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Samsung has announced the mass production of 12 Gb (1.5 GB) LPDDR4 DRAM chips on a 20nm process. The state-of-the-art was previously 8 Gb. The new DRAM chips could enable the production of smartphones with 6 gigabytes of RAM:
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it's only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
There are several phones on the market with 4 GB of RAM, such as the Oppo Find 9, Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, ASUS ZenFone 2, Sony Xperia Z4, Lenovo K80, Huawei Ascend D8, and soon, Micromax's YU5050. These manufacturers could use 12 Gb chips to create phones with 6 GB of faster RAM without using additional chips.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @05:55AM
bluetooth keyboard
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:50PM
I tried it. But apart from the fact that now I can't get the blue colour off my teeth, my phone didn't recognize my typing. Oh, and my fingers went all wet. Not to mention that it simply looks silly if you try to type on your teeth. ;-)
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:53PM
Security, unless you're okay with everyone in the room knowing your SSH hosts and root passwords...
(Score: 2) by Urlax on Thursday October 01 2015, @07:24AM
Since when can bluetooth be sniffed and remotely decrypted?
a lot of android phones have usb OTG as well as all cheap china tablets, so you can connect a usb keyboard to be safe.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:11PM
As far as known vulnerabilities, here's an overview of some (see section 4.1): http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=911133 [nist.gov] - it's basically what you would expect. Old protocols are no longer secure and susceptible to spoofing and MITM, repetition attacks, brute force vulnerabilities, denial of service (not decryption, but still a pain), leaking privacy information, etc. Some of the scarier ones include
20: negotiable key lengths (down to 1 byte!!!)
19: unknown strength of PRNGs.
8: key pairs may be static or otherwise weakly generated
Then you can go through section 4.4 and read a dictionary's worth of recommended practices and at that point, it's just not worth the headache anymore.
But just in a more general sense, Bluetooth is very complex and there are dozens of potential vectors. You have to trust that the handshake protocols are secure, the firmware is secure, the drivers are secure, and the vendors' implementations of all these protocols and specifications are secure. And anyone who knows anything about how the tech industry works knows that security is never anything more than an afterthought (or even worse, just straight out compromised in the name of ease of use). Just look at how many wireless routers, smartphones, and operating systems are vulnerable, and you also have to make sure that your devices are constantly kept up-to-date as well, and you need to just pray that there are no backdoors in there anyways. And just look how innocuous these attacks can be - stagefright, for example, just requires sending a text to a vulnerable device and you'll never know that you've already been pwned!
Simply put, there's just way too much that could go wrong, and I don't want to trust my servers' security on the hundreds of things that could go wrong. We already have tools like aircrack for wireless networks, so who knows what's available for cracking slightly more obscure protocols like Bluetooth on the darknet. Bearing in mind that all communication between the keyboard and the device is _outside_ of any client-server encryption and you should expect that everything this exposed in my personal opinion....