The Turing Phone looked like an interesting device when Turing Robotics Industries (TRI) unveiled it back in 2015. The phone packed powerful hardware, a modern build of Android, and it was fully encrypted. This was back when most phones were not encrypted — it didn’t even have a data port. The excitement died down after a series of delays and changes, and the phone still hasn’t shipped. It’s increasingly unlikely that it ever will now that TRI has , where it was set to manufacture the device. Like many smartphone startups, TRI conducted a big social media campaign and lined up pre-orders for its phone at up to $870.
Over the past two weeks, a new Reddit community for creating fake porn videos took off, courtesy of . It’s an alarming concept for multiple reasons, given the way revenge porn has been used to target individuals. A user community focused on the creation of these edits, r/deepfakes, quickly sprang up on Reddit, while deepfake videos have been popular on Pornhub. Today, both companies announced they were taking steps to end the practice. On Reddit’s front, the r/deepfakes community has been suspended. A company spokesperson told : Reddit strives to be a welcoming, open platform for all by trusting our users to maintain an environment that cultivates genuine conversation.
The value of cryptocurrency is down right now, but online criminals are still happy to generate coins using your hardware. Usually, this comes in the form of crypto mining plugins running on websites, but there’s a new form of malware spreading online that mines coins on your phone. The odds of picking up this particular virus are low, but it’s still a clever bit of coding. The malware, , was discovered by Chinese IT firm Qihoo 360 Netlab. The researchers report this is a “wormable” piece of malware, which means it’s capable of spreading to new devices over a Wi-Fi network.
The mobile world moves at a breakneck pace compared with other types of silicon. Where top-end CPUs and GPUs tend to evolve more slowly, mobile chips are launched each year, every year. But even by these standards, it’s surprising we’re already hearing rumors of a Snapdragon 850, barely two months after covering Qualcomm’s . Qualcomm doesn’t normally boost its SoC model numbers by five, but there have been exceptions to that policy. In the past, when the company wants to showcase a smaller boost to performance, it’s adopted different conventions, such as the Snapdragon 801 versus the Snapdragon 800, or the Snapdragon 805 versus the Snapdragon 801.
Intel’s Optane memory is the first “new” storage technology to appear on the consumer and enterprise market since the earliest iterations of SLC NAND flash started showing up in enterprise solutions a decade ago. While the products have, thus far, been limited to a small slice of the consumer and enterprise markets, Intel intends to continue investing in the technology and to bring more products to market, reports. Long term, the company wants to push all local storage out of the market altogether. Intel is also pushing hard for 5G standard development; its XMM 8060 modem is supposed to be one of the first 5G radios to market when it arrives in mid-2019 or early 2020, and the is its first CDMA-capable modem, which could help the company take over Apple’s iPhone business.
Has your internet seemed miraculously faster and better lately? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would like you to think it has, according to its most recent broadband status report. According to the FCC, voting to last year has encouraged ISPs to fix all the problems with internet access and speeds. As you can imagine, many observers (and several FCC commissioners) think . The Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to issue periodic reports on the state of the broadband market as it pertains to both competition and availability. When the leadership of the is more friendly to the industry, these reports end up with a positive spin.
Sometimes words are hard, and that’s why some 22 million people have installed the Grammarly extension for Chrome. Grammarly promises to catch your typos and grammatical errors, but for a while, it was also exposing your personal documents to potential snooping by any website you visited. That the sort of breach of trust that can spell doom for a startup. Grammarly goes beyond a normal spell checker by assessing your sentence structure and word usage. It operates on websites in virtually any text field, but there’s also a dedicated editing interface if you want to go through a larger block of text.
Roughly 16 months ago, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began issuing Windows Phone devices to its officers. The goal was to give officers the ability to track 911 calls and access databases of criminal activity, and let officers give their own phone numbers to individuals so they could call the officer directly instead of being routed through a switchboard first. It was a surprising move, given that the Windows Phone ecosystem was already on life support at the time, and it was one of the few high-profile wins for Microsoft in the waning days of its platform.
AMD’s Ryzen was a huge success for the semiconductor company in 2017, winning new business, reinvigorating the consumer market, and pushing Intel to make the most aggressive realignment of its consumer product families we’d seen in a decade. From the addition of Hyper-Threading to low-end processors to huge price cuts on higher core counts, Ryzen pushed Intel in new directions. The server market, however, has been a different animal. While AMD has always made it clear that it intended to return to the server space, the company also stated it would do so gradually, ramping up production over time.
