Soon after its release, electronics insurance company SquareTrade put Samsung’s new flagship phone through its breakability test, a series of drops, dunks, and tumbles. It was deemed the most breakable phone of all time: “S8 is the first phone we’ve tested that’s cracked on the first drop on ALL sides,” SquareTrade wrote in a video demonstrating the drops.
Source: Repair Shops Are Stoked That the Samsung Galaxy S8 Is the Most Fragile Phone Ever Made – Motherboard
One of those holes is that Galaxy S8’s face recognition can be tricked with a photo. At least this is what a video from Spanish Periscope user Marcianophone purports.
Source: Galaxy S8 face recognition already defeated with a simple picture | Ars Technica
A single sentence buried in a dense “privacy policy” for Samsung’s Internet-connected SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture more than just your request to play the latest episode of Downton Abbey.
“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party,” the policy reads.
via Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically – The Daily Beast.
A U.S. judge on Thursday rejected Apple’s request for a permanent sales ban in the United States against some older Samsung smartphones, a key setback for the iPhone maker in its global patent battle.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, ruled that Apple Inc had not presented enough evidence to show that its patented features were a significant enough driver of consumer demand to warrant an injunction
via Apple loses bid for U.S. ban on Samsung smartphone sales – chicagotribune.com.
This is pretty obviously a firmware bug. Writing UEFI variables is expressly permitted by the specification, and there should never be a situation in which an OS can fill the variable store in such a way that the firmware refuses to boot the system. We’ve seen similar bugs in Intel’s reference code in the past, but they were all fixed early last year. For now the safest thing to do is not to use UEFI on any Samsung laptops. Unfortunately, if you’re using Windows, that’ll require you to reinstall it from scratch.
ReVuln’s policy of disclosing security holes only to paying customers has met with disapproval from both vendors and security pros, who argue that companies should do what they can to eradicate dangerous software holes. However, the company is unbowed, maintaining that selling knowledge of software security holes is a legitimate business and helps the company recoup the costs of researcher the holes and developing proof of concept exploits for them.
via Security Hole in Samsung Smart TVs Could Allow Remote Spying | The Security Ledger.
A little short on details as I wondered how this could be done sitting behind a proper firewall.
Technologies at issue relate to electronic devices for wireless communications and data transfer including Radio Frequency (RF) technology and in some cases standardized communication protocols including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, LTE, and 802.11 Wi-Fi standards, Ericsson said in the filing.
The faster 64-bit processors will appear in servers, high-end smartphones and tablets, and offer better performance-per-watt than ARM’s current 32-bit processors, which haven’t been able to expand beyond embedded and mobile devices. The first servers with 64-bit ARM processors are expected to become available in 2014.
“Samsung is a lead partner of ARM’s new Cortex A50 processors. However, we’re not in a position to comment on our plans for how we’ll use the Cortex A50 as part of our Exynos product family,” said Lisa Warren-Plungy, a Samsung Semiconductor spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
At a hearing in the court in London on Thursday morning, the judge told Apple that it had to change the wording of the statement within 48 hours, carry it on its home page, and use at least 11-point font.
via Apple’s Samsung statement reprimanded by court of appeal | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
Bloomberg quoted Jacob as saying Apple’s statement was “a plain breach of the order”.
Since the early 2000s, Samsung has been involved in designing of Apple’s A-range of chips as the main manufacturer. Samsung technologies contributed in the development of the A6 predecessors A5 and A5X, thanks to a broad agreement between the two companies. It now appears that the structure of the deal has been dramatically adjusted.
via Moving from love-hate to hate-hate.
As the patent war deepens, the two companies have seen a faster deterioration of their business partnership. Apple has already reduced its memory chip orders from Samsung for the iPhone 5 as it intends to widen its supply chain.
Unlike memory chips, which just read and write data, application processors control an entire computing system, therefore processor chips are more profitable.