The Asus Zenfone 3 Go was just leaked online — and it doesn’t look bad

Why it matters to you

There are a ton of budget phones out there, but they’re not all worth buying. The Asus Zenfone 3 Go is shaping up to be one that is.

The budget-friendly Asus Zenfone Go was one of the most popular devices in the Zenfone 2 lineup, and now it looks like Asus wants to replicate that success. According to recent rumors, the Zenfone 3 Go will be announced before the launch of the Zenfone 4, and it may well make an appearance at MWC 2017.

The report comes from NotebookItalia, and it suggests that the device will be relatively decent, although that will largely depend on the price point. For example, the phone will feature a 5-inch 720p display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, and 2GB of RAM. That’s not bad when you consider the MediaTek chipset the original Zenfone Go used.

More: Asus may reveal a refreshed ZenBook Flip UX300-Series 2-in-1 in late February

On top of those specs, we should also expect a 13MP rear-facing camera and a 5MP front-facing camera, which certainly isn’t a bad combination.

When it comes to design, there are a few leaked images to go off. The images show that the device will feature a similar metal build to the Asus Zenfone 3, though the new device will be a little more simplistic with a smaller camera module that’s moved to the upper left hand corner of the phone’s back, and a basic Asus logo in the middle.

While pricing for the phone is reported to sit at around $160, that obviously remains to be seen. If true, however, the phone could give the likes of the Huawei P8 Lite a run for its money.

The new phone could be useful for Asus in maintaining the Zenfone momentum it has built over the years. That’s especially true if the new device proves to be as popular as the original Zenfone Go — although only time will tell if that ends up happening.

We’ll update this article as soon as we hear more about the Asus Zenfone 3 Go.

Hybrid woolly mammoths could soon walk the Earth, thanks to Harvard scientists

Why it matters to you

Thanks to cutting-edge gene editing techniques, Harvard scientists could soon bring animals based on long-extinct woolly mammoths to life. And they might even help with climate change.

You remember how well Jurassic Park ended, with absolutely no death and destruction, and everything going totally according to plan? Well, scientists at Harvard University have a not dissimilar scheme to bring back another long-extinct creature in the form of the woolly mammoth.

Harvard geneticist and molecular engineer Professor George Church says that his team’s “aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” and that such a dream “could happen in a couple of years.”

This “mammophant” would be part elephant, but with various mammoth genes spliced in using gene editing to give it shaggy hair, smaller ears, cold-adapted blood, and other woolly mammoth characteristics.

More: Scientists create chickens with dinosaur legs, because why not

The project to create the mammophant started in 2015, or roughly 4,000 years since the woolly mammoth became extinct. Since then, researchers in Church’s lab have increased the number of mammoth DNA “edits” they can make into the elephant genome from 15 to 45. For the first time, the team is now talking about progressing the work to embryo stage — although a living creature is still likely to be years away.

When and if the project reaches that stage, the team plans to grow the animal in an artificial womb, as opposed to using a female elephant as a surrogate. This work could take place within the next decade.

“We hope to do the entire procedure ex vivo (outside a living body),” Church said. “It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species [such as the Asian elephant].” At present, Church’s lab is able to grow a mouse embryo in an artificial womb from halfway through its gestation period.

Should the plan to bring back woolly mammoths succeed, Church has noted that there would be two additional benefits. The first could be to help the endangered Asian elephant survive, albeit in a modified form. The second, somewhat surprising benefit may be to help fight climate change by preventing tundra permafrost from melting and releasing greenhouses gas into the atmosphere.

“They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” Church said, as reported by The Guardian. “In the summer, they knock down trees and help the grass grow.”

Just so long as Jeff “Dr. Ian Malcom” Goldblum gives the final project his stamp of approval, we’ll be happy!

Your pants are calling, they want you to know it’s too hot to work today

Why it matters to you

The day could come soon when your pants are smarter about your health than you are — and keep you safe on the job.

If you’re going to wear clothes anyway, you might as well put them to work. Sweden-based Snickers Workwear, a major on-the-job clothing supplier in Europe has started testing workplace wearables that monitor health and safety factors, according to Torque-Expo.

Snickers’s product line already includes clothing and protective accessories to prevent knee injuries, but the wearable takes the next step with real-time monitoring. The company’s Tracker I microprocessor prototype is being used in tests in five countries by 100 workers. The chip fits in a pocket on the Snickers’ Work Trousers and reports workplace noise levels, heat conditions, and knee impact while the tradesperson is working. The data from the Tracker I chip transmits to the wearer’s smartphone.

More: Is that a charger in your pants? BauBax’s smart clothing juices up gadgets wirelessly

Snickers is a division of Hultafors Group. David Clark, a managing director with Hultafors, pointed out the need for clothing that took an active role in workplace safety. Clark referred to a survey in Scandinavia that revealed a majority of professional tradespeople didn’t use health and safety equipment correctly and cut corners at work.

“The study shows that six out of 10 craftsmen are suffering from pain in their knees,” Clark told Torque-Expo. “So we see that there is definitely room for improving their well-being beyond just knee protection — and our Smart Workwear is one way. We are well known for our KneeGuard System, 37.5 Fabric Technology, and technical functionality, but the integration of ‘smart’ wearable technology into our clothing shows the extent to which we are looking at working clothes and well-being on site in a completely new way.”

Snickers’ focus is to use smart workwear to improve workers’ health. The concept of clothing reporting to you while you work can also be interpreted as reporting on you, beyond your own phone to a wider network. Like any new technology, some resistance is likely at first. If workplace comfort, health, and safety can demonstrably be improved with the use of smart clothing that doesn’t make people carry and keep track of additional devices, the long-term benefits could quickly override initial pushback.

Darwin, a mini robot, helps kids with cerebral palsy perform physical therapy

Why it matters to you

Like any kid with homework, kids with cerebral palsy sometimes need encouragement to do their physical therapy. Robots like Darwin can help.

Could robots have a future helping kids with pathologies like cerebral palsy, a condition that often involves impaired muscle coordination and other disabilities? Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology think so.

They are investigating the use of pint-sized robots in pediatric therapy, specifically to encourage children to play an active role in physical therapy.

More: Friendly educational robot designed to help kids with autism

“We’re designing socially interactive robots that can engage children with disabilities in therapy activities, performed in the home environment,” professor Ayanna Howard, who leads the Darwin project, told Digital Trends. “Therapy is designed to help children in achieving their developmental milestones — whether a child with cerebral palsy, child with autism spectrum disorder, or a child recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Our robot is designed to function in the home, to supplement services provided by a human clinician, by engaging with them in therapy exercises just as a clinician does — interacting with them, monitoring their performance, and encouraging them with both motivational and corrective feedback.”

Ayanna Howard with her robot.

In experiments carried out by Howard and her colleagues, 3D-motion trackers monitored the subjects’ movements as Darwin offered encouragements while movements were performed — as well as demonstrating them when they were not performed correctly. With the exception of one isolated case, the robot had a significantly positive impact on kids’ physical activity.

“We are currently running a number of pilots using the technology in a few clinics and homes of children with cerebral palsy,” Howard continued. “Our current pilots show that children with CP are able to successfully follow the therapy protocols and guidance provided by their robot playmates.”

The next goal, she said, is to implement a long-term pilot program of two months to evaluate the robots’ full potential. Once the effectiveness of the bot-aided therapy is validated, the technology will then be ready for commercialization.

While it’s not being viewed as a replacement for human physical therapists, as it serving as an additional tool for practitioners could turn out to be beneficial. After all, what kid didn’t dream of having his or her own robot pal?

9 tips and tricks to optimize your Airpod experience

Now that Apple has removed the headphone jack from the latest iPhone, it’s time for the Apple faithful to embrace the future of wireless audio. You’ve decided against bulkier on-ear and over-ear headphone options and opted to buy the company’s first-ever fully wireless earbuds. Awesome! Now you just need to learn how to use them to their full potential.

More: Simple and reliable, Apple’s Airpods are the best fully-wireless earbuds

That’s where we come in. Here are some tips and tricks to help you master your new wireless wonders straight out of the box. These options may well increase with time, so we’ll be updating this piece as new features come on board.

Connecting to your iPhone

The easiest task in getting to know your new AirPods is pairing them with your iPhone or iPad, which is accomplished by opening the charging case near your phone, then tapping the connect button that appears on the screen. That’s it. Seriously.

Connecting to Android phones and other devices

AirPods aren’t just for iPhone users, they’ll work with Android gear and other Bluetooth-enabled devices as well. A small button on the back of the charging case allows you to connect to anything from Android phones to computers — anything that doesn’t work directly with Apple’s W1 chip. Simply open the charging case and press and hold the button until the indicator light between the AirPods begins blinking white, then find the AirPods in the Bluetooth menu of your chosen device.

Battery life info

Information about the battery life of each earbud, as well as how much juice you have left in the charging case, can be immediately displayed by opening the case within a few inches of your phone. Once opened, a battery status menu indicates how much power you’ve got to work with.

Changing the name

To change the name of your AirPods, simply navigate to the Settings menu of your iPhone, then tap into the Bluetooth menu and select your AirPods from the list of devices. Once selected, you can change the name of your headphones by clicking the Name section and editing it.

Here’s our first look at HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ season four

Richard Hendricks, the hapless-yet-brilliant lead of HBO’s Silicon Valley, is back. And once again, he has some big ideas percolating, judging from the show’s first teaser trailer. But his path to glory will likely be littered with plenty of setbacks, humiliation and hilarity. Just a guess (based on how things have worked out so far on the Mike Judge series). When last we left the Pied Piper team, they were considering pivoting pivot away from the exciting world of compression. But it sounds like things won’t go as smoothly as they expect when the show returns on April 23rd.

Source: YouTube (HBO)

A supercomputer in coal country is analyzing climate change

In Wyoming, where the state produces about 40 percent of America’s coal, a new supercomputer named Cheyenne has just come online to join in the fight against climate change. According to the Associated Press, the $30 million Cheyenne is 20th fastest in the world and is currently working on several projects, including some that will help it predict weather patterns “months to years in advance.”

By building better weather prediction models, Cheyenne will eventually be able to better predict climate change as well. “We believe that doing better predictions of those things have apolitical benefits,” Rich Loft, a specialist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research said, “saving lives and saving money, and improving outcomes for businesses and farmers.”

Cheyenne is located in the Wyoming town of the same name and as the AP notes, it already has the support of some coal industry insiders and climate change skeptics — despite the fact that a downturn in the coal industry has hurt state budgets. Governor Matt Mead, for example, is currently suing to block carbon emission regulations put in place during the Obama administration, but supports the Cheyenne project for jumpstarting the state’s tech industry. While The NCAR plans to keep plugging away at its current projects despite the current political climate, there’s a fear that projects like Cheyenne won’t be possible in the future. Most of the supercomputer’s cost came from the National Science Foundation, which is in danger of losing funding under President Trump, or at least shifting its focus away from environmental and earth sciences.

When vending machines attack (a university)

We are marching toward certain doom at the hands of an angry Skynet of our own invention. Need proof? This week a school was attacked by its own soft drink vending machines.

You read that right.

A university found that its internet was choking and stuttering. An investigation showed the on-campus vending machines were waging a quiet war, alternately throttling and completely shutting down the connection. The infected soda machines and 5,000 other botnet-infected IoT devices were making hundreds of DNS lookups every 15 minutes.

The story comes from Verizon’s recent Data Breach Digest, where the university is not named, obviously to protect the innocent. One security team member remarked, “This botnet spread from device to device by brute forcing default and weak passwords. Once the password was known, the malware had full control of the device and would check in with command infrastructure for updates and change the device’s password—locking us out of the 5,000 systems.”

Connected vending machines are part of the “Internet of Things,” which you may have heard of. This genre of internet-connected appliances and vehicles bring our lives a new kind of convenience, really great, the best convenience. If your idea of convenience is an unpredictable device that occasionally inconveniences you beyond comprehension.

According to the tech who discovered their uni’s soda machines had gone rogue, the botnet was hungry. It spent days, and an untold amount of bandwidth searching for yummy “fish” dinners. They said in the report, “The name servers, responsible for Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups, were producing high-volume alerts and showed an abnormal number of sub-domains related to seafood.”

Everything from light bulbs to vending machines were hooked up to the university’s network in an effort to make management of all the connected devices efficient. “This was a mess,” the tech wrote. “Short of replacing every soda machine and lamp post, I was at a loss for how to remediate the situation.” That was when they reached out to the Verizon RISK Team, which the school had on retainer for network emergencies. In this instance, it was an “IoT outbreak.”

“Luckily for me,” the school’s tech wrote, “a less drastic option existed than replacing all the IoT devices on campus.” Whoever had infected the school’s devices had made a schoolboy error when it came to securing their malware’s own password. “Analysis of previous malware samples had shown that the control password, used to issue commands to infected systems, was also used as the newly updated device password.” They made a plan to intercept the clear text password for one of the compromised soda machines, and then quickly perform a password change before the malware’s next update.” This way, the university could retake control of its thousands of infected IoT devices.

“I instructed the network operations team to prepare to shut down all network access for our IoT segments once we had intercepted the malware password. Short lived as it was, the impact from severing all of our IoT devices from the internet during that brief period of time was noticeable across the campus—and we were determined never to have a repeat incident.”

It worked. One of the tech team’s developers wrote a script to log in, lock the botnet out with a new password, and clear all the devices of infection. “The whole process took a matter of minutes,” they wrote.

The university was lucky they had someone who knew what the hell was going on once they identified the problem. I wish there was a way to install this person in my home or my car. Because as our devices turn on us, we in turn have no one to turn to — and vending machines are now officially, actually out to get us. Make no mistake, our new Skynet isn’t a cool film franchise or laughable allusion to the Terminator. It’s a place where phrases like “IoT security” cuddle up with phrases like “alternative facts” because both phrases have very distant relationships with reality.

That’s because the machines are really starting to act like they’re out to get us. Like the Volkswagen that “red screens” when you tap its in-dash screen too fast. Smart TV’s that spy on users and sell their data to advertisers, or get bricked with malware. Refrigerators that stop working until they’re updated. Pacemakers that rat you out to the cops. And, of course, DVRs and webcams that attack the internet and bring it to its knees.

It’s humiliating! We’re now lower on the food chain than the robots. We already have to prove to computers that we’re living breathing humans every day when we log in to anything with CAPTCHA. And by using anything with an algorithm, we’re teaching them how to outsmart us even more in the future.

The information security sector, to its credit, has been in a panic over this for quite some time. To the point that it’s becoming a tired trope for conference talks. Here in San Francisco, we just endured the RSA Conference. It’s a gathering of tens of thousands of infosec professionals from corporate and government security sectors. And it’s where you go if you want to see the same old, same old for security trends. I’ve come to think of it as a place where people simply shout to hear the echoes.

Some people there repeated what hackers have been warning everyone about for years, but no companies seem to care to listen to. That IoT security is really a problem.

There was a talk on solar panels being compromised, and one on making IoT devices into attack vectors. Another speaker posited a vision of security updates for our new connected nightmare, while some heartened soul put forward a survival guide for the “IoThreats Era.” One talk finally named our collective demon in Protecting Consumers in the Age of IoT.

That while these people were preaching to the choir from a conference stage, we found out an entire university had been taken down by connected vending machines should be a call to action. That is, if anyone was listening.

Germany bans creepy doll over privacy concerns

My Friend Cayla is a smiling, blonde doll that can answer questions and play games by pairing with a smart device. She might also be spying on you.

German watchdog group the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway) warns that hackers can use Cayla to steal personal data through an unsecured Bluetooth connection. It’s already removed the doll from store shelves, and it’s encouraging parents to take precautions.

“Items that conceal cameras or microphones and that are capable of transmitting a signal, and therefore can transmit data without detection, compromise people’s privacy. This applies in particular to children’s toys. The Cayla doll has been banned in Germany,” said Bundesnetzagentur President Jochen Homann. “This is also to protect the most vulnerable in our society.”

Over 18 privacy groups filed complaints with the US Federal Trade Commission and the European Union about connected toys like My Friend Cayla last year. They claimed manufacturer Genesis Toys and its tech partner Nuance violated deceptive practices and privacy laws by recording and transmitting children’s voices without permission.

Stories of hacked devices like headphones and pacemakers are unsettling, but the idea of compromised children’s toys is extra creepy. Since the dolls use an unprotected wireless Bluetooth connection, anyone in the vicinity could potentially listen in to the conversation. A company could also use the toys to advertise directly to children, or it could sell the information it gathers to police and intelligence agencies.

Via: The New York Times

Source: The Bundesnetzagentur

Future iPhone May Use Customized Wireless Charging System Made in Partnership with Broadcom

A future version of the iPhone could use a customized wireless charging system created in partnership with Broadcom, according to JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur (via CNBC).

While Apple and Broadcom have reportedly been working together on a wireless charging solution for approximately two years, Sur is not sure whether the feature will be included in the 2017 iPhone due to “caution around the battery-related recall” of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

Despite Harlan’s caution, the upcoming 2017 “iPhone 8” is widely rumored to include some kind of wireless charging solution, but details on how it is being implemented and whether or not Apple is working with a partner like Broadcom remain unknown at this time.

iPhone 8 concept image via Thadeu Brandão
Past rumors have suggested wireless charging partnerships and supplier deals with Lite-On Semiconductor, MediaTek, Foxconn, Pegatron, and Luxshare, making it difficult to suss out Apple’s wireless charging plans.

Harlan’s research note also echoes previous rumors pointing towards a glass body for future iPhones, which many analysts believe is being implemented to facilitate wireless charging.

“We believe the glass back cover is conducive to wireless charging as it reduces signal interference versus a metal casing,” Sur wrote. “It is possible for Apple to add proprietary features such as fast charging or extended charging to differentiate itself from the pack and enhance the value of its own hardware ecosystem.”

Early wireless charging rumors suggested Apple would use a long-range wireless charging solution, but more recent speculation suggests the company may instead opt for an Apple Watch-style inductive charging solution. A glass body, as is rumored, would be necessary for an inductive charging option, and Apple also recently joined the Wireless Power Consortium, a group committed to the open development of the Qi wireless charging standard used in devices like the Samsung Galaxy.

Along with wireless charging, Apple’s 2017 iPhone is rumored to include a radical redesign, featuring the aforementioned glass body and an edge-to-edge ~5-inch OLED display that eliminates the device’s Home button. Rumors suggest this device will be positioned as a high-end “premium” model that could cost upwards of $1,000, and most sources believe it will be sold alongside two more affordable 4.7 and 5.5-inch devices that resemble the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus.

Rumors disagree on exactly what material the two regular-sized devices will be made from, and whether or not they will include wireless charging as well.

For full details on what to expect from the flagship OLED iPhone 8 and its two companion devices, make sure to check out our dedicated iPhone 8 roundup, which is updated regularly with new rumors.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8 (2017)
Tags: Broadcom, JPMorgan
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