There’s just something about this phone. From the moment I laid eyes on this thing, it just kind of made me happy. It’s small and adorable like a newborn puppy, and despite how petite it appears it photos, it looks and feels even smaller in person. And I’m not the only one that had this reaction. When I brought it into the office, people crowded around marveled. One person cooed at it, another said, “it’s perfect,” while a third remarked that this is the exact sort of thing they’d wished someone would make for years.
From a crowd of tech bloggers, even I was taken aback with its reception. Size alone isn’t what makes this handset remarkable. In part what makes the device exciting is that it’s the rebirth of Palm, the same company that made big ‘ole PDAs and the ill-fated Palm Pre. Maybe more interestingly, Palm’s new phone also envisions an entirely different way of using and living with tech.
For something so small, it’s pretty mysterious, and I’m actually not even entirely sure what to call it. The company that makes it is Palm, but what about the device itself? Is it just Phone with a capital P, or is it the Palm Palm as its comical listing on Verizon’s website suggests? For now, I’ve been going with Baby Phone or the just the mononymous Palm, because like Grimes, Wario, and Rasputin, this gadget is cool enough to need only a single name.
Don’t you just want to squeeze its cheeks?
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)
Now let’s talk about size. I don’t mean its actual dimensions—which are about the same as a credit card—but the reason behind why it’s so tiny. Recently, a lot of companies have been pushing the idea of digital wellness, with Google and Apple adding features to Android and iOS that help you track how much time you spend on your phone. That’s all fine, but in some ways, buying an $800 phone and then putting restrictions on it is like buying an Aston Martin and never driving it faster than 55 mph.
So instead of spending a lot of money on a phone that constantly tempts you, why not get something small and nimble that can still handle traditional smartphone duties, but doesn’t also ruin your life. That’s the real inspiration behind the Palm’s pint-sized body and mini display. You’re supposed to pull it out, check the screen real quick, and then put it away.
As small as the Palm looks, it feels even tinier in real life.
Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)
The Palm is a more straightforward way to fight smartphone addiction, and while it does quite well at replacing your regular phone, it has some quirks and a few sore spots you should know about. I’m going to break things down The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly style.
Happy Monday, everyone! Azure Multi-Factor Authentication is struggling, meaning that some users with the functionality enabled are now super secure. And, er, locked out.
Microsoft confirmed that there were problems from 04:39 UTC with a subset of customers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific experiencing “difficulties signing into Azure resources” such as the, er, little used Azure Active Directory, when Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is enabled.
Six hours later, and the problems are continuing.
The Office 365 health status page has reported that: “Affected users may be unable to sign in using MFA” and Azure’s own status page confirmed that there are “issues connecting to Azure resources” thanks to the borked MFA.
Uit het rapport van de Nederlandse overheid blijkt dat de telemetrie-functie van alle Office 365 en Office ProPlus-applicaties onder andere e-mail-onderwerpen en woorden/zinnen die met behulp van de spellingschecker of vertaalfunctie zijn geschreven worden doorgestuurd naar systemen in de Verenigde Staten.
Dit gaat zelfs zo ver dat, als een gebruiker meerdere keren achter elkaar op de backspace-knop drukt, de telemetrie-functie zowel de zin voor de aanpassing al die daarna verzamelt en doorstuurt. Gebruikers worden hiervan niet op de hoogte gebracht en hebben geen mogelijkheid deze dataverzameling te stoppen of de verzamelde data in te zien.
De Rijksoverheid heeft dit onderzoek gedaan in samenwerking met Privacy Company. “Microsoft mag deze tijdelijke, functionele gegevens niet opslaan, tenzij de bewaring strikt noodzakelijk is, bijvoorbeeld voor veiligheidsdoeleinden,” schrijft Sjoera Nas van de Privacy Company in een blogpost.
LastPass’s cloud service suffered a five-hour outage today that left some people unable to use the password manager to log into their internet accounts.
Its makers said offline mode wasn’t affected – and that only its cloud-based password storage fell offline – although some Twitter folks disagreed. One claimed to be unable to log into any accounts whether in “local or remote” mode of the password manager, while another couldn’t access their local vault.
The solution, apparently, was to disconnect from the network. That forced LastPass to use account passwords cached on the local machine, rather than pull down credentials from its cloud-hosted password vaults. Folks store login details remotely using LastPass so they can be used and synchronized across multiple devices, backed up in the cloud, shared securely with colleagues, and so on.
The problems first emerged at 1408 UTC on November 20, with netizens reporting an “intermittent connectivity issue” when trying to use LastPass to fill in their passwords to log into their internet accounts. Unlucky punters were, therefore, unable to get into their accounts because LastPass couldn’t cough up the necessary passwords from its cloud.
The software’s net admins worked fast, according to the organisation’s status page. Within seven minutes of trouble, the outfit posted: “The Network Operations Center have identified the issue and are working to resolve the issue.”
The biz also reassured users that there was no security vulnerability, exploit, nor hack attack involved:
Connectivity is a recurrent theme in LastPass outages: in May, LogMeIn, the developers behind LastPass, suffered a DNS error in the UK that locked Blighty out of the service.
The service returned at nearly 2000 UTC today, when the status team posted: “We have confirmed that internal tests are working fine and LastPass is operational. We are continuing to monitor the situation to ensure there are no further issues.”
EXPLORER, the world’s first medical imaging scanner that can capture a 3-D picture of the whole human body at once, has produced its first scans.
The brainchild of UC Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, EXPLORER is a combined positron emission tomography (PET) and X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanner that can image the entire body at the same time. Because the machine captures radiation far more efficiently than other scanners, EXPLORER can produce an image in as little as one second and, over time, produce movies that can track specially tagged drugs as they move around the entire body.
The developers expect the technology will have countless applications, from improving diagnostics to tracking disease progression to researching new drug therapies.
The first images from scans of humans using the new device will be shown at the upcoming Radiological Society of North America meeting, which starts on Nov. 24th in Chicago. The scanner has been developed in partnership with Shanghai-based United Imaging Healthcare (UIH), which built the system based on its latest technology platform and will eventually manufacture the devices for the broader healthcare market.
“While I had imagined what the images would look like for years, nothing prepared me for the incredible detail we could see on that first scan,” said Cherry, distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. “While there is still a lot of careful analysis to do, I think we already know that EXPLORER is delivering roughly what we had promised.
EXPLORER image showing glucose metabolism throughout the entire human body. This is the first time a medical imaging scanner has been able to capture a 3D image of the entire human body simultaneously. Credit: UC Davis and Zhongshan Hospital, Shanghai
Badawi, chief of Nuclear Medicine at UC Davis Health and vice-chair for research in the Department of Radiology, said he was dumbfounded when he saw the first images, which were acquired in collaboration with UIH and the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai.
“The level of detail was astonishing, especially once we got the reconstruction method a bit more optimized,” he said. “We could see features that you just don’t see on regular PET scans. And the dynamic sequence showing the radiotracer moving around the body in three dimensions over time was, frankly, mind-blowing. There is no other device that can obtain data like this in humans, so this is truly novel.”
Computer science boffins have demonstrated a side-channel attack technique that bypasses recently-introduced privacy defenses, and makes even the Tor browser subject to tracking. The result: it is possible for malicious JavaScript in one web browser tab to spy on other open tabs, and work out which websites you’re visiting.
This information can be used to target adverts at you based on your interests, or otherwise work out the kind of stuff you’re into and collect it in safe-keeping for future reference.
Researchers Anatoly Shusterman, Lachlan Kang, Yarden Haskal, Yosef Meltser, Prateek Mittal, Yossi Oren, Yuval Yarom – from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Princeton University in the US – have devised a processor cache-based website fingerprinting attack that uses JavaScript for gathering data to identify visited websites.
“The attack we demonstrated compromises ‘human secrets’: by finding out which websites a user accesses, it can teach the attacker things like a user’s sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political opinions, health conditions, etc.,” said Yossi Oren (Ben-Gurion University) and Yuval Yarom (University of Adelaide) in an email to The Register this week.
It’s thus not as serious as a remote attack technique that allows the execution of arbitrary code or exposes kernel memory, but Oren and Yarom speculate that there may be ways their browser fingerprinting method could be adapted to compromise computing secrets like encryption keys or vulnerable installed software.
