Open Android Marketplace Raises Concerns about Mal-Ware
Wired reports that the first malicious application for the Google Android Marketplace may have already appeared. There are reports that an application called MemoryUp results in erasing data on the phone and corrupting memory of the phone.
Doesnt work at all erased my phone numbers and froze my phone," allegedly wrote a user according to the Geek.com site.
The developer of the application, however, appears to be a long running developer and denies their app could be causing the problem:
The application's developers deny those claims. "We are very disturbed by these reports," says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio. "Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product."
Looking at the original report on Geek.com shows that the evidence that this was an intentionally malicious app to be quite flimsy (unverified app review comments only). The app has been pulled in the meanwhile as it gets sorted out.
Still, Google's unregulated Android marketplace makes them more vulnerable to these sort of concerns. In contrast, Apple tries to hold more control over their App Store and manually approves all applications that enter the App Store.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
