What to expect with Apple's 2017 iPhone 'X'

With Apple’s next iPhone seeing even more fevered speculation this week, a long-time display expert offers his predictions.  

Call it the “iPhone 8,” or “10th anniversary iPhone” or what some analysts on Wall Street refer to as the “iPhone X” -- with "X" referring to the roman numeral 10 -- expectations for Apple’s next phone are high after the company turned in a record quarter this week, selling more iPhones than ever.

The centerpiece of that future phone, due later this year, will likely be an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, according Raymond Soneira, a display expert who heads DisplayMate Technologies and published a report this week with his thoughts on Apple’s future phone.

An affordable Android 2-in-1 with a unique keyboard

Last year Lenovo released the Yoga Book, one of the most innovative Android tablet 2-in-1s, well, ever. It has a fashionably slim design and a completely flat keyboard that impressively transforms into a Wacom sketch pad.

Hack knocks out a fifth of the Dark Web

The Dark Web is having a rough time right now... although the victims in this case won't earn too much sympathy. An Anonymous-linked hacker speaking to Motherboardbrought down about a fifth of the Tor network's 'secret' websites (over 10,000 of them) in a claimed vigilante move. The intruder decided to attack a Dark Web hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, after discovering that it was managing child porn sites it had to be aware of -- they were using gigabytes of data each when the host officially allows no more than 256MB. Each site had its usual pages replaced with a message that not only chastised FH2, but offered a data dump (minus user info) and explained the nature of the hack.

Net ​nostalgia: the online museums preserving dolphin gifs and spinning Comic Sans

Jason Scott is a “guerilla internet archivist”. Someone’s got to be. If you’ve got some content embedded in a site that’s about to disappear, then he and his team of coders and data engineers go in there and “Ocean’s Eleven” the joint. In the name of digital archaeology, they migrate as much data as they can to a safe harbour even as the main site goes down. “We swoop in and, to the best of our ability, take a snapshot,” he says.

Scott is interested in conserving the stuff we have forgotten has value. Increasingly, our culture plays itself out on the internet, yet even now we have a tendency to view what we do on there as trivial. Or we make the mistake of assuming that digital means for ever. “The problem is, the internet’s systems have been designed as though everything goes on indefinitely,” he says. “There are no agreed-upon shutdown procedures. When users die, what do you do? Because their accounts live on, and suddenly Facebook is telling you your dead friend also likes Snickers bars. Often, you don’t even know who’s running a site. It’s as if you didn’t know who was in charge of your water supply; then one day, it just stopped ...”

 

Why is Google selling off its satellite fleet?

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, may have sky-high ambitions, but for now, it looks like they’ll be capped at around 60,000 feet.

With the sale of recently acquired satellite imaging company Terra Bella, Alphabet trades direct control over its own fleet of satellites – and all the hassles that can bring – for rights to purchase pictures for Google Earth from a third party. This reorganization is the latest in a series of moves focusing on balancing the company’s eclectic interests with investors’ desire for profits.