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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
According to a report by Reuters, White house spokesman Mark Stroh said that the administration is no longer looking to introduce encryption-weakening legislation to Congress.
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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.
That's a very carefully chosen word, "reservations" - not pre-orders. This is because the Turing isn't actually asking for any money upfront. No, entering your contact information after selecting colors (black and purple, "Beowulf," red and blue, "Pharoh," or white and red, "Cardinal") and storage capacity (16GB for $610, 64GB for $740, or 128GB for $870) is more or less a statement of interest than any commitment to buy the phone on your part.
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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.
This is definitely not the type of publicity that ASUS wants surrounding the world's first quad-core tablet, and users are hoping that the Taiwanese manufacturer will eventually reverse its decision and open the device.
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If you were ever wondering what bootloader encryption, signing, and locking actually meant, this post is for you.
My name is Ivo, and recently I posted this write-up on Reddit (check out the Android subreddit while you’re there!). The post gained quite a bit of traction, and to spread the word further, I'm now posting it here at Android Police. I hope it helps out those of you who are confused.
It’s necessary, if you want to talk about these issues, to get some cryptic terms out of the way, so we actually know what we’re talking about! If you want to find out more about these topics, just click on through to their respective Wikipedia articles.
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