The New Hampshire State House rejected the Digital Fair Repair Act earlier this week in part thanks to a representative who seems to think that cell phones are literally garbage that no one should bother repairing. From a report: The bill would have forced manufacturers such as Apple to share repair manuals and parts with independent repair stores. House members didn't kill the bill, but sent it back to committee for a year of interim study, citing security concerns and, in the words of Rep. John Potucek (R-Derry) the ubiquity, cheapness, and -- in his opinion -- disposability of new smart phones. "In the near future, cellphones are throwaways," Potucek said, according to New Hampshire Business Review. "Everyone will just get a new one."

That is, of course, the problem that right to repair is trying to solve. The new iPhone 11 costs between $699 and $1,349. And it can be hard to find one at the moment. Google's Pixel 4 costs between $799 and $999. Manufacturers seal smartphones to make it difficult to replace the battery and do basic repairs. Often, getting repairs through the company is so expensive that people simply purchase a new phone. Apple's repair monopoly is so dominant that it's the center of an investigation by the United States House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee.

"Kids are outsmarting an army of engineers from Cupertino, California," reports the Washington Post: And Apple, which introduced "Screen Time" a year ago in response to pressure to address phone overuse by kids, has been slow to make fixes to its software that would close these loopholes. It's causing some parents to raise questions about Apple's commitment to safeguarding children from harmful content and smartphone addiction.

When Screen Time blocks an app from working, it becomes grayed out, and clicking on it does nothing unless parents approve a request for more time. Or, at least, it's supposed to work that way. On Reddit and YouTube, kids are sharing tips and tricks that allow them to circumvent Screen Time. They download special software that can exploit Apple security flaws, disabling Screen Time or cracking their parents' passwords. They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, such as changing the time to trick the system or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos.

"These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark Web sort of hacks," said Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. "It blows me away that Apple hasn't thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them."

Though people can still leave voicemail messages, "Some AT&T customers say they have not had access to their voicemail since the beginning of October," one local news site reported this week: An AT&T spokesperson sent the following statement to ABC11 about the issue: "We're aware that some customers may be having difficulty retrieving their voicemail due to a vendor server problem. We're in contact with the vendor as they work to fix it and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

ABC11 received several messages from frustrated AT&T customers.

"I have been told multiple times that it would be fixed the same day. Today I was told there is no estimated repair date. I don't know what to do. I am a psychologist and people who have mental health issues call me," one said. "They get my message and leave me a voicemail. There is no indication that I won't be able to access it."

"Voicemail is a crucial function on most people's devices. Having it down for weeks is unacceptable," another said. "If they don't fix this issue they will be losing lot of customers. I am been calling daily, but no result."
Slashdot reader amxcoder writes today that AT&T eventually cited their vendor's server issue back on October 9th in their help forum, and that in the 11 days since, "the problem appear to be spreading." After contacting Tech Support on October 20th, it appears that Level One tech support is not aware of the problem, and Level Two reports the problem is affecting Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee. However California and possibly other states seem to be affected as well.

Because AT&T is being tight-lipped about this outage, even to it's own customers that it is affecting, it's difficult to know how many customers this is impacting. No official statement is being sent to customers, nor are customers being updated on progress or given an ETA on resolving the problem. Some online chatter is wondering if AT&T is trying to keep this "under the radar" as long as they can because of something more nefarious, such as a data breach, hacked servers, or even ransomware. Anyone's guess is a good as another without official public statement from AT&T.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: If you've been using Linux on DeX (aka Linux on Galaxy) to turn your Samsung phone into a PC, you'll need to make a change of plans. Samsung is warning users that it's shutting down the Linux on DeX beta program, and that its Android 10 update won't support using the open source OS as a desktop environment. The company didn't explain why it was shutting things down, but it did note that the Android 10 beta is already going without the Linux option...

Samsung is still committed to DeX, and recently enabled its desktop-style space on Macs and Windows PCs. However, it's clear that the dreams of fully replacing a PC with your Galaxy phone will have to wait, at least for now.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Blacklisted Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei is in early-stage talks with some U.S. telecoms companies about licensing its 5G network technology to them, a Huawei executive told Reuters on Friday. Vincent Pang, senior vice president and board director at the company said some firms had expressed interest in both a long-term deal or a one-off transfer, declining to name or quantify the companies.

"There are some companies talking to us, but it would take a long journey to really finalize everything," Pang explained on a visit to Washington this week. "They have shown interest," he added, saying conversations are only a couple of weeks old and not at a detailed level yet.

hcs_$reboot writes: Everyone in California will now receive earthquake alerts on their phones seconds before the ground begins to shake, giving residents up to 20 seconds of warning before shaking begins. Developed by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley, the MyShake application (residents will need to download the app to receive the alerts in areas without cell phone coverage) is designed to alert the public when a magnitude 4.5 earthquake or greater has been detected and has been shown to be faster than other alert delivery methods. The wireless emergency alerts will be sent in the event of a more significant quake, magnitude 5.0 or greater. The system does not predict earthquakes. Rather, it uses numerous seismic stations to detect the start of an earthquake and light-speed communications to send the data to computers that instantly calculate location, magnitude, intensity of shaking and create alerts to be distributed to areas that will be affected. When the MyShake app was released back in 2016 it already detected over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries.

A paper describing the early results gives a general idea of the app's success: "On a typical day about 8,000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence."

Motorola has sent out invitations to an event on Nov. 13, where the rumored foldable Razr phone could launch. CNET reports: Motorola said the evening event in downtown Los Angeles will feature the "highly anticipated unveiling of a reinvented icon." The save the date is a gif showing a device being folded and unfolded. "An original unlike any other," it reads, also displaying the numeric 11/13/19 date. According to the invitation, the event will feature special guests and musical performers, as well as "a journey through immersive experiences." "You're going to flip," Motorola's invite says. Motorola's Razr phone is rumored to have a foldable screen, but instead of opening out into a tablet, the phone could fold vertically to fit inside pockets. "It's also been reported that the phone will cost $1,500; measure 6.2 inches; run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor; come in white, black and gold; and have a 2,730mAh battery, 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GM or 128GB of storage," reports CNET.

dryriver writes: A study in the British Medical Journal that looked at 24 of the 100s of Medical apps available on Google Play found that 79% pass all sorts of user info -- including sensitive medical info like what your reported symptoms are and what medications you are taking in some cases -- on to third and fourth parties. A German-made and apparently very popular medical app named Ada was found to share user data with trackers like Facebook, Adjust and Amplitude for example. [Click here for the article in German.] The New York Times also warned recently about apps that want to retrieve/store your medical records.

From the conclusion of the study: "19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 "fourth parties"; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data."

Rwanda's Mara Group just released two smartphones, earning the company the title of the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. Their grand ambitions are to help turn Rwanda into a regional tech hub. Fast Company reports: Rwanda President Paul Kagame has announced Africa's "first high tech smartphone factory," CNN reported. While smartphones are assembled in other African nations (Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa all have assembly plants), according to Reuters, those companies all import the components. But at Mara, they manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging, which is all done in the new factory. Kagame made the announcement in a press conference on Monday in the capital of Kigali. The phones, called Mara X and Mara Z, are the first "Made in Africa" models. Both run on Google's Android operating system. While the company admits they are a little more expensive than other options, like the popular Tecno brand phones made by a Chinese-owned company, they hope customers are willing to pay a bit more for quality and Made in Africa pride.

Camera bumps on smartphones may soon go away thanks to a team of researchers at the University of Utah who've developed a radically thin camera lens. Gizmodo reports: For comparison, the lens elements used in today's smartphone cameras, which gather and focus light onto a tiny sensor, are a few millimeters thick. It might not sound like much, but the best smartphone cameras use multiple elements, which quickly add up, resulting in a thin phone simply not having enough room to house all of them: hence the camera bump trend. But a team of electrical and computer engineering researchers at the University of Utah have succeeded in creating a new type of optical lens that measures just a few microns thick, or about a thousand times thinner and one hundred times lighter than what you'll find in smartphones today.

The lens the researchers created is actually made up of innumerable tiny microstructures, imperceptible to the human eye, and strategically positioned so that each one bends and redirects light towards a camera's sensor. When they're all working together, they produce the same results as a single curved element does. Manufacturing the lenses also required the team to develop a new fabrication process, a new polymer, and custom algorithms to calculate the shape and position of each microstructure. But the resulting lens can be completely flat, and made of lightweight plastic. If you've ever spent a day carrying around a camera with a big lens hanging off the front, you'll appreciate that benefit alone. The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2014 consumer expert and Silicon Valley startup founder Nir Eyal wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. But five years later, the New York Times reports he's offering consumers a new book about how to resist those habits -- even while arguing that "addiction" is the wrong way to describe technology's hold on people: There was a problem, yes, but the thinking was all wrong, he decided. Using the language of addiction gave tech users a pass. It was too easy. The issue was not screens but people's own minds, and to solve the problem they had to look within. "If I call technology something that people get addicted to, there needs to be a pusher, a dealer doing it to you," Mr. Eyal said. "But if I say technology is something that people overuse, then it's, 'Oh, crap, now I need to do something about it myself....'" The solution he proposes in Indistractable is slow. It involves self-reflection. He argues that many times we look at phones because we are anxious and bad at being alone -- and that's not the phone's fault...

Mr. Eyal has written a guide to free people from an addiction he argues they never had in the first place. It was all just sloughing off personal responsibility, he figures. So the solution is to reclaim responsibility in myriad small ways. For instance: Have your phone on silent so there will be fewer external triggers. Email less and faster. Don't hang out on Slack. Have only one laptop out during meetings. Introduce social pressure like sitting next to someone who can see your screen. Set "price pacts" with people so you pay them if you get distracted -- though be sure to "learn self-compassion before making a price pact....."

"I got myself a feature phone that had no apps. I got on eBay a word processor, and all it does is let you type. I made my phone grayscale, which only ruined my pictures," he said. "I tried a digital detox, but I missed audiobooks and GPS...."
He also argues that getting hooked on social media isn't necessarily a bad thing. "For many people, social media is a very good thing and gaming is a very good thing. It's how you use it...." But he's also predicting a "post-digital" movement will emerge in 2020.

"We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking."

"Attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Google's Android mobile operating system that can give them full control of at least 18 different phone models," reports Ars Technica, "including four different Pixel models, a member of Google's Project Zero research group said on Thursday night." The post also says there's evidence the vulnerability is being actively exploited.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Exploits require little or no customization to fully root vulnerable phones. The vulnerability can be exploited two ways: (1) when a target installs an untrusted app or (2) for online attacks, by combining the exploit with a second exploit targeting a vulnerability in code the Chrome browser uses to render content. "The bug is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that allows for a full compromise of a vulnerable device," Stone wrote. "If the exploit is delivered via the Web, it only needs to be paired with a renderer exploit, as this vulnerability is accessible through the sandbox...."

Google representatives wrote in an email: "Pixel 3 and 3a devices are not vulnerable to this issue, and Pixel 1 and 2 devices will be protected with the October Security Release, which will be delivered in the coming days. Additionally, a patch has been made available to partners in order to ensure the Android ecosystem is protected against this issue."

The use-after-free vulnerability originally appeared in the Linux kernel and was patched in early 2018 in version 4.14, without the benefit of a tracking CVE. That fix was incorporated into versions 3.18, 4.4, and 4.9 of the Android kernel. For reasons that weren't explained in the post, the patches never made their way into Android security updates.

People can now type nearly as fast on a screen as they can on a keyboard. "Researchers made the discovery during a study of typing skills in which more than 37,000 volunteers from 160 countries took a speed and accuracy test on their mobile phones," reports The Guardian. From the report: People who tapped out messages with a single finger managed on average only 29 words per minute (wpm), but those who mastered the two-thumb technique hit a blistering 38wpm, only 25% slower than an average typer on a full-sized Qwerty keyboard. One volunteer thumbed out sentences on their mobile phone at a blur-inducing 85wpm, far exceeding the 52wpm that people typically reach on a standard keyboard. While the study involved participants from around the world, the majority were women in their 20s and about half were Americans. People who could remember when mobile phones were only good for phone calls were considerably slower than younger users, the study suggested. Teenagers tapped out sentences at an average of about 40wpm, while those in their 40s and 50s managed only 29wpm and 26wpm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Samsung has ended mobile telephone production in China, it said on Wednesday, hurt by intensifying competition from domestic rivals in the world's biggest smartphone market. The shutdown of Samsung's last China phone factory comes after it cut production at the plant in the southern city of Huizhou in June and suspended another factory late last year, underscoring stiff competition in the country. The South Korean tech giant's ceased phone production in China follows other manufacturers shifting production from China due to rising labor costs and the economic slowdown. Sony also said it was closing its Beijing smartphone plant and would only make smartphones in Thailand. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, said it had taken the difficult decision in a bid to boost efficiency. It added it would however continue sales in China "The production equipment will be re-allocated to other global manufacturing sites, depending on our global production strategy based on market needs," Samsung said in a statement.

Jon Schuppe, reporting for NBC News: The surveillance tools have been installed in schools and public housing, deployed on roads and public transit, and worn by police officers. They've been developed by an array of technology firms competing for government business. And many are now owned by a company seeking to grab a bigger piece of a booming market. Motorola, a brand typically associated with cellphones and police radios, has joined the race among tech firms to deliver new ways of monitoring the public. Since 2017, the Chicago-based tech company -- now known as Motorola Solutions, after Motorola spun off its mobile phone business -- has invested $1.7 billion to support or acquire companies that build police body cameras; train cameras to spot certain faces or behavior; sift through video for suspicious people; and track the movement of cars by their license plates.

By consolidating these tools within a single corporation, and potentially combining them into a single product, Motorola Solutions is boosting its stature in the surveillance industry -- and amplifying concerns about the government's growing power to watch people almost anywhere they go. "Your privacy is more protected when information about you is scattered among agencies and entities. When all that is unified under one roof, that sharpens the privacy issues," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, where he researches technology's impact on privacy. "I don't know exactly what kind of synergies a company like Motorola Solutions might get from assembling all these pieces, but in general it's a scary prospect."

Japan's sole pager provider, Tokyo Telemessage Inc, will shut down radio signals for its services Tuesday, ending support for the device first introduced in the country half a century ago. Japan Today reports: In recent years, the device had been favored mainly by those working in hospitals, where cellphone use was once discouraged because of concerns over the effect of electromagnetic waves on medical devices and where cellphone reception can sometimes be poor. Beeper services in Japan began in 1968 with the predecessor of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. Users would call a specific number via a landline, causing the device to emit a beeping sound. But from the late 1980s onward, the popularity of pagers grew as they could be used to send messages combining numbers and text characters.

The number of pager users exceeded 10 million in 1996, with the device becoming one of the defining symbols of a subculture among female high school students along with "loose socks" and taking photos in puri-kura photo booths. However, beeper services declined with the introduction of mobile phones. The number of pager users further decreased as e-mailing, texting as well as taking and sending pictures by phone became standard.

On Tuesday Purism announced their first Librem 5 smartphones were rolling off the assembly line and heading to customers. "Seeing the amazing effort of the Purism team, and holding the first fully functioning Librem 5, has been the most inspirational moment of Purism's five year history," said their founder and CEO Todd Weaver.

On Wednesday they posted a video announcing that the phones were now shipping, and Friday they posted a short walk-through video. "The crowdsourced $700 Linux phone is actually becoming a real product," reports Ars Technica: Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question. Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted...

[Y]ou're not going to get cutting-edge hardware at a great price with the Librem 5. That's not the point, though. The point is that you are buying a Linux phone, with privacy and open source at the forefront of the design. There are hardware kill switches for the camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband on the side of the phone, ensuring none of the I/O turns on unless you want it to. The OS is the Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS, a Linux distribution that, in this case, has been reworked with a mobile UI. Purism says it will provide updates for the "lifetime" of the device, which would be a stark contrast to the two years of updates you get with an Android phone.

PureOS is a Debian-based Linux distro, and on the Librem 5, you'll get to switch between mobile versions of the Gnome and KDE environments. If you're at all interested in PureOS, Purism's YouTube page is worth picking through. Dozens of short videos show that, yes, this phone really runs full desktop-class Linux. Those same videos show the dev kit running things like the APT package manager through a terminal, a desktop version of Solitaire, Emacs, the Gnome disk utility, DOSBox, Apache Web Server, and more. If it runs on your desktop Linux computer, it will probably run on the Librem 5, albeit with a possibly not-touch-friendly UI. The Librem 5 can even be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you can run all these Linux apps with the normal input tools...

Selling a smartphone is a cutthroat business, and we've seen dozens of companies try and fail over the years. Purism didn't just survive long enough to ship a product -- it survived in what is probably the hardest way possible, by building a non-Android phone with demands that all the hardware components use open code. Making it this far is an amazing accomplishment.

An anonymous reader quotes the Economist: In its latest software release, Apple has made it possible for iPhone users to send all unknown callers to voicemail automatically.

Although the feature will no doubt prove useful to the millions of customers whose peaceful suppers are ruined by fake calls, it could be disastrous for the faltering public-polling industry. The challenges telephone pollsters face have been growing. Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped.

Back in the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%, according to SSRS, a market research and polling firm. But the Pew Research Centre estimates that it received completed interviews from a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018. Although polls with low response rates can still be accurate, their costs increase dramatically as pollsters must spend more time and money calling more people.

After spending about 27 hours with Samsung's new rebooted Galaxy Fold, TechCrunch's Brian Heater noticed something unusual: "a brightly colored, amorphous blob [...] nestled between the lock screen's flapping butterfly wings." While it's nowhere near as severe as the blacked out screens many reviewers of the first wave of units experienced, "it's not a great look, considering that it wasn't dropped on concrete, dunked in water or stepped on," writes Heater. "And the placement smack dab in the center dampens the effect of a 7.3-inch screen." From the report: If I had to guess, I'd say it was pressing the display to close the device that did it. Samsung has since collected the device and will be taking it apart (likely in Korea) to find out what went wrong. We'll update accordingly. We can't say the company didn't warn us. As I noted the other day, Samsung issued a video prior to launch, advising users to "Just use a light touch," B/W the footnote, "Do not apply excessive pressure to it."

There was nothing inside the device while folded. I didn't get it wet or feed it after midnight, and there's no visible damage to the laminate layer, so I can't really say definitively what happened here. And while the screen is certainly still usable, I think I'd probably be irked if I had just paid $2,000 for a handset and had to deal with a large, rainbow colored blob in the exact center of the screen. Part of the white-glove service Samsung is rolling out here is a $149 screen replacement. We got a comment from Samsung on the matter, and it sounds like this particular issue might fall within normal use that wouldn't require an additional fee. Here's what the company has to say on the matter: "We have seen an enthusiastic response to the launch of the Galaxy Fold in several markets over the past few weeks, with thousands of consumers enjoying the unique experience it offers. The Galaxy Fold is a first-of-its-kind device, made with new materials and technologies that allow it to open and close just like a book. We encourage Galaxy Fold owners to read the care instructions included in the box and in the product manual available online. Products used within these guidelines are covered under warranty. If they have any questions, Galaxy Fold owners can consult with Samsung product specialists through the Galaxy Fold Premier Service any time, any day."

The new OnePlus 7T was officially announced earlier today, bringing a speedier Snapdragon 855+ processor, 90Hz display, and more camera sensors for $599 -- nearly $100 less than the base model OnePlus 7 Pro. From a report: There are more upgrades found in the OnePlus 7T's display. The OP7T's 6.55-inch 2400x1080 AMOLED screen includes a 90Hz refresh rate, helping to make the screen feel smoother, and OnePlus has also upgraded the in-display fingerprint sensor on its new device. OnePlus claims that the OP7T has the "fastest, smoothest fingerprint unlock anywhere." Another major upgrade of the OnePlus 7T is on its backside. OnePlus has given the 7T a triple rear camera setup, up from the dual cameras found on the OnePlus 7. The triple rear cam system on the OnePlus 7T includes a 48MP main sensor with f/1.6 aperture and OIS, a 16MP ultra-wide camera with a 117-degree field of view, and a 12MP telephoto camera with a 2x optical zoom.

OnePlus has included ultra-wide Nightscape support for low-light shooting and Super Stable Video to better stabilize your video captures, and 4K video capture at 60fps. Slow-mo video recording is available at 1080p at 240fps or 720p at 480fps, and soon OnePlus will be slowing things down even more, adding 720p video recording at 960fps through a future software update. Around front there's a 16MP selfie camera in a waterdrop notch that OnePlus says is smaller than the notch found on last year's OnePlus 6T. OnePlus has packed the OP7T with 128GB of built-in UFS 3.0 storage, 8GB of RAM, USB-C, stereo speakers, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and Android 10 running out of the box. The OnePlus 7T launches on October 18 at a price of $599. The device will be sold exclusively by T-Mobile, though Verizon and AT&T users can buy an unlocked version from OnePlus' website.