Apple has confirmed the release of the iPhone 11,  sequel to the iPhone XR,  this week alongside the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max.

The new iPhone 11 is available in Purple, White, Yellow, Green, Black and Product Red. The rear of the phone is glass, and there’s a Lightning connector on the bottom edge. However, there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack on this device as Apple has dropped the port.

It comes with a 6.1-inch Liquid Retina display, which is the same size as the screen on 2018’s iPhone XR. The notch remains at the top of the screen, and overall the device looks remarkably like last year’s phone.

The dimensions of the phone are 150.9mm x 75.7mm x 8.3mm, and it weighs in at 194 grams. It’s water resistant, coming with an IP68 rating, and  can survive in up to two metres of water.

For the first time on the cheaper iPhone, the 12MP wide camera with a 26mm lens is paired with a 12MP ultra-wide camera with 120 degree field of view. Night Mode returns for low light conditions, and it comes turned on automatically on the iPhone 11.

The selfie camera is a 12MP TrueDepth camera, and allows users to rotate the phone to take wider images. It’s also the first time Apple has included 4K video recording on the selfie camera.

The chipset inside the iPhone 11 is called the A13 Bionic and Apple claims it has the fastest CPU and GPU in a smartphone with this device.

The battery inside the iPhone 11 is said to last an hour longer than the iPhone XR.

The device comes with iOS 13 software featuring a system-wide Dark Mode for the first time.

The phone will be available in 64GB, 128GB or 256GB options. Pre-orders open this weekend and the phone goes on sale in Thailand as elsewhere on September 20. Prices starts from $699.

The tracker weighs just 22.1 grammes and comes with an adjustable wrist strap, which is about 18mm wide and 155-216mm long. My only gripe is that the tracker is a little too thick, which made it look like it was physically protruding from my wrist. That said, it’s certainly the best value tracker around and lab tests of its battery have shown it will last up to 20 days on one charge.

The Mi Smart Band 4 comes with a 0.95-inch AMOLED display with 120×240 pixel resolution, which is bright and easy to read even when the sun is shining. It comes with five levels of brightness and the all-new full0colour display is 39.9 per cent larger and brighter than previous models.

Mi Smart Band 4 is easy to set up. You must first download and install the Mi Fit app and then sign up for an account with Xiaomi for storing your tracked fitness data. You need to specify your gender, birthday, height and weight, statistics that will be used by the tracker to calculate the calories you have burned during your daily activities and exercises. Next, use the app to add the Mi Smart 4 band and the tracker will be Bluetooth linked to your smartphone.

During my test, I had no problem pairing the tracker with my smartphone and once this was completed, the app also upgraded firmware to the tracker. Once the upgrade was done, the tracker was ready to track my activities though I immediately noticed that several of the tracking and alert options remained turned off as part of the factory setting. If that happens to you, just go back to the Mi Fit app to turn them on.

For example, I used the app to have the tracker alert me of incoming calls to my smartphone that is connected to the tracker.

You can also use the app to have the Mi Smart Band 4 alert you to get up and move every hour from 8 am to 9 pm or between any hours of your choice so that you don’t sit screw up your spine by sitting for too long.

You can also use the app to set schedules and alarms for the Mi Smart Band 4 to alert you. The app can also be used to have other apps send their alerts to the tracker as well as turn on the SMS alert and have all the texts received on your phone sent to the tracker for viewing.

I also found that I needed to use the Mi Fit app to turn on the 24-hour heart rate detection feature as well as to set the tracker to automatically detect my exercise and monitor my heart rate. Another useful function is that the tracker can alert you when your heart rate reaches a dangerous level, such as 150 beats per second, reminding you to slow down and avoid a heart attack.

The Mi Smart Band 4 has six workout modes: Treadmill, exercise, outdoor running, cycling, walking, and swimming. You can select the workout modes from the tracker by swiping and tapping the display. I tried it with a short walk in my neighbourhood and the tracker linked to my smartphone to accurately use its GPS to locate and record the walk distance.

During the test, I found that Mi Smart Band 4 recorded and displayed steps I made per day and the number of hours I slept. The number of steps recorded was almost the same as that recorded by my Fitbit tracker. The Mi Smart Band 4 recorded 11,187 steps while Fitbit reported 11,180 steps.

Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 4 has a suggested retail price of Bt1,290.

Key specs:

Weight: 22.1g

Water Resistance Rating: 5 ATM

Display Type: AMOLED

Screen Size: 0.95 inch

Resolution: 120 x 240 RGB

Screen Brightness: Up to 400 nits (max brightness), brightness adjustable

Button: Single touch button (wake up, go back)

Wrist strap type: Removable wrist strap

Wristband width: 18mm

Memory: 512KB

Storage: 16MB

Sensors: 3-axis accelerometer + 3-axis gyroscope; PPG heart rate sensor; Capacitive proximity sensor

Wireless connectivity: BT5.0 BLE

Battery: LiPo, 135mAh; 2-hour charging; Up to 20-day battery life

Huawei gets around US ban with redesigned ‘new’ versions of existing phone decked with Android 10

BERLIN — Huawei CEO Richard Yu announced the world’s first commercialized 5G system-on-chip during his keynote speech at IFA 2019, darting ahead of competitors Samsung and Qualcomm in the race.

The flagship Kirin 990 and its 5G version will power Huawei’s Mate 30 when the new phone is unveiled in Munich, Germany, on Sept. 19.

“We don’t know when Samsung’s chip will be available — our chipset is available now,” said Yu on the opening day of IFA 2019, calling the Kirin 990 “the best 5G solution today” with less board area and improved power consumption efficiency with ultra-speed downloads.

Samsung was considered to be ahead in the game when it announced the Exynos 980 chipset with built-in 5G earlier in September. The Korean tech giant had promised the chip’s commercialization within the year, but Huawei’s imminent launch of the Kirin 990 next week appears to have overshadowed excitement for the Exynos 980 for now.

As for US chip producer Qualcomm, its Chairman Cristian Amon introduced in a subsequent keynote address following Huawei’s that the upcoming Snapdragon 7 series platform with integrated 5G is expected to be commercially ready by the fourth quarter of 2019.

Leading smartphone makers like Oppo, realme, Redmi, Vivo, Motorola, HMD and LG Electronics are all set to incorporate Qualcomm’s upcoming 5G chipset.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s next new smartphone Mate 30 with the 5G SoC has drawn attention, as it will not come with Google apps and services due to the US White House’s ban on US companies’ businesses with Huawei.

How Huawei will cope in the smartphone business without the Android interface has sparked questions among consumers.

Making the most out of the grace period before the full-on ban, Huawei used the IFA 2019 as an opportunity to announce newly designed versions of its existing smartphone Huawei P30 Pro, with the preinstalled Android 10 interface.

It also introduced the upgraded wireless earphones Huawei FreeBuds 3 with a noise cancellation feature, and a home internet router that enhances network connectivity in every corner of a big house.

By Lim Jeong-yeo (kaylalim@heraldcorp.com)

Korea Herald correspondent

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190908000112

Like its little sibling the Galaxy Fit e reviewed here last week, the Samsung Galaxy Fit is a light fitness tracker with a heart rate sensor and functions that let you monitor your activity all day long but also offers a larger and more colourful display, more memory and an additional sensor for better fitness data accuracy.

Galaxy Fit uses a 0.95-inch AMOLED display with 120×240 pixels in 16 million colours, compared to Fit e’s monochrome 0.74-inch PMOLED display with 128×64 pixels resolution.

Galaxy Fit has 2 megabytes of memory, compared to the Fit e’s128 kilobytes, and also boasts a gyro sensor on top of the accelerometer and HR sensor also used in Fit e.

Despite its larger size and weighing a little more, I found Galaxy Fit is comfortable to wear – even when I went to bed. The size is right for a man’s wrist I think, and the larger display is easier to read. The display has good brightness and it is easy to read outdoors too.

The Galaxy Fit is tough, not least because it complies with military-grade durability standards, and comes with a water resistance of 5 ATM so you can use it outdoors even when it’s pouring with rain.

Two apps are required for use with Galaxy Fit. First, you need to install the Samsung Galaxy Wearable app that will connect the Fit to your smartphone and download all the interface software necessary to communicate with the fitness tracker. Then, you will need to install the Samsung Health app to allow the fitness data from the tracker to be transferred to the cloud storage of your Samsung Health account.

The Galaxy Wearable app will guide you to link Galaxy Fit to your smartphone using a Bluetooth connection. Once connected, the fitness tracker will relay notifications from your smartphone to the Fit. You can use the app to adjust which app can send notifications to the tracker.

You can also use the Galaxy Wearable app to set alarms on the tracker, which will vibrate when the scheduled times come round.

The Galaxy Wearable is also used to select the location for weather data to be sent to your Galaxy Fit.

Unlike Fit e that is buttonless, Galaxy Fit has a multi-purpose side key, which can be used to turn the tracker on and off. When the tracker is on and but the display is turned off, you simply press the side key to turn it on. Once you’ve done that, you tap the touchscreen to navigate it, launch an app or select a menu item. You can swipe the screen left or right or up or down to view panels. You can also touch and hold an item and then drag it to a new location.

The first screen of the tracker, which is called clock face, shows the current time and the current heart rate. Some 20 more clock faces can be downloaded to replace the default one.

The factory setting on the watch has four widgets, Health Summary, Exercise, Sleep and Weather. The Health Summary reports current accumulated steps, your burned calories, and your heart rate. The Sleep reports the length of your sleep and the Weather report – as you will have guessed – tells you what the weather is doing at any given time.

Use the Galaxy Wearable app to add seven more widgets including calendar, stopwatch and timer or remove the ones already installed. You cycle through the installed widgets by swiping the display.

Galaxy Fit starts tracking up to six activities automatically. Select and customise up to 10 preferred activities from more than 90 workouts on the Samsung Health app including aerobics, crunches and dancing. You can also register a favourite activity for a quick start by pressing and holding the side key.

Apart from having the tracker automatically record exercises that last at least 20 minutes, you can use the Exercise widget to select Walking, Running, Cycling and Swimming for the tracker to start recording.

The first time you use Samsung Health, you should specify your birth date, gender, height and weight so that the tracker can accurately calculate the calories you have burned.

The Samsung Health app sets the goal of 6,000 steps each day. The app will display a dashboard that shows your progress towards that goal, the amount of active time spent and the number of calories you have burned and as well as how long you slept the previous night.

You can also use the app to update your weight and the number of glasses of water you have drunk and the amount of calories you have consumed.

The Galaxy Fit automatically tracks your sleep and analyses your sleeping patterns throughout three stages of sleep by detecting the movements of your body.

During the test, I wore Galaxy Fit to walk to the mouth of my soi to exercise and buy food. The tracker automatically detected my walk and recorded it, and also detected my stopping and waiting for the food and saved the activity automatically. The distance calculated by the tracker was quite accurate.

The tracker has a good battery life. One full charge lets you use the tracker for seven or eight days.

Samsung Galaxy Fitness is available in white and black for Bt3,290.

Key specs:

OS: FreeRTOS

Bluetooth: Bluetooth v5.0

Display: 0.95-inch AMOLED with 120×240 pixels, 16M colour depth

Memory: 2 MB RAM, 32 MB ROM

Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyro Sensor,HR Sensor

Battery: 120 mAH, 7-8 days typical usage time

Dimensions: 45.1 x 18.3 mm

Weight: 23g

South Korea’s biggest video games company, Nexon, is seeking to launch its new mobile role-playing game “V4” later this month.

According to Nexon, V4 is to be released to the public on Sep. 27 with a press event for journalists and influencers. More than 100 participants will gather to watch the game’s demonstration and discuss its user interfaces, the company said Sunday.

Short for Victory Four, “V4,” is one of Nexon’s most highly anticipated massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Riding on its success of other mobile action games such as “HIT” and “OVERHIT,” the company aims to attract users here and abroad.

“Through several rounds of in-house tests, we have verified how much the gaming content will be fun and whether the gaming server will be stable,” said Park Young-hyun, CEO of NAT Games, an affiliate of Nexon.

Last week, Nexon released a gameplay footage on YouTube, where players engaged in a massive battle against virtual monsters on a great battlefield.

As of Sunday, the footage has surpassed about 8.6 million views on YouTube.

The virtual battle experience will be delivered through the “Inter Server” system, which allows users to play on five different internet servers, Nexon noted. The company also used high-definition computer graphics to depict characters and battlefields.

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190908000114

The firm adds that it expects to generate revenue growth in Thailand where it will bring its expertise to the healthcare, banking and financial services, telecoms and government industy sectors.

Stephan Neumeier, managing director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky, said that confidential medical records are being breached in Asia Pacific and globally. As rapid digitalisation penetrates the healthcare sector, cybercriminals are seeing more opportunities to attack this lucrative and critical industry, which is not adequately equipped to face this virtual danger.

“Attacks against hospitals and pharmaceutical giants have been happening worldwide, especially in the more advanced countries in the west. In recent years, however, we have seen the threat creeping towards APAC. Kaspersky Reports have even projected that the medical industry in the region can incur economic losses of up to US$23.3 million from cybersecurity incidents,” he noted.

Singapore, which is considered the technology and business hub of Asia, has suffered four data breaches concerning healthcare organisations in just 12 months, he added,

To further reveal the latest threat statistics against the healthcare sector, key cybersecurity experts from Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) will be unmasking new campaigns creeping towards medical facilities and organisations in APAC and beyond.

The dark web is made of anything that is not commonly indexed on the surface web. To be able to get into this hidden part of the web, a user uses special software such as Tor. Tor stands for “the onion router” and is a method for anonymizing data.

Based on the research of the global cybersecurity company, hospital and healthcare infiltrations are among the newest services being offered by anonymous hacking groups, alongside targeted attacks and cyberespionage against specific countries as well as infections to gain energy and maritime information.

“With the healthcare sector lagging behind in terms of their cybersecurity capabilities, we observe that hacking groups are now off to exploit this fact by adding medical information and hospital attacks to their services list that’s publicly available on the dark web. Any organisations, individuals, and companies can be their potential customers since these cybercriminals are offering various services,” said Seongsu Park, security researcher at Kaspersky.

Park also added that medical records can be considered more valuable than a simple credit card. This is because a hospital generally requires a patient’s personal and financial credentials before a check-up or an admission.

Meanwhile, Yeo Siang, general manager at Kaspersky Lab South East Asia, said that Thailand represented a high-potential growth market for the Russia-headquartered business.

He said that the main target markets in Thailand are the banking, financial, government, telecoms and healthcare sectors.

Factors driving market growth come from the awareness of business about cyber-security, the Thailand 4.0 scheme, smart city projects, users’ concerns, as well as awareness over cybersecurity and cyber-threats in the above-mentioned sectors.

Kaspersky Lab is considering establishing a branch office in Thailand. It also expects that by the end of this year, growth in revenue will be in the double digits.

Global cybersecurity company Kaspersky revealed an alarming trend in the pharmaceutical industry – a steady increase in the number of devices being attacked by cybercriminals. From 44 per cent of devices infected in 2017 and just a 1 per cent increase in 2018, the number of detected attempts this year shows that nearly every five in 10 devices inside a pharmaceutical facility is being targeted.

The countries that logged the highest number of attacks are Pakistan with 54 per cent, Egypt 53 per cent, Mexico 47 per cent, Indonesia 46 per cent and Spain 45 per cent. Four more countries in the Asia Pacific region cap the top 15 nations with the highest number of devices infected. These include India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong and Malaysia with more or less four in every 10 machines with malicious attempts detected.

“While it is a known fact that money-hungry cybercriminals can earn easily by attacking banks, we have also observed that these hackers as well as cyberespionage groups are slowly paying a lot of attention to the industry of advanced medicine,” said Yury Namestnikov, head of Kaspersky’s global research and analysis team in Russia. “They are slowly realising that pharmaceutical companies house a treasure trove of highly valuable data such as the latest drugs and vaccines, the newest researches, as well as medical secrets. The rise of internet-connected operational technology [OT] inside these pharmaceutical firms also contributes to the widening attack surface inside this sector.”

Among the advanced persistent threat (APT) groups that have been waging a sophisticated spying war in the global pharmaceutical industry globally are Cloud Atlas and APT10, also known as MenuPass.

“Based on our monitoring of several APT actors’ movements in the Asia Pacific and globally, we figured that these groups infect servers and exfiltrate data from pharmaceutical companies. Their attack techniques and behaviour also prove that these attackers’ apparent goal is to get their hands on intellectual properties related to the latest medical formulas and research results as well as the business plans of their victims,” Namestnikov said.

Vulnerabilities in open source EMR-systems and its dangers

Denis Makrushin, security architect at Ingram Micro, pointed out the risks that come along with the steady migration of hospitals from paper-based data storage to electronic medical record (EMR) systems. He further noted that healthcare organisations, scrambling to digitise their data storage, consider open-source EMR web-portals as an easy and quick option, despite the known security challenges.

“We are seeing fewer printed or hand-written medical books inside hospitals and clinics worldwide due to the advent of open source. Given their limited internal IT workforce, healthcare institutions opt to use convenient services such as OpenEMR, OpenMRS or similar web applications. This technology’s rapid adoption triggers an increase in threats against this widely-used services,” Makrushin said.

OpenEMR and OpenMRS are open platforms for medical practice management. Any organisation can use this product for business without restriction. The source code of this product is also available for any developer. In addition, this software has certifications from trusted organisations.

“Their free and open nature make these EMR-applications highly sensitive to cyberattacks. There have been a lot of security patches released as researchers unmask one exploit after another. I, myself, have discovered vulnerabilities in these applications. A hacker can inject malicious code at the initial stage of registration, and portray himself as a patient. From this, malicious actors can infect the portal’s page and collect medical information from all users of the portal, including doctors and admins. These data can be easily exfiltrated,” he added.

To secure this platform, Makrushin suggests healthcare facilities to:

• Conduct secure software development lifecycle (Secure SDLC)

• Regularly perform architecture analysis, conduct penetration testing, security code review on systems being use

• Control the attack surface

• Periodically update the installed software and remove unwanted applications

• Try to remove all exposure nodes that process medical data

• Raise security awareness for every person involved

• Conduct regular cybersecurity awareness training for all staff and even patients