Android

Google has announced Android 4.2, described as "a new flavor of Jelly Bean", which adds a number of new features to Android 4.1 but is essentially the same OS. One long awaited addition is multi-user support for tablets; users will get their own apps and data but apps are shared locally so only one user has to download or update an application. An application will appear as a fresh instance when another user installs it. When a user switches to another account, if there is a task to be completed, such as a download or a sync, the app is allowed to run in the background.

T-Mobile is aiming to fortify the Android smartphones and tablets it carries by offering users free protection against malware and viruses.

The company announced today that it is partnering with mobile security company Lookout to help T-Mobile customers protect their devices with a product called Automatic App Security. The software will come preloaded on certain devices this year, and then T-Mobile will roll it out to most Android devices in 2013.

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users' online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found.

Google is betting even bigger on Nexus.

The search giant is set to debut the latest version of its Android operating system, known as Android 4.2, at an event scheduled for October 29 in New York. Rather than the rumored Key Lime Pie, it will be known as Android 4.2+, or an updated version of Jelly Bean, according to a person familiar with the announcement.

More than 1,000 out of a sample of 13,000 Android applications analysed by German researchers contained serious flaws in their SSL implementations.

In this paper (PDF), the researchers from Leibniz University in Hannover and Philipps University of Marburg found that 17 percent of the SSL-using apps in their sample suffered from implementations that potentially made them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle MITM attacks.

Researchers with the Sandia National Laboratory have tied together 300,000 virtual Android-based devices in an effort to study the security and reliability of large smartphone networks.

The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment, the researchers stated.  That environment might include a full domain name service (DNS), an Internet relay chat (IRC) server, a web server and multiple subnets, said John Floren a computer scientist with the project.

Researchers have created a proof-of-concept Android malware app that is able to use the phone's sensors and camera to gather data that can be used to surreptitiously create a 3D model of a room. The research paperPDF from Robert Templeman of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indiana and Zahid Rahman, David Crandall and Apu Kapadia of the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University discusses an Android app they created called PlaceRaider.

Sharp announced in a Japanese-language press release earlier today that it has begun mass production of a series of 5-inch smartphone displays which will bring desktop HD resolution to mobile devices. The displays will max out at an impressive 1920×1080 pixels—the same resolution as many HD televisions and widescreen computer monitors—and with a dot pitch of 443 PPI, they will hold the top spot for the highest pixel density ever featured on a smartphone.

CyanogenMod ROMs give Android users the latest Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean treats to their otherwise-neglected smartphones, and it's mostly open-source except for one piece: the boarded-off ROM Manager.

To remedy that, the modding organization is bringing its OTA updater back from the CM5 and 6 graves, letting users pull updates straight to their devices.

Sometimes a word or sentence is enough to destroy friendships and relationships. In computing, pressing Y instead of N can create a nightmare for even the most experienced IT Pro. So it would be very frustrating if Samsung allowed a single line of code to be remotely executed, wiping your near full Galaxy S III, wouldn’t it?

Security researchers have discovered that one line of code is all it takes to start an unstoppable factory-reset of the S III, opening the possibilities for malicious websites to completely wipe the handset, restoring it to it’s out of the box experience.