Snap Spectacles 2.0

Snap today released the next generation of Spectacles, its wearable camera, with new features for taking photos and water resistance. The sunglasses, which have the same striking form as the first-generation model, have been slimmed down and now come in three jewel tones: onyx (black), ruby (red), and sapphire (blue). They’re available to order starting today at Spectacles.com for $150 — $20 more than the previous model. If you’ve followed the story of Spectacles so far, you know that the first version proved to be a costly misstep for Snap Inc. Although reviewers were generally impressed with their whimsical design, Snap made far more units than the 150,000 or so that it ultimately sold. The company wrote down nearly $40 million in merchandise, and laid off about a dozen people.

Given Snap’s struggles in hardware, it’s fair to ask why the company is trying again. The reason is that hardware has the potential to be a much better business for Snap than software does. It enables new services, it can be sold at healthy profit margins, and it’s harder for competitors to copy. Hardware is extremely difficult to do well — but if Snap can pull it off, hardware could help the company chart a profitable path forward. (It lost $720 million last year.) And however this generation of Spectacles performs, it likely won’t be the last. The company is already working on a $300 version of the device that has two cameras for creating three-dimensional depth effects.




Credits:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17279434/snapchat-spectacles-pricing-availability-snap-wearable-camera

Amazon Now Delivers to Your Car

The online retailer on Tuesday introduced Amazon Key In-Car, a delivery service that drops off packages into people's cars without the need for the owners to be present. The new delivery option is free for Amazon Prime members and available immediately in 37 cities across the U.S., with more cities rolling out over time. The service is an extension of Amazon Key, which Amazon introduced last November as a way for delivery people to enter customers' homes using keyless access. The program has received mixed reviews, with some touting it as a solution to package thefts from porches and others seeing it as an invasion of privacy.

With Amazon Key In-Car, customers with compatible vehicles download the Amazon Key App, then link their Amazon account to it. They select the "in-car" delivery option at checkout, and get notifications from the app once their package has been delivered. Amazon tried the program out on a select number of customers, who beamed while sharing their experience in an Amazon-produced YouTube video Tuesday morning. The cars must be parked in a publicly accessible location in order to receive packages, which will be placed either in the trunk or inside the car itself. Some customers were skeptical. "Amazon can't find my 3-story building and type in a key code. How do they expect to find and unlock the trunk of my car?" tweeted one person.

Click here for the video

Credits:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/buckle-amazon-starts-offering-delivery-service-your-car-n868626

China to Rate All Citizens Behavior

China's plan is to give each citizen a social credit score, which goes far beyond the traditional credit score based on finances. The score can fluctuate based on a range of behaviors, like whether you jaywalk or buy Chinese-made goods or buy too many video games. If your score gets too low, you can be banned from buying a plane ticket, renting a house, accessing high-speed internet or getting a loan. Sensetime, one of China's most successful artificial intelligence companies, has created smart cameras for the government that can help catch criminals but also track average citizens. As people, bikes, cars and buses pass in front of the cameras, identifiers pop up. "It can recognize more than 4,000 vehicles," CEO Xu Li explains. "We can tell whether it is an adult, a child, male or female." With China's millions of surveillance cameras, the government can record jaywalkers at city intersections, zero in on their faces and then shame them on public video screens.

Police in Beijing have been seen wearing glasses that resemble Google Glass and can recognize faces linked to the government's national database. The fear is that the government will use this social credit scoring system to punish people who aren't sufficiently loyal to the Communist party. Trying to clear your name or fight your score is nearly impossible, since there is no real due process. For now, technically, participating in China's Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person (which includes every company or other entity)in China will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.



Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/china-turns-to-tech-to-monitor-shame-and-rate-citizens

A Computer That Reads Thoughts

MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not actually speak aloud. The system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system. Electrodes in the device pick up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations — saying words “in your head” — but are undetectable to the human eye. The signals are fed to a machine-learning system that has been trained to correlate particular signals with particular words.

he device also includes a pair of bone-conduction headphones, which transmit vibrations through the bones of the face to the inner ear. Because they don’t obstruct the ear canal, the headphones enable the system to convey information to the user without interrupting conversation or otherwise interfering with the user’s auditory experience. The device is thus part of a complete silent-computing system that lets the user undetectably pose and receive answers to difficult computational problems. In one of the researchers’ experiments, for instance, subjects used the system to silently report opponents’ moves in a chess game and just as silently receive computer-recommended responses.


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Credits:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mit-media-lab-where-tomorrows-technology-is-born/

The 1st Earth Day

As CBS News' Walter Cronkite described it, on a special broadcast called "Earth Day: A Question of Survival," that was "a unique day in American history … a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival." That first Earth Day was a nationwide series of events championing the cause of the environment, from the streets of New York City (where Fifth Avenue was turned into a crowded pedestrian mall) to a sixth grade science class in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Uncounted millions took part that first Earth Day ... the first, but hardly the last. Twenty years later, "Sunday Morning"'s own Charles Kuralt reported on Earth Day 1990. "In all the frozen cosmos we know of no other place like this." Kuralt referred to the planting of 59,000 trees as "an apology to the Earth." Which brings us to today. This 48th Earth Day focuses on ending plastic pollution, including the estimated 480 billion or more plastic bottles sold worldwide every year. Nearly half a century later, the Earth still needs not just our apology, but our help.


https://www.cbsnews.com/video/almanac-the-first-earth-day/

Credits:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/almanac-the-first-earth-day/

12 Year Old can Hack Your Password

Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal is fueling the debate over how to protect digital information. One hacker from Texas is also raising awareness about growing cyber threats. And he's only 12 years old. Reuben Paul is a sixth grader from Austin. The self-proclaimed "Cyber Ninja" has a second-degree black belt in kung fu, and he's on a mission to show how hacking is child's play. Paul hacks household items to demonstrate how they can be exploited to spy on or even harm people, such as turning "smart toys" into listening devices.

He says that the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections that we use almost every day are extremely vulnerable to hacking. "I'll never connect to a public Wi-Fi that I don't know," he said. "Somebody can just hack into that Wi-Fi network and poison it." He showed CBS News correspondent David Begnaud firsthand how a hacker's poison can spread through a Wi-Fi signal. In just seconds he obtained the reporter's Twitter username and password using a fake page he had cloned, after Begnaud connected to his public Wi-Fi network.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/meet-a-12-year-old-hacker-and-cybersecurity-expert

Credits:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reuben-paul-12-year-old-cyber-ninja-cyber-security/

Extra Day for Taxes ... Cuz the IRS's Computers Broke

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service said it would give taxpayers an additional day to file their 2017 returns after computer problems prevented some people from filing or paying their taxes ahead of Tuesday’s midnight deadline. “Taxpayers do not need to do anything to receive this extra time,” the IRS said in a statement announcing the extension. The agency said its processing systems were now back online. Earlier, the agency said several systems were hit with the computer glitch, including one that handles some returns filed electronically and another that accepts online tax payments using a bank account.

The IRS said it believed the problem was a hardware issue and “not other factors.” It was not clear how many taxpayers might have been affected, but the agency said it received 5 million tax returns on the final day of filing season last year. The agency said taxpayers should continue to file their taxes as normal on Tuesday evening - whether electronically or on paper. Taxpayers could also ask for six-month extensions, as President Donald Trump did. The White House said on Tuesday that Trump, because of the complexity of his tax returns, would file his by Oct. 15.



Credits:
http://abc7news.com/finance/taxpayers-given-unexpected-break-after-irs-website-glitch/3357879/

A Company To Clean Up the Ocean's Plastic

Plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean is out of control as a new study finds the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now three times the size of France. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the name given to an area of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii where plastics of all kinds have been accumulating into one big watery junk pile. It contains everything from plastic buckets to discarded fishing nets. A new study shows the patch is bigger than previously thought and is also growing at an astounding rate.

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation is developing technologies designed to remove plastics from places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The organization has estimated its floating debris-gathering systems could clean up half the patch within five years, though a Guardian report from 2016 questioned the feasibility of the project. The foundation expects to launch its first cleanup system in mid-2018. With this new data on the size and growth of the garbage patch, the group may be facing a bigger challenge than it originally expected.



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Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Scans 85% of the Heavans

NASA's next exoplanet-hunting spacecraft is poised for an on-time liftoff Monday (April 16). The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is ready to go, as is its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ride, mission officials said. And the weather is likely to cooperate as well. Some storms will blow through the area tonight, but they'll likely be gone by the scheduled launch time of 6:32 p.m. EDT (2232 GMT) tomorrow, said weather officer Mike McAleenan, of the U.S. Air Force's 45th Weather Squadron. There's just a 20 percent chance that Mother Nature will scuttle that liftoff, he added. The chief concern for tomorrow is strong winds.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an upcoming NASA mission that will look for planets orbiting the brightest stars in Earth's sky. The mission will monitor at least 200,000 stars for signs of exoplanets, ranging from Earth-sized rocky worlds to huge gas giant planets. (TESS is slated to last two years, but if the mission is extended, it may look at more stars.) TESS will look at variations in the brightness of stars. If an exoplanet passes in front of a star (called a planetary transit), it blocks a portion of the light and causes the brightness to dip. The mission is expected to collect thousands of candidate exoplanets, including Earth-sized and "super-Earth sized" planets. This will help astronomers better understand the structure of solar systems outside of our Earth, and provide insights into how our own solar system formed.

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Credits:
https://www.space.com/40308-nasa-tess-mission-all-systems-go-launch.html

Adobe unveiled Project Voco last week. The software makes it possible to take an audio recording and rapidly alter it to include words and phrases the original speaker never uttered, in what sounds like their voice. One expert warned that the tech could further undermine trust in journalism. Another said it could pose a security threat. However, the US software firm says it is taking action to address such risks.

At a live demo in San Diego on Thursday, Adobe took a digitised recording of a man saying "and I kissed my dogs and my wife" and changed it to say "and I kissed Jordan three times". The edit took seconds and simply involved the operator overtyping a transcript of the speech and then pressing a button to create the synthesised voice track. "We have already revolutionised photo editing. Now it's time for us to do the audio stuff," said Adobe's Zeyu Jin, to the applause of his audience. He added that to make the process possible, the software needed to be provided with about 20 minutes-worth of a person's speech.



Credits:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902

Linear Accelerator

If you’re a history buff, you might not know much particle physics. But the two fields share more in common than you’d think. X-rays from a high-energy lab have revealed ancient Greek medical texts that had been stripped and covered with religious writing. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have long been using high-powered x-rays at their Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to analyze ancient texts. This week, they’ll be revealing the text beneath 10th-century psalms from the St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The hidden words were a translation of writings by the ancient Greek doctor Galen.

There’s all sorts of stuff scientists can do with these x-rays, like imaging, characterizing what something is, or revealing mysteries between objects’ surfaces. Here, the researchers reveal the ink that had been scraped off, which they can detect based on the way the x-rays react upon hitting the surface. The text contains Galen’s words translated into the ancient Syriac language a few hundred years after his death, reports LiveScience. Galen himself was a Greek doctor in the Roman empire who lived from 129 to around 216 C.E. He studied all sorts of medicine through dissecting apes (he could not dissect humans, according to Britannica) and his works remained influential into the Middle Ages. He still believed the outdated study of the four humors, but he made some important discoveries, including that arteries carried blood, not air, as had been previously believed.

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Credits:
https://gizmodo.com/particle-accelerator-reveals-ancient-greek-medical-text-1823730808
https://twitter.com/CNET/status/977953255857598465

Best 2018 Tech April Fools

Roku Remote Socks


Buy your new Lexus using your DNA from 23 and me.


2013 Google Nose.