If somebody tries and fails to access your phone three times, Android phones running today's update to Lookout Mobile Security (download) will be able to take a photo of the culprit.

Two new features today bolster the app's already robust security options. The Lock Cam feature, which Lookout said in a blog post announcing the changes will be rolled out over the next week to free users, takes a photo using your phone's front-facing camera, records the location data based on your phone's GPS, and then sends the package to your e-mail account.

Lookout Mobile Security's new Lock Cam feature takes a photo of somebody who tries to use your phone without authorization.

If you've paid for a premium Lookout subscription, you'll get the feature immediately. To activate it, go to the app's Settings and make sure both Advanced Protection and Lock Cam have been enabled. If you don't see the Lock Cam option, it hasn't been rolled out to you yet.

Unlike the Lock Cam, the new Lock Screen message feature is restricted to premium accounts only. The feature lets you leave a message double the length of a Tweet, at 300 characters, which will appear on your... [Read more]

Google has finished a version of its Native Client programming technology that extends beyond mainstream x86 PC processors into the world of ARM chips.

Native Client, or NaCl for short, is designed to let programmers easily adapt the C or C++ software they've written for native software so that it can run as a part of Web apps, too. It's designed for high performance, but it's also got security mechanisms built in to counter the risks of running malicious code directly on the processor. The first version of NaCl, though, only worked on personal computers using Intel or AMD's x86 chips.

Google's David Sehr announced NaCl for ARM today with version 25 of its NaCl software developer kit, which programmers use to build NaCl programs.

The technology is designed so that programmers can bring their existing code to the Web -- for example, game designers who have written a physics engine in C++. But NaCl has been at odds with the Web philosophy in one important way, namely, that NaCl software doesn't simply run on any device with a browser.

Extending to ARM is thus an important step for NaCl, because ARM chips power almost every smartphone out there. But this version of NaCl doesn't do that -- it only works on the new ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks.

Related stories

• ... [Read more]