News briefs for January 18, 2019.
openSUSE announces three new Tumbleweed snapshots[1] to start of 2019, which include updates for KDE Plasma, Vim, RE2, QEMU, curl and much, much more. The openSUSE blog post notes that, "all snapshots have either logged or are treading as moderately stable with a rating of 83 or above, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. There are more than 300 packages in staging that will likely be released in several snapshots over the coming weeks."
Malware in Google Play used motion sensors in phones to hide itself, triggering only when the phones moved. According to Ars Technica[2], the malicious apps avoid detection by monitoring "the motion-sensor input of an infected device before installing a powerful banking trojan to make sure it doesn't load on emulators researchers use to detect attacks. The thinking behind the monitoring is that sensors in real end-user devices will record motion as people use them. By contrast, emulators used by security researchers—and possibly Google employees screening apps submitted to Play—are less likely to use sensors. Two Google Play apps recently caught dropping the Anubis banking malware on infected devices would activate the payload only when motion was detected first. Otherwise, the trojan would remain dormant." Trend Micro found the malware in two apps: BatterySaverMobi and Currency Converter.
XDA Developers got their hands on a Google Pixel 3 XL with a leaked version of Android Q[3], giving them a first look at what Google has been working on. First is a system-wide Dark Theme. In addition, it has a huge permissions revamp "in the Settings app that allows you to get an overview of permission access by apps and restrict certain permissions like location only while the app is in use". It also includes new Developer Options, accessibility settings and other miscellaneous changes.
deepin 5.9 has been released[4]. This release