iPhone 6 Alert: World’s slimmest smartphone screen is here

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Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) remains embroiled with the numerous patent disputes with Samsung.

Even a US Court ruled yesterday that it violated antitrust law in a price-fixing case, saying the Cupertino-based tech giant “conspired to restrain trade” with publishers to boost the price of e-books. READ: iPhone-maker found guilty, vows to fight back.

In addition, Samsung's spearhead smartphone Galaxy S4 seems to be fighting its own set of fires. READ: Samsung Galaxy S4 catches fire while charging.

Grabbing that opportunity with both hands, smart smartphone-makers such as LG are quietly but quickly embarking on a road that made Apple Inc. as successful as it is today – the road to innovation.

This morning, LG Display showcased the world’s slimmest Full HD LCD panel for smartphones. The South Korean giant said it will soon unveil the screen in one of its premium smartphones, but did not reveal which smartphone exactly will be the first to sport it. However, with the company rumoured to launch the LG Optimus G2 in August, to beat the rumoured launch of iPhone 6 (or 5S, as the case may be) in September.

In fact, according to rumours floating around much before LG Display actually unveiled the world’s slimmest screen, the LG Optimus G2 will be so thin that it won’t be able to sport buttons on its side, and power and volume buttons have been taken off the side of the phone and LG has moved them to the back – which is another first. Until now, no smartphone maker has seemingly realized that since we hold the phone in our palm, we can use our index finger to control basic functional buttons. Still, it has to be a delicate balance between functionality and, well, complete inanity, and we’ll be quite interested in seeing how well can LG accomplish that.

There’s even a leak video that shows the functionality, and we must say it looks pretty impressive, at least in the first look. Coming back to the screens, smartphones with screens more than 5-inch have been generally criticized for being too bulky to be held in the average person’s palm, but LG Display maintains that its 5.2-inch panel features better “grip-ability,” as the screen will be just 2.2mm thin.

The state-of-the-art 5.2-inch panel is an exciting advancement for the premium mobile device market enabling sleeker Full HD smartphones featuring and a superior viewing experience, LG Display said in a statement.

Only 2.2mm thin with a 2.3mm bezel, LG Display’s new panel is both slimmest and narrowest among existing Full HD LCD panels designed for mobile devices. “Today’s introduction of the world’s slimmest Full HD LCD panel represents an exciting advancement for the high-end smartphone segment, and is possible due to our world-class expertise in IPS and touch technologies,” said Dr. Byeong-Koo Kim, Vice President and Head of LG Display’s IT and Mobile Development Group.

“LG Display will continue its commitment to developing products that maximise consumer value as well as opening new doors for the mobile and tablet PC industry,” he added.

This world’s slimmest Full HD LCD panel will provide larger visible display space on smartphones, critical as mobile devices are used for multimedia viewing more than ever before. Additionally, the panel will make devices easier to grip as well as lighter in weight.

Key to realizing the world’s slimmest panel is LG Display’s Advanced One-Glass-Solution (OGS), the latest touch technology enabling an enhanced touch screen experience, developed and applied to the new panel for the first time ever.

Dual Flexible Printed Circuits, superior to a single circuit, have been inserted between the panel and touch film, reducing the number of lines on the panel by more than 30 percent. Utilization of a direct bonding system has also resulted in Optical Clear Resin between the panel and touch film for greater brightness.

 The new panel’s superiority in displaying resolution, brightness, and contrast ratio results in enhanced outdoor readability. By utilizing 1,080X1,920 pixels consisting of Red, Green, Blue (RGB) sub-pixels, the panel is a true Full HD display.

And with a brightness of 535 nits at maximum, LG Display claims its panel outperforms all current mobile Full HD LCD panels. It adds that measuring contrast in real-life surroundings with Ambient Contrast Ratio results in a reading of 3.74:1 based on 10,000 lux, confirming the perfect performance of the panel even in strong outdoor sunlight conditions.

iPhone 6 Alert: World’s slimmest smartphone screen is here

Internet-Wide Scan Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Ready-Made Backdoors

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Many poorly-secured company servers are exposed online, offering attackers ready-made backdoors to wipe or steal data.

A security researcher that (gently) probed every computer on the Internet to discover hundreds of thousands of unsecured systems (see “When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet”) has now repeated the exercise to find hundreds of thousands of servers that could be trivially taken over by an attacker.

HD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid7, did a fresh scan of the Internet after hearing about vulnerabilities in a standard component of servers that allows them to be monitored and controlled remotely. Independent researcher Dan Farmer recently showed that flaws in the design of many Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) mean they could all too easily provide unauthorized access and control, too.

Moore’s scan found 308,000 BMCs that used the problem protocol identified by Farmer. A total of 53,000 of them were configured in a way that allows access without a password; 195,000 stored passwords and other credentials unencrypted; 99,000 exposed encoded passwords that could be cracked by an attacker (Moore says that he unscrambled 10 percent in a preliminary test); 35,000 had vulnerabilities in the Universal Plug and Play protocol that Moore’s previous Internet scan highlighted.

Moore explains the consequences of what he found like this in an FAQ document:

“An attacker that is able to compromise a BMC should be able to compromise its parent server. Once access to the server is gained, the attacker could copy data from any attached storage, make changes to the operating system, install a permanent backdoor, capture credentials passing through the server, launch a denial of service attack, or simply wipe the hard drives.”

That information released by the researchers doesn’t reveal anything about what types of organizations are at risk, but the numbers make it clear that the problem is widespread. Moore told Wired that “essentially every modern company and government on the planet” relies on the flawed BMC protocol examined in his study.

These new results underline what Moore told us earlier this year, when speaking about his initial project to ping the entire Internet. Most public attention and industry effort is focused on the security of the computers on people’s desks, but it seems to common for powerful, core parts of IT systems to be exposed online.