Lifeboat Foundation

The late 90s and early 2000s were a breakout time for mobile phones, with cheap GSM handsets ushering in the era in which pretty much everybody had a phone. Back then, a popular way to customize one’s phone was to install a sticker that would flash when the phone rang. These required no batteries or any other connection to the phone, and [Big Clive] has dived in to explain how they worked.

It’s an old-fashioned teardown that requires a bit of cutting to get inside the sticker itself. A typical example had three LEDs in series for a total voltage drop of around 7V, hooked up to two diodes and a PCB trace antenna. A later evolution used raw unpackaged components bonded to the PCB. Future versions went down to a single diode, using the LEDs to serve as the second. The basic theory was that the PCB traces would pick up RF transmitted by the phone when a call was coming in, lighting the LEDs.

Continue reading “Here’s How Those Battery-Free Flashing Phone Stickers Worked” »

LG’s solar business panel business joins the company’s smartphone business in the graveyard, with the latter business being canned last April as it could not compete with other smartphone brands in the market. Prior to the smartphone business closing shop, it had recorded 23 consecutive quarters of loss.

The decision was approved by the board of directors on Monday night, LG said.

LG’s solar panel production will start winding down next month, the company said, with the business to officially shut down at the end of June.

Doorbells are among those everyday objects that started out simple but picked up an immense amount of complexity over the years. What began as a mechanism to bang two pieces of metal together evolved into all kinds of wired and wireless electric bells, finally culminating in today’s smart doorbells that beam a live video feed to their owners even if they’re half a world away.

But sometimes, less is more. [Low tech obsession] built a doorbell out of spare components that doesn’t require Internet connectivity or even a power supply. But it’s not a purely mechanical device either: the visitor turns a knob mounted on a stepper motor, generating pulses of alternating current. These pulses are then fed into the voice coil of an old hard drive, causing its arm to vibrate and strike a bell, mounted where the platters used to be.

Continue reading “Minimalistic Doorbell Doesn’t Need An Internet Connection — Or Even A Power Supply” »

Some say that Moore’s Regulation, which tracks the exponential progress electronics during the last six a long time has stalled, and technological stagnation threatens. Mark Rosker, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Know-how Workplace (MTO), sees issues very in another way. In a new interview with Samuele Lilliu, he explains how the expansion described by Moore’s Regulation has been sustained by waves of innovation from DARPA and the way the following stage, what he calls the Fourth Wave, might be carried ahead by applied sciences his workplace is now creating.

The best model of Moore’s Regulation says that the variety of transistors on a silicon chip roughly doubles each two years. This was an commentary made by Gordon Moore – who later co-founded Intel – in 1965, and it proved to be remarkably correct. Yearly since then, an increasing number of highly effective computer systems and, later, laptops and smartphones have appeared in the marketplace. Low-cost chips have now grow to be important for vehicles, televisions, cameras and different units, which beforehand functioned with out electronics. They’re important throughout the financial system.

Continue reading “DARPA Goals To Preserve Moore’s Regulation Going — Right here’s How” »

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) — A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

An unusual error in NSO’s spyware allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.

“[It is] encouraging to see this long-term, collaborative approach to privacy-protective personalized advertising from Google,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing, ads and business at Facebook said on Twitter. “We look forward to continued work with them and the industry on privacy-enhancing tech through industry groups.”

Google said it will continue to support the current identifiers for the next two years, which means other companies have time to implement changes.

Apple was criticized by Facebook and other companies for rolling out its App Tracking Transparency feature, which reduces targeting capabilities by limiting advertisers from accessing an iPhone user identifier. With that change, users were given a pop-up window that let them block apps from tracking their data for advertising purposes.

Lithium-sulfur batteries have three times the potential charge capacity of lithium-ion batteries, which are found in everything from smartphones to electric cars. Their inherent instability, however, have so far made them unsuitable for commercial applications, with lithium-sulfur batteries undergoing a 78 per cent change in size every charging cycle.

Overcoming this issue would not only radically improve the performance of battery-powered devices, it would also address some of the environment concerns that come with lithium-ion batteries, such as the sourcing and disposal of rare raw materials.

SAN FRANCISCO/SHANGHAI, Feb 8 (Reuters) — SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) has shelved its blockbuster sale of Arm Ltd to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) valued at up to $80 billion citing regulatory hurdles and will instead seek to list the company.

Britain’s Arm, which named a new CEO on Tuesday, said it would go public before March 2023 and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that would be in the United States, most likely the Nasdaq.

SoftBank acquired Arm, whose technology powers Apple’s iPhone and nearly all other smartphones, in 2016 for $32 billion.