US-China Chip War Continues

 A Space I am watching, regards the players and supply chain.  Point me to other relevant information.

US-China chip war: How the technology dispute is playing out    By Suranjana Tewari and Jonathan Josephs  BBC News  (excerpt) 

The US is rapidly ramping up efforts to try to hobble China's progress in the semiconductor industry - vital for everything from smartphones to weapons of war.

In October, Washington announced some of the broadest export controls yet - requiring licences for companies exporting chips to China using US tools or software, no matter where they're made in the world.  Washington's measures also prevent US citizens and green card holders from working for certain Chinese chip companies. Green card holders are US permanent residents who have the right to work in the country.

It is cutting off a key pipeline of American talent to China which will affect the development of high-end semiconductors.

Why is the US doing this?

Advanced chips are used to power supercomputers, artificial intelligence and military hardware.  The US says China's use of the technology poses a threat to its own national security.

Alan Estevez, undersecretary at the US Commerce Department announced the rules, saying his intention was to ensure the US was doing everything it could to prevent "sensitive technologies with military applications" from being acquired by China.  "The threat environment is always changing and we are updating our policies today to make sure we're addressing the challenges," he said.

Meanwhile, China has called the controls "technology terrorism".

Countries in Asia that produce chips - such as Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea - have raised concerns about how this bitter battle is affecting the global supply chain.

And there were three significant developments in the chip conflict over the past week.

More Chinese firms on 'entity list'

The Biden administration has added 36 more Chinese companies, including major chipmaker YMTC to Washington's "entity list".

It means American companies will need government permission to sell certain technologies to them, and that permission is difficult to secure.   The US restrictions have broad implications. Last week, UK-based computer chip designer Arm confirmed that it was not selling its most advanced designs to Chinese firms including tech giant Alibaba because of US and UK controls.

Arm said it was "committed to adhering to all applicable export laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates."  .... ' 

Metaverse Replacing Smartphones?

Discussion and more in Twitter:  https://twitter.com/koubaak/status/1583163030241972225 

Nokias Vision of the world is where the Metaverse replaces Smartphones  ....

The Finland based company with 2700 employees in Coppell sees this next gen Technology moving into the mainstream by 2030 ... '

In the Dallas News:   10/13/2022

Hacking Smartphones

Note this requires device proximity

 Hacking Device Can Secretly Swipe, Tap Smartphone Screen

New Scientist

Jeremy Hsu, August 31, 2022

Separate teams of researchers have developed devices for remotely hacking smartphone touchscreens. Both methods involve placing devices featuring an antenna for transmitting signals and a phone locator under a table. The locator deduces the position and orientation of a touchscreen device placed on the table, then the antenna sends electromagnetic signals imitating electric field disturbances caused by physical touch. The Invisible Finger method created by University of Florida researchers caused both iOS and Android devices to recognize the electromagnetic touches; the GhostTouch technique from scientists at China's Zhejiang University worked with multiple Android devices, but could not crack the iPhone 7 Plus or certain OPPO phone models. The hacks only work with the target device lying face down and positioned close to the antenna.

In NewScientist

Have Phones Become too Smart?

No, Don't think so, just need to be better tailored to needs. 

extract from ACM NEWS

Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?,        By The New Yorker

In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro. Quarantine had prompted McCabe, a mother of two, to invest more effort into documenting family life. She figured that the new smartphone, which had been released the month before and featured an enhanced camera, would improve the quality of her amateur snapshots. But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, "I feel a little duped." Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl's upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that, when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), "what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture." The new iPhone promises "next level" photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. "Make it less smart—I'm serious," she said. Lately she's taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google's line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures.

Apple has reportedly sold more than a hundred million units of the iPhone 12 Pro, and more than forty million of the iPhone 13 Pro since it débuted, in September of last year. Both models are among the most popular consumer cameras ever made, and also among the most powerful. The lenses on our smartphones are tiny apertures, no bigger than a shirt button. Until recently, they had little chance of imitating the function of full-size professional camera lenses. Phone cameras achieved the standards of a basic digital point-and-shoot; many of us didn't expect anything more. With the latest iPhone models, though, Apple is attempting to make its minuscule phone cameras perform as much like traditional cameras as possible, and to make every photo they take look like the work of a seasoned professional. (Hence the names 12 and 13 "Pro," which are distinguished from the earlier iPhone 12 and 13 models mainly by their fancier cameras.) The iPhone 13 Pro takes twelve-megapixel images, includes three separate lenses, and uses machine learning to automatically adjust lighting and focus. Yet, for some users, all of those optimizing features have had an unwanted effect. Halide, a developer of camera apps, recently published a careful examination of the 13 Pro that noted visual glitches caused by the device's intelligent photography, including the erasure of bridge cables in a landscape shot. "Its complex, interwoven set of 'smart' software components don't fit together quite right," the report stated.

From The New Yorker

View Full Article    

In Need of Dumb-Phones?

 I don't think this will become common, too much  attention is payed to Apps and upgrades, but the point is made. 

Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones'

By Suzanne Bearne, Business reporter in the BBC

Seventeen-year-old Robin West is an anomaly among her peers - she doesn't have a smartphone.

Instead of scrolling through apps like TikTok and Instagram all day, she uses a so-called "dumbphone".

These are basic handsets, or feature phones, with very limited functionality compared to say an iPhone. You can typically only make and receive calls and SMS text messages. And, if you are lucky - listen to radio and take very basic photos, but definitely not connect to the internet or apps.

These devices are similar to some of the first handsets that people bought back in the late 1990s. Two phones pictured in 2005, two years before Apple released its first iPhone, and 11 years before TikTok

Ms West's decision to ditch her former smartphone two years ago was a spur of the moment thing. While looking for a replacement handset in a second-hand shop she was lured by the low price of a "brick phone".

Her current handset, from French firm MobiWire, cost her just £8. And because it has no smartphone functionality she doesn't have an expensive monthly data bill to worry about.  "I didn't notice until I bought a brick phone how much a smartphone was taking over my life," she says. "I had a lot of social media apps on it, and I didn't get as much work done as I was always on my phone."

The Londoner adds that she doesn't think she'll ever buy another smartphone. "I'm happy with my brick - I don't think it limits me. I'm definitely more proactive."  .... ' 

Voice Assistant use on Smart Phones

 Less use? Is it a matter of context and environment, or capability? 

Smartphone Voice Assistant Use Stalls Out But Consumers Want More Voice Features in Mobile Apps – New Report

BRET KINSELLA on February 9, 2022 at 4:51 pm   in Voicebot.ai

The use of general purpose voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant contracted over the past 12 months according to data in a new report by Voicebot Research. A national consumer survey of over 1,100 found that fewer U.S. adults said they were using their smartphone-based voice assistant while monthly active users (MAU) also declined as a percent of the population   ... ' 

Liquid Testing with Smartphones

Like the idea that we are extending smartphone use as sensors. It provides another means for gathering and utilizing complex data.   Here a good example:

Liquid Testing with Your Smartphone

By Shichao Yue, Dina Katabi

Communications of the ACM, October 2021, Vol. 64 No. 10, Pages 75-83

10.1145/3481038

Surface tension is an important property of liquids. It has diverse uses such as testing water contamination, measuring alcohol concentration in drinks, and identifying the presence of protein in urine to detect the onset of kidney failure. Today, measurements of surface tension are done in a lab environment using costly instruments, making it hard to leverage this property in ubiquitous applications. In contrast, we show how to measure surface tension using only a smartphone. We introduce a new algorithm that uses the small waves on the liquid surface as a series of lenses that focus light and generate a characteristic pattern. We then use the phone camera to capture this pattern and measure the surface tension. Our approach is simple, accurate, and available to anyone with a smartphone. Empirical evaluations show that our mobile app can detect water contamination and measure alcohol concentration. Furthermore, it can track protein concentration in the urine, providing an initial at-home test for proteinuria, a dangerous complication that can lead to kidney failure.

1. Introduction

Mobile computing has recently seen a surge in research on inexpensive methods for measuring liquid properties and identifying liquid type.7, 12, 17, 21 The developed methods can detect water contamination and distinguish a variety of liquid types such as water, milk, oil, and different alcohol concentrations. The goal of this line of research is to enable liquid testing outside the lab environment and encourage ubiquitous applications. However, the proposed designs require a specialized setup (a robot,21 a special container,7 etc.) and use devices typically unavailable to the general population (e.g., UWB radios or RFID readers). Although they make an important step toward ubiquitous liquid testing, they are still difficult to use by lay users.

This paper asks whether it is possible to deliver such services to lay users without a specialized setup, and using only a device that almost everyone has: a smartphone. Answering this question is not simple. Typically, liquid testing is done by measuring a particular property, such as electric permittivity or optical absorption, and using the measurements to identify the liquid type and characteristics.7, 12, 17, 21 However, none of the properties used in past work can be measured with a smartphone. To address this problem, we explore an alternative liquid property, surface tension, and develop algorithms and system architectures that enable measuring surface tension using only a smartphone.

Surface tension characterizes the force that holds the surface molecules together and minimizes the surface area. Measuring surface tension can reveal water contamination and allow for distinguishing liquid types.19 Water has a relatively high surface tension, and when polluted with organic compounds such as bacteria, oil, petroleum or its derivatives, its surface tension decreases significantly.3, 19 Hence, one may use this property to detect water contamination. Further, lipids and proteins act as surfactants, that is, they reduce surface tension. Alcohol also reduces surface tension, a property that can be leveraged to measure alcohol concentration.20 Most interestingly, the ability to measure surface tension at home can enable early detection of medical problems. For example, low surface tension of urine may indicate the presence of excess protein, a dangerous complication in diabetes patients.8 Daily measurements of urine surface tension help detect diabetic nephropathy (the chronic loss of kidney functions) and monitor the effect of treatment.8

Today, measurements of surface tension require a device called tensiometer, which typically costs thousands of dollars.9 They are often conducted by dipping a platinum plate into the liquid and carefully measuring the force required to pull it out. The process is complicated and requires professional training.9 This high bar hampers the ubiquitous application of surface tension.

We introduce CapCam (Capillary Camera), the first mobile app that measures liquid surface tension using only a smartphone. To measure surface tension, the user places the smartphone on top of a lightweight container, such as a paper cup, and activates the app, as shown in Figure 1. The phone vibrates and forces the container's wall to vibrate. The vibration generates capillary waves on the liquid surface, that is, small waves whose wavelength characterizes the liquid's surface tension. Our app uses the flashlight camera to take a few photos of the liquid, which it processes to estimate the capillary wavelength and hence the surface tension. Our approach is accurate, simple, cheap, and accessible to any user with a smartphone.  .... ' 

Imagine if Your Therapist Could Access Your Smartphone

Very interesting thought, will the contents of our phones provide maps to our psyche in the future?     Useful, but beware of possible uses, privacy?

Imagine if Your Therapist Could Access Data From Your Smartphone

The Wall Street Journal, by Laura Landro

Scientists are designing and testing applications that collect smartphone data to enhance psychiatric therapy and help therapists make more timely interventions. Researchers at the Harvard University-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have developed an app called mindLAMP designed to provide therapists with an overview of patient behavior and mental status. It uses smartphone sensors to collect behavioral data like screen time and sleep, and information from patients through surveys and cognitive tests; doctors review the data to evaluate patients' mental states and to tailor therapy regimens with them. Boston University researchers created the Motivation and Skills Support app to deliver targeted social-goal assistance to patients based on location, movement, and audio data continuously collected by their phones. University of Washington scientists are exploring the use of online search-history data to better understand suicide risk and design methods to detect and prevent it.

Pocket Identity Revisit

Unless something like face identity fails, as mentioned here previously.

The Identity in Everyone's Pocket   By Phil Vachon

Communications of the ACM, January 2021, Vol. 64 No. 1, Pages 46-55

Most every technology practitioner has a smartphone of some sort. Around the world cellular connectivity is more ubiquitous than clean, running water. With their smartphones, owners can do their banking, interact with their local government, shop for day-to-day essentials, or simply keep in touch with their loved ones around the globe.

It's this ubiquity that introduces interesting security challenges and opportunities. Not even 10 years ago, a concept like biometric authentication was a novelty, reserved only for specialized applications in government and the financial services industry. Today you would be hard-pressed to find users who have not had the experience of unlocking their phones with a fingerprint, or more recently by simply looking at the display. But there is more to the picture than meets the (camera's) eye: Deep beneath layers of glitzy user interfaces, there is a world of secure processors, hardware-backed key storage, and user-identity management that drives this deceptively simple capability.

Newer phones use these security features in many different ways and combinations. As with any security technology, however, using a feature incorrectly can create a false sense of security. As such, many app developers and service providers today do not use any of the secure identity-management facilities that modern phones offer. For those of you who fall into this camp, this article is meant to leave you with ideas about how to bring a hardware-backed and biometrics-based concept of user identity into your ecosystem.

The goal is simple: Make it as hard as possible for attackers to steal credentials and use them at their leisure. Let's even make it difficult for users to clone their own credentials to share with other users. In addition to this protection, let's ensure that adding extra factors such as biometric authentication provides a stronger assurance of who the user is. Bringing keys and other secrets closer and closer to something that is physically attached to the user provides a stronger assurance of the identity of the user who just authenticated to the device.

Back to Top

What Is a Digital Identity?  .... '

GE Working on COVID Detection with SmartPhones

Quite interesting idea, accuracy and other details unclear. On surfaces too?   Could be very useful in the current and upcoming pandemics. 

GE is working to put COVID-19 virus-detecting sensors in phones   in Engadget.

The system can identify coronavirus particles on surfaces.

Our phones have been integral in the fight against COVID-19 through test and trace systems that helped to contain the virus in places like South Korea and Taiwan. Now, scientists are harnessing smartphones again to identify coronavirus particles on surfaces as an additional line of defense against the pandemic, alongside more robust treatments such as vaccines and antiviral drugs. Researchers at General Electric have been awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to develop tiny sensors that can be embedded in mobiles to detect the presence of COVID-19 nano-particle ... '

Syncing time on Smartphones for Measurements

Can be useful for synchronization of measurement.

Twist-n-Sync: Skoltech Scientists Use Smartphone Gyroscopes to Sync Time Across Devices

Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Russia)

February 19, 2021

A software-based algorithm developed by scientists at Russia's Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Saint Petersburg State University can synchronize time across smartphones for practical tasks requiring simultaneous measurements. Their clock synchronization method is based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscopes, standard equipment in smartphones. The algorithm was employed in two smartphones capturing simultaneous photos, which outperformed existing synchronization software to realize an accuracy of several microseconds. The technique involves grabbing the smartphones in one hand, twisting them slightly, and allowing the software to process and compute for clock synchronization. The team is adapting the method to systems that include not just smartphones but other sensors, like LiDAR and depth cameras. .. ' 

Comparative Mobile Security IOS vs Android

Steve Gibson does a good job looking at security in smartphones in a recent Twit.TV.  Reviewing the work by Matthew Green at Johns Hopkins.

Comparative SmartPhone Security  from  talk notes  on Twit.TV podcast #603

A team of security researchers at Johns Hopkins, led by cryptographer, security technologist and associate professor of computer science, our friend Matthew Green, decided to take a serious look at the comparative security offered by the Apple iOS vs Google Android smartphone platforms.

To host the results of their analysis they grabbed the domain securephones.io. ...

Resources:  https://securephones.io/      https://securephones.io/main.html    https://securephones.io/main.pdf

TaintDroid: Information Flow on Smartphones

Brought to my attention as part of a broader study: 

 TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones

Authors:    William Enck, Peter Gilbert, Byung-Gon Chun, Landon P. Cox, Jaeyeon Jung, Patrick McDaniel, and Anmol N. Sheth. For their paper TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones. 

In OSDI’10: Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation. “This paper was instrumental in demonstrating that taint tracking could be made both efficient and fine-grained. For unmodified smartphone applications, with minimal monitoring overhead, the authors found dozens of potential leaks of sensitive and private information. This work sparked an important research agenda on smartphone privacy that continues to this day.”

Publication:OSDI'10: Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementationOctober 2010 Pages 393–407

OSDI'10: Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation

TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones    Pages 393–407

ABSTRACT

Today's smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime analysis by leveraging Android's virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users' private information across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications for phone users and valuable input for smartphone security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.  ... '

Training AI in Four Bits

Its happening now.   Consider too that smartphones can be the source of much data that will be used to train such systems.

Tiny four-bit computers are now all you need to train AI  in TechnologyReview

Powerful neural networks could soon train on smartphones with dramatically faster speeds and less energy.   by Karen Hao    ... '

Microsoft Warns about Dangers of MFA on Phones

 This was mentioned in a recent conversation about mlti factor authentication (MFA).  Especially using your phone as a means of MFA.   Good warning.  Includes links to other posts about the topic.

Microsoft Is Warning Against Using This Common Way of Protecting Your Most Important Accounts Those six-digit text message codes aren't as secure as you think.

By Jason Aten  TECH COLUMNIST  In Inc

Microsoft Is Warning Against Using This Common Way of Protecting Your Most Important Accounts

If you're using your phone for multi-factor authentication (MFA) to keep your important accounts safe, Microsoft has a warning for you. We'll get to that in just a second, but first, let's be clear on what we're talking about. MFA is an additional level of security beyond just a user name and password. For example, it's when your bank sends you a text message with a six-digit number that you have to enter on the website in order to get access to your accounts. 

The idea is that if someone were to get access to your user name and password--either through some kind of data breach, or simply because they were able to crack it--your account would still be safe since presumably only you would have access to the code sent to your phone. The problem is, that's not necessarily true. 

That's why Microsoft is warning people that while using text messages or phone verification as a form of MFA is better than nothing, it isn't as secure as you might think. That's because your phone number can be hacked, spoofed, swapped, or stolen. 

Specifically, Alex Weinert, Microsoft's director of identity and security wrote a blog post encouraging people to stop using their phone number for MFA. Weinert points out several reasons, including that SMS messages are not encrypted and that hackers have gotten very good at SIM-swapping.    .... " 

Microsoft Back in the Phone Biz

Surprising perhaps, microsoft dives back into phones, with a not completely novel foldable 2 screen phone.  Real practicality or just the novelty?   Android OS, expensive, big, ready for pre order.

The new Surface Duo
Do one better. There’s a new way to get things done.

Open two screens and open new possibilities

Surface innovation comes to a dual-screen mobile device, featuring the best of Microsoft 365, every Android app in the Google Play store, phone calls, and more.*

Google Turns IPhones into Security Keys

Nice approach.    What not have this done in al the common forms of phones.   Isn't any phone a unique 'key'?

Google turns iPhones into 2FA security keys — good news in an election year     Paul Sawers @PSAWERS in Venturebeat.....

See this motivationally described in more technical detail in the Google Blog ...

Project Zenkey to Use Phones to Authenticate

The idea is that your phone and phone number will act as a secure identifier.     I like the general idea, but expect general mistrust in large carriers will emerge.

The four big US carriers want to help you get rid of passwords, but you’ll have to wait

Project Verify is now ZenKey   By Jay Peters in theVerge

Last September, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced Project Verify, a way to log into apps without making a new account or password by instead relying on your smartphone to authenticate your identity. Think of it like the buttons you’ve likely seen that let you sign into apps and websites using your Facebook or Google account. Now, Project Verify has an official name — ZenKey — and it’s starting to roll out, albeit very slowly.  ... " 

Key AI for Smarter Phones

A good forward look about how smart phones are evolving to an expectation of smarter phones and telecom in the near future.  Conversation, value driven services, increased awareness, integration of user and use history and deeper context are all key.

How Smarter Phones Will Transform Tech, Media, and Telecom

A new generation of devices, powered by artificial intelligence, could be in consumers’ hands within a few years.

by Anand Rao, Raman Chitkara, and Sandeep Ladda In Strategy-Business

" ... It may sound futuristic. But the truly AI-enabled smartphone could become reality within the next three to five years. In our broad definition, AI is a collective term for computer systems that can sense their environment, and, in response to their objectives, think, learn, and act. And in our view, smart devices, including the smartphone, will be the vehicle through which AI will have the greatest effect on the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) industry.

A quantum leap in capability for phone-like devices can’t come soon enough. Given advances in computing, the smartphone now feels increasingly dumb to most users. To be sure, major manufacturers have added voice assistant capabilities and refined them. But, in general, the technology is still very brittle when it comes to understanding discourses or keeping track of an individual user’s transaction history. .... " 

Reading on Screens

Scientists say screens hurt our ability to comprehend the information we read  By Luke Dormehl

...  According to a new piece of research coming out of Pennsylvania State University, adult readers who spend a lot of time using electronic devices turn out to be less adept at understanding scientific texts. Compared to folks who read on paper (which, we believe, is a kind of high-res display made out of wood pulp), people who look at screens for hours each day — whether it’s reading articles, texting, or playing games — find that they pick up only short fragments of information, as opposed to incorporating the information in a more thorough manner. .... "