In the week since Apple said it would Most have come down in support of Apple, though others, including Bill Gates and Simon Segars, CEO of UK chip company ARM, have leaned more towards the FBI’s position. Here’s a roundup of what tech leaders have said so far, starting with some of the most recent views expressed.
A dearth of storage available in smartphones will soon be an issue of the past. Smartphone makers boasted about higher capacity storage on new handsets announced at Mobile World Congress this week. The increased storage comes from SD card slots on the devices. HP announced storage capacity eventually going up to 2TB via an SD card slot in its upcoming Elite X3, while Samsung said its Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge will support a storage capacity of up to 200GB. Samsung’s previous Galaxy S6 handset didn’t have an SD card slot, and capacity was limited to 128GB of internal flash storage. Samsung is offering only 32GB of primary internal storage in the S7 smartphones. Users will have to buy SD cards if they want more storage.
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Sony is still figuring out how to innovate. In addition to The first of the four products is the only one coming to market: the Xperia Ear. It’s a small Bluetooth and NFC-connected virtual assistant that rests in your ear. It looks similar to the
Microsoft’s The leak comes courtesy of a new Microsoft program called Actiongram that appears to be a platform for creating mixed reality videos. In other words, videos that add augmented reality elements like a cartoon character or a digital rendering to real world video capture.
Mastercard is working on a new app that provides extra security when buying things online. But instead of just demanding a password, the app will offer to verify your identify with a selfie. The app is coming this summer for phones, tablets, and PCs, and will be available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, the With selfie checks, users will have to blink for the camera to prevent against spoofing the system with a photo. Alternatively, users will be able to verify themselves with a fingerprint, through systems like Apple’s Touch ID. Mastercard says it will transmit this data in a way that can’t be stolen or used by scammers.
Countless wireless mice and keyboards can be hacked from 100 yards away leaving their host machines and the networks they are attached to open to malware, The problem, which is being called MouseJack, affects Amazon, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, Logitech and Microsoft products, the company says, and likely more vendors’ gear that they haven’t tested. Logitech alone shipped its billionth mouse in 2008, so the problem is widespread.
Though you might not have heard much about it from Samsung, one of the best new features in the Have you ever used a smartphone under sunlight and felt the display was either too dark or too bright? Conversely, does your phone look too bright or not bright enough in a dimly-lit room? While any phone will let you make manual adjustments, you might have to mess with those settings again later when brightness returns to normal. It’s a nuisance, one that Samsung has reportedly eliminated with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. As Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate notes in his
The Galaxy S7 and LG G5 were The Galaxy S7 is a refined version of the excellent design from last year’s GS6. It’s sleek, glossy, and a fingerprint magnet. It looks and feels really premium, particularly on the Edge model. It’s hard to find something to complain about.
Although Apple does not exhibit at Mobile World Congress, the giant trade show in Barcelona, the company casts a long shadow over it. The iPhone maker’s influence there extends to app developers, accessory vendors and, now, the debate about securing digital identity. In a keynote session on security at the show, moderator Michael O’Hara asked presenters whether they sided with Apple or the U.S. government in the legal dispute over whether Apple should help the Federal Bureau of Investigation unlock an iPhone belonging to the employer of one of the San Bernardino attack suspects. For Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, the company that designs the microprocessors found in most smartphones, “It’s a complex situation, there are rights and wrongs.”
Its Registrar keeps a close eye on domain name registrations and changes to registrations with the intention of preventing attackers from gaining control of a domain name, said Ryan Lackey, who works with CloudFlare’s security product strategy. The idea came after CloudFlare began looking for a domain name registrar with better security, Lackey said. CloudFlare is a constant target for attackers. They couldn’t find anything suitable, so CloudFlare decided to develop its own.