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What is the SOVA virus?

India’s federal cyber security agency has recently issued an advisory on the SOVA virus. And, leading banks are alerting their consumers to stay cautious about the new virus. Know more in this segment

Several Indian banks, including HDFC Bank and IDBI Bank, have warned account holders against downloading their mobile applications from any source other than official app stores. They issued the alert after an advisory issued by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In. Reason? A new type of malware, is the SOVA virus.

A new version of the Trojan virus, SOVA, has reportedly targeted over 200 mobile banking and crypto apps and is stealing their login credentials and cookies. It can hold the information to ransom.

– What is SOVA?
SOVA is an Android banking trojan malware that targets banking apps to steal personal information and adds false layers over a range of apps. These layers help the malware mimic the payment app. The malware was first detected for sale in the underground markets in September 2021.

– What can SOVA do?
SOVA virus can harvest usernames and passwords via keylogging, stealing cookies, and adding false overlays to a range of apps. There are several functions an SVA malware can perform. These include performing gestures like swiping, stealing cookies, taking screenshots, and adding false overlays. The virus has also undergone an update. Now, it can encrypt all the data and hold it for ransom.

– How does SOVA work?
The malware spreads through smishing. Smishing is a process where fraudulent SMS are sent to individuals prompting them to share their details, including passwords. Once the app is downloaded on the mobile phone, the malware sends the list of all the downloaded apps to the server that the attacker controls.

The server sends back the list of targeted apps to the malware and stores the critical information in an XML file. The malware and the server then manage the apps.

– Can the attacked app be uninstalled?
Sorry. After the latest updates, when a user tries to uninstall an attacked app, they will be unable to do so. A message, “This app is secured”, will be displayed on the screen.

– How can users protect themselves?
Download the mobile apps only through official app stores. Also, check the “Additional Information” section while downloading the apps and review the app details, number of downloads and user reviews.

Another practice CERT-In recommends is downloading the latest updates of the apps and operating software provided by device vendors. Additionally, download and activate anti-virus software.

Do not browse un-trusted websites or follow un-trusted links and exercise caution while clicking on the link provided in any unsolicited emails and SMSs

In case of any unusual activity in the bank accounts, immediately report it to the respective banks.

Apple iPhone users to get 12 spam message filters with iOS 16 in India

The new feature in Apple’s iOS 16 will make it simple for iPhone users to distinguish between spam messages and helpful ones

The new feature in Apple’s iOS 16 will make it simple for iPhone users to distinguish between spam messages and helpful ones.

According to Mashable, the technological behemoth improved the SMS filters by adding 12 additional filters for spam communications. This update was made specifically for Indian iPhone owners.

There will be 12 sub-categories, according to a study, including warnings for credit or debit cards, bill payment, finances, government services, network providers, healthcare, and online orders. There will also be the currently in place ones, including Transactions and Promotions.

Additionally, users will be able to easily and quickly add movie or train tickets to their Apple Wallet accounts or calendars from their communications.

This new software upgrade from Apple reportedly rolls out to the general public in September and includes a multitude of capabilities.

The business has made numerous improvements to iOS 16 including the lock screen widgets, alerts, and more, making it a completely revamped upgrade. Within 15 minutes, users will be able to amend the texts they have sent over iMessage, as reported by Mashable.

The final public release of iOS 16 will likely occur in September along with the debut of the iPhone 14 series, the following flagship smartphone lineup. The update is presently available for beta testing.

Instagram announces new features, expands Reels duration to 90 seconds

With an aim to help creators engage more with their audience, platform Instagram has announced that it is rolling out new features, including 90 seconds Reels

With an aim to help creators engage more with their audience, the photo-sharing platform Instagram has announced that it is rolling out new features, including 90 seconds Reels.

The Meta-owned platform said that it is now extending the length of Reels up to 90 seconds, which will help users express their most authentic selves on Reels.

“You will have more time to share more about yourself, film extra behind-the-scenes clips, dig deeper into the nuances of your content, or whatever else you want to do with that extra time,” the company said in a blogpost.

Instagram also said that users can now import their own audio directly within Instagram Reels.

“Use the import audio feature to add commentary or background noise from any video that is at least five seconds long on your camera roll,” the company said.

“Make sure that you like how your voice sounds in the recording because others might use it in their reels, too!” it added.

A new feature also lets creators poll their audience on what should happen in their next video so that they can help shape the storyline themselves.

The Meta-owned platform said that it has recently launched Templates, which allows users to easily create a reel using another one as a template. It pre-loads the audio and clip placeholders, so all users have to do is add and trim their unique clips.

“We will continue to invest in building new ways for you to connect with your audience and entertain on Reels. We can’t wait to see what you come up with and the creative ways you use these new tools!” the company said.

Xiaomi OLED Vision TV review: Economical option in premium smart TV segment

The Xiaomi OLED Vision TV is a good screen for watching content, but look elsewhere if you need a television that doubles up as a capable monitor for use with current generation gaming consoles

Chinese electronics maker Xiaomi recently launched its maiden OLED TV in India. Called the Xiaomi OLED Vision TV, the smart television is currently available in 55-inch screen size at Rs 89,999. Though cheaper than most OLED TVs from established brands such as Sony, Samsung, and LG, the Xiaomi’s TV does not cuts corners on any major features, technology or otherwise. It boasts an optical light-emitting diode-based screen panel of 4K UHD resolution with support for wide range of high dynamic range formats such as Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HDR, and HLG. The TV has eight-way speakers system with Dolby Atmos and DTS for audio experience to match the premium visual experience enabled by the OLED panel. The Xiaomi OLED Vision TV seems to be a modestly priced smart television to experience OLED difference. Is it? Let’s find out:

Starting with the design, the Xiaomi OLED Vision has a premium metallic frame neatly holding its modestly sized 55-inch screen. The screen dominates the entire front profile for distraction free viewing experience. The rear profile of the television, however, seems to be done as an afterthought. There is a huge bulge on the lower rear side of the television. Though not a visual distraction, it may make the television look odd hanging on the wall. It could be one of the reasons Xiaomi did not include gears required for wall mount set-up in the package, but legs for the table top installation. Speaking of table top installation, the legs raise the television to some extent but not enough to leave room for a soundbar to sit in front without blocking some portion of the screen.

Xiaomi OLED Vision TV – Metallic leg standComing to the screen, it is a good one for an economical OLED television. The screen is bright, vivid, and responsive. It is a delight to watch 4K content, especially HDR movies, shows and docuseries. It works so even for fast-paced content, thanks to built-in tech for motion smoothing. The TV supports IMAX Enhanced for cinematic experience, but the lack of content makes it a novelty with no actual benefit at present. The screen is good for watching content, but falls short for gaming purpose. It is a screen of 60Hz refresh rate, which is not optimal for best experience, especially for those with one of the new-gen gaming consoles such as Xbox Series X (review) and Play Station 5 (review). Besides, there is no support for adaptive sync technologies such as Nvidia G-Sync, FreeSync, VRR, etc.

ALSO READ – Xiaomi Mi QLED TV 4K review

Complementing the visual experience is the eight-way speaker system of 30W peak output. On paper, the peak output may seem to be on the lower side but is not. The speakers are loud and clear, and, together with Dolby Atmos and DTS, deliver wholesome audio experience.

Rounding up the package is the smooth performance and user experience. The Xiaomi OLED Vision TV boots Android 11 TV operating system with Xiaomi PatchWall loaded separately as secondary interface. The default Android interface is familiar with suggested content from apps visible on the home screen. The PatchWall is similar with regard to navigation but with better apps integration and content filters. Both the Android and PatchWall interfaces work smoothly without interruptions, slowdowns, and lags. That said, the performance is good and it translates to consistent user experience.

Xiaomi OLED Vision TV – Far-field microphone arrayThe Xiaomi OLED Vision TV comes with a petite-looking remote controller. It is a Bluetooth-enabled remote with a minimal design and hotkeys for Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, besides other buttons. The remote lacks a dedicated mute button, but a long press on volume-down mutes the audio in no time. Likewise, there is no dedicated key to go to settings directly, but a long press on the PatchWall button opens quick settings for picture, sound, input and more.

Verdict

The Xiaomi OLED Vision TV is an economical option in the premium OLED smart television segment. It is a good screen for watching content, but look elsewhere if you need a television that doubles up as a capable monitor for use with current generation gaming consoles. That said, the Xiaomi OLED Vision TV is good for most part, but not the best. Yet it makes a good buy because of its price and the features it bring to the table.

Slack launches in India, scouts for firms designing digital workplaces

A survey by Slack of over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers found 4 in 5 respondents desired flexibility, and would switch jobs if their employer didn’t provide it

American workplace collaboration platform Slack has officially launched in India. The firm said it is on a mission to help Indian companies navigate the transition to a hybrid workplace by establishing a digital headquarters (‘Digital HQ’).

Having long championed a digital-first approach to work, Slack’s leadership in the workplace collaboration space was further cemented by the rapid shift to remote work in early 2020 brought about by the pandemic. Today – as the impact of the pandemic eases and Indian companies increasingly shift to a hybrid work model – Slack is calling for leaders to be as thoughtful in designing their digital workplaces as they did in designing their physical offices before the pandemic hit.

“Adopting Slack as a Digital HQ allows Indian companies to connect their teams, tools, customers, and partners in a digital place that’s fast, flexible and inclusive for a work-from-anywhere world,” said the company. “A Digital HQ allows work to flow, breaking down communication and collaboration silos, internally and externally; automates tasks that take away time from deep, meaningful work; and enables new, flexible ways of working, striking the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous.”

In July 2021, Salesforce.com completed the acquisition of Slack Technologies, Inc. for $27.7 billion. Salesforce has had a presence in India since 2005 and today has over 6,500 employees across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

A recent study conducted by Slack involving over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers, The Reinvention of Work, found 4 in 5 respondents had a desire for flexibility, and a significant 80 per cent would seek a role elsewhere if their employer didn’t accommodate this. “Indian companies are keenly aware that the Great Resignation and the Great Relocation are very real, as employee expectations change and the war for talent heats up. Embracing Slack as their Digital HQ provides Indian knowledge workers with the ability to do their jobs from anywhere, at any time,” said the company.

For the many positives brought about by the proliferation of workplace apps that emerged as a response to the shift to remote work in 2020, there have been some challenges. In the same Slack study, Indian knowledge workers said they were wasting an average of 47 minutes a day switching between the various apps they use to do their jobs. One in five respondents said they were losing 10 hours a week – that’s nearly 10 working weeks a year. With over 2,600 app integrations, the Slack platform is purpose-built to address this loss in productivity and improve employee experience in the process.

One of India’s fastest growing internet commerce platforms, Meesho, has embraced Slack as its Digital HQ to save time, build company culture, streamline processes, and improve the way they work. “With the pivot towards remote working, multiple apps and systems were a huge hindrance to productivity and collaboration,” said Shikhar Saxena, Group Product Manager, Meesho. “We are glad to have Slack as a partner where everything happens in one channel, and what used to take a couple of days is now resolved in a matter of hours.”

Slack, which has users in over 150 countries globally, already has a significant following in India – representing one of the largest free user bases for Slack and positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally.

Slack has, in fact, been operating in India for four years, establishing a product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the company’s acquisition of Astro. The Slack India team has since grown to include a go-to-market function in the last year, and now has over 120 employees across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurgaon. Indian companies such as Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, and many more are relying on Slack to drive their businesses forward.

Massive podcast outage after Spotify fails to renew security certificate

Due to an outage on podcast hosting platform owned by Spotify, Megaphone, podcast listeners could not access many of their shows for more than eight hours this week.

Due to an outage on podcast hosting platform owned by Spotify, Megaphone, podcast listeners could not access many of their shows for more than eight hours this week.

According to The Verge, the outage stemmed from the company’s failure to renew Megaphone’s security certificate.

“Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate,” Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles was quoted as saying in a statement.

“During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored,” Styles added.

As per the report, it is a simple mistake with big ramifications.

Megaphone, which inserts dynamic ads into episodes, hosts many of the industry’s top shows.

It also distributes shows on platforms beyond Spotify, including Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Spotify hosts many of its own licensed and owned shows on Megaphone, the report said.

Styles said that the company is reaching out to affected publishers.

Spotify acquired Megaphone in December 2020 for $235 million, making it the streamer’s biggest purchase in its quest to build a comprehensive podcasting tech stack.

Spotify did not comment as to why Megaphone’s SSL certificate was left to expire and why it took so long to fix. The certificate expired at 8PM ET on Monday, according to data found by Podnews. The issue was not resolved for another eight hours, according to the platform’s status page.

Even after Megaphone came back online just before 6AM ET, podcasters experienced delays with the Megaphone CMS. As of 9:45AM, the company said the issue was fully resolved.

Annoyed users cancel Netflix subscriptions during password sharing test

A Netflix experiment to crack down on password sharing outside of households has left users flummoxed, forcing some of them to cancel their subscriptions

A Netflix experiment to crack down on password sharing outside of households has left users flummoxed, as the streaming giant increased subscription fees for such users, forcing some of them to cancel their subscriptions.

In March, Netflix quietly rolled out an experiment among customers in three small markets in Latin America, asking them to pay extra when sharing their account passwords outside their homes.

The streaming giant announced the new password-sharing policy in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica.

According to global tech news site Rest of World, for some Netflix users, the price increase has been enough to convince them to cancel their accounts outright.

“Others continue to share their accounts across households without any notification of the policy change or have ignored the new rule without facing enforcement,” the report said.

Overall, the lack of clarity around how Netflix determines a “household” and the differing charges levied on different customers have left subscribers in the test confused, “risking action from consumer regulators”.

As the OTT platforms witness a surge in subscriptions amid the pandemic, the problem of password sharing has also grown and resulted in stalled user growth for several players.

The major OTT giants, including Netflix, are working relentlessly to fix the problem of password sharing.

Netflix’s terms of use have always stated that subscribers are not allowed to share accounts outside of their household, but the platform had never previously enforced extra charges for infringing the policy.

For the first time, the company is defining “household” as exclusively people a subscriber lives with, said the report.

Netflix representatives told Rest of World that it knows some subscribers understand “household” as related to immediate family but that it has always defined the term as people living in the same building.

The company said different subscribers might be paying differing charges.

Peru’s consumer rights agency, the National Institute for the Defense of Free Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi), said that the “differing charges could be considered a way of discriminating against users arbitrarily”.

Netflix saw its stock tumbling by 20 per cent after it reported a loss of 2 lakh paid subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, its first subscriber loss in over a decade.

Moreover, it forecast a global paid subscriber loss of 20 lakh for the April-June quarter (Q2).

Netflix is fast losing long-term subscribers. According to a survey report by The Information, new data show that people who have been subscribers to Netflix for more than three years accounted for 13 per cent of cancellations in the first quarter this year.

Amazon to end Cloud Cam service, offer free Blink Mini to owners

Tech giant Amazon is shutting down support for its Cloud Cam security camera and offering owners a free Blink Mini to replace it.

Tech giant Amazon is shutting down support for its Cloud Cam security camera and offering owners a free Blink Mini to replace it.

Cloud Cam owners will be able to use their cameras and download video until December 2 of this year, after which all recordings will be deleted and the hardware will no longer function, reports The Verge, which has obtained a copy of an email sent to customers announcing the change.

Customers with the Cloud Cam Key Edition will also lose the ability to connect to smart locks, although they can get a free fourth-generation Echo to replace the functionality.

“As the number of Alexa smart home devices continues to grow, we are focusing efforts on Ring, Blink, and other technologies that make your home smarter and simplify your everyday routines. Therefore, we have decided to no longer continue support for Amazon Cloud Cam and its companion apps,” Amazon said in its email, which was also posted on Reddit.

In a statement to MacRumors, Amazon added “we will continue to offer innovative smart home security solutions for our customers through Amazon’s Ring and Blink brands”. It also specified that it will give Blink Mini cameras to users who are “still actively using their Cloud Cam”.

Amazon smart home spokesperson Jocelyn Shaw clarified to The Verge that Cloud Cam customers who have been active in the past six months will be eligible for replacement of hardware, and customers will get one Blink Mini for each active Cloud Cam they were using, or one Blink Mini and Echo for each Cloud Cam Key Edition.

Alleged prototype of Google Pixel 7 prototype hits eBay ahead of its launch

An alleged prototype of Google’s upcoming Pixel 7 smartphone has been offered on eBay, giving the audience a sneak peek at the device months before its official release.

An alleged prototype of Google’s upcoming Pixel 7 smartphone has been offered on eBay, giving the audience a sneak peek at the device months before its official release.

According to The Verge, the tech giant just revealed the phone a few weeks ago at Google I/O, and the prototype matches up with what the company has already shown.

The distinctive camera bar is back, and this year it is an aluminium bar with cutouts for the cameras. And the alleged prototype’s casing is a deep black that looks just like one of the colours Google showed off at I/O.

The eBay listing includes a few photos of the front, back, and sides of the device, though there is not much to see that users cannot already spot on Google’s official renders.

A photo of the phone turned on shows it has 128GB of storage, which suggests Google will once again be offering a 128GB model as an option for the final phone.

A screenshot showed that the smartphone’s model is GVU6C, the report said.

Google Assistant develops personalised speech recognition feature

According to 9to5Google, the tool will help Google Assistant get “better at recognising your frequent words and names”

Google Assistant will soon recognise your voice as the company is working on a personalised speech recognition feature.

According to 9to5Google, the tool will help Google Assistant get “better at recognising your frequent words and names.”

The “Personalised speech recognition” feature will appear in Google Assistant settings.

The feature description reads: “Store audio recordings on this device to help Google Assistant get better at recognising what you say. Audio stays on this device and can be deleted any time by turning off personalised speech recognition”.

The upcoming feature looks to expand AT and ML-based improvements beyond “Hey Google” to your actual Assistant commands, “especially those with names (using your voice to message contacts) and frequently spoken words”.

It’s still not clear when this capability will launch.

The feature will allow more advanced recognition of commands and contact names.

Owing to privacy concerns, Google will give users an option in settings to opt out of the personalised speech recognition if they don’t want their voice to be stored.

The virtual assistant software application can now also warn users when they need to change their password, and can even help them change it.

The company had said the new experience would roll out gradually, but it is only about now that more than a handful of users have started to get it on their devices.