Mobile Defense Blog


This is the official Mobile Defense company blog. Posts includes news, release notes, security tips, and other announcements from the Mobile Defense team.

Case Western Reserve University Career Fair

We will be attending Case Western Reserve University’s Career Fair on Thursday, February 16th. We are excited to meet students and alumni who might be interested in career opportunities at Mobile Defense.

For more information about CWRU’s career fair, visit this site:
http://studentaffairs.case.edu/careers/events/fairs/getexperienced.html

Carnegie Mellon University’s TechSpark

We are proud to announce that we are presenting at TechSpark on February 13!

For those who have not heard, TechSpark is a recruiting event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. This event is specifically designed for startups and small businesses to not only meet students and alumni, but share our stories and visions for the technologies we are developing. We will talk about Mobile Defense’s founding, mission, and vision for the future. We will also discuss the technologies that we are developing, how we are accomplishing our goals, and how our team is rapidly growing.

We are thrilled to meet the students, alumni, and other attendees at TechSpark and to share the Mobile Defense story.

Update on Mobile Defense 2.x

It’s been pretty quiet around here lately, but we wanted to let everyone know that we haven’t forgotten about our users. We appreciate all of our current beta users who have stuck with us, and everyone who has signed up for the waitlist!

Mobile Defense 1.x was released as a public beta to prove out our system. After a year of testing, we took it off the Android Market so we could focus on working with our OEM partners. As a result, we’ve been able to whitelabel some of our technology and create new features for the upcoming consumer release of Mobile Defense 2.x.

Mobile Defense 2.x will be available in the Android Market within the next few months. More details will be forthcoming as the release date approaches, so be sure to check back here and keep up with us on Twitter.

In preparation for the upgrade, we’ve overhauled our support forums and converted them over to a more robust support desk solution. Our hope is that the new design will allow for easier searches and a better overall user experience. If you’re registered as a Mobile Defense user you can login with your existing Mobile Defense credentials and start posting today.

Thanks again to everyone who has continued to support us! We are doing our best to give you a quality product, and we appreciate your patience as we finalize the next version of Mobile Defense.

Temporarily returning to closed beta in preparation for next release

We greatly appreciate everyone’s interest in helping beta test Mobile Defense. The response has been overwhelming and we are excited to integrate the feedback from hundreds of thousands of existing beta testers. In order to take Mobile Defense to the next level, we are suspending new beta signups while we go heads-down on the next release. We appreciate everyone’s support and patience.

Existing users should not experience any interruptions in service and you can re-install Mobile Defense by visiting http://www.mobiledefense.com/install from your Android phone. Important note, new users attempting to install Mobile Defense will be unable to complete the registration process at this time.

If you would like to be notified via email when we resume accepting new users, please complete this form: https://www.mobiledefense.com/download

Amazon EC2 US-EAST-1 power outage

During our upgrade last night Amazon expereienced a power outage that affected some of our production servers. The problem has been resolved; however, we were forced to restore a snapshot of our database as of 12:03am ET. A small handful of users who registered after midnight will need to create new accounts. We have individually reached out to these users to ensure their phones are protected moving forward. Sorry for inconvenience, please let us know if we missed anyone.

Please refrain from using the password reset and password change features until the next release

UPDATE: The new password system has been implement. This is no longer an issue.

We have identified a minor bug that is causing some phones to get out of sync with our servers. Please refrain from using the password reset and password change features until the next release of Mobile Defense. We realize the current password change process has some problems and is confusing to say the least. So in response to user feedback we have rebuilt our authentication system from the ground up and shifted all of the settings (e.g., password change and deactivate) off the phone and onto the website. This new system allows for greater flexibility and improved security moving forward.

Google Android Market update notifications may be broken but Mobile Defense users are unaffected

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According to Phandroid, the automatic update notifications are broken in the Google Android Market. Fortunately, Mobile Defense has its own update notification system built-in which isn’t dependent upon the Market. Handling updates this way allows us to distribute our app from various locations and have more control over outdated copies. Furthermore, as a security app we feel it is necessary to notify our users when critical updates are released. Our system supports three types of updates and notifies users accordingly:

Minor – Small bug fixes that don’t affect security or safety. For example, cosmetic changes and usability improvements. Our system will not issue a notification for this type of update; however, users may receive a notice from the Android Market app. Minor updates are recommended but not required.

Major – Significant bug fixes or new features that don’t affect security or safety. Examples include, patches to SIM change notifications and our soon to be released registration wizard. Users will receive a single update notification. These updates are strongly recommended and tapping the notification message will begin the update process.

Critical – Security patches and mandatory updates. These updates are very important and required. Users will experience persistent update notifications via the phone, website, and email. After 14 days, if users still have not updated, their phone will be deactivated from their online account. If this occurs, please download the latest version and reconnect your phone. While rare, we only issue critical updates when absolutely necessary.

Mobile Defense users report old versions of apps in Android Market

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Over the past few days we have had a number of reports from users stating that they do not see the latest version of Mobile Defense in the Android Market. To resolved this issue you will need to clear the cache for the Market application. Open your phone’s settings and navigate to “Applications” > “Manage applications” > “Market”, and then simply click on the “Clear cache” button. Your cache size should now be zero. Navigate back to the Market and try downloading the latest version of Mobile Defense. If the issues persists after following these steps, please contact us via our support forum http://support.mobiledefense.com

Thanks to Robert Hamilton for pointing this out!

Mobile Defense designed for performance

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Mobile Defense was designed to have little to no impact on your day-to-day performance. You might have noticed the special text message (aka SMS) we send to your phone. This message is a randomized security token and it allows MobileDefense to stay dormant on your phone and awake only when needed. In other words, Mobile Defense is not continually running in the background on your phone. Therefore, it is not consuming battery or active memory.
 
The only time you should see any noticeable battery drain is when you are remotely connected to your phone via the Mobile Defense website. Once you click on the “Connect to Phone” button from your dashboard a remote connection will be established with your phone. The remote session will remain open until you terminate the connection or until 30 minutes has expired, whichever comes first. The session can be terminated by clicking on the “Disconnect” link in the dashboard.
 
Our internal benchmarks show after a 30 minute remote session indoors with GPS on, Wi-Fi off, and a good EDGE signal, only 13% of the stock G1 battery (1150 mAh) was consumed. In comparison, using the native Google Maps application for an equivalent amount of time would drain more battery. Note, newer phones such as the DROID (1400 mAh) and Nexus One (1400 mAh) have higher capacity batteries and, as result, a 30min remote session under the same conditions only uses 9% battery. While we feel this level of performance is acceptable to most people, we want to give our users even more control, allowing them to utilize Mobile Defense in a way that works best for them.  

For that reason, in a future release we will be providing users with the capability to throttle up/down the update interval and update duration between their phone and our web servers during a remote session. This will allow users to prioritize performance, battery drain, and responsiveness as they see fit. While this is just one of many enhancements in the pipeline, we feel it is a significant step towards empowering our users.

T-Mobile website down for maintenance

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If you’re having problems accessing your T-Mobile SMS to email filters per our YouTube video, please be advised that it appears parts of their website are down for maintenance. As suggested, we recommend trying again later and if the problem persists contact T-Mobile at 1-800-T-MOBILE or dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone.

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