Kiran Upadhyay

Researchers have uncovered huge holes in the application sandboxes protecting Apple's OS X and iOS operating systems, a discovery that allows them to create apps that pilfer iCloud, Gmail, and banking passwords and can also siphon data from 1Password, Evernote, and other apps. The malicious proof-of-concept apps were approved by the Apple Store, which requires all qualifying submissions to treat every other app as untrusted. Despite the supposed vetting by Apple engineers, the researchers' apps were able to bypass sandboxing protections that are supposed to prevent one app from accessing the credentials, contacts, and other resources belonging to another app. Like Linux, Android, Windows, and most other mainstream OSes, OS X and iOS strictly limit app access for the purpose of protecting them against malware. The success of the researchers' cross-app resource access—or XARA—attacks, raises troubling doubts about those assurances on the widely used Apple platforms. &q

Duet Display has added a feature that I frankly never thought it would get: Windows support! That means with the app and a Lightning cable you can use your iPad as a secondary display for your Windows PC or tablet. The app supports devices running either Windows 7 or Windows 8, letting you relish the extravagant advantage of multiple screens on the go even if you’re not cool enough to own a Mac. I kid, I kid; Windows owners can be perfectly cool, but Duet Display’s features can make them even cooler. In case you missed the news when it launched for Mac, it allows you to use your iPad as a wired secondary display, without the traditional lag and other glitches that have accompanied wireless secondary display solutions for iOS devices. It’s built by former Apple display engineers, and it uses an actual display driver to recognize your iPad hardware.

You can check out Instant Articles for yourself by visiting the feature’s Facebook Page on an iPhone. For more on Facebook’s strategy, read our feature piece: Facebook’s Quest To Absorb The Internet. Assuaging publishers’ fears that Facebook would keep all the data, the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics. Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Instant Articles won’t receive preferential treatment from Facebook’s News Feed sorting algorithm just because of their format. But if users click, like, comment, and share Instant Articles more often than others, they may show up higher and more frequently in feed like any piece of popular content. That could incentivize, or implicitly force, more pu

Google quietly rolled out a new login screen for Gmail this week, and not everyone is happy with the update. Where before, Gmail users would enter their username and password on the same page, the new login flow separates this process. Now, you’ll first enter your username, then be directed to a second page where you enter your password. Some complain that this change slows them down, while others point out that the update has broken their ability to log in using various password managers. According to Google, the change was implemented to prepare for “future authentication systems that complement passwords.” The company is vague on the details as to what those may be, but may be referencing other methods to secure accounts like two-step/two-factor authentication, hardware dongles, or perhaps even some web-based variation of Android’s “Smart Lock” system. That latter item allows Android users to keep their devices unlocked when they have a trusted Bluetooth device connected, a

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X. In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today. The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me earlier this week, the company now aims to meet developers where they are — instead of necessarily making them use Windows — and .NET Core is clearly part of this move. Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to d

The absolute worst part of traveling, whether it’s for business or for pleasure, is packing and unpacking a suitcase. The work it takes to pack a bag is negligible, but having a clean inventory of clothes each time you pack takes far more planning. Dufl, a service that launches today, is looking to change all that. The idea behind Dufl is that frequent travelers waste a lot of time trying to clean and prep their clothes for each trip, especially when those trips are pretty much back-to-back. With Dufl, the user never has to pack a bag or clean their travel clothes ever again. Here’s how it works: An interested user downloads the Dufl app and signs up. Soon after, a Dufl-branded suitcase will appear at that user’s door, ready and waiting to be filled with the clothes that user most commonly travels in. Dufl then picks up the bag through its partner FedEx, takes inventory of all the clothes in your suitcase and takes professional photographs, and repacks the bag with the preci

Thanks to the release of Windows 10 for multiple single-board computers, tinkerers are now waking up to the possibility of running Windows as a usable and surprisingly polished alternative open source operating systems like Raspbian. But how do you run Windows on a RaspPi? And why? First, I invite you to check out Microsoft’s refreshingly complete GitHub page where they offer instructions for installing Windows 10 onto Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Galileo, and MinnowBoard. The page offers instructions for getting the official “Windows Embedded IoT” image for use with these devices. You can also just download it here. A note to OSX users: I originally hoped to include instructions on how to flash an SD card for RaspPi2 using OS X or Linux but, sadly, Microsoft’s FFU image files require specific Windows file handling software. I tried converting this to an image file using obvious methods (changing the extension) and unobvious methods (looking hither and yon for an answer) but generally

Microsoft just demonstrated one of the intriguing possibilities from its single platform/multiple form factors approach for Windows 10: the ability to use your phone as your desktop computer. In contrast to Apple’s “Continuity,” which aims to make moving between phone, tablet and desktop seamless, Microsoft’s Continuum instead has the phone you’re using adapt its interface depending on the context you’re using it. In an on-stage demo, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore connected a phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and instantly the UI he was using adapted to the new inputs and outputs. While the operating system interface we saw on screen didn’t look exactly like Windows 10 on a laptop or desktop computer, the applications shown (especially PowerPoint) did. Instead of making minor adjustments to a presentation using a 5-inch screen, you can simply connect to an HDMI-compatible monitor and have all the space and tools you would on a full PC. Belfiore pointed out that the feature re

Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages. Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees, including top talent like Sarah Haider, Safeer Jiwan, and Amol Jain have left the company over the past month or so. One source says the company has been whittled down to under 10 employees from over 20 several months ago and has been in “maintenance mode.” Requests for comment to Secret’s employees and CEO have gone unreturned. It’s probable that Secret will hand its remaining cash back to investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield

Microsoft today announced a new service in its Azure database lineup during its Build developer conference keynote today. The Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which will go into public preview in June, is meant to give businesses access to an elastic petabyte-scale, data warehouse-as-a-service offering that can scale according to their needs. With SQL Data Warehouse, enterprises can ensure that they only pay for the usage they need and when they need it, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its data platform T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan told me earlier this week. Customers are billed for their Azure blob storage, as well as the hourly compute rates they incur while working with the data. Because it separates compute and storage, users only pay for the queries they need. This means a business can aggregate all of its data and only pays for storage until it needs to run a quarterly report over this information, for example. Via

Apple has just released its fiscal Q2 2015 earnings, reporting $58 billion in revenue, $13.6 billion in net profit representing $2.33 per share. Compared to the year-ago quarter, it corresponds to a growth of 27.2 percent in revenue, and an impressive 40.4 percent jump in EPS (adjusted for the 7-for-1 split). Expectations were pretty high following Apple’s blockbuster quarter three months ago — the company reported the largest corporate quarterly earnings of all time. And it turns out that this quarter was Apple’s second-largest earnings of all time. In particular, services are now a $5 billion business, and Apple reported a gross margin of 40.8 compared to 39.9 for Q1 2015. Apple is increasing its share buyback program with an authorization of $140 billion compared to $90 billion last year. Stockholders will also get a 11 percent higher dividend of $0.52 per share. Fortune’s consensus among analysts was for Apple to report earnings of $2.21 per share on $56.85 billion in reve

IBM researchers say they’ve solved a big piece of the quantum computing puzzle with a new system for protecting against errors that can crop up among quantum bits, or ‘qubits.’ The issue the team is addressing is similar to an error that can crop up among the bits storing data in traditional computing. Sometimes, a bit that ought to be a 0 turns up as a 1 (or vice-versa), resulting in inaccurate or broken data. To deal with this, an extra bit is added whose state indicates whether or not the other bits are all correct. Jerry Chow, Manager of Experimental Quantum Computing at IBM Research, told TechCrunch his team is looking for those same bit-flip errors, but also something a bit gnarlier that’s unique to qubits. Given their quantum nature, qubits can be 0 or 1, but the “phase” of the relationship between 0 and 1 can change between negative and positive. In the system designed at IBM Research, there are two qubits that hold data, and another two “checking” for errors — their s

It’s not polite to call someone out of the blue anymore. Best to text them first. That’s why Facebook thinks video calling will live naturally inside Messenger. Today, Messenger is launching free VOIP video calling over cellular and wifi connections on iOS and Android in the U.S., Canada, UK, and 15 other countries. Facebook’s goal is to connect people face to face no matter where they are or what mobile connection they have. With Messenger, someone on a new iPhone with strong LTE in San Francisco could video chat with someone on a low-end Android with a few bars of 3G in Nigeria. Here’s a quick video from Facebook showing Messenger video calls in action: Facebook first introduced desktop video calling in partnership with Skype in 2011, but eventually built its own video call infrastructure. Bringing it to mobile could Messenger a serious competitor to iOS-only FaceTime, clunky Skype, and less-ubiquitous Google Hangouts. With 600 million Messenger users and 1.44 billion on F

You almost certainly associate Tesla with cars — very cool cars — but the company has an even grander vision beyond that. Today, CEO and founder Elon Musk unveiled ‘Tesla Energy’ — a new business arm that is focused on ending our dependence on grid power and switching instead to solar energy. The first Tesla Energy product is ‘Powerwall Home Battery,’ a stationary battery that can power a household without requiring the grid. The battery is rechargeable lithium-ion — it uses Tesla’s existing battery tech — and can be fixed to a wall, removing much of the existing complexity around using a local power source. “The issue with existing batteries is that they suck,” Musk said in a press conference announcing Tesla Energy. “They are expensive, unreliable and bad in every way.” Tesla’s solution, he said, is different. For one thing, the company’s batteries cost $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh — add your snarky Apple Watch price comparison here. They are open for pre-orders in

Loop Commerce, a company that has developed an alternative checkout technology for e-commerce sites that allows customers to more easily buy gifts for friends without having to worry with product details like size or color – or even recipient’s shipping address – is today announcing an additional $16 million in new funding. The round, led by Houzz, Chegg, and Audible investor Oren Zeev, comes largely from the company’s previous investors and brings the startup’s total raise to date to $30 million. As before, Loop Commerce focused on bringing in a number of strategic investors versus traditional venture capital. Others in the round included family office Wicklow Capital; PayPal; Don Katz (EVP at Amazon); Mark Carges (former CTO at eBay); Dan Rose (Facebook VP, partnerships and strategy); Ken Seiff (former EVP e-commerce at Brooks Brothers); Michael Scharff (former SVP at Toys R Us and Best Buy); Chuck Geiger (CTO of Chegg, former CTO of PayPal); Roy Rubin (founder at Magento); An

If you’re familiar with Gett, you probably know it as a service akin to Uber, enabling users to request rides via black cars on-demand. Pretty soon, however, it wants to be known as a platform for ordering all sorts of “essential” products and services via mobile app. Founded as GetTaxi in 2010, the company is rebranding as Gett in all markets as it expands into new verticals of on-demand and scheduled services. Today it operates in 32 cities throughout the U.K., Russia, and Israel, as well New York City in the U.S. Over the coming months, the company plans to enable customers in each of its markets to begin ordering new services beyond its initial car service. Just as it simplifies the process of ordering a car on mobile, with a flat, non-surge pricing structure for rides, the company hopes to make it ultra-simple to order products or services without having to do a whole lot of searching online. The hope is that it can reduce the friction and time it takes to order sushi or a

Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls. Hello’s caller ID feature could clue you in to whether you want to pick up a call from a number you don’t have saved by showing their name and profile picture — as long as they haven’t changed the default privacy setting that lets people search from using their phone number. You’ll then see whatever info they share publicly or with you, like city, employer, website, and more. Technically, nothing is changing about Facebook privacy, though it does make personal info more readily visible. Hello essentially just runs an immediate Facebook

There’s an Uber for everything nowadays, so why not an Uber for weed? Eaze, a startup that enables medical marijuana patients to order cannabis products online and have those goodies delivered to their homes, today is announcing $10 million in Series A round funding led by DCM Ventures with participation from Fresh VC, 500 Startups, Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Ventures, and other strategic investors. The new funds come on top of $1.5 million in seed funding the company had raised last year. The cash will be used to help the company expand availability of its platform into new markets beyond just the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was founded. Launched last summer, Eaze is looking to take advantage of a few different trends. The first is just an acceptance that marijuana use — whether for recreational of medicinal purposes — is here to stay, and is likely to become more pervasive as more states legalize and/or decriminalize cannabis use. The second trend is the move to make eve

In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be "banned from the Internet.” The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades (it’s sold on Amazon!), but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible. "I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine,” Feinstein wrote. "These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet." On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged the two American women living in New York City with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The 29-page criminal complain

One unlucky man who bought a house that can't get wired Internet service is reportedly selling the home just months after moving in. Seth, a software engineer who works at home, bought a house in Kitsap County, Washington, after being told by multiple Comcast employees that he could buy the Internet service he needs to do his job, according to a detailed Consumerist article yesterday. Seth also wrote a lengthy account on his blog titled, "It’s Comcastic, or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable." (The man's last name was not given.) "Before we even made an offer [on the house], I placed two separate phone calls; one to Comcast Business, and one to Xfinity," Seth wrote. "Both sales agents told me that service was available at the address. The Comcast Business agent even told me that a previous resident had already had service. So I believed them." That turned out to be untrue. After multiple visits from Comcast technicians, he says t