One of the reasons we liked the Nexus 7 so much was that it felt like a 7-inch tablet done right. Neither the form factor nor the $199 price point were new—Samsung, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others were all pushing 7-inch Android tablets—but the ASUS-Google joint was the first whose hardware, software, and price came together to make a convincing case for a smaller tablet.
Chrome 23 has been released and besides the significant feature improvements, Google has also addressed a number of 14 vulnerabilities to ensure that their customers are protected against potential cyberattacks.
The high-severity security holes fixed in Chrome 23 include a use-after-free in SVG filter handling, an Integer bounds check problem in GPU command buffer, a use-after-free in video layout, a memory corruption in texture handling, a bad write in v8, and an issue with a buggy graphics driver that only affects Macs.
Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy claims that Sophos anti-virus has a number of serious security flaws and should be kept away from important computer systems.
Ormandy claims that Sophos needs to avoid easy mistakes and issue patches faster.
Five years ago on 5 November 2007, the then newly formed Open Handset Alliance (OHA) announced the launch of Android, described as a "truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices". Headed by Google, the OHA is a consortium of various organisations involved in developing the open source mobile platform. When it was founded, the group had 34 members including T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola, and has since grown to 84 members including various other handset manufacturers, mobile carriers, application developers and semiconductor companies.
If you've used a smartphone or tablet at any point in the last five years or so, you have ARM to thank for it. The company doesn't actually manufacture any of its own chips, but it licenses its low-power CPU architectures and instruction sets to others like Samsung, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Apple, who all use the designs to build better battery life into tiny devices. The company isn't content with its niche, however: it has PCs and servers in its sights, and we're going to be seeing ARM chips in many more devices in the next year or two.
Mozilla Firefox has—barely—dipped below 20 percent market share for the second time in six months, after an October that saw Microsoft Internet Explorer grow, Google Chrome fall, and mobile browsing account for 10 percent of all Web traffic for the first time ever.
Google is aiming to chip away at Siri, potentially converting some iOS device users to its own side along the way. The company announced on Tuesday that its updated Google Search app for iOS is now available on the App Store, complete with its new "enhanced" voice search capabilities that Google discussed in August.
According to Tuesday's Google Blog post, the new voice search feature aims to better recognize the context and intent of your searches while providing "the comprehensive Google search results you know and love."
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.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have remedied a cryptographic weakness in their email systems that could allow an attacker to create a spoofed message that passes a mathematical security verification.
The weakness affects DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, a security system used by major email senders. DKIM wraps a cryptographic signature around an email that verifies the domain name through which the message was sent, which helps more easily filter out spoofed messages from legitimate ones.
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.
