Tag / Android

by Shama-e Zaheer

Mobile Users Get Smarter (Phones)! Apple & Android Rise, Nokia Falls

According to a recent report by Gartner Inc., sales of smartphones were up 74% year-on-year, accounting for 25% of overall sales of mobile devices in Q2, 2011, up from 17% in Q2, 2010.

Having led smartphone sales over the last five years, Nokia is set to lose its top spot as the largest seller of smartphone in Q3, 2011, according to Gartner. These are in terms of smartphone sales to end users. In terms of shipments to vendors, Nokia has already lost the top spot to Apple (and the 2nd place Samsung), according to research firms Strategy Analytics and IDC Research.

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by Shama-e Zaheer

And The Hackers Get Younger by the (Zero) Day

A 10-year-old girl, who goes by the pseudonym – “CyFi”, has found that games apps on smartphones or tablets running on iOS or Android mobile platforms can be hacked into by tinkering with the device’s clock settings, which exposes an exploitable security loophole, or a “zero-day flaw”.

The girl displayed her hacking skills at the first annual DefCon Kids hacker conference – a subset of DefCon Hackers Conference in Las Vegas, the self-identified “world’s longest running and largest underground hacking conference”. Her presentation was titled “Apps — A Traveler of Both Time and Space; And What I Learned About Zero-Days and Responsible Disclosure”.

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