Congress might have passed a bill to make TV commercials quieter, but one anonymous online television engineer explains why it will take more than a law to save our ears. More »
The header says it all folks. We just ran some tests on the AppleTV’s playback limits by streaming 1080p movie trailers in iTunes and managed to verify murmurs saying the device can accept 1080p content. Unfortunately, output is a different story, since it downscales the image back to 720p on your display. Yes it’s a little frustrating — especially since it’s predecessor was up to the challenge — but it should at least comfort those with a massive library of 1080p videos who were worried about reconverting for their new black box. Considering the hardware gems discovered in the AppleTV teardown however, we’re still holding out for the jailbreak community to let us play our 1080p files, and display them too. Oh, and if they could get to work on Super-Hi Vision support at some point, well, that’d be just dandy.
Confirmed: Apple TV can play 1080p content from iTunes, but still only outputs 720p originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’ve been tipped by multiple sources today on some interesting developments in Verizon’s roadmap over the next couple quarters, and if you’re a BlackBerry fan, an Android fan, or a fan of exceptionally fast data, you’re probably going to want to tune in. Let’s get right into the meat of it, shall we? Follow the break!
Verizon scoop extravaganza: Motorola Venus with portrait QWERTY, Stingray LTE tablet, and more? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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HP has just named its new CEO and President, former CEO of SAP, Léo Apotheker. Mr. Apotheker, who was with SAP for over 20 years, will also join HP’s Board of Directors. His elections are to take effect November 1st. The decision has been expected since Mark Hurd‘s dramatic exit in August, though Mr. Apotheker’s name was not one widely circulated as being in the running. The company has simultaneously named Ray Lane as the Chairman of its Board of Directors. Full press release is below.
Continue reading HP names Léo Apotheker as new CEO and President
HP names Léo Apotheker as new CEO and President originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Productivity be damned! The bestest iPhone game ever just got 15 new levels–all of them sure to look mighty pretty on the iPhone 4’s Retina display. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20018191-233.html” class=”origPostedBlog”iPhone Atlas/a/p
Come one, come all — let’s gather and act shocked, shall we? It’s no secret that Google’s Android Market is far easier to penetrate than Apple’s App Store, which is most definitely a double-edged sword. On one hand, you aren’t stuck waiting a lifetime for Apple to approve a perfectly sound app; on the other, you may end up accidentally downloading some Nazi themes that scar you for life. A curious team of scientists from Intel Labs, Penn State and Duke University recently utilized a so-called TaintDroid extension in order to log and monitor the actions of 30 Android apps — 30 that were picked from the 358 most popular. Their findings? That half of their sample (15, if you’re rusty in the math department) shared location information and / or other unique identifiers (IMEI numbers, phone numbers, SIM numbers, etc.) with advertisers. Making matters worse, those 15 didn’t actually inform end-users that data was being shared, and some of ’em beamed out information while applications were dormant. Unfortunately for us all, the researchers didn’t bother to rat out the 15 evil apps mentioned here, so good luck resting easy knowing that your library of popular apps could be spying on you right now.
Update: A Google spokesperson pinged up with an official response to the study, and you can peek it after the break.
Update 2: Looks as if the full study (PDF) has been outed, with the 30 total apps named. Here they are: The Weather Channel, Cestos, Solitaire, Movies, Babble, Manga Browser, Bump, Wertago, Antivirus, ABC – Animals, Traffic Jam, Hearts, Blackjack, Horoscope, 3001 Wisdom Quotes Lite, Yellow Pages, Dastelefonbuch, Astrid, BBC News Live Stream, Ringtones, Layer, Knocking, Barcode Scanner, Coupons, Trapster, Spongebob Slide, ProBasketBall, MySpace, ixMAT, and Evernote. Thanks, Jordan!
Continue reading Study: select Android apps sharing data without user notification
Study: select Android apps sharing data without user notification originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Something as simple as changing your Android phone’s wallpaper or downloading a ringtone could transmit personal data about you, including your location, without your knowledge.
Sound farfetched? It’s not: About 15 of 30 randomly selected, popular, free Android apps sent sent users’ private information to remote advertising servers and two-thirds of the apps handled data in ambiguous ways, say researchers.
The researchers at Duke, Intel Labs and Penn State University, created a tool called TaintDroid that identifies apps transmitting private data to distant locations. TaintDroid monitors how applications access and use your location, microphone, camera, phone numbers in your contact list. The tool also provides feedback once an app is newly installed, letting you know if the app is transmitting data.
“This automatic feedback gives users greater insight into what their mobile applications are doing and could help users decide whether they should consider uninstalling an app,” says Peter Gilbert, a graduate student in computer science at Duke University who’s working on the project. The TaintDroid program isn’t publicly available yet.
The latest data supports a study published in June by mobile security company SMobile Systems that found 20 percent of the then-available 48,000 third-party applications for the Android operating system provided sensitive or private information to outside sources.
Data collection practices in apps are increasingly becoming a major privacy issue for consumers. In July, a mobile security firm called Lookout identified a free wallpaper Android app, Jackeey, that allegedly gathered data about its users, including their phone numbers, carrier subscriber identifiers and phone number of their voicemail accounts. The app then sent the information to a website based in China. The Jackeey app is estimated to have anywhere from 1 to 4 million downloads.
Sprint said it was coming, and lo and behold, the carrier has proven to be true to its word. Here on the final day of September, the year 2010, Sprint has issued a highly anticipated firmware update for the Epic 4G. We’re told that it’ll be pushed automatically to phones, bringing along four major fixes: WiFi standby battery drain, Amazon MP3 cannot download in 4G, large emails lag in upload speeds and increased 3G upload speeds. The new version is S:D700.0.5S.DI18, should take seven or eight minutes to download and will be beamed across The Now Network over the course of the next few days. Is that a congregation celebrating off in the middle distance? Sure is.
Sprint Epic 4G update now rolling out, promises ‘increased 3G upload speeds’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The seemingly unexposed ability to use speaker and headphone remotes to control playback within music apps on iOS 4 is a surprisingly useful feature for Pandora, Slacker, and Napster users. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20018187-233.html” class=”origPostedBlog”iPhone Atlas/a/p
Russian firm hopes to have luxury space hotel in orbit by 2016 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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