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Companies Trying to Rely Less on China for Their Products

reporter 1222 — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 06:07:41 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The US, Japan, and France are prodding their companies to rely less on China to make the world’s smartphones, drugs, and other products.

But even after the coronavirus derailed trade, few want to leave skilled China’s skilled workforce and efficient suppliers of raw materials to move to other countries, AP reported.

Disruptions from the pandemic, on top of the US-Chinese tariff war, fueled warnings that relying too much on China leaves global companies vulnerable to costly breakdowns in the event of disasters or political conflict.

Drugmakers stand out as one industry that is trying to reduce reliance on Chinese suppliers by setting up sources of raw materials in the United States and Europe. But consumer electronics, medical devices, and other industries are sticking with China.

“I don’t know of a single company right now that is moving ahead with any plans to move,” said Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China.

China’s explosive rise as the world’s low-cost factory helped to hold down consumer prices and boosted Western corporate profits. But it has fueled political tension over lost American and European blue-collar jobs. Governments and industry consultants fret that dependence on China can be a threat to supply chains and possibly national security.

Chinese factories assemble most of the world’s smartphones and consumer electronics and a growing share of medical equipment, industrial robots, and other high-tech goods. This country is a dominant supplier of vitamin C and ingredients for antibiotics and other medicines. The ruling Communist Party has spent two decades building ports, railways, telecom networks, and other facilities that are regarded as among the world’s best.

“China still offers an unparalleled supply chain for any industry,” said Jit Lim of Alvarez & Marsal, a management consulting firm.

Philip Richardson, who manufactures loudspeakers in Panyu, near Hong Kong, said he has looked at Vietnam and other countries. But he said while their wages might be as low as 60 percent of China’s, the savings will be eaten up by the cost of giving up his network of Chinese suppliers.

“We gave it consideration for about a minute, and it doesn’t make sense,” said Richardson, who has worked in China for 22 years. “When you buy magnets, now you have to pay for transportation and customs duties into other countries, whereas in China we just buy the magnets and they are shipping to us.”

President Donald Trump took office in 2017 promising to “bring back our jobs.” The next year’s tariff hikes on goods from China in a fight over technology and trade prompted some exporters to shift production. But the changes were small. Most went to other developing countries.

The pandemic has raised political pressure for companies to move.

The Japanese government, which sees China as a strategic rival, is offering 220 billion yen ($2 billion) to companies that move production to Japan in a virus aid package announced in April. It offers 23.5 billion yen ($220 million) for Japanese companies in China to move to other countries.

The tariff war prompted concern about China’s dominance as a supplier of active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, used in antibiotics and vitamins. Some American commentators warned Beijing might retaliate by withholding APIs, though was there no sign that happened.

“There will be an increase in the repatriation of national drug supply chains and the re-establishment of national strategic manufacturing capabilities for key drugs,” Sakshi Sikka, who follows the industry for Fitch Solutions, said in an email.

In May, the US government awarded a contract worth up to $812 million over 10 years to Phlow Corp., a Virginia company set up to ensure against drug shortages by producing ingredients and generics.

In Europe, French drugmaker Sanofi SA is setting up an API supplier to reduce reliance on China. Sanofi said the company will be the No. 2 global producer, with annual sales of 1 billion euros by 2022.

India and Indonesia have announced plans to increase their own production of pharmaceutical raw materials.

Those changes are politically driven and will push up costs, while China’s dominance as a global supplier is unlikely to change in the near future, according to Fitch’s Sikka.

Companies including Nike Inc. that used to make shoes, furniture, clothes, and other low-margin goods in China have been migrating for a decade to Southeast Asia, Africa, and other economies in search of cheaper labor.

For higher-end shoes, however, US import duties would have to rise even further before sites such as Ethiopia or Southeast Asia can compete with experienced Chinese workers and flexible suppliers, said Robert Gwynne, who produces women’s shoes for brands including Steve Madden in Dongguan, near Hong Kong.

“All my clients say, we have to diversify,” said Gwynne. But when shown costs in other countries, “90 percent take the China scenario.”

Companies also increasingly are tied to China by the appeal of its 1.3 billion consumers at a time when the West’s spending growth is anemic.

Makers of automobiles and higher-value goods are spending billions of dollars to expand Chinese production. As the economy reopened, Volkswagen AG said in May it would spend 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) to buy control of its Chinese electric vehicle venture and a controlling stake in a battery producer.

Instead of using China to export, “now a lot of people are producing ‘local for local,’” said Lim.

Only 11 percent of companies that responded to a survey by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said they were “considering shifting investment to other countries,” down from 15 percent last year.

Some are leaving to cut labor costs, but the rest “are really committed to China,” said a chamber vice president, Charlotte Roule.

Moving factories or finding non-Chinese suppliers to reduce the risk of disruption “means further investment,” Roule said. “Who is going to pay for that?”

Charles M. Hubbs, the founder of Premier Guard, which makes surgical gowns, masks and other medical devices in China, said he is gearing up to produce face masks in Mississippi to avoid problems with shipping. But he said such an approach won’t work once the pandemic ends and prices fall back to normal.

“You can afford it now. People are paying $12 for an isolation gown,” said Hubbs, who has worked in China since the late 1980s. “But when COVID is over, you’re going to go back to $3 or $4.”

Many companies already have pursued a “China plus one” strategy in Asia over the past decade. They set up factories in Southeast Asia to serve other markets or insure against disruption in China, even if that raised their costs.

But as China lifted anti-disease controls on business in March, other Asian economies shut down, forcing companies to shift work back to Chinese factories, which are working overtime to make up the shortfall, said Seyedin.

Some US and other leaders are talking about possible tax breaks or other incentives to lure companies home. Trump has threatened to raise taxes on American companies that move from China to any other country but the United States.

Even if tax breaks or subsidies go ahead, companies face the costs of setting up a factory in unfamiliar territory, training rookie employees, finding suppliers, and possible disruption to customer relations said Alvarez & Marsal’s Lim. “Shifting is not free,” he said.

The post Companies Trying to Rely Less on China for Their Products appeared first on Iran News Daily.

POCKET, A New DNA Test Kit Pairing with Phone

reporter 1222 — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 09:40:28 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – A new DNA-testing kit that pairs up with a smart phone could be used to diagnose COVID-19 in less than two hours, scientists say.

‘POCKET’ (point of care kit for the entire test) identifies changes in DNA that signal disease in real-time from samples of blood, urine, or saliva.

It contains two components – a 3D-printed integrated chip, or i-chip, and a box that holds a smartphone, which is used as a heater, signal detector, and result readout, the Daily Mail reported.

The ultra-portable POCKET kit, which costs less than $10 to make, fits into a small plastic bag or a regular-sized envelope.

Weighing about 3 ounces and measuring less than 10 inches long, the tool could be vital in the war against future pandemics, the Chinese researchers claim.

POCKET can also be used to perform point-of-care (POC) DNA tests for agriculture, environmental protection, and food safety.

‘This inexpensive, ultra-portable POCKET platform may become a versatile sample-to-answer platform for clinical diagnostics, food safety, agricultural protection, and environmental monitoring,’ said corresponding author Dr. Ming Chen, of the Army Medical University in Chongqing, China.

‘We detected different types of DNA from clinics to the environment to food to agriculture.

‘The system could potentially be employed for the rapid detection and tracking of infectious diseases like COVID-19.

‘The detection is sensitive, specific, and speedy – less than two hours. It’s also stable, with a shelf-life of more than 10 weeks.’

Previous attempts to create similar POC systems have been hampered by the need to use large equipment such as centrifuges.

POCKET, meanwhile, is cheap and mobile, dispensing with the bulky laboratory equipment usually required for POC tests.

Viral or bacterial DNA is often only found in small amounts so it has to be purified and replicated many times in a process called amplification.

This requires heating the sample to precise temperatures alongside specific chemicals.

It’s also been difficult to detect DNA in a variety of types of samples such as blood, urine, plant matter, river water or food.

POCKET gets around these obstacles using small, lightweight, easily fabricated parts and special reagents with help from a smartphone.

The kit uses the heat of a phone’s processor to warm a sample to a target temperature as reagents, or chemicals, trigger reactions.

If DNA of interest is present these will create visual signals such as light or color that can be seen using the smartphone’s camera.

POCKET detects different types of DNA from blood, mucous, and urine to food such as milk, river water, and plant leaves.

Smartphones are among the most convenient, user-friendly, and powerful interfaces for point-of-care detection in resource-limited settings.

This means the ultra-portable POCKET kit, which fits into a plastic bag smaller than a sheet of A4 paper, could greatly benefit developing countries.

Thanks to a smartphone’s internet connectivity, POCKET can also locate and track the distribution of illness in real-time.

‘On the basis of smartphones’ built-in wireless communication and geolocation capabilities, our POCKET platform makes it possible to real-time locate the distribution of the disease,’ said Dr. Chen.

‘Furthermore, the POCKET platform can serve as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in DNA analysis to transmit on-site testing results to the centralized hospital or public health officials.

‘This would provide Spatio-temporal disease mapping for further investigation – in addition, end-users including patients can receive fast feedback on disease control and prevention.’

POCKET, which also has the potential to detect other nucleic acids such as RNA, has been described further in Science Advances.

The post POCKET, A New DNA Test Kit Pairing with Phone appeared first on Iran News Daily.

Android Phones Bug Targeting Bank Accounts

reporter 1222 — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 10:06:10 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – A vulnerability in millions of fully patched Android phones is the bug being actively exploited by malware that’s designed to drain the bank accounts of infected users, researchers said on Monday.

The vulnerability allows malicious apps to masquerade as legitimate apps that targets have already installed and come to trust, researchers from security firm Promon reported in a post. Running under the guise of trusted apps already installed, the malicious apps can then request permission to carry out sensitive tasks, such as recording audio or video, taking photos, reading text messages or phishing login credentials. Targets who click yes to the request are then compromised, ArsTechnica reported.

Researchers with Lookout, a mobile security provider and a Promon partner, reported last week that they found 36 apps exploiting the spoofing vulnerability. The malicious apps included variants of the BankBot banking trojan. BankBot has been active since 2017, and apps from the malware family have been caught repeatedly infiltrating the Google Play Market.

The vulnerability is most serious in versions 6 through 10, which (according to Statista) account for about 80% of Android phones worldwide. Attacks against those versions allow malicious apps to ask for permissions while posing as legitimate apps. There’s no limit to the permissions these malicious apps can seek. Access to text messages, photos, the microphone, camera, and GPS are some of the permissions that are possible. A user’s only defense is to click “no” to the requests.

An affinity for multitasking

The vulnerability is found in a function known as TaskAffinity, a multitasking feature that allows apps to assume the identity of other apps or tasks running in the multitasking environment. Malicious apps can exploit this functionality by setting the TaskAffinity for one or more of its activities to match a package name of a trusted third-party app. By either combining the spoofed activity with an additional allowTaskReparenting activity or launching the malicious activity with an Intent. The malicious apps will be placed inside and on top of the targeted task.

“Thus the malicious activity hijacks the target’s task,” Promon researchers wrote. “The next time the target app is launched from Launcher, the hijacked task will be brought to the front and the malicious activity will be visible. The malicious app then only needs to appear like the target app to successfully launch sophisticated attacks against the user. It is possible to hijack such a task before the target app has even been installed.”

Promon said Google has removed malicious apps from its Play Market, but, so far, the vulnerability appears to be unfixed in all versions of Android. Promon is calling the vulnerability “StrandHogg,” an old Norse term for the Viking tactic of raiding coastal areas to plunder and hold people for ransom. Neither Promon nor Lookout identified the names of the malicious apps. That omission makes it hard for people to know if they are or were infected.

Google representatives didn’t respond to questions about when the flaw will be patched, how many Google Play apps were caught exploiting it, or how many end users were affected. The representatives wrote only:

“We appreciate the researchers’ work and have suspended the potentially harmful apps they identified. Google Play Protect detects and blocks malicious apps, including ones using this technique. Additionally, we’re continuing to investigate in order to improve Google Play Protect’s ability to protect users against similar issues.”

StrandHogg represents the biggest threat to less-experienced users or those who have cognitive or other types of impairments that make it hard to pay close attention to subtle behaviors of apps. Still, there are several things alert users can do to detect malicious apps that attempt to exploit the vulnerability. Suspicious signs include:

– An app or service that you’re already logged into is asking for a login.

– Permission popups that don’t contain an app name.

– Permissions asked from an app that shouldn’t require or need the permissions it asks for. For example, a calculator app asking for GPS permission.

– Typos and mistakes in the user interface.

– Buttons and links in the user interface that does nothing when clicked on.

– The back button does not work as expected.

Tip-off from a Czech bank

Promon researchers said they identified StrandHogg after learning from an unnamed Eastern European security company for financial institutions that several banks in the Czech Republic reported money disappearing from customer accounts. The partner gave Promon a sample of suspected malware. Promon eventually found that the malware was exploiting the vulnerability. Promon partner Lookout later identified the 36 apps exploiting the vulnerability, including BankBot variants.

Monday’s post didn’t say how many financial institutions were targeted in total.

The malware sample Promon analyzed was installed through several droppers apps and downloaders distributed on Google Play. While Google has removed them, it’s not uncommon for new malicious apps to make their way into the Google-operated service. Update: In an email sent after this post went live, a Lookout representative said none of the 36 apps it found was available in Google Play.

Readers are once again reminded to be highly suspicious of Android apps available both in and outside of Google Play. People should also pay close attention to permissions requested by any app.

The post Android Phones Bug Targeting Bank Accounts appeared first on Iran News Daily.

WhatsApp Killing Phone Batteries, Users Complain

reporter 1222 — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 13:56:26 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – Users are complaining about WhatsApp killing phone batteries with many smartphone owners taking to forums and even the Google Play Store to vent their frustrations.

Android users are up in arms online complaining that one of the most recent WhatsApp updates is draining their phone’s battery life by up to 50 percent in a matter of hours, regardless of active use. These solutions could help.

Some users suggested switching battery optimization from “Intelligent Control” to “Optimize” for WhatsApp or turning off WhatsApp Web, a sister application for your computer which allows you to use a web-based version of the messenger in your browser, RT reported.

Others suggested ‘force stopping’ the application before going to sleep to prevent overnight battery drain, or restricting background processing while also clearing the cache (though this is a rather extreme and annoying fix for an ongoing issue).

“It’s fixed in version 325. Not yet available in the Play Store though, but you can download it from the official site,” Reddit user _sinergie_ posted.

What’s happening?

Users reported alerts on their phone indicating that WhatsApp used battery “While in active use” for some 1.5 hours, despite the fact that they had only opened the application for a negligible amount of time.

Many have pinned the blame on Whatsapp 2.19.308 with OnePlus users seemingly the hardest hit. There are widespread complaints from irate Android users across the internet, from Google Play Store reviews to the OnePlus Forum, Twitter and also on Reddit.

In several extreme cases, users complained that the Facebook-owned instant messaging service accounted for almost half of their phone’s power usage.

“Was wondering why my phone was draining quite a bit faster than normal today. 16% battery drain from WhatsApp after only actively using it for less than 5 minutes today,” wrote one OnePlus 7T user.

Furthermore, people have complained of being unable to charge their devices fast enough to keep pace with the intense power consumption, adding that their phones have also begun heating up while they receive constant alerts about high power consumption.

However, some Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung Galaxy users seems to be immune from the life-draining update and have questioned what all the fuss is about.

“S9+ user here who uses WhatsApp extensively. No change in battery life for the past few months whatsoever” wrote one bewildered user.

The post WhatsApp Killing Phone Batteries, Users Complain appeared first on Iran News Daily.

Smartphone Finger Taps May Lead to Side Channel Attack

reporter 1222 — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 10:30:31 +0000

You type, hacker deciphers, your password is doomed. That is the grim scenario being discussed in a paper that is now on arXiv. “Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones,” is by authors Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan and Ross Anderson, TechXplore reported.

What goes on in the theft process in this manner? Short and simple, sound waves emanating from your typing on a phone are decoded. They evaluated the effectiveness of the attack with 45 participants on an Android tablet and an Android smartphone.

Buster Hein in Cult of Mac said with sound waves traveling through the screen and the air to the phone’s mic, the algorithm predicts where certain vibrations come from.

The researchers said, “by recording audio through the built-in microphone(s), a malicious app can infer text” as the user enters it on his or her device. The team successfully recovered 27 out of 45 passwords on a phone, and 19 out of 27 passwords on a tablet, via typing vibrations.

They designed a machine-learning algorithm able to decode vibrations for keystrokes. The Washington Post: “Among a test group of 45 people across several tests, the researchers could correctly replicate passwords on smartphones seven times out of 27, within 10 attempts. On tablets, the researchers achieved better results, nailing the password 19 times out of 27 within 10 attempts.”

Really, a hacker can steal your password just by listening to you type? Ian Randall in Daily Mail had more about this “machine-learning algorithm.” He said it was built to try to matcheach vibration to a particular point on the devices’ screen where the users had touched the on-screen keyboard while typing or entering a password.

The authors themselves explained what was going on: “When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap generates a sound wave that propagates on the screen surface and in the air. We found the device’s microphone(s) can recover this wave and ‘hear’ the finger’s touch, and the wave’s distortions are characteristic of the tap’s location on the screen.”

The result: by recording audio through the built-in microphone, a malicious app can infer text as the user enters it on his or her device.

For their experiment, they used phones and a tablet. There were 45 participants in a real-world environment. And, when they say real-world, they really mean real-world:

“We conducted the experiments outside of the lab environment in order to simulate real- life conditions more closely, thereby improving the validity of the study.”

The participants performed in three different places: 1) in a common room, where people chat and occasionally a coffee machine makes some drink with loud sounds; 2) in a reading room where people type or speak in a semi-loud voice; and 3) in the library where there are a lot of clicking sounds from laptops. All three places had ambient noise coming in from windows left open.

What did the authors recommend as safeguards and solutions?

The authors said, “Mobile devices may need a richer capability model, a more user-friendly notification system for sensor usage and a more thorough evaluation of the information leaked by the underlying hardware.”

Elsewhere in the discussion, they explored various options, and one of them was to offer “a properly-engineered PIN entry facility, which when called by one application would temporarily blank, and/or introduce noise into, the microphone channel seen by other apps. This approach should logically be extended to other sensors that can be used to harvest PINs via side-channels such as the accelerometer, gyro and camera.”

They also mentioned for the OS to introduce timing jitter, or decoy tap sounds, into the microphone data stream. This would hinder an attacker aiming to identify tap locations.

“As the taps themselves are pretty unnoticeable for humans, this should not disturb applications that run in the background and collect audio with user consent.”

At the application level, they said, “an app might itself introduce false tap sounds into the device, in order to jam and confuse any hostile apps that happen to be listening.” Tactical jamming, they said, was a low-cost countermeasure.

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The first preview of the $1,195 RED Hydrogen One smartphone reveals a massive, ruggedly-built device

reporter 1222 — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 13:00:56 +0000

If you know anything about cameras, and even if you don’t, you must have heard of RED at some point. RED is a company that makes some of the highest-rated video cameras and sensors around.

Basically, if you’re looking for the best, highest resolution sensor around for whatever project you’re working on and you have a tonne of change (perhaps literally), you might be able to pick up something like the award winning RED HELIUM 8K S35 WEAPON Brain (RED speak for sensor module) that can record 8K videos at 60 frames per second.

Clearly, RED has quite a pedigree for making top-of-the-line professional hardware. Its hardware has been used in movies like The Martian, and even in visually splendid TV series like Better Call Saul.

The company has never made a product for the average joe, until recently anyway.

For lesser mortals, RED has been teasing the RED Hydrogen One for a while now. The Hydrogen One is a dual-camera smartphone with an allegedly ground-breaking 3D holographic display, and it’s not cheap either. The device will be available in two variants, an aluminium-bodied one for $1,195 and a titanium-bodied one for $1,595.

The holographic display is a 5.7-inch unit which RED claims can give you a glassless 3D experience and even let you “look around” objects in a scene. The Nintendo 3D series of handheld consoles has offered mainstream glassless 3D technology for many years now, and this is certainly not the first time we’ve heard of “revolutionary” 3D technology. That said, this is RED we’re talking about, and judging by its pedigree we can expect something spectacular.

YouTuber MKBHD rated an invite to RED’s HQ and got to try the holographic display for himself. He also managed to get hands-on time with a non-functioning prototype of the unit, and he made a video about it.

As MKBHD points out in the video, the device is quite large and thick, but seems well-protected and easy to grip. The edges are contoured to allow for better grip and you even find Kevlar on the back surface (the same material you’d find in a bullet proof vest).

A power button is placed on the right side of the device and it doubles as a fingerprint reader. Towards the bottom on the same side you’ll find a dedicated button for the camera. Volume buttons are on the left. Connectivity happens via USB-C, which is at the bottom, residing alongside a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The back of the phone also features several contact points at the bottom. These will be used to attach various modules to the phone.

The speakers seem to be front-firing.

The details of the camera system are unknown, but RED believes that the final product will rival every other camera in the market (RED isn’t referring to smartphones) that isn’t a RED product.

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