Tag: notifications | Page 2

City of Albuquerque launches bilingual, opt-in emergency health alert notifications

January 21, 2021/in Mobile Security

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The City of Albuquerque is upgrading its ABQ Ride app. ABQRide+ will offer new features like real-time bus locations, stop information, trip planning, ticketing, and more. Also, a new feature is a link to the city’s latest events. The app is free on Apple’s app store and Google Play. The original app will still be available until next month.

“As technology is ever-evolving, we want to make sure that we provide our riders with the best information available. We know this upgrade will make it easier for residents and visitors alike to access information and use public transportation,” said Danny Holcomb in a news release, Transit Director.

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Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications — Krebs on Security

November 17, 2020/in Internet Security

An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve “notifications,” browser modifications that periodically display messages on the user’s mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to install their notification scripts and then selling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.

Notification prompts in Firefox (left) and Google Chrome.

When a website you visit asks permission to send notifications and you approve the request, the resulting messages that pop up appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems they typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock. These so-called “push notifications” rely on an Internet standard designed to work similarly across different operating systems and web browsers.

But many users may not fully grasp what they are consenting to when they approve notifications, or how to tell the difference between a notification sent by a website and one made to appear like an alert from the operating system or another program that’s already installed on the device.

This is evident by the apparent scale of the infrastructure behind a relatively new company based in Montenegro called PushWelcome, which advertises the ability for site owners to monetize traffic from their visitors. The company’s site currently is ranked by Alexa.com as among the top 2,000 sites in terms of Internet traffic globally.

Website publishers who sign up with PushWelcome are asked to include a small script on their page which prompts visitors to approve notifications. In many cases, the notification approval requests themselves are deceptive — disguised as prompts to click “OK” to view video material, or as “CAPTCHA” requests designed to distinguish automated bot traffic from real visitors.

An ad from PushWelcome touting the money that websites can make for embedding their dodgy push notifications scripts.

Approving notifications from a site that uses PushWelcome allows any of the company’s advertising partners to display whatever messages they choose, whenever they wish to,…

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How to see old notifications on an Android device

November 11, 2020/in Mobile Security

You can see old notifications on an Android that you’ve previously cleared via the device’s Notification Log.
You can only access your Notification Log after you activate it through your Android device’s Developer Mode.
To enable Developer Mode with just a few repeated taps, find the “Software Information” or “Build Number” options in your Android’s Settings app.
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Have you ever cleared out your notifications on your Android device, only to realize you might have missed something? Typically, you can’t go back to old notifications once you’ve erased them, but there is a way around this through a hidden function called the Notification Log.

To view your Android device’s Notification Log, you will need to access a widget that is only available in Developer Mode.

Note that not all Android versions have this widget, so if your device falls into this category, you’ll need to download a third-party app to view old notifications instead.

Here’s how to see notifications you’ve previously erased on your Android phone.