Hands-on with Verizon's modular Moto Z and Z Force Droid Edition

BY RAYMOND WONG

Motorola's new modular smartphones — the Moto Z and Moto Z Force, both branded with Verizon's "Droid Edition" moniker, are almost here and they look really, really hot.

As revealed at Lenovo Tech World, the two Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow-powered smartphones continue the trend of modular phones started by LG's G5.

Through a 16-dot magnetic pin connector located on the back of the phones, users can attach add-on modules such as a JBL speaker, Kate Spade-branded battery pack, or InstaShare Projector to enhance their capabilities beyond the internal specs.

                              JBL speaker module

                                Projector module

Both the Moto Z and Z Force are respectable flagship phones with 5.5-inch Quad HD displays (2,560 x 1,440 resolution with 535 ppi), Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of 64GB of storage (expandable via microSD up to 256GB). 

There's a fingerprint sensor below the screens and the phones come with the new reversible USB Type-C port.The only real differences between the phones are the dimensions, display durability, rear cameras and battery life. 

The Moto Z comes with a 13-megapixel rear camera with f/1.8 aperture, laser autofocus, OIS and a dual-LED flash, while the Moto Z Force has a higher resolution 21-megapixel camera, which also comes with a f/1.8 aperture, laser autofocus, OIS and dual-LED flash. Both phones have a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

The slightly thicker and heavier Moto Z Force (0.28 inches versus the 0.20-inch Moto Z) comes with a larger 3,500 mAh battery. The Moto Z only features a 2,600 mAh battery.

The Moto Z Force also has a more durable shatterproof display like the Droid Turbo 2, which means the screen is shielded by several additional layers to prevent cracks when dropped.

At a media preview event in New York City, I got to try out the phones and I walked away impressed with the sleek metal and glass designs and smooth performance.

In particular, the Moto Z is so pretty. It's ultra-thin at 0.20 inches thick and I did a quick bend test and the phone didn't flex at all. Good stuff.The software was as expected. Since the phones are Verizon-exclusives in the U.S., they come with tons of pre-installed Verizon apps that you can't remove. Ugh.

You'll also notice in the photos the two phones don't have headphone jacks. Yep, Motorola ditched the headphone jack before Apple. Instead, users will have to pick up a pair of USB Type-C headphones or go wireless with Bluetooth headphones.

The modular "Moto Mods" as the company is calling them are easy to attach and detach. 

I didn't get to try out the cameras too much outside of the showroom, but from what I saw, the cameras are quick to launch, autofocus and shoot. I'm not in love with the huge camera "hump" on the back, but I can see it was a pragmatic design choice for two reasons: better camera sensor and a way to hold the modules in place.

The fingerprint sensors are also fast and responsive — they appear to be the same ones used on the Moto G4 and G4 Plus, which is great.

Based on everything I've seen so far, the Moto Z and Z Force look to be excellent phones.

Moto z is only 5.2mm thick (top) versus the moto z force.

The moto z is the thinner than the iphone 6s.

comes with USB type-c ports.

Modules are easily added on via magnetic contacts.

comes in several beautiful colors.

13-megapixel camera on the moto z and 21-megapixel camera on the moto z force.

Modules do add more bulk though.

The JBL speaker module cost $80 and comes with a kickstand.

kind of a fingerprint magnet.

The best tech for living your freest life

BY SLING TV

Freedom is crucial to happiness. We live our best lives when we feel like we’re untethered, that we can do what we want and what’s best for us without a ton of obstacles standing in the way.

And these days, contrary to what some curmudgeonly grandfather figures may believe, technology is giving us more freedom in our daily lives.   

Here are a few apps and services that are helping.    

If This Then That (IFTTT)   

This super convenient app will free up some time and save you a lot of effort by using "recipes" to connect different apps and services in a way that makes them both more usual and generally more efficient — and it works with more than 300 apps and services.    

It’s pretty easy to set up, too. All you have to do is define the "If this, then that" mechanism to make a recipe. For example, you can save your Instagram photos to Dropbox, have your Android phone automatically muted when you arrive at work, get notifications from ESPN with your favorite sports teams final scores, automatically Tweet your Facebook status updates and many, many more. 

Freedom  

What can be more freeing than an app that is literally called "Freedom?"   

The Internet is, of course, a wonderful thing. Its uses are essentially infinite. But so are its distractions, and sometimes it’s best to disconnect for a while when you really need to be productive and get things done. Freedom eliminates these distractions by blocking the Internet, social media and apps on your iPhone, iPad and/or computer for a specified amount of time. So you can get done what you need to get done, and then reward yourself afterward with some cat videos or Instagram browsing.   

Sling TV   

Freedom from cable television is pretty liberating. Gone are the days when you’d have to pay a ridiculous amount of money specifically to be able to watch live TV. Now, there’s Sling TV, a service that enables you to watch popular channels both live and on-demand without a cable box, the often-terrible customer service and the other negatives that come with being tethered to a cable subscription. You can watch on your television, computer, tablet or smart phone or other streaming devices from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Sling TV starts at $20 per month and includes what are widely regarded as some of the most popular networks (ESPN, AMC, CNN, etc.). You can tailor the channels you have access to by snagging a more robust package or by adding extra channels based on your interests, such as comedy, sports or programming for kids, among other Extras.   

The service has also recently expanded its lineup to include popular channels like FX, Comedy Central, BET, Nick Jr., Bravo and more with Sling Blue. Customers in select markets also have access to content from their local Fox, NBC and ABC feeds (as well as their local regional sports networks). 

Sling TV also recently announced an exclusive deal for Apple TV fans. Right now new Sling TV customers can snag an Apple TV device for $89 (marked way down from its usual $149) when you prepay for three months of Sling TV.      

Instapaper   

Throughout the day, we’ll often come across something online or through social media that we want to stop and read and watch, but we might not have the time, or might not want to stop the momentum of what we’re accomplishing. However, we don’t want to close out of the content and try to remember to revisit it later on. That’s where Instapaper comes in. The app enables you to save whatever you find on the Internet so you can check it out at your leisure. It also syncs what you save to your computer, iPhone, iPad, Android and/or Kindle, so you can read anything from anywhere on pretty much any device you want.  

Dark Sky   

Local weather plays a pretty significant role in our daily lives. It dictates how we dress, what we do and where we do it — so knowing as much about current and impending whether frees you up to plan your life accordingly. While predicting the weather has never been a 100 percent reliable science, the Dark Sky app is about as close as it gets. It gives you hyper-local weather information and precise forecasts so you’ll know the exact minute when rain or other inclement weather will start and stop in your area. And freedom from getting caught outside in a torrential downpour is a wonderful thing.

Nissan's autonomous minivan will go on sale in Japan in August

BY NICK JAYNES

Nissan's big push to offer 10 autonomous models in dealerships by 2020 has officially begun.

Nissan announced that it will sell its first car with autonomous tech onboard, the Serena minivan, to Japanese customers starting in August.

The Serena debuts the brand's autonomous driving system called ProPILOT. It can drive autonomously in a single lane on the freeway, controlling throttle, brake and steering. As Nissan puts it, this eases "driver workload in heavy highway traffic and long commutes."

This compares to semi-autonomous driving systems currently offered in the U.S., which fall into the Level 2 range of autonomy like Mercedes' Drive Pilot andTesla Autopilot. That means, unlike with the Tesla Autopilot system, drivers of the Nissan Serena can safely remove their hands from the steering wheel without endangering safety.By comparison to the beta-tested Autopilot, which can be operated virtually willy nilly, ProPILOT's operation is limited to a single lane on a freeway (identified by GPS) and to speeds between 30 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour) and 100 kph (62 mph).

In 2018, Nissan will unveil an even more robust version of ProPILOT that can automatically change lanes on freeways. Nissan says it will implement a system that can operate fully autonomously in urban environments by 2020.

don't get hooked on the joy of playing 'pokémon go'.it won't last

BY LANCE ULANOFF

Are we allowed to feel joy anymore? 

A level of cynicism will eventually infect the joy of playing Pokémon Go, until we can no longer experience the happiness of finding a Squirtle on a park bench without anticipating the inevitable letdown.

Pokémon Go is not the best game ever, nor is it the most entertaining, but it has generated more communal joy in less time than any digital experience in recent memory.

Which has led us to want to tear it down. Maybe want isn’t the right word. The fact is, we will tear it down. It’s what we do.

SEE ALSO: 8 'Pokémon Go' tricks that'll help you become a Pokémon master

Viral phenomenons such as Pokémon Go are often treated like the opiate of the masses: something that makes us all feel good, but is also probably bad for us in some fundamental way.

Having everybody agree on anything, especially in today’s increasingly polarized society, is rare. So many people simultaneously embracing what is, in essence, a child's video game, is rare. Of course, those of us who play Pokémon Goknow it's more.

There's surely something primal about the treasure hunt, a trigger for the dormant hunter-gatherer part of our brains. 

With its cartoonish yet real GPS-generated map overlay, Pokémon Go turns our mundane world into a fantastic landscape full of hidden wonders. Hiding Poké Balls in minor landmarks turns oft ignored signposts into momentary monuments worthy of intense, if fleeting, scrutiny. Finding a Rattata in the office and then throwing a virtual Poké Ball at it until you catch it is a perfect midday distraction — as long as your boss isn't watching.

If you're not playing Pokémon Go on your phone... wait a minute, of course you are.

The phases of viral

We're still more or less in the honeymoon phase, which came close on the heels of the discovery phase, when many of us found out about Pokémon Go (was that really only a week ago?) and downloaded it for the first time. It might be argued that these tiny epochs are one and the same. After installing Pokémon Go, it doesn’t take long to catch your first Pokémon. The time between discovery and honeymoon can last a matter of minutes.Of course, Pokémon Go would not be as compelling if not for its meteoric growth, which propelled the gameplay into a massive shared experience. We're all Pokemon Trainers, we're all talking about the same thing at once. We're all running around Union Square trying to catch a Weedle. Twitter exploded withPokémon Go references and a thousand online stories reflected our new obsession.

We are, in a sense, tearing Pokémon Go apart with interest. Every attribute is examined, every quirk illustrated. Every unusual moment that happens to take place when someone is playing Pokémon Go is worthy of the spotlight.

Just as quickly, the cracks started to show. Tales of overuse, abuse and pure stupidity soon spread.

And we started to ask, “This thing you love, what if it’s hurting you?”

We train too much

As I read the latest round of Pokémon Go concerns, I recalled the fate of Flappy Bird, another recent near global phenomenon that died before its time. That game was as simple as Pokémon Go is sophisticated. It offered retro, early '90s jaggy graphics and approximately one gaming action. Yet we loved it and endless stories were written about how to play it. Then the creator flipped out and pulled the plug. He couldn’t take the laser-like attention of millions of Flappy Bird users, some of whom could not control themselves and began blaming the game developer for their own obsession with the game.

Pokémon Go is protected from such a flameout by a number of critical factors. It's owned by a real company, Niantic, and the brand is owned by, among others, game and console maker Nintendo. Unlike Flappy Bird, Pokémon is already beloved by millions; this game is just an expertly crafted brand extension. There is no one person to pull the plug and considering the money-making engine it's already become thanks to micro-transactions, it’s unlikely anyone will.

Even so, the end of joy is on the horizon.

Viral, but not in a good way

Such intense use on such a massive scale inevitably reveals the creator’smistakes and miscalculations. A feature like the Lure, which is supposed to attract more virtual Pokémon ends up also attracting criminals who use it to lure unsuspecting targets. Despite the admonitions to pay attention to your surroundings, the game is designed to make us stare at our tiny mobile phone screens while we walk around parks, homes and busy sidewalks. How could people not get hurt? On the flat-out mistake front, Pokémon Go's big privacy blunder, where the Google sign-in gave access to all your Google data, is already bearing the kind of fruit Eve handed Adam: a possible congressional investigation — Senator Al Franken would like to know more about the game's privacy practices.

The ratio of positive stories to negative has already started to shift. For every, "Pokémon is bringing families together" write-up, there's another video of some idiot falling into a lake while chasing a Pikachu.However, unless Pokémon Go is proven to cause cancer in lab rats somehow trained to play the game, I don’t think warnings about the potential dangers of playing an expertly crafted game that blends bug-like cartoon characters with our real world will stop us from playing.

Nor will the joy killers who seek to transform Pokémon Go into a bit of slight entertainment hiding a terrible evil.

No, it'll will be the same people who love the game who will usher in the final phase of virality (the one that comes after our current Obsession): Disinterest.

We will eventually stop caring.

Our interest will not be sapped by anything or anyone. The joy we feel now is real, but it simply can’t last. At some point, the magic of discovery will not seem as magical and, bit by bit, Pokémon Go will recede from the conversation as the cynicism and concern grows and we run out of things to say about it on social and digital media.

Six months from now, we may still be playing Pokémon Go, but that joy of discovery, that pleasure of shared entertainment, the sheer fun of a viral phenomenon will be gone. 

Juno probe’s tiny sensors to perform big science around Jupiter

by Devin Coldewey

One of the striking things about the Juno probe, I remarked to one of its creators, is its simple and streamlined design — compared to other spacecraft, at least. The engineers had a hell of a time packing everything in there, but it helps when critical sensors have shrunk in size from “breadbox” to “soup cracker.”

Nikolaos Paschalidis, now at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center, has been working on miniaturizing those chips for years.

“Before my work, you had electronics that were very big – over two pounds,” he said in a NASA news release. More size means fewer instruments fit on the craft, and more weight means they take up more of the payload — both restrictions that surely chafed the designers of early probes like Voyager and Galileo.

These Application Specific Integrated Circuits, or ASICs, are purpose built (as you might guess from the name) and, in Juno’s case, designed to be highly resistant to radiation, of which it will get a major dose in its travels around Jupiter.

With Juno, thanks to the work of Paschalidis and others, designers had more freedom. Although even at Saltine size it was no joke getting everything in there, Principal Investigator Scott Bolton told TechCrunch in an interview just before the craft entered Jupiter’s orbit.

“I can’t tell you how long it took,” he said. “We had teams of engineers and scientists all trying to solve this jigsaw puzzle. And then when we got the boxes in, we realized we had to put the cables in.”

But the result is a craft with a gratifyingly wide array of instruments. Bolton was excited about the brand-new microwave radiometer, but the extra-small ASICs on Juno are part of its Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument, or JEDI. This set of tools detects — what do you think? — energetic particles, with precision greater than a billionth of a second, using sensors you could fit in your coin pocket.

Juno is in the faraway part of its wide elliptical orbit around Jupiter right now, but the science instruments are warmed up and ready to do some science towards the end of the month when the probe makes its first real pass at the planet.

How To Check Virus Online By Uploading File?

By:Harsh Agrawal

Do you sell any digital goods online? Have you received any complaint from few users saying their Antivirus is blocking the file?

Here at ShoutMeLoud, I sell few e-books (Free + Paid) & plugins. I use Mac OS, as it’s more secure than Windows. Needless to say, I’m little paranoid about security. I ensure my system remains safe by using inbuilt Mac Firewall & stay away from downloading files from unreliable sources.

Getting back to why I ended up searching for online virus scanner:

ShoutMeLoud free WordPress Guide eBook has been downloaded more than 5000 times and in the past 2 months, I received 2 emails saying that their antivirus software (Avast to be precise) disabled the file access. Here is the email that I received:

 

This was something unlikely to happen & I started digging more into this issue. The very first step was to check if the file is infected or not. (Do read the second section to learn about virus false positive detection).

My requirement was simple, as I needed one tool that could check the database of all popular antiviruses & detect any viruses, worms, trojans or malware in my uploaded file.

While I was researching for the tool, I landed on a pretty awesome tool & also some interesting findings that you will be learning in this article.

VirusTotal: An online Tool to check a file to Viruses or Malware

VirusTotal is a free online virus checker tool where you can upload any file & it would test it for the presence of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware. Along with file upload, you can also check any online website/URL & find out if they contain any viruses. This is useful for bloggers as they often get warning that their site has been compromised, and with Virustotal you can quickly check your page to clarify your suspicion.

The tool is pretty easy to use. You can head to their homepage; click on “choose file” to upload any file from your computer (Up to 128 MB) & click on Scan it.

 

The tool will analyze your file with all popular antiviruses & show you the result on the next page along with detected warning. Here is what happened when I scanned one of my ebooks:

 

Even though Virustotal suggested this file to be harmless, but Avast anti-virus was showing “PDF:UrlMal-inf [Trj]” error. That means any user who has Avast anti-virus will get a warning just like Digitalud got one above.

What is PDF:UrlMal-inf [Trj] & how to fix?

This is where things get interesting as I started researching more about PDF:UrlMal-inf [Trj] warning. After a bit of probing, I got the solution from Avast official support as many other users faced the similar warning.

One user who was using iCloud to create a To-do list for himself also got such warning. Here is what Kevin experienced:

 

So the issue is with the Web shield module of Avast Antivirus & a response from Avast staff made the situation clear.

This is what Avast support staff suggested:

Hello,

This detection means that the PDF contains some URL that is blocked. For more info send us the PDF through https://support.avast.com/ -> Avast Virus Lab

Usually, a PDF file has many weblinks & if there is any link that is blocked by Avast, they will block the file access with the warning. This issue could happen with any Word doc or any file that contains a hyperlink to a website that is blocked by Avast database.

At this moment, I couldn’t find a resource online which could let me check which URL is that, so here is what I did & hope it would help anyone in a similar condition like me.

Head over to Avast support & create a support ticket. Let them know about the issue & also attach the file that is blocked by Avast or showing PDF: UrlMal-inf [Trj] issue in VirusTotal. This is what I emailed them:

 

Now, all you need to do is wait for Avast support team to reply back & you can remove the URL that is blocked by them. In Kevin’s case, it was a popular site called Couchsurfing.com.

Another workaround:

Here is another workaround which would work when you have few links in your pdf or doc file. You can remove all links & add them one by one. After adding every link, either use VirusTotal or scan it using Avast online scanner to find the link that is blocking. At this moment, the only suggestion is to remove the link from your file & notify the Website owner about this issue. In most of the cases, the website owner will reach out to Avast team to whitelist their website.

Bonus tip for Website owners who are blocked by Avast Web-shield:

Most of the time Avast blocks a website because your server I.P. might be listed in Anti-spam database. This is very common with shared hosting users who are sharing same I.P. with over hundreds of other sites. You can check using Blacklist checker tool to see if your server I.P. is banned in any of the spam databases.

Read: Does shared hosting affect Website SEO?

Here is how to check if your website I.P. is blacklisted.

• Go to this online ping tool & in the host name type your website URL without www. (Ex: ShoutMeLoud.com)
• Copy the I.P. address that it pinged. For example here is what I got for ShoutMeLOud 64 bytes from 104.28.18.5: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=5.25ms, and 104.28.18.5 is the I.P address.
• Go to Blacklist checker tool & paste the I.P. address & click on check blacklists. If you see any warning message, it’s time for you to either get a dedicated I.P. or change your hosting. Here is what result for ShoutMeLoud looks like:
  

Oops! Wearables can leak your PINs and passwords

by Natasha Lomas

The security nightmare posed by the Internet of Things isn’t just related to the lack of expertise in the types of companies adding connectivity to gizmos and gadgets.

It’s the sensitivity of the connected sensors, strewn hither and thither, opening up potential attack vectors for determined hackers. Hence the need for really robust security thinking to lock down the risks.

To wit: wearables.

Collaborative research conducted by a team from the department of electrical and computing engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology and Binghamton University in New York State, has demonstrated how a wearable device such as a smartwatch could end up compromising a user’s PIN thanks to the motion sensing data it generates.

The team combined wearable sensor data harvested from more than 5,000 key entry traces made by 20 adults with an algorithm they created to infer key entry sequences based on analyzing hand movements, applying the technique to different types of keypads (including ATM style and Qwerty keypad variants) and using three different wearables (two smartwatches and a nine-axis motion-tracking device).

The result? They were able to crack PINs with 80 per cent accuracy on the first attempt, and more than 90 per cent accuracy after three ties… Ouch. Albeit, I guess you can say wearables are useful for something then.

Here’s a description of the work from their research paper:

In this work, we show that a wearable device can be exploited to discriminate mm-level distances and directions of the user’s fine-grained hand movements, which enable attackers to reproduce the trajectories of the user’s hand and further to recover the secret key entries. In particular, our system confirms the possibility of using embedded sensors in wearable devices, i.e., accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, to derive the moving distance of the user’s hand between consecutive key entries regardless of the pose of the hand. Our Backward PIN-Sequence Inference algorithm exploits the inherent physical constraints between key entries to infer the complete user key entry sequence.

The research was reported earlier by IEEE Spectrum. One of the researchers, professor Yan Wang, told IEEE it’s the volume of sensors in wearables that enables the technique to work by providing “sufficient information” of hand movements. So clearly more can in fact mean less (secure).

To eliminate errors when trying to calculate distance moved based on acceleration he said the team worked backwards from the final movement in an input sequence, which was likely to be pressing enter on the keypad. Allowing them to translate the rest of the key presses.

The attack method would not require a hacker to be nearby when a person inputs their PIN, rather the necessary data packets could be stolen by a wireless sniffer placed close to a keypad to capture Bluetooth packets being sent from the wearable to a smartphone. Or via malware installed on the wearable or smartphone to intercept the data and send it on to the attacker.

And while most PINs are just a handful of digits, the team believes the technique could actually be used to power a full keylogger.

“This can be extended to snoop keystrokes and interpret people’s passwords or what has been typed,” professor Yingying Chen, another of the researchers involved in the project, told TechCrunch. “We have another research project about this.”

“Both smart watches and fitness bands pose a risk,” she added of the overall vulnerability.

One way to avoid the risk of your smartwatch or fitness bangle leaking your PIN to a determined hacker is to input the digits with your other, non-wearable-wearing hand. Chen confirmed this would prevent the technique from working.

An alternative strategy for those who do wear a wearable on the hand they enter PINs and passwords is to add some ‘noise’ to the operation — by randomly jerking their hand between key presses, said Wang. Which won’t look at all weird.

Fixing the vulnerability at source would require wearable manufacturers to better secure sensing data being generated by the devices, according to Wang.

He added they could also obscure the signal being leaked by the sensors by injecting noise into the data so it could not be so easily reverse engineered.

On the signal obfuscation front, at its WWDC developer conference this summer wearable maker Apple announced it would be using a technique called differential privacy on the forthcoming version of its mobile OS, iOS 10, to help obscure individuals’ personal data but still allow for large-scale trend patterns to be inferred by analyzing the data in bulk.

Safe to say, in a security sense, having more noise with your signal can actually be a boon.