LG'S NEW G4 PHONES WILL HAVE LEATHER BACKS

Optional leather backs and manual camera controls are two ways LG is seeking to distinguish its new G4 phone from Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxy smartphones.

Mark Lennihan

Juno Cho, President and CEO of LG Corp., holds the LG G4, during an event Tuesday, April 28, 2015 in New York. LG is making smartphones with leather backs as it seeks to distinguish its phones from Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxy smartphones. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

LG's mobile chief, Juno Cho, said a wireless trade show in Barcelona, Spain, last month confirmed LG's belief that smartphones have become clones of one another.

"I was almost shocked," Cho told The Associated Press. "Almost all the phones on display and introduced looked very (much the) same — the same metal casing and emphasis on thinness, overall form factors that are very similar."

The message at Tuesday's announcement of the new G4: We're not like the others.

Apple and Samsung dominate the smartphone market, with LG Electronics Inc. and other companies vying for third place with market shares of less than 5 percent each.

LG will make phones with traditional backs, too — using metal or ceramic. Prices weren't announced, though LG said leather models will cost more in some markets. The G4 is available immediately in LG's home country of South Korea. It will debut around the world in the coming weeks and is expected to reach the U.S. in early June.

Here's how the G4 stacks up:

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THE DESIGN

Apple has long made design a priority, while Samsung began to embrace that this spring with phones that sport a metal frame and a glass back, rather than the plastic used in previous models. In many ways, Samsung's new Galaxy S6 came to resemble Apple's older iPhones. (The iPhone now has metal backs.)

At Tuesday's announcement, LG made a dig at Samsung, without naming it, by pointing out that glass backs can be marred with fingerprints. The G4 will have a choice of leather finishes. Some of Samsung's older phones had imitation leather backs. The G4 uses real leather and has stitching down the middle — for looks, more than anything.

If leather isn't for you, metal and ceramic backs are options. Motorola's Moto X phone offers leather, wood and other non-traditional materials as made-to-order options. With LG, they are part of standard models.

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Samsung Elec's mobile margins not out of the woods

Samsung Electronics may have put a floor under its mobile margins, but skeptics say profits will undergo a new test with the latest flagship Galaxy smartphones, among the most costly the South Korean company has ever made.

Samsung's mobile devices division, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of total profit last year, boosted its operating margin to 10.6 percent in January-to-March, according to the company's final quarterly results released on Wednesday. That's the highest in three quarters. Analysts say Samsung's roll-out of new mid-range products with revamped designs in key markets such as India likely boosted sales.

Mobile earnings slumped 42 percent last year due to intense competition in both the top and low-end segments. Samsung was forced to dump unsold inventory at steep discounts, pushing quarterly margins into the single digits for the first time since 2010.

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Why Google+ failed, according to Google insiders

Last month, Google announced that it’s changing up its strategy with Google+.

In a sense, it’s giving up on pitching Google+ as a social network aimed at competing with Facebook. Instead, Google+ will become two separate pieces: Photos and Streams.

This didn’t come as a surprise — Google+ never really caught on the same way social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn did.

Technically, tons of people use Google+, since logging into it gives you access to Gmail, Google Drive, and all of Google’s other apps.

But people aren’t actively using the social network aspect of it. 

Here’s a chart made by blogger Kevin Anderson, which is based on data compiled by researcher Edward Morbis. His research estimates active Google+ users defined as those that have made a post to Google+ in January 2015. He pulled Google’s on Profile sitemaps and sample profile pages based on them.

Rumors have been swirling for months that Google would change its direction with Google+. Business Insider spoke with a few insiders about what happened to the network that Google believed would change the way people share their lives online. Google+ was really important to Larry Page, too — one person said he was personally involved and wanted to get the whole company behind it. 

The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was “late to market” and motivated from “a competitive standpoint.”

There may have been some paranoia — Facebook was actively poaching Googlers at a certain point, one source said. Google+ employees within Google were sectioned off, this person said, possibly to prevent gossip about the product from spreading. Google+ employees had their own secret cafeteria called “Cloud,” for example, and others on the Mountain View campus weren’t permitted.

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Facebook isn’t a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data

Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. Such, at any rate, is the provocative argument put forward by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. Recently dubbed “the Varian rule”, it states that to predict the future, we just have to look at what rich people already have and assume that the middle classes will have it in five years and poor people will have it in 10. Radio, TV, dishwashers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs: Varian sees this principle at work in the history of many technologies.

So what is it that the rich have today that the poor will get in a decade? Varian bets on personal assistants. Instead of maids and chauffeurs we would have self-driving cars, housecleaning robots and clever, omniscient apps that can monitor, inform and nudge us in real time.

As Varian puts it: “These digital assistants will be so useful that everyone will want one and the scare stories you read today about privacy concerns will just seem quaint and old-fashioned.” Google Now, one such assistant, can monitor our emails, searches and locations and constantly remind us about forthcoming meetings or trips, all while patiently checking real-time weather and traffic in the background.

Varian’s juxtaposition of dishwashers with apps might seem reasonable but it’s actually misleading. When you hire somebody as your personal assistant, the transaction is relatively straightforward: you pay the person for the services tendered – often, in cash – and that’s the end of it. It’s tempting to say that the same logic is at work with virtual assistants: you surrender your data – the way you would surrender your cash – for Google to provide this otherwise free service.

But something doesn’t add up here: few of us expect our personal assistants to walk away with a copy of all our letters and files in order to make a buck off them. For our virtual assistants, on the other hand, this is the only reason they exist.

In fact, we are getting shortchanged twice: first, when we surrender our data – eventually, it ends up on Google’s balance sheet – in exchange for relatively trivial services, and, second, when that data is then later used to customise and structure our world in a way that is neither transparent nor desirable.

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Science Fiction: the latest must-reads

The Affinities

By Robert Charles Wilson

(Tor, 320 pages)

Robert Charles Wilson’s latest describes a social network that has evolved into something even more invasive and threatening than Facebook and Google.

The premise is that the new science of social teleodynamics has come up with complex algorithms that sort humanity into “socionomic affinities.” These proto-ethnicities have, in turn, stepped in to provide a sense of security, belonging and identity in a secular, post-nationalist world that has also turned its back on the dysfunctional train wreck of genetic kinship and family.

Of course, things don’t work out quite as planned. Intra-affiliation competition is as much a product of the new world order as co-operation, and high-tech social bonding turns out to be no match for old-fashioned tribal hatred of the other.

As always, Wilson has grounded his speculations in a suspenseful story focused on real people coping with these changes. It’s a troubling vision of the future, made all the more so by the ambiguity at its heart: are the affinities a good thing? Is this progress, or regression to a more primitive state?

The Machine Awakes

By Adam Christophe

(Tor, 352 pages)

The Machine Awakes is the second instalment in Adam Christopher’s Spider Wars trilogy, telling a stand-alone story set in the same universe as last year’s TheBurning Dark.

As things begin it seems something’s stirring on the moons of Jupiter, and it’s not those pesky Spiders again. Meanwhile, things aren’t going well on Earth either, as the Fleet Admiral has just been assassinated after being overthrown in a coup. But which of the many conspiracies out there is responsible?

It’s up to the Fleet Bureau of Investigation to get to the bottom of all this, and Special Agent Von Kodiak is the man for the job. Expect a really entertaining space opera with all the fixings from a young writer who is hitting his stride.

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Dodgy ‘No iOS Zone’ Wi-Fi Network Could Crash Every iPhone And iPad In Sight

A hacked Wi-Fi router could cause any iPhone or iPad device within range to be rendered absolutely useless, say security researchers.

A team at security firm Skycure has discovered an SSL vulnerability that causes iOS and apps to crash repeatedly by setting a router in a specific configuration.

It says that only iOS devices are affected and that if combined with a previously discovered bug called WiFiGate, which allows for the creation of a dodgy network that forces any device in its reach to automatically connect, entire areas could be declared ‘no iOS zones’.

No iOS Zone

“Basically, by generating a specially crafted SSL certificate, attackers can regenerate a bug and cause apps that perform SSL communication to crash at will,” said Yair Amit, CTO and co-founder of Skycure. “With our finding, we rushed to create a script that exploits the bug over a network interface.

“As SSL is a security best practice and is utilized in almost all apps in the Apple app store, the attack surface is very wide. We knew that any delay in patching the vulnerability could lead to a serious business impact: an organized denial of service (DoS) attack can lead to big losses.”

But this vulnerability affects iOS itself, with continued use of an iPhone in an affected network eventually causing the operating system to enter an endless reboot cycle.

“It puts the victim’s device in an unusable state for as long as the attack impacts a device. Even if victims understand that the attack comes from a Wi-Fi network, they can’t disable the Wi-Fi interface in the repeated restart state,” continued Amit, who discussed the possibility of combining the bug with WiFi Gate.

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