Dutch Cops Claim to Crack Extra-Secure BlackBerry Smartphones: Report

PGP BlackBerry smartphones might not be as secure as the Canadian company wants you to believe. Dutch police have claimed that they were able to access a series of encrypted emails on extra-secure PGP BlackBerrysmartphones.

Investigators from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), which performs forensic investigations in criminal cases, claim that they were able to read emails on a BlackBerry smartphone customised for extra security with PGP encryption. "We are capable of obtaining encrypted data from BlackBerry PGP devices," said Tuscha Essed, a press officer with NFI told Motherboard.

PGP, also known as Pretty Good Privacy, is a program that bolsters the security on a device, and is most commonly used encrypting communication. It offers encryption and decryption features, providing a user the ability to add an additional security layer to their emails, files, and texts. PGP BlackBerry smartphones hence are deemed more secure and are sold by many online vendors, though in most cases PGP encryption on BlackBerry smartphones are just used for email communications.

NFI hasn't disclosed the techniques it utilises to get access to the data on an encrypted smartphone, however, the publication citing an online vendor claims that it is a forensics program developed by private company CelleBrite.

If you have a custom BlackBerry smartphone, and the reason you bought it was its sophisticated security capabilities, the only silver lining coming out of the report is that someone needs to physically have possession of your device in order to hack it.

Law enforcement agencies including the United States' FBI as well as Drug Enforcement Administration and the UK's National Crime Agency wouldn't comment on whether they are capable of decrypting the security on a BlackBerry smartphone. BlackBerry is among the companies that work with the government. John Chen, BlackBerry CEO, recently called out Apple for its unwillingness to hand over a user's data to the government.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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