surveillance and information access. So when President Obama voiced the opinion that encrypted files should be accessible to law enforcement (presumably via some kind of backdoor or exclusive decryption method), privacy advocates joined security experts in a nationwide groan. Thankfully the administration seems to have changed its tune nine months later.
If you've heard about the Turing phone, you're probably either extremely interested or extremely indifferent. (Is it possible to be indifferent to an extreme degree? Anyway.) The somewhat bombastic company has been showing off a device with a unique design and lofty claims of being "unhackable." It's more than vaporware, though - working prototypes have been shown at trade events, and now Turing is taking phone reservations via its website.
Forget about GPS issues, it looks like ASUS has a bigger problem on its hand with the Transformer Prime: a locked/encrypted bootloader. Like with other devices, as soon as the development community found out about this, there were some rather irritated people. The typical backlash against the company has now started on popular social networking sites, along with a petition that has managed to get over 200 signatures in just a few hours.
If you were ever wondering what bootloader encryption, signing, and locking actually meant, this post is for you.
Update: If you've somehow inexplicably ended up at this article, please note, HTC has since announced the 3D will be unlocked (at some point) and their future policy is to have unlocked bootloaders on all devices.
What an absolutely insane week it has been for unlocking encrypted and signed hardware!
AT&T users, rejoice! Brief Mobile has been informed that user DesignGears, along with Getaphixx, has rooted the Motorola Atrix before its official release.