NEW DELHI: HMD Global, the company which holds the license to manufacture Nokia branded smartphones, has launched its new affordable Nokia handset. The company has launched the Nokia G20 in the US.

The company has priced the smartphone at $199 and it comes in two colour options — Night and Glacier. The smartphone will be available for purchase starting July 1. The customers will be able to purchase the smartphone from the company’s official website.

The smartphone runs Android 11 operating system and the company promises to roll out two years of software updates and three years of security updates to the smartphone.

Nokia G20 specifications
Nokia G20 comes with a 6.5-inch HD+ display with 720×1600 pixel resolution. The smartphone is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Helio G35 processor paired with 4GB of RAM.

Nokia G20 packs 64GB internet storage and users can further expand the storage up to 512GB by adding a microSD card. The dual SIM smartphone runs Android 11 operating system.

Nokia G20 sports a quad-rear camera setup with a 48MP main sensor with f/1.79 aperture, 5MP ultra-wide camera, 2MP depth and a 2MP macro camera with f/2.4 aperture. The front is home to an 8MP selfie shooter.

The smartphone comes equipped with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor and a dedicated Google Assistant button. Nokia G20 also comes with an IPX2 rating which makes the smartphone splash-resistant.

The smartphone is backed by a 5050mAh battery with 10W charging support.

Nokia G20

Camera	48 MP + 5 MP + 2 MP + 2 MP
Display	6.52 inches (16.56 cm)
Performance	MediaTek Helio G35 (12 nm)
Ram	4 GB
Storage	64 GB
Battery	5050 mAh
Price in india	14000

see full specifications ❯

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Chinese technology company Lenovo has announced the launch of two new Chromebooks: IdeaPad 5i and Flex 5i. The Lenovo IdeaPad 5i Chromebook comes at EUR 399 (about Rs 35,400). The laptop comes in two colour options: Sand and Storm Grey. The device will be available from July in the European markets. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook also comes at a starting price of EUR 399 but in Abyss Blue and Iron Grey colour options. It will be available from this month. The India launch of the devices has not been announced yet and the new Chroembooks may come to the country at a later date.The low-priced laptops are aimed at students and for general laptop usage.

The Ideapad 5i sports a 14-inch full HD IPS display. Both the Ideapad and Flex Chromebooks come with up to Intel Core i5-1135G7 processors and run Chrome OS. The device comes with up to 8GB LPDDR4 RAM and has a maximum of 512GB SSD.

The Flex 5i is the smaller and the lighter of the two and features a 13.3-inch full HD IPS display. It offers a single option of 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 512GB SSD.

New ThinkPad laptops

The company also announced new ThinkPad laptops which include the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4, ThinkPad L13 Gen 2 and the ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 2. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 features a 16-inch display with up to UHD or 4K resolution. It is powered by an Intel Corei9 H-series vPro processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, plus 16GB of VRAM. The device can be upgraded to a maximum of 64GB OF DDR4 RAM and can accommodate up to 2TB PCle Gen 4 SSD.

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The Microsoft Windows event is about to start in the next 30 minutes where the company is expected to announce the latest version of Windows, likely to be named Windows 11.

The event will be live streamed via the company’s official website at 11 am ET.

If you are wondering what’s new to the upcoming version of Windows, then it isn’t that big of a mystery as of this moment. Thanks to the leaked developer build ISO we already have a wide range of changes and new features that we might see on Windows 11. Read on to know.

What to expect from the next version of Windows

For starters, there will be big visual overhaul be it in terms of window designs, start menu or themes and wallpapers.

Apart from that there will be new icons, animations and widgets as well.

An all-new setup screen
Windows 11 now is expected to get an all-new setup screen with a redesigned layout and a new Blue animation.

New wallpapers
Just like with every new version of Windows, Microsoft will add a bunch of new wallpapers.

New Start Menu
The biggest change we are expecting to see is in the Start Menu. In the leaked ISO, the Start Menu is located at the centre of the taskbar. Keeping that aside, the new Start Menu also looks more minimalistic and feels well laid out as well.

New animations
Windows 11 will also get some cool new animations for minimising and maximising a window.

New icons, new split-view options and more
Windows 11 will also get new icons, new split-view options and some other visual overhaul.

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The US Justice Department on Tuesday blocked some three dozen websites, many of them associated with Iranian disinformation activities, a U.S. government source said.

Several of the sites were back online within hours with new domain addresses.

The sites seized included Press TV, the Iranian government’s main English-language satellite television channel, and Al Alam, its Arabic-language equivalent. Both later were back online using Iranian domain addresses Alalam.ir and Presstv.ir.

The source in Washington spoke after notices appeared earlier on Tuesday on a number of Iran-affiliated websites saying they had been seized by the United States government as part of law enforcement action.

Iranian news agencies said the U.S. government had seized several Iranian media websites and sites belonging to groups affiliated with Iran such as Yemen’s Houthi movement.

The notices appeared days after a prominent hardliner and fierce critic of the West, Ebrahim Raisi, was elected as Iran’s new president and after envoys for Iran and six world powers, including Washington, adjourned high-stakes talks on reviving their tattered 2015 nuclear accord and returned to capitals for consultations.

The website of the Arabic-language Masirah TV, which is run by the Houthis, read:

“The domain almasirah.net has been seized by the United States Government in accordance with a seizure warrant … as part of a law enforcement action by the Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement and Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

The site quickly opened up a new, working website at www.almasirah.com.

Iran’s Arabic language Alalam TV said on its Telegram channel: “U.S. authorities shut down Al-Alam TV’s website.”

A U.S. Justice Department spokesperson had no immediate comment. Two U.S. government sources indicated that the Justice Department was preparing an announcement but it was not immediately clear when it might be issued.

Notices also appeared on the website of Lualua TV, an Arabic-language Bahraini independent channel that broadcasts from Britain.

U.S. prosecutors in October seized a network of web domains they said were used in a campaign by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to spread political disinformation around the world.

The U.S. Justice Department said then that it had taken control of 92 domains used by the IRGC to pose as independent media outlets targeting audiences in the United States, Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The semi-official Iranian news agency YJC agency said on Tuesday the U.S. move “demonstrates that calls for freedom of speech are lies.”

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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) declared Tuesday that her state has landed the first graphite processing plant in the U.S.

In an explanation, Ivey said Alabama agreed with Westwater Resources Inc., a Colorado-based mineral resources organization, to assemble a plant in Coosa County.

Westwater Resources subsidiary Alabama Graphite Products LLC plans to invest $80 million to help construct the first plant in Kellyton, close to Alexander City, and a second period of the project will push the total investment to $124 million.

The construction will begin later this year and is scheduled to be operational before the finish of 2022. The objective of the plant is to produce 7,500 tons of battery-grade graphite every year, as indicated by the statement.

“This plant not only will make Alabama the U.S. leader in graphite production, the go-to place for this important resource in battery manufacturing, it also will elevate our standing even more as a major player in the fast-growing electric vehicle sector,” Ivey said in the statement.

“We’re home to four major auto plants, and the ability to source precious materials in state for the lithium-ion batteries used in electric and hybrid vehicles will be a big plus in attracting other manufacturing jobs to the state.”

Westwater Resources CEO Chris Jones said that he’s appreciative for Ivey’s and other state authorities’ help on the project. “We look forward to being an active member of the business community here for many years to come,” Jones said.

The new graphite plant will make 100 full-time jobs and with hourly wages up to $21.25 an hour.

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San Francisco: MassNotify, the US state of Massachusetts’ exposure notifications app for Covid-19, was automatically installed on some Android phones without warning, according to many users.

According to 9To5Google, the company confirmed that the new “automatically distributed” nature, but states that “Covid-19 Exposure Notifications are enabled only if a user proactively turns it on”.

“We have been working with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to allow users to activate the Exposure Notifications System directly from their Android phone settings. This functionality is built into the device settings and is automatically distributed by the Google Play Store, so users don’t have to download a separate app,” the company told the website.

“Covid-19 Exposure Notifications are enabled only if a user proactively turns it on. Users decide whether to enable this functionality and whether to share information through the system to help warn others of possible exposure,” it added.

With the Massachusetts MassNotify app launch, the Exposure Notifications Express system was updated to leverage this automatic distribution so users can more quickly enable/disable alerts.

The Express approach previously leveraged a more traditional app rather than this new integrated service one.

The state of Massachusetts launched the MassNotify app on June 15.

It is slightly different from the first round of Exposure Notification applications where the state (either directly or via an authorised contractor) built and released a traditional app to the Play Store.

Rather, Massachusetts is using the “Exposure Notifications Express” system that Google and Apple announced last September.

This approach sees health agencies submit a configuration file to the two companies with information on how/when notifications should be triggered and the next steps after getting an alert.

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If your business falls victim to ransomware and you want simple advice on whether to pay the criminals, don’t expect much help from the US government. The answer is apt to be: It depends.

“It is the position of the U.S. government that we strongly discourage the payment of ransoms,” Eric Goldstein, a top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional hearing last week.

But paying carries no penalties and refusing would be almost suicidal for many companies, especially the small and medium-sized. Too many are unprepared. The consequences could also be dire for the nation itself. Recent high-profile extortive attacks led to runs on East Coast gas stations and threatened meat supplies.

The dilemma has left public officials fumbling about how to respond. In an initial step, bipartisan legislation in the works would mandate immediate federal reporting of ransomware attacks to assist response, help identify the authors and even recoup ransoms, as the FBI did with most of the $4.4 million that Colonial Pipeline recently paid.

Without additional action soon, however, experts say ransoms will continue to skyrocket, financing better criminal intelligence-gathering and tools that only worsen the global crime wave.

President Joe Biden got no assurances from Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva last week that cybercriminals behind the attacks won’t continue to enjoy safe harbor in Russia. At minimum, Putin’s security services tolerate them. At worst, they are working together.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said this month that she is in favor of banning payments. “But I don’t know whether Congress or the president is” in favor, she said.

And as Goldstein reminded lawmakers, paying doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your data back or that sensitive stolen files won’t end up for sale in darknet criminal forums. Even if the ransomware crooks keep their word, you’ll be financing their next round of attacks. And you may just get hit again.

In April, the then-top national security official in the Justice Department, John Demers, was lukewarm toward banning payments, saying it could put “us in a more adversarial posture vis-a-vis the victims, which is not where we want to be.”

Perhaps most vehement about a payment ban are those who know ransomware criminals best – cybersecurity threat responders.

Lior Div, CEO of Boston-based Cybereason, considers them digital-age terrorists. “It is terrorism in a different form, a very modern one.”

A 2015 British law prohibits U.K.-based insurance firms from reimbursing companies for the payment of terrorism ransoms, a model some believe should be applied universally to ransomware payments.

“Ultimately, the terrorists stopped kidnapping people because they realized that they weren’t going to get paid,” said Adrian Nish, threat intelligence chief at BAE Systems.

U.S. law prohibits material support for terrorists, but the Justice Department in 2015 waived the threat of criminal prosecution for citizens who pay terrorist ransoms.

“There’s a reason why that’s a policy in terrorism cases: You give too much power to the adversary,” said Brandon Valeriano, a Marine Corps University scholar and senior adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan body created by Congress.

Some ransomware victims have taken principled stands against payments, the human costs be damned. One is the University of Vermont Health Network, where the bill for recovery and lost services after an October attack was upwards of $63 million.

Ireland, too, refused to negotiate when its national healthcare service was hit last month.

Five weeks on, healthcare information technology in the nation of 5 million remains badly hobbled. Cancer treatments are only partially restored, email service patchy, digital patient records largely inaccessible. People jam emergency rooms for lab and diagnostic tests because their primary-care doctors can’t order them. As of Thursday, 42% of the system’s 4,000 computer servers still had not been decrypted.

The criminals turned over the software decryption key a week after the attack – following an unusual offer by the Russian Embassy to “help with the investigation” – but the recovery has been a painful slog.

“A decryption key is not a magic wand or switch that can suddenly reverse the damage,” said Brian Honan, a top Irish cybersecurity consultant. Every machine recovered must be tested to ensure it’s infection-free.

Data indicate that most ransomware victims pay. The insurer Hiscox says just over 58% of its afflicted customers pay, while leading cyber insurance broker Marsh McLennan put the figure at roughly 60% for its impacted U.S. and Canadian clients.

But paying doesn’t guarantee anything near full recovery. On average, ransom-payers got back just 65% of the encrypted data, leaving more than a third inaccessible, while 29% said they got only half of the data back, the cybersecurity firm Sophos found in a survey of 5,400 IT decision-makers from 30 countries.

In a survey of nearly 1,300 security professionals, Cybereason found that 4 in 5 businesses that chose to pay ransoms suffered a second ransomware attack.

That calculus notwithstanding, deep-pocketed businesses with insurance protection tend to pay up.

Colonial Pipeline almost immediately paid last month to get fuel flowing back to the U.S. East Coast – before determining whether its data backups were robust enough to avoid payment. Later, meat-processing goliath JBS paid $11 million to avoid potentially interrupting U.S. meat supply, though its data backups also proved adequate to get its plants back online before serious damage.

It’s not clear if concern about stolen data being dumped online influenced the decision of either company to pay.

Colonial would not say if fears of the 100 gigabytes of stolen data ending up in the public eye factored into the decision by CEO Joseph Blount to pay. JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett said “our analysis showed no company data was exfiltrated.” He would not say if the criminals claimed in their ransom note to have stolen data.

Irish authorities were fully aware of the risks. The criminals claim to have stolen 700 gigabytes of data. As yet, it has not surfaced online.

Public exposure of such data can lead to lawsuits or lost investor confidence, which makes it manna for criminals. One ransomware gang seeking to extort a major U.S. corporation published a nude photo of the chief executive’s adult son on its leak site last week.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has asked in written requests to know more about the JBS and Colonial cases as well as CNA Insurance. Bloomberg News reported that CNA Insurance surrendered $40 million to ransomware criminals in March. The New York Democrat said “Congress needs to take a hard look at how to break this vicious cycle.”

Recognizing a lack of support for a ransom ban, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and other lawmakers want at least to compel greater transparency from ransomware victims, who often don’t report attacks.

They are drafting a bill to make the reporting of breaches and ransom payments mandatory. They would need to be reported within 24 hours of detection, with the executive branch deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to make the information public.

But that won’t protect unprepared victims from potentially going bankrupt if they don’t pay. For that, various proposals have been put forward to provide financial assistance.

The Senate this month approved legislation that would establish a special cyber response and recovery fund to provide direct support to the most vulnerable private and public organizations hit by major cyberattacks and breaches.

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To stay up-to-date with the rising demand of the audio-based audience in recent months, the social media platform, Facebook, has launched a new feature of ‘live audio rooms’.

Proving as a direct rival to the popular audio-only exclusive mobile app, Clubhouse, Facebook has started rolling out audio-based features in the US.

Also read | Facebook launches ads for Instagram Reels

These live audio rooms will be led by influencers and celebrities in which other participants can listen to the ongoing conversations of their choice and sometimes also participate.

The new feature will “enable you to discover, listen in on and join live conversations with public figures, experts and others about topics you’re interested in,” said Fidji Simo, head of the Facebook app, in a blog post.

Also read | Facebook develops new method to reverse-engineer deepfakes and track their source

Unlike Clubhouse, Facebook’s new feature will put a cap of 50 on the number of participants allowed in an audio room. “Public figures can invite friends, followers, verified public figures, or any listeners in the room to be a speaker. The host can invite speakers in advance or during the conversation. There can be up to 50 speakers, and there’s no limit to the number of listeners,” Simo added.

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XDA Developers is reporting that Google has started rolling out a new update for its Messages app to beta users. The version 8.3.026 brings the ability to pin up to three conversations at the top of the list.

This means pinned messages will always stay at the top and won’t be replaced by newer messages.

Other similar apps already have this feature and it isn’t totally new for Google Messages as well. XDA also mentions they have discovered the same feature in the version 8.1.050 of the app last month. Earlier it was hidden beneath the settings but now the feature is more upfront and easy to use.

The website also mentions that not all the users running 8.3.026 of Google Messages will see this feature. They might need to force close the app and clear its cache by heading to smartphone Settings.

Another important thing to note about the pinned conversation feature is that it is not Android version specific. However, the report suggests that it is currently only available on Pixel smartphones.

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A bipartisan group of U.S. senators on Thursday proposed a 25% tax credit for investments in semiconductor manufacturing as Congress works to increase U.S. chip production.

The proposal sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and the top Republican on the panel, Senator Mike Crapo, along with Senators Mark Warner, Debbie Stabenow, John Cornyn and Steve Daines, would provide “reasonable, targeted incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing,” they said in a statement.

The group did not immediately provide a cost estimate for the measure, which is on top of recent proposed semiconductor funding. Last week, the Senate approved $52 billion for production and research on semiconductors and telecommunications equipment. That included $2 billion dedicated to chips used by automakers, which have seen massive shortages and made significant production cuts. The House of Representatives must still act on the measure.

Supporters of funding note the U.S. share of semiconductors and microelectronics production has fallen to 12% from 37% in 1990.

The senators said up to 70% of the cost difference for producing semiconductors overseas results from foreign subsidies.

“The United States can’t allow foreign governments to continue to lure companies’ manufacturing overseas, increasing risks to our economy and costing American workers good-paying jobs,” Wyden said.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said last month the funding could result in seven to 10 new U.S. semiconductor plants.

Raimondo anticipates government funding would generate “$150 billion-plus” in investment in chip production and research – including contributions from state and federal governments and private-sector firms.

The tax credit could benefit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) , which is building a $12 billion semiconductor factory in Arizona, and Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV as well as U.S. firms such as Intel Corp and Micron Technology Inc.

The Semiconductor Industry Association praised the proposal, saying it said would “strengthen domestic chip production and research, which are critical to U.S. job creation, national defense, infrastructure, and semiconductor supply chains.”

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