A TECHNICAL

Quoting from the site wsj.com Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Associated Press Apple   AAPL   +0.19%  responded to China’s influential state broadcaster, which called the iPhone a  “national security concern”  because of a feature that learns the locations of places a user visits most frequently. In a statement titled  “Your Location Privacy”  published on Apple’s China website, the company said it does not track users or share their locations with outsiders. Apple said it created the “frequent locations” feature so users can “quickly and reliably determine their current locations for specific activities such as shopping, travel, finding the nearest restaurant or calculating the amount of time it takes them to get to work.” The statement came in response to a report on Friday by state-run China Central Television, which criticized the frequent locations function in Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating system, because it records the time and lo...

Quoting from the site wsj.com Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban The Line messaging app, shown here in a February demonstration, is becoming a hacker target.   Bloomberg News Hackers are targeting users of the mobile-phone messaging application Line, according to the company and Japanese police. Tokyo-based Line Corp. said that in late May it received a report of a hacking case for the first time since introducing the app in June 2011. The  popular app , which enables users to make free voice calls and send free messages, has more than 480 million registered users, the company says. By mid-June, the number of reported cases rose past 300, a Line spokeswoman said. In a typical scam, hackers pretend to be the owner of the account and ask friends to buy prepaid cards on their behalf. Police in Tokyo and Osaka have issued  warnings to users , telling them to keep their usernames and passwords secret. Police in Osaka said 23 reports of hacking have been f...

Quoting from the site gsmarena Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Historically, the last week of May hasn't seen much action in terms of new smartphone announcements. The market rollouts of flagships announced at our around the MWC have historically dominated, along with rumors about the next big announcements - the new iPhone and, more recently, the new Samsung Galaxy Note. Samsung Galaxy S III released Some of the more interesting stories revolve around the milestones achieved by the Samsung flagships over the year. Two years ago the  Galaxy S III  was just taking the world by storm,  getting a wide by the standards back then 28-country initial release  and  becoming Vodafone's most pre-ordered droid ever . And that was despite  the production issues that plagued the Pebble Blue version . Samsung ships 10 million Galaxy S4 units, adds new colors Fast forward another year and you can see the  Samsung Galaxy S4   scoring its 10 millio...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban One thing that had been rumored for inclusion in iOS 8 that wasn’t announced on stage was a new trick for the iPad that would let it run two apps side-by-side concurrently. The feature was  first reported by Mark Gurman  at 9to5Mac as one in a series of articles revealing upcoming features of the then-secret beta, and claimed that you’d be able to not only run two apps next to each other, but also move data from one to the other. It wasn’t unveiled, but developer Steve Troughton-Smith has uncovered code that suggest it was at least in development. Steve T-S   @ stroughtonsmith Follow So… just in case there was any doubt left… iOS 8’s SpringBoard has code to run two apps side-by-side. 1/4 size, 1/2 size, or 3/4 size The code found by Troughton-Smith allows two apps to run side-by-side in different proportions, taking up a quarter of the screen vs. three-quarters for the other active app, o...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple’s  7-for-1 split went live  today, and its share price dipped under the $100 mark, as the technology company greatly increased its share count. The market is up today, but Apple has picked up more than twice the bounce that the NASDAQ has received, climbing north of 1 percent. It’s not a massive rally, but no one anticipated more. Apple’s split is noteworthy given its massive scale; the company is the most valuable public one in the world, with a market capitalization of around $565 billion. So, Apple’s 1 percent lift today is worth north of $5 billion. Staggering figures aside, Apple’s share price is now a modest $93.70, making it a prime target for inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), a price-weighted exchange. Previously, Apple’s share price made it all but impossible to include given the exchange’s weighting procedure. Call it the Berkshire problem, ...

Quoting from the site techcrunch  Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple has begun to crack down on tools that app developers use to monetize and grow their applications, including incentivized video viewing and rewarded social sharing, as well as discovery tools that allow users to find apps inside the games they’re already playing. The move will have a significant impact on the app industry as a whole, and will serve as something of a “reset” in terms of how apps can achieve growth and scale. With the introduction of  the revamped iOS App Store in iOS 8,  Apple revealed a number of changes to the app discovery process, with new features that help users find apps by trending keywords, by category and subcategory, by related search terms, and more. Developers can even promote their apps in “bundles.” But as these changes indicate, what the company didn’t reveal is that it’s not only trying to reinvent app discovery with iOS 8; it’s also t...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple has enabled MAC address randomization in iOS 8 (from  Frederic Jacobs  via HackerNews ), which means it’s harder for marketers to keep track of your comings and goings in or around public Wi-Fi networks. In the updated software, while your iPhone is scanning for Wi-Fi networks, it assigns a “random, locally administered” MAC address, which is typically a constant, unique identifier attached to your phone’s wireless network interface. Some other changes it has implemented have made it easier for those promoting commerce activity on the iPhone, as I discussed in a column this weekend, but this option helps curtail some of the more surreptitious marketing activity, as opposed to stuff where a customer has displayed a direct intent to want to fork over some cash. MAC addresses can help retailers and others track return visits and build a shopper profile, by linking in-store visits to purchases and oth...

Quoting from the site techcrunch  Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple’s various additions to iOS 8 mean we’re going to see a big shift come September, in terms of what’s available to both consumers and developers, but the group that should be most excited might be marketers and others trying to get users buying things on and with their devices. A few of the new features in iOS 8 make it much easier to shop on and with your iPhone, and since Apple already has a mobile user base that’s shown its willingness to spend, that’s very big news. One such feature was uncovered through the beta late last week: with iOS 8, the  iPhone’s camera can snap pics of credit cards  to automatically populate credit card information fields in Safari. That means no more arduous copying out of your card number, cardholder name and expiration date every time you want to complete a transaction online – instead it’s a single-click thanks to optical character recognition, and it works au...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban Apple, during WWDC last week, delivered some significant updates across various parts of its business. It released, among other things, some  4,000 new APIs  (and a new  programming language ) to developers; a renewed, more aggressive effort in  cloud services ; and some changes across its mobile and desktop operating systems to make them a  lot more integrated  with the primary way that we use our computing devices these days — to go online and interact with other services. But one area of Apple’s business was nearly nowhere to be found at the main event: Maps. I write “nearly” because it was not an event without  any  mentions of Maps — Apple gave a quick line to the news that it now offers  vector maps  and other improvements in China. And there is a  feature  in iOS 8 that will give venue owners the ability to add more indoor...

Quoting from the site techcrunch Posted by:Dr Ahmed.M.Shaban At Macworld 2001,  Steve Jobs famously introduced the “digital hub” strategy for the Mac , making it the device where all of the single-purpose gadgets for things like recording movies or playing music would be managed. At this year’s WWDC event, Apple showed that the iPhone is the new hub, and your Mac, iPad, and everything in the cloud is now just an accessory. This is quite a pivot for Apple — at Steve Jobs’ last WWDC keynote, he declared that iCloud would be the new center of everyone’s digital lives : “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.” So far, iCloud hasn’t really lived up to that promise. While things like Contact syncing across devices work seamlessly on iOS, developers found that using the service to store data didn’t work as well as Apple had promised, forcing them to roll their own solutions or integrate offerings from Dropbox, Amazon or Google. Meanwhile,...