Lifeboat Foundation

You phone does all kinds of things when it’s just lying there: checking your Facebook feed, pulling down Google Now updates, receiving emails and text messages. One thing it’s not doing: giving your battery a break.

Kyocera is working to change that. How? By sandwiching a solar panel to a smartphone display. It’s something they’ve been working on in conjunction with Sunpartner Technologies. They actually showed off their progress last year at Mobile World Congress, and they returned this year to give the crowd a glimpse at their updated prototype.

It’s an Android device with a five-inch screen, and like some of Kyocera’s other phones it’s waterproof and quite rugged. Curious how the solar layer affects the phone’s display? Reports from people that have spent time with the device say that you’d be hard pressed to notice the difference. That’s because the .55mm panel that Kyocera has integrated into their latest prototype’s display is 85% transmissive.

Continue reading “This smartphone’s display is also a solar charger” »

I must admit that appears that almost anything in tech is being called out as a threat. FB, Twitter, Smartphones, CRISPR, AI, etc. Tech advancements do bring greater freedoms & opportunities to express one’s ideas and beliefs as well as enable a greater access to people, information, and geographical locations; however, and that does pose some level of risk in small pockets of the greater poulation. Nonetheless, I hope that the government spying pendullum swing doesn’t go overboard.

Who tweets at you, what you tweet back, and why can predict your next protest act on social media.

Google’s Deep Mind at work in hospitals — very nice.

A smartphone app piloted by the NHS could improve communication between hospital staff and help patients get vital care faster.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has broken with other Silicon Valley giants by backing the FBI in its battle with Apple over hacking into a locked iPhone as part of the investigation into last December’s San Bernardino terror attack.

In an interview with the Financial Times published Tuesday, Gates said a court order requiring Apple to help the FBI access a work phone belonging to gunman Syed Farook was” a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case.”

Gates went on to compare the FBI’s request to accessing bank and telephone records. However, he added that the government must be subject to rules about when it can access such information.

Continue reading “Microsoft founder Gates backs FBI in encryption fight with Apple” »

More from Mobile World Congress 2016: http://bit.ly/24mukpB
Forgoing the use of a phone as its display, LG’s VR headset features two independent screens and connects to your handset with a USB Type-C connection.

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Continue reading “LG steps back into VR with new lightweight headset” »

We’ve just wrapped up the second day of Mobile World Congress, the annual mobile technology conference in Barcelona. We’ve seen smartphones, VR headsets, and some batshit crazy stuff (see photo above)—and almost all of it has been awesome. Here are some of our favorites:

The trolls have gone retro.

Here is a question that keeps me up at night…

Is the San Bernardino iPhone just locked or is it properly encrypted?

Isn’t full encryption beyond the reach of forensic investigators? So we come to the real question: If critical data on the San Bernardino iPhone is properly encrypted, and if the Islamic terrorist who shot innocent Americans used a good password, then what is it that the FBI thinks that Apple can do to help crack this phone? Doesn’t good encryption thwart forensic analysis, even by the FBI and the maker of the phone?

In the case of Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone, the FBI doesn’t know if the shooter used a long and sufficiently unobvious password. They plan to try a rapid-fire dictionary attack and other predictive algorithms to deduce the password. But the content of the iPhone is protected by a closely coupled hardware feature that will disable the phone and even erase memory, if it detects multiple attempts with the wrong password. The FBI wants Apple to help them defeat this hardware sentry, so that they can launch a brute force hack—trying thousands of passwords each second. Without Apple’s help, the crack detection hardware could automatically erase incriminating evidence, leaving investigators in the dark.

Continue reading “Is San Bernardino iPhone Fully Encrypted?” »

Ever since Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg has been speaking to promise of virtual reality as the next communications platform. Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he punctuated those thoughts with a big announcement – the creation of an internal team dedicated to Social VR.

Led by Daniel James and Mike Booth, the team will work closely with Oculus as well as other divisions within Facebook to explore and build the future of social interaction in VR, the company says.

Facebook describes their work in VR as “still early” but Oculus has been working to lay the groundwork themselves with experiences like Toybox and an upcoming social SDK that will allow developers to easily implement key multiplayer and networking features into their experiences. In fact, Oculus’ dedication to Social VR is “the reason why [they’re] part of Facebook,” Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told us earlier this year.

Continue reading “Facebook to Open New Division to Build the Future of Social VR” »