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Over 3 Billion People Downloaded VLC

VLC, the open source video player app was about to surpass the 3 billion downloads level on Friday. Of course, the Videolan team could not miss this occasion to celebrate the success of their product. In order to make it as visible as possible and get a little bit of help from their fans, they set up a special download counter at their CES booth in Las Vegas.

According to one of the lead developers of the app, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, and based on VLC’s estimations, this milestone should have been surpassed on Friday some time afternoon.

Kempf is obviously looking forward to improving VLC especially after seeing how wanted it is and one of those changes would be the introduction of Airplay. This implementation offers Android users the possibility of beaming videos to their Apple TVs from their mobile devices. If you are wondering when that would happen, Kempf said that in about a month Airplay should make its way to the main VLC app.

During the CES celebration, another feature was demonstrated, the enhanced support for VR. This offers the possibility of watching traditional 2D movies in a virtual theater environment while using headsets such as the HTC Vive.

According to Kempf, the Videolan team got most VR headsets to support natively, through the main VLC app, VR video all by reverse-engineering them. VLC would have gotten hundreds of megabytes of code added if they had relied on the SDKs of headset manufacturers. However, this is based on just around 1 megabyte of additional code.

Other implementations on VLC’s list is simplifying the switch from iTunes and building out a more complete media library for its app. However, Kempf said that building a comprehensive media center solution is not the goal here as they are not willing to compete with other more developed platforms.

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Amazon Web Services VP Explains That IoT Shouldn’t Be Used Just For The Sake Of It

IoT is definitely the latest trend for tech lovers. However, regular customers are not the only ones using the internet of things. Many companies decide to adopt the IoT. While this might appear the logical step in order to keep up with the evolution technology, AWS VP of IoT Dirk Didascalou explained that IoT needs to be used for specific problems, not because it is a trend.

“Sometimes we are a little buzzword driven — IoT will solve all my problems, AI will solve all my problems, now we have the new buzzword, AIoT — that’s why we typically start all of our conversations with a question: If you knew the state of all of your assets, all of your things, everything, in your company and you could reason on top of that knowledge, what problems would you solve and why?,” Didascalou said.

Identify the problem

According to Didascalou, the IoT should represent a solution for a problem (or several). Therefore, before deciding to use IoT, and enterprise should start by identifying its shortcomings. Then, the company needs to figure out whether sensor technology would be able to solve its issues.

“We ask about problem statements: What’s hard for you, where do you lose money, what is really a headache for you? We look at dedicated problems and once we understand what are really big business problems for our customers, then we work backward and figure out what can we do with IoT technology to solve them,” he added.

 

Didascalou explained that many enterprises decide to employ IoT without having a clear reason for it. In fact, according to him, identifying the problem is the most important step, and he considers it “half of the success”.

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Attackers Are Targeting IoT Devices

The Internet of Things is taking over the world. If we take a look at the United States most household have IoT devices such as smart speakers. In fact, in 2018, 56 million speakers were sold only in the United States.

While the IoT does come with plenty of benefits, it can also make you vulnerable. It appears that at the moment these devices are the favourite target of cybercriminals. In the past 18 months Spain was the country which had most attacks. Other countries such as the US, Hungary or Singapore were also targeted.

How does it work?

Attackers need open remote administration services in order to infect Internet of Things devices. Hackers can find them using global internet scans. The most popular type of attack remains the DDoS attack.

“We are stuck with over 8 billion IoT devices around the world that, for the most part, prioritise access convenience over security. Organisations need to brace themselves for impact, because IoT attack opportunities are virtually endless and the process of building Thingbots is more widespread than ever,” explained Senior EMEA Threat Research Evangelist at F5 Networks, David Warburton.

When it comes to the most used protocols, the Telnet and Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is the most popular one. The next positions are occupied by Home Administration Protocols (HNAP), Universal Plug and Play protocols (UpnP), Simple Object Access Protocols (SOAP).

“Unfortunately, it is going to take material loss of revenue for IoT device manufacturers, or significant costs incurred by organisations implementing these devices, before any meaningful security advances are achieved. Therefore, it is essential to have security controls in place that can detect bots and scale to the rate at which Thingbots attack. As ever, having bot defense at your application perimeter is crucial, as is a scalable DDoS solution,” added Warburton.

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Vivo “The Waterdrop” Smartphone Leaks Revealed Unusual Design

Thanks to the famous leaker that goes by the name of Ice Universe on Twitter, we could see the new Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone leaks. The peculiarity of this mobile phone would be its unusual design.

As we can see in the images leaked by Ice Universe on his Twitter page (which you can enjoy at the beginning of the article), the future Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone would boast a rounded display with almost no bezels.

“Crazy phone has begun to leak, it is said that this is new Vivo, a mysterious smartphone code-named ‘The Waterdrop,’ this phone will subvert people’s past perception of smartphones, this is the back of the phone design, play your imagination. Coming soon,” said Ice Universe on Twitter.

However, Ice Universe did not reveal other details about the Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone, so we’re now kinda curious about what this device has to offer.

Vivo “The Waterdrop” Smartphone Leaks Revealed Unusual Design

This new Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone might be the sequel (or the combination) of two new phone models Vivo revealed recently. More specifically, in 2018, Vivo presented its new Apex FullView Prototype as a smartphone with very thin bezels and a pop-out selfies camera. Also, more recently, Vivo launched its Nex Dual Display Edition model which boasts displays on both sides.

The Nex Dual Display Edition model’s rear screen comes with large bezels, while the front-facing display comes with very thin bezels. As for the Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone leaks, they could suggest that this future device might also come with two screens and a curved design.

However, we don’t think it would boast a pop-up selfies camera since the codename, “The Waterdrop,” might indicate to a punch-hole camera. On the other hand, the Vivo “The Waterdrop” smartphone might boast two displays with very thin bezels, which would be very exciting to see.

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iOS 11 Electra Jailbreak Received Sileo as An Alternative to Cydia

Sileo, which has been developed by devs such as Coolstar, Nullpixel, AppleBetas, and others, got released for iOS 11 Electra jailbreak as an alternative to Cydia. Sileo rolled out in late-December in its Beta version on Electra’s Repo. However, once the final Sileo version launches, it would become available on its own repo which is currently under development.

At the moment, the beta version of Sileo only works with the latest Electra variant. Thus, Unc0ver jailbreak is not supported for the time being, even though some users reported that Sileo works for them. As mentioned, every iPhone and iPad user using iOS 11 Electra jailbreak can download Sileo from official Electra’s Repo.

“Currently, Dynastic Repo is the only repo that supports payments, with CharizTeam adding support very soon. Cydia Store purchases support downloads only. Sileo will be distributed on a new repo with the initial release. We hope you love the Sileo preview as much as us,” said Sileo team on Twitter.

iOS 11 Electra Jailbreak Received Sileo as An Alternative to Cydia

As for the Sileo beta for iOS 11 Electra jailbreak, the devs behind Silo added more details on Twitter. According to them, “This [Sileo version] is a beta preview. Some functionality is not finalized, and bugs are to be expected. For now, the preview only supports the latest version of Electra. The source code will be published at a later date.”

Even though the Sileo team announced users that the beta version is full of bugs, some users turned to Reddit to complain about the package manager crashing while installing/uninstalling tweaks and other issues. So, in case you want to keep a stable iOS 11 Electra jailbreak, you should avoid downloading Sileo as an alternative to Cydia.

If the devs update Sileo quick enough and release a stable version of it, then, indeed, Sileo might replace Cydia on jailbroken iOS devices. Until them, you can test the Sileo beta version at your own risks.

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