Open an unknown PDF?
Surely not, might contain malware.
Malware made it past Google's detection systems and infected some 9 million Android users, analyst Trend Micro has found. Google has removed 85 apps from the Google Play Store as a result. Remote control Google's secret to a healthy phone? Remote-controlling your apps READ MORE The apps, purportedly TV and video players and …
The problem is, if you ditch all PDF viewers that have security problems, you can't open the file, because they all have (differing) security problems. It comes with the territory, PDF was built for a time when security wasn't an issue and executing embedded scripts and Flash wasn't a concern.
Now PDF is just a liability.
According to GSMArena's list, 221 currently available phones have IR transmitters (my own Honor included).
The last time I wanted to give a negative review on ebay (arrived damaged due to inadequate packaging) I was told that I was not allowed to give anything other than 5 stars (or whatever it is) because the seller was a “premium seller”.
I’ve given up either reading or writing online reviews entirely.
It's a flaw in the review systems. They should all have separate ratings for not only the quality of the item purchased but also the customer service. This would allow someone to grade it as "1" for the item, but give a "5" for the way the seller responded to the problem.
"It's a flaw in the review systems. They should all have separate ratings for not only the quality of the item purchased but also the customer service. This would allow someone to grade it as "1" for the item, but give a "5" for the way the seller responded to the problem."
That's exactly what Amazon do have. Ratings and reviews for goods and vendors are completely separate. The problem is that far too many idiots are apparently unable to understand the difference between the two and insist on putting the wrong reviews in the wrong places. Presumably these are the same people who have the bizarre habit of responding to random questions people have asked about products with the very helpful "I don't know".
For markets like China its very normal, and thus for exported versions. It is only Western markets where this isn't seen as pretty normal.
Our household fleet of various different Xiaomi devices all have IR "blasters". But the sensible way to set them up is not to download dodgy crapps, just to use the makers suggestion of running through trial and error of known and preloaded control protocols for the maker of the device you want to control.
Our household fleet of various different Xiaomi devices all have IR "blasters". But the sensible way to set them up is not to download dodgy crapps, just to use the makers suggestion of running through trial and error of known and preloaded control protocols for the maker of the device you want to control.
If only. My last phone (Samsung) had an IR controller, which was very convenient, it came with a bundled, but non-samsung app to use it. Eventually this grew more and more cruft (EPGs and things, needing to select location just to use it) and added adverts. I did investigate other options, but the ones that looked fairly legitimate either didn't work or were worse in terms of adverts.
Edit: oh and there was another class of controller apps, which were for something else (possibly smart tvs? it was a couple of years ago), telling which was which from the descriptions took a little work usually.
There's still a lot of people out there confused by the rapid progress of technology. You only have to deal with a few tech quesitons from your relatives to get a quick survey of what the average person knows about the inner workings of tech. It's frightening how blase some people are, it's not funny at all, it's damned scary that tech can ruin lives and people show it no respect.
We live, eat and breathe tech on a daily basis, we're barely able to keep up with it but we try to keep an eye on the important stuff. Now imagine the average person who has a ton of other responsibilities like home and family to keep an eye on. They deserve tech that's simple and safe and our duty, if you like, as techies to help the average person keep up with the pace, we shouldn't stand there mocking them when tech isn't their thing. When I need some building work doing, I expect someone to come in and give me an honest opinion about the work I want and hopefully and honest price, I do my best to understand and try to find a good builder but I'm trained in brick laying, plastering, etc, so I have trust word of mouth from friends about a good builder and hope he won't rip me off and it will fall down next month.
I completely agree with you. When I need something done, and don't know how to do it, I seek out a professional and hire them for the job. What you sometimes run into when giving tech advise is the "my buddy" problem; friend, acquaintance, co-worker "knows a lot about" tech (when the best they've ever done is plug in their PS4) and the person you're trying to help follows their advice instead of yours.
Real life case :
At the time I had 20+ years of high-end IT experience. Youngest brother comes to me; "I want to buy a computer, what should I get?" I ask a few questions and make a recommendation. A couple of weeks later he calls back and tells me he bought his computer. Great, what model did you get? X, Y, or Z? He had a friend tell him the computer I recommended was too expensive and that he should buy this cheap, crap, $300 PC clone he saw at Bill 'n Ted's PC Shoppe, Body and Fender Repair. He then proceeds to tell me how great, fast, etc it is.
Fast forward several months. He's installed a bunch of junk on it and the thing is having issues. It's also out of warranty. He comes to me for help. I hand him a copy of "PC Repair For Dummies" and tell him he should have listened to me in the first place. It was difficult, but, he learned.
Sometimes this kind of thing needs to be painful. Drives home the lesson.
So the app gives fake ad views. That should eventually:
A) pollute the dataset that the ad networks use to build up profiles of users
B) negatively impact the business model of the ad networks.
If there's no negative impact on the user (phone stability, mobile data use, premium SMS charges), is this really a negative for the end user? I may need to install the apps and give them a 5-star rating!
Yes, you're right.
It would be a good idea if someone could come up with an application that would heavily pollute the data the Internet behemoths are slurping. Like for example continuously giving random location data proving you're in two different places at the same time, repeating every two minutes "Hey Alexa/Google/Siri" followed by talk from some TV or radio station (preferably in foreign languages).
There must be a innovative way we can fight back.
"Didn't work as advertised, showed lots of ads. Where is the mal?"
By your (flawed) logic, these 8 indictments should be overturned:
https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/3ve-ad-fraud-google.html
Perhaps if those 8 individuals would have just created some bogus apps on the Google Play Store they would still be in business?
After all, the fake browser update that used PowerShell to create a fileless rootkit to serve up hidden ads that caused my siblings Dell XPS to grind to a halt fits your description to a tee:
"Didn't work as advertised, showed lots of ads."
The idiot writer clearly doesn't know the difference and just carries on embarrassing himself in public.
I find it hillarious how this guy still has a job writing tech shite like this.
The only person that has a script created to filter out his rancid spew. (Since 2011)
https://slated.org/bullshit_blocker
Wasn't Trend Micro's apps pulled from the Apple Store recently?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/10/trend_micro_apple_macos/
Users should also be aware that many apps contain trackers and analytics from Facebook.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/51994/
I'll give Register some credit for once. An article that just states the facts, no editorial.
Now if it were an Apple story you could guarantee much editorial on how Apple is evil and anyone who buys Apple an idiot, followed by much trolling and vitriol (vitroll, I just made that word up!) in comments.
Then they are just as bad. What is malicious about showing unwanted ads? It's annoying, but it's not malicious. Anyone saying otherwise is a clickbaiter and can't be trusted.
malicious
/məˈlɪʃəs/Submit
adjective
adjective: malicious
characterized by malice; intending or intended to do harm.
"he was found guilty of malicious damage"
synonyms: spiteful, malevolent, hostile, bitter, venomous, poisonous, evil-intentioned, ill-natured, evil, baleful, vindictive, vengeful, vitriolic, rancorous, malign, malignant, pernicious, mean, nasty, harmful, hurtful, mischievous, destructive, wounding, cruel, unkind, defamatory; More
informalbitchy, catty;
literarymalefic, maleficent
"he bore their malicious insults with dignity"
antonyms: benevolent
I'm not usually convinced by a dictionary quote, so I will bite.
Ads can be an attack surface and therefore they make you vulnerable. Generally as a society we agree that forcing people into vulnerable situations is not ok, and you could argue that the act of forcefully increasing vulnerability is actually harm in itself.
Another argument might be that the app authors intended to serve ads, which take up system resources - thereby depriving the phone user of something. Being deprived of something is harmful, which is why we require consent for things to be taken, and call it theft otherwise.
"What is malicious about showing unwanted ads?"
It's using up your data allowance by doing phantom clicks on ads and in some cases, carry on doing so in the background even when you think you've closed the app, which is using up your CPU cycles and probably slowing down your phone.
Yawn, next you'll be saying on every article. "They aren't hackers they are crackers - hackers are 1960s beardy types who manipulate software to find out how it works".
Well terms get genericised and changed over time. An app that promises to do xyz but in reality does nothing of the sort, just loads up click-frauds through as many ads as possible and then keels over is clearly only intended to deceive. Therefore a generic term of malware could apply.
At least one of the apps mentioned (TV Remote) uses Google's own AdMob and Facebook for serving up the ads.
The app pulls a plain text file from an unencrypted HTTP content delivery network that contains the relevant ID's for AdMob and FB.
And as always, Facebook's Graph API includes "Places" for: speed, heading, altitude, latitude, longitude, signal strength, MAC address, WIFI ssid and Bluetooth.
But the app itself doesn't do anything remotely as advertised.
(See what I did there?)
They still serve more malware than anyone else
They NEVER send you an Email informing you they removed a Malicious app you downloaded (must have valid email to download)
No company in the world gets away with that like google. It's like they are part of the government and can do anything they want.
If one AV company did that even for a day, they would be out of business. But google, ohh they can't be bothered by peoples concerns, there to much data to harvest and money to be made.
High proportion of negative reviews
Um....that thing has an overall 4 star rating. What criteria are you using to define "high proportion of negative reviews"? I mean, yeah, it's got a lot of 1-star reviews, but not enough to drag the rating down significantly. Granted that's because of 100k almost-certainly-bot-generated 5-star reviews, but still most people are just going to look at the overall rating, not the individual reviews.
The process is quite simple to understand. They take an average of all reviews and assign that as the rating. The problem with that approach is that 5-star reviews by the thousand are available for purchase from unscrupulous sorts with access to botnets and distort the ratings significantly.
Disgruntled Alcatel owners have been sounding the alarm about Alcatel's shady built-in applications for a long time but our complaints have fallen on deaf ears.
It's about time Alcatel's dodgy apps are finally getting some attention from the media other than just angry users on Android message boards looking for ways to delete/disable this data sucking bloatware.
https://www.upstreamsystems.com/secure-d-uncovers-pre-installed-malware-alcatel-android-smartphones-manufactured-tcl/