Fast-food items in the U.S. are much saltier than the same items in Europe, according to new research. France and the United Kingdom had the least salty food overall.
from News
From Kotaku: Good Advice For Combating Video Game Addiction
While it’s easy to find mainstream media attacking video games for no reason, it’s also undeniable that video games can be an addictive hobby, especially for young children. More »
from Kotaku
From Ars Technica: Google’s official app market found hosting malicious Android apps—again
Google has removed at least 15 Android apps from its official Play market after receiving outside reports they were malicious trojans that siphoned names, telephone numbers of email addresses of every person in the phone’s contact list.
The apps, which were reported here by McAfee researcher Carlos Castillo, masqueraded as video players offering trailers of Android games and anime content. In the background and without warning, they also obtained the phone number and a unique identifier of the infected device and sent the information in clear text to a remote server under the control of the software developers. Statistics provided by Google Play (formerly the Android Market) indicated they had been downloaded at least 70,000 times, according to Castillo, who didn’t provide the name of the apps or the developers marketing them.
The discovery marks at least the second time Google servers have been caught distributing Android malware since the company announced a new cloud-based service that scours its online bazaars for malicious apps. Two weeks ago, a separate set of researchers found malicious extensions in the Google Chrome Web Store that could gain complete control of users’ Facebook profiles.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on Friday’s report from Castillo. Japanese researchers appear to have been the first to uncover the malicious apps, according to this translation from hatena.ne.jp.
The repeated discoveries of malware hosted on Google servers underscore the darker side of a market that allows anyone to submit apps with few questions asked. Whatever critics may say about Apple’s App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren’t one of them. Why outsiders are making the all-too-frequent discoveries of trojans in Google Play and the Chrome store before the company’s security team does is a question that has yet to be answered.
from Ars Technica
From The UberReview: Man Nearly Becomes PSA for Dangers of Texting and Walking… Around Bears
By now most of us have at least heard that walking and texting can be a dangerous pastime – I mean there are all sorts of things that could go wrong: you could walk into a pole, step in front of a moving vehicle, or as this man proves – wander into the path of a confused bear. Fortunately nobody was hurt and while I am not certain that turning around and running as fast as you can is what you are supposed to do in these situations, it worked for him – so the young man will live to text and walk another day.
Click here to view the embedded video.
–Thanks Michael
from The UberReview
From Gizmodo: Dental X-Rays Linked to the Most Common Brain Tumors
Cancer researchers have found that certain types of dental X-rays significantly increased the incidence of the most common type of brain tumor in the United States: meningioma. More »
from Gizmodo
From Ars Technica: Twitter helps free kidnapped South African from trunk of his car
A South African man, whose name has not been published, was carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.
Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time. Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country—over 10,000 such incidents occurred last year.
from Ars Technica
From Ars Technica: Flashback trojan reportedly controls half a million Macs and counting
Variations of the Flashback trojan have reportedly infected more than half a million Macs around the globe, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web. The company made an announcement on Wednesday—first in Russian and later in English—about the growing Mac botnet, first claiming 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that the count had gone up to 600,000, with 274 bots even checking in from Cupertino, CA, where Apple’s headquarters are located.
We have been covering the Mac Flashback trojan since 2011, but the most recent variant from earlier this week targeted an unpatched Java vulnerability within Mac OS X. That is, it was unpatched (at the time) by Apple—Oracle had released a fix for the vulnerability in February of this year, but Apple didn’t send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.
from Ars Technica