Smartphone Battery Life Could Be Dramatically Improved in "Subconscious Mode"

If your smartphone was allowed to be just barely awake, it could extend battery life by as much as 54 percent. That's the claim of a research team at the University of Michigan that has invented a new "subconscious mode" for smartphones and other WiFi enabled mobile devices.

Computer science and engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang found that, even when devices are in a power-saving mode and not actively sending or receiving data, they're still actively listening for incoming information and spending energy looking for a clear channel of communication on busy networks. Phones in power-saving modes were found to be performing these functions up to 80 percent of the time.

"This idle listening often consumes as much power as actively sending and receiving messages all day," says Shin.

Kang Shin of the University of MichiganShin and his team developed a way for smartphones to listen more efficiently, called Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening, or E-MiLi. Basically, a piece of software would be added to smartphones to slow down the clock on the WiFi card to 1/16th its normal speed. Shin says the challenge was how to allow the phone to recognize an incoming message while it was slowed down to a crawl.

"We came up with a clever idea," Shin said. "Usually, messages come with a header, and we thought the phone could be enabled to detect this, as you can recognize that someone is calling your name even if you're 90 percent asleep."

There's a catch though. All headers would need to be encoded in this new and detectable way, and that has to occur on the sending end. Shin and his team have created new firmware to do the encoding, but it needs to be in all mobile devices on a network for E-MiLi's use to become widespread and have the maximum battery-saving impact. That means device manufacturers need to adopt the firmware modifications and incorporate new chips in their products. That's not quite as easy as downloading a new app.

Shin points out that E-MiLi would be backwards compatible, so phones without the new firmware and software would still be able to receive E-MiLi encoded messages in the future, if its use ever becomes widespread.

Shin and Zhang will be making their pitch to the industry when they present their concept next week at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas.

Follow Eric on Twitter, and at ericmack.org. Follow PC World on Twitter, too.

View the original article here

Facebook Changes Aimed at Improved Privacy

Facebook Tuesday announced changes to its user interface that are designed to improve user privacy and make the social network's privacy options easier to find.

The changes make it easier for a user to control who sees what he or she posts to the social network and what is able to be seen on a user's Facebook page. The changes affect your profile page, your posts, and tagging and adds a new addition: A do-over feature if you change your mind about who sees your post.

Change Details

The changes start with a user's profile page (see image below). Any content on the page will have a drop-down menu beside items there that lets the user know who can see the content--the public, friends, or custom viewers. Those options can be changed with a single click.

Drop-down menus have also been added to posts that users make. Those menus will be refined over time, according to Facebook Product Vice President Chris Cox. "These will make it easy to quickly select exactly the audience you want for any post," he wrote in a company blog.

Facebook is also introducing a sort of "do-over" feature. If you change your mind about who should see a posting after you post it, you can change that with the drop down menu, even after it has been posted (see image below).

Tagging has also been altered. Previously, photos and postings in which users were tagged automatically appeared on their profile pages. Now the user can approve or reject a tagged item before it appears on their profile page. They can't, however, block the tagged item from appearing on another user's pages.

Tagging has been expanded a bit, too (see image below). Users now can tag "friends" or non-friends, as well as pages, whether they "like" them or not. In addition, options for removing tags have been clarified.

Location options have also been changed. Previously, you could reveal your location only through the Places feature on a smartphone. Now you'll be able to add location information to anything—status update, photo or wall posting—and from any device. Of course, you can also choose not to reveal that information, too.

"These changes will start to roll out in the coming days," Cox wrote. "When they reach you, you'll see a prompt for a tour that walks you through these new features from your homepage."

Not Enough Privacy?

However, at least one security expert maintains the social network should have gone further to protect users' privacy.

As good as the new changes are, Facebook missed a real opportunity to advance privacy on its network, says Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos, a cyber security software maker. "A lot of these things are quite cosmetic," Cluley told PC World. "They could have done more about general privacy and safety on Facebook."

"Some of the things they've done here are great, and they're a step in the right direction," he added, "but I worry that there are more fundamental opportunities they could have taken which they ignored with this revamp."

One of those opportunities cited by Cluley was to put more "opt-in" choices in the Facebook system, instead of requiring users to "opt-out" of its offerings. "They've put a nice varnish over Facebook," he said. "But what we haven't got is anything which says, 'From now on, whenever we introduce a new feature, we're not going to share your information without your express agreement."

Changes: Google+ Inspired?

Although Facebook denies it, it appears that the changes are a response to Google's upstart social network, Google+. "Even some of the terminology which Facebook is now using is a direct copy of Google+," Cluley asserted. "For instance, you no longer share with everyone, you share with 'public.'"

"This is a reaction to Google+," he said. "That's not a bad thing. That's how competitiveness develops things. Facebook should be applauded from that point of view."

Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.

View the original article here