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Periscope broadcasters can now assign their own chat moderators

It’s going to be harder for trolls to disrupt Periscope broadcasts. The Twitter-owned live-streaming app has offered chat moderation capabilities for years, but it has so far relied on group moderation. That means when users flagged a comment as abuse, spam or harassment, Periscope would randomly select a few other viewers to take a look and decide if that’s true. Violators would be banned if the users agreed. That worked well in some cases, but it still put control in the hands of the crowd, not the live streamer. Now, Periscope is changing that. Instead of relying solely on group moderation, the company says broadcasters will instead be allowed to assign chat moderators before they start streaming. These moderators can then watch the chat during the live broadcast and actively mute commenters in the audience who are disruptive. After being muted, the person will not be allowed to chat for the remainder of the broadcast. This muting activity will be visible to anyone joining the broadcast from either Periscope or Twitter, but assigning chat moderators can only be done from Periscope, the company says.

When the live stream wraps, the broadcaster can then view a list of all the muted accounts and can choose to block those users from joining in future broadcasts. The addition, which arrived alongside new replay editing tools, is another step toward improving the health of conversations on Periscope, the company claims. It follows another change announced this past summer, which focused on stricter enforcement of its rules around abuse and harassment. Before, trolls whose comments were flagged during a broadcast were only temporarily blocked from chatting. They wouldn’t be able to comment on that live broadcast, but they could still join others in the future and continue to disrupt, threaten or abuse the video creator or the community. The change that rolled out this summer made it so that those people who repeatedly got suspended for violating the guidelines would have their Periscope accounts reviewed and suspended. Online harassment is not a new problem, to be sure, but the major social platforms have been struggling to get a handle on the issues. In Twitter’s case, in particular, it’s been called out for being too tolerant of online harassment and hate speech, under the guise of protecting free speech. But Twitter has been trying to better handle abuse complaints, in more recent months, including through the acquisition of anti-abuse technology provider Smyte, which is helping to automate some of the processes here, as well as with the rollout of more stringent policies and anti-abuse features. Periscope hasn’t received as much attention, but is focusing on reducing the abuse that occurs during the real-time conversations on live broadcasts. More info on how the new chat moderation feature works is here. Via: Techcrunch Read the full article

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Google tweaks Android licensing terms in Europe to allow Google app unbundling — for a fee

Google has announced changes to the licensing model for its Android mobile operating system in Europe,  including introducing a fee for licensing some of its own brand apps, saying it’s doing so to comply with a major European antitrust ruling this summer. In July the region’s antitrust regulators hit Google with a recordbreaking $5BN fine for violations pertaining to Android, finding the company had abused the dominance of the platform by requiring manufacturers pre-install other Google apps in order to license its popular Play app store. Regulators also found Google had made payments to manufacturers and mobile network operators in exchange for exclusively pre-installing Google Search on their devices, and used Play store licensing to prevent manufacturers from selling devices based on Android forks. Google disputes the Commission’s findings, and last week filed its appeal — a legal process that could take years. But in the meanwhile it’s making changes to how it licenses Android in Europe to avoid the risk of additional penalties heaped on top of the antitrust fine. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s senior vice president of platforms & ecosystems, revealed the new licensing options in a blog post published today. Under updated “compatibility agreements”, he writes that mobile device makers will be able to build and sell Android devices intended for the European Economic Area (EEA) both with and without Google mobile apps preloaded — something Google’s same ‘compatibility’ contracts restricted them from doing before, when it was strictly either/or (either you made Android forks, or you made Android devices with Google apps — not both). “Going forward, Android partners wishing to distribute Google apps may also build non-compatible, or forked, smartphones and tablets for the European Economic Area (EEA),” confirms Lockheimer. However the company is also changing how it licenses the full Android bundle — which previously required OEMs to load devices with the Google mobile application suite, Google Search and the Chrome browser in order to be able to offer the popular Play Store — by introducing fees for OEMs wanting to pre-load a subset of those same apps under “a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA”. Though Google stresses there will be no charge for using the Android platform itself. (So a pure fork without any Google services preloaded still wouldn’t require a fee.) Google also appears to be splitting out Google Search and Chrome from the rest of the Google apps in its mobile suite (which traditionally means stuff like YouTube, the Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, although Lockheimer’s blog post does not make it clear which exact apps he’s talking about) — letting OEMs selectively unbundle some Google apps, albeit potentially for a fee, depending on the apps in question. “evice manufacturers will be able to license the Google mobile application suite separately from the Google Search App or the Chrome browser,” is what Lockheimer unilluminatingly writes. Perhaps Google wants future unbundled Android forks to still be able to have Google Search or Chrome, even if they don’t have the Play store, but it’s really not at all clear which configurations of Google apps will be permitted under the new licensing terms, and which won’t. “Since the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome together with our other apps helped us fund the development and free distribution of Android, we will introduce a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA. Android will remain free and open source,” Lockheimer adds, without specifying what the fees will be either. “We’ll also offer new commercial agreements to partners for the non-exclusive pre-installation and placement of Google Search and Chrome. As before, competing apps may be pre-installed alongside ours,” he continues to complete his trio of poorly explained licensing changes. We’ve asked Google to clarify the various permitted and not permitted app configurations, as well as which apps will require a fee (and which won’t), and how much the fees will be, and will update this post with any response. The devil in all those details should become clear soon though, as Google says the new licensing options will come into effect on October 29 for all new (Android based) smartphones and tablets launched in the EEA. Via: Techcrunch Read the full article

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Netflix criticizes EU over ‘content quota’

Netflix used its third quarter earnings report to criticize the European Union over a new content quota for streaming services. The EU, writes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the report, is “currently rewriting its audio visual rules” that will demand streaming services like Netflix “devote a minimum of 30 percent of their catalog to European works.” Netflix’s report acknowledged that catering to a specific audience encouraged more regional original programming for international audiences, but suggested that enforcing quotas on a streaming service could have unwanted negative effects. “We’d prefer to focus on making our service great for our members, which would include producing local content, rather than on satisfying quotas, but we anticipate that a regional content quota which approximates the region’s share of our global membership will only marginally reduce member satisfaction,” the report reads. “Nonetheless, quotas, regardless of market size, can negatively impact both the customer experience and creativity. We believe a more effective way for a country to support strong local content is to directly incentivize local content creators, independent of distribution channel.” “What’s in the back and front of my mind is sharing the world’s best content” Netflix does already boast an extensive catalog of international content. Hastings and Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, have spoken at length in the past about developing original series and films for an audience outside of North America. The Financial Times reported in April that Netflix had plans to “double its production spend in Europe,” spending approximately “$1 billion this year, producing 100 programs in 16 countries.” “What’s in the back and front of my mind is sharing the world’s best content, whether that’s Japanese anime, Turkish telenovelas, the film noir of the Nordics,” Hastings told the Financial Times. “I’ve never been very Hollywood-centric.” There’s extra incentives for Netflix to invest in international content. Nearly 79 million of Netflix’s total 137 million subscribers are international, according to the company’s earnings. Devoting space to that rapidly growing audience (up from 72 million last quarter) isn’t just something that will appease the EU — it’s smart business. “We also continue to expand our international originals, with projects spanning India, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, France, Turkey and throughout the Middle East to just name a few,” the earnings report reads. “In India, our hit series Sacred Games was followed up by Ghoul in late August. La Casa de las Flores, our latest Mexican original, has become a big hit.” Hastings has also previously said the company is interested in developing more Bollywood titles out of India and original anime in Japan. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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FCC chairman criticizes US carriers for ‘unacceptable’ progress after Hurricane Michael

FCC chairman Ajit Pai has released a statement criticizing wireless carriers for being slow to restore service in areas affected by Hurricane Michael. The FCC says that the Category 4 hurricane, which devastated parts of the Florida Panhandle, has knocked out internet and cell service for up to 300,000 households. The hurricane made landfall last Wednesday on October 10th, and as of today, customers for Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T are still experiencing outages in some areas. Pai is joining Florida Gov. Rick Scott in calling for carriers to waive monthly bills for affected customers and to allow them to “change carriers without penalty.” (These days most consumers aren’t under service contracts, so that’s a bit of a moot point.) Pay is also asking the Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau to look into the carriers’ recovery efforts. Verizon reported earlier this week that extensive damage to electrical wires and fiber from Michael has slowed down efforts to get its network back up and running for all customers. The company is currently sharing updates to its recovery efforts online and issued a statement today confirming it will offer free credits to affected customers: “Every Verizon customer in Bay and Gulf counties will be automatically credited for 3 months of mobile service for each line. This free service is for both consumer and business accounts.” AT&T is also offering credits to customers in select counties, and issued a statement to The Verge: “We began preparing for this storm before it arrived and our work continues today. Because of these efforts, we were able to keep our customers, including first responders, connected during and after the storm in many areas. In addition, we deployed 15 large scale portable cell sites to the most storm damaged areas to provide connectivity. Before the storm hit we announced and implemented credits for our customers. Beginning on October 10 credits have been given to customers in Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gulf, Liberty, Taylor and Wakulla counties. We plan to continue extending these credits through October 21st, and will continue as conditions require. Our crews continue working day and night to ensure continuing connectivity for the affected areas.” T-Mobile has not yet issued a statement on whether it will be offering bill credits, but reports on its Hurricane Michael network updates page that service is almost fully restored in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia sites, while the Florida Panhandle site is still being worked on. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Facebook News Feed now downranks sites with stolen content

Facebook is demoting trashy news publishers and other websites that illicitly scrape and republish content from other sources with little or no modification. Today it exclusively told TechCrunch that it will show links less prominently in the News Feed if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait headlines orlanding pages overflowing with low-quality ads. The move comes after Facebook’s surveys and in-person interviews with discovered that users hate scraped content. If illgotten intellectual property gets less News Feed distribution, it will receive less referral traffic, earn less ad revenue, and the there’ll be less incentive for crooks to steal articles, photos, and videos in the first place. That could create an umbrella effect that improves content authenticity across the web. And just in case the scraped profile data stolen from 29 million users in Facebook’s recent massive security breach ended up published online, Facebook would already have a policy in place to make links to it effectively disappear from the feed. Here’s an example of the type of site that might be demoted by Facebook’s latest News Feed change. “Latet Nigerian News” scraped one of my recent TechCrunch articles, and surrounded it by tons of ads.

An ad-filled site that scraped my recent TechCrunch article. This site might be hit by a News Feed demotion “Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts that ink out to low quality sites that predominantly copy and republish content from other sites without providing unique value. We are adjusting our Publish Guidelines accordingly” Facebook wrote in an addendum to its May 2017 post about demoting sites stuffed with crappy ads. Facebook tells me the new publisher guidelines will warn news outlets to add original content or value to reposted content or invoke the social network’s wrath. Personally, I think the importance of transparency around these topics warrants a new blog post from Facebook as well as an update to the original post linking forward to it. So how does Facebook determine if content is stolen? It’s systems compare the main text content of a page with all other text content to find potential matches. The degree of matching is used to predict that a site stole its content. It then uses a combined classifier merging this prediction with how clickbaity a site’s headlines are plus the quality and quantity of ads on the site. Via: Techcrunch Read the full article

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A pioneering scientist explains ‘deep learning’

Buzzwords like “deep learning” and “neural networks” are everywhere, but so much of the popular understanding is misguided, says Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Sejnowski, a pioneer in the study of learning algorithms, is the author of The Deep Learning Revolution (out next week from MIT Press). He argues that the hype about killer AI or robots making us obsolete ignores exciting possibilities happening in the fields of computer science and neuroscience, and what can happen when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence. The Verge spoke to Sejnkowski about how “deep learning” suddenly became everywhere, what it can and cannot do, and the problem of hype. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. First, I’d like to ask about definitions. People throw around words like “artificial intelligence” and “neural networks” and “deep learning” and “machine learning” almost interchangeably. But these are different things — can you explain?

Photo: Terrence Sejnowski AI goes back to 1956 in the United States, where engineers decided they would write a computer program that would try to imitate intelligence. Within AI, a new field grew up called machine learning. Instead of writing a step-by-step program to do something — which is a traditional approach in AI — you collect lots of data about something that you’re trying to understand. For example, envision you’re trying to recognize objects, so you collect lots of images of them. Then, with machine learning, it’s an automated process that dissects out various features, and figures out that one thing is an automobile and the other is a stapler. Machine learning is a very large field and goes way back. Originally, people were calling it “pattern recognition,” but the algorithms became much broader and much more sophisticated mathematically. Within machine learning are neural networks inspired by the brain, and then deep learning. Deep learning algorithms have a particular architecture with many layers that flow through the network. So basically, deep learning is one part of machine learning and machine learning is one part of AI. What can deep learning do that other programs can’t? Writing a program is extremely labor-intensive. Back in the old days, computers were so slow and memory was so expensive that they resorted to logic, which is what computers work on. That’s their fundamental machine language as to manipulate bits of information. Computers were just too slow and computation was too expensive. But now, computing is getting less and less expensive, and labor is getting more expensive. And computing got so cheap that it became much more efficient to have a computer learn than have a human being write a program. At that point, deep learning actually began to solve problems that no human has ever written a program before, in fields like computer vision and translation. Learning is incredibly computational-intensive, but you only have to write one program, and by giving it different data sets you can solve different problems. You don’t have to be a domain expert. So there are thousands of applications for anything where there’s a lot of data.

Image: MIT Press, 2018 “Deep learning” seems to be everywhere now. How did it become so dominant? I can actually pinpoint that to a particular moment in history: December 2012 at the NIPS meeting, which is the biggest AI conference. There, Geoff Hinton and two of his graduate students showed you could take a very large dataset called ImageNet, with 10,000 categories and 10 million images, and reduce the classification error by 20 percent using deep learning. What’s wrong with the hype is that people have the timescale wrong Traditionally on that dataset, error decreases by less than 1 percent in one year. In one year, 20 years of research was bypassed. That really opened the floodgates. Deep learning is inspired by the brain. So how do these fields — computer science and neuroscience — work together? The inspiration for deep learning really comes from neuroscience. Look at the most successful deep learning networks. That’s convolutional neural networks, or CNNs, developed by Yann LeCun. If you look at the architecture of the CNNs, it’s not just lots of units, they’re connected in a fundamental way that mirrors the brain. One part of the brain that’s best studied in the visual system and fundamental work in the visual cortex show that there are simple and complex cells. If you look at the CNN architecture, there are the equivalents of simple cells, and the equivalent of complex cells and it comes directly from our understanding of the visual system. Yann didn’t slavishly try to duplicate the cortex. He tried many different variations, but the ones he converged onto were the ones that nature converged onto. This is an important observation. The convergence of nature and AI has a lot to teach us and there’s much farther to go. How much does our understanding of computer science depend on our understanding of the brain? Well, much of our present AI is based on what we knew about the brain in the 60s. We know an enormous amount more now and more of that knowledge is getting incorporated into the architecture. AlphaGo, the program that beat the Go champion included not just a model of the cortex, but also a model of a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which is important for making a sequence of decisions to meet a goal. There’s an algorithm there called temporal differences, developed back in the ‘80s by Richard Sutton, that, when coupled with deep learning, is capable of very sophisticated plays that no human has ever seen before. As we learn about the architecture of the brain and as we begin to understand how they can be integrated into an artificial system, it will provide more and more capabilities way beyond where we are now. Will AI influence neuroscience, too? They are parallel efforts. There have been tremendous advances in innovative neurotechnologies that have gone from recording one neuron at a time to thousands of neurons at the same time, and many parts of the brain simultaneously, completely opening up a whole new world for that. I’ve said there’s a convergence occurring between AI and human intelligence. As we learn more and more about how the brain works, that’s going to reflect back in AI. But at the same time, they’re actually creating a whole theory of learning that can be applied to understanding the brain and allowing us to analyze the thousands of neurons and how their activities are coming out. So there’s this feedback loop between neuroscience and AI which I think is even more exciting and important. Your book discusses so many different applications of deep learning, from self-driving cars to trading. Is there a certain area you find most interesting? One application where I have been just totally blown away is the generative adversarial networks, or GANS. With the traditional neural networks, you give an input, you get an output. The GANs are capable of developing activity — outputs — without input. Right, I’ve heard about this in the context of these networks creating fake videos. They really generate new things that seem realistic, right? They are, in a sense, generating internal activity. This turns out to be the way the brain works. You can look out and see something and then you can close your eyes and you can begin to imagine things that aren’t out there. You have a visual imagery, you have ideas that come to you when things are quiet. That’s because your brain is generative. And now this new class of networks can generate new patterns that never existed. So you can give it, for example, hundreds of images of cars and it would create an internal structure which can generate new images of cars that have never existed and they all look totally like cars. On the flip side, which ideas do you think might be overly hyped? Nobody can predict or imagine what the introduction of this new technology is going to have on the way things are organized in the future. Of course there’s hype. We haven’t solved the really difficult problems. We don’t have general intelligence, but people are saying robots are right around the corner that will replace us, even though robots are much further behind than AI because the body turns out to be more complicated than the brain to replicate. Let’s look at just one technological advance: the laser. It was invented about 50 years ago and it took up the whole room. To go from that room to the laser pointer I use when I give a lecture requires 50 years of commercialization of technology. It had to be advanced to the point where you shrink it down and buy it for five dollars. The same thing is going to happen to hyped technology like self-driving cars. It’s not expected to be ubiquitous next year or probably not 10 years. It may take 50, but the point, though, is that along the way there’ll be incremental advances that will make it more and more flexible, more safe and more compatible to the way we’ve organized our transportation grid. What’s wrong with the hype is that people have the timescale wrong. They’re expecting too much too soon, but in due time it will happen. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Huawei’s Nano Memory Cards are replacing microSD on its latest phones

Alongside the slate of new phones Huawei announced today was an interesting addition: a new type of expandable storage the company is calling Nano Memory (NM), which replaces the traditional microSD card in the newly announced Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. Huawei says that NM cards, which are identical in size and shape to a Nano SIM card, are 45 percent smaller than a microSD card, and come in at least a 256GB storage and 90MB/s transfer speed version that the company showed off onstage.

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge On the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, the NM Card goes in one of the slots on the dual-SIM tray, with users having to choose between extra storage or a second SIM card. As of now, it seems that the NM Card is exclusive to Huawei, both in terms of phones that support the memory cards and storage companies manufacturing them (apropos of nothing: remember Sony’s Memory Sticks?) Things will be far more interesting if NM Cards expand out to other companies as a new standard for storage — especially as dual-SIM phones are becoming increasingly popular to appeal to international markets (even Apple makes a dual-SIM iPhone for China now.) For now, though, we’re still waiting to hear from Huawei about basic things like price and availability for the NM Cards it announced today, let alone the company’s plans for possibly introducing a new industry storage format standard. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Lexar’s new USB 3.0 flash drive can save up to 10 fingerprint IDs

Lexar announced its new JumpDrive Fingerprint F35 USB 3.0 flash drive today, which uses fingerprint authentication to protect your data. It works with speeds up to 150 MB/s, and it can recognize fingerprints in less than a second. You can set it up to recognize up to 10 different people, and it’s protected with 256-bit AES encryption to keep your files safe. 9to5Mac reports that the 32GB variant is available to preorder on Amazon now for $32.99, but it’s not clear when the flash drive will ship. There are also 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB variants, which will cost $50, $90, and $170, respectively, and they will ship in the next few months. Although Lexar says the JumpDrive is compatible with Mac and Windows PCs, Mac owners without a USB 3.0 port won’t be able to use the flash drive without a dongle. Perhaps the company’s next move should be to focus on making its fingerprint sensors available for USB-C flash drives.

Image: Lexar Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Facebook’s ex-security chief will start a new center to bring Washington and Silicon Valley together

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s ex-chief security officer, thinks his former home at the heart of Silicon Valley is ill equipped to address the world’s most pressing digital problems, namely security, user privacy, and the protection of democratic institutions. To address this, and perhaps help ease the tensions between Washington and the tech industry while pulling in more academic and research experts, Stamos is launching a new institute he’s calling the Stanford Internet Observatory. The former exec, who left Facebook for the world of academia in August and has earned a reputation for being outspoken and frank about the issues facing the industry, plans to formally announce the institute later today with a speech at Stanford. News of Stamos’ plans was first reported earlier today by The Washington Post. “There aren’t processes to thoughtfully think through these trade-offs,” Stamos told The Post in an interview ahead of his planned speech, which is set to take place later today at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. “You end up with these for-profit, very powerful organizations that are not democratically accountable, making decisions that are in their best and often short-term interest … without there being a much more open and democratic discussion of what these issues are.” Stamos is trying to pull together Silicon Valley, academics, and Washington Stamos hopes his new institute — which appears to be equal parts think tank, academia research center, and cybersecurity investigator — will bridge gaps between various academic factions, Silicon Valley’s ruling class, and Washington. The goal is that members of all three groups come together to better hold one another accountable and make meaningful progress on big-picture issues. Stamos says the SIO will aid technology companies in cybersecurity investigations and try to promote more sharing of data and a higher level of transparency, to better protect against future threats. Stamos told The Post that he’s particularly concerned about the US midterm elections, set to take place next month, and a tactic he now calls “hack and leak,” which involves stealing sensitive documents or confidential information and releasing it to sow division and undermine the entire electoral process. He points to Russia’s release of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, and later Hillary Clinton’s campaign communications, as the start of a new era of foreign influence operations that rely on the vulnerabilities inherent in how individuals use technology like email accounts and social networks. Stamos admitted his former employer has made great strides in pushing back against these threats — through better detection of fake news, the sussing out of bot accounts and other suspicious behavior, and more tight regulation of political ad spending. But he regrets Facebook’s handling of the 2016 US elections. “I wish we had had a propaganda-focused intel team back then, instead of just focusing on traditional cybersecurity,” he said. Going forward, Stamos hopes the SIO can act as a check on Silicon Valley’s decision-making while also providing a bridge between the industry and the academic and political communities that also have a stake in the country’s ability to defend, detect, and protect against cyberthreats. “We need way more transparency from the companies,” Stamos said. “None of us would be okay with a legal system where the decisions are made in black boxes and there’s no rights of appeal and there’s no understanding of why decisions were made.” Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Magic Leap’s conference teases the thrilling potential of what its hardware can’t yet provide

Florida-based startup Magic Leap became infamous for hyping itself as a revolutionary company whose vision for augmented and mixed reality would transform the worlds of computing, communication, and entertainment — whenever it finally decided to show its hyper-secretive technology to the public, that is. The company set expectations high, but when it finally shipped its first headset, the Magic Leap One Creator Editor, the consensus was that some of those expectations hadn’t been met. Magic Leap hadn’t magically solved AR’s biggest challenges, it turned out. Like the Microsoft HoloLens before it, Magic Leap’s headset was a glimpse at a compelling, but far from mature, technology that simply couldn’t deliver on the grand vision founder Rony Abovitz had laid out for augmented and mixed reality — or what Magic Leap calls “spatial computing.” Last week in Los Angeles, the company held its inaugural developers’ conference, dubbed L.E.A.P. Con. (The acronym stands for “learn, engage, accelerate, and program.”) In many ways, a developers’ conference feels like the perfect environment to discuss a nascent technology like Magic Leap. This kind of gathering focuses heavily on potential — what creators and executives hope will one day be possible — while allowing a healthy dose of demonstrations and guidance about what’s actually possible today. The conference was a snapshot of the current state of the company, and it was hard to not walk away invigorated by the potential of AR and MR — even though the timeline for anyone to deliver on that potential is still up in the air. Noble vision or tech utopianism? From the beginning of the conference’s keynote address, it was clear that Abovitz wouldn’t be shying away from the enthusiastic hyperbole that’s been a hallmark of Magic Leap from the very beginning. “Today our world feels divided,” he said. “It feels broken.” From there, he wound up a pitch about how Magic Leap’s spatial computing is a new medium, and can therefore be built to avoid the problems with trolling, abuse, and lack of representation that plague other media, from the web to television. That’s a noble idea, and Abovitz is correct that designing platforms with a clear-eyed understanding of how people have weaponized products like Facebook and Twitter could result in media that better protect users. But delivering on that will require specifics that simply weren’t addressed. That makes statements like “spatial computing can be a safe haven and a creative space to include all who respect each other, all who want to build new worlds” come off as Star Trek-inspired utopianism — particularly given that the discussion is about some far-off possible future medium, rather than a functioning platform that exists today.

Image: Magic Leap The real look at the company’s big-picture vision came later, when Abovitz took the stage with Magic Leap chief futurist (and science fiction author) Neal Stephenson, and the company’s senior vice president of creative strategy, John Gaeta. The trio broke down the company’s vision for the “Magicverse” — the virtual destination guests step into when using Magic Leap hardware — which would expand far beyond the single-use applications available for the headset today. They hope the Magicverse will one day include vast, city-scale projects (the company is in early discussions about some of these initiatives already, they teased without explanation) where different virtual “layers” could offer a number of different experiences atop a single, real-world location. One layer could simply be a digital re-skin of a physical city, turning a downtown business district into a futuristic science fiction landscape, for example. Other layers could offer entertainment options, while still others would be dedicated to communications and public utilities. The details about these different layers were sparse, of course. It’s easy to criticize the company for talking up such blue-sky thinking, when the modern-day technology is so limited. But that kind of approach is also vital if a company wants to think well beyond present technological possibilities. Other companies may not speak so openly about their grand visions, to avoid setting expectations that can’t be met in the short term. But for better or worse, restraint has never been Abovitz’s style. A strong proof of concept that demonstrates the potential power of the medium In the demonstrations of what the Magic Leap One can actually do, the strengths and weaknesses of today’s technology came sharply into focus. Weta Workshop and Magic Leap’s Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders was the flagship gaming demo at the conference, dropping participants into a shoot-’em-up scenario where the targets — robotic alien creatures — emerged from portals overlaid on the actual walls of the room. It’s an immediately accessible piece of fun, and a strong proof of concept that can demonstrate to a general audience how magical it can feel for a real environment to be digitally transformed around them. As one portal opened, I crept up on it, peering into an alternate dimension that extended far beyond what had previously just been an ordinary wall. When robots blasted energy weapons at me, I wound up dropping to the floor to take cover behind a coffee table. Like virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality both suffer from technological limitations that prevent imagery from being completely photorealistic. But while VR wraps audiences into completely artificial environments, AR and MR are able to leverage and interact with the actual physical location you’re standing in. That fundamental difference made it that much easier for me to buy into the illusion of Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, even with Magic Leap’s current limitations. However, with robots coming at me from multiple walls, the headset’s limited 50-degree field of view was hard to miss, and if I got too close to the portal on a given wall, the digital imagery would falter and vanish until I took a step back. But the game was nevertheless good at using small visual and audio cues to direct player focus — enough so that I almost always engaged with shooting the approaching robots with the Magic Leap controller, rather than twisting my head to make sure I could see them.

Image: Magic Leap Insomniac Games’ Seedling was a simpler demo, letting players cultivate an alien plant on their own table. The gameplay was simple, and the use of the Magic Leap controller to switch between a watering can and pruning shears didn’t provide the most intuitive experience, but it was still a cute distraction, with the colorful plant growing larger as tiny alien creatures danced and hovered around it. What stood out most in Seedling, however, was a pre-game sequence where I had to flip through a digital magazine that appeared on the table in front of me. The hand-tracking was imperfect, but I eventually managed to flip through the magazine just by pinching the corners of the magazine. Again, it was a reminder that when the technology advances further, it will be intuitive and impressive — it��s just not there yet. Other demos included a piece in which a motion-captured performer from the Royal Shakespeare Company recited a speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It on a table in front of me. I was able to walk up close to the performer, or to either side, and it gave the performance a sense of intimacy that was markedly different from film, TV, or even live theater. Unfortunately Magic Leap didn’t let me eat the Porgs On the more commercial side of things was Star Wars: Project Porg. An experiment put together by ILMxLAB, the project is an experiment to see how the technology could be used to create what essentially amounts to persistent digital pets. A handful of Porgs roamed around the demo space, and I was able to pick them up with the controller and put them on different surfaces, or interact with them using digital treats and toy balls. The Porgs didn’t look completely solid — something my colleague Adi Robertson encountered in several Magic Leap demos earlier this year — but they did respond to my actions. They would back up if I got too close, and if I decided to repeatedly drop virtual toys on their heads, they would bleat and get more and more upset. (Following Chewbacca’s lead and eating one unfortunately wasn’t an option.) The version of the experience that will be released to the public in December will allow the creatures to roam the user’s living room, but the conference demo also featured interaction with smart home devices, allowing a tabletop fan to ruffle a Porg’s feathers, or causing the creatures to respond to music being played in the room. It’s another demonstration of how — once again, one day — the headset will be able to integrate with real environments in any number of ways.

Image: Magic Leap But the most arresting demonstration of the conference for me didn’t have anything to do with space creatures, killer robots, or alien life forms. It was a highly detailed digital avatar named Mica. In the demonstration, a riff on Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, I sat down at a wooden table opposite the digital character. With the Magic Leap One tracking my eye movement, Mica was able to maintain eye contact, and her subtle smiles and other facial expressions gave the distinct impression she was an interactive digital being. Mica wasn’t completely responding to what I was saying or doing — though that is the eventual hope — but the demo nevertheless hinted at the ability to establish what felt like a real connection with a digital creation. It felt more like sitting opposite an actor in a short immersive theater production than taking part in a tech demo, and it was the moment that left me most intrigued about the potential of mixed reality as a medium. The partially occluded digital character, sitting down with me over a table I could feel with my own two hands, grounded the illusion of Mica in a way that was noticeable, with the actual physical reality Magic Leap was projecting upon doing much of the heavy lifting. I found that simple, non-verbal exchange of gazes impactful in a way few digital experiences are — and one that would be almost comical if attempted with AR through a smartphone screen. Magic Leap has talked about Mica as a potential digital assistant of the future, not unlike Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, but that very obvious use case isn’t what intrigued me. Instead, it was how adept this technology is, even in these very early days, at simulating the experience of being next to another human being. The potential there is so vast, stretching across so many use cases and types of experiences, that it’s difficult to fathom. Thinking about it solely in terms of clunky digital assistants seems reductive. In this environment, Abovitz’s blue-sky thinking and outsized claims about what this technology could become seem more inviting, and even believable.

Magic Leap’s digital avatar is named Mica. | Photo by Bryan Bishop / The Verge   While each of the demos tended to highlight one particular aspect of what Magic Leap might one day be able to do, the specter of what it can’t do was omnipresent. During an afternoon presentation, ILMxLAB’s mixed reality supervisor, Michael Koperwas, outlined the numerous experiments the company has engaged in since beginning its collaboration with Magic Leap several years ago. It was a fascinating look inside the creative process. At one point, xLAB toyed with the idea of mixed-reality movie-screen extensions that could bring the action off a screen and into the physical space above the audience. It’s also explored the idea of using Star Wars-style holograms to give video chats a new flair. The company considered bringing characters like C-3PO to life, but found that human-sized characters were ultimately a distraction, given that Magic Leap’s limited field of view would clip portions of the characters unless the audience was standing far away. That led to focusing on experiences that could take place in a “story bubble,” or focusing on smaller characters in general. Magic Leap needs compelling examples and killer apps to become a viable consumer product Designing around a technology’s limitations isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth noting, because so much of the experimental work a company like ILMxLAB is doing is also about finding out what a new technology is best suited to do. Magic Leap has a firm grasp on the utility of future versions of its technology, but seems less certain about what it should be used for today other than experimentation. In the process, a different kind of chicken-and-egg problem begins to present itself: Magic Leap needs compelling examples and killer apps to be a viable consumer product, but the current limitations of the hardware could prevent creators from ever hitting upon those use cases in the first place. All of which leads back to Rony Abovitz and his grand pronouncements about Magic Leap’s potential. It’s undeniable that the company is working on fascinating technology, and is collaborating with some of the most forward-thinking minds in the world when it comes to entertainment, gaming, and extended reality. Companies like AT&T already see Magic Leap as a massive opportunity — the company is building a 5G network on Magic Leap’s corporate campus to help it develop 5G-enabled applications, and AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan compared the device to the iPhone during the L.E.A.P. Con keynote. There is no question that augmented and mixed reality are incredibly compelling, and the future Abovitz envisions is thrilling. But Magic Leap’s headset is still in its relative infancy. Talking to developers and attendees at L.E.A.P. Con, it was clear that everyone was enthusiastic about the potential of the device and the AR medium. But it will take time to get there: time for more iterations of the hardware, time for developers and creators to experiment and play, and time for social norms to change to the point where people will feel comfortable walking around in the real world with things around them obscured by AR overlays. In the meantime, Abovitz’s gift for ambitious hype could be exactly what the company needs to keep developers, investors, and potential business partners excited — even though he’s set expectations the company’s first headset couldn’t meet. With a project as early in its development cycle as Magic Leap, it’s vital to highlight the future everyone involved is working toward. In that sense, the company’s most important products aren’t hardware and games: they’re possibility and promise. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Julian Assange needs to take care of his cat, or it’ll be given away, Ecuador says

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has been hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the past six years, has been given a new set of house rules if he wants to continue his stay. In a memo first published on Ecuadorian website Código Vidrio and obtained by The Guardian, conditions for his stay were contingent on his ability to stay out of activity “considered as political or interfering with the internal affairs of other states.” It also outlines basic housekeeping rules, like cleaning his own bathroom and taking care of his pet cat. Not much is known about where this cat came from; it was reported in his New Yorker profile that the story about the cat being a gift from his children was a lie. All we know is that Assange likes to dress the cat up in neckties and he has given the cat its own Twitter and Instagram accounts. However, in a tragic twist, he hasn’t been able to update them since his internet was taken away in March for violating his agreement with Ecuador not to meddle in other countries’ affairs. The document also states that the Ecuadorian Embassy would not pay for his food, laundry, or any part of his stay starting in December. If he fails to take care of the cat’s “well-being, food and hygiene,” it’ll be taken away and given to someone else. The memo states that Assange’s internet ban is being lifted partially now, and he’ll be able to start using his own phone and computer with access to the embassy’s Wi-Fi. But if this brings about any more political interference and he pisses off the Ecuadorian government again, it “could lead to the termination of the diplomatic asylum.” The cat’s name is Michi (Ecuadorian for “cat”), but it usually just goes by the nickname EmbassyCat. The cat is a central part of PR for Assange, who uses it for everything from garnering sympathy to slapping its face across WikiLeaks merch. Below is an EmbassyCat-branded mousepad sold on the WikiLeaks shop that reads, “I live in the Ecuadorian embassy with Julian Assange : Interested in counter-purrveilance.”

  Assange has not been able to read the memo as of Monday, as it hadn’t been translated from Spanish, and he did not yet have access to the internet. However, we’ll probably know when he’s back online when he decides to update the petstagrams. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Amazon invests in solar power and recycling programs to cut carbon footprint

Amazon announced two new initiatives today that are aimed at reducing its environmental impact. The first is a $10 million investment in the Closed Loop Fund, an effort to pool corporate resources to help the US improve its municipal recycling programs. The other is a solar energy project in the United Kingdom that will see Amazon install 20 megawatts worth of solar panels to help power fulfillment centers across the region. Amazon also signed a deal saying it will purchase enough green energy certificates to ensure 100 percent of all buildings in the UK are offset by renewable sources like solar and wind. It makes sense why, at least domestically, Amazon would be focusing its efforts on recycling: the company’s largest retail sector is North America, particularly the US, and it ships a massive amount of cardboard across the country every day. With the Closed Loop Fund, Amazon wants to contribute to the financing of recycling infrastructures for cities. The company notes in its press release that nearly half of all Americans do not have access to curbside recycling pickup, resulting in countless tons of cardboard and other reusable material getting thrown in the trash and inevitably filling up landfills. Amazon is trying to offset the massive amount of cardboard it ships every day “This investment will help build the local capabilities needed to make it easier for our customers and their communities to recycle and to increase the amount of material recycled across the country,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of Worldwide Operations, said in a statement. “We are investing in Closed Loop Fund’s work because we think everyone should have access to easy, convenient curbside recycling. The more we are all able to recycle, the more we can reduce our collective energy, carbon, and water footprint.” In London, which is a European fulfillment hub for getting packages shipped to the rest of the UK, Amazon will work over the course of the next 18 months on deploying rooftop solar panel systems. The company says it will generate the equivalent of 4,500 UK homes in electricity from solar energy, and in the process, it says it will reduce its carbon footprint by 6,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. While these initiatives are needed from a company as large as Amazon, they lag far behind efforts from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. The other four members of the Big Five have, over the course of the last decade, all been working toward a 100 percent renewable commitment, which involves making global operations carbon neutral through investments in reviewable energy and the purchasing of green energy certificates to offset grid usage. Both Apple and Google achieved that earlier this year. Facebook pledges that it will be 100 percent renewable by 2020, thanks in large part to its building and maintaining of custom data centers, while Microsoft has been carbon neutral for years now. Other big tech companies, like Samsung and Sony, have followed in those footsteps with green energy works and renewable commitments. Amazon has a long way to go to become truly carbon neutral Amazon, however, has been criticized by Greenpeace for its lack of publicly available data on energy use, and the company has clearly prioritized fulfillment and data center expansion over a carbon neutral footprint. Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division has a “long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure,” but the company is only 50 percent of the way there as of January 2018. With regard to Amazon’s retail business, there is clear progress being made, particularly around the company’s Frustration-Free Packaging program that incentivizes retailers to reduce the amount of unnecessary cardboard and plastic that goes into product packaging, which also allows Amazon to ship more products in a single box. The company says the program has “eliminated 244,000 tons of packaging material to date” and slimmed down the numbrt of shipping boxes mailed out by 500 million units. Understandably, Amazon is in the game of shipping, logistics, and retail, which is not quite the same as producing software or running search engines and social networks. So it would have a much bigger obstacle ahead of it in the quest to become 100 percent carbon neutral, although the company has yet to publicly commit to such a mission for its entire business and not just its cloud division. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Pokémon Go update bringing ‘mon from the Sinnoh region is live

If you’ve been laying off the Pokémon Go for a while due to a lack of new monsters, prepare to be glued to your phone again. Niantic is now adding pokémon from the rugged Sinnoh region that first appeared in 2007’s Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum games. Of course, it’s not so simple as a dump of a hundred new ‘mon into your area. The new guys are arriving in waves, likely meaning the most common sorts will start appearing today, while cooler ones and sets of themed critters will arrive over the coming weeks. These are part of the Generation 4 set, but it’s not clear yet which will be appearing first or indeed at all. It’s entirely up to Niantic and you can be sure they’re going to mete these little guys out over several months, interspersed with other events — anything to keep you catching. Everyone will probably have a Chimchar on their shoulder soon, because that sucker is cute, but ultimately everyone is going to want a Dialga. I get the feeling they’re going to be a regular feature at gyms soon. I for one will be working to evolve a Glaceon. There are also some new evolutions, so don’t trash your mid-tier pokémon just yet. Magmortar, Electivire, Tangrowth, and Rhyperior mean you’ll have a use for all that extra candy. Update your app and start draining that battery, Trainer! And don’t forget that we’ve got Niantic’s Ross Finman at our AR/VR Session in LA this Thursday. Drop by if you’re in the area. Via: Techcrunch Read the full article

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Macaw will curate Twitter for you, help expand your network

Twitter today inserts activity-based tweets into your timeline, alerting you to things like the popular tweets liked by people you follow, or those Twitter accounts that a lot of people in your network have just started to follow. These alerts can be useful, but their timing is sporadic and they can be easily missed. Plus, if you turn off Twitter’s algorithmic timeline (as may be possible for some), you’ll lose access to this sort of info. A new Twitter app called Macaw aims to help. Macaw, which recently launched on Product Hunt, offers a set of similar information as Twitter does, with a few changes. Macaw works by first pulling in a list of people you follow. It then tracks what tweets they like throughout the day and turns that into a feed of tweets that were most popular. Macaw does the same thing for users, too – that is, it shows you if a number of people have suddenly started following someone, for example.

Beyond this, Macaw will also show you the “Latest” tweets receiving likes from your network in a separate tab, as well as tweets where someone has asked a question. This “Asks” section will highlight tweets where someone on Twitter has asked something like “Does anyone know…?” or “what are the best…?”, for example. This can help you find new conversations to participate in and help you expand your network.

The end result is a curated version of Twitter, where you can catch up with what’s important, without so much endless scrolling through your timeline. Even if you’re on Twitter itself a lot, Macaw can still be useful. Its default setting will hide top tweets posted by someone in your network – because, chances are, you’ve already read them. With this setting turned on, you’ll only be shown top tweets by users you don’t yet follow. You can also configure how many likes are required for something to be considered a “top” tweet. By default, this is set to 25, but you can change it to 10, 100, or even 1,000. You can adjust the default setting for the age of the tweet, too, from 6 hours to 2 hours, 24 hours, or 96 hours, based on how often you check in.

The app, however, is not a Twitter client. That is, it doesn’t take the place of Twitter or other apps like Twitterific or Tweetbot, as you can’t use it to post tweets, access direct messages, update your profile, or follow users. You’ll need a different app, like the main Twitter client, for that. But a tap in Macaw will launch Twitter for you, making the transition feel seamless. The app was built by Zachary Hamed, who had previously built Daily 140 for tracking a similar set of data, shared via email. He says he started building Macaw as a side project and launched it into private beta in August. It doesn’t currently have a business model, beyond a plan to maybe charge for additional features later on. In some ways, Macaw is similar to Nuzzel, another Twitter summarization app that provides a list of top links that your network is sharing and discussing. But many of the best things on Twitter aren’t links, they’re individual tweets or tweetstorms. (Like that recent Google+ rant, for example). Hamed admits Nuzzel was a source of inspiration for Macaw (a bird that screams constantly, by the way. Ha!) “I was actually inspired by those notifications in the main Twitter app since I’ve always found them fascinating and by Nuzzel, which is one of my most used apps – and whose founder Jonathan I really respect,” Hamed says. “I think there is a lot of hidden insight to be found in posts people have liked and who they start following, especially if there is momentum around certain names or topics. As of now, Twitter only shares one to two of those recommendations, not all of it,” he adds. *While we do like Macaw, the app, one thing we’re not a fan of are the fake reviews on the Macaw website, which pretend to be from @Jack, Mary Meeker, and Chamath Palihapitiya. It’s obviously meant to be a joke, but it falls flat – Macaw doesn’t need this sort of false promotion, and it’s wrong because it could confuse less savvy users. Macaw is a free download on the App Store. Via: Techcrunch Read the full article

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JLab’s new over-ear sport headphones have washable ear pads

JLab’s newest pair of sport headphones come with a unique twist: they’re not earbuds. The Flex Sport are over-ear Bluetooth headphones, and they are designed to be worn during all types of workouts and rigorous physical activity. The headphones come with 20 hours of play time and removable ear pads that can be tossed in the washing machine. The model enters a small but growing category of higher-quality audio gear designed for workouts, including over-ear models from JBL / Under Armour and Jabra. JLab says it’s built a technology into the headphones called Be Aware that lets in ambient noise so that you don’t inadvertently injure yourself by missing the shouts and hollers of nearby athletes or workout partners. As for the hardware, the headphones themselves are made of a breathable, mesh-looking material that JLab says is sweatproof, so you won’t fry the underlying circuitry by exerting yourself too hard. The whole package comes with two adjustable tension bands, which are flexible and made of a durable enough material that they won’t snap under pressure. The Flex Sport headphones are on sale at Best Buy now for $99.99. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Google will let users hide the Pixel 3 XL’s giant notch with a software black bar

After weeks of leaks, Google officially announced the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones yesterday, but one part of the updated device isn’t sitting well with users: the giant camera notch on the front of the XL variant. Fortunately, for the notch-averse out there, it seems that Google will offer an option to hide the notch by blacking out the entire top portion of the display, via Gizmodo. https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1049734782173605888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw It’s an option we’ve seen offered on a variety of other notched Android phones, including those from LG, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Huawei. But it’s nice to see Google offer the option here, too. As 9to5Google points out, there’s already the ability to black out the notch in the existing Android Pie build hidden in the development menu, which may be what the original Google tweet was referring to. But hopefully the company is adding something a little more user-friendly than digging in developer options for when the Pixel 3 hits stores. You can get an idea of what the Pixel 3 looks like with the nixed notch in 9to5Google managing editor Stephen Hall’s tweet below: https://twitter.com/hallstephenj/status/1050036131419607043?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw It’s not clear if the no-notch look is better. Android still has to display a menu bar, which it does below the simulated bezel. That means you’ll lose even more space in addition to the larger-than-normal area on top that you’re choosing to black out to hide the larger-than-normal notch. But at least there’s a choice: keep the notch and deal with the giant slab of despair or sacrifice a huge chunk of your screen to get back the bezels you thought you left behind in the name of aesthetics. Which will you choose? Via: Theverge Read the full article

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Google ends support for Reply, which added smart replies to third-party apps

Google will no longer continue support for Reply, an experimental app that offers smart reply responses to various messaging apps such as Slack, Hangouts, and Messenger. The app launched earlier this year as part of Google’s Area 120 division that incubates and tests wacky apps. “As you know, Reply was an experiment, and that experiment has now ended,” Google wrote in an email to beta testers. “While it might still work for the next few months, you may encounter bugs, or see that the suggestions aren’t as good.” The company says it will incorporate what it’s learned from the app in other Google products, which likely includes Gmail’s Smart Compose and Smart Reply. (Smart Reply is also available on Android Messages.) When I tested the app earlier this year, I found that Reply’s automated responses were often bland, leaned toward affirmative answers, or just simply parroted the noun from the message that was received. It also tended to offer “I love you” as a default third response regardless of context. Reply was also supposed to roll out a Maps and Calendar integration that could offer appointment suggestions or commute estimates based on a user’s current location and traffic conditions, but neither of these suggestions was available in my short time using Reply. If Google plans to still roll out these features, however, expect to see them in Gmail and Android Messages first. Via: Theverge Read the full article

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