Symantec has discovered over a dozen apps with malicious code that could cede control of your smartphone to perpetrators.

In a recent blog post, the security company said the apps, which are hosted on the Android Market, can be used to propagate a “bot-like threat that can receive commands to carry out certain actions, as well as steal information from the device”.

These threats are also known as botnets, where a collection of compromised computers can be controlled by a central server to launch denial-of-service attacks. Private information such as bank account numbers on compromised devices could also be stolen by cybercriminals.

According to Symantec, the malicious code is grafted onto the apps in a package called “apperhand”. Once launched, a service with the same name may be seen running on a compromised device. A search icon will also appear on the home screen

The malicious apps appear to be from three publishers: iApps7 Inc, Ogre Games and redmicapps. About half of the apps in question have been removed from the Android Market as of today.

Malware targeting mobile devices are expected to increase this year. The hardest hit are likely to be Android-based devices, given the operating system’s large market share and open innovation platform, said ICSA Labs, a division of Verizon Business that tests and certifies security products.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched DynamoDB, a cloud database service designed to meet the growing needs of demanding Web-based applications.

DynamoDB will allow developers to launch new database tables and moderate their database capacity without downtime and performance overheads. All data is housed on solid state drives and replicated across multiple AWS availability zones to ensure high availability and durability of data.

The service is built on SimpleDB, Amazon’s other cloud database service that launched in December 2007.

According to Amazon, traditional databases are not designed to meet the performance needs of modern applications, especially popular ones that can cause a single database to reach its maximum capacity quickly.

While the problem can be fixed by distributing database workloads across multiple servers, the process is complex and requires significant time and engineering effort.

With DynamoDB, developers can focus on improving their apps, while AWS will take care of hardware provisioning, software patching and partitioning, among other administrative tasks.

Additionally, Amazon’s pay-as-you-go pricing means you only pay for the resources you need.

“Dynamo was born out of our need for a highly reliable, ultra-scalable key/value database,” said Werner Vogels, AWS’ chief technology officer, in a blog post.

“This non-relational, or NoSQL, database was targeted at use cases that were core to the Amazon e-commerce operation, such as the shopping cart and session service,” he added.

Besides Amazon, early adopters of DynamoDB include IMDB and science information provider Elsevier, which publishes thousands of books, nearly 2,000 journals and over 250,000 articles housed on rapidly changing datasets.

Darren Person, Elsevier’s chief architect, said: “Operating a distributed data store on our own is orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive to manage than traditional databases. DynamoDB delivers a high-performance service that can be easily scaled up or down to meet our needs, helping us eliminate complexity and lower costs.”

You can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) at no cost.

Additional capacity is priced at hourly rates as low as US$0.01 per hour for 10 units of write capacity or 50 strongly consistent units of read capacity, while replicated SSD storage is priced at US$1 per GB per month.

Enterprises using Equinix’s data centres in Singapore and Tokyo can now connect directly to Amazon’s public cloud service.

Through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect, Equinix customers in the Asia-Pacific region can establish private network connections with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, paying only for the network ports used and data transferred out of AWS. Data transfer into AWS is free.

Equinix, a global data centre operator, said the connectivity option will help companies cut network costs into and out of AWS, by lowering bandwidth commitments to ISPs and taking advantage of reduced data transfer rates.

Since the initial roll out to its Virginia data centre campus last year, Equinix has been extending AWS Direct Connect to other locations such as Silicon Valley to meet growing customer demand for hybrid environments.

Carpathia Hosting, a provider of managed hosting services, is using AWS Direct Connect in Equinix data centres to allow customers such as mobile app provider Urban Airship to use a mix of Amazon cloud infrastructure, along with Carpathia’s managed hosting services.

“More and more of our enterprise customers are demanding hybrid hosting solutions that combine the benefits of both dedicated infrastructure and cloud infrastructure,” said Jon Greaves, chief technology officer at Carpathia in a media statement Friday.

“For existing AWS customers, Carpathia Hosting uses AWS Direct Connect to deliver the benefits of having their dedicated infrastructure and AWS’s cloud services managed by a single provider,” he added.

Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner’s technology and service providers group, said the partnership between Equinix and Amazon is good for “obvious reasons”.

“For quite some time now, I’ve been evangelising the importance of carrier-neutral co-location as a ‘cloud hub’, envisioning a future where these providers facilitate cross-connect infrastructures between cloud users and cloud providers,” she said in a blog post last year.

Leong noted that widespread adoption of this model would allow an enterprise to say, get a single rack of network equipment at Equinix, and then cross-connect directly to all of their important cloud suppliers.

“It would drive cross-connect density, differentiation and stickiness at the carrier-neutral co-location providers who succeed in being the draw for these ecosystems,” she added.

eBay has partnered with SingPost and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to offer a new shipping service for eBay Singapore sellers.

Dubbed ePAC, the service lets sellers track the delivery of lightweight goods sold to American customers within six to eight working days. This service is part of eBay and SingPost’s ongoing efforts to boost trade from Singapore to the United States.

From today, eBay Singapore sellers can start using ePAC on a fully integrated platform, allowing them take orders, print labels and track the status of shipments. U.S.-based customers can also track the status of their purchased goods through their eBay account.

Oliver Hua, chief operating officer at eBay Marketplaces in the Greater China region, Southeast Asia and Japan, said Singapore sellers are highly regarded for combining good quality products at great value, and command the second highest sales in Southeast Asia, behind Thailand.

“We foresee ePAC playing a vital role in driving Singapore’s online exports to the United States as demonstrated by a similar shipping service launched with China Post and the U.S. Postal Service in September 2010, which is already processing more than 90,000 parcels a day,” he added.

The e-commerce giant has also been offering a similar service for sellers in Thailand and Hong Kong through partnerships with local postal services.

eBay’s export business is largely led by exporters in China and Hong Kong, according to the company’s Asian Exporter Index published last August.

Large exporters with annual turnovers of more than US$100,000 have experienced year-on-year growth of 26 percent across the region, with 200 exporters – predominantly based in China and Hong Kong – recording annual turnovers of over US$1 million.

The top-selling products sold by Asian exporters on eBay include clothing, jewellery, watches, computers, cellphones and auto parts.

If IBM researchers get their way, remembering passwords will soon be a thing of the past. Big Blue has recently published a video of what it thinks will become reality by 2016, such as mind reading and generating electricity from human activities, among other predictions:

Generate your own electricity
Anything that moves generates kinetic energy, which can be converted to electricity. We can tap this energy from running water, or the rotating wheels of a bicycle to power our homes and offices. IBM scientists in Ireland are already looking at ways to understand and minimise the environmental impact of converting ocean wave energy into electricity.

Biometrics
Your biological make-up could be used more extensively to authenticate access to secured systems and safeguard your identity. According to IBM, biometric data such as retina scans and voice can be combined through software to build your unique DNA-based password. The same biodata could also be used to authenticate ATM transactions, eliminating the use of magnetic strip cards, which are prone to card skimming as we’ve found out this week.

Mind reading
Mind reading has been wishful thinking among science fiction fans for decades. But their wish may soon come true. Within five years, we’ll begin to see the applications of mind reading technology. Doctors could use it to test brain patterns, assist with rehabilitation of patients and understand brain disorders such as autism. IBM researchers are now figuring out ways to link our brains to devices so you can just call someone on a smartphone by thinking about it. In the further future, you could also type on a computer by thinking about the words to say!

No more digital divide
The digital divide will cease to exist in a global society where the wealth of economies is determined by the level of access to information. In five years, the gap between information haves and have-nots will be eliminated, thanks to the adoption of mobile technology. Eighty percent of the global population of seven billion will have a mobile device, IBM predicts. It’ll be cheaper to own a cellphone than open a bank account or buy a laptop. And because of this, rural communities are able to achieve much more than before, such as checking weather reports on their cellphones to determine the best time to fertilise their crops.

Death to junk mail
Too often, we’re flooded with irrelevant information including junk mail. In five years, spam e-mail will become personal notes. Through analytics technology, computers will be able to filter data that’s important and relevant, and bring you information that you would have asked for. Imagine your phone knowing that your favourite band is coming to town and putting tickets on hold for you to purchase.

Do IBM’s predictions sound too far fetched to you? Let us know in the comments.

The new service will be available at Singapore’s central financial district at launch, along with other high traffic areas like Orchard, City Hall, Marina Bay and Novena. By end 2012, SingTel expects to provide coverage for 80 per cent of users, and 95 per cent by end 2013.

Rival telco M1 had launched a limited LTE service earlier this year, but it offered this only to business customers. SingTel’s service is open to consumers as well.

The “red” telco predicts typical day-to-day speeds of between 3.4Mbps to 21Mbps, which will be good enough for video conferencing, whether users are at home or on the go.

For now, the limited service will only be available first on USB dongles that plug into laptops, though LTE phones and tablets have already been available in the US for close to a year now, and Samsung is said to be among the first to unveil an LTE version of the popular Galaxy S II here in Singapore in Q1, 2012.

The big problem for the telco would be the price. At S$69.90 a month, the LTE service can seem expensive to most users of its current 3.5G services, which cost from S$29.90 (up to 3.6Mbps) to S$59.90 (up to 21Mbps). M1′s service, by the way, costs S$59.40.

SingTel’s price is strangely structured as well. For S$69.90, users get 50GB of regular 3G data (up to 21Mbps) and 10GB of LTE data, according to the new Mobile Prestige 75 plan.

But do users know when they are using 3G and when they hop over to LTE? Fortunately, there is a cap of S$94.16 in terms of cost, so at least you won’t get a bill shock of a few thousand dollars.

Also to SingTel’s credit, it’s not calling the LTE service “4G”, as many American telcos have. 4G is defined, at least by the folks who work out wireless standards at the International Telecommunications Union, as a technology that offers 100Mbps downloads. LTE is what many would call pre-4G.

Here are SingTel’s prices, if you are thinking of hooking up to LTE:

Google started the building of a new data centre in Singapore on Thursday, a US$120 million facility which represents the Internet giant’s expansion of operations in the region.

“More users are coming online in Asia than anywhere else in the world,” said Julian Persaud, head of Google Southeast Asia at a launch event. Projected to go online in 2013, the new data centre promises to serve this growing demand by delivering fast and reliable access to Google services.

In addition, the data centre will boost the local job market in a small way, as Google is hiring a small team of full-time staff as well as a number of contractors in a variety of roles, including computer technicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and catering and security staff.

Google will also be launching a community grants programme here in Singapore, which will provide annual grants ranging from US$5,000 to US$50,000 to organizations that focus on four specific topics: technology literacy and innovation, renewable energy innovation, access to high speed internet, and new economy entrepreneurship.

For a start, IAB Singapore will be receiving US$50,000 to conduct digital career training programmes for final-year undergraduates to equip them with the necessary digital skills and knowledge so that they will have an easier time landing jobs in the Internet economy.

After weeks of deliberation, Hewlett-Packard (HP) will now contribute its webOS mobile operating system to the open source community.

Meg Whitman, HP’s newly-minted president and chief executive officer, said in a media statement Friday: ”webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable. By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices”.

All webOS source codes will be available under an open source license to be determined later. HP will engage the open source community to define the charter of the new open source project under a set of operating principles that include accelerating the open development of the platform and transparent governance to avoid fragmentation.

The news might come as a surprise to tech pundits. Some expected HP to license webOS to device manufacturers, especially Android phone companies who could find webOS a viable option to hedge against any impartiality arising out of Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Others reckoned HP might sell webOS to a device maker, but it’s unlikely anyone would take up the offer — or burden — of growing the platform on its own. If a company the size of HP could not succeed with webOS, who could? The most likely candidate to pick up webOS is Amazon, but the online retail giant is already betting on Android with the Kindle Fire.

HP had high hopes for webOS when it acquired the mobile platform along with its US$1.2 billion purchase of Palm in last year. Back then, it planned to role out webOS not just on tablets and phones, but also on printers and laptops. While HP did a good job with the TouchPad, its flagship webOS device that received favourable reviews, the initial sales numbers for the TouchPad were disappointing.

When Leo Apotheker came onboard, the former embattled CEO scuttled HP’s webOS business. The TouchPad was tossed out of HP’s inventory in fire sales in some markets, where the device was sold for just US$99. In Singapore, eager consumers started queuing up as early as 4am to score a TouchPad at the Comex show earlier in September.

Now that the dust has settled, what will “open sourcing” webOS mean for the future of the platform?

To be sure, HP is not washing its hands off completely. The company said it will continue to be active in the development and support of webOS, though we are not sure if releasing webOS source codes merely means more “opportunities to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices”. Such statements are unlikely to lure developers already working on existing platforms that are gaining far more traction in the market.

Moreover, there are already open source mobile platforms like MeeGo and Android, with the latter being more successful. Developers have limited time and resources to write code for yet another platform with a fledgling ecosystem and limited apps – a chief bugbear that underdogs like Windows Phone and webOS have to grapple with.

With the exception of Mozilla Firefox, few open source projects that started life as proprietary software have been wildly successful. Sun Microsystem’s OpenOffice, which started out as StarOffice, is hardly making a dent in office productivity software. OpenSolaris, the open source offspring of Sun’s Solaris Unix-based OS, was supposed to give Linux a run for its money with advanced features like the ZFS file system. That project was killed by Oracle after it acquired Sun.

WebOS could well be picked up by a smattering of third-tier device makers, but the only way for any upstart mobile platform to snatch significant market share away from incumbents is to deliver a superior experience backed by a rich mobile app ecosystem, open source or not. HP has chosen to offload that task to the open source community, but whether developers will bite remains to be seen.

According to tests conducted by AV-Test, which bills itself as an independent IT security and anti-virus research specialist, the most popular free anti-malware apps on the Android Market do not offer reliable protection against malware. The company also partners with PC World magazine to review security products.

Zoner AntiVirus Free was the only free app with a respectable result in the test. The security app, which boasts of 50,000 to 100,000 installations, detected eight out of 10 malicious apps.

BluePoint AntiVirus Free, Kinetoo Malware Scan and Privateer Lite warned against one malicious app, while Antivirus Free by Creative Apps, GuardX Antivirus and LabMSF Antivirus beta failed to detect any malware completely. In comparison, commercial apps by F-Secure and Kaspersky detected all threats without a problem.

Security researchers at Romanian security software company BitDefender recently warned that the number of Android malware could swell from 200 today to 12,000 by March 2012, according to a September report by The Register.

In June this year, researchers at North Carolina State University identified a new Android malware called DroidKungFu that avoids detection by masquerading as a VPN client.

“DroidKungFu clearly represents the next evolution in mobile malware,” said Derek Manky, senior security strategist at Fortinet, a provider of network security appliances.

“Where earlier attempts at Android malware, such as Zeus in the Mobile (Zitmo), are able to intercept the type of two-factor authentication that banks use to validate the identity of the account holder when logging in, DroidKungFu does much more,” he noted.

“By disguising itself as a legitimate VPN client application, the malware quickly gains root access to the device using social engineering. Once executed, DroidKungFu has the ability to download further malware, open URLs in a browser, start programs and delete files on the system,” Manky said in a media statement.

Cloud computing is gaining momentum in Singapore despite concerns over data privacy and security, a new survey has found.

According to the Cloud Maturity Index commissioned by VMware, 63 percent of Singapore firms are either using or planning to roll out cloud initiatives, compared to 53 percent in 2010. The survey was compiled by Forrester Research, which interviewed 6,141 business and IT decision-makers in the Asia Pacific region.

Cloud adoption increased with the size of the organization, with 45 percent of respondents from companies with over 10,000 employees indicating that they are already using cloud computing services.

Telcos and government agencies were the leading organizations that have already implemented cloud initiatives, while those in the education and manufacturing sectors led in the number of planned deployments.

Most Singapore companies indicated a greater likelihood to use a combination of public and private clouds (38 percent) while 34 percent chose private clouds. Public clouds were least popular (five percent) due to concerns over the security of corporate data and applications.

In fact, 79 percent of respondents – the highest in the region – cited data privacy as a barrier to adoption, ahead of other concerns around security and integration with existing systems.

“Serious concerns over data privacy and security have led local respondents to show a strong preference for a hybrid cloud model,” said Ed Lenta, general manager of VMware Asean.

“We believe that seamless federation of information between public, private and hybrid clouds is critical to realizing the true benefits of cloud computing,” he added.

Chief information officers are also leading the charge in cloud adoption. Over half of Singapore respondents said their CIO or CEO calls the shorts for cloud purchases. This reflects growing recognition of the importance of cloud technology to corporate success.

Lenta said: “Cloud adoption is clearly being driven by the top of the organization in Singapore, and we have seen the role of the CIO, in particular, evolve into that of a ‘Chief Innovation Office’ who champions future-proof technologies to drive business agility and efficiency.”

“However, we will have to address the concerns they have in order for companies to fully embrace cloud computing as a strategic business tool,” he added.

With greater adoption of cloud computing, the role of telecoms service providers will grow bigger. 63 percent of local respondents and 70 percent of MNCs surveyed said they expect the roles and importance of hosting service providers to increase within their organizations. This bodes well for telcos such as SingTel, which expects revenues from its cloud computing services to grow by up to 70 percent every year till 2014.