Monthly Archives: December 2018

For Samsung’s 10th-anniversary, a major leak have been exposed regarding the latest in the Galaxy range. Samsung allegedly plan to release four Galaxy S10 models, each with up to six cameras, 5G carrier support, and the biggest phone displays Samsung has ever made. However, with these features there will also be some controversial compromises.

The leak claims that every model of the Galaxy S10 will cut a hole into their displays: “The Galaxy S10 Lite, S10, and S10+ are all Hole in Super AMOLED screens, but the S10+ has dual front cameras, so the whole design is slightly different.”

The ‘hole’ refers to a circular hole cut out of the front touchscreen and positioned in the top left corner, for the front camera. This design allows Samsung to reduce the size of the top bezel to compete with rivals and changes the aesthetics.

However, the single hole, or dual holes in the case of the Galaxy S10+, leave no space for facial recognition sensors so Samsung’s breakthrough Face ID rival has been removed to accommodate it.

Nonetheless, the new releases pave the way for Samsung’s ‘New Infinity’ display which will integrate cameras and sensors under the display. It has been claimed this will remove the need for any form of cutout, but the models won’t be ready until at least 2020. In addition to this, the Galaxy S10 will also be the first mass-market smartphone to support 5G, although not all S10 models will feature it. There will also be a truly affordable entry-level version, as well as a crazy 6.7-inch flagship codenamed the ‘Beyond X’ – an apparent rival for Apple’s 10th-anniversary iPhone X.

The international hotel chain, Marriott, has announced a massive data hack that impacts as many as 500 million customers who made a reservation at a Starwood hotel. Marriott acquired the Starwood hospitality group in September 2016, which operates numerous hotel brands including Sheraton, Westin, Aloft, and W Hotels. It is reported the enormous data breach started in 2014, before Marriott’s acquisition.

Currently it is thought that 327 million people had sensitive data stolen, such as, passport numbers, phone number, email address, date of birth, gender, trip and reservation information, and Starwood Preferred Guest account information. In addition is seems that around 170 million Marriott customers had their basic information stolen, including, names, address or email address. It has also been exposed that some credit card numbers were also stolen as part of the breach.

Breach response experts have stated the fact the attackers attackers had access for four years is likely to have made the breach worse. Time gives attackers the ability to chip away at defenses, or simply learn more about a system to understand where the valuable data is. It is also possible to hackers could have encrypted the stolen data as part of their exfiltration strategy. Hackers often use encryption as a tool to mask data and sneak it past a network’s “data loss prevention” defenses, which monitor for sensitive data in transit.

“If you made a reservation on or before September 10, 2018 at a Starwood property, information you provided may have been involved,” the company’s breach response page reads. The Marriott seem to be erring on the side of caution that all customers were affected before September this year. They have established a call center and breach notification website and are off offering enrollment in the identity monitoring service WebWatcher for one year to anyone who thinks they were impacted by the four-year network intrusion.

Marriott have responded to this incident with resources and information for victims, however a breach that lasted over four years is substantial. “They are still investigating this heavily and don’t know to what extent attackers had access—this could turn out to be much, much larger,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the penetration testing and incident response consultancy TrustedSec. “Four years is an eternity when it comes to breaches. If attackers had access for that long I would assume they had access to virtually everything.”

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and developing a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium.

Due to the lack of success of the Edge, since its release in 2015, Microsoft are building a new web browser to replace Edge on Windows 10. Edge uses a rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, which was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure. But when launched it came with an array of issues that resulted in early users rejecting it. As such, Edge struggled to gain popularity – the decline in usage of Edge (and IE) compared to the rise of Chrome is significant – see W3’s trend graph here.

The new browser, codenamed “Anaheim”, uses Blink – a similar rendering engine to the Google’s Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. In fact, the Edge app for iOS and Android already uses a rendering engines native to Chromium platforms, so this is a change for the desktop platform only.
It has been announced that Anahein will replace Edge on Windows 10, but it is currently unknown if Anaheim will retain the Edge brand or forge a new identity.

Some users will be pleased to hear that Edge will be replaced. Having a Microsoft browser based on Chromium should mean that websites behave similar to how they would on Google Chrome. This is also good news for developers and companies, who need to maintain compatibility across different systems and browsers.

This is another step towards revitalising Windows’ reliability and usability, and represents a significant step for Microsoft, as they have maintained their own web browser and rendering engine since Internet Explorer was first released back in 1995.

There is more to know about Anaheim but the initial announcements seem interesting.

The UK government has pledged £78m of funding to the start-up Raspberry Pi, which sells the most popular British computer in the world. The project will train 40,000 teachers across the UK in computing education – who will then in turn go on to teach computer science to children in every school in England.

Over the next four years, the Raspberry Pi team along with its partners, STEM Learning and the British Computer Society, will deliver a programme for primary and secondary school teachers. They will provide 40 schools with face-to-face workshops and after deliver training to neighbouring schools. This will include free educational resources, nationwide training, and certification.

In other countries, teacher training in computer science tends to be bundled with other science subjects or funded through philanthropy. In the US, Code.org, a non-profit organisation, says 900,000 teachers use its resources, but only just over a third of high schools teach computer science. Code.org is funded through a combination of corporate donations and state or federal money. The UK funding is part of a £100m tranche of money announced by the chancellor in the last Budget, a per capita investment by government that is unprecedented.

Raspberry Pi is a non-profit company founded in 2008 by Eben Upton, with the aim to get young people interested in technology. They designed a $5 credit-card-sized computer that could be programmed by anyone from a laboratory engineer to a child, these are used with partners included Google, ARM and Cisco and have since sold 23m units.

Children will now have the opportunity to work on projects including Google Home voice systems, space experiments and chatbots. Technology is becoming integral to our society, and so the importance of teaching computer science is has become an increased necessity. “We have not seen anything of this scale and comprehensiveness in the world from a government, which is really exciting,” said Philip Colligan, chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.