Pressy: A Physical, Programmable Button for Android Devices

By  J.T. Quigley

As the modern smartphone continues its evolution, buttons are becoming a thing of the past. Some of the most talked about handsets right now, including the LG G2 and Google’s Moto X, have gotten rid of physical home buttons in favor of a third capacitive button. Perhaps it will come as a surprise that Pressy, funded in less than 24 hours via a viral Kickstarter campaign, wants to add a physical button to your Android device.

Pressy is a small plug that can slide into a standard 1/8-inch headphone jack. The visible top portion is a small black button. Through a downloadable companion app, Pressy can be programmed to perform an array of basic functions, which the company calls Actions – such as turning on your flashlight, toggling silent mode on and off, and taking photos (these three functions are out-of-the-box defaults, according toPressy’s official Kickstarter page). Basically, if your phone can do it, Pressy will be able to activate it at the touch of a button.

“The way Pressy works is by running on Android as a background service,” said The Verge. “The app monitors the headset jack, but only really does anything when Pressy is clicked, which should prevent the button from draining battery life. The Pressy app, and therefore the actual hardware, works on any device running Android 2.3 or newer. And once the app is set up, users will even be able to use the mic button on a set of headphones to perform the same actions the Pressy button would.”

Beyond performing an Action, Pressy allows each action to be fine-tuned. “For example, you can set Pressy to take a regular photo or to take a discreet photo (with your screen off and without sound or flash),” explained the Kickstarter PR. Developers will also be able to make their own Pressy Actions in future third-party apps.

Pressy’s creators, Nimrod Back and Boaz Mendel, set a goal of $40,000 to bring the Pressy idea to fruition. After being featured on multiple industry-leading tech blogs, their Kickstarter went viral –surpassing $60,000 in the campaign’s first day. With 45 days left before the project is funded, Pressy has a war chest of nearly $105,000 and rising.

“Early adopters snapped up all the Pressy buttons available for $15, making $17 the lowest tier you can get in on the deal,” said The Next Web. The Kickstarter page also offers a $20 option that includes a keychain for safely storing Pressy when headphones are plugged in, as well as a choice of red, white, or blue (aside from the standard black color option).

Back and Mendel expect the Pressy to ship to backers in March 2014.

Read more at: http://thediplomat.com/tech-biz/2013/08/30/pressy-a-physical-programmable-button-for-android-devices/

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MOTO X:THE PHONE THAT REVEALS WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT MOTOROLA

Almost exactly two years ago, Google announced its purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It was the company’s biggest deal ever, far exceeding previous big buys like YouTube for $1.7 billion and DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Both of those acquisitions were hugely successful, but the Motorola purchase seemed baffling. Mainly, it seemed to provide Google with valuable intellectual property that would allow the company to defend itself against a tidal wave of patent lawsuits. Motorola—the inventor of the very first cell phone—had a great patent portfolio indeed. But the estimated worth of those patents was less than half Google’s purchase price. The other portion brought Google a money-bleeding Chicago-area-based hardware business. The purchase would almost double Google’s head count with employees who brought little to the bottom line. Employees who were not Googly, in a business that seemingly didn’t scale. What was Google thinking?

Finally, we have the answer. The Moto X, announced today, marks the arrival, finally, of the Google Phone.

The Moto X is the first in a series of hardware products that Google hopes will supercharge the mother company’s software and services. A svelte slab with smooth curves at its edge, purpose-built to fit in the palm of your hand. It is designed for mass appeal, not just a slice of the population like Star Wars fans. It has its share of features that distinguish it from the pack, particularly in a period where some of the market leaders are reloading their innovation guns. These include persistent notifications, user-customizable design components, instant photo-capture, and hands-free authentication.

But the defining feature of the Moto X is it’s a virtual ear, always straining to hear its owner’s voice say three magic words that will rouse it to action: “Okay, Google Now.”

Utter those, and a Moto X user becomes master of the universe—to the degree that Google, its developers, and the users themselves have digitized it. The Android mobile operating system was always intended as a gateway drug to Google products and ads. (“We don’t monetize the things we create,” Android creator Andy Rubin once told me. “We monetize users.”) And Moto X is a tool to free-base Google. That’s why, after years of Rubin and others saying, “There is no Google phone,” when referring to Android implementations, this one finally qualifies.

Read more at: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/inside-story-of-moto-x/

Hats off

Hackers gather—and mourn a big loss

EVERY summer Las Vegas plays host to Black Hat, a security shindig where spooks, businesspeople and academics rub shoulders with some of the world’s most talented hackers. The event briefly overlaps with DEFCON, a more informal affair where hackers try to impress one another with their exploits. Both events offer a mix of partying and presentations with disconcerting titles such as “Stalking a City for Fun and Frivolity”, “Home Invasion 2.0” and “Dude, WTF in my car?”

But one of hackerdom’s stars did not make it to this year’s jamborees. On July 25th Barnaby Jack was found dead in San Francisco, where he lived. He was only 35. An extremely popular “white hat”—a hacker who specialises in finding security flaws before nefarious “black hats” discover them—he had been due to give a presentation entitled “Implantable Medical Devices: Hacking Humans”.

Mr Jack had said previously that he had found a flaw in medical devices, such as heart pacemakers and defibrillators, made by an unnamed manufacturer, which could allow an outsider to communicate with them wirelessly. He was planning to show how this could be exploited to make the device malfunction or shut down, using a signal sent from up to 30 feet (9 metres) away. In a blog post earlier this year, he noted that an episode of “Homeland”, a popular American television show, in which a terrorist kills one of the characters by gaining control of his pacemaker, was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed.

The San Francisco police have ruled out foul play, but local medical authorities say it could be some time before the cause of death is established. What is clear is Mr Jack’s immense contribution in the field of “embedded” computers, which work inside other single-purpose appliances. Among his other headline-grabbing feats, he showed how some ATMs could be hacked so that they spewed out banknotes—an exploit dubbed “Jackpotting”. He had also highlighted vulnerabilities in insulin pumps, similar to the flaws in other implanted devices that he was planning to expose this year. In all these cases he shared his findings with the manufacturers before publicising them.

Even so, some worry that by trumpeting their findings at events such as Black Hat and DEFCON, white hats give clues which their shady counterparts could exploit in crime, terrorism or espionage. But the hackers’ defenders say the publicity alerts regulators, and ensures that as many companies as possible learn of the risks quickly. They also point out that the presentations typically leave out important steps so others cannot reproduce hacks. Nico Sell, who has been helping organise DEFCON for over a decade, notes, for example, that Mr Jack agreed to delay presenting his Jackpotting findings for a year, when a manufacturer of ATMs said it needed longer to deal with the bug that he had uncovered.

Read more at: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21582577-hackers-gatherand-mourn-big-loss-hats