I’ve certainly seen from playing Wordle every day that your game improves over time. The brain is like a muscle (not in how it functions) in that practice and time spent sharpening it, does show improvement. It’s like any hobby you do too – practice makes better (or perfect if you really dedicate regular time).

There are many apps out there that purport to beef up your memory skills, though research on whether they work has been spotty and conclusions about efficacy are pretty limited. One thing we do know is that they’re not going to magically cure major cognitive decline. Still, if a few puzzles a day help you feel better and get your gears going, it could be worth a download just to get that rush. Apps are just one of many ways to get a little brain boost, but below are some of the better ones out there.

I’ve tried Lumosity and Cognifit so far. Lumosity is quite nice in that it benchmarks you against others of your age profile. Cognifit was a bit more difficult and the finesse you can use your mouse with, does also make a difference. Most are time based, so you also want to make sure you are in a space where you won’t be disturbed at all. Any phone alert etc is going to pull your concentration away.

See https://lifehacker.com/tech/best-apps-for-improving-memory
#Blog, #brain, #health, #memory, #technology

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director of Activism Jason Kelley said Insanet’s use of advertising technology to infect devices and spy on clients’ targets makes it especially worrisome. Dodgy online ads don’t just provide a potential vehicle for delivering malware, such as via carefully crafted images or JavaScript in the ads that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers and OSes, they can be used to go after specific groups of people – such as those who are interested in open-source code, or who frequently travel to Asia – that someone might be interested in snooping on.

“This method of surveillance and targeting uses commercially available data that’s very difficult to erase from the internet,” Kelley told The Register. “Most people have no idea how much of their information has been compiled or shared by data brokers and ad tech companies, and have little ability to erase it.”

It’s an interesting twist. Sherlock seems designed to use legal data collection and digital advertising technologies — beloved by Big Tech and online media — to target people for government-level espionage.

“Since these ads are being served using known advertisement networks, anti-adware technologies such as not loading JavaScript, using ad blockers or privacy-aware browsers, and not clicking on advertisements should act as a guardrail against this attack,” Dani suggested.

I suppose this gives additional impetus for many wanting to block ads… But if this one was previously secret, how many more are there that no-one knows about? Supposedly, the Wester will use this to spy on the East? We actually don’t know what the East already has, because for some unknown reason we are always discovering what the West is up to in regard to alleged spying (even on their own allies). And as we saw this month, data privacy laws mean absolutely nothing to some major Western powers, as they just get a 3rd party country to do the spying on their behalf, and then pass the data back, or they buy the data from Facebook.

More and more, reading all of this, I can see why so many private citizens are insisting on having E2EE without any backdoors. Unfortunately, a citizen can no longer just trust their own government, and it is mostly lip service that is paid to privacy laws. So laws and political assurances mean very little in reality.

See https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/
#Blog, #Israel, #privacy, #spying, #technology

Fairphone is not trying to compete on bleeding edge specifications. It can be more likened to a mid-range phone, with long support, ethically sourced components, and easily repairable (screwed not glued) modules. For example, you could swap out the main 50MP camera for $75.50 (if that can be upgraded say after a few years, that would be really great!).

It has all the essentials though like Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, sub-6 GHz 5G support, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, dual 50-megapixel cameras, a 90Hz OLED display, a side fingerprint reader, and a normal-sounding modem, DSP, ISP, and AI engine.

The IP55 rating for dust and water resistance does not worry me too much, as I’ve never had need of more than this in over two decades of carrying mobile phones. I have, though, had major pains trying to replace the glued in battery of my Nexus 6P phone. I do anyway fully insure my phone against all-risks.

What is really interesting though, and we’ve heard this before from Fairphone, is that modern consumer phone OS support is often limited by Qualcomm (or other SoC vendor), as Qualcomm must continually adapt Android updates to work with their chips. Fairphone has got partly around this limitation by employing an industrial grade Qualcomm chip instead of the usual consumer version, which has shorter support by Qualcomm.

Although the camera is not going to be as good as my Galaxy S23 Ultra, I’d be quite interested to see if my banking apps would work with this phone. The reason is my banking apps (well one of them at least) has very stringent security requirements which I remember excluded the use of my rooted Pixel 2 XL phone (even the Magisk cloaking could not hide the root status from the banking app). I think the bank also mandates the use of its official app from the Google Play Store too (and this is used for photo verification as well as website 2FA logins for me). The Fairphone does come with its own Fairphone OS, but it does seem you can get that with, or without, the Google Apps. If you can get by without the Google Apps, then this won’t be any problem, but if you have to have the official app from the app store then you may want to be sure this will all work fine.

See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/fairphone-5-sets-a-new-standard-with-8-10-years-of-android-support/
#Blog, #Fairphone, #repairability, #technology

We all have long known the JPEG file format because it is quite old already, and just works everywhere. Back in the day it offered a reasonable compression, being a lossy compression, but it is probably no longer the best format to use. Whilst PNG is a lossless format, so offers better quality than JPEG, its file sizes are even larger than JPEG, so it is generally not found in camera apps as an option to save photos.

Although HEIC is best known for being adopted by Apple across its products from 2017, it was actually finalised in mid-2015 by MPEG (the Moving Pictures Expert Group). The actual encoding format used, is called HEVC, and it is for both image and video encoding. Today, Samsung, Google, Canon, Sony, Qualcomm, and some others also support it.

Not only does HEIC offer better compression than JPEG without sacrificing image quality (meaning also much smaller file sizes), but an HEIC file also carries an alpha channel to store pictures with transparency, a depth map to store LiDAR scans, depth estimations, and more. Overall, it offers more versatility than a JPG file.

I’ve long just stuck with JPEG out of fear of losing compatibility, but I tested HEIC today a bit, and it is reading just fine on my Linux computer, and it saves fine on my Samsung phone too. I’ve uploaded the HEIC photo to Google Photos, and it reads it fine too. On my phone, a JPEG photo takes up 3.9 MB and the identical resolution photo in HEIC is 2.6 MB (about a 40% saving). In general, though, the average saving can be about 50%. That translates not only into less storage space, but also quicker uploads and file transfers too. RAW is another alternative for really high quality, but as it is completely uncompressed, the file sizes are generally around five times larger than HEIC.

While Apple (and Samsung) only uses the .heic format on iPhones and tablets, several other associated extensions exist. For example, Canon and Sony prefer .hif. The rest of the file extensions are .heif, .heifs, .heics, .avifs, .avif, .avci, and .avcs. I seem to recall, too, that Apple saves additional quality features into its HEIC format photos versus into using the JPEG compatible format.

And related to this as well, is the images used on webpages, because again it has been JPEG as the default for many years.

Whilst HEIC is often now used for camera image and video storage, webpages have started to make use of the WEBP format (not intended for cameras). Both JPEG and WEBP are lossy compression formats (because web images are generally not ultra-high resolution, as load times are preferred over quality) and WEBP is said to be about 25-35% smaller size than JPEG. I downloaded 3 sample photos in JPEG and WEBP, and on average the WEBP is about 30% smaller. Mostly all modern browsers support WEBP today.

So JPEG does probably offer 100% compatibility everywhere, but if you can use HEIC for camera photos and videos (check whether your computer requires an extension to be installed) it is probably well worth doing so. The same really goes for WEBP for websites where the images are for viewing in a browser (images intended to be downloaded for printing should probably still be in JPEG format).

It is probably time for us to default to using HEIC where we can.

See https://www.androidpolice.com/what-is-an-heic-file/
#Blog, #HEIC, #images, #JPG, #technology

Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of RHEL available to the public. From now on it will only be available to customers — who can’t legally share it. This is very bad news for downstream projects which rebuild the RHEL source code to produce compatible distributions, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, EuroLinux, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

The core difference is that CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL: it’s what will become the next point release of RHEL. It’s a sort of continuous rolling beta of the next version of RHEL. Alma, Rocky, and so on, and the former CentOS Linux, were downstream of RHEL: they were rebuilds from the same source code, guaranteeing perfect compatibility (and stability).

Red Hat is still “complying” legally with the GPL in that they do provide the source code to their customers, but that code may not be shared further by anyone else.

It does sound like there may be also a sort of workaround for the downstream distros, but it’s not ideal. So we’re going to have to see how they respond with their plans going forward.

Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019, and apart from this move, there have also been some layoffs made at Red Hat (as with many other global companies).

See https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
#Blog, #linux, #opensource, #RedHat, #technology

Seems the broadcast feature will work very similarly to Telegram’s broadcast channels in that an unlimited number of users can subscribe, but communication is broadcast one-way without any replies or comments from subscribers.

This is very useful for especially government, disaster management, news services, etc where millions of users can potentially tune-in, unlike with groups. Broadcast channels are also easier to manage as there is no moderation required.

But the differences come in with WhatsApp wanting to monetise these channels, and also limit them so that individuals are not able to use them. On Telegram’s side, they have always been free, and even individuals could just create one and get going with them.

So WhatsApp continues to try keeping up with Telegram, but they always seem to be two steps or more behind with so many features. Yet we do know that the best features, the best security (I’m speaking broader than Telegram), most interoperable protocols, have never featured in the mass users’ choice of what they use (just think VHS vs Betamax).

If corporates want to ever escape the ongoing squeeze of money out of them, they need to think open networks, interoperability, etc.

See https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/whatsapp-launches-channels-feature-for-broadcast-messages/
#Blog, #broadcasting, #technology, #whatsapp

The team of researchers consists of professor Guenevere Chen of the University of Texas in San Antonio (UTSA), her doctoral student Qi Xia, and professor Shouhuai Xu of the University of Colorado (UCCS).

The team demonstrated NUIT attacks against modern voice assistants found inside millions of devices, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa, showing the ability to send malicious commands to those devices.

The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound waves that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.

We’ve actually heard about these near ultrasound attacks before, but further work has been done on demonstrating how it can work. It does not require someone to be near-by to the listening device at all, as it can be transmitted inaudibly to the human ear during a Zoom call, or even via a YouTube video.

So yes, absolutely nothing special required for this to work. The bigger challenge to the attacker is finding someone who actually has smart speakers to respond with, and them having some or other automation that can be weaponised. But that said, almost everyone has a smartphone or two, and many have default Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant standing by to tell them what the weather forecast is for today. Many of those assistants can also perform phone actions like enable WiFi, open a specific website, disable screen lock, and much more…

If you can authenticate on your smart device using your own vocal fingerprint, it is recommended that you activate this additional security method. Chen also advised that users monitor their devices closely for microphone activations, which have dedicated on-screen indicators on iOS and Android smartphones. And just using earphones also cuts out that sound being able to travel to smart speakers.

See https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/inaudible-ultrasound-attack-can-stealthily-control-your-phone-smart-speaker/
#Blog, #security, #smartassistant, #smartspeaker, #technology, #vulnerability