Opera updates Jesus phone, BlackBerry browser versions After what seems like an eternity, iPhone users can download a new version of Opera. Two weeks ago the Norwegian web company updated its Mobile and Mini versions just for Android, but now it has brought those updates to other platforms – including the Jesus Phone. There are many small tweaks, including more efficient …
"Two weeks ago the Norwegian web company updated its Mobile and Mini versions just for Android, but now it has brought those updates to other platforms"
No Opera updated their versions for all platforms weeks ago. Apple have been mulling over whether to pull the plug or not on it for the last two weeks...
Still I like what you did there, pretend it was an Opera delay, not an Apple one...
Actually there were many updates last weeks, but for Android and Java.
Opera Software is aiming primary on Android, who wouldn't do it when it's the most used platform and growing? And Opera is losing ground to WebKit (Android stock browser, Safari, other alternatives) so they really need to do this.
And they did, very well. And now the updates are available to the rest of the market. Not that Opera don't value them, it's just that we users need to understand the things a company must do to continue to exist being profitable, which may be a delay for the product on our platform. That's ok. It's free!
To those people, using anything other than Opera mobile/mini for browsing 99% of the web on their mobile devices, pray tell why? Sod iphone anyway, its being regularly updated for the rest of us whatever your platform of choice.
Guy in the Sony store couldn't believe the difference when I installed Mini on their Tablet S during a demo, said they were still on a 512k line so seemed appropriate, use it, you'll like it!
/fanboi
Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.
This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.
Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.
A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.
Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.
This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.
First Look The /e/ Foundation's de-Googled version of Android 10 has reached the market in a range of smartphones aimed at the privacy-conscious.
The idea of a privacy-centric version of Android is not new, and efforts to deliver are becoming friendlier all the time. The Register interviewed the founder of the /e/ Foundation in 2020, and reported on /e/ OS doing rather well in privacy tests the following year. Back then, the easiest way to get the OS was to buy a Fairphone, although there was also the option of reflashing one of a short list of supported devices.
Now there's another option: a range of brand-new Murena phones. The company supplied The Register with a Murena One for review, with a pre-release version of the /e/ OS installed.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown for the first time that Bluetooth signals each have an individual, trackable, fingerprint.
In a paper presented at the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference last month, the researchers wrote that Bluetooth signals can also be tracked, given the right tools.
However, there are technological and expertise hurdles that a miscreant would have to clear today to track a person through the Bluetooth signals in their devices, they wrote.
A critical flaw in the LTE firmware of the fourth-largest smartphone chip biz in the world could be exploited over the air to block people's communications and deny services.
The vulnerability in the baseband – or radio modem – of UNISOC's chipset was found by folks at Check Point Research who were looking for ways the silicon could be used to remotely attack devices. It turns out the flaw doesn't just apply to lower-end smartphones but some smart TVs, too.
Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. This would be achieved by broadcasting non-access stratum (NAS) messages over the air that when picked up and processed by UNISOC's firmware would end in a heap memory overwrite.
Microsoft is continuing to lavish love on Android for Windows with an update to Android 12.1 that disables telemetry by default, although, as Microsoft notes, "this update may cause some apps to fail to launch."
Such are the delights of living on the bleeding edge of Windows test builds.
The update for the Windows Subsystem for Android arrived at the end of last week in the Windows Insider Dev Channel and comprises Android 12.1, a new settings app, and Windows integration improvements.
Spyware vendor Cytrox sold zero-day exploits to government-backed snoops who used them to deploy the firm's Predator spyware in at least three campaigns in 2021, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).
The Predator campaigns relied on four vulnerabilities in Chrome (CVE-2021-37973, CVE-2021-37976, CVE-2021-38000 and CVE-2021-38003) and one in Android (CVE-2021-1048) to infect devices with the surveillance-ware.
Based on CitizenLab's analysis of Predator spyware, Google's bug hunters believe that the buyers of these exploits operate in Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Serbia, Spain, Indonesia, and possibly other countries.
Apple may ditch its exclusive Lightning port in favor of the more widely used USB-C for future iPhone models.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted the shift on Wednesday, pointing out that the move would beef up the devices' wired connectivity, and shake up supply chains.
"My latest survey indicates that 2H23 new iPhone will abandon [the] Lightning port and switch to USB-C port. USB-C could improve iPhone's transfer and charging speed in hardware designs, but the final spec details still depend on iOS support," he said.
Google IO Google I/O, the ad biz's annual developer conference, returned to the Shoreline Amphitheater in California's Mountain View on Wednesday, for the first time in three years. The gathering remained largely a remote event due to the persistence of COVID-19 though there were enough Googlers, partners, and assorted software developers in attendance to fill venue seats and punctuate important points with applause.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, opened the keynote by sounding familiar themes. He leaned into the implied sentiment, "We're here to help," an increasingly iffy proposition in light of the many controversies facing the company.
He said he wanted to explain how Google is advancing its mission in two ways, "by deepening our understanding of information so that we can turn it into knowledge and advancing the state of computing so that knowledge is easier to access no matter who or where you are."
Column For the past six months I've been staring at the backside of my iPhone 13 Pro wondering what possessed Apple to build a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) camera into its flagship smartphone.
It's not as though you need a time-of-flight depth camera, sensitive enough to chart the reflection time of individual photons, to create a great portrait. That's like swatting a fly with a flamethrower – fun, but ridiculous overkill. There are more than enough cameras on the back of my mobile to be able to map the depth of a scene – that's how Google does it on its Pixel phones. So what is Apple's intention here? Why go to all this trouble?
The answer lies beyond the iPhone, and points to what comes next.
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