FBI Can Remotely Activate Your Android Phone Mic or Laptop Cameras: Report

It wasn’t long ago when whole world was shocked at the revelation that NSA (National Security Agency) and FBI of United States of America has direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo, Apple and other internet companies, from where they can extract any user information at their will, without any authorization or approval required from justice and legal departments.

Situation has only worsen with this new finding that FBI can remotely activate the microphones and cameras of your smartphones running Google’s Android platform and laptops without users’ consent, reported WSJ.

Report said that FBI has been developing such hacking and surveillance tools for last ten years. Additionally, there are private firms which sell them such tools to spy the users. Without a doubt – as unveiled earlier – FBI has support from technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and others.

Moreover, FBI uses spyware tools to record keystrokes or almost any activity on a computer or smartphone.

Report says that there are usually warrants required to undergo such surveillance on suspects, however, it argues that there were instances when FBI had recorded users’ data without any legal authorization.

With plenty of criticism about NSA’s PRISM program, this new hacking and spying practices from US law enforcement agencies are going to further hike the distrust level of technology users.

It merits mentioning here that there are over 900 million users with Android devices.

These revelations also raise serious questions about the privacy of individuals, which is seemingly brutally murdered by American government and agencies and buried hundreds of miles down under the turf.

Third world citizens are in desperate position, who had embraced these emerging technology gadgets and software for simplifying their lives, but ended up only to be watched by the American government.

Our own government, which can question American government about such shameless practices, is busy doing so many other use-less things.

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Recover Your Lost or Stolen Phone with Android Device Manager

We all know how much pain and anxiety (read torture) a lost phone can give us. Everyone has experienced these situations at least once in their lifetime, but Google has set out to make your tough times much easier by rolling out the first official Android “Device locator”.

The tool is called Android Device Manager.

The Android Device Manager makes your phone shout aloud for you to hear and even lets you use the GPS to locate your device and see it in real time. The former can take place even if your phone is in silent mode.

And in case, you are still unable to find your device and fear that your data might end up in the wrong place, the service can also wipe all the data from your phone so that your personal info and identity remains secure.

The security tool will be available at the end of this month for devices running on Android 2.2 and later. A dedicated app will be released too, after that.

Such apps are nothing new though as a lot of manufacturers have already used the idea to their use. Actually, in all its honesty, some of the similar apps found in the Play Store are even better and offer more functionality. Still, it’s better to have something than nothing at all and it’s certainly quite useful as a lot of people are still unaware of this idea.

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Mediatek Announces World's First True Octa-Core Smartphone Processor

MediaTek, usually reputed for manufacturing low-priced ARM processors on mid-end and low-end smartphones, has announced their world’s first true Octa-core mobile processor which is based on ARM architecture. Which means you’ll be able to use 8 cores simultaneously on your mobile devices with 2X performance of what you get on your current Quad Core processors.

The company has not revealed a lot about their “True octa-core processor”, not even the official launching date yet.

The processor has been codenamed as MT6592, that will feature a 28nm eight-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU that would be clocked around 2.0 GHz, with an unspecified GPU and radios that support up to HSPA+ mobile networks.

LTE modem would not be included in this processor.

Now the word “TRUE” actually means that it uses all of its Cortex-A7 cores for CPU tasks, unlike what we’ve seen in Samsung’s Exynos 5 processor that has an eight core CPU which is actually a hybrid, made of 2x quad core processors which doesn’t take advantage of its all 8 cores simultaneously instead 4 cores work at a time.

Surprisingly MT6592 power consumption would be same as the quad-core processors available in the market.

A graph given by MediaTek shows that, while decoding a video the power efficiency is the same on MT6592 clocked at 2GHz and its competitor clocked also at 2GHz, while the decoding speed is twice the quad core on MT6592. Which means you’ll have some battery smooth performance with faster processing power.

MT6592 would show real benefit in multitasking as every task is allocated to a different core, as per application.

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Intel Hopes Your Ultrabook Will Soon Wirelessly Charge Your Nearby Smartphone

While you can plug a USB cable into your notebook or Ultrabook today to charge your smartphone, Intel is hoping to cut out the cable in the future by allowing your Intel-powered laptop to wirelessly charge nearby devices.

The chip-maker has joined the Alliance for Wireless Power, or A4WP, to back that consortium’s wireless charging standard, which 

rivals standards being promoted by Power Matters Alliance and the Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi. The three wireless charging standards will be battling it out to see which will become the de facto wireless standard for consumer electronics in the future.

Along with Intel, A4WP also is backed by Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, and other players while the Power Matters Alliance is being supported by AT&T Mobility, BlackBerry, Samsung, HTC, and LG among others.“Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,” Intel general manager Navin Shenoy said in a prepared statement.“In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks.”In a post on ZDNet, the publication says that Intel wants to leverage the wireless charging capabilities not only to wirelessly charge Ultrabooks and laptops, but to also use Ultrabooks as a charging plate so that the notebook could provide wireless charging to nearby tablets and smartphones. This may help to eliminate the clutter of wires that many tech travelers carry with them while working remotely.Whatever the case is, wireless charging probably will remain confusing for some time to come until there’s a clear winner. Right now, competing standards make accessories and charging plates incompatible. For example, the Nexus 4′s wireless charging capabilities cannot interact with accessories made for the Nokia Lumia range.

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Photography Industry One of The Worst Hit by the Arrival of Smartphones

The camera and photography industry is in gloom right now. The sales of the products are lower-than-ever, and so is the public interest. This plunging of two kinds can definitely be attributed to the flooding of smartphones in the market, despite the fact that a smartphone camera’s image quality can almost never compete against that of a dedicated camera.

The reason behind the smartphone’s success is clear: a smartphone is a phone, personal computer, storage device and a camera at the same time, while the camera can only take photos. It will beat the competing mobile camera any time of the day but it will always remain a single-function device.

With time, the smartphone camera has gotten better and a phone like Lumia 1020 can also compete against point-and-shoots. Users who can’t afford a dedicated camera find these cameras to be just fine for their daily needs. Also that means one less device to carry around.

There’s another issue as well, and although some will find it bitter, it’s the lack of knowledge. A person who hasn’t held a DSLR in his lifetime will always judge a camera with its megapixels. Absurd idea? It is, but that’s what most people do, believe it or not. To a layman, the 41 megapixel of the Lumia 1020 might sound better than the 20.3 megapixels of the DSLR.

Good thing though is that DSLRs aren’t worst hit by this “domino effect”, it’s the compact category which is. Everyone knows that a lot of cheaper point-and-shoots aren’t really good in image and video quality, or one of them, so a smartphone camera as good as that of a Galaxy S4 might even beat it. The result? Diminishing sales.

“The cannibalization effect on compact cameras by smartphones has become quite serious.”

“The cannibalization effect on compact cameras by smartphones has become quite serious”, says Toshiya Hari, an analyst for Goldman sachs, “I can’t imagine the camera market will grow much further in the coming decade.”

But 2013 may prove to be the industry’s worst year yet. According to estimates, sales will drop by a staggering 30 percent or almost one-third of the entire market to just 68.6 million units. Ironically, smartphone sales are expected to rise with an eerily similar pace, by 32%.

So who’s at blame here? Both the smartphone and camera manufacturing companies. Smartphone manufacturers played it cleverly by talking highly of the cameras they built into their phones but camera companies never did much to spread “awareness”. In the future, they’ll have to co-operate with the smartphone industry in order to survive, by giving their technologies to the industry which destroyed them.

Nikon has already started that. Its president has already confessed earlier that in order for them to survive in this era, the company might change its approach to offer products to competing markets.

“The number of people taking snapshots is exploding by use of smartphones that sold 750 million or so last year and are still growing. We’ve centralized our ideas around cameras but can change our approach to offer products to that bigger market.”

And that seems like the only logical approach right now. Getting into different markets is a difficult task but it can create amazing opportunities. But regardless of anything, one thing is clear: the booming days of the once flourishing camera market aren’t coming back again.

Credits to Bloomberg for this story.

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