An anonymous reader writes: Chipset maker Qualcomm has unveiled its next-gen Snapdragon 835 flagship SOC and confirmed rumors that it will be built by Samsung using its 10-nanometer FinFET process. Compared to the current 14-nanometer Snapdragon 821 (also built by Samsung), the new CPU packs 30 percent more parts into the same space, yielding 27 percent better performance while drawing up to 40 percent less power, the company says. It also improved the design, which will yield "significant" improvements to battery life. The new chip comes with Quick Charge 4, which supports 20 percent faster charging than Qualcomm's last-gen tech. That, the company says, will give you up to five hours of extra battery life with just a five-minute charge. In just 15 minutes, it'll give Snapdragon 835 phones a half-full battery.

Apple is exploring the idea of making iPhones in the United States. But the company has realized that it will cost more than double to make the shiny new gadgets at home, according to a report on Japan-based outlet Nikkei. From the report:Key Apple assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn Technology Group, has been studying the possibility of moving iPhone production to the U.S., sources told the Nikkei Asian Review. "Apple asked both Foxconn and Pegatron, the two iPhone assemblers, in June to look into making iPhones in the U.S.," a source said. "Foxconn complied, while Pegatron declined to formulate such a plan due to cost concerns." Foxconn, based in the gritty, industrial Tucheng district in suburban Taipei, and its smaller Taiwanese rival churn out more than 200 million iPhones annually from their massive Chinese campuses. Another source said that while Foxconn had been working on the request from Apple Inc., its biggest customer that accounts for more than 50% of its sales, Chairman Terry Gou had been less enthusiastic due to an inevitable rise in production costs. "Making iPhones in the U.S. means the cost will more than double," the source said.

Russian digital forensics Elcomsoft says iPhones send near real-time logs to Apple servers even when iCloud backup is switched off. The firm adds that these logs are stored for up to four months. From a report on the Intercept:"You only need to have iCloud itself enabled" for the data to be sent, said Vladimir Katalov, CEO of Elcomsoft. The logs surreptitiously uploaded to Apple contain a list of all calls made and received on an iOS device, complete with phone numbers, dates and times, and duration. They also include missed and bypassed calls. Elcomsoft said Apple retains the data in a user's iCloud account for up to four months, providing a boon to law enforcement who may not be able to obtain the data either from the user's carrier, who may retain the data for only a short period, or from the user's device, if it's encrypted with an unbreakable passcode. "Absolutely this is an advantage [for law enforcement]," Robert Osgood, a former FBI supervisory agent who now directs a graduate program in computer forensics at George Mason University, said of Apple's call-history uploads. "Four months is a long time [to retain call logs]. It's generally 30 or 60 days for telecom providers, because they don't want to keep more [records] than they absolutely have to. So if Apple is holding data for four months, that could be a very interesting data repository and they may have data that the telecom provider might not."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Comcast brought its gigabit cable Internet service to the Chicago area in August, it gave customers in some parts of Chicago and nearby towns the option of subscribing for $70 a month -- half off the standard, no-contract price of $140. Though the $70 gigabit offer required a three-year contract, it came with unlimited data, which normally costs an extra $50 a month on top of the $140 no-contract price. For Comcast customers, this was a good deal. But Comcast didn't make the $70 offer available throughout the Chicago area, and now the company has restricted it even further. The offer remains available in parts of Chicago, namely Uptown, Grand Crossing, the Loop, and South Loop. But Comcast has stopped offering the $70 price in all nearby cities and towns where it was originally available. The $70 price was briefly offered in Arlington Heights, Naperville, Plainfield, Waukegan, Tinley Park, Batavia, and Bloomington in Illinois and in South Bend in Indiana. In those areas, the $140 no-contract price is now the only option for new gigabit cable customers. (People who signed up for the $70 deal before it was rescinded will still get it for three years, as they're under contract.) A Comcast spokesperson said the company had been "testing" the $70 promotion in certain areas of Illinois and Indiana but decided to stop the tests in most of them. It's not clear why Comcast stopped the tests in these cities and towns, but Comcast told Ars that it often changes its promotions and thus could expand the $70 deal to other areas or offer new discounts soon. However, there are no expansions of the $70 offer being announced right now.

An anonymous reader writes:The China Consumers Association (CCA) has asked Apple to investigate "a considerable number" of reports by users of iPhone 6 and 6s phones that the devices have been shutting off and cannot be turned back on again, it said on Tuesday. The reported problems specifically involve users seeing their iPhones automatically shut off despite 50-60 percent battery levels, and the involuntary shutting off in room temperature or colder environments, as well as the inability to turn the cellphone back on despite continuous battery charging, the statement said. "In view that Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s series cellphones in China have a considerable number of users, and the number of people who've reported this problem is rather many, China Consumer Association has already made a query with Apple," the association said in a statement on its website.

Patently Mobile is reporting about a new patent application filed by Samsung that lays out new holographic TV technology. Slashdot reader Rick Schumann writes via Consumerist: Holographic displays as described by Samsung would be able to make the depth the brain perceives consistent with the focus of the eyes. Lasers would be used to project holograms that float in front of the screen, which of course sounds a heck of a lot like a mini Princess Leia telling Obi-Wan Kenobi he's her only hope. The display apparatus could also include an eye tracking unit that would locate an observer's pupils and adjust how far it has to project the holographic image for optimum viewing.

Worth noting: This is just a patent application; no indication of even a working prototype.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists say they can deduce the lifestyle of an individual, down to the kind of grooming products they use, food they eat and medications they take, from chemicals found on the surface of their mobile phone. Experts say analysis of someone's phone could be a boon both to healthcare professionals, and the police. "You can narrow down male versus female; if you then figure out they use sunscreen then you pick out the [people] that tend to be outdoorsy -- so all these little clues can sort of narrow down the search space of candidate people for an investigator," said Pieter Dorrestein, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Diego. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the U.S. and Germany describe how they swabbed the mobile phone and right hand of 39 individuals and analyzed the samples using the highly sensitive technique of mass spectrometry. The results revealed that each person had a distinct "signature" set of chemicals on their hands which distinguished them from each other. What's more, these chemicals partially overlapped with those on their phones, allowing the devices to be distinguished from each other, and matched to their owners. Analysis of the chemical traces using a reference database allowed the team to match the chemicals to known substances or their relatives to reveal tell-tale clues from each individual's life -- from whether they use hair-loss treatments to whether they are taking antidepressants.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is weighing an expansion into digital glasses, a risky but potentially lucrative area of wearable computing, according to people familiar with the matter. While still in an exploration phase, the device would connect wirelessly to iPhones, show images and other information in the wearer's field of vision, and may use augmented reality, the people said. They asked not to be identified speaking about a secret project. Apple has talked about its glasses project with potential suppliers, according to people familiar with those discussions. The company has ordered small quantities of near-eye displays from one supplier for testing, the people said. Apple hasn't ordered enough components so far to indicate imminent mass-production, one of the people added. Should Apple ultimately decide to proceed with the device, it would be introduced in 2018 at the earliest, another person said. The glasses may be Apple's first hardware product targeted directly at AR, one of the people said. Apple has AR patents for things like street view in mapping apps. It was also awarded patents for smart glasses that make use of full-fledged virtual reality. Apple is unlikely to leverage VR in a mass-consumer product, Cook suggested in October. Apple's challenge is fitting all the technology needed into a useful pair of internet-connected glasses that are small and sleek enough for regular people to wear.

Bleeping Computer warns that "The way users move fingers across a phone's touchscreen alters the WiFi signals transmitted by a mobile phone, causing interruptions that an attacker can intercept, analyze, and reverse engineer to accurately guess what the user has typed...when the attacker controls a rogue WiFi access point." The new WindTalker attack leverages the "channel state information" in WiFi signals. An anonymous reader quotes their article: Because the user's finger moves across the smartphone when he types text, his hand alters CSI properties for the phone's outgoing WiFi signals, which the attacker can collect and log on the rogue access point... By performing basic signal analysis and signal processing, an attacker can separate desired portions of the CSI signal and guess with an average accuracy of 68.3% the characters a user has typed... but it can be improved the more the user types and the more data the attacker collects.
The new attack is described in a research paper titled "When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals."

Threatpost, the security news service of Kaspersky Lab, is reporting a new exploit which allows hijacking of third-party apps that support single sign-on from Google or Facebook (and support the OAuth 2.0 protocol). msm1267 quotes their article: Three Chinese University of Hong Kong researchers presented at Black Hat EU last week a paper called "Signing into One Billion Mobile LApp Accounts Effortlessly with OAuth 2.0"... The researchers examined 600 top U.S. and Chinese mobile apps that use OAuth 2.0 APIs from Facebook, Google and Sina -- which operates Weibo in China -- and support single sign-on for third-party apps. The researchers found that 41.2% of the apps they tested were vulnerable to their attack... None of the apps were named in the paper, but some have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times and can be exploited for anything from free phone calls to fraudulent purchases.
"The researchers said the apps they tested had been downloaded more than 2.4 billion times in aggregate."

One of the biggest cons with premium virtual-reality headsets is the fact that they need to be tethered to a powerful gaming PC or game console via annoying wires. In early September, HTC announced it was working on a method to remove the wires, and now their solution is officially available via a $220 add-on kit. UploadVR reports: HTC today announced a tether-less VR upgrade kit for its SteamVR device, made by TPCAST, one of the first of 33 companies to join the Vive X Accelerator. Speaking to UploadVR in a phone interview, [China Regional President of Vive at HTC Alvin W. Graylin] said that the experience would "greatly improve" the overall Vive experience, with no "noticeable difference" for factors like latency. The product will be available to pre-order with a standard battery, though Graylin said that a bigger battery will be sold eventually. We're told the standard battery can deliver around one and a half hours of power. The bigger battery would rest in a user's pocket. HTC expects the device to be adopted by "avid" Vive users, though it could also be useful for businesses. The upgrade kit will be available to pre-order on Vive's Chinese website "in limited quantity" for 1,499 RMB ($220.33). The kit is said to ship starting in Q1 2017. According to HTC, pre-orders go live at 7 a.m. Pacific on Friday. Graylin said anyone could order the unit from there and pay for shipping. According to HTC, in a press release, "Order fulfillment will be prioritized to existing customers who can provide a valid Vive serial number." You can watch some wireless HTC Vive test footage here.

Google is only expected to push the mobile web further now that there are 2 billion active Chrome installs. At the Chrome Dev Summit, Google's vice president of Chrome engineering and the conference's opening speaker said, "We have over 2 billion Chrome instances that are active," which makes Chrome a platform with immense power. The company is expected to reveal how the platform's unbeatable reach earns Chrome and browsers in general a place on the big stage. CNET reports: That power is essential to making Google's vision a reality. If it succeeds, that browser icon might be the one you reach for on your home screen a lot more often. Success on that front also could help restore the fortunes of the web, the closest the computing industry has come to freeing us from software that works only on one device or another, like a Windows laptop but not an iPhone. In an era when tech giants wield tremendous power, the web levels the playing field and makes it easier for new competitors to join the game. It's no wonder Google is pushing the mobile web. This month, browser usage on tablets and phones for the first time surpassed usage on PCs, analytics firm StatCounter said. In October, global mobile and tablet browsing accounted for 51.3% compared to the desktop's 48.7%. However, in other parts of the world the desktop is still king. For example, in the UK the desktop accounts for 55.6% of browsing, 58% in the U.S. and 55.1% in Australia. StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said: "This should be a wake up call especially for small businesses, sole traders and professionals to make sure that their websites are mobile friendly. Many older websites are not. Mobile compatibility is increasingly important not just because of growing traffic but because Google favors mobile-friendly websites for its mobile search results."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is hosting its Chrome Dev Summit today. There hasn't been a lot of news out of the event, but one number that stood out in today's keynote by Chrome Engineering VP Darin Fisher was that there are now 2 billion Chrome installs in active use across desktop and mobile. This is the first time Google has shared this number. Sadly, Google didn't announce any new user numbers for Chrome today. The latest stat for active Chrome users remains at 1 billion -- a number Google shared in April. While this number is surely higher today than it was six months ago, the company decided to focus on the number of active browser install today. "I wanted to make this point that there are a lot of Chrome browsers out there," Fisher said. "What's exciting about this to you all is that when you think about building for the web, there' a lot of browsers out there that implement the latest web standards -- that implement the latest and greatest web features." The report also notes that Google has a total of seven products with more than a billion users: Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, YouTube and Google Play Store.

An anonymous reader writes: "A bug in the iOS WebView component allows an attacker to force someone's iPhone to dial any number, while also locking the user's interface for a few moments, preventing him to cancel the outgoing call," reports BleepingComputer. "The bug was at the heart of the recent accidental DDoS of 911 call centers across the U.S." At the heart of the issue is a Safari bug reported in 2008, which was fixed in iOS 3.0. The same bug also exists in the WebView component used by app makers to show web pages inside other apps. The researcher that found the bug writes in a blog post: "If you think automatically dialing a phone number after clicking a link in an app is not a big issue think again. DoSing 911 is pretty terrible but there are other examples such as expensive 900 numbers where the attacker can actually make money. A stalker can make his victim dial his phone number so he gets his victim's number. Altogether things you don't want to happen. [...] Apple should change the default behavior of WebViews to exclude execution of TEL URIs and make it an explicit feature to avoid this kind of issues in the future."

A new study from the University of California is the latest to show that increased smartphone screen-time can lower one's quality of sleep, which can lead to various negative health conditions such as obesity, diabetes and depression. Medical Xpress reports: Christensen and colleagues sought to test the hypothesis that increased screen-time may be associated with poor sleep by analyzing data from 653 adult individuals across the United States participating in the Health eHeart Study. Participants installed a smartphone application which recorded their screen-time, defined as the number of minutes in each hour that the screen was turned on, over a 30-day period. They also recorded their sleeping hours and sleep quality. The researchers found that each participant totaled an average of 38.4 hours over this period, with smartphones being activated on average for 3.7 minutes in each hour. Longer average screen-time was associated with poor sleep quality and less sleep overall, particularly when smartphones were used near participants' bedtime. The authors state that their study is the first to measure smartphone exposure prospectively, but caution that the study also had some important limitations, including the self-selection of study participants and self-reporting of data. The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

A new Kickstarter campaign aims to sell you fingerprint stickers that, when applied to a pair of gloves, allow you to unlock a mobile device that's protected with a fingerprint scanner. The sticker is powered by Nanotips and is "made with an extremely adhesive conductive material that can be applied to any surface for touch capability." Gizmodo reports: You can of course still access a fingerprint-secured smartphone using regular touchscreen-friendly gloves by simply punching in your passcode on-screen, but why should we have to give up the convenience of a feature like Touch ID for months on end just because it's cold outside? We shouldn't, and these Taps stickers will allow you to use your mobile device's touchscreen and fingerprint reader, for unlocking your phone or making a purchase, even while your actual fingers (and fingerprints) are being kept warm and toasty inside a glove. After applying a textured stick to the tip of your glove, you just have to register it as an approved fingerprint using your smartphone's security settings. You might assume this would mean that anyone with a Taps sticker on their gloves could access anyone else's protected phone. But according to its creators, using nanoparticle technology every single Taps sticker has an individual and unique artificial print ensuring that only your gloves can access your device. That being said, there is still the risk of someone stealing your gloves, which is easier than stealing your fingerprints, so you'll have to weigh the security risks introduced versus the added convenience these offer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A recent patent application (PDF) shows that Samsung has ambitious ideas for future phone-design experimentation, although the South Korean manufacturer may have second thoughts about bendy phones after recent battery explosions and recalls. In April, Samsung was reported to have filed a patent with the Korean Intellectual Property Office for a foldable smartphone. The application was picked up by Dutch website Galaxy Club. The document shows a narrow Samsung device with a screen that bends and folds like an old-school flip phone handset. The device is described as something that can be "folded or unfolded semi automatically." The patent also referred to a "secondary" display, which is supposed to activate when you fold the device, according to International Business Times UK.

An anonymous reader writes: Google's Safe Browsing service will now brand sites which fall victim to malware repeatedly as "repeat offenders." When a site is identified as serving malware -- which usually occurs via an SQL injection attack or through auction-driven network advertising -- Google adds a "This site will harm your computer" tag to domain entries in its search results, and serves further warnings by way of interstitial pages. From today, sites which continue to succumb to attackers will not be permitted to resubmit their domain for consideration via Search Console for thirty days -- enough time to do significant SEO damage. That period does not include additional time for Google to respond to submissions about repaired sites and to remove the warnings.

In the past, Apple has only sold refurbished Macs, iPads and various niche devices on its refurb store. Now the company is officially selling refurbished iPhones, offering the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus in its refurb store. 9to5Mac reports: Apple has sort of sold refurbished iPhones before, but those sales were relegated to an eBay store front and never fully acknowledged by the company. This is the first time that the company has offered iPhones on its official refurb store online. Customers will find the iPhone 6s in 16 GB storage varieties for $449.00. The larger iPhone 6s Plus is being offered in two storage varieties: 16Gb and 64GB for $529 and $589, respectively. It seems that all colors are currently available, which includes Silver, Space Gray, Gold, and Rose Gold. In the end, users can expect to save up to 15% ($110) by going the refurbished route, and remember that these devices come with a full 1-year factory warranty, which makes refurb units a great idea for budget-conscious shoppers. It's also worth noting that all of Apple's official refurbished iPhones are unlocked and come SIM-free, plus they all include a brand new battery and outer shell. It's as close to a new iPhone as you'll get without actually buying one brand new.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Earlier this year, Google announced its plans to bring Android Auto, its phone-centric in-car infotainment platform, "to every car" by launching it as a stand-alone Android app, too. It's taken a while, but the company today launched an update to the Android Auto app for -- well -- Android that makes good on this promise. Even if your car isn't Android Auto compatible, you can now get all the benefits of Android Auto without the cost of a new mid-size sedan. Android Auto on the phone provides you with a simplified interface that combines directions, music, and incoming messages into a relatively distraction free experience. That's essentially the same interface you would see on an in-car display with Android Auto support. Android Auto works with popular apps like Spotify, Pandora, Google Maps and others. Like all things Google, the app will also soon let you use "Ok Google" commands to use directions, send messages and control your music. What's more is that the app will automatically boot-up when the phone connects to your car's Bluetooth network. It's compatible with smartphones running Android 5.0 and newer and will be available to users in more than 30 countries over the course of the next few days.