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Diners at a growing number of restaurants and bars are being asked to stash away their phones — or even lock them up — as part of a push for more memorable nights out. The trend is gaining traction across the U.S., with more spots experimenting with restrictions, incentives or locked pouches, Fox News Digital recently reported. Charlotte cocktail bar Antagonist places guests' phones in locked pouches for about two hours, while Delilah, an upscale supper club with locations across the country, has a no-phones, no-posting policy, according to Axios. Even Chick-fil-A has tested the tactic with a Maryland location...

“Who’s monitoring all of this?” my dad said, immediately skeptical of the oversight on a fast food promo that pays out in ice cream cones. I get my rule-following instincts from my parents, so I knew they would be A-plus students at trying Chick-fil-A’s viral cell phone challenge at a location currently running the campaign: Towson Place, Maryland. Let the record show that I assumed my favorite boomers could breeze through a meal without checking their phones. I have since been enlightened. The concept is simple: Store your silenced cell phone in a “chicken coop” while you enjoy your Chick-fil-A...

Americans’ personal data could be collected and stored overseas — even if they’ve never downloaded a foreign-developed app themselves — according to a new FBI alert warning about the risks tied to popular mobile platforms. That means information like a person’s name, email address or phone number could be pulled from someone else’s contact list and potentially stored abroad if a friend or family member grants an app access to their device. The warning comes after years of scrutiny over TikTok’s ties to China, but the FBI alert suggests the concerns extend beyond any single platform to a broader range...

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with 'dumb' flip phones, the kind they suggest for seniors. My husband recently bought us fancy new 'smart' phones, and it's the first one I've had in ten years. It's huge and much more complicated than anything I've used before. As I've been figuring it out, I've thought I'd like to supplement it with something smaller, simpler and faster when I'm out-and-about, something that just does phone calls, texts, and maybe has a radio, and fits in my pocket. We've been looking at Jitterbug, Iris and some others; does anyone have experience with these...

A new statewide survey shows New York’s bell-to-bell smartphone restrictions in schools are producing real results—fewer distractions, better classroom focus, and stronger student engagement. The findings come from more than 350 school administrators who responded to a survey in November after implementing the state’s new distraction-free policy earlier this year. The responses suggest that limiting phone use during the school day is already transforming learning environments across the state. One assistant superintendent in the Southern Tier called the shift “a game changer,” adding that students are “having conversations with each other” instead of looking down at their phones. Another principal...

Over the past few years, a huge number of schools in the United States and around the world have banned cell phone use among their students.Gothamist spoke to students about their experience with the ban, and the number one takeaway didn’t have to do with anything to do with hot-button topics like social media addiction or cyberbullying. Instead, it was that kiboshing phones is forcing kids to actually talk to each other in meatspace again — and it’s making schools way noisier, for better or worse.“Sometimes I would take naps in the lunchroom, but now I can’t because of the...

New research shows attackers could partially transcribe calls by sensing tiny earpiece vibrations with off-the-shelf radar In A Nutshell Researchers at Penn State built “WirelessTap,” a proof-of-concept that uses millimeter-wave radar to detect tiny vibrations from smartphone earpieces during calls. AI transcription of these signals reached up to 59.25% word accuracy at 20 inches, 40.82% at ~3 feet with a human subject, and 2–4% at 10 feet. While real-world risk is currently low, improvements in radar sensitivity and AI could make such eavesdropping more practical, prompting calls for countermeasures. ================================================================== UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — That private phone call discussing your...

Police are investigating the death of a 20-year-old Brazilian woman who died on a bus with 26 iPhones glued to her skin. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, died of cardiac arrest on July 29, according to multiple outlets, including the Daily Mail. Cops suspect the young woman was likely smuggling the iPhones, the Mirror reported. Passengers on the bus told police the woman, who was traveling solo, had become ill during the trip from Foz do Iguaçu to São Paulo, according to the reports. She complained she was having trouble breathing. Emergency responders tried to revive the...

Google has for years been harnessing the power of its Android smartphones to detect and measure tens of thousands of earthquakes. In a new paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the search giant described how they used motion sensors from its two billion-strong network of phones running Android between the years 2021 and 2024 to detect and alert quakes to users in almost 100 countries around the world. Known as "Android Earthquake Alerts" (AEA), this early warning system has uses the smartphones' accelerometers to detect telltale vibrations as they happen and inform residents of quakes in their areas....

By stripping batteries and hacking Android phones with open-source Linux, researchers built submersible data hubs for AI-powered image recognition. Researchers hacked 15-year-old smartphones into tiny servers that outperform Raspberry Pi at a fraction of the cost. Kadri-Ann Kivastik/ Via Eurekalert ======================================================================== A team at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science has shown that obsolete mobile phones can be wired together to do the sort of heavy data processing normally reserved for expensive server farms while keeping thousands of handsets out of landfills. Led by associate professor of pervasive computing Huber Flores, the engineers stripped the batteries from four...

Everything that connects to the internet can be hacked by malware. This includes your phones (both Android and iPhones) and laptops (whether Windows, Mac or even lesser-known systems like Linux). Devices like your Wi-Fi router and security cameras aren’t safe either. But who would have thought hackers are now targeting your smart TVs, streaming boxes, projectors and tablets, too? That’s right, the FBI warns that bad actors have hijacked over a million of these devices with malware, turning them into unwitting participants in a global cybercrime network. The FBI is warning that more than a million smart TVs, streaming boxes,...

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former...

It's hard to imagine going a day without the reassuring weight of a phone in our pockets. A Harvard Business Review study on phone addiction found we're interrupted by our phones about every 13 minutes of our time awake. Research has found that even a short break from smartphones can significantly boost your mood. As more people hope to take back control of their time and attention, digital detox clubs – groups of people meeting up without phones to reconnect with nature, practice hobbies or just talk – are meeting across the world, from New York City to Seoul. Some...

.. . The real story is what’s being done to lock down Android, and why you’ll need a newer model phone in 12-weeks time... The other highlight further narrows the gap to iPhone, removing some of the looser restrictions that enabled threats to more easily fester on its ecosystem than Apple’s. “The Play Integrity API," Google says, “allows developers to check if their apps have been tampered with or are running in potentially compromised environments, helping them to prevent abuse like fraud, bots, cheating, and data theft.” The company also notes that “apps using Play integrity features are seeing 80%...

Subtitle: A unanimous jury verdict was reversed by an Obama judge shortly after the Democratic administration apparently took interest in the case. Jeff Parker, the CEO of the small Florida-based technology company ParkerVision, explained to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck Thursday how tech giant Qualcomm allegedly stole one of the most revolutionary patented innovations in American history with the help of elements of the Obama administration — technology that was ultimately offshored to China, possibly giving America's pre-eminent adversary a competitive edge. "We are at the beginning of seeing corruption exposed like never before in America," said Beck. Long war...

A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a...

The FBI seized Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s phone and electronics early Wednesday morning — just a week after the election-betting platform successfully predicted President-elect Donald Trump’s win, The Post has learned. The 26-year-old entrepreneur was woken up at 6:00 a.m. in his Soho home by law US enforcement officers who demanded his phone and electronics, a source close to the matter told The Post. It’s “grand political theater at its worst,” the source told The Post. “They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the...

Concord, N.H. (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed the conviction and sentence of a former Republican National Committee official accused in a phone-jamming plot on Election Day 2002. James Tobin, the former regional chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign, was convicted in 2005 of helping to arrange more than 800 hang-up calls that jammed get-out-the-vote phone lines set up by the state Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters' union for about an hour. Republican John Sununu defeated then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for the Senate that day. Tobin was sentenced to 10 months in prison. But the 1st U.S....

Find out if you're accidentally sharing your location with Google, Apple apps and services blog.google, support.apple.com When mobile apps first hit the scene, many were designed to make our phones more useful. This included new tools for productivity, as well as apps for entertainment. Many of today’s apps, though, are packed with sneaky permission requests and hidden trackers. These tactics are legal because app developers (and the companies behind them) have to give you a choice to opt in or out of these tracking permissions. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do that … or the developers make it really...

24 hours after a deadly school shooting in Georgia, local parents are speaking out, worried about strict cell phone policies. Many Apalachee High School students said that they used phones to tell their parents about the shooting. This comes as school districts in Ohio and many other states, including Georgia, are adopting stricter policies on mobile devices. … In the Cincinnati Public School District (CPS), seventh through twelfth grade students are required to lock their phones in a pouch during the school day. It's supposed to limit distractions in the classroom, but not all parents are on board, especially after...