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New Google Data Shows Dangers of Third-Party App Stores (onthewire.io)
Trailrunner7 writes: Google's position in the Internet world is a unique one. In one or another, the company controls or sees much of the traffic on the network and owns one of the larger computing arsenals on the planet. It's also in control of a decent chunk of the mobile world, thanks to Android's popularity, and securing that ecosystem is a tremendous challenge in both complexity and scope. Google scans more than 2 million apps every week for its 1.4 billion Android users. And it collects a lot of data from its users, of course. Some new data from the company shows that using only the Play store is much safer than using third-party app stores. The data Google has collected shows that users who install apps only from the Play store have far fewer potentially harmful apps installed on their devices than users who also sideload apps.
News at 11.
PHAs are apps that the company finds have potentially harmful behavior, undocumented behavior, or other functions that could harm a user’s device or compromise his privacy.
Er... shouldn't that be all of them? Where are these mythical apps that don't have undocumented behaviours (aka a bugs)?
Useless article.
Amazon? What exactly are we talking about here? Who are the players?
Do fucking shut up.
app store censorship and carrier lockdown are bad parts of a 1 app store only system.
In other words, Google says Google is better. How about an *independent* study?
Anyone else remember when apple pulled all the apps that let you use the camera flash as a flashlight? Or how you still afaik can not get a app to scan wifi aps?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
TFA has all the factual content of a fluff piece read by the attractive yet dimwitted weekend morning anchor on the local news. There is no information at all to back up the baseless claims in the article. Not even a link to the "data" or a summary of the "data" that Google has allegedly collected.
This story should never have made it out of the firehose.
"In one or another, the company..."
Error: article makes no sense at sentence two. Can't be bothered fucking reading."
I just checked channel 4 and the news is on right now.
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You'll can pry that from my cold dead hands.
In one or another
It seems this article has lost its "way".
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
And again at 11.
That's a relief, because I chose the totally naive route and IGNORED THEM.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The ability to use the flash as a light is built into the OS now.
Until systemd resets the system date to it's release date and triggers a nuclear launch.
I'd personally trust more a repository of programs where the programs had been built from source by volunteers and was free to tinker with under a FOSS license.
Looks like a Google employee managed to get an advertising piece linked to from Slashdot's main page.
If Google wasn't so stupid about what they don't allow in the Play Store, the 3rd party market wouldn't have been born.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
real conclusion: Users who sideload fall victim of malware that google is able to identify and so block them on their app store.
malware that pass the app store validation also pass google head count in this joke of a study.
My logs are still plain text.
Which means you configured it to pass the logs on to the system logger, this is not the default.
Or else it might mean that you're thinking your logs are text merely because journalctl outputs text.
Geez.
I dloaded doom-touch apk from a russian server and only gripe is their russian font in the gui.
That's news to me.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It doesn't so much follow that Play is safer (although it probably is for other reasons), but that there are determined idiots out there who'll put their phone, privacy and security at risk to save a few dollars.
BTW, there are many reputable 3rd party app stores who either curate or proactively monitor their submissions but Google probably doesn't make the distinction. It probably just scans apks on infected phones and determines if they came from their store or "somewhere else" which means Amazon's appstore, F-droid and all the rest are lumped in with the warez sites.
So, basically google now says, that Apple's "single App Store" is the better model?
10 times more secure of whatever then other android app stores, is still bad, it should be zero. We're talking about malware here, why is it even on google play?
I wonder what the malware rate for the f-droid 'store' is?
Screw this closed source mobile app world, it's even worse then what we had on windows.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
There is an *Apple* app for their own APs that has a scan mode that lets you scan for APs. It's not as fancy as some I've seen for Android, but it's useful enough to have.
Because there's no way to write a wifi-scanner without using private APIs. You can probably write a very basic one that scans for available APs, but gets you little more than what the settings dialog shows you anyways using the available APIs. Getting any more information requires private API usage which is banned.
Of course, no one really talks much about it since Apple has an open-source sideload ability now - open source apps can be loaded on your iOS device provided you have a Mac. (Yes, I say open-source because Apple strongly discourages abusing this mechanism for binary only apps - which is what happened to f.lux - they distributed their app as a binary with an Xcode project wrapper).
Which I find mind-boggling, for Apple has found a way to have a walled garden, support open-source applications (no, you can't download binaries, but you can certainly BUILD the binary yourself and load it on your device), with the advantage that open-source apps can do a lot of things since Apple doesn't approve them. Oh yeah, added Mac sales, yadda yadda yadda.
"have far fewer potentially harmful apps installed on their devices than users who also sideload apps"
This statement tells you all you need to know. Even the Google store gets harmful apps.
Pot, meet kettle.
Now, go to a quiet place and try to figure out why you are such retarded sheep, and are ok with Google having all your personal information while shoving virus-laden ads and pushing nefarious apps to the device you only THINK you own.
Are there any Adults in business anymore?