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Category: mobile phones – Page 106

Minimalistic Doorbell Doesn’t Need An Internet Connection — Or Even A Power Supply

Doorbells are among those everyday objects that started out simple but picked up an immense amount of complexity over the years. What began as a mechanism to bang two pieces of metal together evolved into all kinds of wired and wireless electric bells, finally culminating in today’s smart doorbells that beam a live video feed to their owners even if they’re half a world away.

But sometimes, less is more. [Low tech obsession] built a doorbell out of spare components that doesn’t require Internet connectivity or even a power supply. But it’s not a purely mechanical device either: the visitor turns a knob mounted on a stepper motor, generating pulses of alternating current. These pulses are then fed into the voice coil of an old hard drive, causing its arm to vibrate and strike a bell, mounted where the platters used to be.

Besides being a great piece of minimalistic design, the doorbell is also a neat demonstration of Faraday’s law of induction. The stepper motor is apparently robust enough to withstand vandalism, although we can imagine that the doorbell’s odd shape might confuse some well-meaning visitors too. If you’re into unusual doorbells, you might want to check out this one made from an old wall phone, as well as this electromechanical contraption.

DARPA Goals To Preserve Moore’s Regulation Going — Right here’s How

Click on photo to start video.

Some say that Moore’s Regulation, which tracks the exponential progress electronics during the last six a long time has stalled, and technological stagnation threatens. Mark Rosker, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Know-how Workplace (MTO), sees issues very in another way. In a new interview with Samuele Lilliu, he explains how the expansion described by Moore’s Regulation has been sustained by waves of innovation from DARPA and the way the following stage, what he calls the Fourth Wave, might be carried ahead by applied sciences his workplace is now creating.

The best model of Moore’s Regulation says that the variety of transistors on a silicon chip roughly doubles each two years. This was an commentary made by Gordon Moore – who later co-founded Intel – in 1965, and it proved to be remarkably correct. Yearly since then, an increasing number of highly effective computer systems and, later, laptops and smartphones have appeared in the marketplace. Low-cost chips have now grow to be important for vehicles, televisions, cameras and different units, which beforehand functioned with out electronics. They’re important throughout the financial system.

Describing the progress as a “Regulation” could also be deceptive. Moore’s Regulation is an outline of the development in semiconductor manufacturing, pushed by advances in science and know-how which requires fixed innovation to maintain going, not a pure course of.

How a Saudi woman’s iPhone revealed hacking around the world

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) — A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

An unusual error in NSO’s spyware allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.

Google plans privacy change similar to Apple’s, which wiped $230 billion off Facebook’s market cap

“[It is] encouraging to see this long-term, collaborative approach to privacy-protective personalized advertising from Google,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing, ads and business at Facebook said on Twitter. “We look forward to continued work with them and the industry on privacy-enhancing tech through industry groups.”

Google said it will continue to support the current identifiers for the next two years, which means other companies have time to implement changes.

Apple was criticized by Facebook and other companies for rolling out its App Tracking Transparency feature, which reduces targeting capabilities by limiting advertisers from accessing an iPhone user identifier. With that change, users were given a pop-up window that let them block apps from tracking their data for advertising purposes.

Scientists accidentally stumble on ‘holy grail’ of batteries

Lithium-sulfur batteries have three times the potential charge capacity of lithium-ion batteries, which are found in everything from smartphones to electric cars. Their inherent instability, however, have so far made them unsuitable for commercial applications, with lithium-sulfur batteries undergoing a 78 per cent change in size every charging cycle.

Overcoming this issue would not only radically improve the performance of battery-powered devices, it would also address some of the environment concerns that come with lithium-ion batteries, such as the sourcing and disposal of rare raw materials.

SoftBank dumps sale of Arm over regulatory hurdles, to IPO instead

SAN FRANCISCO/SHANGHAI, Feb 8 (Reuters) — SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) has shelved its blockbuster sale of Arm Ltd to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) valued at up to $80 billion citing regulatory hurdles and will instead seek to list the company.

Britain’s Arm, which named a new CEO on Tuesday, said it would go public before March 2023 and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that would be in the United States, most likely the Nasdaq.

SoftBank acquired Arm, whose technology powers Apple’s iPhone and nearly all other smartphones, in 2016 for $32 billion.

Whistleblower Alleges NSO Offered To ‘Drop Off Bags Of Cash’ In Exchange To Access To US Cellular Networks

The endless parade of bad news for Israeli malware merchant NSO Group continues. While it appears someone might be willing to bail out the beleaguered company, it still has to do business as the poster boy for the furtherance of human rights violations around the world. That the Israeli government may have played a significant part in NSO’s sales to known human rights violators may ultimately be mitigating, but for now, NSO is stuck playing defense with each passing news cycle.

Late last month, the New York Times revealed some very interesting things about NSO Group. First, it revealed the company was able to undo its built-in ban on searching US phone numbers… provided it was asked to by a US government agency. The FBI took NSO’s powerful Pegasus malware for a spin in 2019, but under an assumed name: Phantom. With the permission of NSO and the Israeli government, the malware was able to target US numbers, albeit ones linked to dummy phones purchased by the FBI.

The report noted the FBI liked what it saw, but found the zero-click exploit provided by NSO’s bespoke “Phantom” (Pegasus, but able to target US numbers) might pose constitutional problems the agency couldn’t surmount. So, it walked away from NSO. But not before running some attack attempts through US servers — something that was inadvertently exposed by Facebook and WhatsApp in their lawsuit against NSO over the targeting of WhatsApp users. An exhibit declared NSO was using US servers to deliver malware, something that suggested NSO didn’t care about its self-imposed restrictions on US targeting. In reality, it was the FBI and NSO running some tests on local applications of zero-click malware that happened to be caught by Facebook techies.

New insight into blobs improves understanding of a universal process

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have gained insight into a fundamental process found throughout the universe. They discovered that the magnetic fields threading through plasma, the charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, can affect the coming together and violent snapping apart of the plasma’s magnetic field lines. This insight could help scientists predict the occurrence of coronal mass ejections, enormous burps of plasma from the sun that could threaten satellites and electrical grids on Earth.

The scientists focused on the role of guide fields, magnetic fields threading through blobs, or chunks, known as plasmoids. The guide fields add rigidity to the system and ultimately affect the ratio of large plasmoids to small ones and help determine how much reconnection occurs.

Plasmoid reconnection resembles the that occurs in smart phones or in high-powered computers that model the weather. During this computing, many processors are calculating simultaneously and making the overall calculation rate quicker. Similarly, plasmoids speed up the overall rate of reconnection by making it occur in many places at once.