HTC’s new financing program lets you grab a shiny new phone for $0 down

$0 down and 0% APR? Not too shabby.

As bezels get thinner and cameras get better, prices of today’s smartphones also get higher. Monthly payments when buying a phone through a carrier help to make these rising costs more manageable, but if you want to purchase a phone unlocked and directly through the manufacturer, these options sometimes aren’t available. HTC is revamping its own financing program today under the new name of “HTC Financing”, and it doesn’t sound half-bad.

HTC is partnering with TD Bank to make the program possible, and the biggest draw here is that you can purchase a new phone for $0 down. You’ll need to buy a phone that costs $599 or more in order to use HTC Financing, and at the time of publication, the only one on HTC’s website that qualifies for this is the U11.

If you buy a 64GB U11 with HTC Financing, you’ll pay $0 down and then $28/month for 24 months. You can pick up the 128GB model for the same $0 down, but your monthly rate will be increased to $31/month for 24 months. HTC Financing is available on the unlocked U11 and all of the carrier versions (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon), and better yet, there’s a 0% APR no matter which variant you choose.

HTC Financing admittedly sounds like a great deal for those that want to pick up a U11 without handing over $649 or $729 upfront, and with the U11 Plus right around the corner, the timing for its release is just right. You could certainly pick up a U11 using HTC Financing right now if you wanted to, but seeing as how the Plus will be announced on November 2, we’d advise being patient for a few more days to see what it has to offer.

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• HTC U11 review
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• Manufacturing the U11: Behind the scenes
• Join our U11 forums
• HTC U11 vs Galaxy S8
• HTC U11 vs LG G6

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Why scientists are redefining the kilogram

Physics is a funny thing. Despite dictating the behaviors and states of everything from atoms to stars, our interpretation of its effects are rooted in very human constructs. Meters, amperes and seconds were all defined using arbitrary terms and methods. For years, the kilogram and meter weren’t just terms, they were physical objects held in a Paris vault that some Victorian era committee just decided would be the standard. But now, for the first time since the international system of units (SI) was launched in 1960, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) is redefining four basic units of measurement, not by any human metric but by the immutable forces of the universe.

“This is the most important decision that the BIPM has made in maybe 100 years, which may be a slight exaggeration, but at least since 1960 when they adopted the international system of units,” Dr. Terry Quinn, Emeritus Director of the BIPM said.

A committee from the BIPM met in Paris this week and voted on Friday to recommend redefining the kilogram, mole, ampere, and Kelvin. The motion will be put up for a vote at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) next November.

“For the scale that’s in your grocery store or bathroom, nothing’s going to change,” Dr. David Newell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said. Instead, as Dr. Quinn explains, “it will give you the ability to make accurate measurements on scales far different from the current scale.”

“This redefinition is a major overhaul,” Newell continued, but certainly not the first. For example, we currently define the second by a specific number of cycles of radiation in a cesium-133 atom (9,192,631,770 periods). It was originally considered to be the fraction 1/86400 of the mean solar day.

The meter used to be a real thing that you could hold (like the kilogram still is) rather than the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds. “The SI is slowly evolving to the use of the invariance of nature,” Newell said, rather than basing our observations on specific, physical artifacts.

“What is going to change is that with this redefinition, the uncertainties of fundamental constants is either going to go to zero,” he said. “Or the uncertainties of the related fundamental constants is going to be drastically reduced.”

This means researchers will have far more accurate tools with which to make measurements. That higher fidelity will empower them to go back and reexamine the laws of physics that we believe to be correct and see if they’re as accurate as we think they are. “We may actually find that we don’t know everything,” Newell said. Eventually, we may even take those insights and once again redefine the scientific measurement system when our technology has sufficiently advanced.

Another advantage is these fundamental constants appear throughout nature, Newell explained. Researchers would no longer be tied to the kilogram and would be able to easily scale their units between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds.

“Moreover the present system is explicit unit based — the second, the kilogram, the meter, the ampere — and there’s definitions for all of them,” Newell continued. “The new system is explicitly constants-based — the transition frequency of a cesium atom is an exact number of hertz, the speed of light is an exact number of meters per second.”

Take amperes for example. An ampere (or amp) is the basic unit of electrical current and is defined by the SI as the equivalent to one coulomb (the base unit of electrical charge) per second. Originally it was defined using a thought experiment.

This is problematic for a couple reasons, PhysicsWorld points out. First, it relies on other units of measure — specifically kilograms, meters and seconds — for its definition. This methodology is exactly what the BIPM is trying to get away from. Second, the aforementioned “thought experiment” can never be tested in reality, since it imagines a situation with wire infinitely long, so at some point you’re going to have to approximate.

Instead, the BIPM wants to define amps by the number of electrons that flow through a wire by the exact number of electrons that actually flow through a wire. Recently, a team of researchers from German National Metrology Institute (PTB) in Braunschweig developed a Single Electron Pump. Electrons are generated on one side of a circuit, become trapped as they pass through a series of gates and then are released one at a time on the other side where they can be easily counted. Using this, we can define the ampere as the specific number of single electrons passing through a wire for a given length of time.

Kilograms are equally quirky. The International Prototype Kilogram (IPK) is a cylinder of platinum-iridium sitting in a Paris Vault and is what all other kilograms are measured against. Problem is, materials have a habit of gaining and losing atoms due to chemical interactions with the atmosphere. Of the six official copies of the IPK, one has lost approximately 5 micrograms while two others have gained more than 50 micrograms of mass. You’d be hard-pressed to notice if someone dropped a 50 microgram weight on your toe but for the scientific community, those fluctuations make a big difference.

The IPK isn’t just susceptible to atmospheric reactions. Being a physical object, it can be stolen or damaged. However, “you can’t steal Planck’s Constant,” Quinn quipped.

“If I were to drop [the IPK] on the floor and chip a piece off, the definition of mass would have to be changed because it is defined as this hunk of metal,” Dr. Willie May, former Director of NIST and current VP of the BIPM, said.

“But, by definition, it can’t change,” Quinn interjected. “And so what would happen, had Dr. May dropped it on the floor and knocked a piece off, it would have remained the IPK and the mass of the rest of the universe would have changed.”

That’s where the Kibble Balance comes in. Now on normal balancing scales, you determine the mass of an object by adding mass to the opposite side until they are in equilibrium. In the Kibble balance, the gravitational force generated by the weight on one side is countered with electromagnetic force on the other. With this method, and a bit of math, researchers can measure something called the Planck Constant. Thus we can define kilograms in terms of the Planck Constant rather than a lump of metal.

Kelvin, thankfully, is a bit more straightforward. It’s the measure of temperature, terminating at absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. That absolute nature is important, since, unlike mass, relative temperatures don’t stack. For example, smash two, 10-pound blobs of clay, each heated to 100 degrees Fahrenheit together, the result will weigh 20 pounds but it won’t be any hotter. As such, measuring temperatures in Kelvin is more accurate than Fahrenheit or Celsius though it’s still being framed in an outdated model.

Should the CGPM approve the redefinition of Kelvin next year, the unit will be defined using an acoustic thermometer. These devices measure the speed of sound waves travelling through a low-gravity gas sphere. Since the speed of those waves is fixed for a set temperature, you can calculate that by measuring the frequency of the resonating sound waves and the volume of the sphere.

Even the mole is getting a makeover. This fundamental unit measures the amount of substance known as the Avogadro constant. Moles are used to bridge the gap between the micro and macroscopic worlds. It provides a useable frame of reference when dealing with miniscule items. Or, as XKCD once pointed out, a mole of moles would be 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 animals (602 trillion trillion moles). That’s also the number of sand grains needed to bury the entire UK to a depth of about 40 centimetres, according to the NPL, or the number of human cells on Earth.

The Mole is currently defined using an experiment known as the “primary method” which involves weighing a material of known composition. However, because this system bases the value of the mole on the mass of the prototype kilogram, the CGPM is considering redefining the unit.

Instead, the group wants to drop carbon (the reference substance for moles) altogether and replace it with a 1Kg, 94-mmm wide, nearly spherical mass of 99.9995-percent pure silicon-28. Since the physical characteristics of the sphere — weight, diameter, size of the individual crystal lattices — are known, as well as how much a single silicon atom weighs, these measurements can be used to calculate the total number of atoms in the sphere and, in turn, a revised Avogadro’s constant.

This isn’t the end of the BIPM’s efforts. The group is eyeing the atomic second ahead of the unit’s 50th anniversary of being tied to the radiation cycles of Cesium-133. “At the time we used the best atomic clock we could possibly have,” Quinn explained. “But a lot of science has taken place and there are now ways of making atomic clocks 100 times better. And in the next ten years, I would say, there will be a new definition of the atomic second that is 100 times better.”

Such an advancement will have implications in everything from space exploration and cutting edge physics research to more accurate GPS navigation in your car.

“If we allow the art of the possible,” May said, “you open up the future to things you’ve never even thought of.”

Gmail’s third-party add-ons are ready to make short work of your inbox

In March, Google announced that it would soon internalize all the third-party Gmail add-ons. Previously, users had to install the plugins in each environment, like Chrome or non-Gsuite apps. Today, they are available within Gmail and, once installed, take effect on every device where the account is accessed.

To find them, click the settings wheel in the top-right of your Gmail window and scroll down to “Get Add-Ons.” Easy. There are ten plugins available right now (which you can browse here), including ones that integrate emails into Asana and Trello tasks as well as Intuit Quickbooks and Smartsheet.

Sure, the initial slew is heavily business-centric, but Google noted in March that it was already working with several companies for work-centric integrations. In the blog post announcing the availability of add-ons, Google stated: “If you’re a developer, you can also easily create add-ons for your app or your organization—write your add-on code once and it will run natively in Gmail on web and Android right away.”

Unfortunately, it seems the add-ons are only live in browsers and on Android devices at the moment, with no clear date when they will head to other platforms. When reached for comment, Google spokesperson Brooks Hocog said: “We’re working with Apple to bring Gmail Add-ons to iOS users.”

Source: Google

Uber drivers can now charge more for longer pickups

Uber has spent the past few months trying to mend its image and make itself more driver-friendly, and that’s certainly true for October — although it might hit your bank account if you’re a passenger. It’s adding a slew of features that let drivers charge more for long pickups. They can charge an additional fee if they have to travel a long distance to get you, for one thing. They’ll also apply a per-minute late fee if they have to wait longer than 2 minutes at the pickup point, and will earn a cancellation fee if you change your mind after 2 minutes rather than the previous 5. Uber’s app will also help drivers avoid tolls during pickups “when possible,” and will incorporate tolls into the fare if it’s there’s no choice.

There is the potential for this to create problems. Many a veteran Uber passenger has had that time when they just couldn’t get to the car in time through no fault of their own, or where the driver was technically at the pickup point but stopped at the wrong place due to poor mapping. You’ll definitely want to be as ready as you can when you hit that “request” button, since your Uber driver isn’t going to cut you much slack.

However, this could ultimately help passengers. If Uber workers are paid more and don’t feel jerked around by less-than-considerate customers, they could be more likely to stay on — that means happier and more experienced drivers. Moreover, the fees for long pickups and tolls should reduce the chances that a driver cancels on you to take a more lucrative fare. You may have to pay more, but it beats waiting longer for an Uber when you’re already running late.

Source: Uber Newsroom

Firefox can add web apps to your Android home screen

Firefox is making it easier for Android users to navigate the mobile web with Web App Manifest support, which will ship with Firefox 58 for Android. The feature supports Progressive Web Apps (PWA), the app-like interfaces displayed within mobile web browsers, and will allow users to add them to their home screens so they can be accessed by a single touch (rather than via web search or URL input).

If a website is served over HTTPS and has a valid manifest, a subtle badge will appear in its address bar. Tap this, and an “Add to Home Screen” message will appear. When the PWA is launched from the home screen, it will appear in its optimal view mode and orientation, as well as a separate entity in the app switcher, which means you don’t have to worry about losing progress with it if you click an external link.

Firefox 58 also boasts a bunch of other handy features. “Add Page Shortcut” will let you put a shortcut to any URL on your home screen, while external links accessed via PWAs are opened in a custom tab for added security and a faster load time. Chrome has long spearheaded the PWA effort, but now Firefox is catching up we can expect deeper integration in upcoming releases. Android product manager Andreas Bovens says the team is “quite excited” about a number of upcoming API support products, and that Background Sync Implementation, for example, is slated for Firefox 59.

Source: Mozilla

Facebook is finally testing 4K video for regular videos

It may have taken Facebook a while, but the company is starting to catch up on the 4K video front. According to a report at TechCrunch, Facebook is testing Ultra-High-Resolution video uploads that use the 2160p UHD-1 standard. The site also says that some Facebook pages and profiles can post and watch 4K videos.

It’s about time, too — YouTube has been working with 4K video as far back as 2010, with 4K live streaming rolling out last year. Heck, Facebook itself already supports 4K resolutions in its live 360 videos. The push to higher resolution video makes lots of sense considering Facebook’s push into original content with more than two dozen original shows coming to the Watch tab. As more consumers pick up 4K televisions (and higher), they’re going to expect to see similar on their computer screens.

Update: Facebook confirmed to Engadget that it is currently testing 4K video for both uploaders and watchers.

Source: TechCrunch

Amazon’s Kindle app overhaul delivers easy reading and socializing

The Kindle app has gotten quite a bit less attention that Amazon’s namesake devices, but today the shopping juggernaut made some big changes. For starters, there’s a new light theme that gives “pages” a bit of a parchment look with some ornate flourishes around the borders. The UI has been refreshed overall, with a keen focus on making it easier to access your stuff. Specifically, the search bar is everywhere in the app.

Oh, and if you’re using the app on iOS, you’ll have some pretty deep access to social reading site, Goodreads. You know, in case you want to let everyone know how good (or terrible) the last book you read was. Amazon promises that Android Goodreads support is coming in the future.

Source: Businesswire, iTunes, Google Play

Senators propose reforms to wide-reaching surveillance law

Eleven senators — both Republican and Democrat — introduced new legislation today that calls for substantial reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Reuters reports. Section 702 allows intelligence agencies to monitor the communications of foreign targets living outside of the US, but it also enables those agencies to collect information on US citizens if they happen to be in communication with the non citizens being monitored.

The section in question is set to expire at the end of the year and the proposed legislation — the USA Rights Act — led by Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul would renew it for four years while also requiring the National Security Agency (NSA) to get a warrant before searching through US citizens’ communications. The act would also allow individuals to more easily challenge the law in court and give the Civil Liberties Oversight Board more oversight power. “Congress must not continue to allow our constitutional standard of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ to be twisted into ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’ The American people deserve better from their own government than to have their Internet activity swept up in warrantless, unlimited searches that ignore the Fourth Amendment,” said Senator Rand Paul in a statement. Companion legislation was also introduced in the House of Representatives.

While this bill is bipartisan, Section 702 itself is quite contentious. In June, the Director of National Intelligence, the acting FBI Director, the Deputy Attorney General and the NSA Director asked the Senate Intelligence Committee to make Section 702 permanent. And on the other side of the issue, groups like the ACLU have expressed their concern over the sweeping allowances afforded by Section 702 as did 30 companies — including Google, Facebook, Snap, Uber, Microsoft and Amazon — who sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in May asking for increased oversight of the surveillance program as well as an effort to minimize its impact on individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.

In a statement about the proposed legislation, Representative Ted Poe said, “Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights are at stake. Our bill protects individual freedoms while maintaining intelligence agencies the ability to continue to protect the United States. The days of government searching through Americans private data while skirting through back doors without a warrant must end.” You can read a one-page summary of the USA Rights Act here, a full summary here and the entire bill here.

Via: Reuters

Source: Senator Ron Wyden (1), (2), (3), (4)

Equifax data breach is also being investigated by UK officials

While 143 million US residents were affected by the Equifax breach, they weren’t the only ones impacted. Nearly 700,000 UK residents also had their information stolen — including phone numbers, driver’s license numbers, email addresses, user names, passwords and partial credit card details — and UK authorities are now investigating the company.

Both the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Information Commissioner’s Office are conducting investigations into Equifax, Bloomberg reports, and in the case of the former, it can decide to fine Equifax as well as take away its authorization to run credit checks in the UK. “Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have been affected by the Equifax data breach,” Nicky Morgan, chair of the House of Commons Treasury Committee, told Bloomberg. “The FCA is right to investigate the circumstances surrounding it.”

In the US, the Equifax breach is currently being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the House Oversight Committee and New York’s Department of Financial Services while some Senators have also taken an interest. Additionally, a handful of Equifax big shots who dumped loads of stock just before the company announced the breach are being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possibly participating in insider trading.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office told Bloomberg, “It is a complex and fast-moving case and we are working closely with other UK regulators and our counterparts in Canada and the US.”

Source: Bloomberg

Lenovo and Intel take the first step toward eliminating passwords

Passwords are one of the weakest links when it comes to our online security, and we may be one step closer to getting rid of them altogether. Today, Lenovo and Intel announced the first built-in authentication for PCs that adheres to FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance standards. It’s available in Lenovo’s latest computers (including the Yoga 920, pictured above) and works with Intel Online Connect, which is included in seventh- and eighth-generation Intel Core processors.

There are two different approaches users can take with these new online authentication experiences. First, a swipe of your finger over an encrypted fingerprint reader on your Lenovo laptop will securely log you into a site that is compatible with the tech. Second, automatic two-factor authentication allows you to enter your normal username and password into a participating website, such a Google, Facebook and Dropbox. Instead of automatically logging you in, though, the service verifies your identity and asks you to click a button to log in.

The FIDO Alliance, which is backed by companies such as Samsung, Google and Microsoft, supports banishing passwords altogether. It’s been slow going (for example, Apple’s Touch ID isn’t currently compatible with FIDO), but this first implementation of FIDO standards into PCs brings us one step closer to making all of our online activity more secure — and that’s a win.

Source: Business Wire