As you might suspect, device selection is the big gotcha. Much like Ting, FreedomPop isn't carrying the latest Apple technology. You'll have to be happy with either buying a refurbished iPhone 5 for $349 or bringing over a Sprint-ready iPhone 4, 4S or 5 you already own. This isn't the choice for those who want to live on the bleeding edge, then. Still, it does give you free LTE phone data -- a major advantage when the only alternative on FreedomPop with similar speeds is a hotspot.
To date, FreedomPop's no-cost phone service has been attached to older Android phones. That's fine for many, but not exactly diverse. Your choices are a little better now that carrier has added iPhone support to its lineup, though. You can get 200 voice minutes, 500 messages and 500MB of data per month on Apple's handset without paying a dime; it costs the equivalent of $5 per month if you need unlimited calls and texting. It sounds great, so what's the catch?
As you might suspect, device selection is the big gotcha. Much like Ting, FreedomPop isn't carrying the latest Apple technology. You'll have to be happy with either buying a refurbished iPhone 5 for $349 or bringing over a Sprint-ready iPhone 4, 4S or 5 you already own. This isn't the choice for those who want to live on the bleeding edge, then. Still, it does give you free LTE phone data -- a major advantage when the only alternative on FreedomPop with similar speeds is a hotspot.
0 Comments
Samsung is known for its ubiquitous Galaxy smartphones and tablets, popular smart televisions and, most recently, smartwatches. The Korean consumer electronics giant is about to enter another major new category: virtual reality headsets. We're told by sources close to Samsung that a virtual reality headset is not only in the works at the company's mobile division, but it's set to be announced this year. The urgency is said to be a measure of beating Facebook's Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus to market. Some developers already have early versions of the headset, which -- at least in the development stages -- is powered by flagship Galaxy devices (think: Note 3, Galaxy S5). The consumer model, however, is said to require the power of next-gen, unannounced Galaxy phones and tablets.
First things first, what are we talking about here specifically? A peripheral. We're talking about a virtual reality headset -- along the lines of Oculus Rift, but more akin to the Android-powered GameFace Labs prototype (seen below) -- created by Samsung, powered by Samsung products. This is not the rumored "Galaxy Glass" project. It starts out simply. One day, you're scrolling through the Naval Criminal Investigative Service database, identifying a perp's body when an alert flashes red on your monitor. "INTRUSION DETECTED," it screams. You're getting hacked and there's only one solution: Call your bumbling partner over and have him join you at the keyboard. The two of you frantically bang out rapid-fire key sequences as random program windows flash onscreen. The hacker's getting further and further into the system. Your partner's never seen code like this before and his usual tricks to combat it aren't working. That's when the display goes dead and your silver fox of a boss saves the day by pulling the power plug of your workstation.
That is how the entertainment industry wants you to think hacking works. But, like most Hollywood fantasies, it couldn't be further from the truth. Ubisoft (the studio responsible for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) knows this and for its upcoming cross-platform release, Watch Dogs, the company went to great lengths to ensure its game world didn't fall into those same tropes. Watch Dogs focuses on mega-hacker Aiden Pearce as he manipulates a Chicago run by the CenTral Operating System (CTOS) using only the smartphone in his hand. This CTOS controls everything from the simulated Windy City's traffic lights and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, to the drawbridges that cross the Chicago River. It's a fictitious, near-future vision of connected urban life, but still Ubisoft wanted it to hew as closely to hacking reality as possible. The development team's reasoning for this was simple: "We're trying to be relevant,"Watch Dogs Content Manager Thomas Geffroyd told me. "We felt that by understanding how negatively this culture has been portrayed, we could try to present the public with a more positive and accurate view of hacking and hackers." WhatsApp is one of the most popular cross-platform messaging app which allows you to send and receive SMS without any charges. Whatsapp has one of largest active user base of 300 million and around 20 million in alone India.WhatsApp can be used on any Smartphone Including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Asha platform, but what if you want to use it in PC? yes you can install Whatsapp on PC!
Could random data from your smartphone save you from hackers? Could your cellphone camera give a boost to cryptography programs that help protect your data? That was the pitch that surfaced in a paper this week from a group of researchers at the University of Geneva. The paper studied the visual noise patterns from the camera on a Nokia smartphone, digging deep enough to track quantum fluctuations (tiny, temporary changes in the amount of energy at a point in space). If used right, those fluctuations could provide a source of perfectly random noise that would make a huge difference in future encryption protocols.
TRADITIONAL COMPUTING OFTEN HAS A HARD TIME PRODUCING THE NECESSARY CHAOS The group was trying to solve a persistent problem for cryptography software. For encryption to work, it needs a steady supply of random numbers to throw attackers off the scent. Traditional computation often has a hard time providing the necessary chaos. It's a problem that crypto coders have dealt with over and over, developing lots of answers that each come with their own unique weaknesses. One of the NSA's most infamous backdoors, confirmed in December, involved a secret pattern baked into a NIST-approved random-number generator, effectively breaking any program that relied on it. Cellphone cameras could offer a clean way to fix the problem. The solution focuses on camera noise, the pixely haze that appears when you try to take a cellphone picture in low light. It changes from frame to frame, providing an easily accessible source of chaos. It's also remarkably robust, drawing from the perfect randomness of quantum-based fluctuations in the measurement of light. Measuring the noise on the N9 camera, the researchers found the pattern was a close match for the kind of quantum randomness predicted by theoretical physics. According to their data, the camera noise was drilling down to the basic chaotic properties of light itself. "RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO CHANCE" That's a potentially powerful tool, but it may be a while before it makes a difference in actual cryptography. The big problem is that, along with randomness, most cryptography problems also require numbers to be "pseudorandom" — passing statistical variance tests that genuinely random numbers don’t always pass. Pure chaos is often too messy to be workable. (This irony led to the classic 1969 paper, "Random number generation is too important to be left to chance.") It's easy to manage in a conventional random number generator, but it means the camera noise would have to be smoothed out through something called a "whitening" function. By the end, it might not be any more efficient or powerful than more conventional options. Porting the experiment to other phones might also be tricky since researchers used the Linux-based Nokia N9, which runs on the much-loved but now-abandoned Meego platform. "THE WORD 'QUANTUM' SUCKS PEOPLE'S BRAINS OUT." But that hasn't stopped cryptographers from dreaming of programs powered by quantum chaos. Silent Circle's Jon Callas calls it "The Heisenberg-Schrodinger Credulity Effect." "The word 'quantum' sucks people's brains out," Callas says. "Once they hear it, they stop thinking." Still, he admits he's pitched his own camera-powered randomness engines more than a few times, even if they've never come to fruition. More importantly, the idea may be on the right side of history. As more of our communications move to smartphones, encryption programs are following suit, and cryptographers are looking for ways to make use of the new platform's natural advantage. Given the high-ISO cameras that now come standard on even entry-level phones, it's only natural that mobile crypto will start looking to them for random numbers. It’s not practical yet, but it could be soon. The Smartphone has reached the saturation point. It's really difficult now to make a new product exciting.
As we turn our attention to iPhone 6, Apple still has the 'big screen' ticket unused. I don't know how Apple will implement it, but lots of work must have been done to enable a seamless transition for developers and users. But my question is, what else? A new design, faster/more power-efficient processor, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, better camera... iPhone 5 offered nothing exciting but it introduced a breath-taking design and really important features like LTE. I am pretty sure iPhone 6's design will exceed our expectations. But... until when can Apple rely on design alone? Do you think a bigger screen will be the only main feature of iPhone 6? Do you think that you will be just satisfied with a bigger screen or do you wish for more? Share your ideas and thoughts! Three years ago, a family of rural farmers stumbled across an incredible paleontological site on their land in the Patagonia region of Argentina. The family notified nearby Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio (MEF), and now researchers at the site have unearthed what they believe is the largest dinosaur ever. It's estimated that the massive beast weighed almost 80 tons (80,000 kg) and stood 65 feet tall (20 meters) when it walked the earth some 95 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. Measurements suggest it was over 130 feet (40 meters) from its head to the tip of its tail. That means it was roughly as long as a 13-story building.
But this truly gigantic dinosaur was a herbivore. The specimens found in Argentina's Chubut province (which is part of the Patagonia region) belong to the sauropod group of dinosaurs, which are noted by their small heads, thick, pillar-like legs, and long necks and tails. Perhaps the most well-known sauropod is the Apatosaurus, which often goes by the name "Brontosaurus" in pop culture. But this latest sauropod is twice as long and up to four times as heavy, and researchers are classifying it as a new species of Titanosaur, which is a group of extremely large sauropods. When WhatsApp went down for four hours this weekend, nearly 5 million people signed up for messaging service Telegram. The app skyrocketed to the top of the App Store charts, and is now the top free app in 46 countries from Germany to Ecuador. In the US and several other countries, the app is no. 1 in the social networking category, ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik, and others.
It’s not immediately clear why Telegram emerged as the alternative of choice following WhatsApp’s downtime. Users could have switched to Kik, or Facebook Messenger, or LINE — all of which have hundreds of millions of users. There’s seemingly something different about Telegram. Its rise isn’t only due to WhatsApp’s acquisition and subsequent downtime. "We have been the no. 1 app in Spanish, Arabic, and several Latin American app stores for several weeks before the Facebook deal happened," says Telegram's Markus Ra. "The growth was there — so the WhatsApp acquisition and problems merely multiplied the effect across all affected countries." According to app analytics site App Annie, Telegram started truly gaining steam on February 17th, days before the WhatsApp news even hit. Built by the pioneering Durov brothers behind Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte (also known as VK), Telegram is a messaging service combining the speed of WhatsApp with Snapchat’s ephemerality and advanced new security measures. WhatsApp might have heralded the first time we heard of Telegram, but it certainly won't be the last. Android may be based on Linux, but it’s not based on the type of Linux system you may have used on your PC. You can’t run Android apps on typical Linux distributions and you can’t run the Linux programs you’re familiar with on Android.
Linux makes up the core part of Android, but Google hasn’t added all the typical software and libraries you’d find on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. This makes all the difference. A video overview of the changes to be found in the 2014 release of Ubuntu-based Linux distribution ‘Deepin’ has been posted online. If that reads like a mouthful, no worries: the video below shows a number of neat changes, some of which (e.g., live wallpaper on the lock screen) may leave you with your jaw wide open and drool on your chin. Deepin has form for bringing the bling to Linux, and this latest alpha release shows it doesn’t intend on bucking that trend anytime soon. The upcoming release is pencilled in for release on June 15 and features yet more visual rejigging of its HTML5-based desktop environment, this time underpinned by lashings of Google’s increasingly popular Go language, a helping of Compiz for some fancy effects, and various GNOME technologies. The video below presents a silent overview of the first alpha build. With some 35 million monthly users, cross-platform open-source messaging service Telegram is fast living up to its claim of being a fully-fledged alternative to WhatsApp.
While the service only provides official applications for Android and iOS users, their decision to provide a robust API has allowed third-party developers to create all manner of apps and integration with other operating systems, including Windows Phone, OS X and Google Chrome. Now a new app for Unity brings integration with the web version to the Ubuntu desktop. The previous update (1.9.0) to the Facebook app for Android brought two extra icons to your app drawer – Camera and Messenger apps. Most users weren’t particularly happy with that though and it appears that Facebook listened as today we get a new release, which removes those icons. The functionality should still be available right from your homescreen, though, via widgets .
The dedicated Facebook Camera app gave users a fast shortcut to uploading images while the Messenger is the Facebook chat service that’s available as a standalone app for iOS, Android and Windows 7. According to a report by Mashable Facebook will soon disable the Chat function from its main app and push that functionality solely to its Messenger app.
Facebook brought a major update for its Messenger client, which helped expand its reach. Until today the app had only one use – chats between online Facebook friends. Now it no longer requires you to have a Facebook account.
Facebook has introduced a new set of stickers for the Facebook Messenger service. These are all variations of the famous Facebook Like icon showing a thumbs up gesture, with the hand showing other gestures, including a much requested thumbs down or Dislike gesture that Facebook would probably never implement on their site. So you can’t yet Dislike a post but now you can at least send them a sticker on Messenger.
Facebook has just released the Messenger app for Windows 7. It’s been available for iOS and Android for some time too. Facebook has launched a new ad for their Android-based launcher called Facebook Home. Unlike any of their previous ads, however, this one features the company CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself, along with other members of the team that worked on Facebook Home and is shot in their headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
‘Bingo Friendzy,’ developed by UK developer Gamesys, has been introduced by Facebook as the social network’s first real-money gambling application.
Facebook has just issued an update to its iOS application. Facebook for iOS, which is one of the prominent applications in the App Store now comes with several new features and enhanced user experience.
Facebook has announced two new ways of logging into apps using your Facebook account. The ability to log into other services using your Facebook account has always been a convenient option but the cost of that convenience was giving away your personal information to an app that you may not fully trust.
Included in Android's design guidelines is a section regarding iconography. The guidelines give very specific instructions on how to design a launcher icon for Android - it should have a unique silhouette, it should have a slight downward perspective, and it should be clearly visible no matter what wallpaper is behind it.
That's a beast of a GPU..... NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 Specs Revealed today by website Tyden.cz. For NVIDIA fans waiting to see what their favorite green team is up to it seems the cat has been let out of the bag and the first specs (Albeit Rumored) have arrived on the net in a timely fashion. This new card will feature Maxwell architecture and will feature SMM (Streaming Multiprocessor Maxwell) SIMD designs, which were introduced in the TX 750 Ti that made its debut a few weeks back now. Although only a rumor at this time this story is floating around the web.
|
|