In this week’s cyber news roundup, we cover Google’s questionable decision to save Robinhood from its self-inflicted demise, Apple’s latest critical iPhone update, and the latest reason to give Signal a try.
Without further ado:
Google Purging Negative Robinhood Reviews
You thought you could come to a cybersecurity and technology blog and escape the endless talk about the happenings on Wall Street? Lol. OK. Sure.
We won’t drown you any further with the details surrounding the historically significant week in the stock market. What we do want to focus on, however, is the aftermath.
By this point, you’re probably aware of what happened with Reddit, Wall Street, and GameStop. You’re also probably aware Robinhood, one of the more popular trading and investing apps on the market, abruptly decided it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC and other stocks responsible for the chaos that ensued earlier this month.
That, for obvious reasons, did not sit well with its user base. Understandably upset, those same users decided to unsheathe one of their most destructive weapons: the negative review. Tens of thousands of users took to the Google Play Store to hit Robinhood with negative reviews, a move that temporarily prompted the app’s overall rating to plummet down to a measly one star.
That careful and clever use of italics in the previous sentence? That’s related to Google’s remarkably unpopular decision to salvage Robinhood’s rating by purging about 100,000 negative reviews to bring the app’s rating back to a more respectable 3.4 out of 5.
Google’s policies provide the company with the right to prohibit reviews that “mislead other users or manipulate the rating.” The company also has a system in place to detect any violations of its policy, telling The Verge that it “specifically took action on reviews that it felt confident violated those policies.”
Suffice it to say there’s a lot of gray area in Google’s policy. Reviews, whether positive or negative, are inherently designed to alter the rating with the hopes of creating an accurate representation of the app’s quality as determined by its user base. You can make the case that Robinhood users were indeed malicious with their negative reviews, but you can also make the case that their malicious intent was genuine and warranted. This is actually how people feel about Robinhood, for better or for worse.
As is the case with most of the stories we recap, this one probably doesn’t end here. Stay tuned.
Apple Rolls Out Another Critical iPhone Update
You may want to grab your iPhone right now.
Apple released iOS and iPadOS 14.4 earlier this month, offering some critical protection against a noteworthy vulnerability existing in its iPhone, iPad, and iPod devices with now-outdated software.
In a statement, Apple describes one of the vulnerabilities as “a malicious application [that] may be able to elevate privileges.” Two others were said to provide “a remote attacker [with the potential ability] to cause arbitrary code execution.” The company also notes that it “is aware of a report that [these issues] may have been actively exploited.”
It’s unclear how many users may have been affected, though Apple says more details should be available soon, per TechCrunch.
The discovery appears to have come from the company’s Apple Security Bounty Program. But unlike last year’s noteworthy planned attack that resulted in about half a million dollars in rewards, the researchers who discovered the latest vulnerabilities have opted to remain anonymous.
The update is available for the following devices:
iPhone 6S and later
iPad Air 2 and later
iPad mini 4 and later
iPod touch (7th gen)
So probably go do that now if you haven’t already.
Signal Gets a Facelift
Now for some news that isn’t designed to bring you feelings of sadness and despair.
Signal, just weeks after becoming a popular destination for users migrating away from WhatsApp and its controversial data sharing policies, is striking while the iron is hot. Once considered one of the premiere, albeit lesser known, options for secure communications, Signal is doing its part to attract more users with some popular mainstream features to make newer users feel right at home.
Users can now implement chat wallpapers, customize their profiles with an About field, use animated stickers, and enjoy improved image compression, among other mainstream chat features. It’s a marked shift away from simply being a highly secure messaging platform, and towards a more user-friendly messaging platform (that also just so happens to be highly secure).
The move comes just a month after one of Signal’s more noteworthy updates, when the company rolled out end-to-end encryption for group video calls of up to five people.
