How to Encrypt Data on External Drives

It's not hard to lose a USB flash drive; it's even easier to steal one. If you're the victim of such a theft, panic is understandable. There could be work documents, private pictures, your kid's birthday party video, or amazing notes for a NaNoWriMo novel—anything—on that drive. It's unlikely to be the only copy—this is the age of online backup and sync, after all. But if you're crazy enough to trust your most important, irreplaceable data to a device that's even easier to misplace or forget than your keys, at least make sure that data is secure.

What you'll need is software for encrypting the data, and that software has to be portable, in that it runs on any PC without installation, since it will likely run from the flash drive itself. Note, these solutions also work with any external hard drive, for the most part, plus your much-harder-to-steal internal hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs).

Encryption Software

The first choice should always be to try a free software solution. A current favorite these days is VeraCrypt. It's free, open-source, and Windows-only. It lets you create a volume/vault on your USB flash drive that only you can access, or encrypt an existing drive (as long as it isn't system necessary, like your C: drive), or optionally, encrypt the entire system drive so anyone who tries to install programs or read/write files would need to enter a password each time. That last one is overkill; stick to the first few options.

The volumes created by VeraCrypt can be standard—they're visible but only the person with the password can get access—or hidden. With the latter, even if you're forced to give up the password, it's unlikely anyone can find your data to get access anyway.

When you go to install VeraCrypt, there's an option to Extract. Do that and extract the files to your USB Drive. That makes a portable version, so you don't need to have VeraCrypt on every system that you'll plug the drive into—but it does have to be on an administror-level log-in on the PC.

The VeraCrypt site has an excellent step-by-step tutorial. Another free option is CipherShed; both are off-shoots of the late, great TrueCrypt. BitLocker, which comes with select versions of Windows (the non-"Home" versions), can also be used to secure USB or external drives. If you prefer to pay, check out the $12.99 EncryptStick, which comes for Mac and Windows.

Secure Flash Drives

There are millions of USB flash drives around—I have three of various capacities littering my desk at the moment. So using third-party software to secure their contents makes great sense. But if you want security from the start, there are plenty of drives that come with security built right into the hardware.

A few select flash drives have a number pad right on the drive itself. You enter a PIN code before you can access the contents. They include the Aegis Secure Key 3.0, a $65 flash drive at 4GB with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 encryption (pictured right; it also comes in 8, 16, and 32GB versions).

If you think reaching for the number pad is an issue, there's also a few biometric USB flash drives. IronKey, by Imation, is a pretty well-known name for secure drives; it's F200 with built-in finger-swipe (pictured above) and throws in multi-factor authentication for your files. The price, of course, is much higher, with the base model with 8GB starting at $189 direct and shooting to a price of $649 for 64GB! It gets good marks for security, but most reviews also say its performance is lacking.

But you don't need to have anything fancy built into the hardware of your USB flash drive to be secure. Several models come with encryption software. It's held in a partition of the drive itself and looks to Windows like a CD, so it can auto-play activate when inserted, giving you instant access. Some options include the Kanguru Defender 2000 (4GB for $69); IronKey F150 (8GB for $139), Kingston DataTraveler Vauilt Privacy 3.0 (4GB for $35), and several more. All of these listed are base models; you can always get more capacity by paying more. For savings, be sure to compare on Google or using Amazon.

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System): Why We Must Distribute The Web

IPFS isn’t exactly a well-known technology yet, even among many in the Valley, but it’s quickly spreading by word of mouth among folks in the open-source community. Many are excited by its potential to greatly improve file transfer and streaming speeds across the Internet.

From my personal perspective, however, it’s actually much more important than that. IPFS eliminates the need for websites to have a central origin server, making it perhaps our best chance to entirely re-architect the Internet — before its own internal contradictions unravel it from within.

How, and why? The answer requires a bit of background.

Why We Have A Slow, Fragile And Forgetful Web

IPFS is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that aims to supplement, or possibly even replace, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that rules the web now. Here’s the problem with HTTP: When you go to a website today, your browser has to be directly connected to the computers that are serving that website, even if their servers are far away and the transfer process eats up a lot of bandwidth.

Data providers get charged because each network has a peering agreement, while each network hop costs money to the data provider and wastes bandwidth. Worse, HTTP downloads a file from a single computer at a time, instead of getting pieces from multiple computers simultaneously.

Consequently, we have what we’re stuck with now: a slow, expensive Internet, made even more costly by predatory last-mile carriers (in the U.S. at least), and the accelerating growth of connection requests from mobile devices. It’s not just slow and expensive, it’s unreliable. If one link in an HTTP transfer cuts out for whatever reason, the whole transfer breaks. (Whenever a web page or media file is slow to load, a problem with a link in the HTTP chain is among the likeliest culprits.)

How it works
IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.

Remaking The Internet With IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.

As a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files, IPFS seeks to improve on HTTP in several ways. Two, Juan told me in a recent conversation, are key:

“We use content-addressing so content can be decoupled from origin servers, and instead, can be stored permanently. This means content can be stored and served very close to the user, perhaps even from a computer in the same room. Content-addressing allows us to verify the data too, because other hosts may be untrusted. And once the user’s device has the content, it can be cached indefinitely.”

IPFS also addresses security problems that plague our HTTP-based Internet: Content-addressing and content-signing protect IPFS-based sites, making DDoS attacks impossible. And to help mitigate the damage of discontinued websites, IPFS also archives important public-record content, and can easily store important, public-record content.

IPFS’s final core improvement is decentralized distribution, which makes it possible to access Internet content despite sporadic Internet service or even while offline: “We make websites and web apps have no central origin server,” Juan explained. “They can be distributed just like the Bitcoin network is distributed.” This is actually something that HTTP simply cannot do, and would especially be a boon to networks without top-notch connectivity (i.e., the whole developing world), and for access outside of metropolitan areas.

Released in Alpha last February, IPFS has already started to see a lot of experimentation among early adopters. On September 8, for instance, Neocities became the first major site to implement IPFS, following a call from the Internet Archive for a distributed web. We currently suffer a constant loss of websites as their owners abandon them over the years — a growing crisis to our collective Internet memory — and this is a small but important step toward a more permanent web.

But will websites owned by large corporations follow Neocities’ lead, adopting such an as-yet-untested protocol — especially when the mere mention of “peer to peer” often terrifies them? That takes me to my final point.

Why IPFS Matters For The Future Of Internet Business

As I explain in my upcoming book, we are fast approaching a point where the cost of delivering content will outstrip the benefits — and profits. The major Internet companies are already struggling to stay ahead of our content demands, with armies of engineers at companies like Akamai, Google and Amazon devoted to this one problem.

And they haven’t even seen the worst of it: Thanks to rapid adoption of low-cost smartphones, whole continents of consumers will go online in the coming decade. The Internet of Things promises to only compound this challenge, as billions of devices add their own demands on our rapidly dwindling connectivity.

We are already in desperate need for a hedge against what I call micro-singularities, in which a viral event can suddenly transfix billions of Internet users, threatening to choke the entire system in the process. (A potentially life-threatening outage, when the micro-singularity involves a natural disaster or other emergency.)

Netflix recently started researching large-scale peer-to-peer technology for streaming, an early, hopeful sign that companies of its size and reach are looking for smarter content distribution methods. Netflix, YouTube, all the bandwidth-heavy services we cherish now would thrive on an Internet remade by IPFS, dramatically reducing the cost and time to serve content.

Beyond improved service, IPFS would help the Internet grow into the system we’ve always aspired it to be at our most idealistic, but cannot become with our current protocols: Truly capable of connecting everyone around the world (even offline) to a permanent but constantly evolving expression of who we are, and aspire to be.

Google's new phones launched be called the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P

For the first time since their launch in 2010, Google has unveiled two Nexus smartphones at the same time, one featuring a 5.2-inch display and the other sporting a 5.7-inch screen.
Here is the link of Google Press Event 29/09/2015

At an event in San Francisco, Google announced that it has partnered with Huawei and LG to make the new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P smartphones, respectively. The former will cost $379, whereas the latter will be available for $499; both will be up for preorder starting next today in the US and next week in other markets. There was no word on the India launch of the two smartphones.

The all-new Nexus 6P has a 5.7-inch AMOLED display with QHD (1440x2560p) resolution and comes with the integrated Nexus Imprint fingerprint sensor on the back. The smartphone is reportedly powered by Snapdragon 810 processor with 3GB RAM and comes in three storage variants: 32, 64 and 128GB; there is no support for storage expansion.

The smartphone has a 12.3MP rear camera (1.55micron sensor which captures more light, thus delivering better lowlight photos) that supports 4K recording and can capture videos at 240 frames per second; it is backed by a dual-LED flash. On the front is an 8MP camera, the highest resolution for selfie camera for a Nexus smartphone yet. The smartphone features an all-metal, 7.33mm thick body in white, grey and aluminium finishes, packs a 3,450mAh battery, and comes with front-facing stereo speakers.

Nexus 5X has a 5.2-inch screen with relatively lower Full HD (1080x1920p) resolution and runs on the 64-bit Snapdragon 808 processor with 2GB RAM. The storage capacities of the smartphone are 16GB and 32GB, with no microSD card support.
The 12.3MP camera of Nexus 5X also has a 1.55micron sensor and is backed by a laser autofocus for faster capturing; it can shoot videos in high-resolution 4K videos as well 120fps videos. Google said the smartphone will come with a Smart Burst feature that captures shots at 30fps, and can be used to create GIF images. Available in black, white and blue colours, the smartphone has a 2,700mAh battery.

Both smartphones sport the reversible Type C USB and supports fast-charging; the Nexus 6P charges twice as fast as iPhone 6S Plus, Google said. Android Marshmallow will be preloaded on both Nexus models.

Talking about the fingerprint sensor, Google said it will be built right into Android; named Nexus Imprint, it can recognize fingerprints in less than 600 milliseconds. This means that it can not only unlock the handset, but also works with other apps; it also authenticates app downloads in Play Store and payments in Android Pay.
The new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P smartphones will have an integrated Android Sensor Hub that Google said will track "sensor fusion, activity recognition, gesture recognition, movements and low power times." A use-case Google spoke was that Android Sensor Hub will track when you pick up the handset and turn on the ambient display automatically.

On the software side, Google said it has reduced the number of preloaded apps, and has made uninstalling apps easier as well.
Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P are the first smartphones to get Android's new Google Now on Tap feature, which delivers information to users based on what they are using on screen.

About Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), Google said it will support voice interactions even when the screen is turned off and improves the battery life. On Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, the battery life increases by as much as 30% with Android Marshmallow.

Google said it will release the Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) over-the-air update for older smartphones like Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 next week. Other manufacturers will announce their plans for Marshmallow update separately.

Google Bringing Free Wi-Fi to Train Stations in India

Google today announced that it will provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.

The news comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Google's Mountain View headquarters to champion his Digital India initiative, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post.

In collaboration with Indian Railways—operator of one of the world's largest railway networks—and RailTel—provider of Internet service RailWire via its fiber network—Google's Access and Energy team aims to bring the first stations online "in the coming months" and 100 by the end of 2016, according to Pichai.

"Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day," Pichai wrote. "This will rank it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the world, by number of potential users."

Pichai promised "many times faster" access than existing connections in India, allowing travelers to stream a high-definition video, research their destination, or download a book or game while they wait for the next train.

"Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places … in the future," Pichai said.

Why India? Even though "there are now more Internet users in India than in every country in the world aside from China...there are still nearly one billion people in India who aren't online," Pichai said.

India is one of the countries where Google is rolling out Android One, which provides low-cost Android phones to people in developing countries. "To help address the challenges of limited bandwidth, we recently launched a feature that makes mobile webpages load faster and with less data, and we've made YouTube available offline with offline Maps coming soon," Pichai said today.

Non-English-speaking Indians, meanwhile, can tap into the Indian Language Internet Alliance, which offers Hindi Voice Search, an improved Hindi keyboard, and support for seven local languages.

"Just like I did years ago, thousands of young Indians walk through Chennai Central every day, eager to learn, to explore and to seek opportunity," Pichai wrote. "It's my hope that this Wi-Fi project will make all these things a little easier."

The news comes as Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg was at the United Nations last week calling for universal Internet access by 2020. Facebook is also offering low-cost devices to developing countries via Internet.org (now known as Free Basics). But the effort drew net neutrality complaints in India for offering free access to only a select few apps. Facebook later opened up the program to anyone who could develop low-bandwidth apps.

SOURCE:
http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2015/09/bringing-the-internet-to-more-indians.html
http://in.pcmag.com/

What's the Difference between SSD and HDD?

Until recently, PC buyers had very little choice for what kind of file storage they got with their laptop, ultrabook, or desktop. If you bought an ultrabook or ultraportable, you likely had a solid-state drive (SSD) as the primary drive (C: on Windows, Macintosh HD on a Mac). Every other desktop or laptop form factor had a hard disk drive (HDD). Now, you can configure your system with either an HDD, SSD, or in some cases both. But how do you choose? We explain the differences between SSDs and HDDs, and walk you through the advantages and disadvantage of both to help you come to your decision.

HDD and SSD Explained
The traditional spinning hard drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile storage on a computer. That is, it doesn't "go away" like the data on the system memory when you turn the system off. Hard drives are essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating. That coating stores your data, whether that data consists of weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the Star Wars trilogy, or your digital music collection. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning in a hard drive enclosure.

An SSD does much the same job functionally (e.g., saving your data while the system is off, booting your system, etc.) as an HDD, but instead of a magnetic coating on top of platters, the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power present. The chips can either be permanently installed on the system's motherboard (like on some small laptops and ultrabooks), on a PCI/PCIe card (in some high-end workstations), or in a box that's sized, shaped, and wired to slot in for a laptop or desktop's hard drive (common on everything else). These flash memory chips differ from the flash memory in USB thumb drives in the type and speed of the memory. That's the subject of a totally separate technical treatise, but suffice it to say that the flash memory in SSDs is faster and more reliable than the flash memory in USB thumb drives. SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives for the same capacities.

A History of HDDs and SSDs

Hard-drive technology is relatively ancient (in terms of computer history, anyway). There are well-known pictures of the infamous IBM 350 RAMAC hard drive from 1956 that used fifty 24-inch-wide platters to hold a whopping 3.75MB of storage space. This, of course, is the size of an average 128Kbps MP3 file, in the physical space that could hold two commercial refrigerators. The IBM 350 was only ulitized by government and industrial users, and was obsolete by 1969. Ain't progress wonderful? The PC hard drive form factor standardized in the early 1980s, with the desktop-class 5.25-inch form factor, and with the 3.5-inch desktop-class and 2.5-inch notebook-class drives coming soon thereafter. The internal cable interface has changed from Serial to IDE to SCSI to SATA over the years, but it essentially does the same thing: connects the hard drive to the PC's motherboard so your data can be processed. Today's 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives use SATA interfaces almost exclusively (at least on most PCs and Macs). Capacities have grown from multiple megabytes to multiple terabytes, an increase of millions fold. Current 3.5-inch HDDs max out at 10TB, with 2.5-inch drives at 3TB max.

The SSD has a much more recent history. There was always an infatuation with non-moving storage from the beginning of personal computing, with technologies like bubble memory flashing (pun intended) and dying in the 1970s and '80s. Current flash memory is the logical extension of the same idea. The flash memory chips store your data and don't require constant power to retain that data. The first primary drives that we know as SSDs started during the rise of netbooks in the late 2000s. In 2007, the OLPC XO-1 used a 1GB SSD, and the Asus Eee PC 700 series used a 2GB SSD as primary storage. The SSD chips on low-end Eee PC units and the XO-1 were permanently soldered to the motherboard. As netbooks, ultrabooks, and other ultraportable laptop PCs became more capable, the SSD capacities increased, and eventually standardized on the 2.5-inch notebook form factor. This way, you could pop a 2.5-inch hard drive out of your laptop or desktop and replace it easily with an SSD. Other form factors emerged, like the mSATA miniPCIe SSD card, M.2 SSD, and the DIMM-like SSDs in the Apple MacBook Air, but today many SSDs are still built into the 2.5-inch form factor. The 2.5-inch SSD capsacity currently tops out at 4TB, but will undoubtedly grow as time goes by.

Advantages and Disadvantages
Both SSDs and HDDs do the same job: They boot your system, store your applications, and store your personal files. But each type of storage has its own unique feature set. The question is, what's the difference, and why would a user get one over the other? We break it down:

Price: To put it bluntly, SSDs are more expensive than HDDs in terms of rupees per GB. For the same capacity and form factor 1TB internal 2.5-inch drive, you'll pay about Rs 4,000 for an HDD, but as of this writing, an SSD shoots up to over Rs 60,00. Since HDDs are older, more established technologies, they will remain less expensive for the near future. Those extra ten-thousands may push your system price over budget.

Maximum and Common Capacity: As seen above, SSD units top out at 4TB, but those are still very rare and expensive. You're more likely to find 500GB to 1TB units as primary drives in systems. While 500GB is considered a "base" hard drive in 2015, pricing concerns can push that down to 128GB for lower-priced SSD-based systems. Multimedia users will require even more, with 1TB to 4TB drives as common in high-end systems. Basically, the more storage capacity, the more stuff (photos, music, videos, etc.) you can hold on your PC. While the (Internet) cloud may be a good place to share these files among your phone, tablet, and PC, local storage is less expensive, and you only have to buy it once.

Speed: This is where SSDs shine. An SSD-equipped PC will boot in seconds, certainly under a minute. A hard drive requires time to speed up to operating specs, and will continue to be slower than an SSD during normal use. A PC or Mac with an SSD boots faster, launches apps faster, and has faster overall performance. Witness the higher PCMark benchmark scores on laptops and desktops with SSDs, plus the much higher scores and transfer times for external SSDs versus HDDs. Whether it's for fun, school, or business, the extra speed may be the difference between finishing on time or failing.

Fragmentation: Because of their rotary recording surfaces, HDD surfaces work best with larger files that are laid down in contiguous blocks. That way, the drive head can start and end its read in one continuous motion. When hard drives start to fill up, large files can become scattered around the disk platter, which is otherwise known as fragmentation. While read/write algorithms have improved to the point that the effect is minimized, the fact of the matter is that HDDs can become fragmented, while SSDs don't care where the data is stored on its chips, since there's no physical read head. Thus, SSDs are inherently faster.

Durability: An SSD has no moving parts, so it is more likely to keep your data safe in the event that you drop your laptop bag or your system is shaken about by an earthquake while it's operating. Most hard drives park their read/write heads when the system is off, but they are flying over the drive platter at hundreds of miles an hour when they are in operation. Besides, even parking brakes have limits. If you're rough on your equipment, an SSD is recommended.

Availability: Hard drives are simply more plentiful. Look at the product lists from Western Digital, Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi, and you'll see many more HDD models than SSDs. For PCs and Macs, internal HDDs won't be going away completely, at least for the next couple of years. You'll also see many more HDD choices than SSDs from different manufacturers for the same capacities. SSD model lines are growing in number, but HDDs are still in the majority for storage devices in PCs.

Form Factors: Because HDDs rely on spinning platters, there is a limit to how small they can be manufactured. There was an initiative to make smaller 1.8-inch spinning hard drives, but that's stalled at about 320GB, since the phablet and smartphone manufacturers have settled on flash memory for their primary storage. SSDs have no such limitation, so they can continue to shrink as time goes on. SSDs are available in 2.5-inch laptop drive-sized boxes, but that's only for convenience. As laptops become slimmer and tablets take over as primary Web-surfing platforms, you'll start to see the adoption of SSDs skyrocket.

Noise: Even the quietest HDD will emit a bit of noise when it is in use from the drive spinning or the read arm moving back and forth, particularly if it's in a system that's been banged about or in an all-metal system where it's been shoddily installed. Faster hard drives will make more noise than slower ones. SSDs make virtually no noise at all, since they're non-mechanical.

Overall: HDDs win on price, capacity, and availability. SSDs work best if speed, ruggedness, form factor, noise, or fragmentation (technically part of speed) are important factors to you. If it weren't for the price and capacity issues, SSDs would be the winner hands down.

As far as longevity goes, while it is true that SSDs wear out over time (each cell in a flash memory bank has a limited number of times it can be written and erased), thanks to TRIM command technology built into SSDs that dynamically optimizes these read/write cycles, you're more likely to discard the system for obsolescence before you start running into read/write errors. The possible exceptions are high-end multimedia users like video editors who read and write data constantly, but those users will need the larger capacities of hard drives anyway. Hard drives will eventually wear out from constant use as well, since they use physical recording methods. Longevity is a wash when it's separated from travel and ruggedness concerns.

What is HDR (High Dynamic Range)?

High dynamic range (HDR) video is one of the newest HDTV feature bullet points. It could push video content past the (now non-existant) limitations to which broadcast and other media standards have adhered to for decades. But adoption could be slow over the next few years because it's a complicated and somewhat esoteric feature.

Standard Dynamic Range
HDTV contrast is the difference between how dark and bright it can get. Dynamic range describes the extremes in that difference, and how much detail can be shown in between. Essentially, dynamic range is display contrast, and HDR represents broadening that contrast. However, just expanding the range between bright and dark is insufficient to improve a picture's detail. Whether a panel can reach 100 cd/m2 (relatively dim) or 500 cd/m2 (incredibly bright), and whether its black levels are 0.1 (washed out, nearly gray) or 0.005 (incredibly dark), it can ultimately only show so much information based on the signal it's receiving.

Current popular video formats, including broadcast television and Blu-ray discs, are limited by standards built around the physical boundaries presented by older technologies. Black is set to only so black, because as Christopher Guest eloquently wrote, it could get none more black. Similarly, white could only get so bright within the limitations of display technology. Now, with organic LED (OLED) and local dimming LED backlighting systems on newer LCD panels, that range is increasing. They can reach further extremes, but video formats can't take advantage of it. Only so much information is presented in the signal, and an HDTV capable of reaching beyond those limits still has to stretch and work with the information present.

What Is HDR?
That's where HDR video comes in. It removes the limitations presented by older video signals and provides information about brightness and color across a much wider range. HDR-capable displays can read that information and show an image built from a wider gamut of color and brightness. Besides the wider range, HDR video simply contains more data to describe more steps in between the extremes. This means that very bright objects and very dark objects on the same screen can be shown very bright and very dark if the display supports it, with all of the necessary steps in between described in the signal and not synthesized by the image processor.

To put it more simply, HDR content on HDR-compatible HDTVs can get brighter and darker at the same time, and show more shades of gray in between. Similarly, they can produce deeper and more vivid reds, greens, and blues, and show more shades in between. Deep shadows aren't simply black voids; more details can be seen in the darkness, while the picture stays very dark. Bright shots aren't simply sunny, vivid pictures; fine details in the brightest surfaces remain clear. Vivid objects aren't simply saturated; more shades of colors can be seen.

This requires much more data, and like ultra high-definition video, current optical media can't handle it. Blu-ray discs cannot hold HDR information. That will change over the next few years as the UHD Alliance pushes the Ultra HD Blu-ray standard. It's a disc type that can hold more data, and is built to contain 4K video, HDR video, and even object-based surround sound like Dolby Atmos. It could solve all of the distribution problems of 4K and HDR without requiring a very fast Internet connection. Online streaming will still be a valid way to offer 4K and HDR video, but Ultra HD, Blu-ray provides a physical and broadly accessible way to get it.

What You'll Need
Don't expect to see these discs on your Blu-ray player, though. While they're called Blu-ray discs, they still use different technology and different encoding standards to stuff all of that information onto the medium. You'll need an Ultra HD, Blu-ray player to use these new discs. We'll see if some players will be able to read this media with firmware upgrades in the future, but for now it seems that new players will be necessary.

You'll need an HDR-compatible HDTV, as well. HDR is not 4K. A 4K screen might support HDR, but that doesn't apply to all sets. If your HDTV doesn't support HDR, it won't take advantage of the additional information in the signal, and the panel isn't calibrated to handle that information if it was properly read. So, if you haven't picked up a 4K television yet, you might want to wait for an HDR-compatible one that fits your needs in the future. If you have, don't fret; HDR content is even newer and rare than 4K video, and we won't see it become widely available for a while. The HDR content situation was similar to the 4K video situation three years ago; what's out there is mostly there to show off the technology rather than present a really compelling, broad reason for consumers to adopt it just yet.

Where Is it Now?
Currently, Amazon, 20th Century Fox, Universal, BBC, LG, Broadcom, the UHD Alliance, the CEA, and other organizations are working on standards and distribution methods for HDR content. LG has been promoting its OLED televisions as being HDR-capable, as having Samsung with its own high-end LED televisions. HDR video remains very limited, with only some movies available through a very specific distribution method, like hard drives with the HDR films preloaded on them to ship with HDR-compatible HDTVs.

We'll be keeping an eye out for more HDR news and products as they come out. Expect new HDR displays and content to appear in January at CES 2016.

WatchOS 2 And The Future Of Apps

With flashier announcements at this year’s WWDC, such as Apple Music or more hardcore developer news on the iOS 9 fronts, it’s easy to lose sight of a real game changer: watchOS 2, which is slated for release September 16. Would it be crazy to think this new OS could really make that big of an impact?

After all, despite the fact that the first nine weeks of Apple Watch sales exceeded initial sales for both the iPhone and the iPad, the larger wearable market is still relatively small; vendors reportedly shipped a mere 11.4 million wearables in Q1 of this year, compared to 334.4 million smartphones.

While wearables are still nascent, the reason the watchOS2 will be such a game-changer lies in its native development capabilities. With the iPhone, developers had the attractiveness of having plenty of digital real estate to work with, but the Watch’s small form factor has challenged them to create experiences in a very restricted space.

Further, being tied to the construct of the phone has limited their creativity. Need proof? Consider that as of early September, there were 11,469 apps for the Watch, which represents 274 percent growth since launch. That might sound impressive, but compare it to the iPhone, which saw 437 percent growth within the first three months. This indicates that while there is an appetite, developers need more incentive.

Developers will find that incentive in the watchOS 2, which I believe will cause entire new subcategories of apps to emerge — some even unimaginable with our existing mobile devices today. With native support, developers can now get even more creative and tap into the Watch’s unique features, like sensors and an accelerometer. This will make the Watch much more attractive for developers and expand Apple’s total addressable market.

How will this play out for both developers and consumers? We’ll have to wait and see for sure, but here are a few predictions…

The Body And App Merge, And Become Interactive
We’ve already seen the body and mobile devices becoming more intertwined thanks to apps such as Nike+, but we’ll see a whole new realm of possibilities now that developers can play with the Watch’s sensor capabilities. I expect to see new categories of apps designed for everything from meal planning to travel.

The level of interaction and personalization that will be born out of the Watch will make today’s smartphone experiences look generic and dated.
For example, there might be an app that improves your diet by suggesting what to eat, integrating with other connected devices Watch data such as calories burned and steps taken. Based on what the app learns, it could give you nutritious recipes to meet your goals, or even share locations of nearby healthy restaurants. If you want to stay home, it might even connect directly to food delivery services such as GrubHub so you can get the healthiest meals delivered right to your door.

While the watchOS 2 has the power to drastically improve what technology can do for encouraging general wellness, we are likely to also see apps that provides actual medical diagnosis by tracking your body temperature, heart rate and other biometrics. For instance, biometric analytics apps could provide realistic health goals and medical advice, and even discover previously undetected medical conditions. New smart attachments that integrate with the Watch, similar to Kinsa medical devices, could lead to apps that help with chronic conditions like diabetes and asthma.


Personalization Like You’ve Never Experienced
We’ll also see more personalized notifications emerge thanks in large part to the Taptic Engine. This new Apple Watch technology sends small tapping vibrations and nuanced audio cues to communicate with the wearer. Imagine a dating app that sends vibrations to help guide you to someone new. Or there could be apps that remind you of people’s names you’ve met previously but have since forgotten.

The heart rate sensor, accelerometer and Siri also offer new and exciting avenues for personalization. For those of you who struggle to stay fit, the Watch could lock leisurely apps such as Instagram, Facebook and Angry Birds until you’ve hit your physical activity goals for the day.
Traditional iOS developers can even use the Watch to personalize their own apps. Imagine if fitness apps like RunKeeper could integrate with Pandora or Apple Music to match a song’s beats per minute with your heart rate. The possibilities are endless.

A New Age of Apps

The level of interaction and personalization that will be born out of the Watch will make today’s smartphone experiences look generic and dated. What’s especially exciting about this shift is how it fits into the overarching movement toward the.Internet of Things (IoT)

While industrial IoT is alive and well, in the consumer market wearables are our best hope — before our homes or our cars. Given Apple’s immense developer community support and consumer affinity, Apple can dominate the market and watchOS 2 will play a major part in that. The result for consumers will be a complete overhaul of the apps we use and how they interact with — and improve — our lives.


While having a watch that communicates with all your other devices and automatically serves you experiences purely based on movement and biometrics might sound far into the future, in truth we’re just around the corner. By the time the next WWDC rolls around, we may already be halfway there.

10 new features of Android 6.0 Marshmallow

After months of waiting, Google has finally announced that the next version of its mobile OS Android will be called Marshmallow. Also, it the next update of the OS will be numbered Android 6.0, instead of Android 5.2 as previously speculated.

Announced at Google I/O 2015, Android Marshmallow brings with it a number of new features to spruce up your smartphones and tablets (provided they get the update).

Here we take a look at 10 of the features you can look forward to with the next build of Android...

Google Now on Tap
One of the key Android Marshmallow features is Google Now on Tap, a more advanced version of the company's digital assistant. While Google Now is presently available, on most phones, only via the Search app, Android 6.0 will make it all-pervasive.

This means that you will be able to pull up Google Now to make a quick search across any app while using the smartphone. All you need to do is to select any section on the screen, for example, any particular text, and Google Now on Tap will pull up relevant information, including context-based definitions.

Chrome Custom Tabs
Many a times, you click a link in an app and it either takes you to the default browser (like Chrome, Opera, etc.) or opens the link to the in-app browser. With Android 6.0, app makers will be able to integrate Chrome tabs into their apps, but retain the app's customized look. 

The toolbar color, enter & exit animations, and custom actions as well as the overflow menu can be picked by the app makers even if the link is on an external website.

One of the key uses for the app makers is that the user stays within the app and gets a seamless experience. 


For the users, Custom Chrome Tabs saves them the trouble of logging into websites they are already connected to or authenticate permissions more than once. Moreover, this feature has provision for pre-fetch content, so autofill data and passwords can be entered with just a tap.

Battery life enhancements
While Android Lollipop's Project Volta did not bring as much battery life improvement as was promised by Google, the company claims to have brought a fix with Android Marshmallow's Doze feature. Basically, this feature is said to bring your smartphone to a near-off state when it has been idle for a long time. 

In Google's tests, Android 6.0's Doze resulted in two times the battery life compared to Android 5.0 on the same device with the same apps.


Though Doze allows important notifications and alarms to pass, it does not let the apps refresh in the background, so you won't be able to get key updates as soon as you pick up your phone after a while.

Fingerprint support goes native
While many manufacturers, like Samsung, HTC, OnePlus, Oppo etc., have been using fingerprint sensors in their smartphones for quite some time, Google is making fingerprint sensor support native with Android 6.0.

This will not only add a new security layer to all smartphones (if manufacturers want to add this feature, that is) but also allow payment authentication via Android Pay.


Moreover, fingerprint support can be added to other apps as password for logins.

USB Type C and faster charging
Google is doing away with microUSB as the standard for the Android smartphones with the Android Marshmallow update, replacing it with USB Type C.

This relatively new USB type is backwards-compatible, which means that (like Apple's Lightning adapter) the charging cable can be inserted in the port either way, making it a convenience for all users.


USB Type C has two other advantages: It allows for faster data transfer rates and charge devices faster. In fact, Google says USB Type C can charge products up to 3-5 times faster than the current crop of microUSB chargers.

App permissions
Google has rebooted app permissions with Android 6.0. The Marshmallow will allow users to accept or deny permissions to apps as when they are updated; for example, if an app you download wants to access your camera, you can choose to deny to that requirement while approving the others.

This is different from the current setup, where you must accept all permissions if you want to download an app.

If an app adds new features and wants to access more of your phone's hardware, you can choose to accept to deny those changes while downloading the update.


Android 6.0 Marshmallow also allows you to revisit app permissions; for example, you denied any particular permission initially, you can go into settings and accept it later.

Android Pay
Android 6.0 Marshmallow will bring in Android Pay, an NFC-based payment system that will rival Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

Though it will be launched with Android Marshmallow, it will still be available for devices running on Android 4.4 and above.

Based on Google Wallet, this feature allows you to save your credit cards and loyalty cards in one place. When you want to make a transaction, you will be able to authenticate the transaction via your fingerprint or via your virtual card number (given by Android Pay while registering).

Direct Share
Sharing on Android is already pretty convenient, but Google is trying to make it easier with Android 6.0 Marshmallow with it a new feature called Direct Share.

Though a lot is not known about this feature yet, we know that Direct Share will enable apps to share content (for example images) to specific contacts with just one click.


So, if you share stuff with particular contacts frequently, the software will recognize this behavior and show those contacts on top. It is expected that the APIs will allow for more features, but it will eventually depend on the app makers to integrate them.

New boot animation
Google is bringing in a little change to the boot animation with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which will now show four colorful circles moving about and morphing into various shapes before settling into the Android logo.

This replaces the Android 5.0 Lollipop boot animation, which had four colorful spheres bouncing about for a few seconds before turning into the Android logo.

Customizable toggles
While most custom Android skins allow users to personalize the toggles in the notifications drawer, it is still not a native feature of Google's mobile operating system.

That is, however, about to change with Android Marshmallow, as users will be able to customize the toggles they want on Nexus devices as well (along with any other smartphone that runs on the stock version of Android 6.0).

Apple Introduces The iPhone 6S And iPhone 6S Plus

Today, Apple has unveiled the latest generation of the iPhone in the form of the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 6S Plus. Rumors have been swirling for the past few months, with suggestions that Apple would integrate a Force Touch Display, update the devices’ cameras, and use a more powerful processor.

But the moment of truth has finally arrived, so let’s get to it.

As can be expected from an ‘S’ year, the next-generation iPhones don’t look all that different from last year’s models. However, the innards have been significantly tweaked.

Design
Following rumors, the next iPhone will come in a rose gold color, and all iPhone models are made with a brand new Apple custom alloy, the same alloys used in the aerospace industry. The Apple team has also introduced a new type of stronger glass for the display.

3D Touch
Apple has introduced a feature called 3D Touch, which shows an extra dimension to the screen you’re used to. Using Force Touch, which is already available on the Apple Watch and on new MacBooks, users can hold down on various apps to both ‘peek’ and ‘pop’.

For example, you could lightly tap on the content of an email to peek at the content inside, and if you press harder, the content you’re peeking at will pop open fully.

As is standard with Force Touch, the iPhone will offer haptic feedback as a part of the 3D Touch experience.


A few examples of 3D Touch on the iPhone include: lightly tap on the camera icon to get camera options, and press harder to go straight into selfie mode, lightly tap on various app to choose to go into various parts of the app, lightly tap on a flight number and get flight tracking information as a ‘peek’, or Force Touch an address to get a preview within the Maps app.

It’s not just default Apple apps that use Force Touch — Instagram, Facebook, and others have integrated 3D Touch into their apps to let you peek and pop.

Users can also employ Force Touch to switch between apps instead of using the old double-tap on the home button. Simply Force Touch the edge of the display and swipe between previously opened apps.

This is made possible with the addition of an array of sensors added right under the display.

A9
The new A9, found in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, is the third generation of the 64-bit chip Apple has been using, built with a new transistor architecture. It’s 70 percent faster than the A8 chip used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and 90 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation.


Alongside the new A9, the new iPhones will feature a brand new M9 coprocessor that is always on, to help detect motion for apps like Health. Thanks to the new processors, TouchID is twice as fast in the new phones.

Camera
For the first time in years, Apple is adding more megapixels to the iPhone camera, offering a 12-megapixel camera. That’s a 50 percent improvement from earlier generations of the iSight camera.

But in order to avoid trading off more pixels for lower image quality, Apple has introduced ‘deep trench isolation’, which separates photo diodes to help maintain accurate color quality and reduce crosstalk and noise.

The new iSight camera still protrudes slightly from the body of the phone, just as it does on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.


Beyond the still imagery, the new iSight camera is also capable of taking 4K video, which means each frame has 8 million pixels.

Plus, the front-facing camera has been upgraded to a 5-megapixel camera. And for selfie fans out there, Apple has added a new front-facing flash feature that uses the LED screen to mimic a TrueTone flash that you’d find on the back of the camera. The display also gets 3X brighter right at the moment of capture (similar to Photo Booth on OS X) so that there is enough light for your Kardashian-style shots.




Apple is also introducing a new feature called Live Photos. This works by taking a few extra frames of photos before and after you snap a photo, so that each of your photos have snippets of live action. With the introduction of this feature, Apple is providing APIs so that third-party developers can integrate Live Photos into their own apps, with Facebook coming soon.

Some Other Stuff
The new iPhones support 23 LTE bands up to 300mbps, alongside WiFi up to 866mbps. And if you’re thinking of jumping ship from Android to iOS, Apple is releasing a new app that will help you move over your photos, notes, etc. There are also a bunch of new iCloud storage pricing plans, with 50GB for $1/month, 200GB for $2.99/month, and 1TB for $9.99/month.

In terms of pricing and availability, the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus will come in the exact same prices and configurations as the previous generation, starting at $199 and $299 respectively for the 16GB model.

But beyond that, Apple is starting a new iPhone Upgrade Program that will allow users to get an unlocked phone that includes Apple Care and costs $32/month. Every year.


Everything goes live on September 25.