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July 26, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Google Titan Security Key Prevents Phishing Attacks

Phising is a social engineering method that aims to trick users into giving their passwords. This can normally be mitigated with things called “brain” and “paying attention”, but since we are all humans mistakes may happen on a bad day. Even Google employees who should be tech savvy fell for the tricks from time-to-time, so Google made employees use 2-factor authentication with a hardware security key since January 2017, and none of Google workers failed for a phising attack since then. CNET was provided with a sample of Google’s “Titan Security Key”, which comes in both USB and Bluetooth/NFC versions, and will be available for sale in Google’s online store within the next few months. The full technical details have not been provided for the key, but we do know Titan Security Keys support FIDO protocol, and are built with a secure element and a firmware written by Google that […]

July 26, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Google Unveils Edge TPU Low Power Machine Learning Chip, AIY Edge TPU Development Board and Accelerator

Google introduced artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts to hundreds of thousands of people with their AIY projects kit such as the AIY Voice Kit with voice recognition and the AIY Vision Kit for computer vision applications. The company has now gone further by unveiling Edge TPU, its own purpose-built ASIC chip designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML models at the edge, as well as corresponding AIY Edge TPU development board, and AIY Edge TPU accelerator USB stick to add to any USB compatible hardware. Google Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) & Cloud IoT Edge Software Edge TPU is a tiny chip for machine learning (ML) optimized for performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar. It can either accelerate ML inferencing on device, or can pair with Google Cloud to create a full cloud-to-edge ML stack. In either case, local processing reduces latency, remove the needs for a persistent network connection, increases privacy, and […]

May 9, 2018May 9, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Google Assistant Adds 6 New Voices, Supports Smart Displays, Will Expand to 80 Countries

We’ve already seen announcements about Android P and Android Things 1.0 for Google I/O 2018, but the company also took the opportunity to provide an update to the new features coming to Google Assistant. Some of the improvements are specifically related to the audio features (voice assistant): Google Assistant is now naturally conversational so it can understand more complex requests such as asking the weather using expressions like “Will it be cats and dogs today?”. 6 new voices are now available, and John Legend’s voice is coming later this year. More voices should be supported in the future, thanks to improvements in AI and WaveNet technology from DeepMind that eliminates the needs for recording hundreds of hours of audio in a recording studio, and enabled adding new voices in just a few weeks. Continued Conversation – as its name implies – will allow Assitant and you to have a “natural […]

May 9, 2018May 9, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Android P Beta Released. What’s New?

Last March, Google released Android P developer preview with new features such as indoor positioning with WiFi RTT, support for display notch, HDR VP9, HEIF image compression, a new API to access two or more camera simultaneously and so on. Google I/O 2018 has just gotten started, and the company announced the release of Android P beta with yet more features, and support for phones from more manufacturers. Some of the most notable features include: Adaptive Battery uses machine learning to prioritize access to system resources for a user’s most commonly run apps, and places each app in four “buckets” ranked from “active” to “rare”. Apps will change buckets over time, and apps not in the “active” bucket will have restrictions for jobs, alarms, network and high-priority Firebase Cloud Messages. App Actions will also use machine learning to show actions for specific apps depending on context. For example highlighting “Taylor Swift” […]

May 5, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Lenovo Introduces Mirage Solo Daydream Standalone Virtual Reality Headset & Mirage Camera for VR180 Video Recording

Standalone / All-in-One Android virtual reality headsets have been around for a couple of years, mostly from Chinese vendors. But the number and quality of VR apps available were rather low at the time, and those VR headsets were mostly useful to watch 360° & VR videos. This may explain why larger companies had not launched any standalone headset so far, but this week everything changed, as Facebook started selling their Oculus Go virtual reality headset , and Google & Lenovo have just jointly announced the availability of Mirage Solo, the first standalone VR headset compatible with Google Daydream. Lenovo Mirage Solo specifications: SoC- Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 VR processor System Memory – 4 GB RAM Storage – 64 GB UFS flash, microSD Card slot up to 256 GB Display – 5.5″ QHD (2560 x 1440) LCD display @ 75 Hz Lenses – 2 x Fresnel-Aspheric 110° FOV Camera – Dual […]

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Google Has Made it Harder to Load Google Apps on Uncertified Devices

Cheap TV boxes or development boards that can run Android, are not normally certified by Google, but you can still use Google Apps like the Google Play Store either directly with the manufacturer pre-loading the packages on the device, or manually by installing the packages yourself. According to a report by XDA developers, Google has made it harder to load Gapps on uncertified devices starting from March 16th, and if you try to login on a new custom firmware you may get the message “Device is not certified by Google” when accessing a Google app. The change will apparently only affect newly built firmware , so older firmware should still be able to access Google Play store (TBC). We’ll have to see how it turns out. Google Play Services is said to check ro.build.fingerprint for the build date, but it seems too easy to work around this, if that’s the […]

March 16, 2018March 16, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Android Wear Becomes “Wear OS by Google”

Android Wear is an operating systems for wearables based on Android, but it may be confusing to (some) consumers, since an Android Wear watch may pair with an iPhone and an Android phone is not requires. Google actually reports one third of Android Wear watch users also own an iPhone, so the company has now decided to rename Android Wear to “Wear OS by Google“. Apart from the name change and new micro website, everything remains the same. Now if they could also change “Android TV” to “TV OS by Google” that would also prevent an other type of confusion among users… Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Companies Address Concerns related to Speculative Execution Exploits: Meltdown and Spectre

Yesterday, news surfaced about a “bug” in Intel processors that could be fixed at the operating system level at the cost of a decrease in performance for some tasks, from a typical, and barely noticeable 5% hit, to a more consequent 30% hit for some specific tasks, and as we discussed yesterday I/O intensive tasks are the most impacted by the changes. While Intel (and Arm) are impacted, AMD claims not to be, and the issue was reported by major news outlets and likely impacting the stock price of the companies with Intel stock losing 3.39%, and AMD stock gaining 5.19%, so obviously every company felt the need to answer, starting with Intel’s response to security research findings: Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” and are unique to Intel products are incorrect. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices […]