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Gigabud RAT malware exploits accessibility services to swipe info
Hackers continue to target known assistive software vulnerabilities
Malware has proven to a blessedly small but still persistent-as-a-mosquito problem on Android. Hackers frequently target known weak points in the operating system to take advantage of users, and more often than not, accessibility software is exploited. Recently, cybersecurity researchers Group-IB have attributed a spate of financially-driven hacks across Southeast Asia and Central America to the Gigabud Random Access Trojan (RAT), on Android devices.
Google Meet gets live captions in North America and Latin America
US Americans had to wait for a Google feature, for once
As an international website with a mostly-US staff, covering a US company, we get a lot of commenters telling us how much it sucks that Google's stuff isn't available everywhere immediately. Well today all of you international readers get to thumb your noses at us! Assuming you live in Europe or Asia. And also that you really care about a very specific feature of the Meet video conferencing tool.
YouTube Kids is now available in eight more countries
All the latest additions are in the Middle East and North Africa
YouTube Kids has proven to be a popular way for parents to give their children access to a limited collection of YouTube content, even if that collection occasionally includes videos depicting suicide and cannibalism (oops!). The service has slowly been expanding its global reach, and now Google has added 11 more nations to the availability list.
Niantic's augmented reality take on Pokémon GO continues to be staggeringly popular as it approaches its one month anniversary. It recently passed 100 million downloads across Android and iOS, despite some rather vocal negative press after the removal of the Pokémon step tracker and third-party tools for hunting monsters manually. Today Niantic is expanding the game to some of the biggest markets it hadn't previously supported: South America and Central America.
Update #1 (8/12/14): It looks like Google deleted the tweet embedded below. Between that and the lack of an update to this support page, someone might have pulled the trigger early. But if those countries don't have access yet, they probably will sometime soon.
Samsung is well-known for its ubiquity in the feature-phone market, and it's starting to look like they'll be employing the same assault-on-all-sides approach with Android phones too. As if they aren't struggling already to keep their phones up to date, Sammy is now digging a deeper hole with today's announcement of four budget-oriented devices set to prop up the rather premium Galaxy S.