Google Removes RuFraud Scam on Android Apps

If you’ve been experiencing problems with third-party software from your downloaded apps from the Android Market, it may be because of a fraudulent software that keeps tricking its users to send premium text messages. You’ll be pleased to know that Google has already been notified of this alert and has since removed 22 apps, including Sim City and Angry Birds.

Based on an earlier report by BBC, Lookout (a San Francisco based company for mobile security) has properly informed Google about the existing apps that were causing the unnecessary action. Upon discovery of the RuFraud scam, app users were tricked into downloading an app disguised as a game or program. Later on, they discovered that they actually gave permission to send out a text message—costing them $4.65. At least 14,000 of these apps have been downloaded, Lookout added; with most of its affected users located in Europe. Even though attacks of the same kind are not uncommon, they have increased over the last few months.

The RuFraud Scam was discovered to have originated from Russia.

Lack of an Approval Process

Unfortunately, this can only be expected from the lack of an approval process coming from the Android Market. Compared to the Apple App Store and the Windows Phone Marketplace, apps can easily be uploaded to the Android Market. However, Android developers are required to adhere to the terms and conditions stated in the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement.

Looking back to a previous ZDNet Asia report, Google said it would automatically remove apps which violated their policies and agreement. This includes inappropriate content or malware. Moreover, the Android Market plans to block the abusive developers who repeatedly commit these violations.

Call to Action

In lieu of this, security experts suggested that Google to perform a scan on its Marketplace. Apart from detecting malware and malicious apps, they can better enforce the security of its valued Android users. Considering that this is a heavily used platform, Google really needs to listen to these suggestions.

Ever since March this year, Google has already removed over 50 fraudulent apps including theDroidDream malware—which prompted infected gadgets to send out delicate data to an external command server. In June, it stripped down several versions of the same malware.

“The flexibility of the Android Market is great, but that comes at a potential price to security,” “It will also become a potentially bigger problem in the future. Android’s market share is going up, and so is the number of malware-infected mobile software,” said David Emm, a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs.

Emm also warned that the currently existing vulnerabilities in Android apps have a possibility of turning into larger security breaches throughout the Google network. Since Gmail accounts of its users are attached to the Android Market, a more serious security problem can cause a bigger problem.

Having recently exceeding its 10 billion app downloads, Google has given its users access totop premium apps at 90% offered only for 10 days. Unfortunately, many of these downloads have also produced an error; to which Google has issued an apology just a few days ago.

[Source: BBC]

Google Chrome becomes UK's second most popular web browser

Google's Chrome is Britain's second most popular browser, a sign of the internet giant's increasing grip on the UK search market.Three years after launch, Chrome last month captured 22% of UK users and marginally overtook Mozilla's Firefox browser, according to the web metrics firm Statcounter. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is losing market share to Chrome but remains the most popular browser for UK users with 45% – although it has a head start by being pre-installed on almost all computers sold in Britain. Apple's Safari is UK number four, with a 9% share.

Google's rise in the browser market is in part down to nationwide advertising – Chrome is the first Google product advertised on British TV – but is largely attributed to its speed.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer responsible for Chrome, said the goal had never been to attract a huge user base, but to energise a dormant browser market: "Speed is a fundamental part of it, but it's also about the minimal design and the way it handles security. If you as a user try [to load] a webpage and it feels snappy, it's really hard to go back [to another browser]. It has shown that people spend more time interacting with the web."

Unlike most of Google's talent based at its Mountain View headquarters in California, Bak works from a converted farmhouse in the Danish countryside two hours from Copenhagen. He has become obsessed with speed, and despite numerous tests that show Chrome outstrips all rivals, he thinks it could be much faster. "You should never be happy with [existing] speed," he said. "Of course it gets harder to make substantial gains, but it's all healthy competition. From the beginning we wanted everybody to be fast, and now all browsers are fast. I'm absolutely flabbergasted [by the improvements made by rival browsers]."

Chrome is the number three worldwide, with a 20.65% market share according to Statcounter. But analysts expect it to edge ahead of Firefox, which has dipped steadily since January. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has also fallen heavily, to 43%, with warnings about security vulnerabilities.

Google last month announced its Chromebook laptop, based on its browser and seen as another ambitious attack on Microsoft; it will be made by Samsung and Acer, companies that previously made computers running Microsoft's software.

Unlike most computers, the Chromebook has almost no capacity to store and hosts most data online in a "cloud". Bak said: "The Chromebook is really important because it tries to simplify the machine – it is basically no maintenance, which means you can cut the price. If all you are doing is using a browser it's a fantastic tool."

New data suggests Google+ isn’t raining men: 34 percent of users are female

 

Despite many reports by major news organizations, about 33.6 percent of Google+’s total user base is female, according to new research by unofficial Google+ statistician and founder of Ancestry.com Paul Allen.


Allen, who earlier in the week accurately predicted that Google+ had surpassed 10 million registered members, determined his gender estimates using a method of analysis that is based on U.S. Census data about surname-popularity (the popularity of a person’s last name) and the number of Google+ users with each surname.

“The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being,” Allen wrote in a recent note on Google+.


Allen pointed at several media organizations — like Mashable, Adweek and Forbes — that reported Google+’s gender ratio as predominantly male using flawed data from personal research, SocialStatistics and FindPeopleOnPlus.“Google+ is quickly turning pink,” Allen said.


Other popular social networks, by comparison, are mostly dominated by women, according to a Pew report on social networking sites. The Pew data shows that females account for over half of all users on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and a collection of other less popular social sites . The data has a 2-3 percent margin of error.

The only social network with a male dominated user base is LinkedIn, according to the Pew data. However, Allen expects Google+’s female population percentage to surpass LinkedIn’s (which is 37 percent female) in early August 2011.Allen admits that he ignores the small percentage of people who decline to identify their gender on Google+ when determining his data. Still, his research method has, thus far, proved accurate.

Why did Google+ users get hit by a spam attack?

This weekend there was an 80-minute time period during which Google+ users were hit by an odd spam attack. They weren't simply annoyed by junk emails, but instead smothered by a pile of duplicate Google+ notifications. What went wrong?

According to Business Insider, the issue was the result of a technical hiccup — something which is to be expected given that the social networking service is still in "field trial" mode. Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, was quick to provide an apology for the troubles as well as a bit of a clarification in — what else? — a Google+ post:

Yes, laugh all you want, but even a service run by search engine giant Google can temporarily run out of disk space if its engineers underestimate just how popular it will become.Don't worry though: Whatever issues there were over the weekend appear to be resolved at this point, so we're assuming that someone at Google pulled a few switches and pushed a few buttons to allocate enough sufficient disk space to Google+ and its eager users.

Google dealing with privacy bugs in Google+

  

Google's new social networking site Google+, built to beat Facebook primarily on privacy features, has several privacy bugs the company is working to fix.While some enthusiastic beta testers clamor for Google to open the social networking site to everybody now, it's clear Google needs to address these issues before launching Google+ more broadly.

Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders.So far, beta testers have been mostly positive about Google+, particularly over its design to make it easier for users to share posts and content with different sets of people, as opposed with their entire list of contacts.

Many of the existing privacy bugs in Google+ revolve around the site's mechanism to block users, according to a list of known problems Google has published and is in the process of fixing.For example, after a user blocks someone, that blocked person may not always be removed from the user's extended circles and the blocked person's posts will remain on the user's activity stream.

Likewise, the user's posts made prior to the blocking will remain on the blocked person's stream.In addition, after blocking someone, a user could remain on the blocked person's circles, and the user may still appear on the blocked person's profile as being part of their circle. About the latter bug, Google wrote: "We're working hard to improve this experience."

Google is also working to address a number of non-privacy related bugs, such as the fact that the activity stream may not always get updated in real time and that users can't attach a comment to a comment in a nested fashion.In addition, when a user opens Google+, minimized chat windows from Gmail may re-expand and conversations in chat windows in Google+ or Gmail may not sync between each other.

On other news related to Google+, Google recently announced that as of July 31 of this year, all Google Profiles will become automatically public.Google users will be able to restrict the publicly available information to just their full name and their gender, and keep everything else hidden. People also have the option to delete their Google Profile.

Google can't cope with demand for Google+

Google has suspended current users sending out Google+ invites, saying it has generated "insane demand".Vic Gundotra, the chap leading Google's social network charge, posted on Google+ that the firm had shut down the invite function due to high demand. He said, "We've shut down [the] invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!"

Curiously Gundotra also said that those wanting to leave could do so and take their data with them. Gundotra wrote in the same post, "For any who wish to leave, please remember you can always exit and take your data with you by using Google Takeout. It's your data, your relationships, your identity." Perhaps that statement is an indication of where Google wants to position Google+, giving the user greater ownership over their data that they put onto Google's servers.

Given the anger Google generated when it pushed its Buzz social networking software onto users, it's not surprising that the firm has taken a softly-softly approach with Google+. Google also might be accurately aware that it needs a smooth launch of Google+ and that, while suspending sign-ups isn't perfect, it is far better than having the system fall over due to high demand.

Google as always maintains that Google+ is still in a beta stage, with the firm still ironing out the kinks. David Valentine, general manager of UK and Ireland at Microfocus, a company that does load testing for a number of high profile firms told The INQUIRER, "poor website responses are bad for publicity".

Valentine said that websites are getting ever more complex, making particular reference to Ajax, a set of technologies that Google+ makes heavy use of and require more accurate load testing. Valentine said that users expect a web page to respond within one second and that "if a user gets half way through a transaction and it fails it could lead to that person leaving an angry comment on Facebook".

Google seems to have played it safe, and rather than risk having negative publicity about its ability to provide reliable service it has chosen to suspend the expansion of its social network. It's a wise decision, as the wait simply generates more hype for the firm.

As for Google+ itself, given Google's position as the dominant web brand with an immensely popular search engine, email service, advertising brokerage, web analytics and provider of mobile operating systems, there is actually a chance that it could challenge Facebook. Curiously, due to all those services, Google gets only an incremental increase in the amount of personal data and preferences it has access to with Google+.

With Google already highlighting that data can be removed from its servers using Google Takeout, something that Facebook doesn't offer, this could push Facebook to become slightly more transparent about the way it handles and retains users' data.

source:theinquirer

Google to dump 'I'm feeling lucky' button

Google Inc has plans to kill the " I'm feeling lucky" button, which has for more than 10 years now proved to be an essential part of its search engine. The button is missing from a new user interface design Google is testing in Finland.

'I'm Feeling Lucky' was first created to reflect Google's confidence that its top search result would almost always be the one being looked for. But since the launch of the Google Instant search last year, the button only works if the user first disables the instant search function.

There has been no official word yet confirming whether or not it will be permanently removed. As Google continues to break new ground at a tremendous rate, perhaps the button is part of an older online mindset, reports the Daily Mail.