SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Xenon tubes have been powering the camera flashes for ages now, but with phones getting thinner every year, manufacturers have no choice but replace them with LED lights. What’s more, the performance of the few xenon flashes we’ve seen implemented in smartphones recently is underwhelming because the smaller the flash capacitor, the weaker the light output is. A Singapore invention however has the potential to allow xenon flashes to reclaim some of the lost…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Facebook Inc has said that it been the target of a series of attacks by an unidentified hacker group, but it had found no evidence that user data was compromised. "Last month, Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack," the company said in a blog post posted on Friday afternoon, just before the three-day Presidents Day weekend. "The attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Is Samsung on a trend towards the miniaturization of their flagship devices? Perhaps, if the latest rumor is to be believed. When Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S3 was released, that particular effort was followed up some time after with the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, although the latter did not really do as well as the folks over at Samsung would have expected, since there are also other mid-range devices like the Galaxy Ace hanging around.…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Google’s self-driving cars have been in testing since early 2011, although it experienced its first accident a few months later. Regardless of that, and we’re sure many more undocumented hiccups, Google feels its self-driving cars are improving steadily and expects them to be ready in three to five years. Product manager of autonomous driving Anthony Levandowski recently spoke at a Society for Automotive Engineers conference, where he revealed Google’s plans to release its self-driving…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – A startup from Germany called ubitricity is attempting to make electric car charging ubiquitous with a mobile electric meter that drivers can carry around in their trunk. The company is making its first thousand plugs available this year. The expansion of electric cars has been anything but spectacular, and a major constraint has been a lack of charging infrastructure and “range anxiety” getting the better of consumers. Late last year luxury electric sports car…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Using technologies developed for displays, a Taiwanese company is showing off prototypes of a phone made of glass. Polytron Technologies has released a phone that is invisible, nearly, with electronics that are so tiny they are too small to see. The phone’s circuitry is made up of ultra-thin wires sandwiched between two glass layers. Polytron has a long history with display technology, and markets a product as “privacy glass.” The liquid crystal molecules in…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The iPhone 5 brought a larger 4-inch screen to Apple’s successful smartphone, improving on the iPhone’s previous 3.5-inch screen. It looks as though we could be seeing another iPhone with a screen larger than the iPhone 5, according to an analyst. Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes says we should expect Apple to release an iPhone with a larger, 5-inch screen, which he is deeming the “iPhablet,” in 2013. The reasoning for his speculation is…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Twitter is looking to boost its security systems following an attack which compromised the accounts of some 250,000 users. The San Francisco-based company is hiring engineers for its product security team "to build a more secure platform and user experience" with a specific focus on multi-factor authentication and the ability to detect when Twitter is being accessed fraudulently. Multi-factor authentication allows users prove who they are by combining at least two of the following: something…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Documents filed with the Federal Communication Commission show that Google Glass will make use of bone conduction to generate sound rather than relying on a traditional earphone/speaker setup. The papers reference an "integral vibrating element that provides audio to the user via contact with the user's head". This means that by vibrating the bones near the ear the headset can generate sound without blocking out environmental noise. This basically means you would be able to listen to…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – While it may seem like an unlikely occurrence, cars traveling in the wrong direction of traffic is becoming more and more prevalent. Just last year for example, even we reported on two such occurrences, one taking place in Mississippi and the other in Washington. Back in 2009 Nissan developed a wrong-way driving prevention system called the IT-Assisted Road Information System, which basically worked using Car-2-Car and Car-2-Object communications. Unfortunately, the infrastructure required for such…