n01 writes: Researchers of the University of Washington are testing the prototype of their ApneaApp to diagnose sleep apnea, a health problem that can become life-threatening. To monitor a person's sleep, the app transforms the user's smartphone into an active sonar system that tracks tiny changes in a person's movements. The phone's speaker sends out inaudible sound waves, which bounce off a sleeping person's body and are picked back up by the phone's microphone. "It's similar to the way bats navigate," said Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, lead author and a doctoral candidate in the UW's department of computer science and engineering. "They send out sound signals that hit a target, and when those signals bounce back they know something is there." In technical terms, the app continuously analyzes changes in the acoustic room-transfer-function (sampled at ultrasonic frequencies) to detect motion. This is very similar to what the iPhone app Sleep Cycle Sonalarm Clock does, except that the UW researchers have improved the sensitivity of the method so it can precisely track the person's breathing movements which allows it to not only detect different sleep phases but also sleep apnea events. The advantage in both use cases is that the sleep monitoring is contact-less (there's nothing in the user's bed that could disturb their sleep) and doesn't require any additional hardware besides the user's smart phone.

An anonymous reader writes: Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view with a total resolution of 5120x1440. The headset's origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013, which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios. The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now Overkill's The Walking Dead, which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset.

An anonymous reader points to an interesting comparison of current tablets' peformance, as measured with the Geekbench benchmarking tool, which boils down various aspects of performance to produce a single number. The clear winner from the models fielded wasn't from Apple of Samsung (Samsung's entrants came much lower down, in fact), but from Microsoft: the i5-equipped Surface Pro 3, with a Geekbench score of 5069.; second place goes to the Apple iPad Air 2, with 4046. The Nexus 9 rated third, with 3537. One model on the list that U.S. buyers may not be familiar with is the Tesco Hudl 2, a bargain tablet which Trusted Reviews seems quite taken by.

An anonymous reader sends word that security researchers have been able to extract personal information from a pair of smartwatches: the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear 2 Neo. The G Watch gave up calendar information, pedometer data, and the user's email address, while the Gear 2 Neo gave up health data, emails, messages, and contact information. The researchers said it wasn't very difficult to get the data, in part because it wasn't encrypted. "The Gear 2 Neo uses Samsung's Tizen operating system, while the LG G Watch is one of several models that uses Google's Android Wear operating system. The researchers obtained the data both by poking through the watches' files and finding traces of watch activity on the Samsung Android smartphone to which they were linked. The researchers also have begun testing the Apple Watch."

DeviceGuru writes: The results from the 2015 Hacker SBC Survey cohosted by LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation's Linux.com community site have just been announced and, not surprisingly, RPi won two of the top three slots. With 1721 voting in the survey, the ten most popular single board computers turned out to be the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, Beaglebone Black, Raspberry Pi Model B+, Odroid-C1, DragonBoard 410c, Odroid-XU3, Parallella, Arduino TRE, Edison Kit for Arduino, and Odroid-U3. The report includes scores for all 53 SBCs that were listed in the susrvey, along with data on feature preferences, targeted applications, and the nature of participants' use of [SBCs], and more.

New submitter prisoninmate writes: The Linux Foundation's LinuxLTSI (Long-Term Support Initiative) group has confirmed on Twitter that the next LTS version of the Linux kernel will be 4.1. The information has also been confirmed by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned kernel developer who is currently maintaining several kernel branches, including a few LTS ones. When Linux kernel 4.1 is released, it will become the LTS version of 2015 and the most advanced long-term support release. This is significant because the LTSI releases are (or will be) everywhere, in a "Linux is everywhere" sense. As the initiative's page puts it, "The LTSI tree is expected to be a usable base for the majority of embedded systems, as well as the base for ecosystem players (e.g., semiconductor vendors, set-vendors, software component vendors, distributors, and system/application framework providers). ... The goal is to reduce the number of private trees currently in use in the CE industry and encourage more collaboration and sharing of development resources."

DeviceGuru writes: Russia-based Eltechs announced its ExaGear Desktop virtual machine last August, enabling Linux/ARMv7 SBCs and mini-PCs to run x86 software. That meant that users of the quad-core, Cortex-A7-based Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, could use it as well, although the software was not yet optimized for it. Now Eltechs has extended extended ExaGear to support earlier ARMv6 versions of the Raspberry Pi. The company also optimized the emulator for the Pi 2 allowing, for example, Pi 2 users to use automatically forwarding startup scripts.

DeviceGuru writes: Freescale has announced three new versions of its popular i.MX6 SoCs, including new DualPlus and QuadPlus parts featuring enhanced GPUs and expanded memory support, and a new low-end, IoT focused 528MHz UltraLite SoC that integrates a more power-efficient, single-core ARM Cortex-A7 architecture. The UltraLite, which will be available in a tiny 9x9mm package, is claimed by Freescale to be the smallest and most energy-efficient ARM based SoC. It has a stripped-down WXGA interface but adds new security, tamper detection, and power management features. All the new Freescale i.MX6 SoCs are supported with Linux BSPs and evaluation kits.

MojoKid writes with yet more news from the ongoing Google IO conference: Google I/O kicked off this afternoon and the first topic of discussion was of course Google's next generation mobile operating system. For those that were hoping for a huge UI overhaul or a ton of whiz-bang features, this is not the Android release for you. Instead, Android M is more of a maintenance released focused mainly on squashing bugs and improving stability/performance across the board. Even though Android M is about making Android a more stable platform, there are a few features that have been improved upon or introduced for this release: App Permissions, Chrome Custom Tabs for apps, App Links (instead of asking you which app to choose when clicking a link, Android M's new Intent System can allow apps to verify that they are rightfully in possession of a link), NFC-based Android Pay, standardized fingerprint scanning support, and a new "doze" mode that supposedly offers 2X longer battery life when idle.

msm1267 writes: For the first time, DNS redirection attacks against small office and home office routers are being delivered via exploit kits. French security researcher Kafeine said an exploit kit has been finding success in driving traffic from compromised routers to the attackers' infrastructure. The risk to users is substantial, he said, ranging from financial loss, to click-fraud, man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing.

Patrick O'Neill writes: Tens of millions of daily subway riders around the world can be tracked through their smartphones by a new attack, according to research from China's Nanjing University. The new attack even works underground and doesn't utilize GPS or cell networks. Instead, the attacker steals data from a phone's accelerometer. Because each subway in the world has a unique movement fingerprint, the phone's motion sensor can give away a person's daily movements with up to 92% accuracy.

An anonymous reader writes: A new report from The Information (paywalled) says Google is working on an operating system called "Brillo" that would be a platform for Internet-of-things devices. It's supposedly a lightweight version of Android, capable of running on devices with extremely limited hardware — as little as 32 MB of RAM, for example. The company is expected to launch the code for Brillo at its I/O event next week. This is particularly relevant now that Google has acquired Nest, Dropcam, and Revolv — a trio of "smart home" companies whose devices could potentially by unified by Brillo.

An anonymous reader writes: Palmer Luckey, founder of VR headset-maker Oculus, has been sued by a company accusing him of taking their confidential information and passing it off as his own. Total Recall Technologies, based in Hawaii, claims it hired Luckey in 2011 to build a head-mounted display. Part of that employment involved Luckey signing a confidentiality agreement. In August, 2012, Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift headset, and Facebook bought his company last year for $2 billion. TRT is seeking compensatory and punitive damages (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes: For those of us who don't need or want a smartphone, what would be the best dumb phone around? Do you have a preference over flip or candy bar ones? What about ones that have FM radio? Do any of you still use dumb phones in this smart phone era? Related question: What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life? I don't especially want to give up a swiping keyboard, a decent camera, or podcast playback, but I do miss being able to go 5 or more days on a single charge.

Mark Wilson writes: Chinese firm Huawei today announces its IoT OS at an event in Beijing. The company predicts that within a decade there will be 100 billion connected devices and it is keen for its ultra-lightweight operating system to be at the heart of the infrastructure. Based on Linux, LiteOS weighs in at a mere 10KB — smaller than a Word document — but manages to pack in support for zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking. The operating system will be open for developers to tinker with, and is destined for use in smart homes, wearables, and connected vehicles. LiteOS will run on Huawei's newly announced Agile Network 3.0 Architecture and the company hopes that by promoting a standard infrastructure, it will be able to push the development of internet and IoT applications

Apple has been rumored to be developing their own line of HDTVs for years, but a new report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) says while those plans did exist, they've been abandoned. Apple began pondering the idea of jumping into the television market roughly a decade ago, as iTunes started hosting video content. The AppleTV made a foray into living rooms in 2007, and other devices reached the prototype stage. The company continued to do research and work on their ideas, but eventually gave up more than a year ago. Apple had searched for breakthrough features to justify building an Apple-branded television set, those people said. In addition to an ultra-high-definition display, Apple considered adding sensor-equipped cameras so viewers could make video calls through the set, they said. Ultimately, though, Apple executives didn't consider any of those features compelling enough to enter the highly competitive television market, led by Samsung Electronics Co. Apple typically likes to enter a new product area with innovative technology and easier-to-use software.

DeviceGuru writes: Arduino announced a smaller, cheaper Arduino Yun Mini version of the Arduino Yun SBC at the Bay Area Maker Faire [Friday]. The $60 Arduino Yun Mini SBC sacrifices a number of interfaces in order to reduce size, and gives the OpenWRT Linux based Linino distribution, which is also used by the original Yun, more control over the board's functions. Arduino also announced a new community web portal called my.arduino.org, plus an open source Arduino IDE-alpha development system that is entirely based on JavaScript, which will be available there by the end of the month.

An anonymous reader writes: The in-vehicle wireless charging technology adopted by Ford, Chrysler, Dodge, RAM, and Toyota has been released to the public domain without royalties or licenses. This technology that you probably never heard of before is in 12 vehicles; more vehicles than all the other wireless charging standards combined. The open standard web page shows schematics, app notes, and certification information to get companies to make compatible wireless charging products.

Leomania writes: After watching a post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi short on YouTube (there are quite a few) and then having our robot vacuum take off and start working the room, I just wondered what would be the last electric/electronic device still functioning if humans were suddenly gone. I don't mean sitting there with no power but would work if the power came back on; rather, something continuously powered, doing the task it was designed for. Are we talking a few years, decades, or far longer?

alphadogg writes: A panel of security experts, including from IBM, LogMeIn and formerly RSA, warn that IoT security is a growing threat because device makers haven't baked in security. IT security staffs are already inundated with safeguarding internal infrastructure and cloud-based resources, so guarding against a slew of new threats is likely to be overwhelming. LogMeIn's Paddy Srinivasan says most Internet-of-things OEMs "barely even have IT staff," so they aren't capable of developing rigorous security even if they wanted to. IBM’s Andy Thurai says most companies are rushing technology to market to try to monetize you as much as possible, and they aren't even willing to give you a cut for the data you supply. Regulations may help, but probably not enough and definitely not soon.