OnePlus Nord wired earphones come at 799: Heres what you get for that price

Global technology brand OnePlus on Saturday forayed into the wired earphones category in India with the launch of its first-ever Nord wired earphones. In India, the Nord wired earphones will go on sale on September 1 at just Rs 799 across online and offline channels. The company looks to offer its signature audio experience to a wider audience with an accessible range of wired earphones compatible with the 3.5mm jack. The product will come with 9.2mm dynamic drivers and a 0.42cc sound cavity, set to deliver the all too familiar OnePlus bass experience, the company said in a statement. The design will resemble the community-favourite OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z Series with a smooth black finish, complemented by striking red accents for the classic OnePlus look. Some of the other key features are easy audio controls and magnetic clip. The earphones come equipped with magnets to ensure portability and a hassle-free experience. The device features an inline mic and button controls which give users better control over calls, multimedia and the ability to manage voice assistant. The earphones are compatible with laptops, gaming consoles and Nord smartphones using the 3.5mm audio jack. Moreover, the earphones come with three pairs of interchangeable silicon tips.

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Heres how much Intellexa spyware group charges to hack into Android and iOS devices

A little known spyware company, Intellexa, is now competing with Pegasus developer NSO Group, offering its services to hack into Android and iOS devices for a fee of $8 million (around Rs 64 crore). Malware source code provider Vx-underground found documents representing a proposal from Intellexa, offering services that include Android and iOS device exploits. "Leaked documents online show the purchase (and documentation of) an $8,000,000 iOS Remote Code Execution zero-day exploit," it tweeted. The offer includes 10 infections for iOS and Android devices, as well as a "magazine of 100 successful infections". According to Security Week, the documents, "labeled as proprietary and confidential", revealed that the exploits should work on iOS 15.4.1 and the latest Android 12 update. Apple released iOS 15.4.1 in March, which suggests that the offer is recent. "Specifically, the offering is for remote, one-click browser-based exploits that allow users to inject a payload into Android or iOS mobile devices," the report mentioned. Intellexa is based in Europe, with six sites and R&D labs throughout the continent. "We help law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world to close the digital gap with multiple and diverse solutions, all integrated with our unique and best-in-class Nebula platform," the company posted on its website. Last year, a Citizen Lab report mentioned Intellexa, on Cytrox's predator iPhone spyware being used to target a Greek lawmaker. Citizen Lab said Cytrox was part of the Intellexa Alliance, described as a "a marketing label for a range of mercenary surveillance vendors that emerged in 2019". Apple filed a lawsuit last year against NSO Group to ban the company from using its services and devices. As state-sponsored cyber attacks with government spyware like Pegasus grow, Apple is offering Lockdown Mode this fall with iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura. This mode offers specialised additional protection to high-profile users who may be at risk of highly targeted attacks from private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware. In India, the Pegasus panel said this week that the presence of controversial Israeli spyware Pegasus was not conclusively established in 29 mobile phones examined, and the government did not cooperate in the probe. The top court-appointed panel said five out of 29 mobile phones were possibly infected with some malware, but that does not mean it was Pegasus spyware.

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Zomato could soon let you order groceries through the main platform: Heres how

 Zomato on Saturday kicked off a pilot test of delivering groceries via Blinkit on its main platform in Delhi-NCR, as the online food aggregator aims to "accelerate" the 10-minute delivery platform's journey to profitability. The pilot test is currently being organised at select circles in Delhi-NCR, and after analysing the response, it will be expanded to other cities as well. "Blinkit tab in Zomato app is currently a pilot running at few locations for a small set of customers. We will share more details on this in due course,"A Zomato spokesperson told IANS. Currently, those part of the pilot project can order for a minimum order value of Rs 150 via Blinkit on Zomato's main app, while on Zomato, it remains Rs 49. Once the acquisition of Blinkit is closed, Zomato will experiment with cross leveraging its customers base for Blinkit and vice versa, its Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has stressed. "The Blinkit app will continue to operate independently. We will also start working on integrating the delivery fleet back-ends which should drive higher delivery efficiency over time," he had said in the letter to shareholders. Tech integrations between the two companies will accelerate the pace of progress at both ends. According to the company, the losses for Blinkit are coming down every month -- from Rs 2,040 million (about $26 million) in January 2022 to Rs 929 million ($12 million) in July. Blinkit has also shut down a number of unviable dark stores, which were not scaling and the team will continue to evaluate non-performing stores. In just six months, the Blinkit business has scaled to 20 per cent of Zomato's food delivery GOV while being present in less than 15 cities. "Quick commerce cuts across a wide range of essential spends including grocery, fruits and vegetables, beauty and personal care, OTC medicines, stationery items, among others. Therefore, we expect the overall customer base, average order value as well as monthly order frequency to be higher than food delivery," according to the company. Blinkit last week announced to deliver printouts at people's doorsteps in a jiffy.

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Google wants you to chat with its AI chatbot at your own risk

New Delhi, Aug 27 (IANS) Google has opened its experimental artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for the public and you can now register to chat with the AI-driven bot trained on the company's controversial language model.

Google has already warned that early previews of its LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) model "may display inaccurate or inappropriate content".

'AI Test Kitchen' by Google is an app where people can learn about, experience, and give feedback on Google's emerging AI technology.

"Our goal is to learn, improve and innovate responsibly on AI together. We'll be opening up to small groups of people gradually," said the company.

According to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, 'AI Test Kitchen' is "meant to give you a sense of what it might be like to have LaMDA in your hands".

The ability of these language models to generate infinite possibilities shows potential, "but it also means they don't always get things quite right".

"And while we've made substantial improvements in safety and accuracy in the latest version of LaMDA, we're still at the beginning of a journey," said Google.

"We've added multiple layers of protection to the AI Test Kitchen. This work has minimised the risk, but not eliminated it," it added.

Both Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) have unveiled their AI conversational chatbots, asking the public to give feedback.

The initial reports are scary as the Meta chatbot named BlenderBot 3 thought Mark Zuckerberg is "creepy and manipulative" and Donald Trump will always be the US president.

Meta said last week that all conversational AI chatbots are known to sometimes mimic and generate unsafe, biased or offensive remarks.

"BlenderBot can still make rude or offensive comments, which is why we are collecting feedback that will help make future chatbots better," the company mentioned in a blogpost.

Last month, Google fired an engineer over breaching its confidentiality agreement after he made a claim that the tech giant's conversation AI is "sentient" because it has feelings, emotions and subjective experiences.

Lemoine also interviewed LaMDA, which came with surprising and shocking answers.

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American researchers develop durable coating that kills Covid virus

New York, Aug 27 (IANS) There may soon be a new weapon in the battle against Covid in the form of a durable coating, thanks to Indian-American researchers, that can quickly kill bacteria and viruses on surfaces, and keep killing them for six months or longer.

The coating, which is clear and can be brushed or sprayed on, gets its durability and germ-killing power by combining tried-and-true ingredients in a novel way.

It uses antimicrobial molecules derived from tea tree oil and cinnamon oil, both used for centuries as safe and effective germ killers that work in under two minutes, according to the study led by Anish Tuteja, a professor of material science and engineering at University of Michigan, published in the journal Matter.

"Disinfectant cleaners can kill germs in only a minute or two but they dissipate quickly and leave surfaces vulnerable to reinfection. We do have long-lasting antibacterial surfaces based on metals like copper and zinc, but they take hours to kill bacteria. This coating offers the best of both worlds," said Tuteja.

The research team included associate professor of materials science and engineering and biomedical engineering, Geeta Mehta and materials science and engineering PhD students Abhishek Dhyani and Taylor Repetto.

The coating's durability comes from polyurethane, a tough, varnish-like sealer that's commonly used on surfaces like floors and furniture.

The coating proved deadly to SARS-CoV-2 virus, E. coli, MRSA and a variety of other pathogens.

It killed 99.9 per cent of microbes even after months of repeated cleaning, abrasion and other punishment on real-world surfaces like keyboards, cell phone screens and chicken-slathered cutting boards.

The coating could be a game changer in traditionally germ-laden public spaces like airports and hospitals.

"The antimicrobials we tested are classified as 'generally regarded as safe' by the FDA, and some have even been approved as food additives," Tuteja said.

"Polyurethane is a safe and very commonly used coating. But we did do toxicity testing just to be sure, and we found that our particular combination of ingredients is even safer than many of today's antimicrobials," he mentioned.

The coating could keep killing germs for six months or longer before its oil begins to evaporate and reduce its disinfectant power.

But even then, said Tuteja, it can be recharged by wiping it with fresh oil; the new oil is reabsorbed by the surface, starting the cycle again.

Tuteja estimates that the technology could be commercially available within a year, as it has been licensed to Hygratek, a spinoff company that Tuteja founded with assistance from Innovation Partnerships at the university.

The University of Michigan has applied for a patent based on this technology.

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Shopping on Twitter can bring individual or societal harm to users

New Delhi, Aug 27 (IANS) Twitter shopping, which allows brands to list items for sale and tag products at the top of a merchant's profile, has content moderation risks and can lead to 'individual or societal harm', the media reported.

According to an internal company memo, obtained by The Verge, several elements of Twitter's e-commerce tool are categorised as "high" under "risk assessment".

"One high-risk concern is that merchant-generated fields like shop names and descriptions could be used by bad actors in harmful ways," read the memo.

Unlike Instagram, Twitter users can't buy the product directly on the platform as clicking on items for sale takes them to the merchant's website.

A key upcoming feature of Twitter's shopping is shareability, and the memo also listed this feature as high risk.

It said the shareability feature "could lead to harmful content being amplified further, increasing the visibility of content that violates Twitter rules".

"Shareable Shops therefore increase the likelihood that users may see violative Shops, or violative goods contained in a Shop," the memo read.

"It may also incentivise bad actors to amplify harmful or violative goods by tweeting and sharing their own Shop."

A company spokesperson said in a statement that the memo "was part of a new feature assessment led by the product trust team".

"We're always working to improve the safety of our service and that is particularly true for the addition of new products and features," the spokesperson said.

Twitter's shop feature allows anyone with a professional account selling items in the US to manually add products for sale to their profile.

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NASA gears up to send a megarocket to deep space on Aug 29

Washington, Aug 27 (IANS) The US space agency is geared up to send its debut Space Launch System (SLS) mission called Artemis I into deep space on Monday that will perform a long orbit around the Moon before coming back to Earth.

The uncrewed Artemis I mission has a two-hour launch window that opens at 8:33 a.m. EDT (6 p.m. India time) on August 29 from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39B in Florida in the US.

Artemis I will lay the foundation for a sustained long-term presence on and around the Moon.

"The SLS rocket and integrated Orion spacecraft will help us get a feel for what astronauts will experience on future flights. Artemis I is an important step in NASA's long-term goals for space exploration, paving the way for us to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the Moon," the space agency said in a statement.

The primary goal of Artemis I is to thoroughly test the integrated systems before crewed missions by operating the spacecraft in a deep space environment, testing Orion's heat shield, and recovering the crew module after reentry, descent, and splashdown.

The US space agency last week identified 13 candidate landing regions near the lunar south pole, as it prepares to send humans back to the Moon under the Artemis programme in 2024.

Each region contains multiple potential landing sites for Artemis III, which will be the first of the Artemis missions to bring the crew to the lunar surface.

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