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When it's time to buy a new car, you don't necessarily need to stick with the one you had before. You don't lose your cloud-based photos by switching from Toyota to Subaru, nor will your friends yell at you for ruining the group chat by buying a Kia. That's not the case with smartphones: When you buy an iPhone, it's tough to switch away from it. The same goes for Android: While it's easy enough to switch within the Android ecosystem, such as between Pixel or Galaxy, moving from Android to iPhone can also be a pain. Tech companies tend to make it tempting to stick with their platform, and introduce friction when you try to leave. That, of course, is entirely business-based. Apple hasn't traditionally made it easy to move to Android, because, well, you might actually do it. It doesn't have t...

Malicious extensions do occasionally find their way into the Chrome Web Store (and similar libraries in other browsers) by posing as legitimate add-ons. They are particularly difficult to catch when they are benign to begin with, only morphing into malware after gaining user trust. That's what happened with a number of extensions on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge: researchers at Koi Security identified add-ons across both browsers that operated legitimately for several years before receiving malicious updates that allow hackers to surveil users and collect and exfiltrate sensitive data. The scheme, known as ShadyPanda, reached four million downloads and is still active on Edge. Threat actors ran a similar campaign targeting Firefox earlier this year: They gained approval for benign exten...