Other rumored features to expect in the new iPhone? A faster A10 CPU, 3 gigs of RAM, 32gigs base memory (finally), and faster LTE performance. Again, all rumors, but September is just around the corner.
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Speaking of phones, a new report just out from mobile threat monitor Check Point says up to 10 million Android phones worldwide may be infected with “hummingbad” malware.
Damn those hackers, right? Except it appears Hummingbad isn’t exactly a product of someone killing time in their basement, but rather, it was designed by shady Chinese ad server agency Yingmob to be a cash cow – and it’s working. It seems to be a sort of malware/hacker ad campaign and Check Point says it’s pulling in about $300,000 per month in fraudulent ad revenue. Check Point first spotted Hummingbad back in February and it has exploded since then.
Worse, infected phones can be put to work as a botnet whenever someone decides to take that step. Hummingbad was confined to China and India but is now worldwide, with about a quarter million phones infected in the U.S.
To get rid of it, you‘ll basically need to wipe your phone.
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Google went shopping in France recently and came home with some new berets, baguettes and a little company that will identify things in the pictures people take. Called Moodstocks, the startup uses machine learning-based image recognition to recognize things in your cellphone photos, sort of like how Shazam can suss out that tune you like.
The idea is, you can search for things like “beach” or “car” or “handbag,” and once the Moodstock software finds it, it can of course link to a place to buy said bag or car. Amazon recently bought a company that essentially does the same thing. Hopefully we can turn these features off so we can also browse our photos in peace.
