Month: September 2023
A Windows 11 PC that’s smaller and lighter than the iPhone 15 Pro has been tested — just wait till someone hacks it into a Windows smartphone
The Zepan RY-P1 is a palm-sized mini PC that’s being crowdfunded for development from roughly $280.
Although it looks more like a smartphone – or even a hard drive – the Windows 11-powered Zepan RY-P1 is actually a mini PC that’s soon to become a reality after smashing its crowdfunding target.
This lightweight device, which its makers dub a ‘true mobile office’, weighs just 140g – about the same as a rice ball. It also boasts surprisingly sleek dimensions of 122 x 63 x 10mm, which is smaller than the 6.1-inch Apple iPhone 15 which itself measures 148 x 72 x 7.8mm.
The makers of the RY-P1 have raised more than $43,000 at the time of writing, which is 3,200% more than their original crowdfunding goal, meaning this mini PC is set to ship by December 2023.
Pocket-sized computing
Zepan’s RY-P1 mini PC sits somewhere in the entry-level camp, but you can barely complain given its astonishing size.
It’s fitted with an Intel J4125 CPU and Intel UHD Graphics 600, complemented with 8GB DDR4 RAM as well as a 128GB SSD storage. The device also supports Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6, and can support outputs up to 4K at 60Hz.
It includes a USB-C, USB-2.0 and microSD card slot. But with an expansion dock, users can take advantage of four additional ports, including USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and USB-C as well as HDMI.
“In recent years, opportunities to work outside the home, such as on business trips or workdays, have increased, but many people may be having trouble managing important company and personal files,” according to a Google- assisted translation of the company’s Greenfunding page. “Laptops are heavy, and external hard disks can’t be carried around.
“Therefore, the mini-computer RY-P1 that we are introducing this time was developed with a focus on “compactness.” After finishing work at the office, you can easily store it in your pocket and take it with you on business trips or telework. Unlike external hard disks, there is no need for troublesome data transfers, so you can start up anytime and anywhere and get to work quickly. RY-P1 is truly a mobile office.”
Interestingly enough, Zepan is also shipping this device to some backers with a complementary portable tablet-sized display into which its mini PC can slot neatly. This means it might only be a matter of time before we start to see compatible smartphone-sized touchscreen displays, turning the RY-P1 into a fully-fledged Windows 11 smartphone.
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Researchers find a way to make photos and muted videos ‘speak’ – here’s what it could mean for your privacy
Innovative technology is powered by a sophisticated machine learning system.
Capturing audio from a still image may feel like something out of a sci-fi novel, but one scientist has actually devised a way to do it, with the helping hand of AI.
By creating a machine learning tool called Side Eye, a team led by professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Northeastern University, Kevin Fu, can read into images to an extraordinary degree.
By applying Side Eye to a still image, they can determine the gender of a speaker in the room, where the photo was taken, and the words they spoke, according to TechXplore. They can also apply the tool to muted videos.
An AI-powered privacy nightmare?
“Imagine someone is doing a TikTok video and they mute it and dub music,” Fu told the publicaton. “Have you ever been curious about what they’re really saying? Was it ‘Watermelon watermelon’ or ‘Here’s my password?’ Was somebody speaking behind them? You can actually pick up what is being spoken off camera.”
The machine learning-powered Side Eye exploits image stabilization technology that’s universally used across almost all smartphone cameras.
Cameras built into smartphones have springs to suspend the lens in liquid, meaning photos aren’t taken blurry or out of focus due to somebody’s shaky grip. Sensors and an electromagnet combine to push the lens in the opposite direction to whatever shakiness is being applied, to stabilize the image.
When somebody speaks near the camera lens while the photo is being taken, it creates tiny vibrations in the springs and bends the light in a subtle way. Although it would be near-impossible to extract the sonic frequency from these vibrations, this is made simple due to the rolling shutter method of photography most cameras use.
“The way cameras work today to reduce cost basically is they don’t scan all pixels of an image simultaneously – they do it one row at a time,” Fu added. “[That happens] hundreds of thousands of times in a single photo. What this basically means is you’re able to amplify by over a thousand times how much frequency information you can get, basically the granularity of the audio.”
While Side Eye itself is in a very basic form, and requires far more training data to refine and perfect, should a more advanced form of the system fall into the wrong hands, it could pose a cybersecurity nightmare for many.
But, there are positive implications for the technology too, especially should a far more advanced form of Side Eye be used as a kind of digital evidence for those working to investigate crime.
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