Why IT leaders should pay attention to Augmented Reality

Brian Blau, Research VP, Gartner

  03 Nov 2016 , 16:11

By Brian Blau

Magikarp is in the fountain, Charmander is near the park bench, Rattata is by the front desk and everywhere people are throwing digital PokéBalls with their smartphones.

These names represent Pokémon characters, inspired by the popular 1990’s television show, that show up in your GPS-rendered surroundings while playing the new Pokémon Go app. As players walk around their neighborhoods, offices or any physical environs, the phone vibrates to let users know that a Pokémon is nearby. The image of the Pokémon is displayed over the real-world terrain, and players use the phone screen and a live camera view to “catch” the characters.

A Pidgey appears on a car in screenshots from Pokémon Go

Launched in a limited number of countries in July 2016, the app has risen to the top of the app store charts in the U.S. and broken many app engagement records. While Pokémon Go is a game and its augmented reality (AR) feature isn’t sophisticated, the app’s success has turbocharged attention on AR and

The Huawei Fit is a waterproof fitness tracker with an e-ink display and 6 day battery life

By tech2 News Staff /  03 Nov 2016 , 15:58

Huawei has announced the Huawei Fit fitness tracker, an e-ink toting wearable that you can take with you wherever you go.

As you can see from the image, this tracker features a round face and an e-ink display. Since it’s an e-ink display (think Kindle), the display will be of the always-on variety. The straps are 18mm wide and can be swapped out as needed.

The Fit claims to keep track of all the fitness data you’d expect a fitness tracker to track. This includes heart rate, step count, calories burned, sleep patterns, energy consumed while swimming, etc. One niggle is that the watch doesn’t support GPS, which means that the watch will need to be tethered to your phone (via the Huawei Wear app).

The watch is capable of showing notifications as well.

Huawei claims that you can expect 6 days of battery life when in use and about 30 days of standby time. The company also claims that you can get a full charge in 2 hours.

The Huawei Fit will retail for $129.99 (Rs 8,700) on Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg, but there’s no word on its availability in India at this time.

Despite the lack of GPS, the price makes the Huawei Fit a tempting proposition.

Leaks and rumours: OnePlus 4, MacBook Pro 2017, Huawei Mate 9 and more

Image: iChagezone, Weibo

By Kunal Khullar /  03 Nov 2016 , 14:26

Just a couple of days back we reported leaks around the Samsung Galaxy S8, the iPhone 8 and other devices that would be released or hitting the market soon. Today we have a new set of leaks which have popped up in less than two days. That is bound to happen considering the competition and high consumer demands.

Without further adieu let’s see some of the new leaks.

OnePlus 4

Shown above is the OnePlus 3.

The OnePlus 3 proved to be a successful product for the company and now various sources on Weibo suggest that the OnePlus 4 will be launched in June or July next year. Expect a Snapdragon 830 SoC clocked at 3GHz with an Adreno 620 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 32/64/128GB storage options. The battery could be in the 4,000-4,200mAh range and that the front and rear camera units will be 8MP and 24MP units respectively. The display is said to be a 5.5-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2K (2560×1440).

Huawei Mate 9 Pro

Image: iChagezone, Weibo

We know that Chinese smartphone maker Huawei will be launching the Mate 9 today in Berlin, Germany. There has been a speculation of a higher end smartphone, the Mate 9 Pro. It is expected to arrive with a 5.9-inch display with a 2560×1440 resolution, an octa-core Kirin 960 processor, Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, 6GB RAM and 256GB of flash storage. The rear camera will have a dual-lens setup with 20MP and 12MP sensors. It will run on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.

LeEco LEX850

LeEco recently announced the third generation of its smartphone range, the Le Pro 3 and Le S3. It seems that the company is not yet done for 2016 as a new phone was seen online. Sporting the model number LEX850 it is said to feature a 5.7-inch 2K display, a Snapdragon 821 processor clocked at 2.34GHz, dual 13MP rear cameras. There is 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage on board and a 3900mAh battery.

Apple MacBook Pro 2017

Okay, we know that Apple just refreshed the MacBook Pro series with a neat looking function OLED strip, but speculation for the next year’s model are already coming in. According to KGI Apple will launch another refresh of the MacBook Pros in the second half of 2017 which will support 32GB of RAM. Of course that is dependent upon whether or not Intel releases its Canonlake processors. The Canonlake CPU with LPDDR 4 RAM will consume 15 percent to 25 percent less power than existing CPUs,allowing that power saving to be allotted to additional RAM.

EU-US Privacy Shield data transfer agreement under scrutiny by privacy advocacy groups

(Image credit: Getty Images)

  03 Nov 2016 , 13:51

A new EU-U.S. pact governing the transfer of personal data faces a second legal challenge, putting the details of the deal which underpins billions of dollars of transatlantic trade in digital services under further scrutiny. French privacy advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, non-profit Internet service provider French Data Network and its Federation FDN industry association have now challenged the adoption of the Privacy Shield pact by the European Commission at the Luxembourg-based General Court, following in the steps of Irish group Digital Rights Ireland.

The Privacy Shield agreement was reached earlier this year after the European Union’s highest court struck down the previous Safe Harbor Principles used by companies to enable them to transfer Europeans’ personal data to the United States, due to concerns about intrusive U.S. surveillance of online data. The new agreement gives businesses storing Europeans’ data on U.S. servers – from human resources information to people’s browsing histories and hotel bookings – an easy way to do so without falling foul of tough EU private data transfer rules.

More than 500 companies have signed up to Privacy Shield so far, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, while over 1,000 are being processed by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The agreement seeks to strengthen privacy protections for EU citizens by giving them a means of seeking redress in the case of disputes, including through a new privacy ombudsman within the State Department who will deal with complaints from Europeans about U.S. spying.

But the objectors say that restrictions on U.S. surveillance activities – in particular the bulk collection of data and the purposes for which the data can be used – are inadequate and therefore the Privacy Shield agreement should be annulled. Under EU law companies or individuals may challenge EU acts before the EU courts if they are directly concerned within two months of the act coming into force, otherwise they have to go through national courts, a process which takes longer.

However both challenges face a strong risk of being declared inadmissible if the court finds that the associations are not directly concerned. In their challenge the French groups say that the U.S. ombudsman is not an effective mechanism for dealing with complaints. “The fact that it relies on so-called ‘independent’ instruments is in no way sufficient to consider it an independent judicial entity,” they said.

A spokesman for the European Commission, which negotiated the Privacy Shield with Washington, said it was aware of the new complaint. “We don’t comment on ongoing court cases. As we have said from the beginning, the Commission is convinced that the Privacy Shield lives up to the requirements set out by the European Court of Justice, which have been the basis for the negotiations,” Christian Wigand said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce did not respond to questions about the second challenge.

Reuters

IoT Zombies are eating the Internet

  03 Nov 2016 , 13:16

By Alex deVries and Tim Skutt

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have always been a problem for popular hosted sites, but the ones from the last few weeks are different.

The first one to make the news was Brian Krebs’ krebsonsecurity.com, one of the most comprehensive security news sites today. The DDoS attack was on the order of 620Gbps, which cost Akamai too much to defend and resulted in krebsonsecurity.com going offline for a couple days. The source: hacked webcams acting as DDoS zombies.

A second one was on OVH, a French hosting provider. They survived a 1.5Tbps attack. Their claim that the attack was from 145,000 hacked cameras and DVRs is consistent with Akamai’s observations.

Besides the scale, what’s different about these attacks? IoT

The advent of IoT brings with it incredible scale of powerful low-cost devices. A botnet of 150k devices gives a great platform for an attacker. The devices are often scattered on the Internet, making them difficult to track.

Devices like cameras can be easy to hack. Devices have relatively long life spans and firmware is rarely updated, so devices often remain vulnerable to attacks long after known vulnerabilities are patched. Firmware can be reverse engineered, having either have been ripped from a purchased device or downloaded from firmware updates. Many devices also have default usernames and passwords to make this even easier.

Targets aren’t hard to find, either. Sites like shodan.io make it trivial to find certain devices on the Internet.

Securing devices

There are best practices that can be followed to secure devices. Device identity, secure default configuration, secure updates and resource protection are just some. These work well for new designs.

Let’s also be realistic: in the meantime, there’s millions of improperly secured devices on the Internet and they’ve been there for years. Fixing them is

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro the first Tango capable smartphone will change how we look at AR and here is how

Seeing objects in a room

By tech2 News Staff /  03 Nov 2016 , 12:53

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is the latest smartphone by Lenovo to go on sale for $499.99. In fact, the device is the first one that is powered by Google Tango framework which relies on depth sensing to create seamless Augmented reality figures on the screen. This company has been working on the technology since last few years with constant videos demoing it right from the early stages.Also, Google announced a Project Tango smartphone way back in 2014 along with Project Tango Tablet released in 2014.

Tango was originally known as Project Tango and looked like a simple concept that maybe used for something. We were not sure about what the depth-sensing will actually do but we got a concrete idea about it after Lenovo announced the smartphone in CES 2016 earlier this year. But Lenovo demoed the capabilities of the tango technology in Phab 2 Pro which made it a serious contender for the most innovative smartphone for the year.

The demos during Lenovo Tech World painted a perfect picture of how capable the platform was and that smartphones were powerful enough to sufficiently track the 3D world and project an augmented reality on the screen. These demos included using Tango platform to measure the dimensions of the room accurately and use shopping apps to virtually redecorate your room before buying furniture or new products for your home.

Other demonstrations included live size models of dinosaurs where you can check different species of dinosaurs  with life-size AR renders. The renders can be changes in scale to comparatively study the entire field with an unprecedented level of interactivity. This can result in newer and dedicated applications for students across different fields, right from students of architecture to medical students.

During the launch, there will be more than 20 apps available for Phab 2 Pro users to experience different aspects of what Tango platform has to offer. These apps range from ‘Augmented reality gaming’ and ‘Augmented reality utilities’ with the gaming apps directly aiming at pure gaming like Pokemon GO but without the battery drain while ‘utilities’ hinting at apps like “WayFairView,” “Measure,” and “Magic Plan.”

The OnePlus 4 might be unveiled in June 2017; expect a Snapdragon 830 and 2K display

An image of the OnePlus 3 smartphone. Credit: OnePlus

By tech2 News Staff /  02 Nov 2016 , 17:31

Various sources on Weibo suggest that the OnePlus 4 flagship smartphone will be launched in June or July next year.

Little is known of the phone, but rumours hint at a Snapdragon 830 SoC clocked at 3GHz. This is expected to be paired with an Adreno 620 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 32/64/128GB storage options.

Other rumours indicate that the battery is in the 4,000-4,200mAh range and that the front and rear camera units will be 8MP and 24MP units respectively. It’s not known whether OnePlus will embrace dual-cameras or not.

The display is said to be a 5.5-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2K (2560×1440).

At launch, the phone is expected to run OxygenOS (based on Android 7.1, this time around) and it might support wireless charging and two SIMs.

Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 830 chipset is said to be based on a 10nm manufacturing process, which should translates to a noticeable improvement in battery life and performance. This would also explain the rumoured 3GHz clock speed. The Adreno 620 is an updated version of the current Adreno 530 GPU and one can expect significant performance improvements.

The upcoming OnePlus 3T is also a phone to keep an eye on in the meanwhile. A minor upgrade to the stellar OnePlus 3, the 3T will come with a Snapdragon 821 SoC and an improved camera module.