Huawei wants to come to the U.S., and it might be looking to AT&T for help

Why it matters to you

Huawei has become quite a major player in the smartphone space, but it hasn’t been available in the U.S. That could change with an alleged partnership with AT&T.

It’s not just people hoping to immigrate to the U.S. — smartphones are looking to cross the ocean as well. Namely, smartphones from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, who has quickly become one of the fastest growing mobile device makers in the world. In fact, Huawei is the third-largest seller of mobile phones, a huge step up from just five years ago when it barely managed to eke out 1 percent of the market share.

But in order to grow further, Huawei realizes it needs to find its way into one major market — the United States. Now, The Information is reporting the Chinese company is hoping to work with American cellphone service provider AT&T to bring Huawei’s proprietary Kirin mobile phone chip to the network, and then, perhaps, its phones.

More: Huawei P9 vs. P10: Which stylish Huawei phone is best for you?

Of course, just because Huawei hopes that AT&T might approve such a request doesn’t mean that it will come to fruition. As Fortune noted, the cell phone provider is often approached with such propositions and doesn’t always agree to the terms. Even if things did progress smoothly, the process would still be a rather lengthy one, involving terms negotiations, stocking discussions, and more. So far, neither Huawei nor AT&T have commented on the alleged deal.

This isn’t the first time Huawei has tried to partner with an American company in order to make its way into the country. Previously, the firm attempted to work with Google, both the make the Nexus 6P and to manufacture the Pixel phones. Neither proposition, however, ultimately came to pass. But who knows — perhaps a relationship with AT&T will prove more successful and will finally be the key Huawei has been looking for to open the door to the U.S. market.

Adobe wants to improve complex photo cutouts with deep learning software

Why it matters to you

Clipping a background out of an image is a time-consuming process, particularly with objects with fine details, but new research is bringing automatic clips via artificial intelligence.

Clipping out objects from photos and videos is often a time-consuming process — but Adobe is looking for new ways to change that with deep learning software. Published earlier this month, the research for Deep Image Mapping by Adobe, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign aims to improve on software-based clipping solutions.

Researchers have developed a number of different artificially intelligent programs to automatically subtract a background from an image, but most are based on colors. When presented with an image with similar colors such as the greens in a landscape photo, those programs tend to fail, Adobe says. Similar applications also use a very narrow set of data points to train the software, the researchers say, which makes the system biased to only certain types of images.

More: A new tool could dramatically change selfie editing

Adobe’s latest method, however, relies on the structure of the objects in the photograph, not the colors. The program requires the image and a trimap, or a rough sketch of what should be cut from the image that labels the foreground, the background, and a range in between to enable the computer to find the edges.

The program works by learning the structure of alpha mattes, or the “color” channel that contains all the transparencies in an image. Common alpha mattes include hair and fur as well as semi-transparent objects or even optical blur created from a slow shutter speed. The research team used 49,300 images to train the deep learning program and 1,000 images to test its accuracy. By recognizing the structure instead of separating by color, the program has achieved accurate results even in images with similar tones.

Adobe’s process puts the image through two rounds of encoding, the first to find those edges and the second to refine the details for more accurate clips.

While artificially intelligent image clipping methods are still under research, Adobe’s latest look into the process could mean better clipping tools will eventually make their way inside programs like Photoshop and Premiere Pro — and even the possibility of eliminating the traditional green screen if the feature is robust enough.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 demolishes the competition in new benchmarks

Why it matters to you

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 is fast and that’s a good thing when it could power your next phone.

It wasn’t all that long ago that chip maker Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835, a next-gen processor designed to power the next generation of smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. But despite the impressive theoretical improvements the firm touted at the chip’s launch event, it wasn’t clear just how the Snapdragon 835 would compare to last year’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon. New benchmarks published by Android Police on Wednesday, though, paint a clearer picture.

At Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, the company pitted a Snapdragon 835 reference device against two Snapdragon 821 devices, the Google’s Pixel XL and OnePlus OnePlus 3;  the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, which pack Samsung’s Exynos processor; and Huawei’s Kirin 960-powered P10.

More: Chip maker Qualcomm spends $39 billion to buy NXP Semiconductor

The results spoke for themselves. In Geekbench and PCMark, apps which test processor performance, the Snapdragon 835 outperformed the aging Snapdragon 821 by close to 40 percent in multithreaded tasks. In Geekbench, its single-thread performance wasn’t quite as impressive but the chip still managed to best every processor by at least 10 percent. In PCMark, it scored 10 percent higher than the Huawei P10’s Kirin 960.

Two other benchmarking apps, GFXBench GL and 3D Mark, put the 835’s Adreno 540 graphics chip, and the results were no less impressive. On average, it maintained around a 30 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821 in GFXBench GL’s suite of tests and did 30 percent better than competing graphics chips in 3DMark’s Ice Storm Unlimited test. In 3D Mark’s OpenGL ES3.0 Slingshot Unlimited, it fared better, maintaining a consistent 50 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821.

Antutu, a holistic suite that factors RAM, GPU, CPU, and storage speed into benchmarking tests, showed the 835 well ahead of the immediate competition. Web tests, which show how well the 835 handles graphics-heavy pages, told a similar story. Google’s Octane test showed a 40 percent advantage over Samsung’s Exynos processor, and 50 percent over the 821. Sunspider and Kraken, meanwhile, awarded the 835 similar wins.

More: Hands on: Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820

There is more to the Snapdragon 835 than raw performance improvements, of course. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4.0, the next iteration of its rapid battery charging tech, features a 20 percent improvement in speed and a 30 percent improvement in energy efficiency. That translates to five hours of extra battery in about five minutes of charging, or 50 percent of a battery’s capacity in 15 minutes.

It also packs a wealth of protections against the sort of catastrophic heat buildup exhibited by Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7. One, the latest generation of the company’s Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage software, monitors power transfer in real time to ensure it does not exceed safe operating temperatures. Four levels of thermal protection — some at the chassis, others at the battery, and several inside the chips itself — sense the type and quality of plugged-in charging cables. New features extend the longevity of the battery — Qualcomm said it will maintain at least 80 percent of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles.

The 835 is shaping up to be Qualcomm’s best chip yet and the initial Snapdragon 835 devices are expected to in the first half of 2017.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 demolishes the competition in new benchmarks

Why it matters to you

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 is fast and that’s a good thing when it could power your next phone.

It wasn’t all that long ago that chip maker Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835, a next-gen processor designed to power the next generation of smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. But despite the impressive theoretical improvements the firm touted at the chip’s launch event, it wasn’t clear just how the Snapdragon 835 would compare to last year’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon. New benchmarks published by Android Police on Wednesday, though, paint a clearer picture.

At Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, the company pitted a Snapdragon 835 reference device against two Snapdragon 821 devices, the Google’s Pixel XL and OnePlus OnePlus 3;  the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, which pack Samsung’s Exynos processor; and Huawei’s Kirin 960-powered P10.

More: Chip maker Qualcomm spends $39 billion to buy NXP Semiconductor

The results spoke for themselves. In Geekbench and PCMark, apps which test processor performance, the Snapdragon 835 outperformed the aging Snapdragon 821 by close to 40 percent in multithreaded tasks. In Geekbench, its single-thread performance wasn’t quite as impressive but the chip still managed to best every processor by at least 10 percent. In PCMark, it scored 10 percent higher than the Huawei P10’s Kirin 960.

Two other benchmarking apps, GFXBench GL and 3D Mark, put the 835’s Adreno 540 graphics chip, and the results were no less impressive. On average, it maintained around a 30 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821 in GFXBench GL’s suite of tests and did 30 percent better than competing graphics chips in 3DMark’s Ice Storm Unlimited test. In 3D Mark’s OpenGL ES3.0 Slingshot Unlimited, it fared better, maintaining a consistent 50 percent lead on the Snapdragon 821.

Antutu, a holistic suite that factors RAM, GPU, CPU, and storage speed into benchmarking tests, showed the 835 well ahead of the immediate competition. Web tests, which show how well the 835 handles graphics-heavy pages, told a similar story. Google’s Octane test showed a 40 percent advantage over Samsung’s Exynos processor, and 50 percent over the 821. Sunspider and Kraken, meanwhile, awarded the 835 similar wins.

More: Hands on: Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820

There is more to the Snapdragon 835 than raw performance improvements, of course. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4.0, the next iteration of its rapid battery charging tech, features a 20 percent improvement in speed and a 30 percent improvement in energy efficiency. That translates to five hours of extra battery in about five minutes of charging, or 50 percent of a battery’s capacity in 15 minutes.

It also packs a wealth of protections against the sort of catastrophic heat buildup exhibited by Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7. One, the latest generation of the company’s Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage software, monitors power transfer in real time to ensure it does not exceed safe operating temperatures. Four levels of thermal protection — some at the chassis, others at the battery, and several inside the chips itself — sense the type and quality of plugged-in charging cables. New features extend the longevity of the battery — Qualcomm said it will maintain at least 80 percent of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles.

The 835 is shaping up to be Qualcomm’s best chip yet and the initial Snapdragon 835 devices are expected to in the first half of 2017.

Hackers threaten to remotely wipe iCloud accounts unless Apple pays a ransom

Why it matters to you

Your Apple account could be part of a massive data breach and it could be used by hackers to demand ransom from Apple.

A group of hackers is allegedly trying to extort Apple by holding Apple customers’ data for ransom and threatening to remotely wipe iCloud accounts connected to both iPhones and iPads if those ransoms are not paid.

The group self-identifies as the “Turkish Crime Family,” and it is demanding either $75,000 in Ethereum or Bitcoin or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards, according to a report from Motherboard. Not only that, but the hackers gave Apple an April 7 deadline to meet the demands — or else they will start wiping both phones and iCloud accounts.

More: Apple has finally taken the wraps off the new ruby red ‘iPhone (RED)’

The hackers even went to the trouble of providing screenshots, allegedly showing conversations that the group has had with Apple. In one instance, an Apple security team member asked if the hackers were willing to provide a “sample or the data set,” possibly to verify the validity of the data and make sure that the accounts were indeed breached. Last but not least, the hackers uploaded a video to YouTube with further proof.

In other words, things aren’t looking good.

Even worse? The sheer number of accounts the hackers have access to. According to Motherboard, one of the hackers claim to have gained access to 300 million Apple accounts, including Apple’s own @iCloud. Another hacker in the group claimed that the group had access to an even-more-scary 559 million accounts.

The reports do call into question Apple’s security. It’s currently unclear exactly how they gained access to Apple’s servers, however, it’s possible that the team didn’t directly hack Apple but rather gained information through previous data breaches or used social engineering to get information.

Apple says it’s working with the authorities to bring the hackers to justice and it’s likely we haven’t heard the last of this story. We’ll update this article as we hear more.

Android security came a long way in 2016 but Google says there is more work

Why it matters to you

Android users can be sure Google is working closely with manufacturers and carriers to improve security regardless of what device they own.

With hundreds of different Android devices out in the wild, running different versions of the operating system on different hardware, Google faces a massive challenge in distributing critical security updates. In the past, many users have had to wait up to three months before having their phones patched, not only due to the variation between Android products, but also the lack of urgency with which manufacturers pushed fixes out.

Google has been well aware of this problem, which is why it has made significant strides over the past several years, reducing that wait time to just a couple of days, according to TechCrunch. But there is still work to be done, as Adrian Ludwig and Mel Miller, members of Android’s Security Team, have noted in a year-in-review blog post.

More: Top 5 Android security apps: Do they protect you?

More than 735 million devices from more than 200 manufacturers received security updates last year, according to Google. While that illustrates the company’s commitment to keeping users safe, the job is hardly complete. Ludwig and Miller also noted roughly half the Android products in use at the end of 2016 had not received an update in the preceding 12 months. Google claims its new A/B update system, designed to make over-the-air updates more reliable and prevent them from inadvertently bricking phones, will help encourage installation.

The monthly security update initiative, set in motion after the Stagefright vulnerability was discovered in 2015, also saw expansion in 2016, the team reported. Those updates were released for devices running Android 4.4.4 and up, which comprises 86 percent of all active devices globally.

Ludwig and Miller also said they made strides in stamping out potentially harmful apps (PHAs) in the Google Play Store. Verify Apps, a system that checks users’ devices for PHAs, conducted 750 million daily tests last year, up from 450 million in 2015. As a result, installation of PHAs was reportedly reduced in the top 50 countries in which Android devices are used. Google estimated PHAs accounted for 0.05 percent of all apps on the Play Store last year, compared to 0.15 percent in the year prior.

Of course, Google Play isn’t the only place where users can get their apps, and that is one of the roadblocks Google encountered trying to make Android safer for everyone. The number of devices with a PHA installed — from any source, not just Google’s marketplace — actually rose to 0.71 percent from 0.5 percent.

Although many Android users have chosen Pixel and Nexus devices to receive updates straight from Google automatically, the security team attributed much of its progress to enhancements offered by the release of Android 7.0 Nougat. Chiefly, the introduction of file-based encryption and protections against media-based attacks have bolstered security in the most recent Android phones, regardless of manufacturer.

Still, as much as the Android Security Team has accomplished alongside partners and carriers, it still helps to have friends in the research community. Google said its Vulnerability Rewards Program paid out nearly $1 million to researchers in 2016 for their contributions — some of which were set to rave music.

Deal: Unlimited Calls, Text and 2GB of 4G LTE data for $11.67 per month

Right now, Mint SIM has an amazing deal on high-speed 4G LTE data in the U.S.!

In the U.S., between the Big Four carriers, it’s become a game of race to the top — with that top being unlimited data.

But most people don’t need unlimited data. In fact, most Americans don’t use more than a couple of gigabytes per month, and even the top percentage rarely go over 10GB. 1

That’s why Mint SIM is such a great value proposition. The idea is simple: by signing up for three months of service at a time, you save money every month.

For a limited time, get 2GB of data, plus unlimited calls and texts, for $11.67 per month!

Here’s the lowdown on Mint SIM: It cuts through the BS of “unlimited” to provide exactly what you need at a price that no one can match. The company uses T-Mobile’s extensive 4G LTE network that covers most of the coverage in ultra-fast wireless connectivity. And features like tethering are free, so if you find yourself with extra gigs at the end of the month, you can connect your laptop or tablet to your phone’s data plan and enjoy mobile freedom anywhere.

You could be paying just $11.67 per month for 2GB of wireless data! Learn More

1 Data collected independently by Mobile Nations between June 2016 to September 2016.

All Nest Cams have a dangerous bug, but it will be fixed ‘in the coming days’

Nest Cams are incredibly convenient, but having a permanent connection to the Internet can also be a security risk.

Nest, the Alphabet company that scooped up to take over its smart home ambitions, has a problem. Its Nest Cam line, which includes the (admittedly excellent) Outdoor model, has a dangerous bug that allows a would-be thief or hacker (or hacker thief) to send a signal over Bluetooth to force the camera into a reboot, disabling the unit for up to 90 seconds.

The vulnerability was discovered last October and reported to Nest in October by Florida-based security expert, Jason Doyle, but the cries went ignored, so he felt he had no choice but to make them public in hopes of pushing Nest to do something about it.

There are three issues, all to do with problems in the camera’s always-on Bluetooth connection, which end up forcing the unit to either reset or seek out a non-existent Wi-Fi network. All three issues have the same effect: they take down the Nest Cam entirely. Of course, said hacker would need to be within Bluetooth LE range for the connection to be made — some 60 feet in good conditions, but more likely 30 feet — but now that the exploits are out, such antics could become more common.

For its part, Nest has released a statement claiming that it would be sending a patch to all Nest Cam and Dropcam models “in the coming days,” after discovering and patching the issue internally. Good news for active Nest Cam users, but let’s hope Dropcam has a method of forcing such an update to customers that wouldn’t otherwise be aware of the problem.

Destroy your opponents in ‘Rocket League’ Dropshot mode

Chaotic jet-car soccer game Rocket League just got a little crazier with its new Dropshot mode, which changes how you play the game. This free update rolls out to Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC today, bringing a new competitive tournament as well as some goofy Easter-themed items for your in-game automobile.

Dropshot changes things up in a big way. The new mode has no goalposts, unlike other Rocket League arenas. Instead, each side of the field is covered with destructible hexagons. Smash the massive soccer ball with your jet-car into the ground to destroy the ground and then use the resulting hole to score. It takes two hits to fully destroy a hex space in the arena. When you do score, your opponent’s hexes repair themselves while yours stay as is. In addition, you can now electrify the ball to do splash damage when it hits. All told, a fully powered ball can smash up to 19 panels. This new mode is full of even more intense strategic action for Rocket League players.

The patch also brings three new cosmetic items to your car: an Easter egg antenna ball and two silly but fun roof decorations, an Easter basket and set of bunny ears. You’ll see these as random drops after each match. The fourth season of tournament play also gets some changes, with new skill tiers, fewer divisions and new ranking and skill reckoning that should help balance out all Rocket League competitive gameplay.

Source: Psyonix

Limited edition black OnePlus phone? Not so limited anymore.

So much for that black OnePlus 3T being an ultra-rare beast. OnePlus has revealed that it will launch a limited Midnight Black edition of the 3T at a “later date,” making that once-special color available to everyone “while supplies last.” And the practical difference between this smartphone and the limited edition Colette model (shown below)? Er… there’s no Colette logo on it. That’s all. Yes, the 250 people who lined up at a Paris store on March 21st now have little to brag about besides getting a black 3T slightly earlier than everyone else. So why spoil their fun? If you ask OnePlus, it’s because most people just want the device that badly.

The company tells us that the “community has been asking” for a completely black OnePlus phone for a while. As proof, it pointed us to a Twitter poll it ran where 92 percent of respondents agreed that OnePlus should “matte black all the things.” That’s not exactly a scientific survey, but there’s no denying that there’s at least some interest in a darker shade. We can’t knock OnePlus too hard, then, but this still serves as a lesson in resisting the urge to snap up an exclusive device color as soon as it’s available.

Source: OnePlus