Technology - Google News

WhatsApp security breach may have targeted human rights groups - Yahoo Finance
OnePlus 7 Pro Review—The fastest, best-designed, best-value Android phone - Ars Technica
The Morning After: Lenovo's foldable-screen laptop - Engadget

WhatsApp security breach may have targeted human rights groups - Yahoo Finance

Posted: 14 May 2019 07:56 AM PDT

By Steven Scheer and Ari Rabinovitch

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - WhatsApp said on Tuesday a security breach on its messaging app had signs of coming from a government using surveillance technology developed by a private company and may have targeted human rights groups.

WhatsApp, which is part of Facebook, said it had notified the U.S. Department of Justice to help with an investigation, and encouraged all WhatsApp users to update to the latest version of the app, where the breach had been fixed.

WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging tools in the world, is used by 1.5 billion people monthly. It has touted its high level of security and privacy, with messages on its platform being encrypted end to end so that WhatsApp and third parties cannot read or listen to them.

The company said it was still investigating the breach but believed only a "select number of users were targeted through this vulnerability by an advanced cyber actor."

But its advice to all users to update came "out of an abundance of caution" and a recommendation by Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto. It did not disclose how many users were affected.

A WhatsApp spokesman said the attack was sophisticated and had all the hallmarks of a "private company working with governments on surveillance."

HUMAN RIGHTS

WhatsApp said it was "deeply concerned about the abuse" of such surveillance technologies and that it believed human rights activists may have been the targets.

"We're working with human rights groups on learning as much as we can about who may have been impacted from their community. That's really where our highest concern is," the spokesman said.

Citizen Lab tweeted: "We believe an attacker tried (and was blocked by WhatsApp) to exploit it as recently as yesterday to target a human rights lawyer."

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), WhatsApp's lead regulator in the European Union, said WhatsApp had notified the agency late on Monday of a "serious security vulnerability" on its platform.

"The DPC understands that the vulnerability may have enabled a malicious actor to install unauthorised software and gain access to personal data on devices which have WhatsApp installed," the regulator said in a statement.

Cyber security experts said the vast majority of users were unlikely to have been affected.

Scott Storey, a senior lecturer in cyber security at Sheffield Hallam University, believes most WhatsApp users were not affected since this appears to be governments targeting specific people, mainly human rights campaigners.

"For the average end user, it's not something to really worry about," he said, adding that WhatsApp found the vulnerability and quickly fixed it. "This isn't someone trying to steal private messages or personal details."

Storey said that disclosing vulnerabilities was a good thing and likely would lead to other services looking at their security.

SURVEILLANCE

The Financial Times initially reported on the WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed attackers to inject spyware on phones via the app's phone call function.

The FT said the spyware was developed by Israeli cyber surveillance company NSO Group -- best known for its mobile surveillance tools -- and affects both Android and iPhones.

Asked about the report, NSO said its technology is licensed to authorised government agencies "for the sole purpose of fighting crime and terror," and that it does not operate the system itself while having a rigorous licensing and vetting process.

"We investigate any credible allegations of misuse and if necessary, we take action, including shutting down the system," the company said. "Under no circumstances would NSO be involved in the operating or identifying of targets of its technology, which is solely operated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies."

Social media group Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes last week wrote in The New York Times that fellow co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had far too much influence by controlling Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three core communications platforms, and called for the company to be broken up.

Facebook's shares were down about 1.1 percent in New York.

(Additional reporting Tamara Mathias and Padraic Halpin; Editing by Louise Heavens/Keith Weir/Jane Merriman)

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OnePlus 7 Pro Review—The fastest, best-designed, best-value Android phone - Ars Technica

Posted: 14 May 2019 09:00 AM PDT

The OnePlus 7 Pro. With a front that is nearly all pixels, there isn't much you can do to improve smartphone design from here.

Ron Amadeo
Notches? Bezels? Camera holes? Nope, there's nothing here to interrupt the display. Also note the skinny earpiece integrated into the top edge of the phone.

Ron Amadeo
OK, the bottom has a bit of a chin.

Ron Amadeo
The display is curved along the edges, which serves no purpose and just distorts the image.

Ron Amadeo
Hello. Here's the front camera popped up.

Ron Amadeo
A closer look at the front camera.

Ron Amadeo
The back of this one is really, really, really blue.

Ron Amadeo
A close-up of the three rear cameras and the back of the front camera.

Ron Amadeo
You can see why the blue is so shimmery in this picture. There are tiny diagonal lines carved into the colored layer, which diffuse incoming light. This is all under a smooth panel of glass, by the way.

Ron Amadeo
The back is curved along the sides, too.

Ron Amadeo
Here's a shot of the bottom and the rear camera bump.

Ron Amadeo
There's no headphone jack, but on the bottom we have a USB-C port, speaker, and dual-SIM slot.

Ron Amadeo
The blue back changes depending on the lighting and angle.

Ron Amadeo
OnePlus' three-position switch returns, and just below it is the power button.

Ron Amadeo

Wow. OnePlus is putting the rest of the smartphone world on notice with the launch of its newest smartphone, the OnePlus 7 Pro. The company has become known for providing excellent value in the Android market, and while that is still true of the OnePlus 7 Pro, everything moves even further toward the premium side of the spectrum with this device. With a bigger bill of materials budget behind it, OnePlus has created the best Android phone on the market.

OnePlus isn't just offering features and performance that feel a generation ahead of many of the current devices on the market—it's doing so for a lower price than the super-premium, $1,000 flagships out there. While you can buy a OnePlus 7 Pro today, I think a lot of manufacturers are going to spend the next year scrambling to catch up to OnePlus.

Brace yourselves for an incredibly positive review of the OnePlus 7 Pro.

Wait, how much?

Since OnePlus is both announcing the phone today and lifting the review embargo (we've had the phone for two weeks now!), let's briefly go over what OnePlus is offering.

First up, there's a gorgeous 6.67-inch, 3120×1440 OLED display that runs at a super-fast 90Hz refresh rate. The whole UI runs at 90fps, all the time, and it feels buttery smooth. You won't find any camera notches here, thanks to a front camera that lives in a motorized pop-up section! When selfie time comes, a small square rises out of the top of the phone and displays the 16MP front camera.

With the OnePlus 7 Pro, you're also getting one of the best spec packages on the market. A Snapdragon 855 SoC, 6GB of RAM (with options for 8GB and 12GB) and a 4000mAh battery. There are only (only?) 128GB and 256GB options for storage (Samsung offers 512GB and 1TB), but the OnePlus 7 Pro is the first phone on the market that uses the super-fast UFS 3.0 (Universal Flash Storage) standard. So that lower-density storage has some of the fastest read/write speeds of any phone.

So, how much would you pay for this? A phone with a 90Hz display, a motorized pop-up camera, super-fast storage, and top-of-the line specs? If you put a Samsung sticker on the back of the OnePlus 7 Pro, it's an easy $1,000 price tag. Of course this is OnePlus, so it's cheaper than that. $900? $800?? $700??? Try six hundred and seventy dollars. $670 for the fastest, best-designed phone on the market. Heck, even the top-of-the-line 256GB version with a ridiculous 12GB of RAM is only $750. Either one is an incredible deal.

90Hz OLED is a smoothness revolution

Enlarge / The 90Hz display is awesome, but I could do without the curves on the left and right edges.
Ron Amadeo

The first thing you notice about the OnePlus 7 Pro is the absolutely massive 6.67-inch 3120×1440 OLED display. This is one of the biggest displays ever fitted to a smartphone, dwarfing the 6.4-inch display on the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the 6.5-inch display on the iPhone XS Max. The slim bezels help to cram such a large screen into the device, but at 162.6mm × 75.9mm, the OnePlus 7 Pro is a bigger device than the Galaxy S10+ (157.6mm x 74.1mm), and it manages to be a taller and slimmer than the iPhone XS Max (157.5mm x 77.4mm).

SPECS AT A GLANCE: ONEPLUS 7 PRO
SCREEN	6.67-inch, 3120×1440, 90Hz AMOLED (516ppi, 19.5:9 aspect ratio)
OS	Android 9.0 Pie with OnePlus's Oxygen OS skin
CPU	Eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Four Cortex A76-based cores (One 2.84GHz, three 2.41Ghz) and four Cortex A55-based cores at 1.78GHz
RAM	6GB, 8GB, or 12GB
GPU	Adreno 640
STORAGE	128GB or 256GB
NETWORKING	802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC
PORTS	USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C
CAMERA	Rear: 48MP main camera, 8MP 3x telephoto, 16MP wide angle Front: 16MP pop-up camera
SIZE	162.6 x 75.9 x 8.8 mm
WEIGHT	206g
BATTERY	4000 mAh
STARTING PRICE	$669
OTHER PERKS	NFC, quick charging, optical in-display fingerprint sensor, water resistance, dual SIM

Thanks to the pop-up camera, the OnePlus 7 Pro display fills the front of the phone, with no notches, holes, bezels, or other blemishes to speak of. With an all-screen design, the OnePlus 7 looks absolutely stunning, and I'd argue it's the best-looking smartphone on the market. While, sure, we have foldable smartphones on the horizon, the OnePlus 7 Pro (and all these other pop-up camera phones) feels like the end of slab smartphone design. When the front of the device is basically entirely pixels, there isn't much more progress to be made. This is it: the pinnacle of the traditional smartphone design. I'm going to point this out repeatedly in this review, but OnePlus is not only beating the competition here—it's doing it for around $330 cheaper.

OnePlus CEO Pete Lau told The Verge the 7 Pro display is three times more expensive than displays used on previous OnePlus models, and you can really tell. The 1440p resolution is the highest the company has ever done, and with a 90Hz refresh rate, it's one of the speediest smartphone displays on the market.

If you've never tried a faster-than-60Hz touchscreen before, it is a revolution in performance and smoothness. Instead of the usual 60fps, everyone on the OnePlus 7 Pro runs at 90fps, which means animations playback is smoother, scrolling happens without a hitch, and the whole phone is just a joy to fidget with. Thanks to the new SoC and OnePlus's optimizations, there aren't any noticeable frame drops during normal scrolling, and even if you turn on the GPU profiler so you can scientifically identify frame drops during heavy loading, dropping a frame at 90fps is a lot less noticeable than 60fps.

There really aren't any shenanigans when it comes to the 90 Hz display, either. There is a single setting that will let you change the default always-on 90Hz mode to an always-on 60Hz mode, and that's it. Of course, a 50 percent higher refresh rate means having to draw 50 percent more frames all the time, and this comes at a battery cost.

Thanks to the easy settings, we were able to test just how much battery 90Hz costs. We had a pretty even 14-ish percent runtime increase when we switched to 60Hz across both our Web browsing and WebGL battery tests. The Web browsing test lasted 642 minutes at 90Hz and 725 minutes at 60Hz, while our WebGL battery test (which actually rendered 3D objects at 90fps) ran for 439 minutes at 90 Hz versus 504 minutes for 60Hz. Keep in mind, these tests are run with the screen on all the time, so that 14 percent runtime cost is the absolute worst case scenario for the 90Hz mode. 90Hz doesn't cost anything when the screen is off, and most phones spend the majority of their life with the screen off.

Enlarge / 90Hz mode does have some effect on battery life.

It's not just the refresh rate that make the phone feel snappy, either. OnePlus says the 7 Pro actually samples touch inputs at 135Hz, for even faster response times. All of these touch and display improvements—combined with the speedy SoC, storage, and tons of RAM—make the OnePlus 7 Pro the fastest feeling Android phone I have ever used.

The OnePlus 7 Pro display isn't flat. The display is curved on the long edges, just like a Galaxy S10. The back is curved, too, and both the front and back of the phone wrap around the sides to meet a colored metal band that goes around the perimeter. The 7 Pro has a glass back, which is a strange choice for a phone that does not have wireless charging.

Enlarge / Silky smooth interface, or a bit more battery life? You get to pick.
Ron Amadeo

With all these curved sides, the body gives off a very Samsungy vibe. I will say the same thing to the OnePlus 7 Pro that I say to every Samsung phone released in recent memory: curved displays are pointless. They aren't an improvement over flat screens, and they just distort the sides of the user interface. OnePlus talks about it being "easier to hold," but uh, you are definitely holding it wrong if your fingers come in contact with the front of the display. A curved display might actually make the phone worse to hold since, with slimmer sides, there isn't as much surface area for your fingers to grip on to. A straight, 90 degree transition into the display would also probably help to keep fingers away from the display and stop errant touch inputs.

The curve is not the end of the world on the OnePlus 7 Pro, but there are no benefits to curving the display, only the minor negative of a distorted image. It makes reading Web pages particularly weird, as a lot of designs put the first letter of each line in the curved area, making them look all melty.

I was given the "Nebula Blue" version of the phone, which features an extremely blue back panel. Under the glass is a colored layer with microscopic diagonal lines carved into it, giving it a shimmery, frosted look that diffuses incoming light. In photos, it will range from from dark blue to bright blue, depending on how the light is hitting it. It looks great! A phone with some color is always nice to see. The back collects fingerprints like any other glass phone, but the frosted look does some work to hide the smudges.

Despite the all-screen design, OnePlus did manage to cram an earpiece into the top edge of the phone. It doubles as one half of the stereo speaker setup, paired with a second speaker on the bottom edge.

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The Morning After: Lenovo's foldable-screen laptop - Engadget

Posted: 14 May 2019 04:30 AM PDT

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

This morning, we're checking out the latest update in Walmart vs. Amazon, and Lenovo's bright new idea for a laptop is going to feel very familiar.

Aren't all laptops foldable?Lenovo is working on a ThinkPad with a foldable display

Now that we (almost) have folding smartphones, Lenovo's new prototype tries the technology on a larger scale. It has a 13.3-inch OLED display, which closes in upon itself with a Galaxy Fold-like magnetic latch. Laid flat, the flexible seam disappears, and when it's propped open, a keyboard appears on the lower half of the screen. We'll have to wait until at least next year to see this available as a real product, but it could be a way to have a large screen in a device the size of a paper notebook.

Box that.Walmart takes on Amazon Prime with free, next-day deliveries

The retail giant's NextDay delivery offering is rolling out in Phoenix and Las Vegas today, May 14th, and will be available for online customers in Southern California over the next few days. Unlike Prime, there's no membership fee required; however, it only applies to some of Walmart's items, and orders have to meet a $35 minimum.

Moving forward.Supreme Court rules against Apple in App Store price-fixing case

The Supreme Court has ruled against Apple in a long-standing case over price fixing in the App Store, in a decision that allows iPhone owners to proceed with a lawsuit against the company. The court agreed with the plaintiffs' assertion that people who buy apps from the App Store are doing so directly from Apple, and as such they aren't prohibited "from suing Apple under the antitrust laws." Now the lawsuit can go to trial, unless the parties settle. In a statement, Apple said, "We're confident we will prevail when the facts are presented and that the App Store is not a monopoly by any metric."

Now in testing at PDX.Lyft and Uber's latest ride-sharing invention: the airport taxi line

Instead of wasting time hunting for their Uber or Lyft, passengers landing at Portland International Airport can just hop in an available car and share a six-digit code with the driver. If successful, they could expand the PIN feature to airports across the country.

Prices TBA.Lenovo's new ThinkBook laptop line is built to be slim and secure

This new ThinkBook series promises "business-grade" features and security in a fairly sleek package. The laptops have thin bezels and are less than .65-inches thick, even with dedicated Skype keys, Radeon 540X GPUs, TPM 2.0 security chips, fingerprint readers and webcam privacy shutters. If you need more power, however, the new 15-inch ThinkPad X1 Extreme can be had with a 4K OLED display, GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics and a 9th-gen Core i9 CPU.

It's all about services.Apple's redesigned TV app arrives

The company is now rolling out the updated application to iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and compatible Samsung smart TVs, complete with a fresh look, the new Channels feature and curated sections such as For You and Kids. Apple says there are now more than 100,000 films and TV series on iTunes, including a large collection of 4K HDR content that you can rent or buy. Now you can get to all of that without having to leave its TV app. Plus, with Channels, users can subscribe to premium networks without leaving the app and download videos for offline viewing even from services that don't normally offer the feature, like HBO Go.

They custom fit a box to the package instead of working the other way around.Amazon might start using robots to box your orders

Sources told Reuters that Amazon is considering the CartonWrap machines from CMC Srl, which can build boxes around custom orders and add seals and labels. The machines can reportedly build 600 to 700 boxes per hour, which is four to five times faster than a human.