Amazon Fire phone now official: Starting $199 for 32GB on contract with AT&T

June 19, 2014

Jun 19: Amazon just unveiled Fire, their first ever smartphone which will be sold exclusively via AT&T with a two-year contract. Pre-orders begin today and customers can either pay $199 for the 32GB version or $299 for the 64GB version. The phone ships on July 25. Amazon is also throwing in 12 months of Amazon Prime service free with Fire.

Amazon Fire phoneThe Amazon Fire sets its self apart with a couple of defining features which Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. Dynamic Perspective uses a new sensor system to respond to the way you hold, view, and move Fire, enabling experiences not possible on other smartphone. The fours sensors on each corner of the phone are also accompanied by infrared LEDs for the depth perception to work even in pitch darkness. Firefly quickly recognizes things in the real world—web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, movies, music, and millions of products, and lets you take action in seconds with the dedicated Firefly button.

Fire features aluminium buttons and injected moulded steel connectors for a premium look and feel. You also get a 4.7-inch HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and a rubber frame for protection. The display boasts of 590nots of brightness, making it readable even in hard lighting. You also get global LTE coverage, Wi-Fi "ac" with channel bonding, NFC and Bluetooth.

It"s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset running at 2.2 GHz. There"s 2GB of RAM and internal storage options of 32GB or 64GB. There"s no mention of a microSD card slot however. The Fire also gets a 13MP rear camera with a f/2.0 lens and Optical Image Stabilisation. There"s a dedicated camera button too and pictures captured can be saved to Amazon"s Cloud Drive, which offers unlimited storage.

Multimedia is taken care of by dual stereo speakers placed on either side (horizontally) along with the Dolby Digital enhancements. The Fire also comes bundled with flat-cable earphones with magnetic earbuds for easy storage.

Fire deeply integrates Amazon exclusive services like X-Ray and Second Screen. ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction) predicts which movies and TV episodes you"ll want to watch and prepares them for instant playback before you even hit play.

Mayday is now available over 3G and 4G, in addition to Wi-Fi. Simply hit the Mayday button in quick actions and an Amazon expert will appear via live video to co-pilot you through any feature on the device. Amazon experts are able to draw on the screen, talk you through how to do a task, or do it for you. This feature is available 24×7, 365 days a year, and it"s free.

Amazon will also release the SDK for Dynamic Perspective and Firefly so apps like MyFitnessPal can give you nutrition values when you point the camera to any food objects.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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Agencies
July 2,2020

Paris, Jul 2: Several interacting exoplanets have already been spotted by satellites. But a new breakthrough has been achieved with, for the first time, the detection directly from the ground of an extrasolar system of this type.

An international collaboration including CNRS researchers has discovered an unusual planetary system, dubbed WASP-148, using the French instrument SOPHIE at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Universite).

The scientists analysed the star's motion and concluded that it hosted two planets, WASP-148b and WASP-148c. The observations showed that the two planets were strongly interacting, which was confirmed from other data.

Whereas the first planet, WASP-148b, orbits its star in nearly nine days, the second one, WASP-148c, takes four times longer. This ratio between the orbital periods implies that the WASP-148 system is close to resonance, meaning that there is enhanced gravitational interaction between the two planets. And it turns out that the astronomers did indeed detect variations in the orbital periods of the planets.

While a single planet, uninfluenced by a second one, would move with a constant period, WASP-148b and WASP-148c undergo acceleration and deceleration that provides evidence of their interaction.

The study will shortly be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Agencies
May 19,2020

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday warned of a Trojan malware campaign which is targeting India's co-operative banks using COVID-19 as a bait.

Seqrite, the enterprise arm of IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies, detected the new wave of Adwind Java Remote Access Trojan (RAT) campaign.

Researchers at Seqrite warned that if attackers are successful, they can take over the victim's device to steal sensitive data like SWIFT logins and customer details and move laterally to launch large scale cyberattacks and financial frauds.

According to the researchers, the Java RAT campaign starts with a spear-phishing email which claims to have originated from either the Reserve Bank of India or a nationalised bank.

The content of the email refers to COVID-19 guidelines or a financial transaction, with detailed information in an attachment, which is a zip file containing a JAR based malware.

Upon further investigation, researchers at Seqrite found that the JAR based malware is a Remote Access Trojan that can run on any machine which has Java runtime enabled and hence it can impact a variety of endpoints, irrespective of their base operating system.

Once the RAT is installed, the attacker can take over the victim's device, send commands from a remote machine, and spread laterally in the network.

In addition, this malware can also log keystrokes, capture screenshots, download additional payloads, and extract sensitive user information, Seqrite said, adding that such attack campaigns can effectively jeopardise the privacy and security of sensitive data at the co-operative banks and result in large scale attacks and financial frauds.

To prevent such attacks, users need to exercise ample caution and avoid opening attachments and clicking on web links in unsolicited emails.

Banks should also keep their operating systems updated and have a full-fledged security solution installed on all the devices, Seqrite advised.

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