Of course Huawei is making a Gear VR rival

Huawei may have just announced the fancy P9 and P9 Plus smartphones in London last week, but it actually saved a little surprise for its Shanghai launch today. Well, we say “surprise” but it’s also very much a “me too” thing at this point. Simply dubbed Huawei VR, this headset series will initially come in three flavors to let you slot in the company’s most recent flagship devices: the two P9 phones and the larger Mate 8. Given their mere 1080p screen resolution, don’t expect any crisp video quality through those goggles, but Huawei claims its VR solution is the first to offer 360-degree sound field on the go, as long as you have the right content loaded and your own headphones plugged in.

The Huawei VR headsets work in a similar way as Samsung’s counterparts: Just pop the front cover open, then secure the phone (with the VR app running, of course) using the clips inside, and then snap the cover back on. Likewise, they have a touch panel, a back button and volume keys on the right for interfacing with the app. You won’t be able to wear your glasses underneath the goggles, but the adjustable lenses will accommodate myopia of down to -7.00.

In terms of specs, you get the usual 20ms low latency and 95-degree field of view (it’s 96 degrees on Samsung’s Gear VR and 110 on the HTC Vive plus the Oculus Rift), with the added benefit of an anti-blue light filter to protect your eyes.

The more exciting part here is obviously the content. At launch, Huawei VR will offer over 4,000 free movies (presumably only a fraction of these are VR videos) and over 40 free games, along with over 350 panoramic images and over 150 panoramic tours. It’s obviously still early days as Huawei skipped the price and date, so we’ll just have to keep an eye out for a future announcement.

Source: Sina Weibo

GoPro brings more stats to your action videos, BMW, Polar and more on the list

GoPro has announced its Developer Program which allows other companies to make GoPro cameras do anything they need. It will also mean GoPro can take advantage of other hardware and sensors.

Big names like BMW and Polar have already announced cars and wearables that work with GoPro.

The Developer Program has been underway, in secret, for over a year and now some 100 partners are being announced. This means GoPro cameras can offer more sensors and features, by working with other hardware. It also means apps can integrate GoPro camera for near limitless possibilities.

This move should help GoPro keep up with new developments from the competition. The Garmin Virb and TomTom Bandit offer motion sensors to incorporate data into videos, like speed while skiing for example.

Now GoPro will be able to offer the same thanks to partners like Polar. Its V800 watch already has the GPS and motion sensors to measure that sort of data and can now link to the GoPro.

BMW has also announced integration with its track cars. This will allow videos to playback car data in sync, like revs, speed, location and more.

Fisher-Price has also worked with GoPro to come up with child-friendly camera housing and mounts. These will let parents record playtime with their children without focusing on working a camera, while offering a unique perspective – from the toy’s view.

Developers can connect to GoPro via the HeroBus, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Imagine using your GoPro as a home security camera as an app was developed to leverage that. The possibilities are exciting.

Expect plenty more partners to be announced to show just how versatile the newly adapted GoPro cameras can be.

READ: The best GoPro photos in the world, prepare to lose your breath

BT Infinity 1 offers 52Mbps fibre broadband from just £10 a month

BT has introduced a new entry level fibre broadband package, BT Infinity 1. It offers speeds of up to 52Mbps as standard for as little as £10 a month.

In addition to the internet connection, customers also received access to the provider’s sports channels, BT Sport 1,2, ESPN and Europe.

The package sits with the company’s other Unlimited Infinity packages, but unlike those has a cap on monthly internet usage. BT Infinity 1 customers can use up to 25GB of data a month.

In addition, the £10 a month (on a 12 month contract and for the first 12 months only) is reliant on taking a BT phone line, charged at £17.99 a month for line rental. And unlike the unlimited plans, does not include weekend calls. You also only get 50GB of cloud storage included rather than the 100GB offered to unlimited customers.

It’s also worth noting that there will be a £49 activation fee.

It comes with a BT Home Hub 5 (with a £7.95 delivery charge applied).

READ: BT Home Hub 5 hands-on: Making BT Infinity even better

BT claims that its new service is the fastest standard fibre service around, citing Sky, TalkTalk and Plusnet each offering up to 38Mbps and Virgin Media offering up to 50Mbps. However, your actual speed will be dependent on the “time of day, line and location”.

Virgin Media’s up to 50Mbps fibre service is also unlimited, rather than capped. As is Sky’s equivalently priced package.

You can find out more about BT Infinity 1 at bt.com.

Shortened URLs make it easy to spy on people

Security researchers have discovered that short URLs are able to be brute-forced, potentially exposing personal data to anyone motivated to look. The issue was found by Martin Georgiev and Vitaly Shmatikov after looking at the abbreviated web addresses used by companies like Google, Microsoft and bit.ly. The standard Google Maps URL, for instance, takes up around 150 characters, but for ease of use, the product offered a six-character alternative. But a combination of six-characters is small enough that it’s possible to break simply with trial and error, exposing your cloud storage files and mapping requests to the world.

Georgiev and Shmatikov were able to find Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive files that were shared with short URLs. But some of those files were tied to folders that had write-access, enabling anyone in the world to drop malicious code into your cloud storage. Naturally, since anything stored online is automatically copied to your desktop, the duo claim that there is a very real risk of “large-scale malware injection.” The pair claim that 7 percent of the OneDrive and Google Drive accounts they scanned were vulnerable in this way.

The researchers were also able to use the flaw to up their stalking game quite significantly. For instance, short Google Maps URLs often contained directions between two private addresses. It would be quite easy to infer relationships from that data that were otherwise intended to be private. Even worse is that some people’s map links revealed highly personal information such as the medical facilities and places of worship that they visited. In addition, the pair were able to find and name people who visited juvenile detention facilities, pawn brokers and other such information that is ordinarily kept secret.

One of the reasons that people don’t really think about short links is that they’ve been told to believe in “security from obscurity.” It’s the idea that if people don’t know about a file that’s on the internet, they won’t be able to find it, but the pair have blown that out of the water. Early on in the paper, the duo say that people believe that the URLs are “safe because they are ‘random looking’ and not shared publicly.” But, in fact, this simply isn’t true anymore, and “each resource shared via short URL is thus effectively public, and can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world.” As far as the pair are concerned, “automatically generated short URLs are a terrible idea for cloud services.”

At the end of the paper, the researchers reveal the differing ways in which Google and Microsoft handled the news of the hack. Google doubled the character length and subsequently told Wired that it “appreciate contributions to the safety of Google Maps and Google products.” Microsoft, meanwhile, is quoted by the researchers as saying that the vulnerability “does not currently warrant an MRSC case,” although did quietly remove the shorten link function within OneDrive — although that’s no comfort to existing users who still remain exposed.

Via: Wired

Source: Paper (.PDF)

Apple’s Recycling Initiatives Recover $40 Million in Gold

Apple released its latest annual environmental report yesterday, and some of the numbers included reveal just how much the company is able to recover from old devices.

Business Insider notes that Apple was able to recover over 61 million pounds of steel, aluminum, glass, and other materials from its computers and iPhones. Included in that total is 2,204 pounds of gold, which is well over a ton.

The gold haul alone is worth $40 million at current prices ($1,229.80 per troy ounce of gold), while the total amount of material recovered is reportedly worth well over $50 million.

Cult of Mac ran the figures quoted by Apple through today’s metal prices, and came up with individual figures for copper ($6.4 million), aluminum ($3.2 million), silver ($1.6 million), nickel ($160,426), zinc ($109,503), and lead ($33,999).

Apple says in total it collected almost 90 million pounds of ewaste through its recycling programs, which works out as 71 percent of the total weight of the products the company sold seven years earlier.

Apple made much of its efforts to reduce waste at its media event last month. The company also unveiled a robotic system it has developed called ‘Liam’ that can disassemble old iPhones and recover recyclable materials.

The company said that Liam will initially focus on recycling junked iPhone 6 handsets, but Apple plans to modify and expand the system to deconstruct different models and recover more resources.

Tag: Environmental Responsibility
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Can’t find anything on the App Store to play? Apple plans app search overhaul

When you’re looking for an app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch on the Apple App Store do you just download those suggested on the front page or navigate through the basic search feature? We suspect it’s the former as the latter has long been far from impressive. It doesn’t seem to have the stamp of care and attention expected of Apple.

That’s soon to change if a new report is to be believed. Apple is said to have constructed a “secret team” to look at App Store search and effect some much-needed improvements.

One of those, claims Bloomberg, is designed to make more money for Apple – to monetise the App Store search much like Google search. This would essentially bring in a system whereby app publishers and developers could pay to push their games and software to the top of search results.

READ: Apple iPad Pro 9.7 review: The tablet to beat all tablets

Paid search might make it easier for smaller developers to highlight their applications if Apple keeps fees down to reasonable levels, after all they are competing with more than 1.5 million other apps. Or it might make it harder for them if the mega-publishers like Rovio, King and Supercell snaffle all the top spots. It’s hard to know for sure at this point.

What is perhaps more interesting for the consumer is that it is said that the team within Apple is also looking at ways to improve customer browsing. That might pay more dividends for iOS users.

Bloomberg states that the team hasn’t been working long, so changes might take a fair while yet. They are certainly long overdue, however.

UC Davis tries to erase references to pepper spray incident

When you try to suppress or scrub information that’s already out there, it tends to have the opposite effect. Barbra Streisand and Beyonce learned that the hard way, and now you can add the University of California, Davis to that list. According to the Sacramento Bee, UC Davis spent at least $175,000 in an effort to remove references of the 2011 pepper spray incident from the internet. The Bee got its hands on documents showing the university’s contract with one of the PR companies it hired to combat all the negative writeups against it.

The first PR firm UC Davis contracted in 2013 was a Maryland company called Nevins & Associates. Its proposal promised “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor.” The school also availed the services of Sacramento-based ID Media Partners in 2014, which aimed to “achieve a reasonable balance of positive natural search results on common terms concerning UC Davis and Chancellor Katehi.” A simple Google search can tell you that neither company was successful in eradicating references to the infamous event.

The pepper spray incident happened in November 2011 when a number of students decided to hold an Occupy movement demonstration on campus. All the videos that circulated show that it was a peaceful rally, when a police officer suddenly pepper sprayed a line of participants who were merely seated on the ground and who didn’t fight back.

UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis revealed that the payments for those PR firms came from the budget of the university’s communications department. She also told the Bee that they worked to ensure that the university is “fairly portrayed.” Doug Elmets, a public affairs consultant in Sacramento told the publication, though, that this is just “one more example of how out of touch the leadership at UC Davis is when it comes to their public perspective.”

Source: The Sacramento Bee

BT boosts entry-level fibre broadband speeds to 52Mbps

In its mission to supply the UK with faster broadband, BT has announced a new speed upgrade for Infinity fibre customers. New and existing entry-level subscribers can now enjoy up to 52Mbps, a 32 percent increase from their previous 38Mbps connection.

BT is keen to advertise that the new Infinity 1 package gives customers faster speeds than similar packages from Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin. Sky and TalkTalk share the same Openreach networks as BT, meaning that it’ll only be a matter of time until they launch their own 52Mbps packages. While Virgin Media’s basic offering comes in slightly lower than BT at 50Mbps, its business plans reach a whopping 300Mbps, compared to Infinity 2’s 78Mbps.

Before you get too excited, bear in mind that in order to notice those faster speeds, you need to be enjoying maximum connectivity from your existing 38Mbps service. If you’re only getting around 20Mbps, then an upgrade won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

New customers will be expected to pay £10 per month for the first 12 months (with a 25GB cap) or £12.50 for “unlimited” downloads, but that will also come with £18 a month line rental and a one-off £49 activation cost. Existing BT Broadband subscribers can upgrade to the new service at no extra cost but will be tied into a new contract.

The speed boost will likely be welcomed by UltraHD subscribers, who were told when they signed up that the recommended download speed is 44Mbps. With better connectivity, the service can better handle higher definition broadcasts, while delivering faster speeds to the rest of the household.

Source: BT

It’s time for the first Pokemon General Election

The world’s first Pokemon election is happening, and only one of the 720 candidates will be elected. In Japan, timed to promote the latest in a possibly never-ending series of movies, the company is holding an vote to choose one Pokemon — which somehow apparently makes it different to the many popularity polls it’s held before. (Pikachu regularly does well, as do rare, powerful ‘mon.) Voting, on adorable physical Poke-ballots, will be held in Pokemon Centers and Toys ‘R Us stores across Japan, while residents will also be able to vote online on their 3DS through Japan’s network of Seven-Eleven convenience stores and its WiFi hub.

There is one thing voters should factor into their decision — and it’s not the fictional candidates position on healthcare — the winner will become a free download for theater goers that bring their 3DS (and a copy of Pokemon X, Y, Omega Ruby, or Alpha Sapphire). Voting kicks off tomorrow through May 8th.

Via: RocketNews24

Source: Pokemon The Movie (Japanese)

Vinyl sales continue to surge in the UK

The vinyl revival shows no sign of slowing down. Today, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has announced that 637,056 LP albums were sold in the first three months of 2016. That’s a 62 percent increase on the same period last year, and puts vinyl’s cut of the UK album market at 3.9 percent, up from 2.1 percent in Q1 2015. Vinyl sales smashed industry expectations last year, climbing for the eighth successive time to 2.1 million. The BPI estimates that sales will breach 3 million in 2016 — possibly 3.5 million — if the format continues on its current trajectory.

Vinyl’s resurgence has triggered a wave of interest from musicians and retailers alike. Tesco and Sainsbury’s, for instance, now stock the format in a significant chuck of stores. LPs have also proven popular with video game enthusiasts — in the last 12 months we’ve seen records for Hotline Miami, Monument Valley, and countless others. A poll conducted by ICM, and shared exclusively with the BBC, has also shown that music streaming apps are boosting vinyl sales. That’s partly due to the general rise in streaming, but also because of the way these services encourage discovery.

ICM’s research has suggested that 7 percent of UK vinyl collectors don’t own a record player. That’s surprising but also understandable, given the popularity of LPs as collector’s items. Gorgeous album art, coupled with their physical size, can makes them great pieces to put on your wall, coffee table or book shelf. Some audiophiles might scoff at this idea, but it’s ultimately supporting a format that was otherwise headed to extinction. Regardless of how people enjoy them, the uptick in sales is only benefitting artists, labels, and the people that still like to play LPs at home.