Friday, July 12, 2019

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Xiaomi Mi Superbass Wireless Headphones Launch in India on July 15

Friday, July 12, 2019  
After announcing that it will be launching the Redmi K20 and K20 Pro in India on July 17, Chinese smartphone and consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi has today announced that it will be launching a new pair of headphones in India on July 15.



The announcement has been made on Twitter by the company’s official Indian handle, with the hashtag “#BreakTheWire” and “#MiSuperbassWirelessHeadphones” along with an image of the headphones; clearly Xiaomi isn’t trying to hide anything other than the price at this point.

According to the image embedded in the tweet, the headphones have a decidedly sporty look, and will come in at least a black and red color scheme. The image also mentions that the headphones will have a 20 hour battery life, and will come with 40mm drivers, which is par for the course for headphones of this size; although I’m sure Xiaomi will price these much lower than other headphones with 40mm drivers.


On the Amazon page for the headphones (yes, there’ already one), the company mentions that the headphones will have deep impactful bass output, and that they are “made for bass lovers.” The page also claims that the headphones will have superfast Bluetooth connectivity with no compromise on sound quality which leads me to think they’ll come with aptX support and maybe Bluetooth 5.0 for faster and better connections.

As mentioned earlier, the Mi Superbass Wireless Headphones will be launching on July 15, Midnight, and according to Mi India’s tweet, will be available on Mi.com and Amazon India for a yet to be disclosed price.

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Thursday, July 11, 2019

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“Agent Smith” the new malware that affected millions of Android devices

Thursday, July 11, 2019  
Cyber security solutions provider Check Point on Wednesday revealed that 'Agent Smith," a new variant of mobile malware, has quietly infected around 25 million Android devices globally, including 15 million mobile devices in India.



Disguised as a Google-related app, the malware exploits known Android vulnerabilities and automatically replaces installed apps with malicious versions without the users' knowledge or interaction, said Check Point Research, the threat intelligence arm of Israel-based Check Point.

The malware currently uses its broad access to the devices' resources to show fraudulent ads for financial gain, but could easily be used for far more intrusive and harmful purposes such as banking credential theft and eavesdropping.This activity resembles previous malware campaigns such as "Gooligan", "Hummingbad" and "CopyCat".

"The malware attacks user-installed applications silently, making it challenging for common Android users to combat such threats on their own," said Jonathan Shimonovich, Head of Mobile Threat Detection Research at Check Point.

"Agent Smith" was originally downloaded from the widely used third-party app store, 9Apps and targeted mostly Hindi, Arabic, Russian and Indonesian-speaking users.So far, the primary victims are based in India though other Asian countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh have also been impacted.

There has also been a noticeable number of infected devices in the UK, Australia and the US as well.Check Point has worked closely with Google and at the time of publishing, no malicious apps remain on the Play Store, said the company.

"Combining advanced threat prevention and threat intelligence while adopting a 'hygiene first' approach to safeguard digital assets is the best protection against invasive mobile malware attacks like 'Agent Smith,'" said the report.

In addition, users should only be downloading apps from trusted app stores to mitigate the risk of infection as third party app stores often lack the security measures required to block adware loaded apps.
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Pi 4 has a notable USB Type-C power issue

Thursday, July 11, 2019  
A bug has recently been identified with the USB Type-C implementation on the new Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer. It was already confirmed officially by the board's co-creator Eben Upton.



Apparently, the Raspberry Pi 4 refuses to take power from certain USB Type-C cables. Most notably ones that users have re-purposed from Macbooks and other new Type-C powered laptops.

Without getting overly technical, what is happening here is that certain cables identify the Raspberry Pi 4 incorrectly as an audio adapter accessory and then refuse to provide sufficient power.

The solution for now - either use the official Raspberry Type-C power adapter or a non e-marked Type-C cable. What is that, you may ask? Well, then read the next paragraph for a more nerdy explanation, or simply skip it if that's not your cup of tea.

Electronically marking Type-C cables refers to the process of implementing certain maker chips on one or both ends of the cable. The USB specification allows for these to be connected in two main ways and come in two flavors - passive and active, mostly depending on whether they need to augment the actual data transfer through the cable or not. Furthermore, e-marked cables are required if you need a full-featured cable, like one that needs USB 3.1 Gen1 or Gen2 (which are no longer called that), or uses USB Alt-Mode or provides more than 3 amps of current. The Type-C cables that ship with most laptops likely tick at least one of these boxes, which is what apparently causes the Raspberry Pi 4 incompatibility.

While this issue might sound bad, it shouldn't actually be that hard to correct in future revisions of the Raspberry Pi 4 board. And its definitely not uncharacteristic for the UK company to go though several revisions for its popular fruit-themed single board computers.

After all properly designing these to remain compatible with previous Raspberry Pi models while making them exponentially more powerful with each generation is no easy task. $35 now get you a surprisingly potent quad-core Cortex-A72 chipset, 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, two micro HDMI ports, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports and many more goodies.

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