Now Facebook Can See Inside Your Heart, Too

Facebook scientists figure out how to identify your romantic partner or best friend from among your connections.

Each day brings fresh confirmation that giving away any information means you’re giving all of it away, thanks to algorithms that crunch your language use, purchasing habits, friend structure, and other bits of information. Now “big data” can see inside your heart. The latest offering from Facebook’s data-science team  teases out who is romantically involved with whom by examining link structures.  It turns out that if one of your Facebook friends—let’s call him Joe—has mutual friends that touch disparate areas of your life, and those mutual friends are themselves not extensively connected, it’s a strong clue that Joe is either your romantic partner or one of your closest personal friends. The company says this could help them decide which posts to give extra prominence in news feeds. “If we can do a better job of identifying all the most important people in your life, there is a lot of opportunity to make Facebook better,” says Lars Backstrom, a data scientist at Facebook.  Surely, it will also be of value to Facebook’s advertisers. The finding adds to the pile of other evidence of data-mining possibilities on Facebook.  A study earlier this year by University of Cambridge researchers, using data from 58,000 volunteer U.S. Facebook users, found it could predict traits like race, sexuality, substance abuse, and parental separate, using Facebook “likes.”  And others are teasing out demographic cues such as gender and age from the kind of language you use (see “How Your Facebook Profile Reveals More About Your Personality Than You Know”).

A Password You Wear on Your Wrist

A mobile security startup called PassBan thinks the best way to keep mobile devices secure is to allow people to choose from a bevy of different authentication options—including one that you wear on your wrist.

“We didn’t want to be in the business of forcing one factor or another on the user,” says cofounder and CEO Kayvan Alikhani.

Most of us have to remember countless passwords for different online services, and we are often asked to choose complicated strings of characters to make them harder to guess. A growing number of companies offer alternatives to conventional passwords, including various forms of biometrics (see “Instead of a Password, Security Software Just Checks Your Eyes”).
More than half of cell phone users in the U.S. also own smartphones, and many apps keep users perpetually logged in, thereby bypassing the usual security controls. People also use smartphones and tablets to store and access an increasing amount of personal data, making them ever-more valuable if they’re lost or stolen. And yet, while there are plenty of companies focusing on securing desktop and laptop computers, the market for mobile security is still in its infancy.
PassBan released a free Android app in February called Passboard that allows you to secure individual apps on a smartphone with any of more than a dozen verification techniques, including identifying your voice, face, location, or a specific gesture. Initially available in private beta, the company says, the app will be available to anyone starting Friday.
And at a developer event at the company’s San Francisco office on Wednesday, the company showed off a wristband that can unlock a phone or tablet when the wearer makes a simple gesture in the air. It also showed off tools that will let third-party developers incorporate PassBan’s technology into their apps.
The wristband will be available in a couple of weeks, Alikhani says, and the company hopes to sell it for less than $20. He expects such sensors to ultimately be embedded in watches or other things we carry with us.
PassBoard works by intercepting the launch of any app that a user has secured it with. Once you’ve secured your Facebook app, for example, when you tap on it, a PassBoard popup commands you to verify your identity with whatever method you’ve chosen. For those with a wristband, it can be set up to authenticate you with a shake or tap on the wristband, or with just your proximity to your smartphone. Whichever method you choose, it must be registered and transmitted via Bluetooth to your handset to unlock an app.
Alikhani says it is possible for someone who has the wristband and your smartphone to access data on the handset, assuming they know your signature gesture. But if you secure a phone with a wristband gesture and also require another factor—like choosing a sequence of colors—that could make it trickier to access.
David Wagner, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, doesn’t think PassBoard offers anything particularly unique or useful, saying that his research suggests that only a minority of users employ even a simple passcode to lock their phones. He expects this is because there isn’t much of a security risk for most people—someone who steals your phone probably just wants to wipe the data and resell it.
He is intrigued by the idea of wearable authentication, however, though PassBan will have to convince users it’s worth spending the money to get it.
PassBan isn’t the only company that thinks wearable authentication may be the next big thing in security. Google is apparently exploring the idea of using items a user is likely to have on them anyway—such as jewelry—to log in to a computer.

The Nexus 5 Gets A New Color And A New Rumored Launch Date

There really isn’t much we don’t know about Google and LG’s new Nexus 5 at this point — a leaked service manual blew the door open on plenty of technical details, and Google even “accidentally” outed the device in the Google Play Store, giving us a $349 price tag for the base 16GB model.

Now, thanks to the one and only @evleaks, we’ve gotten yet another glimpse of the forthcoming phone in some decidedly different livery. Rather than the bog-standard matte black finish we’ve seen on and off for the past few months, this newly leaked image shows off a white version of the device ahead of its official launch… whenever that may be.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Nexus 5′s long journey from rumor to actual product, the Android 4.4 KitKat device is said to sport a 4.95-inch display running at 1080p and a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz. Oh, and let’s not forget 2GB of RAM, an active LTE radio, and a mildly improved 2300mAh battery — all told we’re looking at a pretty solid update.

Arguably more important than that new chromatic choice is the latest in a long line of purported release dates for the Nexus 5 — this time it looks like November 1 is the day to circle on your calendars. For a while there it looked like we would get our first official glimpse at the Nexus 5 on October 15, a day that came and went with nary a peep from Google. Then there came word of a small Google Play event slated for the evening of the 24th in New York City, which ultimately turned out to be little more than a meet-and-greet for certain members of the press.

Couple that with a separate report from the folks at MobileSyrup forecasting a launch on October 31 and it’s starting to seem very likely that the Nexus 5 will make its grand debut at the end of the month. Of course, that’s only a few days away and there’s still no smoking gun — Google hasn’t started distributing invitations — so we’ll see just how much longer this not-so-secret secret winds up staying under wraps. Curiously enough, the Nexus 5 may not be alone when it hits the Google Play Store for real. An LTE-enabled version of the Nexus 4 put in an appearance in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s device certification listings.