Techmeme: OEMs and carriers make Android's security update strategy ineffective at Android's scale; a major attack on unpatched phones seems inevitable (Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica)

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August 10, 2015, 1:55 PM

Top News

Tim Culpan / Bloomberg Business:

HTC market valuation falls below its cash on hand; brand, factories, and other assets deemed to have no value by investors — HTC Trading Below Cash Leaves a Smartphone Brand With No Value — An HTC M9 smartphone. Photographer: Pau Barrena/Bloomberg — A 60 percent plunge …

More: AppleInsider, TechCrunch, 9to5Google, Business Insider, AndroidGuys, Phandroid and ZDNet

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:

OEMs and carriers make Android's security update strategy ineffective at Android's scale; a major attack on unpatched phones seems inevitable — Waiting for Android's inevitable security Armageddon — Editorial: Android's update strategy doesn't scale, and that's recipe for disaster.

More: PCWorld

Mark Scott / New York Times:

PageFair study claims ad-blocking, regularly used by 200M people worldwide, will lead to $22B of lost ad revenue this year — Study of Ad-Blocking Software Suggests Wide Use — Guillermo Beltrà spends a lot of time surfing the web. — Yet like many avid Internet users …

More: Inside PageFair, AdExchanger, The Digital Reader, Business Insider, Fortune, Marketing Land, Business Insider, Ubergizmo and The Next Web. Tweets: @counternotions. See also Mediagazer

Hunter Scott:

How a Twitter bot written to automatically enter contests won 1000 prizes in 9 months, or about 4 contests per day — Twitter Contest Winning as a Service — This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning on average 4 contests per day, every day, for about 9 months straight.

More: Engadget, Business Insider, PCMag Australia Feed, Guardian, Techweez, Fox News and TechSpot

Connie Chan / Andreessen Horowitz:

How WeChat works, and how it became so popular in China: millions of apps within the WeChat app, built-in payments, and more — When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China — This post is all about WeChat, but it's also about more than just WeChat.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @stevecheney and @jonrussell. Thanks:@larrychiang

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:

Blockfeed, available in NYC, extracts location from news articles and serves users a feed based on where they are — Blockfeed App Surfaces Hyper Local News — The death knell has been sounded for local journalism at regular intervals during the digital era.

More: AVC

Harrison Weber / VentureBeat:

One year after the relaunch: Dennis Crowley on the future of Foursquare, privacy, and Yelp — Nearly a year after Foursquare's relaunch, we caught up with chief executive Dennis Crowley to talk Foursquare's future, its plan to cash in on ad tech, privacy, burrito discovery, and why the six-year-old startup doesn't have to kill Yelp.

Nick Wingfield / New York Times:

Vainglory creator Super Evil Megacorp raises $26M round led by Index Ventures — Vainglory Breaks Through in E-Sports on a Tablet — Under everyone's noses, the competitive video game scene has gotten huge, with more than 113 million fans globally by some estimates.

More: Super Evil Megacorp, VentureBeat, PE Hub Blog and The Verge

Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:

Google Hangouts for Android updated with Material Design, speed improvements, and less battery drain — Google today updated Google Hangouts for Android with a revamped design, faster performance, and new messaging features. You can download the latest version now directly from Google Play.

More: Official Google Blog, BetaNews, The Next Web, Android Police, 9to5Google, The Verge, AnandTech and Droid Life

Owen Williams / The Next Web:

Plex for iOS gets total redesign, better sync and Rotten Tomatoes integration — It's been a long time since Plex updated its iOS app, but today it's announced a major overhaul that brings a number of new features and makes the app available for free. — The first thing you'll notice is the revamp of how the app actually works.

More: Plex Blog, 9to5Mac, Engadget, The Verge, TechHive and Pocket-lint

Aman Shah / Reuters:

Xiaomi partners with Foxconn to assemble smartphones in India, announces first locally made phone, $110 Redmi 2 Prime — Xiaomi ties up with Taiwan's Foxconn to assemble smartphones in India — Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc [XTC.UL] has tied up with Taiwan's Foxconn to start assembling phones …

More: Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The Indian Express, CNNMoney, Bloomberg Business, VentureBeat, Tech2, Quartz and Tech in Asia

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:

Google goes with Vulkan as Android's low-overhead graphics API — Khronos also announces OpenGL ES 3.2, which Android already partially supports. — Low-overhead graphics APIs are all the rage these days, at least if you're the sort of person who gets excited about graphics APIs. iOS 8 introduced Metal …

More: Android Developers Blog, 9to5Google, VentureBeat, Engadget and AnandTech

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