The Concerns About Phone Security: A Discussion with Marco

Some people are jumping to conclusions about phone security and the potential for recording what users are doing without their knowledge. While it's true that some phones have features that allow for remote access, this doesn't necessarily mean that they can be accessed at will. There may be security levels that need to be met in order to gain access to certain features.

The idea of being able to tap into someone's phone without their permission is a concern, but it's not something that should be taken lightly. Even if the patent for this technology hasn't been approved yet, it's still possible that Apple may use it in some capacity. Alternatively, third-party security apps could potentially be developed to utilize these features.

However, there are also concerns about hackers or someone releasing an app that secretly collects data from users. This is a very real possibility, and one that should not be taken lightly. Recently, there was an incident where a 17-year-old kid released an app on the App Store that disguised itself as something else, but actually turned the iPhone into a wireless tethering device.

This highlights the importance of being cautious when using apps and being aware of the potential risks. Even if you have an Android device, you should still be concerned about security. On the other hand, if you have an iPhone, there is some reason to be scared as well. This is because phones are becoming increasingly like computers, and with that comes a greater risk of data breaches.

One device that was recently released is the Dell Streak, which has generated interest among tech enthusiasts. The Dell Streak is a tablet-like device that runs on Android, and it has some impressive features. However, before getting too excited, there are still some issues to be worked out.

In addition to the Dell Streak, we also have some contests to give away to our listeners. One of these contests gives away 20 copies of the new game Just Cause 2. To enter, simply visit our website and post in the comments or forum with what you think about the game. We're also partnering with MSI to give away a high-end motherboard and two GeForce GTX 460 cards, as well as 10 copies of Metro 2033.

The motherboard is compatible with most processors, including the Core i7 that Dave showed us earlier. This could be a great opportunity for someone who wants to build a powerful gaming PC. The contest details can be found on our website, and we'll announce the winners soon.

In conclusion, phone security is an important topic that should not be taken lightly. While there are some concerns about the potential for recording what users are doing without their knowledge, it's also possible that Apple may use this technology in some capacity.

Finally, to give back to our listeners, we're running two contests. One of these contests gives away 20 copies of Just Cause 2, while the other partners with MSI to give away a high-end motherboard and two GeForce GTX 460 cards, as well as 10 copies of Metro 2033.

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If you want to stay up-to-date with the latest news and reviews from Hot Hardware, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or our website at hothardware.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on hot Hardware we're talking the latest in processors from Intel and AMD plus Apple may be evil hello welcome to hot Hardware where we talk the hottest Tech Amaya Zar with Dave altavilla and Marco chapeta let's get right to it Dave Intel has released a dual core Atom Processor I think it's running on Pine tril could you break down the situation there yeah Pine tril is the code name for the plattin form uh the processor is actually Pine View there's you know a sort of a pine freshness going on there um but yeah actually you know anybody who's ever played with a netbook or owned a netbook um with an Atom Processor and let's face it it's a large majority of the netbooks in the market uh has probably felt at one time or another that they need a little bit more performance out of that thing uh and so the nice thing is Intel started coming out with some dual core atom processors uh with hyperthreading so two threads per core for four threads total so a little bit of multi-threaded processing capability but very recently um they also Goose up the clock speed you know previously atom processors were maxing out at about 1.66 GHz now we've got a 1.8 GHz dual core Atom Processor with hyperthreading and uh I'm going to I'm going to pull out a prop here this is uh an assus notebook that uh I can't I can't tell you too much about it or I'd have to kill you okay um but uh it's got this new 1.8 GHz dual core Atom Processor and um you know feels a lot more responsive than your average Netbook did you get to run any official tests unofficial tests to see how much faster it is I did um put a few of the numbers up actually on hob.com just uh yesterday and um you know just processor numbers because we can't go into too much detail on the notebook yet uh the netbook excuse me um but yeah it's uh you know on the average of about 10% faster in certain applications and especially where uh multi-threading uh is required do you know if we're going to see any price bumps in these netbooks I mean just because Intel comes out with a new processor doesn't mean it's going to be any cheaper are we going to see netbooks go up towards $700 again or what do you think no I think obviously the pressures on the manufacturers to uh keep netbooks in the you know $300 to $400 Max kind of price range maybe five uh if you include things like discret Graphics this one happens to be infused with Nvidia uh ion uh and Optimus for uh simultaneous or I should say Dynamic switching rather on the Fly for the uh GPU for graphics and multimedia capabilities so if you get things like that bolted into it you'll be up around the higher end towards 500 or so but you get into the $ six or $700 range and you really not talking Netbook pricing anymore you're talking notebook pricing and uh you know the the netbook manufacturers have to limbo under that bar and stay in the 3 to 400 range if they want that sweet spot all right next up AMD known for its processors are apparently getting into the ch children's television game with a show called bobcat and bulldozer wait wait I'm being told by my producer that I'm completely wrong uh Marco could you please correct me and tell the audience what what what is this bobcat and bulldozer thing sure so bobcat and bulldozzer are code names um for two upcoming processor uh microarchitectures from AMD Bobcat is a competitor to intels Adam what Dave was just talking about and bulldozer is going to be a a new high-end processor for you know clients and uh and servers things like that so what was leaked it was like a road map well it wasn't actually leaked AMD disclosed some details of what these two new processors um you know are going to be made of so Bobcat is you know like Adam it's going to be a low power processor design but unlike Adam it's going to be an outof order processor which you know sort of inherently is going to make it perform better you know all other things being equal so Bobcat's looking like it's going to be a low power there saying there's going to be sub one watt configurations um out of order processor for netbooks that should you know if the information that's been released so far you know all comes true significantly outperform atom so you know netbooks should see a big performance boost once Bobcat hits towards the end of this year do you know if AMD actually has any Partners lined up to use Bobcat or are they just hoping that somebody's going to pick them up since Intel does have their new dual core out so it's kind of too soon to say you know any specific um design wins for AMD but they've they've had partners for the Neo um already I would assume you're going to see some based on Bobcat and if its performance is as good as we think it's going to be you're going to see design wins based on the based on the processor what about bulldozer so bulldozer is going to be a totally new architecture for the higher end of the market um there's not as many details as there are for Bobcat but AMD is doing something interesting you know Intel has hyperthreading um and both companies have you know multicore setups bulldozer is going to do something interesting it's sort of a cross between hyperthreading and true dual core um you know per module where some parts of the chip are shared um some parts are discreet and it allows them to make the chip smaller and lower power and they're saying you know it doesn't adversely affect performance so they're saying 50% more throughput over Current Designs so it should be very similar when it hits and do we have a release date a timeline nothing solid but should be towards the end of this year maybe beginning of next year all right pretty cool and in more processor news Intel is introducing a lower cost six core i7 Dave what's the situation here yeah actually um anybody that's into high-end processors and the performance enthusiasts or maybe uh workstation professionals that are used to paying top dollar for the fastest uh machine on the planet that they can get their hands on knows that Intel's latest and greatest Flagship usually almost always debuts it somewhere in the uh 10 or excuse me $1,000 to $1,100 range and that's a lot for a single chip you know just for the processor alone you can get a a real nice full system for that um you know with a with a more mid-range processor involved of course but uh Intel recently released a little bit of a price reduction on their core i76 core uh processor and the core i7 970 is very much uh like the core i7 980x which is also their their six core it was the only six core available until now um this is a down clock variant a little bit slower clock speed a 3.2 GHz core i7 6 core uh and it's also got one of the speeds and feeds on the chip a little bit slower it doesn't make much difference performance the qpi link quick path interconnect link is uh a little bit slower 4.8 gig of transfers per second versus 6.4 that doesn't make a whole lot of difference in performance and the top end clock speed 3. 2 gig um stock speed versus 3.3 on the 980x is not that much uh lower either but the nice thing is it's 8.85 so you know you're in the neighborhood of $150 $200 less than the 98x so ex price redu reduction there are there are there any other trade-offs uh for the price you know not really and as a matter of fact again in multi-threaded uh applications especially um this processor competes real nice with the 980x you know it's up there in the you know 90% range of the 980x performance U maybe even a little more 95 in certain cases um and so you know really uh if you want to save a few bucks grab one of these and if you're really Hell Bound on performance overclock it a little bit and you'll have 980x kind of performance and over in apple Land Apple has managed to do something that's annoying people there's a surprise Apple has filed a Patent filed for a patent that would allow for monitoring and disabling certain iPhones the eff is upset Marco could you fill in the rest of this picture yeah sure this patent application is is actually really scary so Congress sort of made jailbreaking legal recently you know with the ruling but apple is still very against jailbreaking so they filed for a patent that not only allows them to detect iPhones that have been jailbroken but also to monit biometric information of the phone's user so they can track heartbeat uh take pictures without the user's knowledge of both the user and the environment the phone's in record audio from the area it's just this really kind of scary big brother kind of stuff yeah I've I've been following this story personally because I kind of know a little bit about law and the thing about this whole patent situation for me is that they just file for the application one the PTO doesn't actually have the patent Trademark Office doesn't actually have to give them the patent that's the first thing second thing um just because they have the patent doesn't mean they'll actually use it so I think that I starting to think that people are kind of blowing this out of proportion do you think that do do either one of you guys think that Apple's actually going to execute on this patent or do you think this is something they would probably use and maybe even license to people like rim or uh any Android manufacturer like Motorola because this is kind of for them for other people you know kind of an exciting idea that they can actually monitor everything can you imagine Google Google getting their hands on this they can actually hear what you're saying and bother to advertise to you so Dave what do you think you know yeah I'll chime in on that a little bit I think I think you're absolutely right and people love a good story you know a big brother story especially sink their teeth into but what you have to remember here is Apple's patenting something whether or not they productize it is a is a whole another question and and then how does that product um you know come out in the market what does it look like this all could be some uh you know for example security feature now you know you there's going to be some people riding when I say that but this doesn't have to be something that can be invoked at will maybe there's some security level that gets access to this maybe this is you know uh something that you know government gets a warrant on or whatever and we got to find a bad guy and now we can tap into his phone but you got to have a warrant to get at it that kind of thing not that it can't be hacked certainly could be hacked by a bad guy or a good guy okay but um you know we just don't know how this is going to shake out if it shakes out at all I think it's jumping to conclusions what do you think Marco should people be freaking out should they be throwing out their iPhones right away no they shouldn't be throwing out their iPhones right away but I'm of the opinion it first you know the patent may not get approved so um that's the first thing to consider if it does I don't know maybe Apple would use it in some capacity I don't think they're just willy-nilly gonna record what users are doing perhaps they'll set up some sort of API where people can you know program third party security apps as Dave mentioned that could use these features I'm more concerned of literally you know about hackers or somebody releasing an app that secretly collects data you know it was recently on the App Store I think it was you know um a 17-year-old kid released this simple app disguised as something else that actually turned the iPhone into you know a wireless tethering device was a flashlight application flashlight application yeah that was a really good sneaky way you're right I mean this is a very real possibility that if it hooks into these apis assuming they can actually find the API cuz I'm assuming Apple's not going to be like you know what tell you what this is open like the iPod iPod API because that's this is a little bit more uh Security based and then again theoretically when you use one of these products it'll show you system level this is trying to hook into this API so and then again we'll see that just means that it looks like uh our phones are turning more and more and more into computers so if you have an Android device you have reason to be scared if you have an iPhone you have reason to be scared if you have a razor you have no reason to be scared oh what's that I think I'm seeing a new device coming up what what is this yeah we're going to be looking at this in the near future this is the Dell Streak and uh we've got it in the labs right now and it's it's a whole lot of fun could use a little update on the Android uh side of things U you know foyo would be nice on this puppy but uh nice device I I like it and uh find out what hot Harbor editor Dan deun uh says about uh this one and uh it's it's good stuff is the review out already no he's working on it now so we'll be yapping about this pretty soon Marco let's give the people something for watching us and listening to us just blather on what can you possibly give away I mean I'm sure I'm sure there's something right yeah H how about we run two contests they're actually they're already running um in one contest we're giving away 20 copies of the new game well relatively new game Just cause two um all you have to do is come by the site and uh Post in the news or in the Forum so you giving away 20 copies to one person uh no 20 winners okay so this more than just two giveaways this is like 21 giveaways what's the other thing giveway well the other one is pretty exciting too uh we partnered with MSI and we're giving away a high-end x58 based motherboard and two GeForce GTX 460 cards in addition to 10 copies of Metro 2033 to 10 different winners so this motherboard can it work with any of the processors we talked about today yes the core i7 Dave showed n socket 1366 Intel processor so all you have to do is win this contest and your entire system will cost you like 800 bucks that's actually pretty good that's going to be one powerful machine I'm assuming you can use a case is there anything else you guys like to add before we go yes what's that follow us baby Facebook hot hardw hot Hardware excuse me Twitter HOT hardware and dig. Hardware Hardware what was it hot Hardware Hardware so I'm brain dead it's Friday so very easy and that does it for this episode of hot Hardware you can find everything we talked about and more and contest information at hot hardware.com not. hotwar um am my's actor Dave Marco thanks again for being here and we will see everybody next week right thanks I all right yes so long folkscoming up on hot Hardware we're talking the latest in processors from Intel and AMD plus Apple may be evil hello welcome to hot Hardware where we talk the hottest Tech Amaya Zar with Dave altavilla and Marco chapeta let's get right to it Dave Intel has released a dual core Atom Processor I think it's running on Pine tril could you break down the situation there yeah Pine tril is the code name for the plattin form uh the processor is actually Pine View there's you know a sort of a pine freshness going on there um but yeah actually you know anybody who's ever played with a netbook or owned a netbook um with an Atom Processor and let's face it it's a large majority of the netbooks in the market uh has probably felt at one time or another that they need a little bit more performance out of that thing uh and so the nice thing is Intel started coming out with some dual core atom processors uh with hyperthreading so two threads per core for four threads total so a little bit of multi-threaded processing capability but very recently um they also Goose up the clock speed you know previously atom processors were maxing out at about 1.66 GHz now we've got a 1.8 GHz dual core Atom Processor with hyperthreading and uh I'm going to I'm going to pull out a prop here this is uh an assus notebook that uh I can't I can't tell you too much about it or I'd have to kill you okay um but uh it's got this new 1.8 GHz dual core Atom Processor and um you know feels a lot more responsive than your average Netbook did you get to run any official tests unofficial tests to see how much faster it is I did um put a few of the numbers up actually on hob.com just uh yesterday and um you know just processor numbers because we can't go into too much detail on the notebook yet uh the netbook excuse me um but yeah it's uh you know on the average of about 10% faster in certain applications and especially where uh multi-threading uh is required do you know if we're going to see any price bumps in these netbooks I mean just because Intel comes out with a new processor doesn't mean it's going to be any cheaper are we going to see netbooks go up towards $700 again or what do you think no I think obviously the pressures on the manufacturers to uh keep netbooks in the you know $300 to $400 Max kind of price range maybe five uh if you include things like discret Graphics this one happens to be infused with Nvidia uh ion uh and Optimus for uh simultaneous or I should say Dynamic switching rather on the Fly for the uh GPU for graphics and multimedia capabilities so if you get things like that bolted into it you'll be up around the higher end towards 500 or so but you get into the $ six or $700 range and you really not talking Netbook pricing anymore you're talking notebook pricing and uh you know the the netbook manufacturers have to limbo under that bar and stay in the 3 to 400 range if they want that sweet spot all right next up AMD known for its processors are apparently getting into the ch children's television game with a show called bobcat and bulldozer wait wait I'm being told by my producer that I'm completely wrong uh Marco could you please correct me and tell the audience what what what is this bobcat and bulldozer thing sure so bobcat and bulldozzer are code names um for two upcoming processor uh microarchitectures from AMD Bobcat is a competitor to intels Adam what Dave was just talking about and bulldozer is going to be a a new high-end processor for you know clients and uh and servers things like that so what was leaked it was like a road map well it wasn't actually leaked AMD disclosed some details of what these two new processors um you know are going to be made of so Bobcat is you know like Adam it's going to be a low power processor design but unlike Adam it's going to be an outof order processor which you know sort of inherently is going to make it perform better you know all other things being equal so Bobcat's looking like it's going to be a low power there saying there's going to be sub one watt configurations um out of order processor for netbooks that should you know if the information that's been released so far you know all comes true significantly outperform atom so you know netbooks should see a big performance boost once Bobcat hits towards the end of this year do you know if AMD actually has any Partners lined up to use Bobcat or are they just hoping that somebody's going to pick them up since Intel does have their new dual core out so it's kind of too soon to say you know any specific um design wins for AMD but they've they've had partners for the Neo um already I would assume you're going to see some based on Bobcat and if its performance is as good as we think it's going to be you're going to see design wins based on the based on the processor what about bulldozer so bulldozer is going to be a totally new architecture for the higher end of the market um there's not as many details as there are for Bobcat but AMD is doing something interesting you know Intel has hyperthreading um and both companies have you know multicore setups bulldozer is going to do something interesting it's sort of a cross between hyperthreading and true dual core um you know per module where some parts of the chip are shared um some parts are discreet and it allows them to make the chip smaller and lower power and they're saying you know it doesn't adversely affect performance so they're saying 50% more throughput over Current Designs so it should be very similar when it hits and do we have a release date a timeline nothing solid but should be towards the end of this year maybe beginning of next year all right pretty cool and in more processor news Intel is introducing a lower cost six core i7 Dave what's the situation here yeah actually um anybody that's into high-end processors and the performance enthusiasts or maybe uh workstation professionals that are used to paying top dollar for the fastest uh machine on the planet that they can get their hands on knows that Intel's latest and greatest Flagship usually almost always debuts it somewhere in the uh 10 or excuse me $1,000 to $1,100 range and that's a lot for a single chip you know just for the processor alone you can get a a real nice full system for that um you know with a with a more mid-range processor involved of course but uh Intel recently released a little bit of a price reduction on their core i76 core uh processor and the core i7 970 is very much uh like the core i7 980x which is also their their six core it was the only six core available until now um this is a down clock variant a little bit slower clock speed a 3.2 GHz core i7 6 core uh and it's also got one of the speeds and feeds on the chip a little bit slower it doesn't make much difference performance the qpi link quick path interconnect link is uh a little bit slower 4.8 gig of transfers per second versus 6.4 that doesn't make a whole lot of difference in performance and the top end clock speed 3. 2 gig um stock speed versus 3.3 on the 980x is not that much uh lower either but the nice thing is it's 8.85 so you know you're in the neighborhood of $150 $200 less than the 98x so ex price redu reduction there are there are there any other trade-offs uh for the price you know not really and as a matter of fact again in multi-threaded uh applications especially um this processor competes real nice with the 980x you know it's up there in the you know 90% range of the 980x performance U maybe even a little more 95 in certain cases um and so you know really uh if you want to save a few bucks grab one of these and if you're really Hell Bound on performance overclock it a little bit and you'll have 980x kind of performance and over in apple Land Apple has managed to do something that's annoying people there's a surprise Apple has filed a Patent filed for a patent that would allow for monitoring and disabling certain iPhones the eff is upset Marco could you fill in the rest of this picture yeah sure this patent application is is actually really scary so Congress sort of made jailbreaking legal recently you know with the ruling but apple is still very against jailbreaking so they filed for a patent that not only allows them to detect iPhones that have been jailbroken but also to monit biometric information of the phone's user so they can track heartbeat uh take pictures without the user's knowledge of both the user and the environment the phone's in record audio from the area it's just this really kind of scary big brother kind of stuff yeah I've I've been following this story personally because I kind of know a little bit about law and the thing about this whole patent situation for me is that they just file for the application one the PTO doesn't actually have the patent Trademark Office doesn't actually have to give them the patent that's the first thing second thing um just because they have the patent doesn't mean they'll actually use it so I think that I starting to think that people are kind of blowing this out of proportion do you think that do do either one of you guys think that Apple's actually going to execute on this patent or do you think this is something they would probably use and maybe even license to people like rim or uh any Android manufacturer like Motorola because this is kind of for them for other people you know kind of an exciting idea that they can actually monitor everything can you imagine Google Google getting their hands on this they can actually hear what you're saying and bother to advertise to you so Dave what do you think you know yeah I'll chime in on that a little bit I think I think you're absolutely right and people love a good story you know a big brother story especially sink their teeth into but what you have to remember here is Apple's patenting something whether or not they productize it is a is a whole another question and and then how does that product um you know come out in the market what does it look like this all could be some uh you know for example security feature now you know you there's going to be some people riding when I say that but this doesn't have to be something that can be invoked at will maybe there's some security level that gets access to this maybe this is you know uh something that you know government gets a warrant on or whatever and we got to find a bad guy and now we can tap into his phone but you got to have a warrant to get at it that kind of thing not that it can't be hacked certainly could be hacked by a bad guy or a good guy okay but um you know we just don't know how this is going to shake out if it shakes out at all I think it's jumping to conclusions what do you think Marco should people be freaking out should they be throwing out their iPhones right away no they shouldn't be throwing out their iPhones right away but I'm of the opinion it first you know the patent may not get approved so um that's the first thing to consider if it does I don't know maybe Apple would use it in some capacity I don't think they're just willy-nilly gonna record what users are doing perhaps they'll set up some sort of API where people can you know program third party security apps as Dave mentioned that could use these features I'm more concerned of literally you know about hackers or somebody releasing an app that secretly collects data you know it was recently on the App Store I think it was you know um a 17-year-old kid released this simple app disguised as something else that actually turned the iPhone into you know a wireless tethering device was a flashlight application flashlight application yeah that was a really good sneaky way you're right I mean this is a very real possibility that if it hooks into these apis assuming they can actually find the API cuz I'm assuming Apple's not going to be like you know what tell you what this is open like the iPod iPod API because that's this is a little bit more uh Security based and then again theoretically when you use one of these products it'll show you system level this is trying to hook into this API so and then again we'll see that just means that it looks like uh our phones are turning more and more and more into computers so if you have an Android device you have reason to be scared if you have an iPhone you have reason to be scared if you have a razor you have no reason to be scared oh what's that I think I'm seeing a new device coming up what what is this yeah we're going to be looking at this in the near future this is the Dell Streak and uh we've got it in the labs right now and it's it's a whole lot of fun could use a little update on the Android uh side of things U you know foyo would be nice on this puppy but uh nice device I I like it and uh find out what hot Harbor editor Dan deun uh says about uh this one and uh it's it's good stuff is the review out already no he's working on it now so we'll be yapping about this pretty soon Marco let's give the people something for watching us and listening to us just blather on what can you possibly give away I mean I'm sure I'm sure there's something right yeah H how about we run two contests they're actually they're already running um in one contest we're giving away 20 copies of the new game well relatively new game Just cause two um all you have to do is come by the site and uh Post in the news or in the Forum so you giving away 20 copies to one person uh no 20 winners okay so this more than just two giveaways this is like 21 giveaways what's the other thing giveway well the other one is pretty exciting too uh we partnered with MSI and we're giving away a high-end x58 based motherboard and two GeForce GTX 460 cards in addition to 10 copies of Metro 2033 to 10 different winners so this motherboard can it work with any of the processors we talked about today yes the core i7 Dave showed n socket 1366 Intel processor so all you have to do is win this contest and your entire system will cost you like 800 bucks that's actually pretty good that's going to be one powerful machine I'm assuming you can use a case is there anything else you guys like to add before we go yes what's that follow us baby Facebook hot hardw hot Hardware excuse me Twitter HOT hardware and dig. Hardware Hardware what was it hot Hardware Hardware so I'm brain dead it's Friday so very easy and that does it for this episode of hot Hardware you can find everything we talked about and more and contest information at hot hardware.com not. hotwar um am my's actor Dave Marco thanks again for being here and we will see everybody next week right thanks I all right yes so long folks\n"