Author: Clinton

The first fruits of the merged Nest and Google Hardware teams is starting to show.  A new update to the Nest app brings Google Assistant to the Nest Cam IQ Indoor Camera.  The app update is rolling out now in the Play Store and once it is updated, it will enable Assistant so you can use voice commands to view and control the camera.

This is the first Nest device that has Assistant integrated into it but it likely is the tip of the iceberg.  When the merger between the two teams was announced, one of the specific things mentioned was bringing Google AI and Machine Learning to Nest devices.

Google today announced that their own first and second generation of Pixel phones now are certified as Android Enterprise Recommended devices.  I means that the four Pixel phones – the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL – join the ranks with the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, LG V30, Nokia 8 and others.  You can see the complete list of devices here.

The Android Enterprise Recommended program certifies devices that meet criteria for manageability, support, productivity, security, and reliability.  The idea behind the program is to eliminate the guesswork on which devices are up to the task of being ready to handle the wear-and-tear of being an enterprise phone but also manageable from an enterprise IT perspective.

Google Reply, the app that adds the ability to use smart replies to a variety of messaging apps on your Android phone, has been released in beta by Google’s Area 120 team.  For those that aren’t familiar with Area 120, it is the experimental development area within Google.  For those who are familiar with Microsoft Garage from Microsoft, it is the same concept.

Google Reply adds smart replies to the notification shade for Android Messages, Facebook Messenger, Hangouts and Twitter Direct Messages.  But it also brings the ability to send auto replies for when you are driving or, later on, when you are exercising or sleeping.  It is a handy app indeed.

Yesterday I posted on the discovery of a code commit in Android P that prevents idle apps (those running in the background) from gaining access to your phone’s camera.  This is a security measure and one that, until this point, Android hasn’t properly addressed.  Now it seems there is a new commit that limits access to your phone’s microphone too.

The new commit has strikingly similar language to that of the commit found yesterday.

If a UID is in an idle state we don’t allow recording to protect user’s privacy. If the UID is in an idle state we allow recording but report empty data (all zeros in the byte array) and once the process goes in an active state we report the real mic data. This avoids the race between the app being notified aboout (sp) its lifecycle and the audio system being notified about the state of a UID.

This commit, like the one yesterday, essentially cuts off any app trying to gain access at a base level within Android.

For the fourth consecutive week, the Chrome OS Dev Channel has received another new update.  This week however, it is something new.  Chrome 66 has come to the alpha channel in build version 66.0.3344.0 (Platform version: 10403.0.0).

There hasn’t been a massive amount of insight into what is going to be coming in Chrome 66 and the release notes – of which there are none for this update – didn’t shed any light.  It is known that the Symantec Trust Certificates prior to June 1, 2016 will be removed.  It is also expected that split-screen Android mode will be available.  That feature, to this point, has been in the hidden Canary channel of the platform.

Based on a new commit found in the Android code review repository, it looks like Android P is going to have a significant security improvement built into it.  The commit suggests that idle apps will no longer have access to the camera and it looks like it will be universal across all apps.

If a UID is idle (being in the background for more than cartain (sp) amount of time) it should not be able to use the camera. If the UID becomes idle we generate an eror (sp) and close the cameras for this UID. If an app in an idle UID tries to use the camera we immediately generate an error. Since apps already should handle these errors it is safe to apply this policy to all apps to protect user privacy.

Today, a rogue app could access your camera without you knowing, even if that app is running in the background.