According to Mercury News, a man behind a series of attacks on Google’s Mountain View campus was charged with arson last week. Fearing that Google was tracking and watching him, Raul Murillo Diaz threw Molotov cocktails at a Street View vehicle, shot the windows of several buildings, and possibly burned a self-driving car.
According to a report from PC World, both Google and Microsoft are planning to announce plans to add a smartphone kill switch to their mobile software in an effort to combat device theft. The feature would allow users with stolen devices to report their device as missing and disable it from being used without specific credentials in an incident of theft. This feature has already proven to deter theft of iPhones as iOS recently introduced a similar functionality.
The news comes after The New York Times released data from the city’s police pointing to a 19 percent decline in iPhone thefts in 2014 compared to the same period in 2013 which considers Apple’s Activation Lock feature introduced to the public last fall with iOS 7. The report from PC World notes that thefts of Samsung devices have risen by more than 40 percent.
A crowd-sourced crime-reporting and safety app trialled on selected university campuses has now been rolled out to everyone. Tapshield allows real-time viewing of crime stats and suspicious activity in an area, and allows you to summon help when in trouble.
An award-winning mobile safety app and response dashboard, TapShield uses collaboration and crowd-sourcing to build safer communities & improve response times. Think of TapShield as your social safety network with you wherever you want to go.
The way the app works is that users can report crimes in progress and anything else they spot that concerns them, and those locations and incidents are then automatically shown to other Tapshield users in the area.
When a crime is reported, Tapshield sends a message to campus security when used within one of the participating colleges, and dials 911 when used elsewhere. You also have the option of sending a non-emergency alert to police when you see something that concerns you but which doesn’t justify an immediate emergency response – such as a bunch of street lights out, leaving a path in darkness.
If you have to make a journey that concerns you, you can specify your route and ETA and allow family and friends to follow your journey remotely, raising the alarm if you go off-route or don’t reach your destination when expected.
Finally, the app has a ‘yank’ mode, which automatically sends an alert if headphones are forcibly pulled from the device, such as when your phone is snatched by a thief.
Tapshield is a free download from Google Play.
Via TheNextWeb
