Month: August 2017

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How Your Phone Number Became the Only Username That Matters

Before it was the world’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp wasn’t even a messaging app. Founder Jan Koum simply thought it would be neat to open his address book and see a status message—at the gym, in a meeting—next to everyone’s names. He also knew no one wants to endure the rigamarole of creating a username and password, maintaining a buddy list, and joining yet another social network just to know what their friends are up to. So Koum let people log into WhatsApp using only a phone number. He also used the iPhone’s Address Book API to automatically scan your contacts to see who you knew that was already using the service.

Great growth-hacking, yes, but helping people find friends proved more of a side effect than anything. "I was just lazy and couldn’t remember my Skype password," Koum says. "I kept having to get new usernames and start all over. I went through, like, three different accounts in the matter of a summer, and I was like, ‘Screw this.’" Looking back, though, he considers the decision central to WhatsApp’s massive success. "You look at the painful experience you’d have with some of the legacy messaging apps on a desktop, and the elegance and simplicity of SMS," Koum says. "To us, it was just like, well, if SMS can do it, why shouldn’t we?"

WhatsApp was among the first apps to equate your account with your phone number. Now apps like Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger do it, too. Starting this fall, setting up your iPhone will be as easy as punching in your number. The supposedly super-secure way of logging into apps involves texting you a secret code to verify your identity. Phone numbers are killing the username, killing the password, and making it easier than ever to go wild online. So guard it with your life, because it is your life.

But Who Are You?

Virtually every powerful company has tried to assert itself as The One True ID. Facebook Connect followed you around the web, making your Facebook credentials a virtual passport to other sites and services. Twitter always hoped to turn your @username into a similarly powerful login, and your profile page into your personal website. The +YourName convention of Google Plus might have turned into something similar, if only anybody used Google Plus.

Beyond the tech giants, the popular open source tool OpenID united your many emails, screen names, and profiles with a simple URL. The Fido Alliance brought Google, Visa, Samsung, Intel, and others together to create a powerful, secure login device you could use anywhere. The Obama administration even got in the game, developing the controversial National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Under the that system, every user would have a "single credential," like a card or a piece of software, that could be used to log into any website or platform. Some of these programs made real headway, but none could get universal support.

But a phone number? Everyone has one. The universality of smartphones turned the address book into a gold mine for anyone building a social app. Facebook Messenger’s explosive growth happened largely because you only needed a phone number to sign up. When Google created the Duo and Allo messaging apps, the company opted not to associate your profile with your Google account, but with your phone number. "Your contact list is fully populated with lots of your friends’ phone numbers," Nick Fox, Google’s VP of messaging, said at the time. "You don’t need to manage new contacts. Whatever contacts are in your phone, work within the app." It also helped that you could send someone a message in Allo, and if they weren’t using the app they’d get your message as a plain ol’ SMS—with a nudge to sign up.

As more of your personal life moves online, having a single way to identify yourself matters. It helps you find people, helps people find you, and helps keeps you safe. And while people change email addresses when they switch jobs or tire of being fartman420@hotmail.com, a phone number has remarkable staying power. Now that you can port your number between phones, plans, and even carriers, you have no reason to change yours. And the odds are your phone’s area code indicates where you were living when you first got a cell phone—like a badge of honor, a statement of personality wrapped up in three numbers.

Can I Have Your Number?

Your phone number provides far greater security than a password, but it isn’t perfect. Scammers can steal your identity using only your digits, and spoofing someone’s number or even stealing it right off a SIM card remains shockingly easy. There are other problems, too: You’ve probably never told Amazon your Wells Fargo password, but they both know your phone number. "Your cell phone number is… tied to the same portals of information that is aligned with your social security number," private investigator Thomas Martin wrote earlier this year. "The little known secret is the cell phone number is more useful because it is connected to hundreds of databases not affiliated with your social security number."

So be careful who has number. You may even want to pick up a burner, or use a service like Sideline and Burner that provides disposable phone numbers. "Dating and Craigslist were the two primary use cases at the beginning," says Greg Cohn, Burner’s co-founder. Over time, Cohn says, the Burner crew was amazed at "how many different use cases people had for phone numbers, and extra phone numbers." Customers include celebrity users who don’t want their primary number getting out, and people in sales looking to separate work from personal calls on a single device.

Eventually, your phone itself could replace your number as your primary identity—at least when it comes to authentication. Some apps don’t require a password at all, but text you a code each time you log in. Smart home devices are programmed to spot your phone, and assume it’s never more than a few feet from its owner. You are your phone, and your phone is you. The trend will only accelerate as wearables become more popular and you start strapping stuff to your body instead of shoving it in your pocket. You’ll unlock your phone with your face, pay for stuff with your thumbprint, and log into Facebook with your voice.

For now, though, there’s nothing more personal than your phone number. So hang onto it, treasure it, be choosy about who you give it to and what you type it into. Those digits represent you more than any username or email address or password. So next time you give someone your number, make sure they know just how honored they should feel.

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Tesla quietly upgrades Autopilot hardware in new cars

Tesla may have promised that all its newly-made vehicles from October 2016 onward would have the groundwork for self-driving capabilities, but that doesn’t mean its technology is set in stone. Electrek has learned that Tesla is quietly equipping new Model 3, S and X production units with upgraded Autopilot hardware (HW 2.5). Don’t put your barely-used P100D up for sale, though, as this isn’t a night-and-day upgrade. Although Electrek says the new gear includes a secondary node to enable more computing power, a spokesperson says 2.5 is really about adding "computing and wiring redundancy" that "very slightly" boosts reliability.

Every HW 2.0 or later car should still have the foundations for self-driving functionality, in other words. And while it’s "highly unlikely" that these vehicles will need an upgrade when fully autonomy is an option, Tesla will upgrade them to 2.5 for free.

The improvement underscores the fine line Tesla has to walk with when it comes to upgrades. The electric car maker revolves around constant iteration, but it also has to meet the expectations of customers who bought expensive add-ons assuming they’d eventually get full self-driving features. Tesla likely has more headroom for vehicle upgrades than this, but it can’t do anything that would limit driverless tech to post-2.0 vehicles.

Via: The Verge

Source: Electrek

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LG V30’s camera has the lowest f-stop in a smartphone

After focusing on audio for the V20, LG decided to shift its successor’s selling point to something else: its camera. We still have a few weeks before V30’s launch, but the phonemaker has followed up a leak of its hands-on footage with the revelation that the device will have the largest aperture on a smartphone yet. LG has incorporated an f/1.6 lens into the phone’s dual camera — as you might know, the lower the f value, the bigger the aperture is and the more the light gets in. An f/1.6 lens lets 25 percent more light in than an f/1.8 lens, for instance.

V30’s aperture is complemented by the camera’s glass lens that can reproduce colors better than plastic lenses can. LG says the phone’s camera is just better than its predecessors’ overall — it even reduces edge distortion for wide angle shots like landscape images and (ahem) "groufies" despite being slimmer.

"LG boasts an unrivaled heritage in smartphone photography," the Korean electronics maker said, "and our decision to adopt glass in the V30 camera is specifically because this has traditionally been the realm of DSLRs. For the users for whom the V series was designed, this kind of innovation is significant." We’ll know for sure how good the phone’s image quality truly is after it launches on August 31st.

Source: LG

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NASA’s plasma rocket making progress toward a 100-hour firing

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With 200 kW of solar power, the VASIMR engine could be used as a lunar tug.

Ad Astra Rocket Company


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Almost everyone recognizes that if humans are truly to go deeper into the Solar System, we need faster and more efficient propulsion systems than conventional chemical rockets. Rocket engines powered by chemical propellants are great for breaking the chains of Earth’s gravity, but they consume way too much fuel when used in space and don’t offer optimal control of a spacecraft’s thrust.

NASA recognizes this, too. So in 2015, the space agency awarded three different contracts for development of advanced propulsion systems. Of these, perhaps the most intriguing is a plasma-based rocket—which runs on Argon fuel, generates a plasma, excites it, and then pushes it out a nozzle at high speed. This solution has the potential to shorten the travel time between Earth and Mars to weeks, rather than months.

But to realize that potential, Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company must first demonstrate that its plasma rocket, VASIMR, can fire continuously for a long period of time. The three year, $9 million contract from NASA required the company to fire its plasma rocket for 100 hours, at a power level of 100 kilowatts, by 2018.

This week, Ad Astra reported that it remains on target toward that goal. The company completed a successful performance review with NASA after its second year of the contract, and it has now fired the engine for a total of 10 hours while making significant modifications to its large vacuum chamber to handle the thermal load produced by the rocket engine.

When Ars visited the company early in 2017, the company was pulsing its rocket for about 30 seconds at a time. Now, the company is firing VASIMR for about five minutes at a time, founder Franklin Chang-Diaz told Ars. “The limitation right now is moisture outgassing from all the new hardware in both the rocket and the vacuum chamber,” he said. “This overwhelms the pumps, so there is a lot of conditioning that has to be done little by little.”

  • A view of the plasma plume during a test firing.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Loading the VASIMR engine into the vacuum chamber.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Where the plasma comes out of the rocket engine.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • The VASIMR engine and the exterior of the vacuum chamber.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Exterior view of the vacuum chamber.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Installing cryopumps inside the vacuum chamber.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Franklin Chang-Díaz peers into the vacuum chamber during a test firing.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Franklin Chang-Díaz.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

  • Setup of the VASIMR engine (VX 200SS) inside the vacuum chamber during tests. The rocket is at left, and the area of the plume is shown by the purple outline.


    Ad Astra Rocket Company

As the company continues to test the new hardware, it is gradually building up to longer and longer pulses with inspections in between. As Astra remains on target to perform the 100-hour test in late summer or early fall of 2018, Chang-Diaz said.

Initially, the company foresees the plasma rocket as a means for pushing cargo between Earth and the Moon, or on to Mars. With solar powered panels, the rocket would have a relatively low thrust and therefore would move loads slowly but efficiently. But with more power, such as from a space-based nuclear reactor, it could one day reach much higher velocities that would allow humans to travel rapidly through the Solar System.

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AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way

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With an orange and blue color scheme to boot…


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If Ryzen was a polite, if firm way of telling the world that AMD is back in the processor game, then Threadripper is a foul-mouthed, middle-finger-waving, kick-in-the-crotch “screw you” aimed squarely at the usurious heart of Intel. It’s an olive branch to a part of the PC market stung by years of inflated prices, sluggish performance gains, and the feeling that, if you’re not interested in low-power laptops, Intel isn’t interested in you.

Where Intel charges $1,000/£1,000 for 10 cores and 20 threads in the form of the Core i9-7900X, AMD offers 16C/32T with Threadripper 1950X. Where Intel limits chipset features and PCIe lanes the further down the product stack you go—the latter being ever more important as storage moves away from the SATA interface—AMD offers quad-channel memory, eight DIMM slots, and 64 PCIe lanes even on the cheapest CPU for the platform.

Threadripper embraces the enthusiasts, the system builders, and the content creators that shout loud and complain often, but evangelise products like no other. It’s the new home for extravagant multi-GPU setups, and RAID arrays built on thousands of dollars worth of M.2 SSDs. It’s where performance records can be broken, and where content creators can shave precious minutes from laborious production tasks, while still having more than enough remaining horsepower to get their game on.

Sure, dive deep into the technicalities and Intel’s Skylake-X is still the absolute fastest when it comes to pure instructions-per-clock performance and high-frame-rate gaming. But the sheer daring of AMD Threadripper and accompanying X399 platform is nothing short of astonishing. Its performance, particularly in content creation tasks and production workloads, wipes the floor with the Intel equivalent. Taken as a whole, there really is no competition—Threadripper is the High End Desktop (HEDT) platform to beat.

Double trouble

When AMD unveiled its Zen architecture, which finally morphed into a product as Ryzen, much was said about Infinity Fabric, the company’s new interconnect designed for maximum scalability. The 14nm FinFET Zen core is designed as a four-core-complex (CCX), with Infinity Fabric used to bind two CCX together to create the eight-core CPUs of Ryzen 7. What many didn’t quite realise at the time is just how well Infinity Fabric would work (after a few teething troubles were resolved, at least) and just how far AMD could push it.

Threadripper 1950X is effectively two eight-core Ryzen 1800X CPUs placed onto the same package joined together by Infinity Fabric. The result is a CPU measuring a mammoth 72mm by 55mm, which slots into the even larger TR4 motherboard socket. Threadripper is, physically at least, the biggest consumer CPU released since the cartridge slot format of the Pentium 2—and even then the CPU itself was just a small part of the cartridge.

The retail experience

AMD has embraced Threadripper’s ample frame with aplomb. It comes in ludicrously ostentatious retail packaging that’s as oversized and dramatic as the CPU itself. Opening it is a multistage process of tearing through paper seals, twisting a latch to “unlock the power,” and removing steel clamps and protective windows.

Yes it’s over-the-top, and yes, it’s a little bit silly. But the eye-catching packaging and involved unboxing experience is as much as testament to AMD’s bullish bid to woo the enthusiast as it is to an over zealous marketing team.

The advantages and disadvantages of AMD’s Infinity Fabric design are well documented at this point—and I’d advise taking a look at Peter Bright’s excellent deep dive into the Zen architecture to learn more—but many of the quirks that arose from it have since been patched out or tweaked. Do note, however, that Infinity Fabric performance still depends greatly on memory speed. Thankfully, running 3200MHz memory with a Threadripper CPU is as simple as loading an XMP profile—a far cry from the memory issues that plagued Ryzen at launch.

Indeed, with Threadripper being based so heavily on Ryzen, it’s a pleasingly stable platform. The only real difference is the memory configuration—which is now quad-channel with ECC support, thanks to the two dual-channel controllers present on each eight-core die—and the PCIe lane configuration, which now features 64 lanes, four of which are reserved for connection to the new X399 chipset.

With Threadripper, you can run two graphics cards at X16 PCIe speeds, two at X8, and still have enough lanes left over for three X4 NVMe SSDs connected directly to the CPU. Intel’s i9-series offers a mere 44 PCIe lanes on the CPU by comparison, but does make up the difference with a further 24 lanes on the motherboard (they do, however, share a single X4 PCIe link to the CPU).

There are two Threadripper CPUs available at launch: the 16C/32T 1950X, and the 12C/24T 1920X. Both feature the same 512K of L2 cache per core (8MB total), 16MB per die (32MB total) of L3 cache, and 4.0GHz boost clock across four cores. They can both boost as far as 4.2GHz across the same four cores thanks to AMD’s XFR (extended frequency range) enhancements, which offer increased clock speeds for those with suitably robust cooling setups. The only difference between them is the slight base clock bump to 3.5GHz on the 1920X, versus the 3.4GHz of the 1950X. Like the rest of the Ryzen line-up, both Threadripper CPUs are fully unlocked for overclocking.

At $1,000/£1,000, the 1950X offers 16C/32 where Intel offers just 10C/20T. While Intel’s superior IPC performance and clock speeds do make up some of the difference, to get the same core count with an i9 costs $1,700, while the the top-end 18C/36T i9-7980XE costs an eye-watering $2,000. The 1920X fares even better, offering 12C/24T for $800. Intel doesn’t have an equivalent chip for the price, only the more expensive i9-7900X, or the $600 i7-7820X, which features a mere 28 PCIe lanes and just eight cores. Simply put, AMD offers a lot more for a lot less.

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