Important announcements
Study finds that most Android VPNs are not as secure as they claim
In theory, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) protects your data because it’s supposed to mediate the internet access. By using various techniques such as encryption and masking, a secure VPN act as a firewall and will protect you from malicious traffic. A study conducted by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation points out that 18 percent of apps don’t encrypt traffic, 16 percent inject code into your data stream and 84 percent leak IPv6 and DNS data.
You can read more here.
Facebook is shutting down Parse developer platform
Parse was known for its “backend as a service” product, and provided SDKs and APIs to let developers make apps to run quickly without the effort of building a backend from scratch. The platform was very popular among smaller developers which also came from the fact that it was completely free for many small users and you could opt to pay a fee once your application began to grow and require more resources.
More info are available here.
Google paid $3 million in 2016 for its bug bounty program
In 2016 Google paid $3 million in rewards to 350 bug hunters from 50 countries who discovered more than 1,000 security vulnerabilities in Android, Chrome, and other Google products. This sum is about 50% higher than the $2 million that Google spent on similar rewards in 2015, and double the $1.5 million it paid out in 2014. Counting last year’s awards, Google has so far awarded $9 million in bug bounties since it first introduced the Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) in 2010.
You can read more here.
Top new products
Moto G5
The phone will have a a 3000mAh battery, a 5.5-inch full-HD display and will come with 16GB of inbuilt storage. Moto G5 will have a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel camera at front.
More info here.
ZTE Blade A610
The smartphone will have a 5,000 mAh battery, a MediaTek MT6750T octa core processor, 2 GB RAM, and 16 GB ROM. It will also come with a 5.5 inch FHD display, 13 MP rear camera and 8 MP front facing camera.
More info here.
LG Watch Sport
The Watch Sport will be priced at $349 and will have NFC (and thus Android Pay support), GPS, and a heart rate monitor. It will also come with Android Wear 2.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity.
More info here.
Top interesting info
WordPress patches dangerous XSS, SQL bugs
Three security flaws including a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and SQL injection problem were patched by WordPress. While the WordPress core was not directly vulnerable due to the security flaw, the patch adds hardening which will “prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability.”
You can read more here.
Apple has removed the Check Activation Lock Status page from iCloud.com
Activation Lock was introduces in iOS 7, and it is a security feature meant to prevent the use of lost or stolen devices. The tool allowed users to enter the serial number or IMEI of iOS devices to find out if Activation Lock was active, and so helping consumers who were interested in purchasing used devices to avoid stolen ones. Apple has not commented on why it took down the tool.
More info can be found here.
Google Chrome for iOS is now open source
Despite the “additional complexity” associated with the platform, Google says that its team spent a lot of time over the past several years to make the necessary changes required to upstream the code for Chrome on iOS into Chromium. Developers can now compile the iOS version of Chromium just like they do for other platforms. “Development speed is also faster now that all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire Chromium community and automatically run any time that code is checked in,” the company said.
You can read more here.
