On Monday, Apple unveiled its Apple Card, the company's boldest move yet toward becoming a truly mainstream mobile payments company. And the product has vast implications for our augmented reality future, some of which may not be immediately obvious to many.
Instagram wants to bridge the gap between advertising and shopping for a more central buying experience. The app has long been a platform for advertisements, with both companies and creators using it as an outlet to link to products, so it's only natural for Instagram to allow users to buy content featured in posts without ever leaving the app.
While Microsoft dominated the augmented reality news at this year's Mobile World Congress, a small AR startup we've covered in the past arrived in Barcelona, Spain, to unveil the next phase of its mission.
The week of the annual Consumer Electronics Show is supposed to be filled with good news for the augmented reality industry as AR headset and smartglasses makers show off their new wares.
Unlike the realm of virtual reality, augmented reality is less about losing yourself in some fantasy environment, and more about getting things done in the real world. So while we've seen some great games that capture the imagination on devices like the Magic Leap One and the HoloLens, when it comes to real-world usage, the biggest developments coming for AR apps that are the more practical ones.
In case you hadn't heard, Google is now a legit cell service provider. Google Fi has its pluses and minuses, but the biggest upside is in the pricing. Depending on how much data you typically use, there's a good chance you could save a lot of money without sacrificing coverage by switching to Fi.
This week, Next Reality released the fifth and final set of profiles on the NR30 leaders in augmented reality, with this chapter focusing on the influencers in the industry.
The Pixel 3 XL versus Galaxy Note 9. Stock Android versus Samsung Experience. When I began this comparison, I thought the Pixel 3 XL would be unfairly outmatched. But after looking at the specs side-by-side, you'll see a different picture. This year, Google delivered a worthy alternative to Samsung's best offering.
Besides the Apple vs. Samsung competition, few battles are as vocal as the battle between the best Pixel and best iPhone. This year, it's the Pixel 3 XL and iPhone XS Max, two phones that are equipped with minor hardware updates from their predecessors, though both showcase significant OS-level improvements.
The battle between the Pixels and the iPhones has been heating up over the last few years, and this year's bout is the best one yet, with Google's Pixel 3 taking on Apple's iPhone XS.
Continuing our NR30 series this week, we focused on the leaders of the software development industry that make augmented reality experiences possible. In other news, two of the current leaders in making AR headsets, Microsoft and Magic Leap, are pursuing multiple verticals with their products, as both now appear to be interested in making AR headsets for the military.
If there's one strength of Apple's that iOS and Android fans can agree on, it's the company's dedication to user privacy. With each new iteration of iOS, Apple builds upon these foundations, enhancing and increasing each iPhone's ability to protect its user's data. In iOS 12, Apple has added many new features to Safari, most of which have their own unique way of keeping you safe online.
Most users don't realize how much valuable data is in their network traffic. With a few simple tools, an attacker can quickly pick out cookies, passwords, and DNS queries from a macOS device as it covertly streams the victim's network traffic to the attacker's system. Here, we will cover two methods for analyzing packets flowing from a Mac.
Command injection is a technique used by hackers to execute system commands on a server, usually via a web application or some kind of GUI. This can happen when an application provides some sort of functionality to the user involving the use of system commands. When the input is not properly sanitized, commands not originally intended to be run are allowed to be executed.
We need to take our privacy and security much more seriously. Whether it's malware-infected apps or the mishandling of our data by companies like Facebook, there are threats all around us in this digital world. Fortunately, some smartphones are simply designed to protect us better.
With the announcement of ARKit 2.0 at WWDC 2018, Apple is bringing some powerful new capabilities to mobile augmented reality apps this fall.
There's always been a clear divide between flagship and midrange phones. Flagships will run you at least $700, while midrange typically falls between $250 and $550. The main difference is the processor, with midrange phones sporting a 600-series Snapdragon and flagships rocking the 800-series. Now, Qualcomm may have just created another smartphone tier with their newly-unveiled 700-series chip.
While hackers have taken advantage of numerous vulnerabilities in Adobe's products to deliver payloads to Windows users via PDF files, a malicious PDF file can also wreak havoc on a Mac that's using the default Preview app. So think twice before double-clicking a PDF open on your MacBook — it might just be a Trojan with a rootkit inside.
The reveal of Magic Leap One: Creator Edition brought with it some insight into the path the device took from prototype to "final" design.
Any internet user will need to download files eventually, and most simply have faith that what they are downloading is trustworthy. This doesn't give much clarity into the contents of the file, but if the file's author published the original checksum, comparing it to the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded file can ensure nothing was tampered with.
On the airplane, in the middle of cold and flu season, your seatmate is spewing, despite the clutch of tissues in their lap. Your proximity to an infectious person probably leaves you daydreaming (or is it a nightmare?) of pandemics and estimating how likely it is that this seatmate's viral or bacterial effusions will circulate throughout the plane and infect everyone on board.
The bacteria in our gut — a community called the gut microbiome — have been in the spotlight a lot lately. What we're learning about how our intestinal bacteria adapt and grow with our bodies could help athletes perform better, according to researchers starting a company focused on creating probiotics that mimic athletes' microbiomes.
The Google Assistant is an incredibly useful tool that's now available for both Android and iOS. You can use plain English to send voice commands that range from turning off your smart lights to answering almost any question — but many of these features won't work properly if you have certain Google activity controls disabled.
When you have an infection, a doctor prescribes antibiotics to make the bacteria that causes it disappear. Sounds like a good idea, but the disappearance of microorganisms that have inhabited humans for millennia could be driving rising numbers of serious illness and debilitating conditions.
Nintendo's Super NES Classic system, a pint-sized version of the iconic Super NES from the '90s, is highly anticipated in the gaming world. The retro system has already met its fair share of controversies and it's been a long journey to preorder. Finally, the Super NES Classic is officially available for preorder, but it's selling out fast.
A 6,000-year-old forest inhabitant awakens to find life in the forest around it in crisis. Plants, trees, animals, and birds are moving north to escape increasingly heated air, even as mass extinctions take place around the world. The inhabitant stirs and remembers it has lived this before and knows what to do.
The USB Rubber Ducky comes with two software components, the payload script to be deployed and the firmware which controls how the Ducky behaves and what kind of device it pretends to be. This firmware can be reflashed to allow for custom Ducky behaviors, such as mounting USB mass storage to copy files from any system the Duck is plugged into.
Bed bugs are parasites not yet known to spread disease — but they cause plenty of irritation. As scientists and landlords search for new ways to deal with the pests, a new study examines how we can deter bed bugs without so many chemicals.
Pot, weed, bud, herb – whatever you want to call it, the green earthy treat makes everything way more fun. Now that marijuana is legal to some extent in more than half of all US states, we thought it was high time to showcase some apps that enhance your experience with the controversial pastime known as rolling up.
Bitcoin continues to make chaotic waves in the finance industry, with one bitcoin currently worth about $1,250 as of this writing. What's great about bitcoin is that you don't need to shell out rent money to get in the game, because bitcoins can be bought in increments—basically, whatever you can afford.
The search for the causative agent of colony collapse—the mass die off of honey bees throughout the US and Europe—has escalated with increasing confusion lately. Everything from pesticides and stress to viruses and mites have been implicated, and some researchers think that many of these environmental factors work together to take down hives.
Bacteriotherapy sounds a lot more amenable of a term than "fecal transplant," yet they're both treatments that use bacteria itself to cure or treat infections. Fecal transplants, specifically, are an up-and-coming treatment option for a potentially deadly and difficult-to-treat diarrheal infection called Clostridium difficile.
Joe McKenna died when he was 30 years old. A young married man with his future ahead of him, he was cleaning up the station where he worked as a fireman. Struck by a piece of equipment fallen from a shelf, Joe complained of a sore shoulder. Over the next week, Joe worsened and ended up in the hospital. Chilled, feverish, and delirious, his organs shut down from an infection we'd now call septic shock.
Reading through various internet forums, it certainly sounds like the Google Pixel and Pixel XL are attracting more iPhone users than any of Google's previous Nexus devices. The sales figures seem to back that up, too, as the Pixel is outpacing last year's Nexus 6P, and pre-order demand has exceeded Google's expectations, causing delays in shipments. (We reached out to Google but they wouldn't give us any specifics on sales numbers or numbers of switchers.)
Google is working on something so big they had to name it after an entire galaxy: A new operating system that merges Android and Chrome OS into one unified front.
No matter how far technology advances, battery life continues to be an issue. Powerful new hardware is introduced each year, but smartphone batteries only get a few extra milliamp-hours to compensate.
If you spend a lot of time reading about food, chances are you've heard about bone broth. It's all the rage these days, from high profile chefs like Marco Canora building menus around it, to celebrities like Salma Hayek using it as self-prescribed beauty regimens.
I've been an iPhone user in the iOS ecosystem for years now after a brief stint in the Android realm. But, I'm also enthusiastic about varying forms of technology in general; I realize that iOS is far from perfect and that healthy market competition is beneficial for all. So, naturally being curious about other platforms, I decided to take Windows Phone for an extended trial run.
Now that smartphones have ensured that we're connected to the internet 24/7, online privacy has become more important than ever. With data-mining apps hoping to sell your information for targeted ads, and government agencies only one subpoena away from knowing every detail of your private life, encryption has become our last line of defense.
While attempting to hack a web app, there may come a point where the attacker may have to escape the default directory in order to access unauthorized files. This is known as a directory traversal attack. Much as the name implies, this attack involved traversing the servers directories. But in order to move to an unauthorized directory, we need to know where those directories are. Today we'll be building a tool to brute force these directory locations based on HTTP response codes. Before we g...
