Namotel Acche Din Rs 99 smartphone: Potemtial customers should know that the company has also added a note on its site that says, ‘Pictures shown on website is for illustration purposes only’.
Namotel Acche Din Rs 99 smartphone: Promoter Madhava Reddy has claimed that he is marketing the world’s cheapest smartphone, the 3G-enabled Namotel Acche Din, for just Rs 99.
Reddy claimed that Namotel is the world’s cheapest phone with 4 inch display and it runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop and is powered by 1.3GHz quadcore processor along with 1 GB RAM.
The smartphone will be available for booking from May 17th to 25th May, 2016.
The website of the company, Namotel.com, shows that the price has been slashed from Rs 2,999 to Rs 99 and that the smartphone is available on cash-on-delivery basis – something called a ‘lifetime membership fee’ too will be charged. It also adds that nominal delivery charges will be levied.
The message that is being displayed by the company says, ‘Joy and freedom represents the logo! The same joy will flourish in billion Indians In the form of smart Connect with (3 different looks and shapes) Android Smart powerful Phone at 99. We make this product to show love for India it is a ‘’MAKE IN INDIA’ Initiative.This model is limited and it is applicable only for India and who holds Aadhar Identity.’
The company has also said that a ‘one year warranty’ applies to the product and that ‘This limited warranty shall apply to Namotel Smartphone and its Parts. For handset and accessory defects under normal use circumstances and at the discretion of the company, Namotel shall provide free of charge repair and/or replacement services within the warranty period.’
The company has also added a note on its site that says, ‘Pictures shown on website is for illustration purposes only’.
Namotel Acche Din mobile top 10 specs: 1. QUAD CORE PROCESSOR 2. 1GB RAM+ 4GB ROM 3. 3G smartphone 4. 2MP REAR + .3MP FRONT 5. DUAL SIM 6. 4″ HD DISPLAY 7. 1325 mAh BATTERY 8. PLASTIC HOUSING 9. WHITE, BLACK 10. ANDROID LOLLIPOP
Red Hat recently announced the latest iteration of its widely popular enterprise Linux — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8. This release comes with lots of new features, marking the Production Phase 2 of RHEL 6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 provides new capabilities to system admins by making this dependable server Linux even more stable.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the leading server Linux distributions around, including the likes of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
The world’s leading open source solutions provider Red Hat, has announced the general availability of RHEL 6.8. With more than 6 years of successful run, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has set the stage for delivering new capabilities and bringing a stable and trusted platform for IT admins.
Red Hat releases RHEL 6.8 with many new features!
The base image of RHEL 6.8 has been changed to allow sysadmins to migrate the workloads to containers. As usual, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes multiple changes to help the organizations improve their security and efficiency.
Improving the VPN security, RHEL 6.8 has switched to libreswan, replacing openswan as VPN endpoint solution.
Thanks to the improvements to the Identity Management client code (SSSD), the customers will see simpler management and client-side performance.
With the new adcli support, the Active Directory domain RHEL management has been simplified. Identity login has also been made simpler with client cached authentication.
In RHEL 6.8, Relax-and-Recover, a system archiving tool, has been included to make lives of system admins easier by helping them create backups in the familiar ISO formats.
The dealing with packages has also been made simpler with an enhanced yum tool. RHEL 6.8 also provides a better understanding of storage usage and performance. Another great change comes in the form of support for up to 300TB data in xfs filesystem.
This release also marks the Production Phase 2 of RHEL 6.
Russian national pleads guilty in global hacking scheme
Russian Hacker Vladimir Drinkman faces 30 years sentence after pleading guilty to hacking NASDAQ, stealing 160 million credit cards.
Vladimir Drinkman, a 34 year old Russian hacker has pleaded guilty in US Federal Court for his role in hacking NASDAQ, JCPenny, 7 Eleven, Dow Jones, JetBlue and other major organisations in the United States. Reportedly, the hacker admitted his involvement in the world wide scheme that ultimately captured details of more than 160 million credit cards.
Federal attorneys in New Jersey who charged Drinkman with conspiracy charges involving wire fraud and unauthorized access to protected computers said the case was the largest to ever be prosecuted on U.S. soil. They alleged that the American companies and individuals lost more than $300 million because of the date breaches perpetrated by Drinkman.
Drinkman, who was arrested in the Netherlands in 2012 and extradited to the U.S. earlier this year, is scheduled to be sentenced in January.
“Defendants like Vladimir Drinkman, who have the skills to break into our computer networks and the inclination to do so, pose a cutting edge threat to our economic well-being, our privacy and our national security,” U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman of the District of New Jersey said in a statement.
Drinkman and his gang, a number of whom remain at large, would monitor the computers of target companies and scan for vulnerabilities in their SQL implementation to create backdoors and ultimately netting the confidential data and later selling it on “underground” forums of the Internet.
Three of his alleged co-conspirators remain fugitives. A fourth, Dmitriy Smilianets, 32, of Moscow, who allegedly sold the stolen information, remains in federal custody.
Some of this year’s Emmys have already been awarded. There’s a few non-broadcast Emmy awards and even some non-ballot awards that are presented. There’s a kind of Emmy called a “juried award” that doesn’t even have a list of nominees. In the categories of Animation, Costumes for a Variety Program or Special, Motion Design, and Interactive Media, there are juried awards that are decided by a panel of experts in the field.
Picture this: a panel of professional costumers get together for some coffee and talk about the best costume work done for entertainment purposes on TV or in TV-related events. If they decide there was a single Emmy-worthy achievement, only one award is given out. If they decide there are three things worthy of awards, three winners are announced. If they decide the year sucked and nothing is worthy of special recognition, no awards are given out. As an example, this year, Over the Garden Wall, the animated Cartoon Network miniseries that aired last fall, won “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.” So did episodes of Adventure Time and Gravity Falls, but they didn’t beat a list of nominees, they were simply the best (according to the jury).
The reason the 2015 juried award Emmys are a bigger deal than other years is that this year saw the first virtual reality experience win an award. With consumer-friendly VR headsets making their way to the market for the first time, people are about to engage with their Oculus Rift or HTC Vive in new ways. Those ways are now worthy of award.
In the category of User Experience and Visual Design, the Emmy goes to Fox’s Sleepy Hollow Virtual Reality Experience that premiered at San Diego Comic-Con 2014. Using the Oculus Rift DK2 headset, users are transported into the world of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow TV series where Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) tells you the Headless Horseman is in the area. Then, the Horseman approaches the user and cuts his or her head off and lifts it off the ground where it falls. Using VR, it’s pretty simple, but it was also effective enough to get the Emmy.
The short was produced by a Canadian company called The Secret Location, which used a combination of CGI and live action elements to create the experience.
It seems like there’s a premium in introductory VR experiences based on horror premises. A lot of the noticeable VR popping up at film festivals in the past year has had a thriller or horror bent, and this year at E3, a demo called “Kitchen” where a demonic figure stabs the user in the leg with a knife and pulls their head back made waves as being gut-wrenching.
“Kitchen” ran on Sony’s Morpheus headset at E3, but seemed to have played with the basic thrill Sleepy Hollow provides: a shocking and sudden change in perspective without the user’s motion motivating the software. A Kotaku writer who tried Kitchenconcluded: “The demon’s gnarled fingers slowly slid over my eyes from behind and yanked my head back hard…The vision in the headset tilted upwards which means my eyes were pointing in a completely different direction to the way I was facing. It was a deliberately disorientating effect that caused a huge rush of vertigo; probably the worst I’ve ever experienced. And with that, the game cut to black.”
Although Sleepy Hollow‘s graphics aren’t cutting edge, a lot can be said for immersing new users in a new system of experiencing visual entertainment. If you’ve ever gotten to try a VR headset, you know the experience can occasionally feel claustrophobic and immersive simultaneously. It looks like the great leaps forward in VR story-telling will be made with things we can witness and feel even though we know them to be fake. Like the Headless Horseman decapitating you.
One small step for man, a giant leap for VR, and Sleepy Hollow‘s first Emmy as a show.
The basic technology underpinning the Bitcoin virtual currency could be used by some of the world's biggest banks.
Nine banks, including Barclays and Goldman Sachs, may adopt the blockchainsystem that logs who spends which virtual coins in an ever-expanding computer equivalent of a ledger.
The banks want to use the blockchain method because it is hard to fool - making fraud more difficult.
It could also speed up trading systems and make deals more transparent.
The project to test blockchain-like technology is being led by financial technology firm R3 which has signed nine banks up to the initiative.
The other seven are JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBVA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Technical meetings with the banks had prompted discussion of how it could be used within banks' trading arms, said David Rutter, head of R3 in an interview with Reuters.
For Bitcoin, the blockchain acts as a globally-distributed ledger that logs transactions. Everyone involved with the virtual currency contributes to the way the blockchain verifies each deal. The sheer number of people involved makes it very hard for one bitcoin user to get fraudulent deals verified and approved.
Despite this, Bitcoin has been hit by a series of scandals and thefts although most of these came about because hackers exploited weaknesses on exchanges where coins are traded or in digital wallets where they are held.
Mr Rutter said the banks were most interested in the technical architecture underpinning the blockchain that could be adapted for their own ends. The first place the blockchain was likely to find a role was as a log of who bought which stocks or shares, he said.
By adopting the technology banks could cut the cost of reporting transactions and working out who bought what and when, he added.
No timetable has been given for when technical trials of the blockchain-like technology might begin.
NASA will launch a 4K TV channel in the U.S. to showcase ultra-HD NASA space exploits
The U.S. space agency, NASA announced that it has plans to launch a 4K TV channel this fall and has already begun test broadcasts. The channel will stream ultra-high definition (UHD) footage from the International Space Station. According to the NASA, the footage will offer an never before look at what it’s like to live and work aboard the ISS.
“This important new capability will allow researchers to acquire high resolution – high frame rate video to provide new insight into the vast array of experiments taking place every day,” NASA wrote on their YouTube page. “It will also bestow the most breathtaking views of planet Earth and space station activities ever acquired for consumption by those still dreaming of making the trip to outer space.”
NASA is partnering with Harmonic, a worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, to launch the new channel, called NASA TV UHD, the first ever non-commercial consumer ultra-high definition (UHD) channel in North America. The partnership is the result of a Space Act Agreement between Harmonic and the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Robert Jacobs, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Communications at the agency’s headquarters in Washington said “Partnering with Harmonic gives NASA an outlet for its UHD content, which has four times the resolution of HD and is the next iteration of digital television.”
The NASA TV UHD will broadcast 24 hours a day and be available free of commercials, according to a promotional video that is currently being broadcast alongside NASA’s existing channels on the AMC-18 satellite.
Initial programming will be based around eight different video series: Solar System, Earth View, Mars, NASA Classics, Liftoff, ISS Life, Deep Space and Development.
The agency will use Harmonic’s end-to-end video delivery system to deliver content at 2160p at 60fps, which will allow viewers to enjoy footage on a wide range of television and internet-connected devices.
The new UHD channel is expected to launch on November 1, following preliminary tests. According to the announcement, Harmonic is also in discussions with pay TV companies to bring the channel to consumer via satellite, cable and optical networks. The channel also will stream on the internet, which will require at least 13 Mbps access connectivity to receive the signal and enjoy the UHD experience.
“As NASA reaches new heights and reveals the unknown, the NASA TV UHD channel can bring that journey to life in every home. And as organizations at the forefront of innovation, together we are leading the adoption of this exciting technology,” said Peter Alexander, chief marketing officer at Harmonic. “As the leader in UHD development, Harmonic provides a complete solution for Ultra HD video production and delivery, enabling content and service providers to offer better video quality at a low total cost of ownership.”
Find Out How 900 Million Worldwide WhatsApp Users Managed By A Team Of Only 50 Engineers
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently announced on his Facebook page that his company’s instant messaging service is currently used by more than 900 million users worldwide. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly reacted with two posts, of which one said “congratulations,” and the other said “Here’s an activity shot of you composing this upgrade,” which referred to a picture of Koum keying his 900-million-client post into a cell phone.
Facebook is the owner of WhatsApp, as Zuckerberg and company had paid $19 billion to take over the startup more than a year back, suggesting that they now run three of the most predominant web applications. Facebook is used by more than 1.5 billion individuals across the globe, while Facebook’s Messenger, an instant messaging service spans 700 million. In such a scenario, the 900 million-user milestone is a huge achievement for WhatsApp, as it not a product of the powerful Facebook.
One of the interesting fact is that WhatApp achieved this milestone with just a small team. At the time of acquisition by Facebook, it had a group of 35 designers and more than 450 clients. Due to the rise in the quantity of WhatApp clients, the designing staff currently consists of 50 architects that runs things naturally.
Jamshid Mahdavi, WhatsApp programming specialist at an occasion in San Jose, California told Wired that the organization utilizes a programming language called Erlang that manufactures its administration. Erlang may not be too predominant like the more extensive coding group, however, it is very suitable for designers to convey new code on fly and to balance exchanges from extremely large number of clients.
Although Erlang’s roots are in telecommunications, it’s unique features like concurrency and extensive library make it suitable as a general-purpose programming language and well-suited to programming projects such as network servers, control systems and web development. WhatsApp is part of a larger push towards programming languages using Erlang that are designed for concurrency, where many processes run at the same time.
Erlang lets coders work at high speed, which is another important part of modern software development. It offers a way of deploying new code to an application even as the application continues to run, which makes it more useful in an age of constant change. However, on the flipside, there are only few coders who know Erlang, and it doesn’t necessarily fit with a lot of the code that are already built by internet companies these days.
Muslim Teenager from Irving, United States arrested for getting homemade clock to school
Irving Police on Monday arrested a teenage American boy of Sudanese origin for bringing a homemade clock to school to impress his teachers.
14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a freshman at Irving MacArthur High School, said he took an electronic clock he built over the weekend to school on Monday morning to show his engineering teacher his skills with making things. However, the school authorities called the police mistaking the electronic clock for a bomb.
The boy, who has won awards for his inventions, was taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention, The Dallas Morning News reported. Additionally, the boy has been suspended from school for three days.
Mohamed’s clock is now in a police evidence room. “Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb – though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock,” the report said.
However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Ahmed was targeted because of his religious and racial identity. CAIR said it is also worried that some of the student’s rights may have been violated.
“I think this wouldn’t even be a question if his name wasn’t Ahmed Mohamed,” said Alia Salem, executive director of CAIR’s North Texas chapter. “He is an excited kid who is very bright and wants to share it with his teachers.”
Ahmed’s reaction after being caught
While a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him, Mohammed who was fiddling with a cable told the newspaper “Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do.”
Mohamed, a self-assured kid with thick-framed glasses and a serious expression, had just started at MacArthur High School a few weeks ago. He said he loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school. So, on Sunday night, the ninth grader quickly put together a homemade digital clock, a circuit board and power supply connected to digital display, and placed everything inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.
Mohamed showed the clock to his engineering teacher on Monday, who looked wary. “He was like, ‘That’s really nice. I would advise you not to show any other teachers,’” the teacher said.
He kept the clock inside his school bag. However, during the English class, the clock beeped in the middle of a lesson, annoying his teacher. Sadly, the clock kept beeping, and the teacher insisted on being showed what was causing the disruption. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward. “She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.
“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”
The English teacher kept the clock, and during sixth period, Mohamed was pulled out of class by the principal. The school authorities called the police, who searched Mohamed’s belongings and questioned his intentions.
“They took me to a room filled with five officers in which they interrogated me and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention,” the teen said. “They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’ I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
But his questioner responded, “It looks like a movie bomb to me.”
The school principal even threatened to expel Mohamed, if he did not make a written statement.
During questioning, officers repeatedly brought up his last name, Mohamed said. When he tried to call his father, Mohamed said he was told he couldn’t speak to his parents until after the interrogation was over.
“I really don’t think it’s fair because I brought something to school that wasn’t a threat to anyone,” Mohamed told NBC. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I just showed my teachers something and I end up being arrested later that day.”
Irving Police Officer James McLellan stated that school officials were worried about the device. “Clearly, there were disassembled clock parts in there, but he offered no more explanation than that,” McLellan said. “A lot of these details that the family and he have provided to you were not shared with us yesterday. He was very much less than forthcoming.”
Mohamed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said McLellan. But school staff and police officers remained suspicious.
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?” McLellan said.
Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the boy’s father who migrated to the US from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president said “He just wants to invent good things for mankind. But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
Earlier this year, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne became a national celebrity in anti-Islamic circles by giving rise to rumours in speeches that Muslims were making plans to usurp American laws.
“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem.
She said she had spoken to lawyers about the boy’s arrest. “We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”
As for Ahmed, he is still fighting with the memory of handcuffs encircling his thin, 14-year-old wrists. “It made me feel like I wasn’t human,” he said in a video interview. “It made me feel like a criminal.”
Canon’s new 250MP sensor has insane resolution and can click planes from 18 kms away
Japanese camera manufacturer giant Canon has announced that it has developed a new sensor. The new sensor has 250-megapixel 19,580 x 12,600 APS-H CMOS sensor, according to the Verge, which Canon claims is a world record for having such great resolution with such a small size.
The company says its new sensor is capable of distinguishing the lettering on the side of an airplane from 18 km away, i.e., 11.1 miles. APS-H is a sensor size bigger than APS-C but smaller than full-frame and is mainly used on Canon’s legacy EOS-1D line of DSLRs.
The sensor has a fast signal readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels a second. Canon says it has good noise performance despite the pixel count. Also, the sensor can be used to capture incredibly high-resolution video, about 30 times sharper than 4K at five frames per second.
The new sensor has a fast signal readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels per second. Canon claims that the sensor has good noise performance despite of the huge pixel count. Videos can be captured at incredibly high resolution using the sensor and the videos will be 30 times sharper than 4K at five frames per second.
Canon says the new sensor technology will not be used for commercial purposes as of now and will be put to use as crime prevention tools, specialized surveillance, ultra-high-resolution measuring instruments, field of visual expression and other industrial equipment. However the sensor would not find a place in the smartphones for now, but the company claims that the sensor can be accommodated in a relatively small camera body.
Canon’s achievement of using the sensor along with a prototype camera, to reading the lettering on an airplane over 11 miles away is quite awesome. However, it is a little difficult to tell how much of that magic is the sensor, as the company has not revealed any details about the camera or lens used. The technology is still in the development phase but it might enter mainstream photography in the next few years.
Both the companies did not show off much in the way of gameplay, but one may guess that the app will be free to download, with in-app purchases for additional content. The players can also purchase an optional Go Plus wearable that runs on Bluetooth and pairs with both Android and iOS. The Go Plus looks like a Pokeball flashes and vibrates notifying you that something is happening in the game in your neighborhood. That way, players won’t be staring at their phones while walking around the city, waiting for something to happen. It also goes a bit further than that though, and you can even use the Go Plus to capture a wild Pokemon.
Meet Remix Mini, the $30 Android PC made by 3 ex-Googlers
Three ex-Google employees have launched a $30 PC that runs on Google’s mobile operating system, Android, after raising more than $1.6 million in a crowdfunding campaign to get the project going.
JIDE, a company founded by them has launched a mini PC “Remix ” in the market that is meant to provide users basic functionalities of a PC at an affordable cost. The Remix Mini which fits in palm of hand is being billed as the first truly Android PC ever.
“The idea is that we want to make sure it’s affordable and accessible,” David Ko, one of Jide’s co-founders and an ex-Googler, told CNBC by phone.
“A lot of people are using the PCs mainly for email, surfing the web, watching videos, all these can be done with mobile tech and you don’t really need a big tall PC. A traditional big tall PC can cost you a few hundred dollars. In a mobile lifestyle, people are looking for flexibility.”
This PC runs on Remix OS, developed by Jide, based on Android, that means the OS is Android’s extension to carry out normal PC functions.
Users have the ability to have multiple screens as well as run all the apps that are available through the Google Play app store. Ko said developers do not need to re-write apps for Remix OS. The founder also said that the PC could be used as full productivity device, especially since Microsoft opened its Office suite of apps to Android.
It has got basic connectivity features of a PC like WiFi, Bluetooth and a USB slot. Two models of Remix are available one with 1GB RAM and internal memory of 8GB and the other with 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal memory.
While the $30 price tag is cheap, customers will still need to have a TV or monitor to plug the Remix Mini into as well as a keyboard and mouse.
The Remix Mini received over $1.6 million from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign which came from nearly 22,000 backers.
Jide is trying to offer something different in a PC market that is set to decline this year. But it is direct competition with smartphones and tablets. The iPad Pro launched by Apple on Wednesday as well as Microsoft’s Surface tablets and other 2-in-1 devices are a bid to get people to use mobile devices for productivity cases. The attached keyboard and touchscreen allows them to be both a notebook and tablet.
Analysts said this could be a challenge for Jide’s Remix Mini.
“There is no question that as processors get more powerful and software gets more capable, this kind of solution is more suitable. Where it fits in a world where everyone has a smartphone is unclear though,” Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC by phone.
At the same, Microsoft launched a feature called Continuum this year that allows any smartphone running Windows 10 to be turned into a PC when connected to a larger screen, removing the need for a box like Remix Mini.
But Jide said it can also compete in this space after it launched a $399 Android tablet of its own earlier this year with a detachable keyboard, aimed at productivity uses.
An affordable PC is the demand of the time, at least for those who don’t need to play heavy games or do complex computing tasks and also don’t want to spend exorbitant money on currently available choices. Seems like Jide has got the right plan to serve such users to provide them value for money, portability and hence to gain grip in the market with an accelerated pace.
The company expects to hope shipping the Remix Mini from mid-to-late October.
iPhone frenzy begins in Australia as fan camps outside Apple Store for the new iPhone 6s
Every time Apple announces a launch, fans queue outside its stores to lay their hands on the latest Apple product. Each time before Apple unveils a new product or make announcements of upcoming gadgets, die hard fanatics who simply wants to be first in line also camp outside of an Apple Store.
Apple all set to reveal its latest iPhone today and it looks like someone has camped outside of an Apple Store in Australia.
There may be a number of reasons why this person had decided to camp outside the Apple Store but one thing is certain. This particular Apple fanboy is going to have his 15 minutes of fame in tech forums and Reddit.
Who knows, he may also go down in history or a fact book as being the first person to camp for iPhone 6s.
Apple is unveiling its latest iteration of iPhone today and fans are hoping that it may also announce an ‘iPad Pro’, or perhaps even a revamped version of the Apple TV. It is quite possible that Apple may announce all three of them at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco at 10 a.m PT.
You can watch the live stream which is available to Windows users for the first time in years through support for Edge, Microsoft’s new browser introduced with Windows 10.
But the question remains, would you camp outside a store for a product?
Amazon's Fire phone may have struck out last year, but the company is still swinging for the fences, this time with a $50 tablet.
In a market dominated by Apple and Android, Amazon is once again trying to compete. The online retail giant is slated to release a tablet with a 6-inch screen just in time for the holidays, according to The Wall Street Journal.
While the company was criticized for pricing the Fire phone on par with Apple's iPhone, it seems this new device is taking flak for its lower price tag.
The newspaper speculated that the devices could struggle to gain a foothold because consumers may attribute the low cost to mean lower quality. (Amazon declined to comment.)
However, Carolina Milanesi, chief of research and head of U.S. business at Kantar Worldpanel, said that in the U.S. market, Amazon's Kindle Fire has done better than any other tablet vendor within the Android ecosystem.
Amazon "might be willing to cannibalize some of those sales in order to provide users with devices that offer a wider range of functionalities and, therefore, service subscription opportunity—video, music, shopping—so as to grow brand stickiness," Milanesi told CNBC.
In this scenario, the device is no longer the big purchase for consumers. Instead, the services and software take the spotlight. In fact, Amazon Prime, which traditionally is bundled as a free trial with many of Amazon's devices, costs nearly double the $50 tablet.With Apple likely to announce new versions of its already popular devices Wednesday, Amazon could face some potentially daunting problems.
"You've got your audience that will go after whatever the latest Appleproducts are and I think it's a slightly different group," said R.J. Hottovy, a consumer equity strategist at Morningstar. "I think a lot of times these cheap tablets are almost for secondary tablets or people buying tablets for their children or first-time tablet users who have never had one before."
Hottovy, like Milanesi, noted that Amazon's focus is not on competing with Apple, but bolstering its own ecosystem. The company is not likely to make a significant profit on tablets, but sales could cause an uptick in Prime memberships and service users.
"That's the key question right now. What kind of demand is out there for Amazon's hardware products, particularly ones that are a little bit away from the core business?" said Hottovy.
Researchers Killed a Simulated Human By Turning Off Its Pacemaker
With the increase in hacking these days, right from infecting a computer to remotely hacking a car in motion, one may wonder what would happen if a hacker decides to compromise your bionic arm, your pacemaker, or maybe your brain implant. Thanks to some students at the University of South Alabama, we have an answer: You die!
To see what would be the outcome of hacking a medical grade human simulation, a group of undergraduates recently at the university spent a few hours to find the same. And the results were as one would expect.
Meet iStan, the “most advanced wireless patient simulator on the market” with internal robotics that mimic human cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems,” according to its manufacturer, http://www.caehealthcare.com/eng/patient-simulators/istan#block_3429. “When iStan bleeds, his blood pressure, heart rate and other clinical signs change automatically, and he responds to treatment with minimal input from an instructor. With wireless operation, iStan can be placed in any field location, including an automobile, and display all the vital signs and signals of a critically ill or injured patient,” CAE Healthcare added.
Costing $100,000, the simulated iStan is frequently used by hospitals to show and explain medical school students how to carry out procedures without killing people.
Mike Jacobs, Director of the simulations program at University of South Alabama, told Motherboard “They sweat, they cry, they talk. It responds to 300 different types of simulated medications and procedures, and the physiological response is identical to that of a human.”
Jacobs and his team decided to find out whether the medical training dummy was susceptible to similar types of attacks as compared to our regular technology. They carried out attacks that could be launches against iStan, concentrating on the communications between it and its controlling laptop’s front-end platform that utilizes Adobe Flash Player and Muse.
With no connected devices whatsoever, iStan, as a robot is much more susceptible to hacking than a human. However, iStan is almost certainly not more hackable than your average pacemaker, which has time and again proved to be susceptible. In contrast to a real human, one need worry about going to jail if you can hack iStan.
“The simulator had a pacemaker so we could speed the heart rate up, we could slow it down. If it had a defibrillator, which most do, we could have shocked it repeatedly. If it was the intent, we could definitely cause harm to the patient,” Jacobs said. “It’s not just a pacemaker, we could do it with an insulin pump, a number of things that would cause life-threatening injuries or death.”
iStan was handed over to a group of undergraduate students taking a cybersecurity class for a semester by Jacobs, who is not a hacker. The team of students was able to gain access to most of iStan’s functions just within a few hours, indicating that iStan’s operation was susceptible to denial-of-service attacks, security control attacks, and its PIN security lock could be busted open through brute force.
“We did this because we were wanting to beef up security on our end and put some safeguards in place. It may not be totally possible to prevent hackers, but, knowing these can easily be hacked increases your awareness of vulnerabilities,” he said. “It’s definitely concerning—if there’s a high profile individual with a medical issue, it certainly makes them vulnerable.”
The researchers went on to explain that “for security reasons” they were not revealing the actual PINs or full device MAC addresses.
The university’s hospital is looking into ways to wirelessly encode transmitted data sent between medical devices, added Jacobs.
The results were published by the team in the preprint journal arXiv, which means that their work has not yet been reviewed by their peers. work has not been peer reviewed yet. The doctors need to be prepared to cope with hackers and cyberattacks in hospitals in the future, suggests the team.
“Future practitioners will be trained to deal with medical device failures, byzantine or otherwise,” they wrote. “[Medical schools] will reinforce the use of alternate or traditional techniques that do not rely on technology.”
Pre-installed malware found on Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo smartphones
It has already been known that every smartphone manufacturer ships their end product with some bloatware however finding malware on one is very dangerous for the smartphone owner. A recent research found that as many as 26 different smartphone models are being shipped pre-installed with malware. Security firm G Data has uncovered more than two dozens of Android smartphones from popular smartphone manufacturers — including Xiaomi, Huawei andLenovo — that have pre-installed spyware in the firmware.
A study conducted by G Data shows that mobiles shipping with pre-installed malware has increased by about 25 percent in Q2 of 2015 compared to the first quarter. The study shows that smartphones and tablets from Chinese brands Huawei, Xiaomi, and Lenovo were discovered to have apps modified to spy on its users or to insert ads.
G Data is the same research company which last year disclosed that the Star N9500 Smartphone had capability to spy on users, compromising their personal data and conversations without their knowledge.
Christian Lueg, the spokesperson for G Data said that the malware was injected by a middleman. Their efforts to find the source lead them to China, thereafter they lost it. “We lost the trail in China,”he stated.
A total of 26 smartphone units were discovered to be carrying a malicious software right before the consumer acquires the device.
The pre-installed malware is installed disguised in popular Android apps and can not be removed without unlocking/rooting the phone since it resides inside the phone’s firmware.
“Over the past year, we have seen a significant [growth]in devices that are equipped with firmware-level [malware and spyware]out of the box which can take a wide range of unknown and unwanted actions,” Product Manager Christian Geschkat from G Data said in a statement.
