Galaxy Nexus 4G LTE Finally On Sale

Verizon Wireless finally announced that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Android 4.0 on its 4G LTE network will be available on Thursday in stores and online for $299.99 with a two-year agreement.

The announcement, which came late Wednesday, arrived after days of speculation that the phone was being delayed over a dispute between the carrier and Google over the Google Wallet application, which doesn’t work on Verizon’s version.

During the period many expected Verizon to release the Galaxy Nexus, problems with the carrier’s LTE network arose for nearly two days, pushing LTE users to Verizon’s slower 3G service.

But Verizon never admitted there was any delay in releasing the device and pointed out that it had never given an official release date until Wednesday.

Verizon will carry a 4G LTE version that supports download speeds of up to 12Mbps. Online sales were set to start at 1 a.m. ET Thursday.

The new device has many features putting it at the top of the market for competing smartphones, including one of the highest prices: $299.99. Many rivals are priced at $200 or $250 on other U.S. carriers.

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Android Hits 10 Billion

Google said it exceeded 10 billion total app downloads from the Android Market over this past weekend at a growth rate of 1 billion downloads per month.

By comparison, Apple’s App Store passed the 15 billion download mark in July, with more than 200 million iOS devices now being used globally.

Google estimates there are more than 200 million Android smartphones and tablets.

“We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012,” said Eric Chu, direct of the Android Developer Ecosystem in a blog post Tuesday.

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IBM Goes Social

Responding to increased use of tablets within business settings, IBM will launch on Wednesday several mobile applications designed to let employees use IBM enterprise social collaboration software with iPads and other mobile devices.

The new applications, free to customers with active licenses of the IBM software, have been built specifically for tablet interfaces and have security, IT management and compliance features.

“The apps are very lightweight and talk directly back in a secure manner to the enterprise systems that people who don’t have these devices are using inside the company,” said Rob Ingram, senior manager of IBM’s Mobile Collaboration Strategy.

One of the applications lets employees use IBM Connections via iPads, while another one is for LotusLive Meeting users to participate in online meetings using iPhones or Android, BlackBerry or iPad tablets.

For IBM Sametime, another application lets employees engage in one-on-one or group instant messaging sessions on iPad and Android tablets. There is also one application for Lotus Symphony Viewer that lets users view ODF-based files, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations, on iPads, iPhones or Android devices.

There are also applications for managing telephony tasks within IBM Sametime from tablets and for Android device users to add widgets to home screens as shortcuts to their Lotus Notes mail and calendar.

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Yahoo Messenger Flaw Exposed

An unpatched Yahoo Messenger vulnerability that allows hackers to change people’s status messages and possibly perform other unauthorized functons can be exploited to spam malicious links to a large number of users.

The flaw was discovered in the wild by security researchers from antivirus vendor BitDefender while investigating a customer’s report about unusual Yahoo Messenger behavior.

The flaw appears to be located in the application’s file transfer API (application programming interface) and allows attackers to send malformed requests that result in the execution of commands without any interaction from victims.

“An attacker can write a script in less than 50 lines of code to malform the message sent via the YIM protocol to the attacker,” said Bogdan Botezatu, an e-threats analysis & communication specialist at BitDefender.

“Status changing appears to be only one of the things the attacker can abuse. We’re currently investigating what other things they may achieve,” he added.

Victims are unlikely to realize that their status messages have changed and if they use version 11.5 of Yahoo Messenger, which supports tabbed conversations, they might not even spot the rogue requests, Botezatu said.

This vulnerability can be leveraged by attackers to earn money through affiliate marketing schemes by driving traffic to certain websites or to spam malicious links that point to drive-by download pages.

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‘iPhone’ Most Searched Term On Internet

Apple’s iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the most searched term on the Internet in 2011, according to Yahoo!

The digital media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five.

American Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.

“This is the first time since 2002 that we have had a gadget at No.1, which is an iPhone.” Vera Chan, a Web trend analyst at Yahoo!, said in a conference call announcing the results of the review now in its 10th year.

“Even though the product has been around for four years it just became such a major news story,” she added.

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RIM’s Playbook Gets Jailbroken

Three hackers say they have taken advantage of a vulnerability in Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet to gain root access to the device, a claim that could damage the BlackBerry maker’s stellar reputation for security.

Root access means a user has permission to change any file or program on a device and can control hardware functions.

In a response to questions concerning the issue, RIM said it is investigating the claim, and if a “jailbreak” is confirmed will release a patch to plug the hole.

The three hackers – who identify themselves as xpvqs, neuralic and Chris Wade – plan to release their data within a week as a tool called DingleBerry.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems are frequently attacked by users who want to run programs that have not been authorized by the manufacturers, but breaches of RIM’s software are more rare.

The PlayBook runs on a different operating system than RIM’s current BlackBerry smartphones. However, the QNX system will be incorporated into its smartphones starting next year.

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Hackers Attempt To Access AT&T Mobile

AT&T Inc, the No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier, said it is investigating an “organized and systemic attempt” to access mobile customers’ information but that it did not believe any accounts were breached.

The company, which had 100 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter, said it is advising less than 1 percent of its wireless customers that there was an attempt to obtain information about their accounts.

It said that the parties involved appeared to have used “auto script” technology to see if AT&T telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts.

Spokesman Mark Siegel said AT&T’s “investigation is ongoing to determine the source or intent of the attempt to gather this information.”

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at&t iPhone 4S Has Fastest Speeds

A study measuring the performance of the iPhone 4S on the three major U.S. wireless carriers found AT&T to be the best in Web browsing and data downloads and uploads when compared to Apple’s latest smartphone on either the Verizon Wireless or Sprint networks.

iPhone newcomer Sprint was found to be superior with its iPhone 4S for network voice quality on the uplink (when the user is speaking), but Sprint was also about five times slower in Web browsing and data downloads than AT&T, according to the study released Friday by Metrico Wireless, a mobile performance measurement company. Verizon finished in the middle on those data tests, but trailed the other two carriers in voice quality.

Metrico measured five performance factors shortly after the iPhone 4S was launched on all three carriers in October: whether calls could be connected and held; voice quality; data performance; Web browsing by page load speeds and video performance.

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DoJ Charges Clickjacking Perpetrators

The U.S. Department of Justice is charging seven individuals with 27 counts of wire fraud and other computer-related crimes, accusing the group of hijacking 4 million computers across 100 countries in a sophisticated clickjacking scam.

According to the indictment, the defendants had set up a fake Internet advertising agency, entering into agreements with online ad providers that would pay the group whenever its ads where clicked on by users. The group’s malware, which it had planted on millions of user computers, would redirect the computers’ browsers to its advertisements, thereby generating illicit revenue.

The malware worked by capturing and altering the results of a user’s search engine query. A user would search for a popular site, such as ones for Netflix, the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, Apple iTunes and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Whenever the user would click on the provided link, however, the browser would be redirected to another website, one that the group was paid to generate traffic for.

The malware the group used also blocked antivirus software updates, which left users vulnerable to other attacks as well, according to the DOJ.

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Google, which last week created a bit of chaos with the launch of a Gmail application for Apple iOS devices, has decided to put out discontinue its Gmail application for the BlackBerry.

As of Nov. 22, Google will no longer offer technical support to users of the application, nor will it allow people to download it anymore, the company wrote in a blog post.

However, people will be able to continue using it, although Google will put its development efforts on the version of the application for mobile browsers, available at gmail.com.

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