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Category: mobile phones

Snap on Tuesday unveiled new-generation Spectacles sunglasses that can take 3D pictures to share on its Snapchat messaging service known for ephemeral posts.

Spectacles 3, set for release late this year, were described as a limited release and priced at $380, more than twice the price of an “Original” version available at the Southern California company’s website.

Spectacles sunglasses with built-in cameras that synchronize wirelessly with smartphones to share pictures or video snippets to Snapchat were launched in late 2016.

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The art of matchmaking has traditionally been the province of grandmas and best friends, parents, and even—sometimes—complete strangers. Recently they’ve been replaced by swipes and algorithms in an effort to automate the search for love. But Kevin Teman wants to take things one step further.

The Denver-based founder of a startup called AIMM has built an app that matches prospective partners using just what they say to a British-accented AI. Users talk to the female-sounding software to complete a profile: pick out your dream home, declare whether you consider yourself a “cat person,” and describe how you would surprise a potential partner.

At first glance, that doesn’t seem too different from the usual swiping-texting-dating formula of modern online romance. But AIMM, whose name is an acronym for “artificially intelligent matchmaker,” comes with a twist: the AI coaches users through a first phone call, gives advice for the first date, and even provides feedback afterwards. Call it Cyrano de Bergerac for the smartphone era.

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Security researchers from Google’s Project Zero team recently uncovered pre-installed apps in Android devices that either allowed remote attackers to carry out remote code execution, could disable Google Play Protect in devices, or could collect information on users’ web activities.

At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Maddie Stone, a security researcher on Project Zero and who previously served as Senior Reverse Engineer & Tech Lead on Android Security team, revealed that her team discovered three instances of Android malware being pre-installed in budget Android phones in the recent past.

One such pre-installed app was capable of turning off Google Play Protect, the default mobile security app in Android devices, thereby leaving devices vulnerable to all forms of cyber attacks or remote surveillance. The Project Zero team also found an app pre-installed on Android phones that gathered logs of users’ web activities.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy Note 10 Plus hands on.
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This is my Samsung Galaxy Note hands on video. The Note 10 (Plus) represents Samsung’s top tier smartphone offering packing a 6.8-inch AMOLED display and up to 12GB of RAM.

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Researchers have developed a soft neural implant that can be wirelessly controlled using a smartphone. It is the first wireless neural device capable of indefinitely delivering multiple drugs and multiple colour lights, which neuroscientists believe can speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, addiction, depression, and pain. A team under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and his collaborators have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device, using Lego-like replaceable drug cartridges and powerful, low-energy Bluetooth, can target specific neurons of interest using drugs and light for prolonged periods. This study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“This novel device is the fruit of advanced electronics design and powerful micro and nanoscale engineering,” explained Professor Jeong. “We are interested in further developing this technology to make a brain implant for clinical applications.”

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For five years, several AT&T employees were conspiring with a Pakistani man to install malware on company computers so that man could unlock millions of smartphones subsidized by the carrier, according to federal investigators.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Muhammad Fahd for bribing AT&T employees at a call center in Washington state to pull off the scheme. According to the feds, Fahd allegedly paid more than $1 million in bribes to the AT&T employees during the conspiracy, which allowed him to fraudulently unlock more than 2 million AT&T phones from 2012 to 2017.

Fahd allegedly partnered with businesses that offered cell phone unlocking services in exchange for a fee. These unnamed business would then supply him with the IMEI numbers of the phones bound to AT&T’s network.

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He can hack your WhatsApp, find out where you are in 15 minutes and monitor your iPhone. But Tal Dilian says he’s one of the good guys. It’s badly-behaved governments who should be in trouble, not the $12 billion industry he’s come to represent.

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With a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge available to us at the tap of a smartphone, we all take digital information for granted. But when it can be replicated at zero cost, how do the economic laws of supply and demand work, especially in the context of using digital currency?

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