Engadget

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse isn't so narrowly focused as to think that the proposed Clearwire acqusition represents the end of the road for spectrum. Far from it: he tells Bloomberg Businessweek that the company is investigating future airwave deals involving companies and government auctions. The Clearwire deal mostly bought time, according to Hesse. Naturally, these ambitions are partly contingent on both SoftBank's purchase of Sprint and the absence of any Dish-sized hurdles to the Clearwire pact. As long as the path stays clear, though, we wouldn't assume that Hesse's shopping spree is over.

0 Comments

Between this and the Arduino, you'd think NASA's Swamp Works was a hackerspace -- though, perhaps in a sense, the research facility kind of is. And really, between the organization's on-going fascination with the potential of 3D printing and a desire to meet budgetary concerns, we probably shouldn't have been all too shocked to see a first-gen MakerBot Replicator on a table of the former Apollo-testing facility. The printer wasn't actually in use during our visit, and the Hazardous Operation tag could probably be taken to be a bit tongue-in-cheek -- though, when it comes to space travel, you can never be too careful.

0 Comments

International diplomacy may feel like schoolyard antics, but the participants do have something a little heavier to throw at each other. After President Obama signed an executive order to improve national cyber security, the White House is now reportedly opening the box marked Trade and Diplomatic Sanctions, which it'll lob at any country that's found to be appropriating US trade secrets. The executive has published a report, outlining a dozen thefts from companies such as GM, Ford and DuPont, fingering China as being behind a majority of them. If the hacking persists, then James Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the White House should deny visas or access to US banks to Chinese people and corporations -- making us wistful for the courtroom dramas of yore.

Update: We've corrected the story to correctly attribute the comments made by James Lewis.

0 Comments

It's 2013 and white hat hackers like Adam Laurie are still breaking into ID chips that are supposed to be secure. How come? Partly it's the way of the world, because no man-made NFC or RFID security barrier can ever be truly impervious. But in practical terms, a chip's vulnerability often stems from the fact that it can be taken apart and probed at a hacker's leisure. The secure element doesn't necessarily need to have power running through it or to be in the midst of near-field communication in order to yield up its cryptographic key to a clever intruder who has sufficient time and sufficient desire to breach the security of a smartphone, bank card or national border.

Which brings us to the latest device in NXP's SmartMX2 range -- a piece of technology that is claimed to work very differently and that is expected to hit the market next year. Instead of a traditional key stored in the secure element's memory, every single copy of this chip carries a unique fingerprint within the physical structure of its transistors. This fingerprint (aka Physically Unclonable Function, or PUF) is a byproduct of tiny errors in the fabrication process -- something chip makers usually try to minimize. But NXP has found a way to amplify these flaws in a controlled way and use them for identification, and it'd take a mightily well-equipped criminal (or fare dodger, or Scrabble cheater) to reverse engineer that.

Read More | 0 Comments

Apples and oranges watches. Today's bumper pack of patent applications from Cupertino included this nugget, outlining a small flexible screen that's paired with a "bi-stable spring." In normal lexicon, we're talking about one of those slap bracelets that go from completely straight to wrap-around in an instant. Interestingly enough, Apple isn't the only tech company sniffing around these bracelets as a possible holster for their tech -- Nokia mused on slightly similar notions back in March 2012.

This is an application, so most of what today's filing tells us is certainly not set in stone, but new ideas include a "kinetic energy gathering component" within the band -- like the trickle charge feature found on watches -- to pump energy back into the device. One example embodiment of the idea includes a touchscreen interface that will allow music browsing, phone call reviews and even text input through a "simple virtual keyboard." The concept also mentions AMOLED screen tech, as those deactivated (so, black) pixels would assist in eking out battery life in a device where space is definitely at a premium. The filing also suggests that the device could house an end-detection sensor, allowing the wearable to configure itself to each user, regardless of differing wrist measurements, and deactivate sections of the flexible display that aren't on show. This particular application was made in August 2011 -- a fair while before the recent increase in iWatch murmurings. As is the case with Apple's patent contributions, however, we'll wait to see whether the patent is granted and whether these ideas will ever crystallize into a genuine product. In the meantime, maybe it's time to buy up some snap bracelets on eBay: they might just be making a comeback.

0 Comments

This one's a little puzzling. Japanese carrier Emobile has announced a new phone from Huawei, the memorably-named GL07S. The confusing part is that it looks almost identical to the black-colored Ascend P2, with the same three-line menu button differentiating it from another handset leak. It's hard to say just yet, but Huawei might be readying two devices like it did during CES, where it unveiled the P2's predecessor alongside an even thinner S model. This Japan-bound offering measures up a 8.6mm thick, which while certainly no porker, is a bit more than those promises of a 6.5mm smartphone. However, there's still enough here to intrigue us, with a quad-core 1.5GHz processor, 13-megapixel camera, 32GB of built-in storage and a 2,350mAh battery rounding out a pretty respectable spec sheet. It's also going to be an important phone for the relatively small phone network too -- it's their first LTE smartphone.

0 Comments

You may not know about TestFlight if you're used to running apps rather than building them, but odds are that you know its effects when over 300,000 iOS apps have reached testers that hopefully caught bugs in advance. That makes the launch of a private Android beta something of an event, as it gives developers the same simple feedback and provisioning for pre-release apps. Coders who split their time between both Android and iOS also get a truly cross-platform management console as part of the expansion. There's no set date for when the beta expires, but TestFlight eventually plans to offer its utility directly through the Google Play Store -- and might just keep the Android app train rolling smoothly.

0 Comments