Exciting Technology

Fresh on the heels of Snapchat announcing Story Explorer, Vine has  today announced  a new way to discover Vines following a similar theme. When browsing in a channel or through your own feed, simply swipe left on a Vine to see other content that is of a similar nature. In the example provided as part of Vine’s blog post, you can see Vines of Justin Bieber across multiple accounts, like J-Bieb’s himself, the AMAs, and more. Vine actually launched a Similar Vines feature back in  October  for Android and brought it to iOS shortly after, but now users have the ease of simply swiping left to find them. Before, users had to click into the “Similar Vines” tab under the post. Vine wouldn’t go into too much detail describing how it determines which Vines are similar, but the company did say this upon introduction of the feature: As you and your fellow Vine viewers watch and interact with Vines, that activity helps us determine which posts to show. ...

Shortly after going public,  Square  announced that its new card reader is now available to pre-order on  its website  for $49. The new reader will ship in early 2016. It’s been a slow roll-out for the company’s new reader as Square first teased it at Apple’s WWDC in June. Compared to the good old Square reader that you put in your headphone jack, this one packs a few new features. First, it supports Apple Pay, and potentially other contactless payment systems. It has an NFC chip and a tokenization system for secure contactless payments. Second, the new bigger design comes with a new slot for chip cards in case you can’t pay with your phone. Finally, it’s a wireless reader that connects to your phone or tablet using Bluetooth. It has a small built-in battery and you can recharge it with a standard microUSB port. According to  Square’s website , 100 retailers are already using the new reader. But the company has yet to ship the new rea...

The future of wearables could be inked on your skin.  Chaotic Moon , a software design and development firm based in Austin, Texas, is developing a high-tech tattoo made of components and conductive paint to create circuitry to basically turn you into a cyborg…er collect health and other biometric data from your body. Chaotic Moon’s tattoo kit is in the nascent prototype stage right now, but CEO Ben Lamm told me it will be able to collect and upload health and informational data, much like Jawbone or the Apple Watch and send it to medical staff – or maybe even the military. “This is the new wearable,” Lamm told TechCrunch. “The future of wearables is biowearables.” “This is not something that can be easily removed like a Fitbit. It can be underneath a flack jacket, directly on the skin to be collecting this data and being reported back,” Lamm said of military applications. The tattoo is temporary and washes off much like a temporary fashion tattoo. According to Chao...

Increasing the focus on its nascent payment service, China’s  Xiaomi  has brought a fingerprint scanner to its range of affordable smartphones for the first time after it unveiled the third-generation Redmi Note in Beijing today. The sensor, which is located on the reverse of the Redmi Note 3, is the most striking feature of the new 5.5-inch phablet, which will retail for 899 RMB ($140) and will initially debut in China. Also of note, the phone comes with a metallic body for the first time while Xiaomi has increased the device’s battery to a whopping 4000mAh capacity. Under the hood, the phone is powered by a Helio X10 chip from MediaTek. It comes in at 8.65mm thick and, at 164g, is 4g heavier than the previous Redmi Note 2, which  was unveiled just three months ago . The Redmi Note 3 also includes the same 13-megapixel front camera and five-megapixel rear camera as its predecessor. This devi...

Accepting all forms of payment is important. At this point, credit/debit cards are everywhere, and many of us use them exclusively (I don’t ever carry cash anymore). Obviously, a business which doesn’t accept card will lose my business. Now it’s time for NFC mobile payments and EMV chip cards to enter the business. Square has been a go-to solution for vendors who can’t afford expensive credit card readers… or maybe just need more portability, and you can use Square on-the-go, wherever your smartphone is. Now they are releasing a nifty new reader that can handle both NFC and the recently adopted chip in newer payment cards, so they will be current with the times. This is unlike the card reader we are used to seeing, though. That little dongle that connected to your 3.5 mm headset jack is still included, but seems archaic next to the newest, baddest payment system. The Square contactless and chip reader is a little block that connects to your smartphone ...

  Similar to the Superfish malware that surrounded Lenovo laptops in February, another big computer manufacturer  Dell  spotted selling PCs and laptops pre-installed with a rogue SSL certificate that could allow attackers: To impersonate as any HTTPS-protected website and spy on when banking or shopping online. The rogue certificate, dubbed  eDellRoot , was first discovered over the weekend by a software programmer named  Joe Nord . The certificate is so creepy that it automatically re-installs itself even when removed from the Windows operating system. Also Read:  Lenovo Caught Using Rootkit to Secretly Install Unremovable Software Superfish 2.0: Unkillable Zombie The self-signed transport layer security (TLS) credential came pre-installed as a root certificate on Dell PCs and laptops that are signed with the same private cryptographic key, which is stored locally. That means an attacker with mode...

A Day In The Life Of A Penetration Tester. There is demand for experienced IT Security Professionals,  especially folk that can defend networks and of course keep prying eyes away from sensitive data, but is the job what most people think it is? Are pentesters (often referred to by the more sexy term ‘ethical hackers’) having a ball, is it a glamorous espionage-type job full of excitement  or  is it deadly boring  or  a mix of the above? Let’s get the definition right straight off the bat: a penetration test that is executed by pentesters is a series of methodologies that are commissioned to evaluate computer and network security by simulating real-life cyber attacks. Simply said, if they find a vulnerability then they have earned their wage and deserve a ‘pat on the back.’ Typically the processes involved are a mix of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ bits: The Fun Bits 1. Being able to establish the viability of a particular set of attack vectors (also referred...

Opera Max, the Android app that can help you reduce mobile data usage across various apps and services on your phone, has today announced a new feature sure to please music lovers everywhere. Streaming music is a big data user and now Opera Max can integrate with some of the leading providers to help you still get your tunes but use less data while you're filling your ears. The services available to take advantage include YouTube Music, Pandora, Slacker, Gaana and Saavn. By using Opera Max with any of these services its said you'll save up to 50% of your data compared to using them without. Opera Max can already offer data savings on video streaming and the technology behind this is similar. It uses optimizations powered by Rocket Optimizer, managing streaming audio traffic and can convert the streams to a more efficent, AAC+ codec from MP3 and MP4. The benefit to AAC+ being a quality sound delivered over a low bitrate connection. Opera has done great work to date in...

Corning has presented  Gorilla Glass 4 , which is said to offer double the assurance against split and broken glass from that offered in the  Gorilla Glass 3 . Examination done by the organization recommends that dropping your telephone (showcase side down) on a harsh, hard surface is more inclined to result in blood turning sour shouts and  cries  of urgency from cell phone proprietors. Things On Which Gorilla Glass 3 is differentiated from Gorilla Glass 4: Youthful Modulus  – How “hardened” is the material, the higher the worth the stiffer, yet the exchange off of this is increment in  fragility . Poisson Ratio  – the hub anxiety of the material when it is pulled or pushed.  Envision  extending a bit of air pocket gum — the  focal  point of it will  get to be  more slender. Shear Modulus  – characterizes the material’s reaction to shearing push or shear pressure, an essential variable in terms of...