Researchers Hack Mobile Data Communications

  Researchers plan to show today how to break the encryption that protects information sent over the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), a standard commonly used to send data to and from mobile devices, and from other devices such as smart meters. This breach makes it possible to listen in on data communications such as e-mail, instant messages, and Web browsing on smart phones, as well as updates from automated industrial systems.  The researchers, who will make their announcement at the Chaos Communication Camp, a hacker event taking place near Berlin, Germany, previously cracked the Global System for Mobile Communications...

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Thin Displays as Wristbands

The U.S. Army is testing a prototype "watch" that's lightweight and thin and has a full-color display. This display is built on flexible materials encased in a rugged plastic case and can be worn on a wristband to display streaming video and other information. It uses newly developed phosphorescent materials that are efficient at converting electricity into red, blue, and green light, which means the display needs less power to work. Most phones, laptops, and TVs today use liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) controlled by electronics built on glass. To make more energy-efficient displays that are controlled by flexible electronics, which...

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A Flexible Color Display

Researchers at HP Labs are testing a flexible, full-color display that saves power by reflecting ambient light instead of using a backlight. The prototype display's pixels are controlled by fast-switching silicon transistors printed on top of plastic. If the technology can be commercialized, the display will compete with liquid crystal screens as well as other low-power color flexible displays in the works. "Our goal is to make a display with the color saturation of newsprint that can be manufactured for about $10 per square foot," says Carl Taussig, director of the Information Surfaces Lab at HP's Palo Alto, CA, research center. At...

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Energy-Harvesting Displays

Adding solar cells to liquid-crystal displays could help recover a significant amount of energy that's ordinarily wasted in powering them. Two research groups have created light filters that double as photovoltaic cells, a trick that could boost the battery life of phones and laptops. Over 90 percent of the displays sold this year will use liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology. LCDs are, however, tremendously inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the light produced by a backlight into a viewable image. The LCD in a notebook computer consumes one-third of its power. This type of screen remains dominant because manufacturers...

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Why Google Wants Motorola

Google announced today that it has agreed to acquire the smart-phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. In a statement, Google said the deal was largely driven by the need to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio, which it said would help it defend Android against legal threats from competitors armed with their own patents. This issue has come to the fore since a consortium of technology companies led by Apple and Microsoft purchased more than 6,000 mobile-device-related patents from Nortel Networks for about $4.5 billion, in early July. Battle lines are being drawn around patents, as companies seek to protect their...

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Personal Security

Many medical implants, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, are equipped with wireless radios that let doctors download data about the patient's condition and adjust the behavior of the implant. But these devices are vulnerable to hackers who can eavesdrop on stored data or even reprogram the implant, causing, for example, a pacemaker to shock a heart unnecessarily. While it may be possible to engineer new, more secure implants, millions of people are walking around with vulnerable devices that can't be replaced without surgery. An anti-hacking device presented this week at the annual SIGCOMM communications conference in Toronto may...

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Five Ways Apple Should Spend Its $76 Billion

Last week, Apple reported that it now has reserves of $76 billion in cash, short term securities and long term securities. As many wags pointed out, that's more than the cash-strapped U.S. government has left. On Tuesday, Apple also briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the world's most highly valued company, at more than $340 billion in stock-market valuation. With tens of billions of dollars to throw around and super-high investor confidence, shouldn't Apple reinvest in some cutting-edge R&D that could make it even more successful? Apple has already shown the value of introducing unique new technologies for its products: the...

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New System Swaps the Cash Register for an iPhone

  Square, a new startup based in San Francisco and headed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, opened its doors amid much hype and fanfare last week. But some experts are already questioning whether the company will be able to sustain itself. The startup hopes to make it make it big by allowing virtually anyone to accept credit card payments by connecting a simple reader to a mobile device. Dorsey, Square's CEO, envisions the technology being used by small businesses, street vendors, and even individuals who want to sell a couch on Craigslist or collect money from a friend. However, some experts question whether the device will find...

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Can Video Kill the Credit-Card Form?

The days of tediously having to punch in credit-card details whenever you make an online purchase may be numbered, thanks to a new payment system that turns any webcam into a credit-card reader. Created by San Mateo, California-based Jumio, the new system, called Netswipe, not only makes online transactions simpler, but also improves security, says company CEO Daniel Mattes. The company's management team includes Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin. Netswipe prompts a customer to hold up his credit card to his webcam. An on-screen video feed guides the customer to hold it within a template so it can capture the details. "It takes about...

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An Ultra-High-Definition 3-D TV

  New electronics enable a jump in performance in a prototype display made by Samsung Samsung has shown off a prototype of an ultra-high-definition 3-D television. The 70-inch prototype uses a novel electronic circuitry to control eight million pixels. It's not likely to go into volume production soon, and there isn't any content to display on it, says Paul Semenza, a senior analyst at Display Search. But at last month's Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles, the display drew crowds and garnered a best-in-show award. Samsung is the latest TV manufacturer to demonstrate a technology that uses a type of backplane—the...

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Putting Location-Based Ads to Work

Ads targeted to a person's location are an advertiser's dream. The reality is more complicated. The spread of smart phones that track their owners' precise location seems like a wonderful development for advertisers. These devices could enable completely new kinds of digital marketing that make ads more relevant, meaningful, and effective. At the Location Based Marketing Summit, held last week in New York City, experts discussed the promise--and teething problems--facing this new section of the advertising industry. Search engines already use positioning information from smart phones to deliver search results--and search ads--that are...

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Using Wi-Fi for Navigating the Great Indoors

A phone can locate you indoors to within a few paces by combining Wi-Fi signals and the jolt of your footsteps. The arrival of GPS receivers in cell phones led to a boom in location-based apps and services—everything from maps that show you where you are, to new kinds of social networking. But step inside a building and GPS often fails. Now a startup has technology that enables devices to know their position inside a building to within a few steps, and it hopes this could lead to a second wave of indoor location-aware services. WiFiSLAM, which publically demonstrated its technology for the first time last week, enables a phone to...

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Rise of the Point-and-Click Botnet

In 2005, a Russian hacker group known as UpLevel developed Zeus, a point-and-click program for creating and controlling a network of compromised computer systems, also known as a botnet. Five years of development later, the latest version of this software, which can be downloaded for free and requires very little technical skill to operate, is one of the most popular botnet platforms for spammers, fraudsters, and people who deal in stolen personal information. Last week, the security firm NetWitness, based in Herndon, VA, released a report highlighting the kind of havoc the software can wreak. It documents a Zeus botnet that controlled...

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Most Malware Tied to 'Pay-Per-Install' Market

A shadowy industry lets spammers and other cybercriminals pay their way into your computer. New research suggests that the majority of personal computers infected with malicious software may have arrived at that state thanks to a bustling underground market that matches criminal gangs who pay for malware installations with enterprising hackers looking to sell access to compromised PCs. Pay-per-install (PPI) services are advertised on shadowy underground Web forums. Clients submit their malware—a spambot, fake antivirus software, or password-stealing Trojan—to the PPI service, which in turn charges rates from $7 to $180 per thousand successful...

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A New Kind of Smart-Phone Connection

Several smart-phone manufacturers are developing plans to launch U.S. handsets that can connect to other devices when tapped together, or act as electronic wallets by instantly paying for goods when waved over a reader.The technology to make this possible--Near Field Communications (NFC)--is a step beyond the contactless radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology used in many transit systems or security access cards for buildings. NFC uses the same high-frequency radio waves as RFID and can make a connection over a distance of up to around 10 meters. It is also compatible with existing RFID systems. But NFC devices can both send and receive...

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New System Swaps the Cash Register for an iPhone

Square, a new startup based in San Francisco and headed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, opened its doors amid much hype and fanfare last week. But some experts are already questioning whether the company will be able to sustain itself. The startup hopes to make it make it big by allowing virtually anyone to accept credit card payments by connecting a simple reader to a mobile device. Dorsey, Square's CEO, envisions the technology being used by small businesses, street vendors, and even individuals who want to sell a couch on Craigslist or collect money from a friend.However, some experts question whether the device will find a niche in the...

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Google Wallet: Who'll Buy In?

Google announced an app and a number of partnerships that could help it become a key gatekeeper in mobile electronic payments—a space that many expect to boom over the next few years.Google Wallet, announced today at an event in New York, is a app that lets users tap their smart-phone in stores to pay for purchases using near-field communication (NFC) technology—but only after they've entered their credit or debit card details. A related product called Google Offers will let users send coupons to their virtual wallets, via a Google search, for instance, or an advertising billboard using NFC.Ubiquitous and increasingly sophisticated smart phones...

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