The Mozilla Marketplace for Web apps is locked to outsiders -- for now.

Mozilla took a big step toward the coming conflict between native apps and Web apps as it introduced Web app support to Firefox 16, which moved to the the developer's Aurora channel last Friday.

The Web app support in Firefox 16 Aurora (download for Windows, for Mac, for Linux, and for Android) means that when the Mozilla Marketplace opens to the public -- likely to be sometime before the end of 2012 -- people will be able to run Web-based apps through any iteration of Firefox. This is part of Mozilla's "Kilimanjaro" project, syncing up the various Mozilla projects in preparation for the Firefox OS push that's coming next year.

This comes on the heels of the Firefox 15 release to beta, which focused on ... [Read more]

Nicholas Percoco, head of Trustwave's SpiderLabs, managed to turn a legitimate Android app into malware without alerting the malware detection system.

Security researchers testing Google's Bouncer malware detection system for Android apps have managed to submit a benign app and then slowly update it to add malicious functionality, one of the researchers told CNET today.

Nicholas Percoco, head of Trustwave's SpiderLabs, and colleague Sean Schulte will be discussing their research during a session at Black Hat and Defcon next week in Las Vegas entitled "Adventures in Bouncerland."

After Google launched its Bouncer system to protect apps in the Google Play Android market in February, the researchers wanted to see if they could turn a good app that was already in the system into something malicious without triggering the Bouncer malware alarm system. They succeeded.

First they created an app that was designed to allow users to block text messages from specific individuals, known as an SMS blocker. Once the app was in the market and available for public d... [Read more]