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Our hands are fast and precise instruments, but so far, we haven’t been able to capture their sensitivity and accuracy in user interfaces. However, there’s a natural vocabulary of hand movements we’ve learned from using familiar tools like smartphones, and Project Soli aims to use these motions to control other devices. For example, your hand could become a virtual dial to control volume on a speaker, or a virtual touchpad to browse a map on a smartwatch screen. To make our hands self-contained interface controls, the team needed a sensor that could capture submillimeter motions of overlapping fingers in 3D space. Radar fits all these requirements, but the necessary equipment was just a little…big. So the Project Soli team created a gesture radar small enough to fit in a wearable device. It’s a new category of interaction sensor, running at 60GHz; one that can capture motions of your fingers at resolutions and speeds that haven’t been possible before—up to 10,000 frames per second. To get there, the team had to reinterpret traditional radar, which bounces a signal from an object and provides a single return ping. From a hardware and computation perspective, this would have been challenging to recreate on a small scale. So to capture the complexity of hand movements at close range, Soli illuminates the whole hand with a broad radar beam, and estimates the hand configuration by analyzing changes in the returned signal over time.
For the past fifteen years, Aperio IT has provided our commercial and corporate clients in the Sacramento area with information technology services and products, combined with expert guidance in planning and providing for their information technology needs. August of this year marks our official fifteenth anniversary, and we invite you to join us in celebrating!
To mark our fifteenth anniversary, our team will be participating in United Cerebral Palsy of Sacramento and Northern California’s “Steptember” charity event. Our goal is to raise a total of $3,000 toward United Cerebral Palsy of Sacramento and Northern California’s efforts to “help pay for equipment, therapy, and support for people with cerebral palsy and other disabilities.” We’d be delighted if you’d like to join us in supporting this worthy cause. If you want to sponsor our team, please go to the “Steptember” donations page and enter one of our team names. We have three teams competing, each with the goal of raising $1,000:
You can also keep an eye on our Facebook page to see how our teams are doing.
Many members of the Aperio IT team already support charities in the community in an individual way. Participating in United Cerebral Palsy of Sacramento and Northern California’s fund raising efforts represents our company’s first effort to get involved as a team. And although this is our first attempt, it certainly won’t be our last. We’re eager to give something back as a thank you to the community that has supported us over the last decade and a half and helped us to grow and succeed!
Supporting our community
In addition to supporting more charitable events as a team, Aperio IT plans to continue to support the charities and organizations we’re already involved with. These are some of the groups we’re honored to be able to support:
It was 15 years ago when we first opened our doors at Aperio IT and it was 15 years ago when Lee applied for a job and stepped foot in our office. It was than we hired him as a Systems Engineer. Lee has been like the glue to Aperio IT, holding everything together, figuring out problems before they become problems and we couldn’t of asked for a better employee. Lee was recently promoted to our Service Manager where he oversees all of our Help Desk. Lee has helped shape our company into what it is today and we never could of done it without him. Thank you so much Lee. We are looking forward to 15 more years with you.
The scam plays on the fears that users have of their device encountering technical issues, and criminal groups are charging unsuspecting people up to £50 over the phone to get their devices back to full functionality, in spite of the fact that there is nothing really wrong with them.
This nefarious approach to scamming phone owners first took off in the US but has since been reported by British users, with a message popping up on screen and encouraging them to call an 0800 number because their device has allegedly ‘crashed’.
The alert, which appears when users visit particular sites in Safari, even claims that third-party apps are to blame for the problems and claims that if users do not call the number of get it ‘repaired’, they will end up losing personal information.
In reality, anyone who makes a call to the number shown on screen will be put through to someone who requests their payment card information and will proceed to take money from their account.
This kind of identity theft can be effective if the people being targeted are uncertain about how their device works and are concerned that they need to get their handset repaired as quickly as possible. And because the issue is software-based rather than hardware-based, customers may not think to take their device to an official Apple store or a reputable repair outlet.
In this instance, replacing iPhone parts will not make a difference because the scam occurs as a result of a pop-up message which cannot seem to be removed as long as the handset is connected to the internet.
The work-around for this which some users have found is to activate airplane mode from the settings menu, and then clear the Safari browser’s history and cookies. Those who have yet to be impacted by the message are advised to de-activate the option to display pop-ups when using Safari, as this will prevent the alert from ever appearing.
Privacy issues such as this loom large in the mobile market whenever a high-profile case comes to light. And where fraud against the iPhone parts ways with traditional email phishing scams is that it can appear to take over an entire device, leaving users at the mercy of the scammers.
Giving financial details to third parties over the phone is always a bad idea, but it is perfectly possible to see how people might be duped by this, especially if they do not know about how Apple’s mobile ecosystem operates. Hopefully, by bringing this story to light, fewer people will fall foul of what is undoubtedly a particularly malignant example of major mobile fraud.
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