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In the study, Dasient analyzed the live behavior of Android apps to determine their security posture. Of the 10,000 applications evaluated, more than 800 were found to be leaking personal data to an unauthorized server, Daswani says.

In addition, the researchers found that 11 of the applications were sending potentially unwanted SMS messages out to other smartphones--the mobile version of spam, Daswani says.

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Launching in Google's Android Market yesterday, the new Hulu Plus app allows Android users who subscribe to the $7.99-per-month service to stream TV shows and movies directly to their mobile devices.

For now, the app supports just six Android phones--the Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, Motorola Droid II, Motorola Droid X, and the Motorola Atrix. But Hulu is promising support for more Android phones as the year progresses.

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"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

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The volume of attacks that target the Android mobile operating system has increased by 400% since the summer of 2010. Also in that timeframe, one in 20 enterprise mobile devices has gone missing.

Those two findings come from the "Mobile Malicious Threats" report released Tuesday by Juniper Networks, which sells networking hardware and security products.

While significant, the four-fold increase in malware targeting Android isn't unexpected. "You don't have to be extraordinarily smart to write mobile malware these days because most devices don't have any security tools to stop the malware," said Dan Hoffman, chief mobile security evangelist at Juniper Networks, in a telephone interview.

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The Web-based version of the Android Market is receiving five new categories to help sort through applications: Top Apps, Editor's Choice, Top Developers, Related Apps, and Trending Apps. Each presents apps in a different way to make the discovery process more compelling and less annoying. Despite these improvements to the Web interface, the more important story is being told on Android devices directly.

Google announced a significant refresh to the Web interface of the Android Market on Wednesday and plans to push out an update to the Market on Android devices in the coming weeks. The goal of the update is to increase the visibility of the best applications and give developers (more) credit for their hard work.

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he new interface, is called Renderscript, said R. Jason Sams, an Android performance and graphics programmer at Google. He didn't say so in so many words, but the goal for the feature has to be better games on Android. It's a broader feature, though: it's used in Honeycomb's YouTube and Books apps.

"The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of their applications and are comfortable working closer to the metal to achieve this," Sams said in a blog post yesterday. "The target use is for performance-critical code segments where the needs exceed the abilities of the existing APIs."

To that end, Renderscript exposes two hardware-accelerated interfaces, one for rendering 3D graphics and one for for power-efficient computing operations. To use it, Renderscript relies on a variant of the C99 version of the C programming language. And the Renderscript plumbing that comes along with Honeycomb, aka Android 3.0, makes the decisions about whether to run the computing jobs on regular or graphics processors.

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In the last quarter of 2010, manufacturers shipped 32.9 million Android devices, while Nokia shipped 31 million Symbian handsets globally, according to analyst firm Canalys. Android now holds a third of the market, compared to 31% for Nokia. Apple held steady from the same quarter in 2009 with 16.2% market share, while RIM slid from 20% to 15%. Microsoft fell from 7.2% to 3.1% last year, as it unveiled its new OS, Windows Phone 7.

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Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s second-largest maker of wireless handsets, said it met a sales target for its most popular smartphone as the company seeks to narrow the gap with Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

Samsung sold 10 million units of the Galaxy S model in 2010 after introducing the device in June, the company said in an e-mailed statement today. The Suwon, South Korea-based phonemaker aims to double sales of smartphones this year as more customers use the device to make video calls, read electronic books and use social networking sites.