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Barnes & Noble was pretty thoroughly trounced by Amazon when information technology came to e-readers and tablets, but now the bookseller is trying to come dorsum with a new $fifty Android tablet that competes with the Kindle Fire. It's a nice tablet past all accounts, but in that location's one apparent issue that may prevent people from buying — it's running the same software that acquired a security scare several months agone with Blu's $50 Amazon Prime phone.

The incredibly popular Blu R1 HD was mysteriously "unavailable" for weeks after the news bankrupt that it was sending user data like account information and SMS contents back to a server in Communist china. This was explained as a error in the way the Adups module was configured (the data was deleted upon discovery and was allegedly never used for anything). Adups is a visitor that manages OTA updates. So instead of Blu running its own OTA server or using Google's, it has Adups take care of deploying the firmware. It's not an uncommon arrangement, but it is uncommon for the OTA component to be stealing user data, even if it was unintentional.

The NOOK Tablet vii takes aim at Amazon'southward successful $50 Fire tablet — what is it with $l Android devices and security bug? The vii-inch tablet has a pocket-size octa-core MediaTek ARM chip and 8GB of storage with a microSD card slot for expansion. Different the Burn down, this tablet runs a Google-certified build of Android, pregnant you get admission to Google services like the Play Store, Gmail, and Maps.

No i had ever heard of Adups at the consumer level until a few weeks ago, and at present it'due south basically synonymous with malware. That's non really what it is, though. Adups and like pieces of software have the admission to do scary-sounding things because they're organisation components. They have a apply, but Adups was set incorrectly on the Blu phone. Simply having Adups on a device doesn't hateful information technology's sending your data to China, but what if information technology is?

r1hd

The R1 Hard disk drive, which only recently went dorsum on auction after the Adups scare.

The fact of the affair is that Barnes & Noble should have known better than to use Adups. The version of Adups on the NOOK Tablet seven is manifestly older, before it completely disabled some of its more invasive information drove tools in an attempt to ease tensions. That doesn't mean the NOOK Tablet seven is using those tools, just once again, this is about appearances. This but looks suspicious.

I'm not going to tell yous the NOOK Tablet 7 is stealing data because it uses Adups, but this is about trust. Do you trust Barnes & Noble to do its due diligence to ensure this $50 tablet'due south version of Adups is configured correctly? It'southward up to you.

We've reached out to Barnes & Noble for annotate and will update if we hear back.