Boot up: Tinder leaking locations, malware-filled Chrome extensions and a digital bounty

Plus new Samsung phones, tablets and adverts, and accidentally racist computers

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 commercial Photograph: Samsung

New Tinder Security Flaw Exposed Users’ Exact Locations for Months

Tinder--which connects flirty smartphone users with others nearby--is supposed to show users roughly how close they are to each other. Distance is rounded to the nearest mile, a safe-seeming threshold that has helped the app become addictive to both sexes. In October, however, researchers at Include Security discovered that Tinder servers were actually giving much more detailed information--mileage to 15 decimal places--that would allow any hacker with “rudimentary” skills to pinpoint a user’s location to within 100 feet. Depending on the neighborhood, that’s close enough to determine with alarming accuracy where, say, an ex-girlfriend is hanging out.

Accidentally turning Tinder into Grindr?
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 hits out at the iPad Air in a new commercial
Opinion is divided on the Guardian Tech Desk as to whether this ad is brilliant or terrible, but it firmly positions Samsung - in the tablet space, at least - as the plucky underdog, hitting up at Apple. How strong a position is that for the megacorp?
The minority report: Chicago’s new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist?

When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, “I haven’t done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn’t done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.

One of the supposed upsides of the Big Data approach is that it is agnostic about causality. Analytics report correlations, and sometimes those are ones which no human would think of. But other times, they’re ones that no human would allow themselves to think of. In this case, the approach seems to have independently invented the concept of racial profiling.
Wurm MMORPG offers 10,000 Euros reward after DDoS attack

Wurm, the 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has offered a reward totalling 10,000 Euros for information which might lead to the conviction of hackers who launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the site.

Online games are fairly frequently the target of DDoS attacks, but it’s rare that any fight back quite so strongly.
Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates

To make matters worse, ownership of a Chrome extension can be transferred to another party, and users are never informed when an ownership change happens. Malware and adware vendors have caught wind of this and have started showing up at the doors of extension authors, looking to buy their extensions. Once the deal is done and the ownership of the extension is transferred, the new owners can issue an ad-filled update over Chrome’s update service, which sends the adware out to every user of that extension.

This seems like the sort of thing that Chrome’s Web Store was supposed to stop, but it’s hard enough to vet extensions when they are submitted, let alone with every update.
Samsung plans to launch new Galaxy Gear models next week >> The Verge

USA Today reports that a new Galaxy Gear model will run Tizen, the carrier-friendly mobile operating system championed by Samsung that has yet to see commercial availability; the current Gear runs Android, suggesting that the company could be looking to move away from Google’s platform across a number of different market segments.

Interesting if Samsung does indeed ditch Android for its own operating system, Tizen, on the Galaxy Gear. Samsung has indicated in the past that Android isn’t the only route it wants to take, and the Gear could be Samsung’s Android placement Tizen trojan horse.
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