Nokia dumps Ovi mobile brand

Nokia is to stop using the Ovi brand to sell music, games and mobile apps, according to the BBC.

The company said it planned to wind up the four-year-old project and would offer services under the Nokia name in future. In its early days, critics claimed Ovi was an ill-conceived, rushed reaction to Apple's app store and iTunes.

However, by 2011 its worldwide user base was downloading an average of five million products every day. The changeover was revealed on Nokia's Ovi blog by editor Pino Bonetti.

The vast majority of devices running Google's Android OS are vulnerable to attacks that allow adversaries to steal the digital credentials used to access calendars, contacts, and other sensitive data stored on the search giant's servers, researchers have warned, notes The Register.

The weakness stems from the improper implementation of an authentication protocol known as ClientLogin in Android versions 2.3.3 and earlier, the researchers from Germany's University of Ulm said.

After a user submits valid credentials for Google Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, or several other accounts, the programming interface retrieves an authentication token that is sent in cleartext. Because the authToken can be used for up to 14 days in any subsequent requests on the service, attackers can exploit them to gain unauthorised access to accounts.

Over 20 000 malicious e-mails are targeted at UK government networks every month, chancellor George Osborne revealed yesterday in a speech at the Google Zeitgeist conference, reports V3.co.uk.

Osborne detailed the government's plans to ride the open data revolution to improve services, make government more efficient and cut regulation, and warned that this “age of digitised services” creates significant challenges.

Pointing to the recent large-scale hacking attack on Sony's network, which may have exposed the personal details of up to 100 million customers, the chancellor claimed the government is targeted by cyber criminals just as frequently as the private sector.

Microsoft's Bing search engine is increasing its emphasis on the recommendations shared within Facebook's online social network to give people something they can't find on Google's dominant search engine, reveals the Associated Press.

Starting yesterday afternoon, Bing's search results vary depending on whether the person making a request is logged into Facebook's online social network at the same time.

For example, Bing's standard ranking system might analyse a search request about the band U2 and relegate a link pertaining to the music group to the fourth or fifth page of results if the query came from someone who wasn't logged into Facebook at the time.