Symantec is reporting that they have detected a malicious Android app doing the rounds on file-sharing sites in the US and Asia. The fake application impersonates a pirated version of an app called Walk and Text, which lets you overlay a keyboard on a live feed from your phone's camera to avoid crashing into things while walking and texting, and is currently available in the Android Market ... Read more »

It sure is nice to see some new developer action over at Flickr. The relatively slow-moving photo-sharing service has just announced a new sharing update, which consists of several new and easy ways to embed or link to your photos: Share from Photo page: There's a new sharing option on each and every photo page. When logged off, the button shows only Facebook and Twitter options. But once ... Read more »

It's a big day for Google, what with the announcement that Kansas City (not that Kansas City, but the other one that's actually in Kansas) has been selected to be the lucky town to get wired up with Google Fiber -- but that's not all they've gone public with today. Their "+1" project, which has been the subject of conjecture for months, was finally unveiled as well. Google didn't exactly ... Read more »

Google is preparing to make the ads in Gmail even more accurately predict your tastes and needs. While Google has been relying on the contents of each individual email to help it target the ads next to it, the coming overhaul will make ads learn from the entirety of your email correspondence. To become more relevant to you, Gmail ads will start using some of the same signals that are ... Read more »

Google and the FTC have just announced that they've reached a settlement in the FTC's investigation of Google's privacy violations committed during the rollout of Google Buzz, the company's social network built inside of Gmail. One of the reasons Buzz never quite took off may have been the enormous backlash surrounding its launch, and Google's handling of Gmail users' privacy. The FTC claims ... Read more »

iSites -- a zero-code cloud-based 'app creator' -- can now generate HTML5 apps that work on iOS devices. With this new feature, dubbed 'InstantApp', you can now design a single app in your browser and publish it natively on Android and iOS, and as an HTML5 iPhone app. We haven't looked at iSites before, but it shot to fame last year when it launched with native iOS and Android support. ... Read more »

While this slick little HTML5 audio player might not pack all of the features of your favorite desktop media application, it's still a very cool demonstration of what a Web app can do with access to local resources -- like MP3 and OGG files. Just fire up http://antimatter15.github.com/player/player.html in your HTML5-compatible browser and browse to the topmost folder in your music ... Read more »

Right on cue, Google has launched in-app payment support for Android applications. Developer testing began last week, and now many popular apps -- like the ones pictured above -- can begin charging users for add-on functionality, content, or whatever the heck else they feel is worthy of additional bits of your pocket change. If you were wondering, Google will take the same 30% cut that Apple ... Read more »

Bots -- like the kind which automate IRC rooms and Google Wave -- are a good thing to know about. There are plenty of useful bots worth knowing about, too, including the Google Talk Guru. Just add guru@googlelabs.com to your GTalk buddies, and you can start firing off questions. Lifehacker suggests that the same types of queries supported by Google SMS will work, though we didn't have any luck ... Read more »

Just a little under two months after its release candidate went live, Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011 has been finalized and released into the wild. The new version of Microsoft's slick, do-it-all server OS is a big step forward from its predecessor. Built on the Windows Server 2008 R2 base, Home Server 2011 features a simpler dashboard, a better backup solution, dead simple remote access to ... Read more »

Over on the Internet Explorer Blog, Microsoft has posted results from an extensive comparison of the top five Web browsers. The goal: to determine whether Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Safari 5, or Opera 11 is able to squeeze the most life out of your laptop's battery. A baseline was determined with test systems sitting idle, and then browsers were pointed at about:blank, a ... Read more »

Cloud Girlfriend, despite what it sounds like, doesn't really have anything to do with cloud computing. Rather, it uses a cloud of women to pose as your girlfriend on Facebook, or your favorite social network of choice. The service is scheduled to launch 'soon,' and there's no indication of how much it will cost. With the tagline 'The easiest way to get a girlfriend is to already have one,' ... Read more »

We've all thought it, but never dared think it could be true: what if Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL actively monitor our instant messenger chats? What if mentions of 'bomb' and 'underage' are tracked and sent to law enforcement agencies? What if chat providers don't agree with the things we say, or the links we share, and filter or censor the content of our transmitted messages? Well, it looks like ... Read more »

Google's been busy with its pedal-powered Street View trike, going where no Street View car can reach, bringing us some of the most impressive virtual tours of significant landmarks across the globe. Now Google has made available Street View imagery of some of the most historic and impressive places in both Italy and France. Have you ever wanted to take a look round the Colosseum in Rome ... Read more »

The Mozilla-powered rapidly iterating media player for Android, Songbird, just got updated to version 1.1, bringing with it both bug fixes and new features. Top of the list is Android 3.0 Honeycomb support, so now you can get Songbird on your Honeycomb tablet. Also included is a new lock-screen widget that allows you to control music playback right from the lock-screen. Speaking of widgets, the ... Read more »