Steven Max Patterson, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Steven Max Patterson

Author Archives: Steven Max Patterson

Android apps run securely on Chrome OS in Linux containers

With first-quarter shipments exceeding Macs in the United States, Chromebooks are very popular. Schools and enterprises choose Chromebooks for their very streamlined use case: low cost, fast boot security, simplicity and ease of administration.Chromebooks just got a little more complicated, but for the better, with Google’s announcement that the Android Play Store will be available on Chromebooks and that Android apps will run on the Chrome operating system. The million Android apps—which include popular apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word and Skype and games such as Clash of Clans and Angry Birds—will remedy the Chromebook’s relative app sparsity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s intelligent assistant, Google Home, was never a top-secret project

The announcement of the Google Home intelligent assistant was an unexpected but not really a surprise announcement. Leaks did not ruin the surprise, but rather Google’s open approach to innovation did. Through participation in open forums and open source projects, published papers, and the release of application programming interfaces (APIs), Google publicly signals its direction.Google Home was built using the Google Assistant software platform that was also announced this week. Think of Google Home generally as a hardware competitor to Amazon Echo, and Google Assistant is a software platform like Google Now but much more context aware and intelligent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Google will not announce a VR headset at Google I/O 2016

Rumors are flying that Google will announce a virtual reality (VR) headset this week at the company’s annual software developer conference Google I/O. The rumors sound ridiculous to me. Here’s why.Today, the Verge and Android Police sparked more speculation based on a VR category showing up on the seller’s Google Play console and a year-old Wall Street Journal story that Google was working on a VR headset. Well, not exactly, but let’s take a minute, cut through the hype and think through this rationally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google I/O 2016: 9 predictions about new products Google will announce

Google already went public with a detailed schedule of the Google I/O 2016 technical sessions. But what will be revealed in the opening two-hour keynote led by Google CEO Sundar Pichai is a tightly held secret until May 18 at 10 a.m. PT. The following are some rumors and educated guesses about what Google could announce during the keynote.1. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and 360° video announcements. Google probably won’t announce a VR headset. Not because Google can’t, but because developers’ attention is completely consumed by the Oculus and the HTC Vive maelstrom and because 50 different VR headsets are predicted to be announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next January. Headsets will become a commodity that doesn’t fit Google’s business model—though it may sell one made by a partner, like it sells Nexus Android devices. Google will monetize VR in another way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What SWAG will Google I/O 2016 attendees take home?

Next week, Google will show its love for independent software developers by giving them an exclusive first-look at new technologies and early and free access to new hardware at the ninth annual Google I/O conference. Here are a couple of educated guesses at free hardware, which developers call SWAG (something we all get), attendees will take home.Early access hardware giveaways The past is a good predictor of the future. Looking back at earlier I/O shows, Google wanted to give their loyal developers a head start developing for strategic new platforms and bestowed upon them the newest hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android’s Stagefright vulnerability hardened against exploits

Last week Google announced fixes to the widely reported Stagefright vulnerability. Fix might not be the right word, though, because as of April 19, 2016, when Google released the Android Security Year in Review for 2015, the company reported: “As of this writing, we have not observed, nor are we aware of, any successful attempts to exploit the Stagefright vulnerabilities against actual user devices.”The status of this exploit seems to contradict the many reports of the Stagefright vulnerability, dating to its announcement at the Black Hat security conference last summer. If all were true, Android phones could be expected to spontaneously combust at any moment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple needs the iPhone 7 to reignite growth

Apple depends on the iPhone flywheel effect to draw consumers into its proprietary ecosystem and throw off iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, App Store and iTunes revenues. When that effect doesn’t work, things go south, as we’ve seen in Apple’s first decline in 13 years.The decrease, in fact, marks the beginning of the end of the iPhone 6 product cycle. iPhone 6 growth spiked because of pent-up demand for iPhones with larger screens that Android competitors proved consumers wanted. Former iPhone users that became large-screen Android users returned to Apple, increasing iPhone sales. For iPhone sales to rebound from this current decline, though, the iPhone 7 must have a vital growth-reigniting feature–something really important to consumers that hasn’t been invented by a competitor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android Wear smartwatches get fashion boost

Emphasizing fashion over functionality, Google today announced the MODE interchangeable and colorful, silicon and leather smartwatch straps—a sign that Android Wear smartwatch growth will come from making Android Wear more fashionable.Early Android Wear smartwatches, circa 2014, such as the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch stressed functionality over style and form. These were prototypes to seed developers with a software platform they could use to begin to build apps and were for enthusiasts to begin to use and understand the smartwatch category.Many consumers, however, complained Android Wear watches didn’t match their expectations of what watches should look like. After all, a watch is a fashion statement first, a time piece second and app platform third. And so Android Wear watches began to subtly change, with Motorola’s Moto 360 winning praise for its round design over the Apple Watch and the round Huawei watch acting as Google’s de facto Nexus smartwatch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Better SWIFT software design would have thwarted Bangladesh Bank cyber heist

In February, attackers tried to steal $951 million using the SWIFT bank transfer system by submitting transfer requests from the Central Bank of Bangladesh to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before the cyber heist was detected, attackers got away with $81 million by routing and laundering the funds through a bank account in the Philippines. Most of the transfers were thwarted for an unexplained reason.Reuters reported the details of the cyber heist based on an interview with defense contractor and security researcher BAE Systems. It wasn’t clear if BAE Systems worked independently, for SWIFT or for the Bangladesh Bank. The report exposes that the SWIFT software has the same design flaws as the Target point-of-sale (POS) system. Both imprudently relied on the assumption of an impenetrable perimeter for security. The fault appears to be SWIFT’s—if BAE is correct in its report that “the malware registers itself as a service and operates within an environment running SWIFT’s Alliance software suite, powered by an Oracle Database.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Better SWIFT software design would have thwarted Bangladesh Bank cyber heist

Flagship HTC 10 to debut on Verizon Wireless

The HTC 10 announcement left the impression that HTC built another desirable unlocked phone like the HTC One A9 that Verizon Wireless customers were locked out of buying. But today, without a formal announcement the HTC 10 appeared on Verizon’s website. The Verizon version of the HTC 10 isn’t available on HTC’s website.Preorders begin on April 29 2016. There was no mention of price and availability. It should be priced at $699 unless HTC diverges from its usual policy of pricing the same models at the same prices; though promotions can be different between carriers for the same models. Looking at the hardware, the same model that supports AT&T and T-Mobile also has the frequency bands for Verizon, indicating that the early May availability could be the same for all three models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android users could be harmed by EU ruling

Yesterday, the European Union launched an inquiry into Android’s dominant 80% share of the smartphone market. The Antitrust Commission announced it will investigate the connection between Google Play services and Google apps.Any smartphone supplier can run the Android Open Source Project (OASP,) a free and available as an open source project. China’s Xiaomi, for instance, takes the Android OASP and repackages it with a UI that looks like iPhone’s UI. Xaomi doesn’t opt in to the Play Store for its apps, but relies on its own app store. Most hardware OEMs opt in to Google Play services because they want access to the million plus apps on the Play Store and Android’s security services. Security is a more subtle point but an important part of the Android operating systems architecture that is built on Play Services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Magic Leap adds virtual reality head-tracking and possibly hand-tracking

A second demonstration of mega-venture Magic Leap’s virtual reality technology indicates that head-tracking has been added and possibly hand-tracking.Head-tracking, which wasn’t shown in the only other demonstration that happened over a year ago, lets a person move around a hologram to see it from different sides. Hand-tracking, which is a mouse-like metaphor interface that lets people interact with virtual objects using hand movements, also seems to have been added. The report also hints at the principals behind how Magic Leap’s virtual reality works. Wired reported on Kevin Kelly’s visit to Magic Leap in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to experience the second public demonstration of the company’s version of virtual reality that it calls mixed reality (MR). A comparison of the Wired story with one written by Rachel Metz over a year ago for the MIT Technology Review measures Magic Leap’s progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using the IoT for good: Beacon of Hope project to help fight human trafficking

With their Beacon of Hope IoT app, twin sisters and social entrepreneurs America and Penelope Lopez, are taking up the fight against one of the most revolting crimes on the planet—human trafficking. In 2013, the United Nations reported that 20.9 million people have been pushed into forced labor and sex trades around the world. Ranked in the top three of fastest-growing crime categories, the same study reported modern slavery has become a booming $32 billion illicit trade. Recognizing the importance of the issue, the Lopez sisters created the Beacon of Hope project. It is the latest in their string of hackathon successes that includes an anti-bullying app and a police bodycam with facial recognition. This project began at the ground zero of hackathons, the AT&T hackathon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which draws hackers like the Kentucky Derby draws gamblers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook tells B2C businesses: I feel your mobile pain

Facebook’s Messenger chat-bots and an update to the React Native cross-platform mobile development framework—both announced last week week—could relieve the pain felt by businesses trying to shift customer interaction from the web to mobile.It might seem there is an app for everything, but not every business has one. Building a token app that lives a lonely existence on the app store doesn’t help keep customers buying as they shift from the web to mobile. And meaningful mobile relationships and revenue-generating campaigns still elude most businesses because of the high cost of having Android and iOS development teams and the challenges of recruiting developers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thanks, Obama: TV will never be the same, and consumers will love it

It’s fitting that President Obama launched a new initiative to open up TV set-top boxes to competition 20 years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because consumers are in for as radical a makeover of television today as they experienced with the transformation of telephone communications back then. This isn’t Kansas anymore!In the next few years, consumers’ expectations for TV will be radically different, and in a decade, today’s TV will look as antiquated as cordless phones and answering machines look today.Opening up the set-top box means much more than market competition to lower the price and break the stranglehold that cable companies have over equipment leases that tie consumers to their TV. It means set-top boxes can include other features, such as Google Cast (renamed from Chromecast) AppleTV, Amazon Prime or Roku.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s React Native could succeed where other cross-platform frameworks have failed

At the F8 developer conference earlier this week, Facebook reported an unprecedented 85 percent reuse of code attributable to React Native on its internally developed Android and iOS Ads Manager app.On top of that, the company announced that Microsoft will port React Native to run on Windows 10, Windows phones and Xbox One. And Samsung announced it would port React Native to its Tizen OS that runs on many devices, including wearables and smart TVs.That is significant considering cross-platform frameworks have such a bad reputation that developers often joke that Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and then there is cross-platform.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zuckerberg wants the Facebook Messenger platform to replace iOS and Android platforms

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Messenger will become the next platform with the addition of chat-bots and AI linked to Facebook business pages. Did he really mean the next platform will replace Android and iOS mobile platforms? Unquestionably he did. Messenger has now been promoted to the Messenger platform, raising expectations of former PayPal President and Facebook Messaging Vice President David Marcus.Zuckerberg has an uncontestable vision: consumers would rather interact with businesses via a text chat that resembles one with a friend instead of telephoning a call center or using another frustrating form of B2C communications. In this scenario, customer service is delivered via the Messenger platform that can be programmed with a chat-bot to respond to customer chat messages. A B2C merchant will be able build Messenger plug-ins for customer service and sales assistance. The bot could learn on its own to be more helpful by adding a separate AI and machine-learning module. It’s still a vision; the chat-bot and AI beta was released yesterday for innovators to start testing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The HTC 10 campaigns for the title best smartphone of 2016

HTC announced the HTC 10 premium smartphone today—its entry into the extreme competition for best smartphone on the planet. The device belongs to a category that makes no compromises in exterior presentation and interior performance. Trade-offs are a luxury enjoyed by makers of commodity smartphone models that pragmatic consumers buy.HTC earned its reputation by designing exquisite phones that others in the industry, including Apple, had to follow and sometimes copy. Most notably the iPhone 6 and 6s product lines look like HTC designs. Powered by a Qualcomm 820 SoC, the HTC 10 will be one of the fastest phones available. However, raw speed is its least-important feature because almost every smartphone is fast, to such an extent that the performance increase of the newest phones compared to last year’s is barely perceptible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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