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.

Andy Rubin, the controversial mobile industry executive who co-founded Android, left Google amid allegations of sexual misconduct while retaining a huge severance package, and went on to create the Essential Phone, has tweeted photos teasing an upcoming device with an elongated design and very tall UI composed of card-like apps. The Verge reports: It look extremely small in his hands, too. The device has a large button and volume rocker on the right edge and a fingerprint divot around back, below what appears to be a single main camera. And as you can see, these devices have some decidedly flashy finishes that change color when you view them at different angles -- a sea green that shifts to yellow and blue, for example.

An Essential spokesperson confirmed to the The Verge that this is the company's new phone, adding: "We've been working on a new device that's now in early testing with our team outside the lab. We look forward to sharing more in the near future." A couple hours later, Essential tweeted some slightly more official images of the new phone, which it's calling Project Gem. XDA-Developers also spotted some leaked code that mentions the divot on the rear of the device may activate its voice assistant when you tap your finger to it. They also suggest it runs Android and packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor.

Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) introduced a bill, dubbed the Protecting Privacy in our Homes Act, that would require tech companies to include a label on products disclosing the presence of internet-connected microphones or cameras. "The proposed law does not define what kind of labels would need to be appended but rather would order the Federal Trade Commission to put in place specific regulations 'under which each covered manufacturer shall be required to include on the packaging of each covered device manufactured by the covered manufacturer a notice that a camera or microphone is a component of the covered device,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Consumers face a number of challenges when it comes to their privacy, but they shouldn't have a challenge figuring out if a device they buy has a camera or microphone embedded into it," Gardner said. "This legislation is about consumer information, consumer empowerment, and making sure we're doing everything we can to protect consumer privacy." Most products that ship with cameras or microphones included tout the inclusion of such recording devices as a selling point, which could make this kind of regulation feel redundant at best. That said, there's quite a difference between "most" and "all." A rule such as the regulation Gardner proposes would close the gap that, for example, led owners of Nest Secure devices to the unpleasant discovery earlier this year that the products had shipped with undisclosed microphones.

Fast Company highlights some of the "privacy nightmares" surrounding low-cost Android smartphones, which can be very attractive for those on a tight budget. One example is the MYA2 MyPhone: According to an analysis by the advocacy group Privacy International, a $17 Android smartphone called MYA2 MyPhone, which was launched in December 2017, has a host of privacy problems that make its owner vulnerable to hackers and to data-hungry tech companies. First, it comes with an outdated version of Android with known security vulnerabilities that can't be updated or patched. The MYA2 also has apps that can't be updated or deleted, and those apps contain multiple security and privacy flaws. One of those pre-installed apps that can't be removed, Facebook Lite, gets default permission to track everywhere you go, upload all your contacts, and read your phone's calendar. The fact that Facebook Lite can't be removed is especially worrying because the app suffered a major privacy snafu earlier this year when hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users had their passwords exposed.

Philippines-based MyPhone said the specs of the MYA2 limited it to shipping the phone with Android 6.0, and since then it says it has "lost access and support to update the apps we have pre-installed" with the device. Given that the MYA2 phone, like many low-cost Android smartphones, runs outdated versions of the Android OS and can't be updated due to their hardware limitations, users of such phones are limited to relatively light privacy protections compared to what modern OSes, like Android 10, offer today. The MYA2 is just one example of how cheap smartphones leak personal information, provide few if any privacy protections, and are incredibly easy to hack compared to their more expensive counterparts.

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.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is expected to launch the next version of the iPhone SE 2 in the first quarter of 2020. "The new phone will be more affordable than the rest of the Apple iPhone lineup and feature newer internals, like an A13 processor with 3GB RAM, in a familiar iPhone 8 chassis," reports 9to5Mac. From the report: Kuo says that most of the new iPhone SE's hardware specification will mirror the iPhone 8. The analyst predicts Apple will sell 30-40 million units across 2020. The Q1 timeframe lines up with a previous report from Nikkei, which said to expect a cheaper iPhone with iPhone 8-esque design in the spring. This would mean it would feature a 4.7-inch LCD display and Touch ID home button. Kuo does not predict an exact price for the new phone. Before the 4-inch iPhone SE was discontinued, Apple sold it for $349 in a 32 GB storage configuration.

The current iPhone product range at Apple stores spans the iPhone 11 series, iPhone XR and the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. The 4.7-inch iPhone 8 is currently on sale for $449 for 64 GB. Presumably, when the new SE launches, Apple will stop selling the iPhone 8 altogether. Given the current pricing of the 8, you could easily see how Apple could sell an iPhone SE 2 32 GB for around the same price as the old SE, in the $349-$399 range.

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.

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.

Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler aren't the only companies using "cheat devices" to get around environmental legislation. According to The Independent, "global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with 'cheat devices' that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air." From the report: More than $12 billion has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil. This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) that kick in on January 1st. However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions.

A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world's largest ship classification company. Only 23 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port. The Exhaust Gas Cleaning System Association has estimated that 4,000 ships will be operating with scrubbers by the time the legislation is enforced, up from fewer than a hundred in 2013. For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organization that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.

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."

At its annual hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced Sidewalk, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol the company is developing to connect all of the IoT devices in and around your house. TechCrunch reports: Amazon argues that Bluetooth and WiFi don't have enough range, while 5G takes too much power and is too complex. "We came up with something that we call Amazon Sidewalk," Amazon's device chief Dave Limp said at the event today. "Amazon Sidewalk is a brand new low bandwidth network that uses the already existing free over the air 900 megahertz spectrum. We think it will be great for keeping track of things, keeping things up to date -- but first and foremost, it will extend in the distance at which you can control these kinds of simple, low-cost, easy-to-use devices.

The details here remain a bit vague, but Amazon says that you may be able to use Sidewalk to connect to devices that can be up to a mile away, depending on how the base station and devices are positioned. Amazon already sent out 700 test devices to households in L.A. to test the access points -- and once you have a lot of access points, you create a network with some pretty broad coverage. Amazon says it'll publish the protocol so that other device makers can also integrate it into their devices.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi tweeted today that Microsoft is now being used on over 900 million devices, and that the Redmond company added more new Windows 10 devices in the last 12 months than ever before. Engadget reports: That's a massive number, and as Thurrott points out, if Microsoft maintains this pace, Windows 10 could reach 1 billion devices by early 2020. That's especially impressive considering that it just announced 800 million devices in March.

Apple has confirmed Monday that it will manufacture the redesigned Mac Pro in Texas. The company said it will assemble the workstation at the same Austin, Texas plant that has produced the cylindrical Mac Pro since 2013. The reason for the move: exemptions from Trump's China tariffs for "certain necessary components" in the system. Engadget reports: Apple had received 10 out of its 15 requested exemptions for components like partial circuit boards. While Apple has a network of U.S. suppliers for its products, many of the parts for computers (and those of rivals) are still made in China -- the company wouldn't have seen much benefit from U.S. assembly if it had to pay a premium for some of the Mac Pro's key ingredients.

CEO Tim Cook (who hinted at this possibility in July) touted this as part of Apple's existing commitment to American jobs, including its recent investment into Corning. However, it's not necessarily the coup it sounds like at first blush. Apple can produce the Mac Pro stateside due to both its low volume (few people will buy a $6,000 tower for home use) and the high levels of automation at the Austin plant. This won't lead to an abundance of new jobs, and it may still be more practical to make high-volume products like iPhones and MacBooks in China even if future tariffs cut into Apple's profit margins.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: In the future, your office might have an extra appliance next to the copy machine and the refrigerator: an algae bioreactor. Designed to fit inside offices and eventually sit on the rooftops throughout cities, it can capture as much carbon from the atmosphere as an acre of trees. And there's an initial prototype already at work. Inside the bioreactor, algae does the work. "What's amazing about algae is it's really cheap and it's easy to grow -- the core things it needs are sunlight, CO2, and water," says Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Hypergiant Industries, an AI-focused tech company that developed a prototype of the device, called the Eos Bioreactor. Because algae grows much more quickly than trees, it can also sequester carbon more quickly; the company estimates that the device, which optimizes the algae's ability to capture CO2, can sequester around two tons of carbon out of the air each year.

The first version of the device, which is currently in operation, is three-by-three-by-seven feet. It's a closed system that works indoors, connecting with an HVAC system to reduce CO2 levels inside and release cleaner air. The closed system also makes it possible for the team to study how algae grows -- with sensors monitoring everything from light and heat and pH to the speed of growth and oxygen output -- and how the system can be tweaked to work best in different conditions outside on rooftops. "With the first generation Eos, we have precise control of every aspect of the algae's environment and life cycle," he says. "It's a photobioreactor, but it's also an experimentation platform. We'll be using this platform to better understand the environment that best suits biomass production under controlled circumstances, so that we can better understand how to design reactors for the variety of environmental conditions we're going to encounter in the wild." The team behind the device says they're working on mobile apps that can monitor and run the bioreactors autonomously. It's also "working on DIY plans that it will release next year so people can build the bioreactors at home," the report mentions.

Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 IoT devices, likely affecting millions of consumers. Help Net Security reports: In nearly all the devices (12 of the 13), ISE achieved its goal of obtaining remote root-level access. The table below shows the types of vulnerabilities that ISE identified in the targets. All 13 of the devices evaluated by ISE had at least one web application vulnerability such as cross-site scripting (XSS), operating system command injection (OS CMDi), or SQL injection (SQLi) that could be leveraged by an attacker to get remote access to the device's shell or gain access to the device's administrative panel. ISE obtained root shells on 12 of the devices, allowing complete control over the device.

Six of them can be remotely exploited without authentication: the Asustor AS-602T, Buffalo TeraStation TS5600D1206, TerraMaster F2-420, Drobo 5N2, Netgear Nighthawk R9000, and TOTOLINK A3002RU. "We found that many of these issues were trivial to exploit and should have been discovered even in a rudimentary vulnerability assessment," says ISE founder Stephen Bono. "This indicates that these manufacturers likely undergo no such assessment whatsoever, that the bug bounty programs they employ are ineffective, that vulnerability disclosures sent to them are not addressed, or more likely, all of the above."

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that oversees implementation of the Wi-Fi standard, is launching its official Wi-Fi 6 certification program. "That might sound boring, but it means the Wi-Fi 6 standard is truly ready to go, and tech companies will soon be able to advertise their products -- mostly brand new ones -- as certified to properly support Wi-Fi 6," reports The Verge. From the report: So the point of Wi-Fi 6 is to boost speeds within a crowded network. The theoretical maximum speed for Wi-Fi is increasing, too -- to 9.6 Gbps from 3.5 Gbps -- but those numbers don't really matter since you'll never get them at home. What matters is that Wi-Fi 6 has a bunch of tools allowing it to operate faster and deliver more data at once, so the speeds you actually get will be higher than before. Those gains will be most noticeable on crowded networks, where the efficiency improvements will make up for the higher Wi-Fi demands. (Wi-Fi 6 also mandates a major security improvement.)

Really, though, today's launch is largely a formality. The Wi-Fi certification program -- while important, and very much marking the beginning of the Wi-Fi 6 era -- isn't required, and companies have been rolling out Wi-Fi 6 devices for months that likely work just fine. But the Wi-Fi Alliance is made up of members of the tech industry big and small, and its actions represent what wireless features and technologies they're interested in delivering, so this is a clear sign that Wi-Fi 6 has arrived. All that said, this week's biggest news for Wi-Fi 6 has no immediate connection to the Alliance: it's that the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro go on sale, and both support Wi-Fi 6. That's going to quickly put millions of Wi-Fi 6 devices into people's hands, meaning adoption of the new tech will very suddenly be well underway.

MojoKid writes: Gamer-targeted smartphones are beginning to pop up more often now, with devices like the Razer Phone 2, Xiaomi Black Shark, and the ASUS ROG Phone making waves in the market with performance enthusiasts. The latest release from ASUS, the ROG Phone II sports a specially binned chip from Qualcomm called the Snapdragon 855+. The higher performance SoC sports an octa-core CPU clocked at 2.96GHz, paired with an overclocked Adreno 640 GPU that can boost its performance up to 15 percent above spec. A generous 12GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a 120Hz 6.59 FHD display trim out the rest of the ASUS ROG Phone II's specs. In addition, an enhanced on-board cooling system features a 3D vapor chamber, heat spreaders, and cooling pads that efficiently dissipate heat from inside the phone to the outside. It is designed to be above spec for the Snapdragon 855 chipset and necessary to keep 855+ stable during long gaming sessions. In benchmark testing, there's no question these system upgrades put up significantly better numbers than the average high-end Android phone on the market these days, such that the phone is about 10% faster than devices like Samsung's Galaxy Note 10 or the OnePlus 7 Pro. The ASUS ROG Phone II will be available later this month but pricing is still being determined.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel's behavior, one of the former officials said.

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as "StingRays," mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use. The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates -- though it's not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful. An Israeli Embassy spokesperson denied that Israel placed the devices and said: "These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn't conduct espionage operations in the United States, period."

Furthermore, after this story was published, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied that Israel was behind the devices. "We have a directive, I have a directive: No intelligence work in the United States, no spies," he said in a gaggle with reporters. "And it's vigorously implemented, without any exception. It [the report] is a complete fabrication, a complete fabrication."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: All watches should be banned from exam halls to discourage cheating, says an inquiry into the extent of malpractice in exams taken by pupils across the UK. Smart watches, connected to the internet, are already banned from use by students taking public exams. But the review, commissioned by exam boards, says it is becoming difficult to distinguish between hi-tech and traditional watches. Review chairman Sir John Dunford called for a "blanket ban" on watches. The Independent Commission on Examination Malpractice, set up by exam boards to investigate the prevalence of cheating in public exams in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, says that overall there is a "very low level of malpractice." "It can look as if it's a time-telling watch and actually, you press a button and it becomes an email-type watch," said Sir John, a former head teachers' union leader. "If you don't ban them all I think you're giving a very difficult job to invigilators who are looking round an exam room. So I think the obvious thing to do here is to ban watches."