The US warns it will hack Russia's infrastructure if it interferes with the election

By Rob Thubron on November 7, 2016, 8:30 AM


Last month, the US Intelligence Community blamed the Russian government for a series of high-profile cyberattacks that were apparently aimed at influencing this week’s election. Now, American officials have warned that any attempts by the country to interfere directly with the vote itself will result in a US attack on key Russian systems.

Quoting “a senior intelligence official and top-secret documents,” an NBC News report claims that US military hackers have already penetrated Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications network, and the Kremlin’s command systems. The preparations are being made in the event of an attack that disrupts the US election “in a significant way.”

Officials have said that they do not anticipate a full digital attack from agents acting on behalf of the Russian government, but they do expect some “cyber mischief,” such as the release of fake documents and other forms of misinformation. There are also concerns over a possible attempt to slow down Americans’ internet access on election day, which could, for example, result in some people being unable to search the web for directions to their nearest polling station.

The extent of the US’ cyberwarfare capabilities is unknown, though military officials often say they are the most advanced in the world. The threat of retaliation for election interference has reportedly been delivered to Russia through back channels.

Russia has responded to the “unprecedented, insolent” US warning with a threat of its own. A spokesman said that “given such an aggressive, unpredictable line, we have to take measures to protect our interests, somehow hedge the risks….such unpredictability is dangerous for the whole world.”

It’s going to be an interesting week.

​Waiting for a cheaper Raspberry Pi 3? The $20 Orange Pi PC 2 might fit the bill

By Nick Heath  | November 7, 2016, 9:26 AM PST

The latest challenger to the credit card-sized computer is broadly similar to the Raspberry Pi 3 but cuts the Wi-Fi to shave $15 off its price.

The Raspberry Pi computer continues to inspire rivals to chase its success, with this month seeing the launch of the Orange Pi PC 2, a Raspberry Pi 3 challenger with more modest specs that sells for $20.

The quad-core, ARM-based Orange Pi PC 2 has broadly similar specs to the Raspberry Pi Model 3 B but has one fewer USB 2.0 port, lacks Wi-Fi and is powered via a 5V/2A barrel jack, rather than a micro-USB.

On the other hand the Chinese-made Allwinner H5 quad-core, ARM Cortex A53-based system-on-a-chip used in the Orange Pi PC 2 is relatively new and was designed for use in 4K TV boxes. The Orange Pi PC 2's memory is also of the faster DDR3 type, compared to the Pi 3's LPDDR2.

The $15 that the Orange Pi PC 2 shaves off the Raspberry Pi 3's asking price might also be enough to tempt those waiting for the Raspberry Pi 3 to be released in its cheaper Model A incarnation.

The company that makes the Orange Pi PC 2has said the board will be available with images to run Android, Ubuntu, Debian, and the official Raspberry Pi OS Raspbian. However, this isn't the same version of Raspbian that can be downloaded from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website, but a Raspbian image with the Allwinner H5 Linux kernel and bootloader.

One other note of caution is that an earlier version of Allwinner's custom Linux kernel for its SoC was found to have a backdoor built into it.

Earlier in the year, the firm behind the Orange Pi launched another spin on the Raspberry Pi, the Orange Pi One, a more expensive, slightly higher specced alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero.
Specs

CPU: Allwinner H5 quad core Cortex A53 processor

GPU: ARM Mali-450MP GPU

Memory: 1GB DDR3

Storage: micro SD card up to 64GB, 8Mbit SPI NOR flash

Video: HDMI 1.4 with CEC support, AV port

Audio: HDMI, AV port, on-board microphone

Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet

USB: 3x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port

Camera: MIPI CSI Interface

Expansion: 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header

Debugging: 3-pin UART header for serial console

Misc: IR receiver; Power button; Power and status LEDs

Power Supply: 5V/2A via barrel jack.

Dimensions: 85mm x 55mm

Weight: 38g

Gaps starting to close in cyberinsurance policies

By Evan Koblentz  | November 7, 2016, 9:23 AM PST

Insurance companies are starting to fill the loopholes in their cybersecurity products, which could prevent costly lawsuits and angry customers down the road.

Make sure you're covered for the gray areas—that's the warning from insurance attorney Scott Godes, who talked to TechRepublic recently about the chasm between cyberpolicies and traditional crime coverage.

Uninsured losses resulting from social engineering are an all-too-common plight of American businesses, said Godes, a partner in the Washington., D.C. office of Barnes & Thornburg, where he co-chairs the data security and privacy practice.

For example, the P.F. Chang's restaurant chain got hacked for 60,000 customer credit card numbers, and then got stuck with a nearly $2 million billto a payment processing company that its cyberinsurance policy from the Chubb insurance company didn't cover, Godes observed.

Some insurance companies are trying to fill the middle ground. One example is Willis Towers Watson, an insurance brokerage that recently announced its CyFi plan—that's short for cyberinsurance and fidelity, vice president Peter Foster explained.

Fidelity bond is insurance-speak for a crime policy involving the theft of money. A client of Foster's in the financial field nearly lost a large sum when one of their corporate officers was asked to surreptitiously transfer money online, which inspired Willis to expedite its product offering, he said. That wouldn't have been covered in a standard cyberinsurance policy.

"They managed to stop it in time, but it's what got them concerned," Foster said. "Because [CyFi] is a gap filler, it is considered primary coverage to fill that gap and will also serve excess over the crime policy and the cyber policy," he said.

"Such gaps may include losses arising from social engineering; theft of confidential information; a narrow definition of computer systems; mechanical failures or errors in program designs; and cyberterrorism," Willis' announcement stated. Willis plans to make the policy available to other industries, not just the financial field, Foster added. Lloyd's and U.S. Underwriters are the companies behind the policy, he said.

Godes said Willis' new plan goes further than others have to date. "Cyberinsurance in particular has kept me busy since 2008," he said. "You would be hard-pressed to find stock cyberinsurance that covers money lost by being wired around from social engineering fraud."

There are other caveats that companies shopping for cyberinsurance should beware, Godes added. Those include coverage limits due to regulatory actions; lack of coverage for the cost of call monitoring, credit monitoring, and forensic investigations; and denial of coverage if a hack began before the coverage term. Another aspect to consider is cybercoverage for an attack on your company that results in hurting other companies, such as the recent distributed denial-of-service attack on domain name system provider Dyn.

However, "It's still an evolving market. Ultimately the policies as we see them today have only been around a few years," Godes noted. "Ask a lot of questions as you're buying. That's probably point number one. Ask questions about why and how this policy you're thinking about buying is well-suited to your company and your company's risk. What might be important to one entity might be completely unimportant to another."

Android nears 88% global market share, but Apple still makes more money

By Conner Forrest  | November 4, 2016, 11:20 AM PST

Android market share hit 87.5% in late 2016, according to new findings from Strategy Analytics. However, that doesn't necessarily hurt Apple.

When it comes to the smartphone OS of choice around the world, Google's Android is the clear winner. According to new data from Strategy Analytics, Android commanded an 87.5% market share in Q3 2016, compared to Apple's 12.1% in the same time frame.

In a press release announcing the findings, Linda Sui, a director at Strategy Analytics, said that overall smartphone shipments had grown to 375.4 million in Q3 2016. Sui also said in the release that this marked "the smartphone industry's fastest growth rate for a year."

Of those total shipments, Android represented 328.6 million units, iOS represented 45.5 million units, and other companies accounted for 1.3 million units. For Android, this counts as 10.3% year-over-year growth, and -5.2% year-over-year growth for Apple.


To explain what the overall market looks like now, Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawston said the following in the press release: "Android's gain came at the expense of every major rival platform. Apple iOS lost ground to Android and dipped to 12 percent share worldwide in Q3 2016, due to a lackluster performance in China and Africa. BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows Phone have all but disappeared due to strategic shifts, while Tizen and other emerging platforms softened as a result of limited product portfolios and modest developer support."

The drop in Apple's iPhone sales is well-documented. In October 2016, Apple posted its first annual sales decline since 2001, driven in part by three consecutive quarters of falling iPhone sales and revenue.



However, despite the disparity in handset shipments, Apple apps remains well and above more profitable than their Android counterparts. An App Annie report from July 2016 claimed that, despite having half the number of app downloads as the Google Play Store, Apple's App Store generated twice the revenue.

Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen said that Apple simply has a different strategy than Android when it comes to mobile. Android has a broader approach, while Apple's iOS primarily targets the high-end market, which limits its reach, Nguyen said.


"I also don't expect them to move down market in any significant way," Nguyen said. "Looking across their history and portfolio of offerings, they've always differentiated by focusing on the high-end."

Focusing on that high-end allows Apple to make more money in the margins, especially when it comes to storage upgrades, Nguyen said. But, that means they need to focus on selling customers on why their product is worth the extra money.

Additionally, the Android ecosystem is dealing with its own problems. Woody Oh, a director at Strategy Analytics, said in the press release that Android's lead in the market looks "unassailable," and the software is still attractive, but a host of challenges remain.

"The Android platform is getting overcrowded with hundreds of manufacturers, few Android device vendors make profits, and Google's new Pixel range is attacking its own hardware partners that made Android popular in the first place," Oh said in the press release.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

*Android market share grew to nearly 88% in Q3 2016, according to data from Strategy Analytics.

*Apple's market share fell down to 12.1% in the same time, leading to the company's first drop in  sales since 2001.

*Still, Apple's App Store makes more money than the Google Play store, despite having half as many downloads.

Big Data could be the deciding factor between Hillary and Trump

Image: Reuters

  07 Nov 2016 , 16:46

By Muqbil Ahmar

It is going to be a photo finish, predict the psephologists. In this head to head, technology could play a major role, particularly Big Data, in deciding who gets to wear the crown eventually. While Trump has berated the technology, calling it “overrated,” the Hillary camp has gone all out to mine and collect data from every possible source: from voter registration and public records to social media activity. They are following up on the data-driven election strategy that Barack Obama built to great success while running for his second term. Many election analysts have credited Obama’s Big Data initiatives for his 2012 election win, saying that his tactics have set up a novel precedent for how election campaigns of the future would be run.

On one side, Hillary has stood her ground, with her campaign team developing and harnessing cutting-edge analytics to target swing voters. Trump hasn’t. While other candidates entered into arrangements and partnerships with data strategists, the sole exception had been Trump, who has instead relied heavily on his own personal appeal. He has, in fact, been critical of Big Data Analytics during his campaigns. “I’ve always felt it [Big Data] was overrated. Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.” On the contrary, Trump has used social media and the traditional media coverage to promote himself and his opinions. Trump’s strategy of not leveraging Big Data may turn against him and put him at a disadvantage as compared to his more analytically-aware rival.

But now, in the last moments, Trump has had to eat his words. In the month of September alone, Trump paid a Big Data Analytics UK firm Cambridge Analytica $5 million to help target voters. The company has claimed that it has data on around 230 million adults in the USA and approximately 4000 “data points” on every one of them, including gym and club memberships, charity donations, and card transactions. All this is a last ditch effort to analyze the ultimate voter and his political leanings and how to make them change their minds.

In the 2012 presidential election campaign, Obama used path-breaking data analytics. First of all, he focused on swing or undecided voters. His strategy was simple: there is no point in wasting resources wooing those who have already made up their minds or are political loyalists—they would not vote favorably even in a zillion years. A core team of more than 100 data analysts ran 66,000 computer simulations every day. Analysts put together data from various sources: voter registration records, charities and donations, and public department information. In fact, third-party data was also bought (including data collected from social media).

Ironically, even when Trump has belatedly decided to go for a data-centric strategy, he has followed the trodden road—one that followed in 2012. He hasn’t taken into account that technology, particularly Big Data Analytics, has been innovating fast and moving into uncharted territories to mine and process data, making the 2012 strategies look old school. Over the past four years, private vendors and companies have developed and sharpened Big Data tools, adding Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Sentiment Analysis, and Language Processing to the potent mix to leverage the state-of-the-art technologies and expand their scope.

“Big Data techniques and data mining have hugely enhanced and expanded in scope. Machine learning is a particularly helpful in increasing the correlation between the data and its influence as there is self-learning inbuilt, so that the tool adapts and learns in every new situation. This can be applied to any situation and business,” said Shashank Dixit, CEO, Deskera, a Cloud technology firm that has recently developed its own Big Data tool.

Campaigners within both the parties agree that Democrats have a sizable lead in collection of information on voters and their smart use of those leads could be the difference, particularly if the contest goes to the wire. Clearly, Hillary Clinton has the advantage of inheriting the database that Obama built over two campaigns; however, it remains to be seen how successfully she is able to leverage it. However, there is one thing that has been established beyond doubt: the candidate with the smartest data wins.

Will Trump’s last minute effort prove sufficient or will it be a classic case of too little too late? Only time will tell, the results would anyway be out soon.

With over 10 years of experience in the field of journalism, the author is a technology evangelist and avid blogger.

Brazilian astronomers discover two new exo-planets orbiting a sun like star

HIP 68468. Image: Aladin.

  07 Nov 2016 , 16:46

A team of Brazilian astronomers has discovered two new planets around a star similar to the sun known as HIP 68468. The two new planets, dubbed “super Neptune” and “super Earth”, are the first to be discovered by Brazilian astronomers since the discovery in 2015 of a planet similar to Jupiter, according to Brazil’s G1 news website on Friday. Astronomer Jorge Melendez, a professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo, and head researcher, said one of the objectives of the team was to compare the solar system with other planetary systems, Xinhua news agency reported.

The planetary environment around HIP 68468 is quite different from the system that includes Earth, he said. While the mass of the newly discovered planets was similar to that of Earth’s and Neptune’s, the planets rotate very close to their star, which suggests they may have migrated from a more exterior to a more interior region of their planetary system. “Super Neptune, called HIP 68468c, has a mass that is 50 percent greater than the planet Neptune. But while our Neptune is far from the sun (30 times the distance between the Earth and Sun), the orbit of the new planet is only 70 per cent of the Earth-Sun distance,” G1 said.

Super Earth, or HIP 68468b, has a mass that is three times larger than Earth’s, and its orbit is barely 3 percent of the distance from Earth to the Sun. That means that it is “practically stuck to its star”, HIP 68468, which is 6 billion years old and some 300 light years away from Earth. According to Melendez, the research indicates that the star HIP 68468 has “swallowed” a planet, due to the presence of high levels of lithium, an element that is usually abundant in planets, not stars.

The discovery was made at the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert.

IANS

Xiaomi’s new Mi Sports Bluetooth headset are sweatproof offer 7-hours of battery

By Kunal Khullar /  07 Nov 2016 , 14:06

Xiaomi has transformed from just a smartphone maker into a technology brand. From power banks to air purifiers, there is no stopping the Chinese giant. It has just announced a new sports Bluetooth headset with a not so innovative name, the Mi Sports Bluetooth Headset.

The earbuds look very neat and offer a loop so to secure them around your earlobes. Yes, they are connected with a wire so they will be much more secure. In terms of weight they weigh at just 17.8gms and a 110mAh battery which is said to offer 7-hours of battery backup. It comes with Bluetooth 4.1 along with A2DP and it can be paired with up to two devices at the same time.

They are splash resistant with an IPx4 rating so a bit of sweat and light rain will not damage it. The company says that it has the capacity to operate in temperature range of -20°C to 70°C, but we doubt anyone would listen to music at those extreme temperatures.

The Mi Sports Bluetooth headset will come in two colour options, black and white and are priced at 149 CNY which is about Rs 1,500. They will come with five ear tips as well. No word if the company will launch the product in India as of yet.

China adopts controversial cyber security law amidst opposition from foreign businesses and right groups

Image credit: Reuters

  07 Nov 2016 , 14:33

China adopted a controversial cybersecurity law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, although the law has triggered concern from foreign business and rights groups. The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to come into effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.

Overseas critics of the law argue it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed “critical”, and includes contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers located in China. Rights advocates also say the law will enhance restrictions on China’s internet, already subject to the world’s most sophisticated online censorship mechanism, known outside the country as the Great Firewall.

Yang Heqing, an official on the National People’s Congress standing committee, said the internet was already deeply linked to China’s national security and development. “China is an internet power, and as one of the countries that faces the greatest internet security risks, urgently needs to establish and perfect network security legal systems,” Yang told reporters at the close of a bimonthly legislative meeting.

More than 40 global business groups petitioned Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in August, urging Beijing to amend controversial sections of the law. Chinese officials have said it would not interfere with foreign business interests. Contentious provisions remained in the final draft of the law issued by the parliament, including requirements for “critical information infrastructure operators” to store personal information and important business data in China, provide unspecified “technical support” to security agencies, and pass national security reviews.

Those demands have raised concern within companies that fear they would have to hand over intellectual property or open backdoors within products in order to operate in China’s market.

“Vague, Ambitious”

James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, called the provisions “vague, ambiguous, and subject to broad interpretation by regulatory authorities”. Human Rights Watch said elements of the law, such as criminalising the use of the internet to “damage national unity”, would further restrict online freedom.

“Despite widespread international concern from corporations and rights advocates for more than a year, Chinese authorities pressed ahead with this restrictive law without making meaningful changes,” Sophie Richardson, China Director at Human Rights Watch, said in an emailed statement. Zhao Zeliang, director of the Cyberspace Administration of China’s cyber security coordination bureau, told reporters that every article in the law accorded with rules of international trade and that China would not close the door on foreign companies.

“They believe that [phrases such as] secure and independent control, secure and reliable, that these are signs of trade protectionism. That they are synonymous. This is a kind of misunderstanding, a kind of prejudice,” Zhao said. Many of the provisions had been previously applied in practice, but their formal codification coincides with China’s adoption of a series of other regulations on national security and foreign civil society groups.

The law’s adoption comes amid a broad crackdown by President Xi Jinping on civil society, including rights lawyers and the media, which critics say is meant to quash dissent. Last year, Beijing adopted a sweeping national security law that aimed to make all key network infrastructure and information systems “secure and controllable”.

“China’s government has come to recognise that cyberspace immediately and profoundly impacts on many if not all aspects of national security,” said Rogier Creemers, a researcher in the law and governance of China at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “It is a national space, it is a space for military action, for important economic action, for criminal action and for espionage,” he said.

Reuters

The MMS mission by NASA just set the Guinness World Record for the highest altitude GPS signal fix

Image: NASA.

By tech2 News Staff /  07 Nov 2016 , 14:05

The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) by NASA now holds the Guinness world record for the highest altitude fix of a GPS signal. The fix was taken from a height of 43,500 miles (70006 kilometres) above the surface of the Earth.

Next year, the MMS will enter phase two of its mission, when it is expected to set a new world record, from at least twice the altitude of the current record.

The MMS spacecraft fly in a tetrahedral formation. Image: NASA.

The MMS is a flock of four satellites in a tight formation that are in an extremely elliptical orbit around the Earth. The mission holds another record for being the closest flying spacecraft in a formation, with a distance of only four and a half miles (roughly seven kilometres) between two satellites.  At their closest approach to Earth, the four satellites move at a blistering 22,000 miles per hour, which is also the fastest known use of a GPS receiver.

The four satellites are flying in a pyramid shaped formation to study a phenomenon in the magnetosphere of the Earth, known as magnetic reconnection. The phenomenon occurs due to the interaction between the magnetic fields of the Earth and the Sun.

The satellites use GPS tracking to stay in formation and obtain high resolution, three dimensional observations. The precise GPS coordinates are required for the sensitive, position and orbital calculations.

BlackBerry officially announces the DTEK50 and DTEK60 at Rs 21,990 and Rs 46,990 in India

By tech2 News Staff /  07 Nov 2016 , 15:21

BlackBerry has fully embraced its new Android avatar with the official launch of two new handsets in India. The two devices, called the DTEK50 and DTEK60 are priced at Rs 21,990 and Rs 46,990 respectively. Both the devices will start selling by early December.

The DTEK50 is a few months old and is already on sale in some countries. The devices packs in a 5.2-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of Full HD (441 ppi). Under the hood you’ll find a Snapdragon 617 SoC and 3GB of RAM. Onboard storage is limited to 16GB, but it’s expandable by up to 256GB via the microSD card slot. A 13MP f/2.0 rear camera and 8MP f/2.2 front camera make up the camera system. It has a 2,610 mAh battery, which supports Qualcomm’s QuickCharge 2.0 standard.

The more powerful DTEK60 was unveiled in October this year and packs in flagship specs, featuring a Snapdragon 820 SoC (clocked at 2.15GHz), 4GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. This is also expandable by up to 256GB via the microSD card slot.

The screen on the DTEK60 is a 5.5-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2K (2560×1440 or 534ppi). The camera unit consists of a 21MP f/2.0 rear camera and an 8MP f/2.2 front camera. The battery is a 3,000 mAh unit with QuickCharge 3.0 support.

Both phones run Android 6.0 Marshmallow with a custom BlackBerry skin and BlackBerry’s own, custom DTEK security suite.

Connectivity comes in the form of 4G support, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2 with A2DP with GPS, GLONASS, etc. also supported.

Interestingly, the DTEK60 uses a USB Type-C connector whereas the DTEK50 uses a microUSB connector. The DTEK50 also lacks a fingerprint sensor.

Facebook Messenger is testing Instant Games, a new HTML5 based game platform

By tech2 News Staff /  07 Nov 2016 , 13:52

Facebook is working on introducing a new platform called ‘Instant Games’, which will rival the native mobile ecosystems established by Google and Apple with the help of their mobile operating systems. Facebook has not been able to get back into the gaming sector on mobile devices despite a proper platform on desktop devices.

According to reports, the company is following up on the success of inbuilt games like Basketball in Facebook Messenger. Even though there is no precise date of launch for this new platform, some of the games are already available to play. Since it is yet to launch officially, you can’t share your score or invite others to play the game. These HTML5 games can be embedded anywhere, right from web pages to Messenger screens to bots. This can be the strategy that Facebook has long been waiting for to drive up user interaction on Facebook Messenger as people can play and challenge their friends on the platform.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

According to the report by TechCrunch, the company will soon launch a proper API and development kit for third party developers. Some of the games set to be part of the platform are already online, though they seem to be geo-locked and may not be playable at all locations. But one of the most important factors is that the games will not be heavy in terms of file size of the data files.

This way a large number of people can play these games in the Messenger without any additional download. One thing to note here is that this is not the first attempt by Facebook to enter the mobile gaming market, since its first attempt went down the drain in 2012. This comes right after the launch of Facebook Gameroom, a new offering by Facebook to target PC gaming platform like Steam.

Google search will soon rank mobile sites higher than desktop ones; experiments underway

By tech2 News Staff /  07 Nov 2016 , 12:36

Google, the king of search, has announced plans to shake up its indexing and ranking algorithm to prioritise the mobile site over the desktop one.

The company argues that most people use Google search on mobile anyway and that such users will obviously prefer results that link to mobile sites. Google’s current algorithm indexes the desktop version of a website and ranks that sites pages for content in desktop mode.

Google says that today, this is the wrong approach to take. Mobile sites can sometimes offer less information than their desktop counterparts, which is bad for a mobile-first world. Keeping this in mind, Google is now conducting experiments with its search algorithm to determine the best way to rank websites in the future.

“Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.”

Currently, Google’s live indexing algorithm is still looking at Desktop pages first, so you have some breathing space to transition your site to mobile (if you haven’t already).

The company says that if you have a responsive, dynamic website, you shouldn’t be worried. If you don’t have that and instead use different structures for desktop and mobile, Google has some suggestions for you here.

Google adds that if you’re building a new site, it will be better to have a functional desktop site than an incomplete mobile site.

Galaxy Note 7 fiasco: Samsung exchanged ‘nearly 85 percent’ units, but what about the other 15 percent?

Image: Hui Renjie

By Naina Khedekar /  07 Nov 2016 , 10:01

Imagine owning a ticking time bomb? Well, that’s exactly how Samsung Galaxy Note 7owners must feel. But, the good news is, Samsung has confirmed that ‘nearly 85 percent’ have already exchanged their units via the Note 7 Refund and Exchange Program. And, it also claims that most of these users have opted for another Samsung device. The other devices could most likely be the Galaxy S7 models, but this goes against what analyst had claimed about Note 7 users opting for iPhone instead.

All in all, it is good to know that majority of the Note 7 units have been returned. But, what about the 15 percent units that have been lurking in the dark. While these users haven’t reached out to Samsung yet, the company is trying to make amendments to put a hold to its scarring reputation.

So, the company has begun issuing the software update that will limit the device battery to 60 percent. While we have been hearing about the update for sometime now, we wonder what took the company so long to push it out. Meanwhile, there are already other problems burgeoning for the South Korean firm. After the premium handset, the company is said to have recalled 2.8 million washing machines after reports said that some of the units were exploding.

Read the complete statement from Samsung about the Note 7 recall numbers below:

As of today, nearly 85 percent of all recalled Galaxy Note 7 devices have been replaced through the U.S. Note7 Refund and Exchange Program, with the majority of the participants opting to receive another Samsung smartphone.

We remain focused on collecting the outstanding Galaxy Note 7 phones in the market. To further drive participation, we will be releasing a software update in the coming days that will limit the phone’s ability to charge beyond 60 percent, as well as issue a reminder pop-up notification every time a consumer charges, reboots or turns on the screen of their Note 7 device.

Any Galaxy Note7 owner who has not yet participated in the U.S. Note 7 Refund and Exchange Program should immediately power down their phone and contact their carrier or retailer today.

Its been a while since the Note 7 fiasco started, and getting its devices off people’s hand should have been (and we believe it is) the company’s top priority. However, a considerable amount of units are still out there somewhere. Whether its lack of awareness or other problems (like we saw with the Note 7 ‘available’ in India, which is actually a market that didn’t see the device go on sale officially) that have become a roadblock, but it is essential for users to get rid of the Note 7 as soon as possible. If you still own a Note 7 or know someone who owns it, get in touch with Samsung. And if you don’t want to, just bury the device!