Email wasn’t designed with security in mind. Unless you take steps to protect your communication, emails are sent in plain text - and so are your email account username and password.
At the same time, if you and your recipient are taking the appropriate security precautions, mobile email can be a secure and reliable alternative to other forms of mobile communication. If you have data service for your mobile, encrypted email can replace text messaging, and if you aren’t able to access a website securely to upload content - photos or videos for example - getting it to a trusted contact as an email attachment can be a safer alternative.
Email wasn’t designed with security in mind. Unless you take steps to protect your communication, emails are sent in plain text - and so are your email account username and password.
At the same time, if you and your recipient are taking the appropriate security precautions, mobile email can be a secure and reliable alternative to other forms of mobile communication. If you have data service for your mobile, encrypted email can replace text messaging, and if you aren’t able to access a website securely to upload content - photos or videos for example - getting it to a trusted contact as an email attachment can be a safer alternative.
This article suggests the following tactics for improving the security of your mobile email:
A User Guide to Orbot - Anonymized Tor Browsing on Your Mobile Phone data sheet 3224 Views
Author:
SaferMobile
Abstract:
Orbot is an anonymizing and circumvention app that connects Android phones to the Tor network. Developed by The Guardian Project, it is currently the only way to use Tor on a mobile phone.
Orbot is for Android users who need to browse anonymously or circumvent blocked sites. It should work on both older and new model Android phones, and does not require a rooted phone (although there are some advantages to using it with one). Orbot is designed for proficient Android users.
Orbot is an anonymizing and circumvention app that connects Android phones to the Tor network. Developed by The Guardian Project, it is currently the only way to use Tor on a mobile phone.
Who should use it?
Orbot is for Android users who need to browse anonymously or circumvent blocked sites. It should work on both older and new model Android phones, and does not require a rooted phone (although there are some advantages to using it with one). Orbot is designed for proficient Android users.
How does it work?
Orbot sets up a connection to the Tor network and makes it available to apps through a local proxy.
biNu’s mission is to deliver mobile web services that are fast and easy to use. For most people, using their mobile browser is not a pleasant experience. The HTML browser architecture of the web works well on PCs but does not work well over mobile wireless networks and small handheld mobile devices.
biNu is designed from the ground-up to work within these limitations and deliver a superior and more efficient mobile data experience by providing access to internet services such as search, wikipedia, education, religion, messaging (chat,SMS).
77% of the world’s population, or 5.3 billion people, are mobile subscribers. However:
feature phones outnumber smart phones 4 to 1
3.9 billion mobile subscriptions are in the developing world
many mobile-web users are mobile-only
soon more people will access the web from their phones than PCs
biNu enhances the feature phone user experience by improving Internet access speeds, social media and app availability. biNu delivers content in any language to any phone, irrespective of the installed language capabilities of a mobile device.
biNu offers Google Search & Translate, Wordnik English Dictionary, Wikipedia, news and blogs, weather, live sports scores, exchange rates, job listings, health information, the Bible and Quran in multiple languages, SMS services and more.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
biNu is a cloud-based software platform that delivers mobile internet services:
in any language
to mass-market and smart phones
with ultra-fast (10x) response times,
a simple, minimum key-click interface
and low data bandwidth.
Main Services:
Mobile Payments
Mobile Social Network/Peer-to-peer
Information Resources/Information Databases
Stand-alone Application
Display tool in profile:
Yes
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2010-09
Platforms:
Android
Blackberry/RIM
Java ME
Current Version:
3.2
Program/Code Language:
Java/Android
Java
Organizations Using the Tool:
biNu is used by consumers.
Number of Current End Users:
Over 100,000
Support Forums:
www.developer.binu.com
Languages supported:
English, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, French and 150 others.
Handsets/devices supported:
All feature phones 2500 + devices and models
Andriod
Black Berry
This year, Chinese company Huawei launched an $80 Android phone, the IDEOS, through Kenyan telecom Safaricom. According to sources, the phone has sold over 350,000 units in Kenya, “a staggering statistic considering nearly half of Kenya’s population lives on less than two dollars per day.”
We thought it important to take a closer look at this relatively low-cost device and the larger issues and questions that arise from it.
The Android Edge?
An article on Singularity Hub suggests that while affordability is a key driver for adoption, a larger issue with the IDEOS phone is the competitive edge of Android phones:
Bribespot is a mobile app for Android that allows people to submit reports of corruption and bribes. People can also submit reports on a website and instances are plotted on a map using Google maps API.
In March 2011, Artas Bartas and a team of people from Estonia, Finland, and Lithuania developed the app at Garage48, an event where participants try to pitch and develop an app within 48 hours. Bartas is familiar with issues of corruption; prior to Bribespot, he worked for the UN development program coordinating anti-corruption projects. And, unfortunately, there is demand for an app like Bribespot.
The app has been downloaded 600 times. On the site, about 700 total reports have been submitted and visualized, from around the world.
Today's Mobile Minute brings you news about Apple's profit share, the Atlantic Magazine's case for texting, the launch of free SMS in Zimbabwe, a look at how mobile device users choose video apps, and a report on malware in Android's marketplace.
PC Mag reports that Apple's iOS, despite being only 20% of the world's smartphone market, receives roughly two-thirds of mobile phone profits. The magazine breaks down the data in several charts, showing operating profits across quarters, and how operating shares have changed between 2007 and now (in Q2 2007, Apple had 1% of the market and the most popular vendor, Nokia, had 55%; by Q2 2011, Apple has 66% of the market).
Curious about why SMS matters? Check out The Atlantic's "Why Texting is the Most Important Information Service in the World." The article pulls together a lot of statistics and real-world examples to demonstrate how SMS is used around the world. From government initiatives in the Philippines (the article reports "87 percent of Filipinos prefer communicating with the government via SMS, compared to 11 percent with an Internet-preference"), to mobile payments in Afghanistan, to agricultural info and help lines in Uganda, the piece looks at how SMS is changing the way people use their phones to interact with the world around them.
In other SMS news, the company Free SMS Zimbabwe has launched a new initiative that combines advertising with texting. Users of the service can send an SMS with a maximum of 100 characters and the other 60 will be an advertisement; users can send 100 character SMSs for free as the company subsidizes the cost through the ads.
When choosing mobile video apps, a Nielsen Wire survey reveals that the most important factor is "free/low subscription rates." Roughly 63% of respondents chose cost as a very important factor when choosing a mobile video application, more than other factors like video selection, presence of advertisements, or the ability to sync multiple devices.
The 2011 Mobile Threat Report, a new study from Lookout Mobile Security, found some big security threats to Android users. eWeek reports that "Android handset users are 2.5 times more likely to be affected by malware today than they were 6 months ago, as anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million users were impacted by malware on their smartphone or tablet computer."
[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]
Despite the smartphone craze of the past 5 years, featurephones are still king in much of the world. From the perspective of activists, rights defenders, and journalists, they cannot be ignored. And feature phones have plenty of built-in capability to help users stay safer. During the course of our research, we've uncovered valuable features that even the most experienced users may not be aware of.
As a part of SaferMobile, a project of MobileActive.org, we've focused on documenting the most important ways that a user can lock down a mobile handsets. No external apps or special tools are required, just a charged battery. We've condensed these tips into single-page, device-specific reference guides for a variety of makes & models that get straight to the point. And yes, we made sure to cover smartphones and featurephones.
[Updated with audio recording: If you'd like to hear this Mobile Minute in audio form, check out this podcast recorded by Ashiyan Rahmani-Shirazi @ashiyan]
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on Egypt's ruling against former president Mubarak for cutting Internet and mobile services, the rise of online phone calls, the operating system with the most data downloads, an effort to crowdsource citizen reports from the upcoming Turkish elections, and a look at mobile web content and access in East Africa.
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been fined $34 million by an Egyptian court for cutting access to Internet and mobile phone networks during protests earlier this year. Other Egyptian officials (former interior minister Habib al-Adly and former prime minister Ahmed Nazif) were fined as well, for a total of $90 million in fines among the three former leaders.
A new report from the Pew Research Center reveals that online phone calls are becoming much more common. The center reports that 5% of Internet users go online to make a phone call each day, and 24% of adult American Internet users have used the Internet to make a phone call.
Curious about which operating system users download the most data? Wonder no more – Android owners use roughly 582 MB of data each month, compared to Apple users who came next with 492 MB of data. The information, compiled by Nielsen, also found that although Android users use more data, iPhone owners downloaded more apps.
Turkey's elections are coming up on June 12th, and students at the Istanbul Bilgi University have launched a crowd-sourcing website in order to report on the election. Called CrowdMap, the site maps reports from SMS, email, Twitter, and other Internet sources to provide instant updates about the election outside of the mainstream media.
There are plenty of anecdotal stories of seemingly random delays lasting multiple hours or even days in many countries where we work. While network congestion and growing infrastructure are often to blame for SMS unreliability, there are also legitimate concern that delays may be an indication of deliberate message filtering and monitoring.
What has emerged is an environment in which activists and human rights defenders are unable to clearly understand what networks - and what behavior - is safe or hazardous for themselves or their contacts. The end goal of this research, put simply, is to change this paradigm. Rumors of keyword filtering are not helpful; what is helpful is any evidence of surveillance.
SMSTester is a simple Android app that allows a user create a set of keywords to be sent as SMS messages. This allows the user to explore differences in latency for any type of message - from basic, everyday text like ‘milk’ or ‘newspaper’ to politically inflammatory text such as ‘revolution.’
We then set up a logging mechanism to timestamp and record each SMS as it is sent (from the sender side) or received (on the receipt side). By comparing the sent and received timestamps, we’re very easily able to calculate message latency from one SIM to another.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
The application is designed to be installed on both sides of a single SMS conversation: a sender uses the app to automatically transmit a series of messages to the receiver, where incoming messages are logged upon receipt. Diagnostic data from the send side can be optionally included in the message payload itself such that the receive side can parse, analyze and display test results without needing access to data from the send side. This feature drastically improves flexibility and enables effective testing without requiring physical co-location.
Each message sent is coded with a unique GUID by the application so that data sets from both sides can be later combined if necessary. The output of the data is stored on the device SDCard in comma separated value (CSV) format, which makes it easy to import and parse in any office spreadsheet application.
Main Services:
Other
Display tool in profile:
Yes
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2011-04
Platforms:
Android
Program/Code Language:
Java
Organizations Using the Tool:
MobileActive.org
Support Forums:
https://lab.safermobile.org/wiki/SMSTester
Languages supported:
Any
Handsets/devices supported:
SMSTester is currently availble as an Android application only. However, as the application itself does not require a large amount of computational power or high-end hardware, it can be deployed on virtually any Android handset with SMS capabilities, including low-cost options.
Apple’s release of version 4.3.3 of its iOS operating system “..kills iPhone tracking”, according to a recent article. After nearly three weeks of public attention on this issue, this news will perhaps appease some iPhone fans but is not likely to end the debate over what users should know and control about their smartphones’ location tracking abilities. Like Apple, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone systems have also recently come under fire, though important differences exist in the way each company collects and uses location-based information.
We have reviewed recent articles and research on each of these mobile operating systems’ location tracking capabilities and will describe the various claims made and the research undertaken to test these claims.
Today's news covers a new Android app development contest in Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya's rebel-created cell network, a look at how Android has become the fastest-growing mobile OS, a study on how mobile owners listen to music on mobile devices, and the growth of mobile Internet in South Africa.
Are you an app developer in Sub-Saharan Africa? Google has launched an Android Developer Contest – there are three competition regions (West and Central Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa) and three categories (Entertainment/Media/Games, Social Networking/Communication, and Productivity/Tools/Lifestyle). Check out the competition's page to learn more – submissions open on June 1st and are due by July 1st.
After Libyan government forces disabled mobile and Internet services in March to cut off rebels' communication, a group of expatriates set up a new cell network outside of government control. Read the Wall Street Journal's in-depth coverage of the creation of the system here.
Using mobiles for data collection is increasingly common, particularly in the area of mobile health and with a focus on community health workers. eMOCHA is a program using a smartphone Android application for storing and transmitting data easily.
Developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education, eMOCHA (which stands for “Electronic Mobile Open-source Comprehensive Health Application”) uses video, audio, touchscreen quizzes, GPS and SMS to collect and analyze large amounts of data. Larry William Chang, director of field evaluations for eMOCHA, explains in an interview with MobileActive.org that the inspiration for developing the tool came out of researchers’ experiences in the field and their desire to build solutions to gaps in health care data collection systems.
Fellow team members include Miquel Sitjar, lead developer for eMOCHA, and Robert Bollinger, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education. Chang says, “We all had these public health problems and these education and training problems that we were looking to solve, and we wanted to build a mobile-based platform that could address all the different challenges we were facing. So we designed eMOCHA to address some of the public health and patient care problems that we were seeing with our other work.” eMOCHA’s first deployment began in October of 2010, and new pilots have been announced for 2011.
Today's Mobile Minute features mobile app revenue, context around ICTs and revolutions in the Middle East, an infographic of the top mobile operating systems around the world, new funds for telecommunications in Iraq, and malware in the Android app store.
A new report from Forrester Research estimates that revenue from mobile apps will reach $38 billion by 2015. The New York Times looks at the data from the report and examines what it means for the future growth of the app market.
2-3 March, Mobile Banking Southern Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa) This conference focuses on the potential of mobile banking for Southern Africa. Panelists will lead discussions on everything from mobile banking security to exploring ways to bring m-payments to the unbanked. If you want to learn more about how mobile banking is affecting Southern Africa, this is the event for you. 7-9 March, AnDevCon (San Francisco, USA) If you're interested in building and monetizing Android apps, check out AnDevCon for workshops, classes and presentations about ways to build for the Android OS.
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on how the Egyptian government shut down the country's Internet and mobile services, work-arounds for communicating during a government-ordered Internet blackout, problems with keeping customers engaged in mobile banking and payment services, Android's new place as the top-selling mobile operating system in the world, and a prediction for huge increases in mobile data traffic by 2015.
In the aftermath of the Egyptian telecommunications blackout, ArsTechnica looked at both how the Egyptian government managed to limit the country's communications so effectively (mainly through ordering major ISPs and Telcos to shut off service) and if a government-mandated Internet/mobile lockdown could be recreated in other countries. In related news, Wired.com has created a wiki on how to communicate if the government limits/shuts down Internet access.
Vodafone announced that the Egyptian government invoked emergency powers and forced it and the other telcom providers in Egypt to send pro-government text messages to Egyptian subscribers. In a press release, Vodafone claims that the messages were not scripted by Vodafone, and that although they protested the government's involvement, they "do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content." Since then, a much-nedeed debate has begun on the responsibility of telcoms to resist this interference.
Surveillance technology is currently only in the hands of those who are already in power, which means it cannot be used to combat the largest problem facing modern society: abuse of power. So the question remains: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" - roughly, Who watches the watchers? This is where OpenWatch comes in. The recent ubiquity of mobile telephones with media recording capabilities and the ability to run any software the users chooses gives the public a very powerful tool. Now, we are all equipped to become opportunistic journalists. Whenever any of us come in contact with power being used or abused, we can capture it and make it become part of the public record. If we seek truth and justice, we will be able to appeal to documentary evidence, not just our word against theirs. Ideally, this will mean less corruption, more open government and a more transparent society.
OpenWatch aims to democratize this theory of 'scientific journalism' championed by Julian Assange and apply it to citizen media. OpenWatch is not only intended to display abuse of power, but also to highlight appropriate use. As we are unbound by technological restrictions, we can aim to record every single time power is applied so that we may analyze global trends and provide a record for future historians. Police, corporate executives, judges, lawyers, private security agents, lobbyists, bankers, principals and politicians: be mindful! We are watching!
OpenWatch recorder is a tool for Android phones which secretly records audio and video, then automatically and anonymously uploads it to a server, which it can be reviewed and listen on the OpenWatch website. Client and server software is Free and Open Source.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
App resides and runs on a server
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Secretly Records Audio and Video
Automatically Uploads Media Anonymously to a Secure Server
Roughly 13 percent of the world’s population still lacks access to a regular supply of clean drinking water, and monitoring current water pumps and sanitation points is an important part of making sure that areas that have gained access to clean water don’t lose it. Water for People is a non-profit organization that monitors water and sanitation points in the developing world; last February, the organization began to investigate how mobile technology could help their work and from this, FLOW was born.
FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch) is an open-source, Android application that allows field workers to use mobile phones to document how well water pumps and sanitation points in the developing world are functioning, then transmit that data to create an online tagged map of target regions.
Sana Mobile: Connecting Big-City Care to Patients in Remote Villages data sheet 6102 Views
Decision making support for nurses and health workers, even when connectivity is poor or low, is possible with Sana Mobile, an Android-based mobile health application. Formerly known as Moca Mobile, the Sana technology facilitates remote consultations between health care specialists and community health workers in remote areas.
Sana Mobile started at MIT's NextLab, where developers, faculty and students collaborate to tackle a problem using mobile technology. The Sana technology was developed by Sidhant Jena, Sana team lead and Harvard Business School student and Russell Ryan, lead engineer and MIT student.
When general practitioners lack the expertise to diagnose a case, they refer patients to specialists, who may not be easily accessible. The Sana technology addresses the lack of accessibility to specialty care in places, where specialist doctors and tertiary care centers are sparse.
The Mobile Minute is here to bring you coverage on Sierra Leone's crackdown on unregistered SIM cards, Wall Street firms' move away from BlackBerry, Tim Berners-Lee's concerns about the mobile web's privacy, accountability, neutrality of networks, and accessibility, and a how-to guide for taking the best photos with your Android phone.
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on the debate between native apps and web apps, an Android application that uses Spyware to mine GPS data, questions about how to define "mobile" devices, an infographic that details texting habits in the US and around the world, and a controversy over a mobile water-finding app for people crossing the Mexico/US border.
Mobile communications are very easily surveilled. There is a need for anonymity services so that monitoring governments and networks cannot track user activities. This tracking should be prevented even if the surveilling party has information about what websites or information the user is browsing.
Orbot provides an anonymity engine which implements Tor on the Android Operating System. When coupled with a browser, or instant messaging client, Orbot can disguise the source of activities on the Internet. Anybody monitoring the connection to the internet-based service will not be able to tell the source of the web transation.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
Orbot is an application that allows mobile phone users to access the web, instant messaging and email without being monitored or blocked by their mobile internet service provider. Orbot brings the features and functionality of Tor (see technical overview or lay man's guide) to the Android mobile operating system.
Enabling Data-Driven Decisions with the Open Data Kit (ODK) data sheet 5676 Views
A research group at the University of Washington has done what few others manage – turn a research project into a real-world application. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a collection of tools that allows organizations to collect and send data using mobile phones. The system, in operation for about a year, has already been used for projects such as counseling and testing HIV patients in Kenya to monitoring forests in the Brazilian Amazon.
What is ODK?
The project began when University of Washington (UW) professor Gaetano Borriello began a sabbatical at Google to build a mobile data collection system. He brought along some of his PhD students from UW’s Computer Science and Engineering program to work on the idea as their intern project, and ODK was born.
Epidemiologists and ecologists often collect data in the field and, on returning to their laboratory, enter their data into a database for further analysis. The recent introduction of mobile phones that utilise the open source Android operating system, and which include (among other features) both GPS and Google Maps, provide new opportunities for developing mobile phone applications, which in conjunction with web applications, allow two-way communication between field workers and their project databases.
Data collected by multiple field workers can be submitted by phone, together with GPS data, to a common web database and can be displayed and analysed, along with previously collected data, using Google Maps (or Google Earth). Similarly, data from the web database can be requested and displayed on the mobile phone, again using Google Maps.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
GPS and Google Maps data plotting
Easy to share data with multiple researchers
Main Services:
Voting, Data Collection, Surveys, and Polling
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2009-09
Platforms:
Android
Current Version:
1
Program/Code Language:
Java/Android
Javascript
PHP
Organizations Using the Tool:
Imperial College London
Languages supported:
English
Handsets/devices supported:
Android devices
Reviews/Evaluations:
TreeHugger.com http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/epicollect-app-for-android-puts-laboratories-on-phones-your-phone.php
EpiCollect Research Paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006968
At the turn of millennium, tech journalists (clawing their way back from the Y2k=K non-disaster) found smartphones. Futuristic interfaces, newly-discovered mobility and the work-anywhere promise of the Blackberry kicked off the trend, later boosted by the emergence of high-speed mobile Internet and a new crop of Internet-enabled devices. Market figures are for smartphones are certainly impressive, with Gartner recording device sales of 139.4 million in 2008, up 13.9% from 2007.
That same year, the meteoric rise of the iPhone gave us the ability to purchase third-party smartphone applications through the App Store which became a major selling point for the hardware. In the first quarter of 2009, smartphone sales represented 13.5% of mobile phone sales worldwide. Sales show no sign of slowing, and neither does the blistering pace of innovation in hardware, interfaces and 'ecosystems' like the App Store.
