Android

Cyanogen, makers of popular software based on Android that extends the abilities of smartphones, is making a bid for the mainstream. The four-year-old company, which began as a one-person side project, said today that it has raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The goal is to vault past Blackberry and Windows Phone to become the third-most popular mobile operating system, after traditional Android and iOS. And the company is already closer than you might think.

Amid rumors of layoffs and a possible sale of the company, BlackBerry today announced some good news: its growing BBM instant messaging service will be available for Android and iPhone devices in the next several days.

BBM is one of the high points of the failing BlackBerry legacy business, with recent growth in BBM users mainly in Europe and Asia. Until now, BBM has only been available for BlackBerry devices.

 If an Android device (phone or tablet) has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network, then Google probably knows the Wi-Fi password. Considering how many Android devices there are, it is likely that Google can access most Wi-Fi passwords worldwide.

Recently IDC reported that 187 million Android phones were shipped in the second quarter of this year. That multiplies out to 748 million phones in 2013, a figure that does not include Android tablets.

When you use enough Android devices, you start to realize something: There are certain apps you just can't live without. The apps that form a foundation of what makes a phone your own. The core essentials you need to get by.

As a guy who writes about and reviews mobile technology, I use a lot of Android devices. And I've noticed a consistent pattern with what apps I load onto a phone first -- whether it's a personal phone I'm planning to use long-term or a review unit I'm moving into for a few weeks.

 As the market for smartphones booms globally, there is a developmental focus on well-polished apps. Browsing the Internet is perhaps the biggest allure of a smartphone, and big names on desktop are getting popular on mobile too.

Mozilla’s Firefox might be extremely popular on a computer, though it isn’t as popular on mobile. Sure, the company has the ZTE Open and Firefox OS to deal with, but development for Android is still steaming ahead.

A paper presented at last week's USENIX Security Symposium in Washington described how a group of security researchers at Georgia Tech were able to create a "novel method of attack" that can defeat the mandatory software review and code-signing mechanisms defending apps in the Apple App Store. The title of the paper was Jekyll on iOS.

Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions.

Users of Android Bitcoin apps have woken to the unpleasant news that an old pseudo random number generation bug has been exploited to steal balances from users' wallets.

The Bitcoin Foundation's announcement, here, merely states that an unspecified component of Android “responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses, that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft.”

Police in the Chiba Prefectural zone of Japan have arrested nine people suspected of making nearly $4m by distributing malware that harvested mobile user's contact information and using it for a fake dating website.

The arrests came after a joint operation between the police and Symantec, and the security company reports that the possible ringleader of the group is Masaaki Kagawa, president of IT firm Koei Planning and a semi-professional poker player who has netted over $1.5m in winnings from tournament play over in the last six years.

It may well be that the NSA is recording every breath you take, every move you make.

But it's going to take them quite some time to review whether your breaths and moves are, in some way, significant or even troubling.

So along comes an Android app that can help you by forewarning the NSA with "Look! It wasn't me!" I am grateful to Android Central for forewarning me about USA PRISM Plus. Being an Android app, this sprightly invention relies on utter openness. For it takes random shots of your cell phone and sends them to the NSA Careers Twitter account.