Some people are entirely unaware of just how filthy their smartphones are. Other people know full well that smartphones are a hotbed for bacteria, but they still don’t bother to do anything about it. The PhoneSoap 3 UV Cell Phone Sanitizeris a device that was initially funded on Shark Tank that should be an essential accessory for every smartphone owner. It’s a box that blasts your phone with UV light, killing 99.99% of bacteria on both sides and the edges of your phone. Please, do yourself a favor and get one, they are $60 on Amazon.

Here’s more info from the product page:

•  AS SEEN ON SHARK TANK AND DISCOVERY CHANNEL.PhoneSoap’s revolutionary bacteria-zapping technology was featured on ABC’s Shark Tank and tested and proven on the Discovery Channel.

•. KILLS 99.99% OF BACTERIA WITH UV LIGHT.Our patented design is the only device that can thoroughly sanitize your entire phone. Sitting on a UV transparent plate and surrounded by scientifically proven germicidal UVC light and a reflective interior, PhoneSoap kills99.99% of all bacteria on your phone.

•  STAY HEALTHY.Our phones gather all the bacteria we touch throughout the day where they breed and grow. Our phones are Petri dishes in our pockets! Stay healthy by keeping your devices clean with PhoneSoap.

•  FITS AND CHARGES ANY PHONE. PhoneSoap 3 fits all phones, including the larger phones such as the iPhone 8 Plus. It also has two charging ports on the back of the device, a USB and USB-C. You already charge your phone every night. Now you can charge and sanitize at the same time. With PhoneSoap 3 you can charge a second device, such as a smartwatch, at the same time.

•  CLEAN WHATEVER FITS.While we have built PhoneSoap 3 around sanitizing phones, you can sanitize whatever fits inside. From pacifiers, smart watches and headphones to credit cards and keys.

British scientists have developed a self-contained and tamper-proof "quantum compass" that doesn't rely on GPS signals to provide a highly accurate measure of where it is in the world.

The compass is a quantum accelerometer that is capable of measuring tiny shifts in supercooled atoms and so calculate how far and how fast the device has moved. Having a device like the quantum compass aboard a ship, the captain knows exactly where his ship is without having to rely on orbiting satellites.

The system has been designed by quantum physicistsat Imperial College, London – who developed a laser system for cooling atoms down and at photonics and quantum technology specialist firm M Squared– which developed another laser system to act as an “optical ruler.” Their work has been funded by the UK's Ministry of Defense.

Although GPS satellites are a modern marvel and are used by just about everyone to identify their precise location, the fact is the system is not perfect.

A phone's GPS is accurate to roughly 15 feet, although military GPS devices can be accurate to centimeters. Then there is the fact that tall buildings will often throw a signal off and signals can be impaired by any large, dense object.

But that's not why the Ministry of Defense is interested in a quantum compass: its concern is that the GPS system is vulnerable to attack or deliberate disruption. A GPS signal could be spoofed or blocked for instance. When you're thinking about nuclear submarines, it's usually best to consider the worst.

“Pirates are now sophisticated enough to cause disruptions to ships’ GPS systems and lure them to rocks or take over and board them,” said Graeme Malcolm, the CEO of M Squared.

“They can be an even bigger issue in areas of defense and security, where the resilience and security of cities and countries are impacted. This new device is an absolute reference that goes down to the atomic level.”

Accuracy. This is not the first time that accelerometers have been used for navigation, but the reality is that such systems are not sufficiently accurate, meaning that as time goes on the system becomes increasingly out of whack and requires recalibration.

Not so with the quantum compass, according to its makers. Lasers are used to supercool atoms, and then another laser is used to act as "optical ruler" measuring how far those atoms have moved. At extremely low temperatures, atoms behave in a ‘quantum’ way, acting like both matter and waves.

Here's how Dr. Joseph Cotter, from the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial College, explained it: "When the atoms are ultra-cold, we have to use quantum mechanics to describe how they move, and this allows us to make what we call an atom interferometer."

As the atoms move, their wave properties are affected by the acceleration of the vehicle. The optical ruler can measure these minute changes very accurately and then with a few relatively simple equations it is possible to figure out exactly where you are.

Size. But this is not something you're going to find in your smartphone: the prototype system is about three-feet wide and high, and it is incredibly expensive.
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Plus, it can currently only measure in one plane. The scientists say they will soon be able to take measurements in three planes – making it an entirely independent super compass that can tell you where exactly it is at any point.

 Moore's law – the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years while the costs are halved. 
          Gordon Moore, Fairchild Semiconductor (1965)
 
"Moore's Law is over," says Mike Muller, chief technology officer at chip designer Arm, the Japanese-owned company whose processor cores are found inside most mobile phones.

Given Moore's Law has been the engine driving the breakneck pace at which computers have advanced over the past 50 years this statement might seem worrying.

"On one level it's true, but I'd say, certainly from my perspective and Arm's perspective, we don't care," he says.

Muller and his colleagues have good reasons for their indifference to the end of Moore's Law.

For one, the bulk of Arm-based processors are sold into the embedded computing market, where there is still plenty of scope for transistors to get smaller and chips to get faster.

But more importantly, Arm believes the regular boosts to computing performance that used to come from Moore's Law will continue and will instead stem from changes to how chips are designed.

Here are three ways that Arm expects processor design will evolve and advance.
 
1. 3D chips will continue to improve processor performance. Muller believes chip designers will continue to squeeze more power from processors by stacking more transistors and processor dies on top of each other.

"There's a whole bunch of stuff happening in 3D, whether that's within the silicon and 3D transistors stacking within a die, [or] stacking dies together," he said.

2. Computers will rely on increasingly specialized chips. Today's systems offload workloads to processors tailored to accelerate tasks. For example, offloading 3D rendering to GPUs or running trained machine-learning models on Google's TPUs, Muller predicts future systems will have an even more full range of specialized chips.

Greg Yeric, director of Future Silicon Technology for Arm Research, says there's plenty of runway to continue improving accelerators.

"For the next three to five years there's a lot to be gained just by making better CMOS-based machine learning," he says.

3. Computers will move beyond silicon chips. Soon, it's possible we will reach the limits of conventional materials and technologies used to build processors, such as the CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) chips used today, says Yeric.

At this point, the chips inside systems will become more diverse, with traditional CMOS chips sitting alongside more exotic forms of information processors.

"We're going to start to see accelerators that are hardware differentiated," says Yeric.

"So, you can have a special kind of transistor that does one thing really well, [which] doesn't necessarily do all [computing] well, and you can have a chip that bolts onto a regular CMOS chip.

"We have widgets that vastly outperform CMOS on certain things. It could be photonics; it could be spintronics; it could be new memory.

"Architecting those systems is going to be a bit more of a challenge. However, I really don't see that we're going to have a slowdown at the system level, it's just that the systems won't look like a big monolithic piece of CMOS."

Muller says to expect the likes of neuromorphic, spintronics, and even quantum photonic chips to find their way inside systems.

"There is going to be in the 10-15-year timeframe new technology to take us beyond CMOS," he says.
"Products, as bought by people like you and me, are just going to keep getting better and better.
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"Our jobs [chip designers] might be getting harder and harder, but from a consumer's perspective there isn't going to be a slowing down," he says.

Google might have just made itself the most significant example of how security keyscan work better than other forms of multi-factor authentication. According to Krebs on Security,ever since Google required over 85,000 of its employees to use physical security keys instead of one-time codes in 2017, it hasn't had a single case of account takeover from phishing. "We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google," a company spokesperson said. "Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time."

Security keys like the one made by Yubikey give you a way to log into a website by merely plugging it in and pressing a button. You don't even need to type in your password anymore, much less generate a one-time code. While the method has its weakness, considering it relies on a physical item you can lose, it's considered safer than two-factor authentication, especially the type that sends you codes via SMS. Hackers could intercept messages sent to your device, after all, and gain entry to your account that way.
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Unfortunately, Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) – that's what you call the type of multi-factor authentication that uses physical keys – support is pretty limited at the moment. You can already depend on it for protection on Chrome, but you'd have to manually activate it on Firefox by going to "about:config" first. Microsoft won't be rolling out U2F compatibility for Edgeuntil later this year, and Apple has yet to reveal whether Safari will ever support the standard. Further, only a few websites and services can use it, including Facebook and password managers such as Keepass and LastPass. It remains to be seen if Google's positive experience with the standard can help it become more widespread, but it's the kind of meaningful testimonial that could give it a massive boost.

Installing solar panels in your home can lower your environmental footprint and your monthly bills, but there are also some disadvantages you should know. Here are seven issues to consider.

1 Solar Panels Don’t Require Maintenance.Despite what solar panel makers may tell you, maintenance of the panels is not a problem once you have them installed. Solar panel manufacturers try to get people to lease solar panels, insisting that then the homeowner won’t have to worry about maintenance. Don’t let this get to you! The only thing you have to do is keep the panels clear of debris, by using a garden hose, out of direct sunlight, a few times a year.

2 SRECs and Tax Credits Aren’t Forever.Solar panel manufacturers will push you to invest in their product for many reasons, including the promise of SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Credit) and tax credits. Every Megawatt-hour of electricity produced by your solar panels results in an SREC. In some states, SRECs are sold to utility companies, who then pay homeowners for each SREC they purchase. While such credits are a great incentive, they’re not a forever promise. For example, the Federal Solar Tax Credit will end for home solar in 2021.

3 The Effectiveness of Your Solar Panels Drops Each Year.It’s not a significant drop, but solar panel manufacturers aren’t going to be quick to disclose that efficiency of panels drops each year slightly. For panels manufactured after 2000, a 20-year-old panel will produce around 92% of its original power. 

4 You Should Be Careful of Your Warranty.It’s essential you do research on the solar panel manufacturers out there and hone in on which one has the best warranty. Most warranties last for 20 to 25 years, but for them to follow through, the manufacturer must still be in business. As always, choose a manufacturer with a solid reputation.

5 The Production of Solar Panels Creates Pollution.Solar is held up as an energy-saving, environmentally-friendly powerhouse. And while that’s undoubtedly true in many cases, the transportation and installation of solar energy systems are linked with the emission of greenhouse gases. Toxic materials and hazardous products have also been associated with the manufacturing process.

6 You Might Not Want Solar If You Have Low Electricity Costs.Solar is enticing for many reasons, most notably for financial and environmental sustainability. But if you don’t have substantial electricity costs, to begin with, you might want to reconsider investing in solar, since, if your electricity costs are low, your solar savings will be as well. Along with the size of your home and your usage, where you live also has an impact on your energy costs. For instance, in Louisiana, the cost of electricity is 27% lower than the national average.
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7 You May Not Be a Good Candidate for Solar Energy. Along with living in a state with low electricity costs, there are other things to consider regarding solar energy. For instance, you might need to cut down trees that shade and beautify your home, and that can be very expensive. You may not even have the right roof to support solar panels structurally. These aren’t topics that solar panel companies are going to put right out there, but you should think of all of these things as you consider your options. Are you a good candidate for solar? Here’s what you need to know.

No doorman? No problem. Amazon introduced a new delivery solution for apartment complexes that promises to deliver both convenience and safety (alongside your actual package, of course). Meet Hub by Amazon, a container that allows for the storage of packages so that they’re not just strewn about a lobby, or worse yet, potentially stolen. The Hubs look just like traditional Amazon lockers, but instead of being installed in public spaces and businesses, they’re instead located in apartment and condominium complexes.

Best of all, the Hub isn’t just for Amazon deliveries – instead, if your mother wants to FedEx a care package to you while you live your big city dreams, the package can reside safely in Hub until you have finished with your 12-hour workday. Neither senders nor recipients have to make any specifications when it comes to getting their packages delivered – you still input your regular shipping address, and the Hub merely serves as a temporary stopover until you return home. When you’re ready to pick up, use a personalized pickup code to open the corresponding door and access your delivery.

“We’re always striving to make things easier for our customers. Building on Amazon’s expertise in locker solutions, the Hub addresses frustrations from property owners, carriers, and residents concerning package delivery,” Patrick Supanc, director, Amazon Worldwide Lockers and Pickup, said in a statement. “Now half a million residents in some of the premier properties in the country have access to the Hub, Amazon’s latest delivery solution. The Hub simplifies delivery for residents, offering quick and secure access to packages, day or night. For delivery providers, it offers a single, convenient location for package drop-off and gives property managers time and resources back to focus on other priorities.”

This could serve as a huge help to folks who live in buildings with tricky delivery schedules. You will no longer have to worry about staying home to wait on a package to arrive, nor will you have to remember to ask your building staff about that delivery that was supposed to come last week. Building managers will likely also appreciate the convenience offered by Hub – rather than requiring property staff to declutter a lobby or send packages to the proper apartment unit; everything can be centralized in Hub.
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Already, Amazon says that several of the largest residential property owners in the U.S. have signed up for Hub and that more than 500,000 apartment dwellers already have access to the amenity. If you’re interested in petitioning your building to include one of these handy lockers, you can request Hub by Amazon at the newly dedicated homepage.

People who buy refurbished phones and laptops choose these products for two reasons. They want to add something to their vintage collection, or they merely want more by paying less. A large number of people fall into the second category where the aim is to get more features, better hardware at a low price. Whether it’s a bike, car or an electronic device, when it comes to buying repaired or used items online, the first question that comes to mind is “Should I buy a refurbished product or settle down for fewer features with a brand new product?” Here’s a guide to help you go through this process.

What is refurbishment? It is a process of distribution of electronic items which were returned to a vendor or the manufacturer. Remember that the reason behind such returns can be anything from faulty hardware components to a damaged body part or the user not willing to keep the phone. 

First things first.No matter how inexpensive the deal is, always check who refurbished the product. In some cases, manufacturers sell refurbished products and refurbishment is done by the manufacturer only. In other cases, vendors who sell in a marketplace also get phones repaired from a third-party supplier. Make sure that you ask about which company has restored the device and make sure you’ve checked that company’s track record.

Warranty. Check the warranty that’s offered on the repaired item. If there’s no warranty available for the product, you should prepare yourself to see the product die soon after its arrival. This is one of the biggest mistakes people make with refurbished phones.

Almost every brand new smartphone and laptop comes with a year-long warranty, but with refurbished products, the warranty can be somewhere between zero to six months. Check if the product you like has at least 3 to 6 months warranty because buying a refurbished smartphone or laptop with one week or 10-day warranty is like inviting trouble.

When to buy & when not to buy. You should look for the existence of the product in the market. Let’s say you are getting a good deal on a laptop and the seller is giving you a warranty of three months. It can be a good deal only if the manufacturer is still making the product and the components are likely to be available in the market for a long time. Don’t buy anything that is out of production, especially electronic items.
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Many companies sell refurbished phones and laptops directly as a way to clear their inventory and make some money on the old stuff. Before buying anything, check the seller’s track record and make sure that you’re buying from a reliable company who takes responsibility for sale transactions.

Remember that Russian router malware warningfrom last week? The situation is even worse than we originally thought, and a whole lot more router owners are going to have to factory-reset their devices and install firmware updates.

Not only are many more Linksys, MicroTik, Netgear and TP-Link routers vulnerable to the VPNFilter malware, according a recent report from Cisco Talos labs, but several Asus and D-Link models are now also thought to be vulnerable, as well as a couple of Ubiquiti routers and individual Huawei, Upvel and ZTE devices. In all, nearly 70 devices are impacted, including QNAP network-attached-storage drives.

The malware itself has a previously unnoticed capability: It can stage a man-in-the-middle attackon your web traffic, altering what you see online and possibly hiding other nefarious deeds.

"They can manipulate everything going through the compromised device," a Cisco Talos researcher told Ars Technica. "They can modify your bank-account balance so that it looks normal while at the same time they're siphoning off money."

How to Protect Yourself. To really be protected from VPNFilter, you need to first fully update your router's firmware, then write down all your Wi-Fi network names and passwords, and finally factory-reset your router.
Once you've done all that, change the router's administrative username and password, then recreate the original network names and access passwords so that your Wi-Fi-enabled devices can reconnect without trouble.

To be safe, ALL routers should be updated and factory-reset because of the VPNFilter malware, despite that being an arduous process, because we don't know where this is going to end.

The malware seems to infect only devices that are known to have had security flaws, all of which have fixes available. If you've kept up on your router patches, or your router patches itself automatically, you probably haven't been infected. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing for sure.

Only a factory reset will remove the malware, which contains a beachhead module that survives regular reboots; only firmware patches will prevent you from being infected again. Ten days ago, the FBI took down a server from which the beachhead module got instructions to download additional malware components, but it appears that a fallback mechanism lets the beachhead module use other sources.

You might want to think twice before plugging your iPhone into a friend’s laptop for a quick charge. 
Security researchers have discovered an all-new type of iOS hack called “trustjacking” that uses a little-known Wi-Fi feature to access a device’s data, even when the targeted device isn’t in the same location anymore.

The hack works this way: 

             1) An iPhone user plugs into the USB port on a friend’s computer.

             2) iOS asks if you want to trust the computer and mentions that it will have access to your data.

             3) You can then enable iTunes Wi-Fi Sync from the PC giving the devices the ability to communicate
​                 anytime they’re on the same network. Hence the name “trustjacking.”

iTunes Wi-Fi Sync is a useful feature when you’re at home and connected to a network you trust. But researchers at Symantec say, “everything is possible,” as far as attacks go if you trust the wrong computer.

The Discovery of Trustjacking. “We discovered this by mistake actually,” said Symantec’s Adi Sharabani in an interview with Wired.” Roy was doing research, and he connected his iPhone to his computer to access it. But accidentally he realized that he was not connected to his own phone. He was connected to one of his team members’ phones who had connected their mobile device to Roy’s desktop a few weeks before. So, Roy started to dig into what exactly he could do and find out if he were an attacker.”

Once your iPhone is synced to a hostile computer, the attacker could install malware on your phone or initiate a backup to pull all your photos, apps and text messages. Hackers could also use the flaw to watch your screen in real-time and take screenshots that sync back to their computer.

The good news is researchers haven’t found any instances of trustjacking attacks out in the wild yet. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist though. Apple tweaked the Wi-Fi Sync feature with iOS 11 so that it asks for the device’s passcode before trusting. Researchers say Apple needs to do more though to let users see what networks they’ve given trust to. 

If you’re worried that you may have given a malicious computer access to your iPhone you can scrub all your connections by going to Settings >> General >> Reset >> Reset Location & Privacy.

A new lidar sensor could equip thousands of driverless cars with the sensing abilities required to drive at high speeds on the open road.

Lidar has become the primary way most driverless cars sense the world around them, bouncing laser light off nearby objects to create 3-D maps of their surroundings.

For years, the industry leader in lidar has been Velodyne, which builds some of the most expensive, ultra-high-resolution sensors available. But the rapid growth of self-driving vehicle research prompted other firms to start making them too – among them, a startup called Luminar, which was set up by Stanford drop-out Austin Russell and came out of stealth last year.

Luminar’s technology is different to other lidar systems. It uses a longer wavelength of light to operate at higher powers, allowing it to see darker objects over longer distances. It’s also able to zoom in on areas of specific interest.

But its sensors, which use a mechanical mirror system and expensive indium gallium arsenide semiconductors, were difficult and pricey to produce. Early units cost at least tens of thousands of dollars and required an entire day of human labor to assemble.

Over the last year, Russell, who was one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2017, says the firm has taken steps to change that. It acquired a chip design firm called Black Forest Engineering, hired consumer electronics experts, and set up its manufacturing complex in Orlando – all with the aim of building its sensor at commercial scale.

As a result, Russell says that the latest version of the sensor is approaching being auto-grade, meaning it should be ready for extreme temperatures, inclement weather, and other adverse conditions a production car might be exposed to (though it’s yet to be certified as such). The careful redesign of its laser detector chip, meanwhile, has cut its cost from tens of thousands of dollars to just $3, and automation means the sensors can now be built in eight minutes.

All of that means Luminar reckons it can offer a set of sensors for “a few thousand” dollars, Russell says. At the same time, it’s also boosted the specs, so the sensor can detect objects that are 250 meters off—enough for 7 seconds of reaction time at 75mph.

Ingmar Posner, an associate professor of information engineering at the University of Oxford and founder of the university’s autonomous-driving spinoff Oxbotica, says that the specifications and price point of the sensor “sound great.” But he also points out that the price will need to fall further if the sensors are to be used in affordable consumer vehicles.

That could yet happen. Russell points out that the sensor cost is related to the scale of production, and by the end of the year Luminar plans to be building 5,000 of its sensors every quarter. That’s a lot – more than the 10,000 sensors that competitor Velodyne planned to build last year – and would give it enough, Russell claims, to equip every autonomous test car on the roads by the end of this year.

The major hurdle to that kind of market dominance is convincing other research groups and automakers to switch from their existing sensors – something that would require rewriting control software and re-mapping entire cities so cars can navigate using the new sensors. Russell likens the situation to “ripping off a Band-Aid,” because it will need to happen at some point as carmakers switch to using auto-grade, rather than experimental, sensors.
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What remains to be seen for Luminar, though, is just how soon that Band-Aid gets pulled.