QiKU to release its first ever smartphone

QiKU is new manufacturer looking to get in on the smartphone market. A new tweet from Evan Blass states the company is prepping its first ever Android smartphone.

You may have heard of Chinese antivirus maker Qihoo 360. This is the actually the same company as QiKU. The company plans to release an Android powered smartphone aimed at the Chinese market. Pictures of the anonymous smartphone indicate an all-metal design with a dual lens system, a fingerprint scanner and an Iris scanner for scanning your eyes. If the pictures are legitimate we are looking at a very slim profile. At this time we have no details on any specifications nor pricing and availability. Hopefully we’ll find out more on the new company’s plans for this smartphone in the coming weeks. It’s only a matter of time before something else leaks.

Source: Evan Blass (Twitter)

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UK’s startup WileyFox launches two new Cyanogen smartphones

WileyFox, a UK startup has just launched their first devices, the Storm and the Swift, both running on the latest Cyanogen OS. The two devices have solid specs at a competitive price, following the footsteps of the OnePlus smartphones. 

WileyFox is trying to compete in the mobile market by using OnePlus’ main strategy; create smartphones with strong specs while pricing them at a reasonable price.

The Storm is the most expensive of the two, priced at £199 ($310). It features a 5.5-inch 1080p display,  a 20-megapixel main camera with a Sony sensor and an eight-megapixel front camera. The Storm runs on Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon 615 processor with integrated LTE, comes with 32GB of storage, 3GB RAM, and has an SD card slot to expand memory up to 128GB.

The Swift, priced at £129 ($200), packs a 5-inch 720p display, a 13-megapixel main camera with a Samsung sensor and a five-megapixel front camera. It’s running on Qualcomm’s 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 processor with integrated LTE, sports 2GB of RAM, and offers 16GB internal storage expendable up to 32GB.

Both of the devices also have dual-SIM slots, 2,500 mAh capacity battery that is removable on the Swift but not on the Storm. Both handsets will be available exclusively online in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Pre-orders start this week, with the cheaper Swift shipping in early September and the Storm in October.

Via: Engadget

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The Oppo R5s has reached the states

Starting today, you can buy the Oppo R5s in the United States for a discounted price of only $220 unlocked. 

Last week, Oppo announced the R5s, which would be made available in a few countries. Today, the company has decided to bring the handset to the states. You can purchase the handset unlocked at a discounted price of only $220 until August 27. After that, the handset’s price will be slightly lifted.

The Oppo R5s is an upgrade from the original R5. This time around it will include more RAM and additional internal storage space. All the remaining specs will be kept the same as its predecessor including its super thin profile, camera and dimensions. In case you’re wondering, the handset will be receiving the all-new Color OS 2.1 update based on Android Lollipop in the near future. Unfortunately, the R5s won’t include US LTE bands. So please take note of that before you make your purchase. For more details, hit the source link down below.

Source: Oppo

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AT&T HTC One M8 and M9 get Stagefright fix in new patch

AT&T has begun pushing out a new patch to the HTC One M8 and One M9, which aims to fix the Stagefright exploit.

The update comes in at 28MB to 55MB in size and fixes nothing but the Stagefright issue. There are no additional performance enhancements or bug fixes–it’s purely a security update.

As per the norm, the update could take a few weeks to get to everyone, as they release these types of things in stages in order to avoid infecting smartphones with wide spread bugs in the case of a programming accident.

Anyone gotten the update yet?

source: AT&T (1), (2)

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Internet tool fights censorship by making banned data look ‘normal’

It’s getting harder to evade censorship in countries like China and Iran, which have increasingly taken to blocking VPNs, the Tor network and any other service that might let you see the unflattering truth. A clever new tool should help you leap over those hurdles, however. Marionette, developed by researchers at RedJack and Portland State University, masks your visits to banned sites and services by making your data transmissions seem innocuous. It doesn’t just disguise the traffic type — you can program it to mimic the variances you’d expect from a given form of traffic (say, a voice chat) and respond in a convincing way when the censors’ blocking software comes calling.

Marionette’s source code is available right now, but it may be a while before it’s in widespread use — if you’re a political dissident, you don’t want the software to break and let governments catch you in the act. Don’t be surprised if it flourishes, though. The hope is that it might find its way into Tor, giving the anonymity network’s users a ready-made way to escape online oppression. While there’s a good chance that authoritarian regimes will eventually find a way to stop Marionette, there’s no doubt that they’ll have their work cut out for them.

[Image credit: AP Photo/Andres Kudacki]

Filed under:
Internet

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Via:
MIT Technology Review

Source:
USENIX, GitHub

Tags: censorship, freespeech, internet, marionette, redjack

Researchers may have found a cancer cell’s ‘off’ switch

Aside from their abnormal growth rates, cancerous cells aren’t that much different from normal healthy tissue. That’s why radiation and chemo treatments can’t effectively target just tumors. However, a team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic believe they’ve discovered a mechanism that can rein in cancer’s uninhibited growth by retraining these wayward cells to die like they’re supposed to.

See, when cells get old and prepare to die, they’re supposed to stop dividing. This process is controlled by “biological processors” called microRNAs which feed the cell just enough of the PLEKHA7 protein to inhibit division. But in the case of cancer, the microRNAs don’t deliver enough of the protein and the cells begin to divide out of control, resulting in a tumor. In a recently published study in the journal Nature Cell Biology, the Mayo Clinic team found that by injecting microRNA directly into a tumor, PLEKHA7 levels returned to normal and the cancerous cells stop reproducing.

“This is an unexpected finding,” Chris Bakal, a specialist at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, told The Telegraph. “Normal cells touch each other and form junctions, then they shut down proliferation. If there is a way to turn that [process] back on, it would be a way to stop tumors from growing.”

What’s more, the method has shown to be surprisingly effective against some especially aggressive forms of cancer, at least in initial lab tests. However, the researchers don’t believe this will be some magic bullet that cures cancer outright. “This important study solves a long-standing biological mystery, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves,” Henry Scowcroft, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information manager, told The Telegraph. “There’s a long way to go before we know whether these findings, in cells grown in a laboratory, will help treat people with cancer. But it’s a significant step forward in understanding how certain cells in our body know when to grow, and when to stop. Understanding these key concepts is crucial to help continue the encouraging progress against cancer we’ve seen in recent years.” Still, any step forward in the fight against this disease will be a welcome one.

[Image Credit: Scott Tysick / Getty Creative]

Filed under:
Science

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Via:
Telegraph, Quartz

Source:
Nature

Tags: cancer, chemo, MayoClinic, medicine, microRNA, PLEKHA7, protein, radiation, tumor