UNDΞR THΞ HOOD

Amazon’s Alexa can now listen and respond to whispers, and she will whisper back. Now first, this might set off another wave of anxiety for privacy advocates. Your virtual assistant is not only spying on you and potentially recording or storing your conversations, now she can do even if you tried to keep your voice down. Amazon’s team just made that sensitive microphone function even more acutely. Video demonstrating Alexa whisper: So, why do we need to whisper in the first place? Will it come handy in anyway? Yes. If you whisper, “Echo, play a lullaby,” for the infant who’s almost asleep in your arms, Echo will whisper back, “Here’s a station for lullabies from your Amazon Music library,” instead of screaming at  full startling volume. What's more? Whisper is not the only important feature that will come to Amazon Echo devices this year, we also have bunch of new ones. Guard : Guard will let you say, “Alexa, I’m leaving,” and the device will automatically acti...

Google has been working on a Material Design refresh for Chrome across desktop and mobile in recent months, and elements of the redesign are starting to make their way to the stable version of the browser. Chrome 68, released recently, now includes parts of the Material Design refresh hidden behind settings flags in both the iOS and desktop versions. Chrome 68 for Android does not yet include the Material Design refresh changes. By default it is not enabled even if you're on the latest version. Here's how to turn it on: Navigate to chrome://flags/#top-chrome-md In “ UI Layout for the browser’s top chrome ” change the option from default to refresh Restart Chrome to see the changes

At WWDC today (June 4), Apple's Senior Vice President Craig Federighi revealed a lot of new Mac features, and a new name. Yes, macOS 11.14 Mojave is coming to users this fall. Highlights of this new, free update include a universal dark mode, a dynamic desktop, a Finder that photographers will love and a version of Safari with even more privacy-focused tools than before. Apple also improved screenshots in ways that iPhone and iPad users will find familiar. Oh, and Apple announced the baby steps its taking to bring iOS apps to the Mac, including four of its own titles -- Apple News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Home. Dark Mode This feature allows you to take all of the user interfaces in your Mac's apps, and turn them from bright to dark hues. Federighi said apps really pop against a white background, and while I'm inclined to believe him, I'm mostly happy to have a native feature that means my eyes will be hit with less bright light. Dynamic Desktop For th...

Design flaws in processors from leading chipmakers could let attackers access sensitive information. How did this happen, and what's the fix? While the whole industry is scrambling on Spectre, Meltdown focused most of the spotlight on Intel and there is no shortage of outrage in Internet comments. Like many great discoveries, this one is obvious with the power of hindsight. So much so that the spectrum of reactions have spanned an extreme range. From “It’s so obvious, Intel engineers must be idiots” to “It’s so obvious, Intel engineers must have known! They kept it from us in a conspiracy with the NSA!” Source : Graz University of Technology/Natascha Eibl For those of you who don't know, this notorious exploit allows access to your operating system’s sacrosanct kernel memory because of how the processors handle “speculative execution,” which modern chips perform to increase performance. An attacker can exploit these CPU vulnerabilities to expose extremely sensitive da...

Android Material Design So even after having just 3gb of RAM, iPhone 10 is very more faster than few Android flagship smartphones out in the market and it's not only because of Apple's 11 Bionic chipset but it's also because of booting time, app opening animation, multitasking, closing animation and the RAM management. Yes, I want to say iOS handles everything just perfectly and smoothly. The reason we hate iOS / Android is because we cannot customize it and iPhones are very more expensive than Android smartphones. Yeah we have variety of Android smartphones out there which we consider better than iPhones and actually they are but one cannot deny the fact that iPhones are very more smoother than most of the Android smartphones but that's going to change with Android 9.0 P. Google is saying enough is enough they will dominate iOS operating system with Android 9.0 by doing major interface changes and by major they literally mean major the last huge change we ...

As widely rumoured, Asus has introduced its 2018 flagship smartphone for the year, the Zenfone 5Z at the ongoing MWC 2018 conference at Barcelona, Spain. The handset comes alongside its less-powerful variant, the Zenfone 5 and the Zenfone 5 Lite . Zenfone 5Z with notch Sure, Apple didn’t have any sort of official presence at this year’s MWC, but this was the week the iPhone X really came into its own. The company’s premium flagship was everywhere in spirit, through the design choices from the competition. For some it was the mere legitimization of the notch — for others, the inspiration was a bit more unabashed. Asus Zenfone 5Z will be made available in Midnight Blue and Meteor Silver colour variant and has a completely new design as compared to its older series siblings. The smartphone boasts of a 6.2-inch FullHD+ IPS display with 19:9 aspect ratio, which is even more than that of the Galaxy S9. Interestingly it has a familiar iPhone X - like 'Notch' on top of th...

Windows 10’s growth is on a roll, the flagship operating system is currently running on over 300 million PCs and devices worldwide, since its launch last year. With the accelerated growth, comes new opportunities, both good and bad. The latest example of the bad is a Product Activation Scam that some users are starting to see on their installations. The Windows 10 Activation Pro Scam is quite convincing. Since Microsoft has been aggressively pushing for everyone to upgrade to Windows 10, it can easily fool non-techy users. Scams Pretending to Be Windows 10 Product Activation Recently, a follower on Twitter sent a tweet asking me to confirm if a recent message on their computer about activating Windows 10 was a scam. After reviewing the image below, it turned out her hunch was right. Scams such as this are intelligently designed and engineered to appear genuine. Users will notice the graphics use the same colors and themes associated with the real Windows 10 update branding. M...

Gone are the days when Vivo along with its sister company Oppo was called 'rubbish'. After introducing the world's first under screen fingerprint scanner partnering with Synaptics in CES 2018, it took the tech-world by storm. Vivo joined the ranks of the top 10 smartphone makers in the first quarter of 2015 with a global market share of 2.7%. It has still gigantic numbers in sale in India and other Asia Pacific counties. However smartphones produced by the giant have always been condemned. It's obvious that you might have also heard Oppo and Vivo starting the 'selfie trend' in India with their selfie centric devices. They are also notoriously popular in advertisement. Banners and hoardings of the two companies are seen everywhere. They don't fall behind to engage big celebrities as influencers like Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and many others. They also sponsored their brand in Indian Premier League. And moreover started some crappy hashtags lik...

The title seemed like it's reverse. Didn't it? haha Yes, I'm not talking about running Android apps in Windows, I'm talking about running Windows x86 apps in your Android!!! Developers from CodeWeavers have just released version 3.0 of the Wine compatibility layer for Linux-based systems, which can now be built into an APK package and installed on your Android device. Earlier it could power Chromebooks to do the same. Wine 3.0 release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. You can get the full documentation here . Image source :Android Police Although you’ll need an x86 Android device to take full advantage of it. Wine does support ARM devices, but you can only use programs that were ported to Windows RT. You can find a few examples here. The Wine project is working on using QEMU to emulate x86 CPU instructions on ARM, but that’s not complete yet. XDA Developers forum has a list of such apps that can be run full-fledge...

Finally this year a company that is far less popular in comparison to big tech behemoths like Apple and Samsung made them bite the dust. Vivo showed 'em all! This is the phone, the first one to have a fingerprint sensor integrated into the display. The first phone to have the fingerprint sensor integrated into the display so it's right in this area down here which is available to use as you would with any other smartphone display but when you lock the phone and you want to unlock it, it turns into a fingerprint sensor. It works exactly like the capacitive fingerprint sensor you might have seen on Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S or whatever. But the difference is the advantage now i.e. you have these ultra thin bezels top and bottom on the phone but you still have the fingerprint sensors right at the front where it used to be, and where for a lot of people, it should be if you have no bezels we have nowhere to put it. So a lot of companies have to come up with compro...

There are two ways to integrate with WhatsApp: -Through a custom URL scheme -Through Android's intent system Custom URL Scheme: WhatsApp provides a custom URL scheme to interact with WhatsApp: If you have a website and want to open a WhatsApp chat with a pre-filled message, you can use our custom URL scheme to do so. Opening whatsapp://send?text= followed by the text to send, will open WhatsApp, allow the user to choose a contact, and pre-fill the input field with the specified text. Here is an example of how to write this on your website: Hello, world! Android intent system: Like most social apps on Android, WhatsApp listens to intents to share media and text. Simply create an intent to share text, for example, and WhatsApp will be displayed by the system picker: Intent sendIntent = new Intent(); sendIntent.setAction(Intent.ACTION_SEND); sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "This is my text to send."); sendIntent.setType("text/plain"); ...

On November last year, Facebook killed Messenger Day and consolidated it with Facebook as Stories, the 24-hour ephemeral posts in either Facebook or Messenger appeared in both apps synced with each other. And after a while Instagram rolled out a “cross-post to Facebook Stories” feature that populated to Messenger too, though there was no current plan to allow Facebook Stories to be pushed to Instagram. Now Facebook is looking at how to bring WhatsApp into the fold. Facebook could soon offer users an option to post the same Story to three networks that are all owned by the tech giant. Instagram recently confirmed the testing of a tool to cross-post Stories as a WhatsApp status. After users in Brazil spotted the new option, Instagram confirmed to Tech Crunch that the feature is currently in testing. Like the option to post an Instagram Story to Facebook Stories, the tested tool would allow Stories to also post to WhatsApp, where they would live as a status. While...

Dual cameras are arguably one of the biggest smartphone trends in 2017 we've seen them in every phone from the best flagships all the way down to the entry-level smartphones. And why do we want them well just like having two eyes? Having two different lenses allows your smartphone to perceive depth. We can't fit DSLR optics into a seven millimeter body so therefore having two cameras allows for an artificially created but nonetheless impressive looking blurring off the background.  Dual cameras If we take a look at phones like the Galaxy Note 8 the Huawei p10 with their dual cameras, I wouldn't part with the feature for anything it's amazing it can turn you're pretty amateur photography into something that really looks like it was taken with a crew and a giant camera five times the size. And as a matter of fact, one of the few improvements from the Galaxy S8 plus to the Galaxy Note 8 is that dual camera and the change is so significant that for a lot of ...