Samsung has begun rolling out a new user interface for Galaxy Note 5 users in China and South Korea as part of its 'Galaxy Beta Program'. The new UI is dubbed 'New Note UX', and notably does away with the traditional launcher button than Android users have become accustomed to over the past years.
According to a report on Playfuldroid, the new UI, despite being named 'New Note UX', will roll out to devices including the Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, S6, S6 Edge, and the S6 Edge Plus. The site also reports that the new UI will be rolled out to the mentioned devices in August this year, so long as there aren't any problems along the way.
Aside from the removal of the launcher button, the new UI comes packed with new rounded square icons - reminiscent of those used on Ubuntu Phone, an updated settings menu, and a new layout for the power toggle dropdown in the notification bar.
By removing the launcher button, Samsung is aligning TouchWiz closer to Xiaomi's MIUI which also does not have a launcher button. Instead, all the applications sit somewhere on one of the home screens. There is no information on whether the UI will become available outside of the two countries.
Samsung recently released its newest Galaxy S7 variant, the Galaxy S7 Active, promoting the phone’s tougher capabilities to meet the demands of more active users.
The phone’s primary features include a water- and dust-resistant screen, 4,000 mAh battery life and a MIL STD-810G protection that keeps the phone shatter- and, supposedly, drop-resistant as well, “to keep things intact even when it's bumped or dropped.”
Yet how many times can we accidentally drop the phone and still have it function, really?
In the latest video from the PhoneBuff channel on YouTube, the Galaxy S7 Active’s dropping limits are figured out in "Galaxy S7 Active vs. Galaxy S7 Drop Test!"
Pitted against its original counterpart, Galaxy S7, both phones undergo four rounds of dropping to test out the various angles the phones can land on. Both phones are released onto a hard block at the same time from equal heights and damages are accessed as soon as the phones are stable on the ground.
In round one, the back face of each phone is tested, and the S7 Active wins this round. Only a few scuff marks appear on the S7 Active which can be easily wiped off while the Galaxy S7’s back completely shatters, forming minor and major cracks throughout the phone’s back case.
In round two, the bottom side of both phones is tested and both devices win the round. The S7 Active and Galaxy S7 both suffer the same amount of minute scrapes and scratches, not easily noticeable unless focused upon.
In round three, the side on which the buttons exist on both phones is tested and the S7 Active wins against the Galaxy S7. Both phones suffered the same amount of scratches again, but the S7 Active’s damages only appeared on its top and bottom bumpers, protecting the rest of the device’s side, including the side buttons.
In round four, the front face of both phones is tested and the S7 Active survived the drop with a few scratches, while the Galaxy S7 became completely inoperative as its exterior and interior displays both shattered from the fall.
A bonus round was given to the S7 Active to see just how many times it could withstand the dropping and after about 50 times of repeated falls, the phone remained functional with minimal damages.
Overall, the Galaxy S7 Active undoubtedly wins with flying colors and thus, truly lives up to its name.
Developer Nick Lee has earned himself a reputation for putting weird and wacky operating systems on Apple gadgets, including Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. Now, he's gone the practical route of bringing a full-fledged version of Android to the iPhone. There's just one catch: you need a special, 3D-printed smartphone case to make it work.
Lee decided to clone the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and make a custom version of Android Marshmallow he could run on a board he bought himself. He then 3D printed an iPhone-sized enclosure he found on Thingiverse, and combined the board, a battery, a boost converter, and resistor to make a lightweight case. At first, it was quite bulky, resembling a brick you'd be more likely to have seen in a cellphone store 15 years ago.
But after slimming down the design, Lee was able to craft an enclosure not too much larger than your standard smartphone battery case. He also included openings for HDMI and USB ports, as well as a SD card slot. In his YouTube demonstration, Lee appears to slip a light sheet of plastic over the components before placing an iPhone on top.
He also appears to boot Android by way of a custom Tendigi app on the iPhone's home screen. Tendigi, where Lee works as CTO, is a mobile design and development studio in Brooklyn, and Lee uses its iOS app to communicate with the case and load his custom version of Android on an iPhone 6S's display. The whole process here took many days, Lee says, and it's not exactly practical. But it is a fascinating look at both the ingenuity it took to perform this feat and the lengths at which you have to go to get even a custom open-source version of Android running on Apple's flagship phone.
The website LeakedSource revealed 32,888,300 Twitter usernames and passwords were also on sale on the dark web, which it is believed has already led to a rash of high profile hacks, including Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Now, it has been revealed what the most popular passwords were - with more than 120,000 users opting for '123456'.
That was followed by '123456789,' 'qwerty,' 'password,' and a host of other easily guessable passwords (including '12345').
A Saudi-based group of hackers is believed to be behind the attack.
Now it seems the Facebook founder was not their only high profile target as Evan Williams, the co-founder and former chief executive of Twitter has also been hacked by the same group.
Mr Williams' Twitter account was hacked on Wednesday, through his Foursquare account, by the hacking group OurMine.
The group reportedly posted a tweet, which has since been removed, that read: 'Hey, it's OurMine Team, we are just testing your security, please send us a message' followed by an email address.
A Twitter spokesperson told MailOnline the social media site itself had not been hacked.
'We are confident that these usernames and credentials were not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached,' they said.
'In fact, we've been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what's been shared from recent other password leaks.'
A number of other high-profile figures have been hacked, including Lana Del Rey, Drake and Kylie Jenner - although it is not yet known if those attacks are related.
Today, the website LeakedSource revealed 32,888,300 Twitter usernames and passwords were also on sale on the dark web.
The attacks were probably achieved by retrieving passwords stored in people's browsers, like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, LeakedSource said in a blog post.
'The explanation for this is that tens of millions of people have become infected by malware, and the malware sent every saved username and password from browsers like Chrome and Firefox back to the hackers from all websites including Twitter,' the blog said.
The 360-degree photos promised by Facebook’s Oculus VR virtual reality subsidiary last month have officially arrived.
Product manager Andy Huang announced in a Newsroom post Thursday that 360 photos are currently available for viewing via Facebook on the web and the latest versions of its flagship iOS and Android applications, adding that the tools for users to share their own 360 photos will be made available “over the next few days.”
Once those tools are rolled out, Huang said users will be able to share panoramic photos taken via iOS devices or Samsung Galaxy phones, or 360-degree photos shot with 360 photo apps or cameras, the same way they would share any other photos and videos, and the 360-degree scrolling capability will be functional in News Feed for any photos that appear with a compass icon.
Users can move their phones or drag those photos with their fingers to experience them in 360, and tapping them will convert them to full-screen.
Samsung Gear VR users can click the “View in VR” button in the top-left-hand corner of photos and insert their phones into their headsets.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has had a busy month already. Apart from
chatting with ISS astronauts using Facebook Live, the 32-year-old entrepreneur
also found two of his social media accounts hacked - Twitter and Pinterest.
To make this month even busier, Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced he will be
holding his first Q&A session on Facebook Live on Tuesday next week.
Making the announcement in a post on his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg said the Q&A session powered by Facebook Live would be different from the Townhall
Q&As he has held in the past, saying the medium is more interactive.
Zuckerberg said the session will cover topics users are interested in, such
as "connecting the world, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, live video,
entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and more."
As before, users can leave questions that they want to ask Zuckerberg on the
Facebook post. The highest voted ones will be answered by the Facebook CEO.
The Facebook Live Q&A session with Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled for 11:30am
PT on Tuesday (12am IST on Wednesday).
Facebook is investing a lot into its new Live platform, and in the recent past has expanded the feature in several ways. This latest Q&A session will serve as an example of the power of the platform, something the company was obviously also looking to do with its ISS Facebook Live session earlier this month. Related post: Watch | Zuckerberg hosts first Facebook Live with astronauts aboard ISS
Twitter for Android is getting a much better, much easier-to-use design. The new look was announced today, though you may have caught sight of it a couple months ago, as it's been in testing among Twitter beta users.
The redesign makes it much easier to move between the different sections of Twitter's app, allowing you to swipe from side to side to switch between your feed, Twitter Moments, your notifications, and your messages. The buttons for each of those sections are now much bigger, too, so you no longer have to tap tiny icons at the top of your screen.
The app's update is really about moving all of Twitter's features into much more accessible places. That includes the four areas mentioned above, but it also includes sections that were originally hidden within the gross "..." menu of the app. Those items are now all accessible through a pane that slides out from the side of the screen, which will let you quickly access your profile, settings, and Twitter's underrated Highlights feature. The app is also getting a Material Design-mandated floating button, which can be used to send a tweet from just about any screen.
Twitter says that the new design is rolling out to everyone on Android today. It's supposed to be available after an app update.
Ramadan is not only a religious time to be closer with Allah, but also moments to share and interact with others, especially Iftar and Suhour. The holy month of Ramadan is a great time for 1.6 billion Muslims everywhere to use Twitter. Despite Twitter seeing has been struggling to expand its relevance with product updates, Arabic is the fastest growing language on Twitter.
For Ramadan 2015, Twitter has announced three hashflags – its term for custom emoji that show up in most of its apps and on the Web – to celebrate Ramadan when you use the appropriate hashtag in either Arabic or English.
According to latest Twitter stats published April 2016, stats that 77% of Twitter’s Monthly Active users are from outside of US. With large, distributed conversations happening on every corner of the network.
For the first time since the first tweet was written by co-founder and CEO of Twitter, Dorsey on 21 March 2006. Jack Dorsey decided to acknowledge the importance of the holy month for Islam, and wish all Muslim users a Ramadan Kareem.
أهنئ كل المسلمين حول العالم بمناسبة حلول شهر رمضان المبارك #رمضان_كريم
Also to help people around the world celebrate the holy month marked ninth of the Islamic calendar, Twitter used to launch several initiatives to make Twitter more fun and useful every day during Ramadan.
For Ramadan 2016 celebration, Twitter launched a special Twitter emoji for Ramadan again to be available globally, but this year Twitter extending this fun form of self-expression to Periscope, too.
On Twitter, use any of the hashtags above in your Tweets and you’ll see a crescent moon appear next to these terms, from today to the end of the holy month.
HOW MUSLIM USERS REACTED TO
@jack شكرا يا جاك الله اكرم :))) ده جاك مؤسس توتير
A VIDEO has emerged showing a seemingly easy way to access your iPhone without needing to enter the passcode.
It is claimed that this simple trick will apparently let you bypass the phone’s security in seconds, meaning you can get to your device even if you’ve forgotten your code.
With just a few simple steps, the video shows how surprisingly easy it can be to get into the phone without going through its security, The Sun reports.
According to the video, you have to hold down the home button on the lock screen and wait for Siri to pop up.
When Siri is listening, just ask what the time is and click the clock symbol to take yourself into the ‘clock’ app.
How to unlock iPhone without password
This should lead you to the ‘World Clock’ tab, where there is a section that allows you to pick what tone is played once the alarm goes off.
From this menu, there is the option to buy more tones, which redirects you to the iTunes store.
From here, by clicking the home button, you can get to the phone’s home screen without entering the passcode.
Confused commenters claim it works for some people on some phones, while others have had no luck with the trick.
One viewer explained the trick only works if you have enabled touch recognition, since the phone uses your fingerprint to bypass the passcode.
This article originally appeared in The Sun and was reproduced with permission
Snapchat Inc. has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users.
Snapchat has been growing quickly, boosted by its popularity among young people. The app had 110 million daily users in December, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak about the numbers.
Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc. but has since been surpassed by Facebook’s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Twitter has 310 million monthly active users, according to its most recent earnings report. The company doesn’t disclose how many of those people check in daily, but in the third quarter, it said about 44 percent of monthly users are active each day in the service’s top 20 markets. Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said at the time that the percentage had been stable but that “we’ll be sure to disclose” if there was a significant change. The company hasn’t given an update since then. This implies a daily active user count of 136 million. Twitter and Snapchat declined to comment.
Snapchat has made communicating more of a game by letting people send annotated selfies and short videos. It has allowed people to use its imaging software to swap faces in a photo, transform themselves into puppies, and barf rainbows. (In March, Facebook said it acquired the startup behind an app called Masquerade, which offers similar photo-manipulation tools.) Snapchat encourages people to visit the app frequently with features such as the "Snapstreak," which counts the number of consecutive days they’ve been communicating with their closest friends. Snapchat’s other content, such as news and Live Stories, disappear after 24 hours.
Messaging on Snapchat is “very modern,” Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday at Recode’s technology conference. He acknowledged that Twitter at times can be confusing and alienating—something he’s trying to fix.
The teenager told Mirror Online: “I’d love to visit North Korea one day but I think I just blew my chances”.
North Korea is one of the most restrictive countries in the world but they seem to be testing a social network
A British teenager hacked North Korea's version of Facebook after correctly guessing a password on Kim Jong-un's internet servers.
The youngster, who is studying computing at college, guessed the logins for StarCon by looking up details of the software used to create the site.
He used “admin” and the default password “password” to gain access to the site’s admin page and says he could delete and suspend users, change the site’s name, censor certain words and manage the adverts.
The teenager – who we are not naming – told Mirror Online: “I was curious and decided to visit it. The site was created using off the shelf software, so naturally i went to the vendor's website looking at what features it had.
“I came across a default username and password and though why the heck not.
“Once I logged in I was able to see the sites statistics, basic user information, site settings and change the site’s adverts.
Kim Jong-un is one of the few people in North Korea allowed to access the internet
“I went ahead and changed the adverts saying that I found the login details then changed them to prevent anyone coming in and trying to do anything malicious.”
The website has a similar design to Facebook – including a newsfeed, likes and profile pages – and was discovered by researchers.
It appears to have been built using software called phpDolphin and analysts say it could be a “trial that was inadvertently made public”.
The teenager who gained access says he was “expecting an error”.
He said: “I was surprised it even worked, surely this should have been changed before going live?”
His advice for North Korean officials is to “always test for vulnerabilities before making a site live, and of course, change the default password”.
He added: “I’d love to visit North Korea one day – though I think i just blew my chances.”
The StarCon website appears to be a clone of Facebook (stock photo)
Internet researcher Doug Madory told VICE that the site’s servers are located in North Korea. It has since been taken down by hackers and redirected to a YouTube video.
He said: “It seems like it’s brand new. Very few websites resolve to the North Korean address space, and this one does.
“It seems kind of weird that they would build this, but maybe they did.”
The site appears to be unfinished and many pages are still populated with English filler text.
North Korea is considered one of the most restrictive countries in the world having banned Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
North Korea has been linked to a number of cyber attacks in the past and is said to have teams of thousands of trained hackers
Researchers estimate there are only a few hundred internet users in the country.
But the country is not averse to technological development.
North Korea has its own computer operating system called Red Star OS and has repeatedly been linked to hacks including that of Sony Pictures in 2014.
Last year defector Prof Kim Heung-Kwang revealed that the country has thousands of trained military hackers and could destroy infrastructure or even kill people.
A Facebook-like social network has appeared on a North Korean web server, apparently installed by the state-run Internet service provider.
The site, which wasfirst spotted by Doug Madoryat Dyn Research, is available at www.starcon.net.kp. It’s running PHP Dolphin, a do-it-yourself social network application that advertises to allow anyone to create their own social network.
It doesn’t look like any customization has been done, so why it’s appeared and what it’s for is a mystery. It could even have been a trial that was inadvertently made public.
Star is the name of the Internet service provider in North Korea.
The site has already attracted a number of curious Internet surfers to sign up, but there isn’t much to see. It’s devoid of content except for a few messages users outside of North Korea are posting.
The DPRK has one of the world’s strictest Internet censorship systems and the vast majority of citizens are not allowed access. Those that do have access are closely monitored, so the idea that a social network could exist on the Internet for domestic use is difficult to see.
Of course, someone has already made a Kim Jong Un account.
A fake Kim Jong Un account on the Starcon network.
An interesting note: every posting and message immediately shows up as 30 minutes old, presumably because the Dolphin software doesn’t recognize North Korea’s recently created time zone, which is 30 minutes off most of the rest of the world.
Enjoy it while you can. I expect the site will be taken down when an engineer at the ISP realizes it’s public and attracting attention.
Microsoft isn't interested in building its own self-driving car. Speaking at the Converge conference in Hong Kong this week, Microsoft's Peggy Johnson revealed that the company will continue to build software for cars rather than create vehicles. "We won't be building our own autonomous vehicle but we would like to enable autonomous vehicles and assisted driving as well," said Johnson, who is the head of business development at Microsoft.
Google and Fiat Chrysler agreed last month to work together to build self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans with Google's autonomous technology. It appears that Microsoft is keen to follow a similar path, but just on the software side. "We in different ways enabled a variety of different partners and you'll see us continuing to do that," explained Johnson. Microsoft is open to partners requesting an operating system for cars, and Johnson specifically cites examples of being able to work in self-driving cars eventually.
Harman is integrating Microsoft Office 365 into its infotainment systems, and the partnership will bring the entire suite of productivity apps including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to cars for the first time. "You're sitting in the car for many, many minutes a day. Can that be part of your new office, can it be your new desk, a place where you actually get work done?" asked Johnson. "We believe it can."
Microsoft has a long history of providing software for vehicles. Ford, Kia, BMW, Nissan, and Fiat have all used special versions of Windows to create their own interfaces and systems. Microsoft even revealed its "Windows in the car" initiative two years ago, but it has yet to partner with any manufacturers to make it a reality.
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