E Buzz - 06 August 2010

Tesco has launched what it describes as "our most ambitious mobile application yet" on Nokia's Ovi Store. The app offers e-shopping for groceries, letting users search for products and add them to their online basket. It synchronises with Tesco's website, so that items added to the basket in the app are mirrored online, and vice versa. Mobile developer Ribot created the app for Tesco, which went live this week in Nokia's store.

Mobile Entertainment 

Mobile games publisher Connect2Media has teamed up with retailer HMV and label Defected Records to promote its new Lumines game. HMV is launching a contest around the game, with prizes including a trip to Ibiza, and free downloads of Defected's new compilation album. It's the first big campaign of this kind for the hmvgames portal, which HMV launched with Orange earlier this year. HMV, Orange and Defected will all be plugging the contest to their customers.

The Symbian Foundation has responded to Google's Android sales announcement by claiming its activating 50 per cent more phones each day. According to a report by analyst firm Canalys, over 300,000 Symbian-powered phones were sold every day in Q2 this year, compared to Android's 200,000. This equates to three phones per second being activated.

ore than one-fourth of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be classified as smartphones, according to ABI Research. ABI released its projections today as part of its mid-year report on the smartphone market. Currently ABI projects that 19 per cent of mobile phones sold in 2010 will be smartphones, up from 16 per cent of all mobile phones sold in 2009. ABI defines a smartphone as a cellular phone that runs on a high-level operating system.

 

The open source Mozilla project has been offering cash bounties for security bugs for six years now, but often bug finders simply turn down the cash. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge, according to Mozilla. "A lot of people would say, 'Don't worry about it. Donate it to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] or just send me a T-shirt,'" said Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development, in a recent interview.

Google has ended support for its Google Wave real-time collaboration and communication because of a lack of users. Google, which unveiled Wave at its annual I/O developer conference last year to whoops and cheers, said that it would no longer be working on the real-time collaboration and communication tool. The company acknowledged that despite huge internal excitement over the possibilities offered by Wave, users did not display the same enthusiasm. “Google Wave set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser,” wrote Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations at Google in a blog post. “We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag and drop files from the desktop – even “playback” the history of changes. “We were jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication,” he admitted.

The NHS spends up to £86m a year on thousands of websites that are difficult to find, badly designed and irrelevant to patient needs, according to a leaked government report. The Department of Health's digital communications review, circulated internally in June, identified 4,121 NHS websites – but noted that more than 1,000 were no longer accessible. Almost a third of the 2,873 live NHS websites had "at least one notable deficit in standards" with confusing navigation or poor content. Only half the websites provided email addresses, prompting the charge that "vulnerable members of the public are often not being properly catered for". The review is based on the findings of a research paper showing that patients "struggled to locate the NHS online with a Google search" and even when they did "the scale and depth of information on offer was daunting to many".

The Guardian 

A frequency analysis study of the words used in different types of spam has revealed the tactics used by spammers. Research conducted by MessageLabs Intelligence into short URL spam split the data into four types: sales spam, phishing, malware and targeted attacks. In each case it classified the words used in the headers into a top 10 format. The most common word in sales spam was 'Viagra', reflecting the popularity of pharmaceutical sales, which makes up around three quarters of all sales spam messages. 'Prices' was the second most common word, with 'special' and 'discount' also polling highly. For both phishing and malware spam the top word was 'account', showing the financial targets commonly sought by the spammers. 'PayPal' was popular with phishers while malware writers favoured 'attached' or 'attachment', a favourite attack vector

A critical flaw in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that was disclosed last week at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas could allow an attacker to compromise a user's system. The flaw, which is caused by an integer overflow error in the way the PDF viewer parses fonts, was disclosed by Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at consulting firm Independent Security Evaluators, during a Black Hat presentation. The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to corrupt memory via a specially crafted PDF file, according to an advisory from security firm Secunia. If exploited successfully, the flaw could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected system. “We are aware of the vulnerability reported by Charlie Miller at Black Hat and are in the process of developing a patch,” Adobe said in a statement sent to SCMagazineUS.com yesterday.

SC Magazine 

 

Almost a million mobile phones are upgraded in the UK every month as savvy customers seek out the best new handsets with the coolest, cutting-edge features. Until relatively recently, the only way to get rid of your unwanted phone was to “part-exchange” it for a new phone in some high-street stores, or give it to a charity that sends old handsets to people in developing nations. But now it’s possible to sell your unwanted mobile phones to “recycling” companies. With some three-year-old handsets fetching £50, it’s time to search dusty drawers and cupboards for the phones that time forgot. All you need is the handset – don’t bother with the box, manual or charger, and even if your phone is broken, you might get something for it. Finding the best price for your phone has got much easier thanks to a host of specialist price-comparison sites that have sprung up online. Input your phone’s make and model on a site such as Compare My Mobile or Search My Mobile, and it will aggregate prices from partner websites to show who is offering the best deal.