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A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code.

OnePlus is ready to sell its new flagship smartphone in the US weeks after it made the device official. Having now finally gotten Federal Communications Commission clearance, the OnePlus 15 is available for preorder. It’s currently only live on the OnePlus storefront, but the device will eventually come to Amazon and Best Buy as well.

The OnePlus 15 launched in China earlier this year, and it was supposed to go on sale in the US a month ago. However, the longest US government shutdown on record got in the way. Most of the FCC’s functions were suspended during the weekslong funding lapse, which prevented the agency from certifying new wireless products. Without that approval, OnePlus could not begin selling the phone. Thus, it had no firm release date when the phone was officially unveiled for the US in early November.

Interested parties can head to the OnePlus website to place an order. The base model starts at $900 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This version is only available in black. If you want the Ultraviolet or Sand Storm (with the distinctive micro-arc oxidation finish), you’ll have to upgrade to the $1,000 version, which has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

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Almost every technological innovation of the past several years has been laser-focused on one thing: generative AI. Many of these supposedly revolutionary systems run on big, expensive servers in a data center somewhere, but at the same time, chipmakers are crowing about the power of the neural processing units (NPU) they have brought to consumer devices. Every few months, it’s the same thing: This new NPU is 30 or 40 percent faster than the last one. That’s supposed to let you do something important, but no one really gets around to explaining what that is.

Experts envision a future of secure, personal AI tools with on-device intelligence, but does that match the reality of the AI boom? AI on the “edge” sounds great, but almost every AI tool of consequence is running in the cloud. So what’s that chip in your phone even doing?

What is an NPU?

Companies launching a new product often get bogged down in superlatives and vague marketing speak, so they do a poor job of explaining technical details. It’s not clear to most people buying a phone why they need the hardware to run AI workloads, and the supposed benefits are largely theoretical.

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Google is following through on its pledge to split Android versions into more frequent updates. We already had one Android 16 release this year, and now it’s time for the second. The new version is rolling out first on Google’s Pixel phones, featuring more icon customization, easier parental controls, and AI-powered notifications. Don’t be bummed if you aren’t first in line for the new Android 16—Google also has a raft of general improvements coming to the wider Android ecosystem.

Android 16, part 2

Since rolling out the first version of Android in 2008, Google has largely stuck to one major release per year. Android 16 changes things, moving from one monolithic release to two. Today’s OS update is the second part of the Android 16 era, but don’t expect major changes. As expected, the first release in June made more changes. Most of what we’ll see in the second update is geared toward Google’s Pixel phones, plus some less notable changes for developers.

Google’s new AI features for notifications are probably the most important change. Android 16 will use AI for two notification tasks: summarizing and organizing. The OS will take long chat conversations and summarize the notifications with AI. Notification data is processed locally on the device and won’t be uploaded anywhere. In the notification shade, the collapsed notification line will feature a summary of the conversation rather than a snippet of one message. Expanding the notification will display the full text.

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Samsung has a new foldable smartphone, and it’s not just another Z Flip or Z Fold. The Galaxy Z TriFold has three articulating sections that house a massive 10-inch tablet-style screen, along with a traditional smartphone screen on the outside. The lavish new smartphone is launching this month in South Korea with a hefty price tag, and it will eventually make its way to the US in early 2026.

Samsung says it refined its Armor FlexHinge design for the TriFold. The device’s two hinges are slightly different sizes because the phone’s three panels have distinct shapes. The center panel is the thickest at 4.2 mm, and the other two are fractions of a millimeter thinner. The phone has apparently been designed to account for the varying sizes and weights, allowing the frame to fold up tight in a pocketable form factor.

Huawei’s impressive Mate XT tri-fold phones have been making the rounds online, but they’re not available in Western markets. Samsung’s new foldable looks similar at a glance, but the way the three panels fit together is different. The Mate XT folds in a Z-shaped configuration, using part of the main screen as the cover display. On Samsung’s phone, the left and right segments fold inward behind the separate cover screen. Samsung claims it has tested the design extensively to verify that the hinges will hold up to daily use for years.

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Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws:

Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.

It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”

Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.

Its secret is shrewd use of the antiquated telecom language Signaling System No. 7, known as SS7, that phone carriers use to route calls and text messages. Any entity with SS7 access can send queries requesting information about which cell tower a phone subscriber is nearest to, an essential first step to sending a text message or making a call to that subscriber. But First Wap’s technology uses SS7 to zero in on phone numbers and trace the location of their users.

Much more in this Lighthouse Reports analysis.

Here’s the summary:

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.

Full paper. News article.

This is a weird story:

The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards that could have been used for telecom attacks within the area encompassing parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“This network had the power to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City,” said special agent in charge Matt McCool.

The devices were discovered within 35 miles (56km) of the UN, where leaders are meeting this week.

McCool said the “well-organised and well-funded” scheme involved “nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement.”

The unidentified nation-state actors were sending encrypted messages to organised crime groups, cartels and terrorist organisations, he added.

The equipment was capable of texting the entire population of the US within 12 minutes, officials say. It could also have disabled mobile phone towers and launched distributed denial of service attacks that might have blocked emergency dispatch communications.

The devices were seized from SIM farms at abandoned apartment buildings across more than five sites. Officials did not specify the locations.

Wait; seriously? “Special agent in charge Matt McCool”? If I wanted to pick a fake-sounding name, I couldn’t do better than that.

Wired has some more information and a lot more speculation:

The phenomenon of SIM farms, even at the scale found in this instance around New York, is far from new. Cybercriminals have long used the massive collections of centrally operated SIM cards for everything from spam to swatting to fake account creation and fraudulent engagement with social media or advertising campaigns.

[…]

SIM farms allow “bulk messaging at a speed and volume that would be impossible for an individual user,” one telecoms industry source, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the Secret Service’s investigation, told WIRED. “The technology behind these farms makes them highly flexible—SIMs can be rotated to bypass detection systems, traffic can be geographically masked, and accounts can be made to look like they’re coming from genuine users.”