Woman sues Google after in-app purchases drain her bank account

One day last August, Susan Harvey tried to download a previously purchased app onto a second mobile phone, only to have Google's dashboard tell her that - yikes! - there were 109 transactions on her account.

Clicking on another tab on Google's site led her to find that, even worse, there were about 650 transactions listed, most of which she says she didn't recognise.

Her bank records told the tale: between April 2013 and May 2014, her account had been drained of thousands of dollars.

According to The Register, the California woman last week filed a lawsuit against Google in the Eastern California District Court, alleging that the search company's inadequate security enabled crooks to run up thousands of dollars in charges on her Google Play account that were then debited electronically without her sign-off.

Harvey also accuses Google of first refusing to reimburse her, then backing down and agreeing to refund the money, but ultimately failing to pay up as promised.

At first, Google claimed that the transactions in question did, in fact, belong to Harvey.

Both her bank - Bank of America - and Google requested police reports, which Harvey's lawsuit says she submitted. Still, neither the bank nor Google reimbursed her.

Harvey took matters into her own hands, getting in touch with the vendors listed in the transactions.

Nearly all of them told her that they didn't recognise the transaction numbers as being part of their own billing. The vendors said that the transactions were, in fact, Google transactions, and that Google itself was receiving the money.

When she relayed her findings to Google, the company acknowledged that Harvey hadn't made the transactions, but it still refused to reimburse her.

After more complaining, Harvey says Google's legal department contacted her and told her the refund was in the works.

But as of the time of the filing, not only hadn't she seen her money, but some of the transactions identified as fraudulent had disappeared from her account.

From the filing:

After plaintiff repeatedly complained and advised Google of her findings, Google's legal department contacted plaintiff and advised her that all transactions would be reimbursed.
To date, all transactions unauthorized by plaintiff have not been reimbursed and notably, some transactions previously identified as fraudulent have been erased from plaintiff's account.

Harvey is claiming that there must have been a flaw in Google Play that allowed thieves to post bogus transactions to her account, that Google acted negligently by allowing her personal information to be breached and her identity to be stolen, and that Google broke breach notification law by not telling her about the problem.

She's also claiming that Google allowed electronic fund transfers - some recurring - to go through without her authorization.

She's requesting a jury trial and monetary damages.

Google declined to comment when contacted by The Register.

Regardless of the lawsuit's outcome, it's a good reminder of why we should all be keeping a close eye on our bank account statements.

Spotting the first unrecognizable transaction can help stop hemorrhaging of funds to swindlers before you lose thousands, whether the criminals are coming in from Google Play or anywhere else.

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IS THE INTERNET REALLY MAKING US SMART?

The Internet has wrought incredible changes to learning, both in what we can learn and the way that we learn it. Not only is the information of the world largely available (free of charge) at our fingertips, but we also increasingly have access to new ideas and bright minds from around the world.

Is all of this actually making us smarter though? There has been a great deal of discussion over the years on the impact of the Internet on our brains, with respected voices ranging from Nick Carr to Susan Greenfield suggesting that the web is actually making us dumber.

Whilst this may seem hard to understand given the tremendous opportunities the web affords us, a recent Yale-led study suggests they may have a point.

The study, which consisted of nine separate experiments, found that when we obtain knowledge online, we perceive our knowledge as much greater than we do when the knowledge is obtained through other channels.

“This was a very robust effect, replicated time and time again,” the researchers say. “People who search for information tend to conflate accessible knowledge with their own personal knowledge.”

For example, two groups were tasked with finding out how zippers work. One group looked online, whilst another were given more tangible resources to search in.

When the participants from the two groups were asked afterwards how good their knowledge was of unrelated domains, those from the online group believed their knowledge was far superior to that of the offline group.

Intriguingly, when the same participants were quizzed prior to the experiment, no such differences were present.

What’s more, this effect was so pronounced that people even had an inflated sense of their knowledge having answered the question incorrectly.

“The cognitive effects of ‘being in search mode’ on the Internet may be so powerful that people still feel smarter even when their online searches reveal nothing,” the authors reveal.

They go on to suggest that this sensation of the web being almost an appendage of our brain is particularly pronounced among younger people, where there could be a considerable distortion to our perceived knowledge levels caused by the degree with which we’re plugged into the net.

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One in six Android apps is a malware, says study

BENGALURU: One in every six Android applications is a malware, according to a study by technology security company Symantec. The study also found that 36% of all Android applications are Graywares, which are not malicious by design but do annoying and inadvertently harmful things like tracking user behaviour.

In what could be seen as a warning to the large number of startups emerging in India, the study said cyberattackers are focusing more on small- and mid-sized business firms now since these are the ones that are increasingly creating intellectual property. It said 60% of all targeted attacks struck such organizations in 2014.

"The attackers know that a large portion of intellectual properties are generated from smaller companies. With hundreds of startups coming up every day in India, the number of attacks are likely to rise as companies give more importance to bringing a product to market quickly than on security," Tarun Kaura, director of Symantec's technology sales for India & Saarc, told TOI.

Symantec said the research was conducted on 6.3 million Android applications. "We found that roughly 17% of all the apps come right under the classification of malware. Also, 2.3 million apps that are available today track the users' behaviour," said Kaura. The study also found that nearly one million malwares are created every day across the globe. "Around 317 million malwares were created in 2014. This was a 26% rise from 2013," Kaura said.

Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Kochi are the cities that came most under cyberattacks last year. Among the various business sectors in India, those dealing with critical infrastructure like banking, telecom, transport and energy were subjected to the most attacks. India is among the top 10 infected countries in the world.

India is also ranked second after the US under social media scams, the report said. One of the major social media scams was a click-bait video link inviting Facebook users to watch the farewell message of late Hollywood actor Robin Williams which he allegedly shot before committing suicide on August 11 last year. Williams had never recorded a farewell message, and the link led to a malware. The post was automatically shared too by the ones who clicked on the link, thus reaching to more vulnerable users.

Symantec said the study is based on empirical data collected by its global intelligence network. It said the study tracked 8.4 billion emails every month and 1.8 billion websites every day in 157 countries using 57.6 million attack sensors.

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Google launches its own mobile telephone service

NEW YORK: Google said on Wednesday that it was launching its own US mobile wireless service, with considerable potential savings for customers using their devices at home and for international travel.
The service called Project Fi is only available by invitation for now, and only for the Google Nexus 6 smartphone.
The service will use Wi-Fi hotspots along with the US mobile networks of Sprint and T-Mobile, and also may be used in 120 ..

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Buying a Wi-Fi Router? Here Are the Features and Specifications That Matter

Read at NDTV Gadgets

If you're using Wi-Fi in your house, the odds are good that you just went with the free router that the ISP provides. It's convenient since you don't need to set up anything, and it saves both time and money.

And then the problems start - the network is slow, or doesn't reach most parts of your house - and there's not much you can do about it. Most people avoid buying a router themselves because of the complication of the specifications and the effort it takes to understand them.

You can try looking for alternatives yourself, but the router page on the company website or an e-commerce website doesn't provide you the details in a simple language that would help you make the decision. So you end up taking the path of least resistance and keep using the ISP's router.

That may work for some, but for most people it is advisable to invest in a better router, so you can get your home network working according to your needs. This way, you can make sure that the router is fast enough for your usage, and has enough range to cover your house.

Router with or without Internet

The most common use of a Wi-Fi router is to share an Internet connection between various devices, but that's not its only use. You can even use the router even without an active Internet connection to connect your devices like smartphones, tablets, TVs, computers to each other for streaming videos, file transfers and more. In such a case, you'll obviously have no ISP and will need to invest in a router of your own.

Most users, however, need a router to use the Internet connection on multiple devices. Now your Internet connection can either be cable or ADSL. If it's the former - you should check with your ISP to identify what kind it is if unsure - you typically wouldn't need anything other than the router. However, if you have a DSL connection - the kind supplied by the likes of BSNL, MTNL, and Airtel, which usually comes with a landline - you'll also need a ADSL modem. In such a case, it makes sense to buy a router with a built-in ADSL modem, which will take lesser space on your table and there will be fewer wires to manage.

However, these routers are a little bit more expensive - a standalone ADSL modem costs less than Rs. 1,000 so keep this in mind when comparing a router with built-in ADSL modem against a modem + router combo.

There are a lot of different numbers and specifications floating around, but these are the ones you want to keep in mind buying a router:

Router's Wi-Fi Standard (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac)

The first thing you'll want to check is the Wi-Fi standard that the router supports. Older ones would be 802.11 'b' or 'g' - but almost all new routers also support 'n'. This standard - 802.11n - allows you to transfer data at 600Mbps (mega bits per second) theoretically, though some 802.11n routers come with top speeds of only 300Mbps (which translates to downloads of 37.5MBps or mega bytes per second).

The latest Wi-Fi standard is 802.11ac. It allows a transfer speed of 1.3Gbps. Of course, in practical scenarios the speed is reduced a lot. This means that 802.11ac allows you to connect more devices with high data transfer speed, thanks to better multi-antenna and MIMO (Multi Input Multi Output) support. MIMO allows multiple streams for a single connection for faster connections, particularly if you are doing multimedia activities.

Only a handful of phones and laptops support 802.11ac and the technology is more expensive at the moment than 802.11n routers. So which one should you go for? For now, the choice is simple - the 'n' standard is more than fast enough for your Internet connection in India, and it's more likely to be supported by all your devices. As a bonus, you save money too.

Router's wireless frequency (2.4GHz or 5GHz) Frequency of a router will decide how powerful your network would be for multiple devices. The two main standards are 2.4GHz and 5GHz. The key difference between these two is of interference and range.

Advantage of 5GHz frequency is that there will be less disturbance for each device, so they can attain maximum gain from the bandwidth," explains network engineer Hirak Patel. "And the interference from the other Wi-Fi networks is also very less." This means that if you are connecting lots of devices, or if there are overlapping networks in the same area (like a multi-story apartment building) then a 5GHz network is the better choice. The 5GHz routers are more expensive than the 2.4GHz routers, so you should go with the 2.4GHz ones, unless interference is a real issue with your network.

Speed of the router

Even if the router is following a certain standard, the actual speed depends on the hardware used in the specific model. The maximum speed in the router is usually specified in the spec sheet. You would have the speed written under "High Speed Upto". The slower router is often cheaper - and if the only use is going to be connecting devices to the Internet, then you should buy the cheapest one, considering that even 300Mbps is several times higher than the typical 4Mbps or 8Mbps connections in India.

If you're using it to stream movies inside your house from your computer to the home theatre, you might want to spend a little extra for more speed. If you want to stream full-HD (1080p) movies to your laptop or tablet a 300Mbps router would be more than enough. But to stream the content to multiple devices simultaneously, or to stream 4K content, 600Mbps routers are for you.

Router's antenna range

There is no straightforward method to measure the range of the WiFi router, since it depends on a wide variety of factors.

"You always need to consider the environment you're in. Also, your home or office's architecture plays a major part in the range of a particular router", explains US-based network consultant Pranav Rajpara. You can instead look at the dBi ratings of the antenna of the router, which will be included in the specifications.

In a small to medium sized apartment, 2-4dBi is sufficient, according to Rajpara. If you have many obstacles (walls, other household electronics like a fridge or microwave) between where you will be sitting and your router's position, you will need a router with higher dBi ratings.

Walls play a large part in blocking the WiFi signals. Concrete walls and even thin wooden doors create a hindrance for the signals. A study says that the signal strength gets very weak after 3 to 4 walls. So if the router you got from the ISP isn't up to the mark, you must look at this dBi specification, and go with a higher number.

Router ports, security, and additional features

If you have a small office and desktop computers in place, check for the number of LAN ports available to connect. This can often be more convenient. Newer routers also provide additional USB ports. That would help you connect the printers for network printing or a hard drive for file-sharing. Once again, the router you buy has to match your needs - if you're connecting just your phone and laptop to the Internet, then you should choose a router without extra ports instead. Some routers come with extra features, like Apple's Airport Express which has AirPlay support. It comes with a 3.5mm port where you can connect any speakers and wirelessly stream music from your PC, Mac, or mobile.

For security, check if it supports 128 bit encryption, and WPA2 standard compatibility. These are pretty standard now so you don't have to worry much about this.

Conclusions

While the free router you get from your ISP is a good way to get connected quickly, if you're facing any problems then you should consider investing in a router yourself. Following the advice above, you know what to look for if you want to expand the range of your network or have a new Internet connection; if you need more range or more speed; if you're planning on sharing files and streaming video between your devices or if you're just planning on connecting your laptop and mobile phone to the Internet.

A basic user can get decent a 150Mbps or 300Mbps routers from Rs.800 onwards - stick to well-known brands like Netgear, Asus, D-Link, Cisco Linksys, not for any other reason but because there will be a lot of documentation on the Internet if you're ever having trouble and need help figuring things out.

If you're in a large space and getting the connectivity to the router is difficult, look for one with a higher dBi rating. Is network interference an issue because of all your neighbours' routers? Look for a 5GHz router for your own connection instead. Unless you're an advanced user with very specific needs for very high speed data transfers, you shouldn't have to spend more than Rs. 2,000 on a router, and it could make a pretty big difference.