Lifeboat Foundation

WHETHER you’re an Android fan or an iPhone lover, you should be wary of a common text message scam.

It’s called “smishing” and has been flagged by the experts at Security Intelligence as a growing problem.

Smishing is essentially the same as phishing, the common email scam technique that tries to get you to give away personal data.

The firm’s strategists broke down why AI is about to “revolutionize everything” with a similar impact to Steve Jobs’ smartphone.

On April 3, 1973, Marty Cooper made the world’s first call from a handheld portable brick phone —weighing 2.5 pounds and 11 inches long.

The first cellphone inventor aka the father of cellphones, Marty Cooper, has projected that phones would be implanted under the skin of consumers’ ears.

“The next generation will have the phone embedded under the skin of their ears,” said cooper.

Continue reading “Your body, ‘perfect charger’ for smartphones, says father of cellphone” »

While the chatter around the metaverse has slowed down, both social media companies and phone manufacturers have been experimenting with tech that could lead to commercial AR glasses. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled its new prototype Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, which weighs 126 grams and has a “retina-level” display.

Xiaomi has used a pair of MicroLED screens with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and free-form light-guiding prisms to recreate an image. The company said that when PPD (pixels per degree) reaches 60, humans can’t perceive individual pixels. The Xiaomi AR glass display boasts 58 PPD, so that’s close enough.

Xiaomi said it is using electrochromic lenses to adjust viewing in different light conditions. The glasses also have a complete blackout mode for a fully immersive experience — kind of making it like a VR headset.

Nokia’s legacy as a traditional mobile phone maker is over, and its new focus is on networks and industrial digitalization.

No more Nokia phones. On Sunday, the Finnish maker announced plans to rebrand its identity for the first time in almost six decades.

“There was the association to smartphones, and nowadays we are a business technology company,” Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters in an interview.

The buzz in the wireless industry is all about space, or what is referred to as non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). The wireless 3GPP Release 17 specification includes two new standards for satellite communications from smartphones, mobile electronics, and IoT devices directly to satellites. While satellites have always been part of the wireless communications infrastructure, they have traditionally provided backhaul network communications, not direct communications to mobile devices other than clunky satellite phones and emergency equipment. Direct satellite communications with individual mobile devices will help overcome gaps in terrestrial cellular networks, providing a truly global infrastructure that can be leveraged by a variety of industries, and bridge the digital divide by bringing wireless communications to rural areas that often lack the infrastructure even with the rollout of 5G cellular networks.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project or 3GPP is a global standards body consisting of a wide variety of wireless ecosystem members, such as intellectual property (IP) providers, semiconductor companies, networking companies, device OEMs, and wireless operators. Since 1998 and 2G cellular technology, members of the 3GPP have worked together to develop standards for new wireless technologies continuously. While the industry is now well past 3G and new generations of cellular technology are still introduced approximately every 10 years, new releases of the 3GPP standards are released approximately every two years within a generation in an on-going effort to increase the efficient use of a limited natural resource – radio spectrum. The standards also encourage the freeing up of additional spectrum, the development of new radio access networks (RANs), new encryption technology, higher network performance, aggregation of spectrum from different carriers and wireless technologies, support for additional use cases, and new network configurations. In other words, the 3GPP group is tasked with improving wireless technology with each generation and providing a global network that can be accessed from anywhere and by any device. With the inclusion of satellite networks, or non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), a global network will finally be possible.

The latest 3GPP standard that was finalized in 2023 is Release 17, the 3^rd Release within the 5G cellular generation. Among other enhancements and additions, Release 17 includes two new standards for satellite networks, IoT-NTN and New Radio NTN or NR-NTN. The IoT-NTN standard defines narrow band using a 200KHz channel for two-way messaging and other low-bandwidth consumer and embedded/IoT applications, such as location tracking, asset tracking, and sensor monitoring. The data rates for IoT-NTN are similar to the data rates that were experienced in 2G. It will provide basic data connectivity.

Armed with tools and repair guides from hardware repair advocacy firm iFixit, a user can remove and replace the phone’s back cover, battery, screen and charging port.

Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing at HMD Global, said that this process would cost on average 30% less than replacing an old phone with a new one.

Smartphone companies are increasingly working to make phones last for longer amid pressure from regulators to make electronics devices more sustainable.

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3 model despite being “10x smaller.” Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It’s part of a new family of language models called “Large Language Model Meta AI,” or LLAMA for short.

“Unlike Chinchilla, PaLM, or GPT-3, we only use datasets publicly available, making our work compatible with open-sourcing and reproducible, while most existing models rely on data which is either not publicly available or undocumented,” tweeted project member Guillaume Lample.

Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns and new stars and planets form out of old gas and dust, these elements eventually make their way to Earth and other worlds. After 3.7 billion years of evolution on our planet, humans and many other species have come to rely on them in our bodies and our lives. Iodine, for instance, is a component of hormones we need to control our brain development and regulate our metabolism. Ocean microplankton called Acantharea use the element strontium to create intricate mineral skeletons. Gallium is critical for the chips in our smartphones and our laptop screens. And the mirrors of the JWST are gilded with gold, an element useful for its unreactive nature and ability to reflect infrared light (not to mention its popularity in jewelry).

Scientists have long had a basic idea of how these elements come to be, but for many years the details were hazy and fiercely debated. That changed recently when astronomers observed, for the first time, heavy-element synthesis in action. The process, the evidence suggests, went something like this.

Continue reading “How Star Collisions Forge the Universe’s Heaviest Elements” »