Xpertfeed

With five additional apps found containing FalseGuide, Check Point has estimated 2 million Android users have unknowingly downloaded malware. An estimated 2 million Android users have now fallen victim to malware mistakenly downloaded from Google Play, which was initially reported to have affected approximately 600,000 users. The malware, dubbed FalseGuide, was hidden in more than 40 guide apps for games, the oldest of which was uploaded to Google Play as early as November last year, security researchers from  Check Point said . "Since April 24, when the article below was first published, Check Point researchers learned that the FalseGuide attack is far more extensive than originally understood," Check Point said. "The apps were uploaded to the app store as early as November 2016, meaning they hid successfully for five months, accumulating an astounding number of downloads." The security firm said it found five additional apps containing the malware...

Microsoft is working to add a new battery-saving feature to Windows 10 'Redstone 3', and it has begun testing it on machines with Intel sixth-generation and beyond Core processors. Microsoft rolled out its second "Redstone 3" test build for PCs on April 14. On April 18, officials went public with one of the under-the-cover features in that build:  Power Throttling . Microsoft officials first talked up intentions to provide this kind of battery-saving feature in January, when the company was testing the Windows 10 Creators Update. In Build 15002 of the Creators Update. Microsoft officials said they were experimenting with power throttling with some, but not all, testers. In early experiments, Microsoft executives said Power Throttling showed up to an 11-percent savings in CPU power consumption for "some of the most strenuous cases."Power Throttling (a temporary, not final, name for this feature) is in the Insider Preview build 16176 for Fast Ring PC t...

The limited test is so Samsung can understand how the market will react to a dual-screen smartphone. A report said Samsung also has a foldable OLED smartphone in the works to get into the market. Samsung plans to carry out pilot production of a dual-screen smartphone during the middle of this year,  reported  ET News, as the smartphone giant looks to better understand how the market will react to the form factor. Samsung is planning to produce 2,000 to 3,000 dual-screen smartphones and has already ordered corresponding components to complete the prototype device, the report said. It's not clear what the specific design of the dual-screen smartphone will look like, but it will be made up of two display panels, folded and unfolded. The Investor  added  that the prototype can be folded open 180 degrees and the two display panels are connected by a hinge in the middle. Samsung has been working on foldable display technology, but has yet to bring...

The bank has launched a pilot trialing voice verification for money transfers greater than AU$1,000. Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) has announced it will be introducing voice biometrics to its mobile banking in a bid to improve security on high value transactions. From mid-2017, customers transferring more than AU$1,000 through ANZ's mobile apps will be able to use their voice to automatically authorise high value payments, and bypass usual security measures such as visiting a branch in person. ANZ will kick off the new technology with a pilot running with ANZ staff and select customers in May using the Grow by ANZ mobile app. The service will then be rolled out to ANZ goMoney and other digital services progressively, the bank said. According to Peter Dalton, ANZ managing director customer experience and digital channels, voice biometrics is the next step in making banking more convenient for customers while also strengthening security. "One of the...

Summary: Verizon, Comcast and AT&T all defended their business practices following a controversial congressional vote that gives them the power to sell customers' data. Major internet service providers (ISPs) on Friday said they don't plan to sell their customers' web browsing data, even after Congress cleared the way for them to do so. The statements from Verizon, Comcast and AT&T follow the congressional vote to repeal federal regulation that would have prevented ISPs from selling consumers' personal information. "We have  committed  not to share our customers' sensitive information (such as banking, children's, and health information), unless we first obtain their affirmative, opt-in consent," wrote  Comcast senior vice president Gerard Lewis . He argued that Comcast's privacy commitments "go even beyond this protection of sensitive information that has dominated the dialogue this week. If a customer does not want us to ...

Summary: Microsoft fixes a bug that made its file-hosting service, OneDrive, slow on Linux but not on Windows. Microsoft has resolved a bug that made OneDrive and OneDrive for Business slow on Linux machines but not on any other platform, including iOS, Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows. A Microsoft OneDrive spokesman called Edgar has now confirmed that the issue has been resolved, pointing to a failure in a browser component designed to speed up background processing called prefetching. "We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms, iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, but for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue. Rest assured that this was not intentional. It was an oversight," Edgar  said  on  Hacker News . Microsoft fixed the issue by disabling prefetching and then enabled it again...

Summary: AMD takes aim at the highly lucrative mainstream PC market with its new Ryzen 5 chips. The high-end processor market may be where all the bragging rights lie, but it's the mainstream market where the volume is, and AMD is taking aim at that segment with its new Ryzen 5 processors. Ryzen 5 is AMD's new line of mainstream processors, joining the already released high-end Ryzen 7 chips, and the budget Ryzen 3 chips which are planned for the second half of the year. Ryzen 5 is a much bigger deal than Ryzen 7 because the mainstream processor sub-$300 market is about twice as big as the high-end market processor market. And AMD's re-entry into this mainstream market presents a real threat to Intel's dominance over the PC industry. AMD is unveiling four Ryzen 5 chips, ranging from the $249 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X down to the $169 4-core/8-thread Ryzen 5 1400: Model Cores/Threads Speed (GHz) Cooler Price ($) Ryzen 5 1600X 6/12 3.6/4.0 - 249 Ryzen 5...

Summary: The secretive system uses data and other techniques to ferret out cops and root out anyone who may do the service harm. An internal program used by Uber for years to dance around the police in areas where the ride-hailing service was frowned upon has been exposed. In cities such as Boston, Las Vegas, and Paris, alongside countries including China and South Korea, Greyball is used as part of the violation of terms of service (VTOS) program which Uber created in 2014 to ferret out and black-mark anyone that may be a threat to the firm.Dubbed Greyball, Uber's program uses data analytics and a myriad of other tactics to avoid the authorities in places where the service is resisted by law enforcement or banned outright, according  to the New York Times . Predominantly used in the US, Greyball first came to light in the same year when investigators began to hail rides using the Uber app to build a case against the company. One such investigator, Erich England from ...

Summary: History is littered with typo miscues that led to major tech outages, mixups and lots of losses. Amazon Web Services outlined its post mortem on its S3 outage and the cause boils down to one word: Typo. A typo?!? That's crazy right? Not really. In fact, typos plague software, code and have cost companies billions of dollars. The cloud giant offered the following when explaining its outage. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team  was debugging an issue  causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. Folks say misery loves company and the good news for AWS is that the typo club is pretty...

Summary: The city with the highest-profile Linux desktop projects is turning back to Windows, but the fate of Linux isn't tied to the PC anymore. After a nearly decade-long project to move away from Windows onto Linux, Munich has all but decided on a dramatic u-turn. It's likely that, by 2021, the city council will start to replace PCs running LiMux (its custom version of Ubuntu)  with Windows 10 . Going back maybe 15 or 20 years, it was seriously debated as to when Linux would overtake Windows on the desktop. When Ubuntu was created in 2004, for example, it was with the   specific intention of replacing Windows   as the standard desktop operating system. Linux on the desktop has about a two percent market share today and is viewed by many as complicated and obscure. Meanwhile, Windows sails on serenely, currently running on 90 percent of PCs in use. There will likely always be a few Linux desktops around in business -- particularly for developers or data sc...