New iPhone 5S photos appear, specs hint at 12 MP camera, higher CPU clock, quad-core GPU
Parts for the iPhone 5S have leaked quite a few times before, and now we have another batch of what seems to be chassis waiting to be stuffed with internal silicon.
The more interesting part here are the claimed specs accompanying them, which say that we'll get a 4" 2272x1280 pixels IGZO display accounting to whooping 652 pixels per inch<ppi>, meaning high brightness at frugal battery consumption, the same A6 SoC like in the iPhone5, but clocked higher, and a quad-core PowerVR SGX544MP4 GPU, instead of the tri-core unit we have now.
The source also confirms 2 GB of RAM, NFC at last and the elusive fingerprint scanner we've been hearing about for a while, linked to mobile payment system of sorts, though we have to see the two gigs of RAM listed officially to believe them. As for the camera, it gets downgraded a bit in terms of resolution from the last leaks, claimed to be 12 MP instead of 13 MP now, but a dual LED flash system is confirmed.
NEW YORK: Do you know precisely where you'll be 285 days from now at 2 pm? Researchers have developed a new tracking software that can tell you exactly where you will be on a precise time and date years into the future.
Adam Sadilek , formerly of Microsoft
John Krumm
They used information from a pool of 300 volunteers in the Seattle metro area, Sadilek and Krumm gathered a mountain of location data.
As the volunteers went about their daily lives — going to work, to the grocery store, out for a jog, even for transcontinental travel — each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone, Fast Company Magazine reported. The researchers also installed GPS devices in commercial shuttles and transit vans that the volunteers used regularly, and the volunteers' own vehicles, to further ensure accuracy.
After collecting over 150 million location points, the researchers then had Far Out, the first system of its kind to predict long term human mobility in a unified way, parse the data. Far Out does not need to be told exactly what to look for — it automatically discovered regularities in the data.
"For example, it might notice that Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually about the same and fairly consistent from week to week. Then when we ask about a future Tuesday or Thursday, the algorithm automatically produces a typical Tuesday/Thursday as a prediction," they said.
For those who fear Virtual Money Transfer and The Under Developing Countries GOOD NEWS !!!
iZette
Enter iZettle, a Stockholm, Sweden-based company which wants to solve this problem by introducing a credit card reader which does work with smart cards.
Instead of swiping a card, this little device lets you insert them into iZettle to read the chip contents. In that sense iZettle is not plugged on the headphone jack but on the Dock connector, making the device bigger than Square but I guess something’s gotta give.
Aside from the regular card processing, users will also be able to share their spending with friends on Facebook and Twitter a la Blippy. The short iZettle promo video follows.
Same Kind of Thinking from Ezetap an Indian Company
Bangalore-based Ezetap has launched a new mobile point-of-sale device that will cost a lot less than similar products in the market, while meeting global security standards and RBI guidelines.
Rapid growth in India's online retail and financial service sectors is leading to a demand for secure point-of-sale devices, as companies move towards non-cash based transactions. Overall, credit and debit card based transactions in India are expected to touch 862 million this year, a growth of 33% over last year, according to a report by Atos Worldline India.
"India is the toughest market, very competitive and cost sensitive," said Ezetap co-founder Abhijit Bose, who expects to sell one million devices in the next two years. The Ezetap device, will be priced at around Rs 2,900, consists of a lightweight card reader that can be plugged into any smart device or feature phone used by a retailer. Customers need to only swipe their cards on the mobile to complete the transaction.
"Most people prefer cash on delivery. And it became difficult, when they did not have exact cash at the time of delivery," said Abhinay Choudhari, co-founder of online grocery store BigBasket.com, which has about 1.5 lakh customers. Experts said with the government promoting digital payments, the mobile point of sale market is expected to soar. "Millions of mom-and-pop businesses, or kirana shops, cannot afford expensive integrated point-of-sale solutions," said Uttam Nayak, group country manager for India at Visa.
There are a number of companies that offer mobile payment solutions, including Mswipe, Prizm Payments and Synergistic Financial Networks. "It is a very competitive space," said Nayak who expects the insurance and ecommerce industry to be the biggest adopters of mobile point of sale solutions.
Ezetap has bagged banking customers, such as Citibank and Yes Bank, as well as those in the ecommerce, telecom, insurance and hospitality sectors. The company has launched operations in Kenya and expects to enter the South-East Asian markets in the next three months.
An eighth of all SIM cards used around the world could be at risk of fraud, theft, or being bugged, a German security expert has claimed.
It has been revealed that the encryption that is used by some mobile SIM cards can be a direct source for hackers in remotely controlling their host handsets. According to The New York Times report, this flaw is directly linked to cards using DES (Data Encryption Standard).
Karsten Nohl, the founder of Germany’s Security Research Labs, who has supplied some hacking achievements previously, brought in details of the attack to both the New York Times and Forbes.
According to Nohl, two targeted SMS texts could allow a hacker to send premium text messages, re-direct and record calls and even undertake payment system fraud of NFC-equipped devices.
Nohl said: “We can remotely install software on a handset that operates completely independently from your phone. We can spy on you. We know your encryption keys for calls. We can read your SMS’s. More than just spying, we can steal data from the SIM card, your mobile identity, and charge to your account.” Nohl also said that he can complete such operation in about two minutes, using the personal computer.
Nohl is preparing to present his findings to the annual Black Hat security conference coming up on July 31 in Las Vegas.He estimated that the flaw might affect as many as 750 million mobile phones.
Verizon and AT&T said they knew of Nohl’s research, but said their SIM profiles were not vulnerable to the flaw. AT&T added that it had used SIMs with triple Data Encryption Standards (3DES) for almost a decade; Verizon did not specify why its SIMs were not vulnerable.
“Give me any phone number and there is some chance I will, a few minutes later, be able to remotely control this SIM card and even make a copy of it,” Nohl says.
Nohl has already advised GSM Association and other chip makers to tighten up technology to block the kind of messages he had sent in the process. He also asked operators to comply with the newer standards of encryption. Nohl also warned consumers using SIM cards more than three years old to get new cards from their carriers.
