Slashdot reader rufey writes: Earlier this month, the bodies of two children were discovered buried in the backyard of Chad Daybell, the current husband of the childrens' mother, Lori. In the recently released probable cause document released this week, it was revealed that location data obtained from cell phone GPS and tower pings from persons of interest played a large role in both identifying who was probably involved, and at what times that activity occurred. The location accuracy was apparently sufficient enough to identify two areas of interest in the large backyard...

More information about the case of Lori Daybell's two children can be found here.

An iPhone user created a shortcut that prompts an iPhone to begin recording police interactions by the user simply uttering the phrase: "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over." The task utilizes Apple's relatively new "Shortcuts" feature, which allows users to conduct tasks on their phones with a single voice command using Siri. From a report: Twitter user Robert Petersen posted a link to the shortcut and an explanation of what it does. Users can download the police shortcut, but must make sure to have the Shortcuts app installed.

Upon saying "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over," any music that may be playing is paused and the screen's brightness is dimmed while the phone's "do not disturb" capability is turned on. The phone then automatically sends a message to a contact the user sets up, letting that person know that the user is being stopped by police, along with providing the user's location. The front camera is then turned on and the phone begins to record video of what is happening. "Once you stop the recording it sends a copy of the video to a contact you specify, puts volume and brightness back to where they were, turns off Do Not Disturb, and gives you the option to send to iCloud Drive or Dropbox," according to a Reddit post by Petersen. There are apps with similar functions available for Android, including one called "Stop and Frisk Watch," which is designed to record incidents by "simply pushing a trigger on the phone's frame."

The restaurant review that divulges distressing family dynamics. The Facebook post that rehashes an embarrassing encounter. The tweet that reveals a phobia few people know about. On our smartphones, we are quick to reveal private emotions and highly personal experiences to faceless strangers. From a report: Building on her earlier research that equated smartphones with adult pacifiers, Shiri Melumad, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, set out to determine why we express ourselves in a more intimate, personal style on our smartphones than on our personal computers -- and how marketers can harness this behavior. In research published in March in the Journal of Marketing, Dr. Melumad conducted three field studies and two controlled experiments. One study looked at nearly 300,000 Twitter posts created in a 12-hour span. Tweets written on phones contained 47% more first-person pronouns and 52% more references to family than those written on PCs, she found.

"Consumers tend to convey feelings or thoughts that are more private or intimate on their smartphones, which is captured by the use of 'I' or 'we' and mentioning family and friends," says Dr. Melumad. A second study employed 1,380 judges as well as natural-language processing software to analyze a random sample of more than 10,000 TripAdvisor restaurant reviews. The software scan revealed that reviews written on smartphones again contained more first-person pronouns and more references to friends. And, crucially for marketers, they were judged to be more self-disclosing and, in turn, more persuasive. "Smartphone-generated content seems to be more diagnostic of how people truly feel," Dr. Melumad says. "Those reviews heightened readers' interest in visiting the restaurant." The final field study found that people were more likely to disclose personal information in response to an ad when targeted on their smartphone than on their PC.

NBC News reports that in various parts of America, "States that had committed to using contact tracing apps or expressed interest are now backing away from those claims." The few states that have rolled them out have seen only tepid responses. And there are no indications of any momentum for the apps at a national level... A survey of state health officials from Business Insider this week showed that only three states — Alabama, North Dakota and South Carolina — said they were going to use the software provided by Apple and Google. The number hasn't grown since the same three states reported interest last month, and none has launched an app with the Google-Apple software...

Even the World Health Organization has piled on. "Digital tools do not replace the human capacity needed to do contact tracing," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing this week, adding that more evidence was needed and that the WHO would convene experts to share information...

A handful of states — North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah — launched apps without the support of Apple and Google, but none saw widespread adoption. More states, including Washington, have considered doing so or have launched test versions, and it's possible that apps will gain momentum closer to the fall, when they might be taken up by more employers, schools and universities and at related football games.
Two months ago Google and Apple announced a joint project to build a contact-tracing app -- which was supported by the governor of America's most populous state, California. But now a spokesperson for California's public health department tells NBC News that the state isn't currently using any apps or cellphone tracking technology.

"Most of the contact tracing work (notifying people who have been in close contact with an infected person to prevent the disease from spreading to others) can be done by phone, text, email and chat."

A few weeks ago, news broke that Google was allegedly disappointed with the Google Pixel 4, even prior to that device's launch. However disappointing it may have been, it doesn't appear to have stopped Google Pixel sales from hitting a record high in 2019. From a report: According to third-party analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Google Pixel sales hit 7.2 million units in 2019. Although the numbers don't get broken down by device, it's likely most of those sales come from the two 2019 phones launched -- the Google Pixel 3a and Google Pixel 4. At least some of the shipments are probably made up of Google Pixel 3 sales, too. However, it's estimated that the Google Pixel 4 only sold around 2 million units over its first six months, which would mean a portion of that number wouldn't count towards the 2019 total. Therefore, it's basically a guarantee that the bulk of the Google Pixel sales in 2019 came from the Pixel 3a line.

With 2.5 billion users worldwide, Google has a responsibility to make its Android operating system as secure as possible. But the company has at times struggled to adequately vet apps in the Google Play Store, allowing malicious programs through that thousands or millions of users go on to download. With Google's release of the Android 11 Beta on Wednesday, though, the company is taking steps to make it even more difficult for rogue apps to grab your data even when they do slip by. From a report: Google has worked for years to incrementally tighten Android security under the hood. And the release of Android 11 is particularly focused on expanding privacy improvements to give you more control over what your apps can access and giving more ways to distribute software updates across Android's fragmented and disjointed device population. Android 10 addressed some of this as well, requiring that app developers request permissions and then reaffirm user choices more often. Android 11 adds a feature that allows developer to request one-time permissions for things like the microphone, camera, or location as an alternative to all or nothing. You can share your location with a friend through a chat app once, for example, without granting indefinite location access, or having to remember to wade back into settings to revoke the permission later.

"We can see that people are actually leveraging these features from Android 10 and thinking about their choices when they're giving apps access to permissions," says Charmaine D'Silva, an Android product manager who works on privacy. "So building on that this time we've added even more controls." Android 11 will also rein in apps that you don't use very often, automatically revoking permissions if you don't open it for a still undetermined period of time. If you start using the app again you can always reinstate its access, but the permission won't be lurking forgotten. Google plans to experiment with different cutoffs after 60-90 days, with the goal of eliminating stray permissions without breaking functionality.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Thanks to some Japanese-language news sources, we now know the nature of the big Sega reveal that was teased for this week's Famitsu. The publisher is working on some kind of initiative that it's dubbed "fog gaming." While it's not exactly clear what that is -- or if it's comparable to cloud gaming services like Google Stadia -- according to analyst Serkan Toto, it will likely involve using the guts of arcade machines during off-hours.

Global smartphone shipments will fall nearly 12% to 1.2 billion units in 2020, market research firm IDC said on Wednesday, citing lower consumer spending due to the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis. From a report: The COVID-19 pandemic has not only disrupted business supply chains, with major smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung Electronics flagging financial hits, but also squeezed consumer spending worldwide. "Nationwide lockdowns and rising unemployment have reduced consumer confidence and reprioritized spending towards essential goods, directly impacting the uptake of smartphones in the short term," said Sangeetika Srivastava, senior research analyst with IDC.

South Korean phone manufacturer LG has released a security update last month to fix a vulnerability that impacts its Android smartphones sold over the past seven years. From a report: The vulnerability, tracked under the identifier of CVE-2020-12753, impacts the bootloader component that ships with LG smartphones. In March this year, US software engineer Max Thomas discovered a vulnerability in the bootloader component that had been added to LG smartphones starting with the LG Nexus 5 series. In a technical breakdown of the vulnerability published on Tuesday, Thomas says the bootloader component's graphics package contains a bug that lets attackers sneak in their own code to run alongside the bootloader's graphics under certain conditions, such as when the battery dies out and when the device is in the bootloader's Download Mode. Thomas says that threat actors who perfectly time an attack can gain the ability to run their own custom code, which could allow them to take over the bootloader, and inherently the entire device.

Following the rioting and looting from the death of George Floyd, Apple has a message for those who power on a stolen iPhone: "This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted." Forbes reports: Apple CEO Tim Cook sent a message to his employees as those protests escalated, saying that "there is a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together, we must stand up for one another, and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism." Cook went on to say that "at Apple, our mission has and always will be to create technology that empowers people to change the world for the better. We've always drawn strength from our diversity, welcomed people from every walk of life to our stores around the world, and strived to build an Apple that is inclusive of everyone."

These words were being digested as the tech giant made the decision to close the majority of its U.S. stores for the safety of those staff and its customers, stores that had only just reopened after the COVID-19 shutdown. Apple has unsurprisingly become a favored target of looters, given the likely spoils on offer, and the decision was taken to remove stock from shop floors and shutter locations. It has long been known that Apple operates some form of proximity software that disables a device when it is taken illegally from a store. Until now, though, little had been seen of that technology in action. Well, thanks to social media, we can now see the message that greets a looter powering up their new device: "This device has been disabled and is being tracked," it says. "Local authorities will be alerted."

MojoKid writes: AI and Machine Learning performance benchmarks have been well explored in the data center, but are fairly new and unestablished for edge devices like smartphones. While AI implementations on phones are typically limited to inferencing tasks like speech-to-text transcription and camera image optimization, there are real-world neural network models employed on mobile devices and accelerated by their dedicated processing engines. A deep dive look at HotHardware of three popular AI benchmarking apps for Android shows that not all platforms are created equal, but also that performance results can vary wildly, depending on the app used for benchmarking.

Generally speaking, it all hinges on what neural networks (NNs) the benchmarks are testing and what precision is being tested and weighted. Most mobile apps that currently employ some level of AI make use of INT8 (quantized). While INT8 offers less precision than FP16 (Floating Point), it's also more power-efficient and offers enough precision for most consumer applications. Typically, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 powered devices offer the best INT8 performance, while Huawei's Kirin 990 in the P40 Pro 5G offers superior FP16 performance. Since INT8 precision for NN processing is more common in today's mobile apps, it could be said that Qualcomm has the upper hand, but the landscape in this area is ever-evolving to be sure.

India is offering financial incentives and plug-and-play facilities with an outlay of about 500 billion rupees ($6.6 billion) to attract investments from global companies in the manufacture of mobile phones and related components. From a report: The government will initially target five global suppliers and extend a financial incentive of as much as 6% on incremental sales of goods made in the country for a period of five years, according to the ministry for electronics and information technology. An incentive of 25% on capital expenditure will be provided for production of electronic components, semiconductors and other parts. Electronic manufacturing clusters with ready-to-use facilities will be offered. The move has the potential to make India as global hub for mobile phone manufacturing and make it the largest exported item out of India while generate half a million jobs, Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister for electronics and information technology, said at a press conference in New Delhi Tuesday.

It's no secret that 5G networks drain battery. "To rectify that grim side effect, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Lille in France have developed a new radio-frequency switch they say is 50 times more energy efficient than the current solid-state switches," reports Popular Mechanics. From the report: The solution is actually rooted right in the problem. Because smartphones are packed with switches that perform duties like hopping back and forth between different networks and spectrum frequencies (4G to LTE, to WiFi, to Bluetooth, etc.), batteries drain much faster. State-of-the-art radio-frequency switches are constantly running in the background on your iPhone or Android device, consuming not only battery life, but processing power. So when the limited number of 5G-enabled smartphones on the market are constantly bouncing back and forth between 4G and 5G communications, for instance, the problem is amplified.

"The switch we have developed can transmit an HDTV stream at a 100GHz frequency, and that is an achievement in broadband switch technology," lead researcher Deji Akinwande, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a prepared statement. And the premise is simple: the switches stay off most of the time. Unless the radio-frequency switches are actively helping the device jump between networks at that precise point in time, they stay off, preserving precious battery life for other processes.

To build it, the scientists used a nanomaterial called hexagonal boron nitride, a newcomer in the materials science field that comes from the same family as graphene, a honeycomb-lattice sheet of carbon atoms used in everything from bike tires to cleaning up radioactive waste. According to research in Semiconductors and Semimetals, hexagonal boron nitride is only as thick as a single layer of atoms and is the thinnest known insulator in the world, with a thickness of 0.33 nanometers (for comparison's sake, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick). In this case, these scientists used a single layer of boron and nitrogen atoms in a honeycomb pattern. Then, they sandwiched the layers between a set of gold electrodes. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Electronics.

Well-known leaker Universe Ice on Twitter, along with dozens of other users, have discovered that simply setting an image as wallpaper on your phone could cause it to crash and become unable to boot. Android Authority reports: Based on user reports, many models from Samsung and Google are affected, while we've also seen some reports from users of OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi devices (it's not clear if these latter devices ran stock software or custom ROMs). From our own testing and looking at user reports, Huawei devices seem to be less exposed to the wallpaper crash issue. There are a few solutions, depending on how hard the phone is hit. Some users were able to change the wallpaper in the short interval between crashes. Others had success deleting the wallpaper using the recovery tool TWRP. But in most cases, the only solution was to reset the phone to factory settings, losing any data that's not backed up.

The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it's not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app. [...] An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google's Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit).

Apple has released iOS 13.5.1 today, which the company says "provides important security updates and is recommended for all users," albeit without much detail in the change log. But as noted by Twitter account Apple Software Updates, the update is meant to patch out the kernel vulnerability used by the recent Unc0ver jailbreak. The Verge reports: Apple's support page lays things out more clearly -- the update was designed to prevent an application from being able to "execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges." In other words, iOS 13.5.1 is designed to block jailbreaking. The Unc0ver jailbreak was particularly notable in the iOS jailbreaking community because it was available on the then-current iOS 13.5, allowing users of the latest Apple devices to install new software features outside of Apple's gated App Store.

AMD "has a potent combination of both CPU and GPU technologies," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid, that "can play well in the laptop market especially, where a tight coupling of the two processing engines can mean both performance and cost efficiencies." One of the first all-AMD laptops to hit the market powered by the company's new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors is the Dell G5 15 SE, it's a 5.5 pound, 14.4-inch machine [with a 15.6-inch display] that sports an understated design for a gaming notebook but with an interesting glittery finish that resists fingerprints well. With a retail price of $1199 (starting at $879), the model tested at HotHardware is powered by an AMD Ryzen 4800H 8-core processor that boosts to 4.2GHz and an AMD Radeon RX 5600M mobile GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 memory...

In the benchmarks, AMD's SmartShift technology load-balances CPU and GPU power supply for optimal performance and very respectable numbers that are competitive with any similar Intel/NVIDIA powered machine. The Dell G5 15 SE put up north of 60 FPS frame rates at maximum image quality in current-gen game titles, but with a significantly better price point, relatively speaking.
The GPU also has 2,304 stream processors across 36 compute units, and "Overall, we think Dell hit it out of the park with the new G5 15 SE," the review concludes.

"This all-AMD budget blockbuster has all of the gaming essentials: a fast processor, a powerful GPU, and a 144 Hz display."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Believers of 5G conspiracy theories have apparently been buying a $350 anti-5G USB key that -- not surprisingly -- appears to just be a regular USB stick with only 128MB of storage. As noted by the BBC today, the "5GBioShield" USB stick "was recommended by a member of Glastonbury Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which has called for an inquiry into 5G." The company that sells 5GBioShield claims it "is the result of the most advanced technology currently available for balancing and prevention of the devastating effects caused by non-natural electric waves, particularly (but not limited to) 5G, for all biological life forms." The product's website charges 283 British pounds for a single 5GBioShield, which converts to nearly $350. That's what it costs to get "protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device." The USB stick apparently doesn't need to be plugged in to anything to work its magic. "It is always ON and working -- that's why we used quantum nano-layer technology," the company says in an FAQ.

But what does the 5GBioShield actually consist of? The BBC pointed to a recent teardown by security company Pen Test Partners, which found that the device is just a USB stick with 128MB of storage. The company wrote: "When plugged in to our test machine we may have missed the bubble of 'quantum holographic catalyzer technology' appearing. The stick comes loaded with a 25 page PDF version of the material from 5GBioShield's website. It included a Q&A of distances for the "bubble" and how to know if it is working. It's an "always on" system apparently, is always working, powered or not, so no visual checks needed. A review of the stick's properties revealed nothing more than what you'd expect from a regular 128MB USB key. We weren't even sure that 128s are still in production!" The report says that the London Trading Standards has launched a probe to investigate this product.

How will the company defend itself? BioShield Distribution Director Anna Grochowalska told the BBC, "We are in possession of a great deal of technical information, with plenty of back-up historical research," and "we are not authorized to fully disclose all this sensitive information to third parties, for obvious reasons."

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS: Because force-quitting apps and restarting or shutting down devices are necessary only to fix unanticipated problems, there are two notable downsides to engaging in such behavior as a matter of habit: reduced battery life and wasted time. Why would these behaviors reduce battery life? Remember, iOS is a modern operating system that's built on top of Apple's proprietary hardware. Apple has put a great deal of effort into ensuring that iOS knows the best ways to manage the limited hardware resources within your iPhone or iPad. No one, possibly short of an iOS systems engineer armed with Apple's internal diagnostic and debugging tools, would be able to outguess iOS itself on issues like memory usage, power draw, and CPU throttling.

When you invoke the App Switcher in iOS, you can swipe right to see all the apps you've used, possibly since you got your device. (The very first app in my iPhone 11 Pro's App Switcher is Apple's Tips, which I think came up automatically when I turned the iPhone on last year and hasn't been touched since. It's difficult to count apps in the App Switcher, but I probably have at least a hundred in there.) As the number of apps in the App Switcher should indicate, those apps are not necessarily running -- they merely have run at some point in the past. They're much more like the contents of the Mac's Apple > Recent Items menu. In normal usage, iOS devotes the lion's share of CPU and memory resources to the app that you're using. That's sensible -- the performance of that app is paramount. However, the next few apps in the App Switcher may also be consuming some CPU and memory resources. That's because iOS correctly assumes that you're most likely to return to them, and it wants to give you the best experience when you do. The screen shouldn't have to redraw multiple times, Internet-loaded content shouldn't have to update, and so on. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: The National Cyber Security Agency in the UK is expected to conclude that U.S. sanctions against Huawei will make it impossible to use the Chinese company's technology as planned for 5G networks. The emergency review, announced on Sunday, is designed to pave the way for Downing Street to push for the total elimination of Huawei equipment in British phone networks by 2023 and quell a Conservative backbench revolt.

That move will amount to a hasty reversal of the policy announced by ministers in January to limit Huawei to 35% of the British 5G network supply. It also risks irritating China and adding hundreds of millions of costs to BT and other phone companies...

In early May, the U.S. said it would impose fresh sanctions against Huawei as part of a long-running campaign against the company, whose technology, the White House claims, could be exploited by China to conduct surveillance against the west. The U.S. sanctions, due to be introduced in September, would prevent Huawei from using U.S. semiconductors and software to build 5G equipment and force it to source alternatives, most likely from China. Whitehall sources said the threatened U.S. restrictions meant that any review would almost certainly say that Huawei posed a security risk. A particular concern was that Huawei would become reliant on unfamiliar and untested components, which could be exploited...

Leaks on Friday suggested that Downing Street was preparing the ground for a dramatic climbdown.

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: A renowned iPhone hacking team has released a new "jailbreak" tool that unlocks every iPhone, even the most recent models running the latest iOS 13.5. [9to5Mac points out it also works on iPads.]

For as long as Apple has kept up its "walled garden" approach to iPhones by only allowing apps and customizations that it approves, hackers have tried to break free from what they call the "jail," hence the name "jailbreak...." The jailbreak, released by the unc0ver team, supports all iPhones that run iOS 11 and above, including up to iOS 13.5, which Apple released this week. Details of the vulnerability that the hackers used to build the jailbreak aren't known, but it's not expected to last forever...

Security experts typically advise iPhone users against jailbreaking, because breaking out of the "walled garden" vastly increases the surface area for new vulnerabilities to exist and to be found.