Month: September 2019

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  The OnePlus 7T. You can't see it now, but that screen is 90Hz. [credit: OnePlus ]

OnePlus is releasing its next high-end smartphone, the OnePlus 7T. This isn't quite a followup to our favorite Android phone of the year, the OnePlus 7 Pro, but it takes the same basic package and trims it down a tiny bit for a more mainstream audience.

The OnePlus 7T is $599, leaving only $70 of difference between it and the 7 Pro. Naturally then, there aren't a lot of differences between the OnePlus 7 Pro and this new OnePlus 7T. As far the design goes, the 7 Pro's party trick pop-up camera has been swapped out for OnePlus' tried-and-true water drop notch. In the past OnePlus' notch design has been one of the most compact and unobtrusive in the industry, and for the 7T OnePlus says the notch is now 34 percent smaller than the OnePlus 6T's version. The back has gotten a design tweak too, with the camera components now living in a big circle.

The display is a 6.55-inch, 2400×1080 OLED panel. This is slightly less than the 6.67-inch, 1440p panel on the 7 Pro, and the 7T panel is also flat, instead of curved along the sides on the Pro. The new panel is still 90Hz, though, bringing the 7 Pro's best feature to an ever-so-slightly-smaller price point. The phone body is also ever-so-slightly-smaller: 160.94mm × 74.4mm for the 7T compared to 162.6mm × 75.9mm for the 7 Pro.

Enlarge / Malicious apps discovered by Symantec Threat Intelligence popped up full screen ads, and hid the app title even in the App Switcher view—making it difficult for users to know where they were coming from. (credit: Symantec)

This week, Symantec Threat Intelligence's May Ying Tee and Martin Zhang revealed that they had reported a group of 25 malicious Android applications available through the Google Play Store to Google. In total, the applications—which all share a similar code structure used to evade detection during security screening—had been downloaded more than 2.1 million times from the store.

The apps, which would conceal themselves on the home screen some time after installation and begin displaying on-screen advertisements even when the applications were closed, have been pulled from the store. But other applications using the same method to evade Google's security screening of applications may remain.

Published under 22 different developer accounts, all of the apps had all been uploaded within the last five months. The similarity in coding across the apps, however, suggests that the developers "may be part of the same organizational group, or at the very least are using the same source code base," May and Zhang wrote.

Enlarge (credit: By Pleonr - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81714448)

A drought in Spain has revealed an ancient stone circle that usually stands hidden beneath the waters of the Valdecañas Reservoir in western Spain. But the so-called “Spanish Stonehenge” is just a small piece of an ancient Spanish landscape flooded by dam construction in the 1960s.

The dolmen of Guadalperal

The exposed rocky floor of the reservoir today is punctuated by about 150 granite stones in concentric oval rings around a chamber about 5m wide, meant to be entered through a megalith-lined passage facing east. It has earned the nickname “Spanish Stonehenge,” but that’s something of a misnomer. Unlike Stonehenge, Guadalperal wasn’t built as an open-air monument.

The standing stones visible today are the framework of a burial mound. Once, the spaces between the concentric rings would have been filled with earth and pebbles, and the vertical stones would have supported a roof of horizontal slabs. An earthen mound would have covered the whole thing; you can still see the remains of that structure in the bank of sand and gravel that now surrounds the standing stones.