This Extraordinary App Visualizes Radio Waves From Cell Towers And Satellites Around You

iPhone App lets You See the Cell Towers, Wifi Signals and Satellites Around You

Wireless devices like cellphones, tablets, and laptops send out signals that are all around us, but completely invisible to the naked eye. Electromagnetic radiation is everywhere that is transmitted from millions of towers and Wi-Fi routers, which create a pulsating and invisible world around us.

To visualize the landscape wireless world around us, a Dutch artist named Richard Vijgen, who is also a programmer from Netherlands has created a new iOS app called Architecture of Radio, which uses your GPS location to give a 360 degree visualization of the unseen digital world.

“We are increasingly dependent on a global ecosystem of digital signals. We use them for so many things, yet we cannot see them,” reads Vijgen’s description of the app. “We can see the roads we use to travel, the buildings we live in, but not the infrastructure that is changing the world.”

Using datasets of almost 7 million cell towers, 19 million Wi-Fi routers, and hundreds of satellites, this $3 augmented reality app created by Richard Vijgen plots the ‘infosphere,’ the intricate network of signals both wired and wireless.

‘The purpose of this app is to make the invisible visible so we can look at it, think about it and discuss it,’ the iTunes description says.

The app plots the densities of digital signals, like radio waves, which exist outside the spectrum of visible light on a 3-D moving graph.

According to the App website, it is site-specific, and works by ‘reversing the ambient nature of the infosphere; hiding the visible while revealing the invisible technological landscape we interact with through our devices’.

You can now download the $3 iOS app for iPhone or iPad from here. When you fire it up, you see a cobalt-blue screen where the app takes your GPS location and loads a series of datasets drawn from a global database that includes the cell towers around you and the satellites overhead. The Android version of the app is expected to roll out soon.

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Here is why Apple killed the 3.5mm headphone jack on the iPhone 7

Apple explains in detail why it killed the 3.5mm headphone jack

Apple unveiled its latest smartphones – the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus – at a grand event in San Francisco on Wednesday (September 7). Both new iPhones go on pre-order in the U.S. on September 9 and will be going on sale in the country on September 16.

For some time now, the world’s biggest tech company had been widely expected to kill off the headphone jack at the launch of the iPhone 7 in San Francisco. So, it was no surprise when the iPhone 7 was revealed without 3.5mm headphone jack, and has been replaced by headsets that plug into the device’s Lightning adapter, which is also used for charging. The Lightning adapter will be provided for free inside of every iPhone 7 box to help smooth over the transition away from the 3.5mm jack.

However, Apple’s decision to remove the headphone jack that has been around and in-use for decades as part of an underlying push towards wireless, is likely be a topic of heated debate for months to come.

Yesterday, Phil Schiller said that Apple was deserting the headphone jack because it was the only company “courageous” enough to make such a drastic and bold decision. In short, Schiller’s hyperbolic joke became a point of laughter across the web.

Further, defending the company’s decision for removing the headphone jack, Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering Dan Riccio told BuzzFeed News, “We’ve got this 50-year-old connector — just a hole filled with air — and it’s just sitting there taking up space, really valuable space.” He adds, “It was holding us back from a number of things we wanted to put into the iPhone. It was fighting for space with camera technologies and processors and battery life. And frankly, when there’s a better, modern solution available, it’s crazy to keep it around.”

Removal of the headphone jack has allowed Apple to increase the size of the 4.7-inch iPhone 7 battery by 14%, finally offering users with an extra two hours of battery life. Further, removing the 3.5mm jack has also helped Apple deliver a more water-resistant iPhone, Riccio explained.

Apple executive, Greg Joswiak said, “The audio connector is more than 100 years old. It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn’t been touched since then. It’s a dinosaur. It’s time to move on,” justifying that there is no convincing reason to keep the 3.5mm headphone jack active.

In the meanwhile, another Apple executive Phil Schiller said that the shift to wireless technology is “inevitable.”

“You’ve got to do it at some point,” Schiller added. “Sooner or later the headphone jack is going away. There are just too many reasons aligned against it sticking around any longer. There’s a little bit of pain in every transition, but we can’t let that stop us from making it. If we did, we’d never make any progress at all.”

Whether or not Apple has made a sensible decision to do away with the 3.5mm jack on the iPhone only time will tell.

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Forensic Firm that Unlocked Terrorist's iPhone 5C is Close to Crack iPhone 6

The FBI didn't disclose the identity of the third-party company that helped them access the San Bernardino iPhone, but it has been widely believed that the Israeli mobile forensic firm Cellebrite was hired by the FBI to put an end to the Apple vs. FBI case.

For those unfamiliar in the Apple vs. FBI case: Apple was engaged in a legal battle with the Department of Justice over a court order that was forcing the company to write software, which could disable passcode protection on terrorist's iPhone, helping them access data on it.

However, Apple refused to comply with the court order, so the FBI hired an unknown third-party firm, most likely Cellebrite, who managed to successfully hack the locked iPhone 5C used by the terrorist in the San Bernardino shooting incident last year.

he new method helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack iPhone 5C, but that wasn't the FBI's victory as the method didn't work on iPhone 5S and later iPhone models.

Cellebrite is on its Way to Hack the Locked iPhone 6

Now, Cellebrite is reportedly "optimistic" about Hacking the more Secure iPhone 6.

CNN reports that an Italian architect, named Leonardo Fabbretti, met with Cellebrite last week whether the company could help him gain access to a locked iPhone 6 that belonged to his dead son.

Fabbretti's son, Dama Fabbretti, was passed away from bone cancer last September at the age of 13. However, before his death, the son added his father's thumbprint to allow him to access the phone.

Fabbretti was trying to access the messages, notes, and photos of his dead son on the iPhone 6, but unfortunately, the phone had a restart. It now required the passcode for unlocking, and his father doesn't know the code.

Fabbretti initially contacted Apple on March 21, and the company reportedly tried to help the grieving father, but they found that the iPhone was not backed up to the cloud. Expressing sympathy, the company told him that there was nothing they could do.

Hacking iPhone 6 for Free

After watching Fabbretti's story in the news, Cellebrite offered to help the man by hacking the iPhone 6 for free. Fabbretti met with the company employees last week at its office in northern Italy and said:

"The meeting went well. They were able to download the directories with the iPhone's content, but there is still work to be done in order to access the files."

According to the company, there are chances of accessing the files on locked iPhone 6 that contain photos and conversations of the son with the dad, along with a handful of videos taken just 3 days before his son died.

Both Cellebrite, as well as Apple, have yet to comment on the case.

If the Cellebrite gets the success in creating a new method to unlock iPhone 6, undoubtedly the company will sell its tool to the FBI agents to solve their several pending cases, in the same way, it helped the agency accessing the terrorist's locked iPhone 5C.

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Apple Engineers say they may Quit if ordered to Unlock iPhone by FBI

Apple Vs. FBI battle over mobile encryption case is taking more twists and turns with every day pass by.

On one hand, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is boldly warning Apple that it might compel the company to hand over the source code of its full iOS operating system along with the private electronic signature needed to run a modified iOS version on an iPhone, if…

…Apple does not help the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unlock iPhone 5C belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists.

And on the other hand, Apple CEO Tim Cook is evident on his part, saying that the FBI wants the company to effectively create the "software equivalent of cancer" that would likely open up all iPhones to malicious hackers.

Now, some Apple engineers who actually develop the iPhone encryption technology could refuse to help the law enforcement break security measures on iPhone, even if Apple as a company decides to cooperate with the FBI.

Apple Emplyees to Quit their Jobs

Citing more than a half-dozen current and former Apple engineers, The New York Times report claims that the engineers may refuse the work or even "quit their jobs" if a court order compels them to create a backdoor for the very software they once worked to secure.

"Apple employees are already discussing what they will do if ordered to help law enforcement authorities," reads the report. "Some say they may balk at the work, while others may even quit their high-paying jobs rather than undermine the security of the software they have already created."

Apple previously said that building a new backdoored version of iOS to satisfy the FBI's demand would require up to a month of work and a team of 6-10 engineers, naturally Apple's top software engineers.

However, Apple employees said they already have "a good idea who those employees would be." They include:

1. A former aerospace engineer who developed software for the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
2. A senior quality-assurance engineer who is an expert "bug catcher" with experience in testing Apple products.
3. An employee specializes in security architecture for the operating systems powering Apple products including iPhone, Mac and Apple TV.

The FBI wants Apple assistant to help the authorities bypass security mechanisms on the San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook's iPhone 5C so that they can extract data from the phone.

Given that the San Bernardino case is currently working its way through the courts and that no one is prepared to stand down, the possibility that Apple might have to comply with the orders is probably years away.

Source : click here

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