BZ Media’s Android Developer Conference kicked off today in Santa Clara, headlined by keynote speaker Hans Dockter creator of the Gradle build system and CEO of Gradle. He showed off some of the improvements his company is working into future releases of the system. Gradle is currently at version 2.9, but Dockter spoke about the … continue reading
Wikipedia has a past of being notorious for incorrect information, since it’s a site that anyone can edit. Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, has built an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to identify these acts of vandalism, a step toward replacing some of the volunteer editors with AIs. His engine relies … continue reading
Advertising is to be expected when using a mobile device. But a recently detected Android adware takes advertising to a whole new level by setting up other programs with advertisements in an unwanted and malicious way. It even steals confidential information from the victim. Discovered by “Dr. Web,” a group of Russian anti-virus specialists, Android.Spy.510 … continue reading
More than half the data transferred to and from 500 popular Android applications was found to have little or no impact on user experience, according to a recent MIT study. “We looked at the communication of mobile applications and counted the number of statements in the application that establish these connections,” said Julia Rubin, a … continue reading
Microsoft is looking to entice Android users to switch to Windows Phone with a new tool. AppComparison is a Google Play app designed to list which Android apps are available on Windows. “Are you considering changing your Android device to Windows Phone? AppComparison identifies your favourite Android apps and matches them with apps available from … continue reading
Google today announced the preview release of Android Studio, the company’s developer environment for mobile applications that focuses on speed of delivery and testing Android apps for every device. In a call with SD Times prior to today’s first Google Android Developer Summit, Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson, group product manager for Android Studio, outlined three key … continue reading
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has partnered with the FIDO Alliance in order to strengthen authentication across the Web. FIDO aims to address the lack of interoperability among authentication technologies. “Standardizing strong authentication in the Web Platform will help us to improve user and application security by moving beyond passwords,” said Wendy Seltzer, technology … continue reading
The open-source programming language Julia is getting a boost from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The foundation has announced a U.S.$600,000 grant to help bring the programming language out of beta and to version 1.0. Julia is designed to eliminate the need for researchers to use multiple programming languages to perform computational analyses and … continue reading
Mozilla has announced the Firefox OS 2.5 developer preview along with an experimental Android app. The app lets developers experience Firefox OS as an alternate home screen on their Android device, without having to re-flash and replace Android installation. Version 2.5 features add-ons that can extend apps, a new privacy feature that allows users to … continue reading
Lookout, a mobile security company, has detected more than 20,000 samples of a trojanized adware pretending to be top apps like Candy Crush, Facebook, Google Now, NYTimes, Okta, Twitter, WhatsApp and more, according to its blog. Auto-rooting adware is a malware that roots the device automatically after the user installs it, embedding itself as a … continue reading
Developers want end users to engage with their applications, and a new way of trying to achieve that is having devices learn from the user and adjust accordingly. This capability has been seen in technologies such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, IBM’s Watson, and Microsoft’s Project Adam, but has been mostly too complex and too … continue reading
Facebook announced it will be mandating members of its team to switch to Android in an effort to better acquaint them with the world’s largest mobile platform. The company sees this as an essential piece in its efforts to reach new users in markets that are coming online for the first time. Chris Cox, Facebook’s … continue reading
