On the surface, ChatGPT might seem like a tool that can come in useful for an array of work tasks. But before you ask the chatbot to summarize important memos or check your work for errors, it's worth remembering that anything you share with ChatGPT could be used to train the system and perhaps even pop up in its responses to other users. That's something several Samsung employees probably should have been aware of before they reportedly shared confidential information with the chatbot.Soon after Samsung's semiconductor division started allowing engineers to use ChatGPT, workers leaked secret info to it on at least three occasions, according to The Economist Korea (as spotted by Mashable). One employee reportedly asked the chatbot to check sensitive database source code for errors, another solicited code optimization and a third fed a recorded meeting into ChatGPT and asked it to generate minutes.Reports suggest that, after learning about the security slip-ups, Samsung attempted to limit the extent of future faux pas by restricting the length of employees' ChatGPT prompts to a kilobyte, or 1024 characters of text. The company is also said to be investigating the three employees in question and building its own chatbot to prevent similar mishaps. Engadget has contacted Samsung for comment.ChatGPT's data policy states that, unless users explicitly opt out, it uses their prompts to train its models. The chatbot's owner OpenAI urges users not to share secret information with ChatGPT in conversations as it's “not able to delete specific prompts from your history.” The only way to get rid of personally identifying information on ChatGPT is to delete your account — a process that can take up to four weeks.The Samsung saga is another example of why it's worth exercising caution when using chatbots, as you perhaps should with all your online activity. You never truly know where your data will end up.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/three-samsung-employees-reportedly-leaked-sensitive-data-to-chatgpt-190221114.html?src=rss
Substack users woke to a strange surprise today when trying to share links on Twitter, finding an error message when interacting with any tweet featuring a Substack link. Tweets with an outgoing link to Substack cannot be retweeted, replied to or even liked. The error message states that “some actions on this tweet have been disabled by Twitter.” The loss in functionality even extends to tools like TweetDeck.
Outdoor pizza ovens are having a moment. The compact, portable models have become popular for both novice and pro cooks alike, allowing them to host casual pizza parties or cater events as part of a restaurant business. While the wood- and gas-burning ovens can be fun to use for all skill levels, they have to remain outdoors, and using wood or charcoal requires more attention.After making some of the best outdoor pizza ovens, Ooni introduced its first electric model designed for indoor use in March. The Volt 12 ($999) encompasses everything from the company’s existing product line, from high-heat cooking to consistent results, and adds ease of use and baking versatility to the mix. This beast is big and expensive, but it also makes some damn good pizza.DesignPhoto by Billy Steele/EngadgetThe Volt 12 looks like what I’d expect an electric pizza oven from Ooni to look like. It bears the most resemblance to the Karu 16, one of the largest models the company offers. The gray and black color scheme is on every current Ooni model, except for the all-silver multi-fuel Karu 12. Rather than a rectangle, the Volt 12 has angled corners, making it more of a flat octagon than a boring box. Ooni says the exterior is powder-coated and weather resistant so you can take it outdoors – not that you would want it to get too wet. Since this model is more of a countertop appliance than its open-flame predecessors, the Volt 12 has short, stubby legs rather than the longer, folding ones on the wood- and gas- burning units.Only three Ooni models have glass doors that allow you to watch the entire cooking process. As an electric, indoor oven, the Volt 12 is one of those. Unlike the Karu 16 and Karu 12G, this panel is gloss black instead of metal. The door has a robust black handle that remains cool to the touch, even at 850 degrees, and a row of three control dials sit beneath the glass window. The only other button is an on/off switch on the left side of the front. This turns off the power completely. When this is switched on, the oven sits in standby mode until you hit the power button on the front that actually gets the Volt 12 ready to use.On the left is the time dial with the power button above it. The center control is for temperature, which ranges from 350 to 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Lastly, the far right dial is for “balance,” allowing you to shift how much power is given to the top and bottom heating elements. In other words, you can put more emphasis on the stone for a crisper crust or more on the top for a bit more browning/char. The balance control also activates a boost feature that can be used to get the stone to return to target temp quickly between pizzas (it takes about 45 seconds). All three controls are flanked by white lights for precise level indications. During pre-heating, for example, the temperature dial starts at 350 and slowly moves around to your target, blinking along the way at the current status.The bottom heating element sits underneath the stone – a 13-inch square cooking surface that can accommodate a variety of pans in addition to 12-inch pizza. There’s also an interior light that stays on the whole time, making it very easy to see how things are progressing without having to open the door.Setup and usePhoto by Billy Steele/EngadgetBefore the first use, you’ll need to season Volt 12. This requires you to run the oven at full blast (850) for 20 minutes and then allow it to cool before preheating to launch your first pizza. The cooldown takes quite a bit longer than the preheating or 20-minute burnoff, so you’ll want to do thing well before you need to actually cook. The cool down time on the Volt 12 takes a while. While the exterior will be back to room temp sooner, it takes a while for the inside to do the same since the Volt 12 is so well-insulated. This means you’ll have to wait at least an hour to safely store it or put the cover on.Ooni says the 1,600-watt Volt 12 can hit 850 degrees in 20 minutes where it can cook a pizza in 90 seconds. This makes it slightly slower to achieve max temperature than its wood- or gas-burning counterparts. The Karu 16, for example, can reach 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes. Still, 20 minutes is remarkably quick, and in my experience, the Volt 12 actually hit 850 faster than that.The key advantage the Volt 12 has over its wood-burning siblings is convenience. Those models make great pizza with the subtle flavor of wood fire, but the flames require supervision whereas the Volt 12 is very much set it and forget it. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the fire in between stretching dough, topping pizzas and launching them into the oven. The Volt 12 also sets the balance dial based on your cooking temperature, but you can adjust it if you need to. Most outdoor Ooni ovens have an optional gas burner (propane and natural gas models), which would also remedy some of the headaches with temperature regulation.Making the pizzaPhoto by Billy Steele/EngadgetAll of this sounds great on paper, but it would be for naught if the thing didn’t make good pizza. Thankfully, Ooni has translated its formula for excellent outdoor cooking to its electric oven. The Volt 12 produces comparable results to any of the company’s other models, right down to the char and leoparding on Neapolitan pies. Since the temperature dial gives you more precise control, it’s easier to achieve the desired cook on everything from New York style to thin-and-crispy. With the extra space inside, you can also make Detroit pan pizza, as well as roast and bake other items with ease. The Volt 12 did well with any type of crust I threw at it, churning out tasty pies consistently in just a few minutes.Running wide open at 850 degrees, the Volt 12 makes excellent Neapolitan-style pizza. You’ll need to make sure you have a proper dough recipe (Scott Deley’s The Ooni Pizza Project is a great guide), but assuming you're starting with a good base, the oven will do its thing well. I found that the Volt 12 is a little more forgiving with rotating the pies than the open-flame outdoor models, so you don’t need to babysit it quite as much. These pizzas were light and airy with a slight crispness to the bottom and the requisite leoparding. New York-style pizzas baked at 650 were also great, with crisp edges and bottom, with a pleasant chewiness to the crust.Photo by Billy Steele/EngadgetThere are some downsides to the Volt 12, the big one being the price. It’s $999, and I’ll be the first to tell you that excellent pizza is achievable with your main oven and a baking stone or steel that costs a fraction as much. The second thing is it’s huge. The Volt 12 takes up the entire depth of the counter and is 20 inches wide. It also weighs just under 40 pounds. That’s not too heavy, relatively speaking, and the Volt 12 can easily be chucked in the backseat for a nearby party. Ooni did design it with built-in handles on the sides though, which makes the task of moving it slightly easier.The competitionIn the US, Ooni’s main competition for the Volt 12 is the Breville Pizzaiolo. This oven has been on the market for a few years at this point, with a design that looks more like one of the company’s toaster ovens. It’s an all-stainless steel aesthetic, with a glass door for viewing and easy-to-use controls up front. Out of the box, the Pizzaiolo runs on a variety of presets for different styles, but Breville also equipped it with a manual mode to give you full control over the top and bottom heating elements.The three strikes against this alternative are cost, a confining cooking surface and the lack of interior lighting. The Pizzaiolo is $999.95, so unless you find one on sale, you won’t save any money over the Volt 12. The stone on the Pizzaiolo is circular instead of square, so you’ll only be able to use 12-inch round pans in addition to your pizza. And lastly, there’s no light inside, so it can be a challenge to keep tabs on the cooking process. You’ll almost certainly have to open the door at some point for a closer inspection.Wrap-upWith the Volt 12, Ooni enters new territory by bringing its formula for stone-baked pizza indoors. While the results are consistently great across a range of styles, this is the company’s most expensive product to date, and I can see that being prohibitive for some – no matter how good the pizza is. A Karu 16 with the additional purchase of a gas burner is $920 or $950 (propane vs. natural gas), which would give you the convenience of a control dial with option of cooking with wood. Still not cheap, but that oven is big enough to do more than just pizza, so it’s also quite versatile. What it really comes down to is where you’ll be cooking most often – inside or out – or if you’re just fine upgrading your pizza game with accessories for your kitchen oven. And there’s absolutely no shame in doing that.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ooni-volt-12-review-180019262.html?src=rss
Google announced end-of-life dates today for products relying on the Nest app that won’t carry over to the new Google Home. If you own any Nest Secure or Dropcam home-security products, you have a year to use them before they become paperweights. Phasing out old and incompatible hardware could signal that the arrival of Google’s more customizable new Home app is drawing near.Nest Secure will continue to work until April 8th, 2024. To ease the blow, Google is offering some freebies to customers — as the company often does when its products head to the Google Graveyard. Nest Secure users will receive an offer for a free ADT Self Setup System (up to a $485 value); alternatively, they can opt for $200 in Google Store credit. Google says it will send an email with redemption instructions to eligible users.Dropcam products will also cease to work after April 8th of next year. Google advises users to download and save their video history before this date to avoid losing it. As consolation for Dropcam customers, the company is offering a free Nest Cam (indoor, wired) for those with a Nest Aware subscription; those without a subscription can take 50 percent off the same camera.DropcamFinally, Works With Nest, the API system allowing third-party integrations with otherwise incompatible smart home accessories, will stop working after September 29th. Google points customers to Assistant-based routines in the Google Home app as a replacement, and it plans to launch a script editor “in the coming months” to make up for other lost features. The company says it’s also “working closely” with partners to provide replacement integrations.Google announced an updated Home app last October that could be the primary source for today’s hardware cutoff announcements. The updated Home app integrates Matter, including its Fast Pair feature. It’s available now in a public preview.Nest Secure launched in 2017 as a fresh take on smart home security. Designed to compete with legacy brands like ADT (which Google later invested in), the system included a Guard base, motion-detecting sensors for windows and doors and tag keychains, which let you quickly enable or disable the system. Google announced in 2020 it had discontinued the platform but promised it would continue working for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Dropcam began as a pioneering smart home security brand, launching some of the first cloud-connected cameras. Google / Nest bought the startup in 2014 for $555 million, a move that founder Greg Duffy later described as a “mistake.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nest-secure-and-dropcam-products-will-stop-working-in-april-2024-172925431.html?src=rss
NASA has launched an innovative air quality monitoring instrument into a fixed-rotation orbit around Earth. The tool is called TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument, and it keeps an eye on a handful of harmful airborne pollutants in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ground-level ozone. These chemicals are the building blocks of smog.TEMPO traveled to space hitched to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA says the launch was completed successfully, with the atmospheric satellite separating from the rocket without any incidents. NASA acquired the appropriate signal and the agency says the instrument will begin monitoring duties in late May or early June.
For the fifth time in just over three months, Tesla has slashed the prices of its electric vehicles in the US, as Reuters reports. The company has cut prices by up to six percent across its lineup. The Model 3, for instance, is $1,000 less expensive than it was yesterday. It now starts at $41,990, according to Tesla's website.There are bigger discounts on higher-end configurations. The Model Y Long Range and Performance models have dropped by another $2,000 to $52,990 and $56,990, respectively. The Model S and Model X have already seen major price cuts this year and have dipped by an extra $5,000 to starting prices of $84,990 and $94,990. As Electrek points out, the price of the base Model S has tumbled by $20,000 since 2022, while the Model S Plaid is over $25,000 less expensive than it was a few months ago.Tesla said this week it delivered almost 423,000 EVs in the first three months of 2023 amid the initial waves of price cuts in the US, China and other countries. That figure marked a company record, as deliveries increased by four percent from the previous quarter. However, Tesla again missed analyst estimates.The company aims to deliver 1.8 million EVs this year. It's not on track to do that yet based on the first-quarter figures. Although the multitude of price cuts could ultimately boost demand and make Tesla more competitive in an increasingly crowded sector, analysts have noted that the discounts could eat into the company's profit margins given the relatively small increase in deliveries they've spurred to date.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-cuts-ev-prices-for-the-fifth-time-this-year-161008384.html?src=rss
EA will release the mobile free-to-play Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth on May 10th, marking its first LOTR game since 2009's The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. It also unveiled the first real trailer, showing gameplay, menus and more. It's one of five LOTR games currently in development from Embracer (which bought the rights last year), including the much anticipated Lord of the Rings: Gollum set to arrive shortly afterwards.The trailer features a "stylized realism art style," EA wrote, leaning into existing lore with wanderers, warriors, wizards and other classic LOTR characters. AT the same time, it creates "a more diverse and inclusive Middle-earth," the company said, while showing off Story, PVP and other gameplay modes.Heroes of Middle-earth includes characters from both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, along with collection systems, turn-based combat and more. In a previous news release, EA said that players will experience "iconic stories from the world of Tolkien and take up the fight against the great evils of Middle-earth." Given the free-to-play aspect, there are of course microtransactions.Heroes of Middle-earth is set to arrive on iOS and Android on May 10th, with pre-registration now open. Meanwhile, Lord of the Rings: Gollum will launch on consoles and PC May 25th, and Embracer reportedly has three additional titles in development for the next two years.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lord-of-the-rings-heroes-of-middle-earth-arrives-may-10th-160018567.html?src=rss
It's Friday, which means it's time for another roundup of good tech deals. Today's highlights include Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite back down to $100, which is within $5 of the popular e-reader's all-time low. Apple's AirPods Pro are $50 off their list price at $200, while the Apple Watch SE is a good value at $219. Beyond that, we're still seeing a handful of deals on Super Mario games for the Nintendo Switch, as well as discounts on Samsung storage gear and Logitech's MX Keys Mini keyboard, among others. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.Amazon Kindle PaperwhiteAmazon's Kindle Paperwhite is on sale for $100, which is $5 more than the e-reader's all-time low but still $30 or so less than its usual street price. We gave the "Signature Edition" of the Paperwhite a review score of 97 in late 2021; by comparison, this model has less storage (8GB instead of 32GB), no Qi wireless charging and a slightly less advanced front light. Those shouldn't be dealbreakers, though, as the standard Paperwhite still provides a sharp 6.8-inch display that's easy on the eyes, a lightweight and waterproof design with a USB-C port and access to the same mammoth e-book library.There are excellent alternatives here: Kobo's Clara 2E, the top pick in our guide to the best e-readers, is a similarly capable device for those who'd rather not shop in Amazon's closed-off ecosystem, while Amazon's base Kindle offers a more affordable entry point into the Kindle library. Both of those models have six-inch displays, though. if you'd prefer a larger screen and don't mind buying your e-books from Amazon, the Paperwhite is still highly comfortable — and a good value at this price.Samsung Evo SelectSamsung's Evo Select is a dependable way to add more storage space to a Nintendo Switch, Raspberry Pi, GoPro or any other gadget that supports microSD cards. The 256GB model is currently available for $19, which is a new low. This V30- and U3-rated card isn't the absolute fastest you can buy, but it's quick enough to run games and record 4K video with minimal issues, and it's backed by a 10-year warranty. Most importantly, it's affordable. For reference, this variant typically retails around $25.Nintendo Switch game saleA handful of deals from Nintendo's Mario Day sale last month are scheduled to end on Saturday, but recommended games like Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, Super Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Maker 2, and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe are still down to $40 for now. While these are not massive discounts, they bring each game about $10-15 lower than usual. Nintendo is still fairly stingy when it comes to discounting first-party Switch games, so if this week's release of the The Super Mario Bros. Movie has you itching for more Mario at home, this is a decent chance to save.Nintendo has a few other Switch game deals of note going on this week. The acclaimed FPS games Doom and Doom Eternal are down to all-time lows of $10 and $13, respectively, while a bundle that pairs the beloved RPGs Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden is $10 off at $30. The latter is the first discount we've seen for those Switch ports. Portal Companion Collection, which includes the classic first-person puzzler Portal and its co-op-friendly sequel Portal 2, is down to a low of $12 as well.Logitech MX Keys MiniLogitech's MX Keys Mini is a compact wireless keyboard we recommend in our guide to the best iPad accessories. It has a slim profile, but its backlit and well-spaced keys are more comfortable to type on than most portable keyboards we've tested. Typically priced around $100, the MX Keys Mini is currently available for $66 at Lenovo when you use the code EXTRA5 in your cart prior to checkout. This deal technically applies to the Business version of the device, which means it comes with a different USB receiver that isn't compatible with many older Logitech devices. However, the keyboard can still pair with and quickly swap between three separate devices over Bluetooth.Apple AirPods ProWe've seen Apple's AirPods Pro fall to $200 multiple times in recent months, but this discount still comes within a dollar of the lowest price we've seen. Normally, the noise-cancelling earbuds go for around $225. We gave the second-gen AirPods Pro a score of 88 in our review last year, and they're currently the "best for iOS" pick in our guide to the best wireless earbuds. There are more well-rounded pairs out there with better battery life and mic performance, but Apple's in-ears still deliver impressive ANC and sound quality, and they're particularly easy to use with other Apple devices.Samsung Galaxy S23The unlocked, 128GB version of Samsung's Galaxy S23 is down to $700, which is a $100 discount for a phone that launched in February. The S23 isn't a top pick in our guide to the best smartphones, and it's not as strong of a value as Google's Pixel 7, but it's worth considering if you specifically want a smaller handset with flagship-level features. It's fast and well-built, and its 6.1-inch, 120Hz OLED display should be smooth and vibrant. The camera isn't top-tier in low-light settings but still far from poor overall, and Samsung is promising four years of OS upgrades, with an extra year of security updates.The S23 isn't the phone to buy for battery life, though, as its smaller size means there's less space for a battery that can last longer than a day. We gave the 6.6-inch Galaxy S23+ a review score of 86 earlier this year: Apart from the larger frame, that phone comes with twice as much storage by default, faster charging support and a bigger battery, but the two devices are otherwise similar.Fully Cora standing desk converterThe Fully Cora is a simple standing desk converter that we've previously recommended. It's meant more for a laptop and a handful of accessories than a full keyboard and monitor setup, but if you just want a way to sit less while working, it's a relatively unobtrusive, lightweight and easy-to-adjust tool for doing that. The device is currently available for $90 as part of a wider sale at Fully's online store. It's technically been at this price for a few weeks, but it's still half off Fully's MSRP. Just note that you may have to invest in a separate stand to keep your laptop at a more comfortable eye level.Apple Watch SEThe Apple Watch SE has dropped to $219, which is within $10 of the lowest price we've seen. This isn't the first time we've seen the smartwatch hit this price, but it's still $30 below Apple's MSRP. We gave the latest SE a review score of 89 last September, and we currently recommend it for first-time and budget-conscious wearable buyers in our guide to the best smartwatches.Compared to the pricier Apple Watch Series 8, the top pick in our guide, the SE lacks an always-on display mode, fast charging and premium features like a skin temperature sensor, ECG monitor and blood oxygen sensor. Its display is a smidge smaller, too. That said, it still provides most of the core Apple Watch feature set for way less money, with support for notifications, heart-rate monitoring and crash detection. It also uses the same processor as the Series 8, so it doesn't feel slow in everyday use.Samsung 980 Pro SSD with HeatsinkThe 1TB model of Samsung's 980 Pro SSD with an integrated heatsink is on sale for $87, which is a new all-time low. On average, the device has run closer to $120 in recent months, though its price has steadily dipped over time. We recommend this speedy PCI Express 4.0 drive in our guide to the best SSDs for the PS5, as it meets Sony's strict requirements for upgrading that console's storage.It's best if you buy the 980 Pro for that specific purpose, though. If you simply want a new SSD for an aging PC and don't care about gaming, a less expensive PCIe 3.0 drive should be a better value. For that market, SK Hynix's Gold P31 is a well-regarded option that's currently down to $72 for a 1TB model.Apple + Target gift card bundleHere's a simple one: If you buy a $100 Apple gift card at Target, the retailer will throw in a $10 Target gift card for no extra cost. As a reminder, an Apple gift card can be used on purchases at the company's physical retail shops, the App Store and Apple services like iCloud and Apple Music. Target has run this promotion several times before, but if you plan on shopping at Apple and Target in the near future anyway, it's effectively a bit of free money. Target says the offer will end on April 8.Blue Yeti NanoThe grey model of the Blue Yeti Nano is on sale for $53 at Amazon. Outside of a very brief drop to $50 last year, that's the lowest price we've tracked. The Yeti Nano is a compact USB microphone we've recommended in the past. There are certainly clearer-sounding options for those looking to get into more professional recordings, but if you just want a mic upgrade for your work calls that's easy to set up and won't take up a ton of room on your desk, the Yeti Nano is a decent value when it's discounted to this extent. If space is less of a concern, note that the standard Yeti is down to $80; that mic is bigger but sounds better and offers more pickup patters to accommodate different types of recordings.Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K MaxAmazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Max is back down to $35, matching the lowest price we've tracked. The 4K media player has regularly bounced between this deal price and its MSRP of $55 in recent months, but for less than $40 it's a good value for those who want to add more streaming services to their TV. The device itself is reasonably fast and supports most of the major apps and HDR formats. (Compared to the standard Fire TV Stick 4K, the speed upgrade is enough to make the 4K Max a better buy.) It has voice search functionality built into its remote, which is convenient. For tinkerers, it's also easier to sideload unsupported apps here than it is with similarly priced streamers.The caveat is that the Fire TV UI tends to advertise Amazon's own content over shows and search results from other apps. That means the 4K Max will work best if you regularly use Amazon services like Alexa and Prime Video. If you aren't as beholden to Amazon, Roku's Streaming Stick 4K and Google's Chromecast are close alternatives that we recommend in our guide to the best streaming devices. The former has a simpler and more neutral interface, while the latter is generally more accurate at searching and better about personalizing its UI to your viewing habits.Ninja DZ401 Foodi air fryerNinja's DZ401 Foodi is the "best dual-zone" pick in our guide to the best air fryers, offering two baskets that allow you to cook two foods in two different ways at the same time. Not everyone needs something this hefty, but if you often have to cook for a large family, it can be useful. The 10-quart model is down to $180, which is roughly $20 below its usual going rate. The device dropped as low as $130 during the holidays last year, but this discount matches the lowest price we've seen in 2023.Master & Dynamic MW75A recommendation from our guide to the best wireless headphones, Master & Dynamic's MW75 is on sale for $419 with the checkout code GIVEGET30. Normally, this noise-cancelling pair goes for $599. Even at 30 percent off, it's hard to call the MW75 a great value, as its ANC can't really match less expensive alternatives like the Sony WH-1000XM5 or Bose QuietComfort 45. But the pair stands out for its decidedly upscale design, which uses a premium-feeling blend of leather, aluminum and tempered glass. It sounds nice as well, though some may prefer a bit less treble presence by default.Either way, we don't see the MW75 drop this low very often, so if you've got cash to burn and are particular about aesthetics, it's worth considering. The code above is applicable to various other Master & Dynamic headphones as well; the company says the sale will run through April 10.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-kindle-paperwhite-falls-back-to-100-best-tech-deals-this-week-150031378.html?src=rss
The latest edition of Star Wars Celebration is underway and, along with some fresh details about shows coming to Disney+ over the next year or two, Lucasfilm revealed more info about what's ahead for the movie side of the franchise. It announced three Star Wars films, one of which will feature the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey.That film will take place 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, the final movie in the Skywalker saga and the most recent Star Wars movie to hit the big screen. It will center around Rey forming a new Jedi Order. Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel, Saving Face) will direct the film.A movie from James Mangold (Logan, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) will delve into the origins of the Force and the Jedi. It will be set 25,000 years before anything else we've seen in the Star Wars universe to date, according to The Hollywood Reporter.Meanwhile, Dave Filoni will finally get a shot at directing a live-action Star Wars movie. Filoni has been at the heart of the franchise for many years. He directed the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and has been deeply involved with the recent spate of Disney+ shows, such as The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. Fittingly, the movie he's set to direct will tie the stories of those shows together and put a bow on them.Disney and Lucasfilm haven't revealed release dates for any of these films. However, Disney's current slate includes holiday 2025 and 2027 dates for untitled Star Wars flicks.After the last three Star Wars films (The Last Jedi, Solo and The Rise of Skywalker) didn't exactly receive wide acclaim, Disney and Lucasfilm walked back on their plans to release a movie every year. They have made several attempts to get other Star Wars films off the ground, including Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron, a trilogy from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, another trilogy from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and entries from Taika Waititi and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige.All of those projects have either been canned or deprioritized, according to reports. Disney and Lucasfilm are evidently hoping these three freshly announced films will reignite Star Wars' success in movie theaters, even if we'll have to wait at least a couple of years to see the first of them.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/three-new-star-wars-movies-are-coming-including-one-with-daisy-ridley-as-rey-144805449.html?src=rss
AI Chatbots are relatively old by tech standards, but the newest crop — led by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard — are vastly more capable than their ancestors, not always for positive reasons. The recent explosion in AI development has already created concerns around misinformation, disinformation, plagiarism and machine-generated malware. What problems might generative AI pose for the privacy of the average internet user? The answer, according to experts, is largely a matter of how these bots are trained and how much we plan to interact with themIn order to replicate human-like interactions, AI chatbots are trained on mass amounts of data, a significant portion of which is derived from repositories like Common Crawl. As the name suggests, Common Crawl has amassed years and petabytes worth of data simply from crawling and scraping the open web. “These models are training on large data sets of publicly available data on the internet,” Megha Srivastava, PhD student at Stanford's computer science department and former AI resident with Microsoft Research, said. Even though ChatGPT and Bard use what they call a "filtered" portion of Common Crawl's data, the sheer size of the model makes it "impossible for anyone to kind of look through the data and sanitize it,” according to Srivastava.Either through your own carelessness or the poor security practices by a third-party could be in some far-flung corner of the internet right now. Even though it might be difficult to access for the average user, it's possible that information was scraped into a training set, and could be regurgitated by that chatbot down the line. And a bot spitting out someone's actual contact information is in no way a theoretical concern. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee posted on Twitter that, when someone asked ChatGPT to chat on encrypted messaging platform Signal, it provided his exact phone number. This sort of interaction is likely an edge case, but the information these learning models have access to is still worth considering. "It’s unlikely that OpenAI would want to collect specific information like healthcare data and attribute it to individuals in order to train its models," David Hoelzer, a fellow at security organization the SANS Institute, told Engadget. “But could it inadvertently be in there? Absolutely.”Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, did not respond when we asked what measures it takes to protect data privacy, or how it handles personally identifiable information that may be scraped into its training sets. So we did the next best thing and asked ChatGPT itself. It told us that it is "programmed to follow ethical and legal standards that protect users’ privacy and personal information" and that it doesn't "have access to personal information unless it is provided to me." Google for its part told Engadget it programmed similar guardrails into Bard to prevent the sharing of personally identifiable information during conversations.Helpfully, ChatGPT brought up the second major vector by which generative AI might pose a privacy risk: usage of the software itself — either via information shared directly in chatlogs or device and user information captured by the service during use. OpenAI’s privacy policy cites several categories of standard information it collects on users, which could be identifiable, and upon starting it up, ChatGPT does caution that conversations may be reviewed by its AI trainers to improve systems.Google's Bard, meanwhile, does not have a standalone privacy policy, instead uses the blanket privacy document shared by other Google products (and which happens to be tremendously broad.) Conversations with Bard don't have to be saved to the user's Google account, and users can delete the conversations via Google, the company told Engadget. “In order to build and sustain user trust, they're going to have to be very transparent around privacy policies and data protection procedures at the front end,” Rishi Jaitly, professor and distinguished humanities fellow at Virginia Tech, told Engadget.Despite having a "clear conversations" action, pressing that does not actually delete your data, according to the service’s FAQ page, nor is OpenAI is able to delete specific prompts. While the company discourages users from sharing anything sensitive, seemingly the only way to remove personally identifying information provided to ChatGPT is to delete your account, which the company says will permanently remove all associated data.Hoelzer told Engadget he’s not worried that ChatGPT is ingesting individual conversations in order to learn. But that conversation data is being stored somewhere, and so its security becomes a reasonable concern. Incidentally, ChatGPT was taken offline briefly in March because a programming error revealed information about users’ chat histories. It's unclear this early in their broad deployment if chat logs from these sorts of AI will become valuable targets for malicious actors.For the foreseeable future, it's best to treat these sorts of chatbots with the same suspicion users should be treating any other tech product. “A user playing with these models should enter with expectation that any interaction they're having with the model," Srivastava told Engadget, "it's fair game for Open AI or any of these other companies to use for their benefit.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-do-ai-chatbots-know-about-us-and-who-are-they-sharing-it-with-140013949.html?src=rss
Super Mario Bros. is an almost perfect kids film. It's stunningly animated, it has enough momentum to keep youngins from being bored, and almost every character is unique and likable (even Bowser himself, thanks to the comedic stylings of Jack Black). It's clear that Nintendo didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that other Mario movie, the live-action 1993 film that's ironically beloved by some '90s kids (it's all we had!), but ultimately failed to capture the magic of the games. This film, meanwhile, is chock full of everything you'd remember from NIntendo's ouvre. It's a nostalgic romp for adults, and it's simply a fun time for children.But boy is it safe. Maybe I'm a bit spoiled by the excellent non-Pixar animated films we've seen over the last decade, especially the ones that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have touched (The Lego Movie! Into the Spider-Verse!). But it's glaringly obvious Nintendo didn't want to take any major creative risks with this adaptation. The script from Matthew Fogel is filled with enough humor and references to keep us from feeling bored, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic deliver some inspired sequences. But it's almost like the film is trapped in a nostalgia castle thanks to the whims of an aging corporate dinosaur. (Bear with me.)Nintendo/IlluminationThat wasn't a problem for the kids in my matinee audience, but it's a bit disappointing if you've waited decades to see a truly great Mario adaptation. It's in line with the recent live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie — Super Mario Bros. is "fine." There's no attempt to achieve anything deeper than the basics: Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are two floundering Brooklyn plumbers who are inexplicably transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. Luigi, ever the scaredy-cat, is almost instantly captured by Bowser's minions, and it's up to Mario and Princess Peach (an effervescent Anya Taylor-Joy) to save him. Big bad Bowser, meanwhile, has plans to either marry Peach or, barring that, take over the kingdom.The film bombards you with an endless series of references from the start – just look at all those Punch-Out! characters on the wall! – something that will either delight longtime Nintendo fans or make your eyes roll. Personally, though, I mostly enjoyed seeing how all of the nostalgia fodder was deployed (the adorably fatalistic Lumalee from Mario Galaxy practically steals the film). The filmmakers also show off plenty of visual flair, like an early scene in Brooklyn that rotates into a 2D chase sequence. If only some of the musical choices were more creative. (A Kill Bill reference? Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" during Mario's training montage? Come on.)It's always nice to see kids movies reach far beyond our expectations — The Lego Movie wrestled with the prison of capitalism, the importance of pushing against restrictive social expectations and how fandom can ruin the thing you actually love, all in addition to being a fun adventure for kids and injecting a dose of smart humor for adults. In Super Marios Bros., Mario learns to eat mushrooms because they literally make him big and strong. What subtext!At the same time, I can still respect a movie that simply accomplishes its goal of entertaining children. Over the years, I've been subjected to plenty of truly awful kid's films with ugly animation and production design, lazy writing, and zero creative vision. I wish I could reclaim the time I spent watching Space Jam: A New Legacy or the 2011 Smurfs movie. The Super Mario Bros. may be a bit basic and safe, but it's not a waste of time.For one, we've never seen Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom look this good. Illumination may not have the stellar track record of Pixar, but this movie is filled with gorgeously detailed characters, vibrant worlds jam-packed with detail and some of the most fluid animation I've seen in years. It's a visual feast, and it makes me long for the day when a Mario game can look so lush (as much as I loved Super Mario Odyssey, it's visuals are held back by the Switch's aging hardware).And for the most part, the voice acting kept me invested. Jack Black is inspired as Bowser, a hopeless romantic who can only express his feelings through song and world domination. Charlie Day basically plays his usual harried persona, but it fits Luigi, a character who mainly exists to support his little bigger brother. And Anya Taylor-Joy makes for a perfect Princess Peach, a leader who has to feign bravery to protect her adorable Mushroom Kingdom people.Nintendo/IlluminationFor all of Chris Pratt's hype about his Mario voice, though, it's merely serviceable. The movie jokes about Charles Martinet's original problematic accent (Martinet also voices two characters in the film), but Pratt's spin on it just feels like someone pretending to be a schlubby Brooklynite. That's particularly surprising since Pratt injected so much life into his Lego Movie lead.What's most disappointing about The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it's so close to being genuinely great. If the film had more time to build up its characters, or if it made room for Jack Black unleash his full Tenacious D talents as Bowser, it would easily be stronger. Why not go a bit harder on that Mario Kart sequence? (Even Moana managed to fit in a Mad Max: Fury Road reference!) Why not spend a bit more time on the rivalry/budding bromance between Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Mario?With a projected opening weekend of $150 million or more, it's clear that Nintendo has a hit on its hands. A sequel is inevitable. I just hope that the company loosens up the next time around. After all, what fun is a Mario adventure without taking a few creative leaps over chasms of uncertainty?This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/super-mario-bros-movie-review-fun-safe-romp-135146207.html?src=rss
At the Star Wars Celebration in London, Lucasfilm has unveiled a raft of news, trailers and more on its numerous upcoming streaming series, Variety has reported. That starts with a first look at The Acolyte showed to the ExCel Center crowd (but not online yet) and a launch date window of sometime in 2024.First revealed at Disney's Investor Day 2020, The Acolyte takes place in the High Republic era of the Star Wars universe (100 years before the franchise’s prequel trilogy) during a period called the Golden Age of the Jedi. The cast includes Jodie Turner-Smith, The Good Place star Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Rebecca Henderson and Carrie-Anne Moss.The first look showed footage of a Jedi temple, fighting with Moss, a gold lightsaber, and a shots of the Jedis lighting up their sabers in unison. "This is about power and who is allowed to use it," a tagline read. The show is reportedly a "mystery thriller" seen from the perspective of the Siths, with the term "acolyte" describing soldiers of Sith Lords, according to Variety.
This week, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into our review of Amazon's Halo Rise and look into the role it plays in the company's overall strategy as a healthcare provider. Then, our hosts contemplate the cancelation and possible end of E3, as well as the spate of odd news around April Fools day, including Twitter's doge-ification and ASUS' ill-timed gaming handheld launch.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!Subscribe!
Samsung has warned of plummeting profits and plans to cut back on memory chip production in response to falling demand, The Korea Herald has reported. It expects to earn just 600 billion won ($455 million) for the first quarter of 2023, a drop of 96 percent from the same period last year. It blamed falling demand for memory chips, a situation that could be a bad sign for the tech industry as a whole."We’re adjusting to lower memory production to a meaningful level... in addition to optimizing line operations that are already underway,” Samsung said in a statement. It added that it would continue to invest in clean room infrastructure and expand R&D spending, as it sees improved memory chip demand in the mid- to long-term.Although it trails Taiwan's TSMC in other areas, Samsung is the global leader in DRAM and NAND flash memory chip production with 40.7 and 31.4 percent shares respectively. Such chips are used in consumer devices of all kinds, ranging from smartwatches to mobile phones and laptops. The oversupply of memory chips is therefore a sign that demand for such products has fallen significantly due to an ongoing global economic slowdown.The slowdown comes just a short time after one of the biggest tech industry booms of all time, powered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since late in 2021, however, memory prices have dropped through the floor, with DRAM and NAND prices down by 20 and 15 percent in just the last quarter alone. One bright spot for Samsung has been sales of its new Galaxy S23 smartphone, which helped bolster profits, the company said. It will reveal more details in its earnings report set to drop at the end of April.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-warns-of-lower-profits-amid-falling-demand-for-memory-chips-113551159.html?src=rss
Apple's Mac Mini M2 computers are the cheapest way to get the company's latest processors, and now Amazon is offering them at the lowest prices we've ever seen. You can buy the 256GB version for just $500 ($100 off the regular price) and the 512GB model for $690, or $110 off — both all-time lows.In our Engadget review, we gave the Mac Mini a solid score of 86, lauding the performance and classic aluminum design. It's tiny but mighty, with the M2 processor easily powerful enough for productivity chores and multitasking. The chip combines computing operations, like CPU, GPU, input/output interfaces and certain memory processes into one "system on a chip," allowing for faster processing speeds.On top of that, you get killer connectivity, with two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C connections, HDMI 2.0 (with 4K 240Hz and 8K 60Hz output), two USB-A ports, a headphone jack and gigabit Ethernet (upgradeable to 10 gigabit). The M2 Pro model adds two additional USB-C ports, making it even more useful for creatives with a ton of accessories.The Mac Mini M2 won't replace your gaming machine, but it can handle nearly everything else you throw at it. We wouldn't recommend the overpriced storage or RAM upgrades either, as the M2 is much more efficient with RAM than typical PCs. Still, if you're looking for a cheap but powerful Mac, this is the way to go.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-mac-mini-m2-models-fall-to-new-all-time-lows-100512675.html?src=rss
Google will soon start rolling out WebGPU, a new feature that will allow Chrome browsers to use your graphics card to accelerate games, graphics and AI, the company announced. It'll be enabled by default in Chrome 113 set to arrive in a few weeks for Windows PCs (via Direct3D 12), MacOS (Metal) and ChromeOS (Vulkan).WebGPU will give web apps better access to your graphics card, Google said, allowing developers to achieve the same level of graphics with far less code. That could make for new and interesting Chrome browser-based 3D apps, and without a doubt, better games.At the same time, it will power over "three times improvements in machine learning model inferences," the company added. That could pave the way for machine learning apps that run locally, like NVIDIA Broadcast's strange "eye contact" feature.Google calls the initial release a "building block for future updates and enhancements," as developers begin to dig into it and create new applications. The API has been in development for over six years, and should be available to Firefox and Safari down the road (Edge often gets features at the same time as Chrome), and expand to more operating systems like Android. You can try the feature for yourself if you're on the Chrome Beta track using a demo called Babylon.js, which already offers full WebGPU support.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-webgpu-is-coming-to-chrome-to-boost-online-gaming-and-graphics-085305456.html?src=rss
Twitter has finally shut off its free API and, predictably, it’s breaking a lot of apps and websites. The company had previously said it would cut off access in early February, but later delayed the move without providing an updated timeline.But, after announcing its new paid API tiers last week, the company seems to have started cutting off the thousands of developers relying on its free developer tools. Over the last couple days, a number of app makers and other services have reported that the Twitter API is no longer functioning. Mashable reported the shutoff seems to have started Tuesday morning, though many developers are still trying to understand what’s happening as Twitter doesn’t seem to have communicated with most developers about the changes.The ending of Twitter’s free API comes after the company abruptly changed its rules to ban third-party Twitter clients as part of a larger shakeup of its developer strategy. But, as we’ve previously reported, third-party clients were only a small fraction of the developers, researchers, bot makers and others who relied on Twitter’s APIs.For example, apps and websites that used Twitter’s API to enable sharing of content to and from Twitter are now seeing that functionality break. WordPress reported Tuesday that it was no longer able to access the API, rendering its websites unable to automatically share posts to Twitter. (The issue has since been fixed, according to the company.)
Pop star Maggie Rogers isn’t going to let bots spoil her upcoming tour. The “Alaska” singer told fans in an email today that she’s getting a jump on automated scalpers by selling tickets the old-fashioned way: in-person sales.Rogers says fans can physically walk up to box offices on Friday to get first dibs on pre-sale tickets for her US summer tour, running from July to August. “On Friday, for one day only, we’re running an in-person pre-sales, where you can go directly to your local box office to buy a ticket,” wrote the artist, who rose to fame after a video of Pharrell Williams reacting to her “Alaska” demo went viral in 2016. “There’s a two-ticket-per-person limit, but you can choose any ticket you want — all of the prices and tiers will be available, along with exclusive merch and a special playlist I cooked up just for box office day.”Rogers says the in-person process will vary from city to city, and she advises fans to check her website for specifics. For fans in the NYC area, she adds that she will visit the Music Hall of Williamsburg box office in Brooklyn on Friday, greeting fans buying tickets for her Forest Hills show scheduled for July 27th.If you can't make it to the box office on Friday, Rogers says her website will open registrations for traditional artist pre-sales on April 11th. In addition, Spotify will have its own pre-sales on April 12th with local promoters joining on the 12th and 13th. General availability opens on April 14th.Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold, testifying before Congress in JanuaryASSOCIATED PRESSTicketmaster has been in hot water lately over its inability to prevent bots from scooping up pre-sale tickets and reselling them for egregiously inflated prices. After 1.5 million presale codes went out to Taylor Swift fans in November, 14 million buyers (including “a staggering” amount of bots) tried to purchase tickets. The company said it was hit with 3.5 billion system requests, leading to the site crashing and fans left without access.That caught the attention of the US Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called for the breakup of Ticketmaster. Joe Berchtold, President and CFO of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, acknowledging the problem but punting a resolution to (the largely dysfunctional) Congress. Despite a reported DOJ investigation, Senate hearings and the usual political showboating, the government hasn’t yet produced any reforms.A similar fiasco unfolded in December when thousands of Bad Bunny fans heading to see the reggaeton star in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca were denied entry at the door, with staff telling them their Ticketmaster-purchased tickets were fake. That incident led to Mexican antitrust scrutiny, but Ticketmaster avoided paying announced fines after it refunded buyers who were denied entry and provided additional compensation.Although Rogers deserves credit for an analog solution to a modern-day problem, the story says more about our high-tech, modern-day ticket-purchasing catastrophe as it does the artist’s crafty workaround.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/maggie-rogers-thwarts-ticket-bots-with-in-person-sales-204546294.html?src=rss
After entering a new generation of electrification with the EV6, this week at the New York Auto Show we got a chance to check out Kia’s upcoming flagship electric SUV in the Kia EV9. And while we weren’t allowed to drive it just yet, after seeing it up close, it low-key might be one of the most important electric vehicles of the year.Like the EV6 and Hyudai’s recent EVs including the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6, the EV9 is based on the E-GMP platform which supports an 800-volt architecture and up to 350 kW charging which Kia says can refill the battery from 10 to 80 percent in 25 minutes. As for range, the EV9 will be available in a few different configurations starting with the base model that features a single motor paired to a 76.1 kWh battery, while the long-range version will come with a larger 99.8 kWh power pack. And while Kia has yet to get official numbers from the EPA, it’s expecting the long-range model to deliver about 300 miles on a charge, with the standard-range spec coming in at a bit less (probably around 260 miles or so).Unfortunately, both of those models won’t be especially quick, with an expected 0 to 60 time of around 8.2 seconds for the base model, which actually goes down to 9.4 seconds for the long-range model due to its bigger and heavier battery. Thankfully, if you want something a bit speedier, there's also the GT-line which gets the same long-range battery but with a more powerful AWD dual motor setup, which promises a 0 to 60 time of 5.3 seconds. Though if that's not enough, Kia president Ho-Sung Song said there will also be a full GT version of the EV9, though it won't be available until sometime in 2025.Meanwhile, when it comes to design, while the EV9 features similar proportions to the Telluride, at 197 inches, it’s a touch longer than Kia’s gas-powered SUV. But the real difference is its styling, which is bold and modern, featuring a blocky silhouette softened by just enough curves and sweeping body lines so that it doesn’t look overly sci-fi, like Hyundai’s forthcoming Ioniq 7.Photo by Sam Rutherford/EngadgetIn front, Kia offers what it calls its digital tiger nose grille, which features hidden lights that can even be customized with a selection of animations. On top of that, because the EV9 will be Kia’s first car to support over-the-air updates, you’ll be able to download new software including things like additional lighting patterns post-release. The car also features 15 exterior sensors including two LiDAR arrays in front which use object detection to help the driver spot potential obstacles.You also get flush door handles for a sleeker look and improved aerodynamics. And while your taste may differ, I also want to call out the wheels on the EV9. The base model features funky triangular rims with a bit of aerodynamic streamlining, while the GT-line gets 21-inch alloys with a neat plus-shaped design that reminds me of a D-pad from a game controller and seems like a direct nod towards attracting younger buyers.And in a way, that’s sort of a theme for the EV9 as a whole, because similar to late-model Teslas, Kia is hopping on the chrome delete trend by using very limited amount of shiny metal and completely eliminating the use of high-gloss finishes (like piano black) throughout the interior vehicle.Photo by Sam Rutherford/EngadgetInside, the EV9's design is centered around the idea of "reductionism" and "technology for life" which you can see in things like hidden haptic switches on the dash that are only visible when the car is on and a clever dual-level center console that offers tons of storage for passengers in both the front and second-row seats. Kia even included little design touches like mesh headrests in front, which are meant to give parents an easier way to check in on children in back. The one bummer is that due to U.S. safety regulations, the EV9’s optional second-row swiveling seats will only be available in Korea.However, the real star for families is that third row of seats. Even for me at six feet tall, I had no trouble getting in back. Sure, it’s a bit cramped, and if the second row of seats is pushed all the way back there isn’t much room for my legs. But if you don’t mind pushing the seats up a few inches, that third row has more than enough room to accommodate adults on short trips.Finally, when it comes to tech, the EV9 should be rather well-equipped. The car will come with a digital car key that works with both NFC and UWB connectivity. There’s also a full-color head-up display for the driver built into the dash along with an optional rear-view camera system instead of a traditional mirror. I also appreciate the EV9’s rather minimalist infotainment system that splits its long, skinny display into two sections: one that extends behind the steering wheel for the driver, while the other half is reserved for general stuff like music, navigation and more. I also think Kia has hit a nice balance between on-screen touch controls and dedicated physical buttons for stuff like heat and AC. And like every good car nowadays, the EV9 has a built-in wireless charger and plenty of USB-C ports (two for every row of seats), plus a full household-style power outlet in the trunk.So after taking a close look at the EV9, I think it looks great, it's surprisingly roomy for a midsize SUV, and its tech looks solid too. But more importantly, I think Kia may have succeeded in trying to make an affordable all-purpose three-row EV SUV. That's because while Kia is still waiting to announce official pricing, we're expecting the EV to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $56,000, which sort of makes it a rarity in the current EV market.Photo by Sam Rutherford/EngadgetThe EV9’s potential pricing presents a huge discount compared to almost every other three-row EV SUV on the market like the Tesla Model X, Volvo EX90 and the Mercedes EQS SUV – the cheapest of which starts at around $80K. And when you look at the EV9 next similarly-priced rivals like the Model Y or the EQB, while those cars do have optional third rows, they're even more cramped and not suitable for anyone besides children or pets. And then there are others like the BMW iX, Cadillac Lyriq which the Polestar 3 we saw last week which are either significantly more expensive or don't even have three-row seating (or both).So while a lot will hinge on the EV9’s final price, for people looking for a big but still relatively affordable electric family car, the Kia new flagship EV SUV looks like a great candidate when it eventually comes out sometime later this year.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/kia-ev9-first-look-one-of-the-most-important-electric-suvs-of-2023-200227668.html?src=rss
When Elon Musk first proposed taking over Twitter, one the first changes he claimed he'd make would be “open-sourcing” Twitter’s algorithm. Last week, Twitter finally followed through on that promise, publishing the underlying code for the site’s "For You" recommendations on GitHub.Quickly, Twitter sleuths began sifting through the code to see what they could dig up. It didn’t take long for one eyebrow-raising finding: that Musk’s tweets have their own category (along with Democrats, Republicans and “power users”). Twitter engineers hastily explained that this was for “stat tracking purposes,” which has since been confirmed by other analyses. And though Twitter removed that section of code from GitHub within hours of its publishing, it’s still fueled speculation that Twitter’s engineers pay special attention to their boss’ engagement and have taken steps to artificially boost his tweets.But there have been few other major revelations about the contents of the code or how Twitter’s algorithm works since. And anyone hoping this public code would produce new insights into the inner workings of Twitter will likely be disappointed. That’s because the code Twitter released omitted important details about how “the algorithm” actually works, according to engineers who have studied it.The code Twitter shared was a “highly redacted” version of Twitter’s algorithm, according to Sol Messing, associate professor at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and former Twitter employee. For one, it didn't include every system that plays a role in Twitter’s recommendations.Twitter said it was withholding code dealing with ads, as well as trust and safety systems in an effort to prevent bad actors from gaming it. The company also opted to withhold the underlying models used to train its algorithm, explaining in a blog post last week that this was to “to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected.” That decision is even more consequential, according to Messing. “The model that drives the most important part of the algorithm has not been open-sourced,” he tells me. “So the most important part of the algorithm is still inscrutable.”Musk’s original motivation to make the algorithm open source seemed to stem from his belief that Twitter had used the algorithm to suppress free speech. “One of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people's tweets — if they're emphasized or de-emphasized —that action should be made apparent,” Musk said last April in an appearance at TED shortly after he confirmed his takeover bid. “So anyone can see that action has been taken, so there's no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”But none of the code Twitter released tells us much about potential bias or the kind of “behind-the-scenes manipulation” Musk said he wanted to reveal. “It has the flavor of transparency,” Messing says. “But it doesn’t really give insight into what the algorithm is doing. It doesn't really give insight into why someone's tweets may be down-ranked and why others might be up-ranked.”Messing also points out that Twitter’s recent API changes have essentially cut off the vast majority of researchers from accessing a meaningful amount of Twitter data. Without proper API access, researchers are unable to conduct their own audits, which would be able to provide new details about how the algorithm works. “So at the same time Twitter is releasing this code, it’s made it incredibly difficult for research to audit this code,” he wrote in his own analysis.Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) also raised the importance of audits when we talked last year, shortly after Musk first discussed plans to “open source” Twitter’s algorithm. Like Messing, she was skeptical that simply releasing code on GitHub would meaningfully increase transparency into how Twitter works."If you're actually interested in public oversight on something like a Twitter algorithm, then you would actually need multiple methods for oversight to happen” Hanna said.There is one aspect of Twitter’s algorithm that the GitHub code does shed some new light on, though. Messing points to a file unearthed by data scientist Jeff Allen, which reveals a kind of “formula” for how different types of engagement are given priority by the algorithm. “If we take that at face value, a fav (twitter like) is worth half a retweet,” Messing writes. “A reply is worth 27 retweets, and a reply with a response from a tweet’s author is worth a whopping 75 retweets.”While that’s somewhat revealing, it’s, once again, an incomplete picture of what’s actually happening. “It doesn't mean that much without the actual data,” Messing says. “And Musk just made data so insanely expensive for academics to get. If they want to actually study this now, you basically have to get a giant, massive grants — half a million dollars a year — to get a meaningful amount of data to study what's happening.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-did-twitters-open-source-algorithm-actually-reveal-not-a-lot-194652809.html?src=rss
Walmart just announced a major expansion to its electric vehicle charging network, with "thousands" of Walmart and Sam's Club locations getting new EV charging stations. According to the company, full implementation will be completed by 2030.The news does not say precisely how many of the approximately 5,300 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club locations throughout the country will be added to the network, and the company declined to share additional information with Engadget. Walmart currently operates 1,300 EV fast-charging stations located at more than 280 retail stores and affiliated facilities.“With a store or club located within 10 miles of approximately 90% of Americans, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a convenient charging option that will help make EV ownership possible whether people live in rural, suburban or urban areas,” wrote Vishal Kapadia, Senior Vice President of Energy Transformation at Walmart. “Easy access to on-the-go charging is a game-changer for drivers who have been hesitant to purchase an EV.”Walmart is still looking for energy suppliers, according to a report by Reuters. In the past, it has worked with providers EVgo and VW’s Electrify America. No matter the provider, Walmart has stated that each participating store will receive four chargers and that the company will keep energy prices low, though it has not provided cost estimates.Walmart wants to improve its overall environmental footprint in ways both large and small. In addition to this new EV charger initiative, the company stated that all supply chain vehicles will achieve "zero emissions" by 2040 and that it has already transitioned to some electric vehicles for deliveries.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/walmart-announces-major-expansion-to-ev-charging-network-184805909.html?src=rss
T-Mobile and Major League Baseball (MLB) are renewing their partnership. In addition to sponsoring various pro-baseball events, the carrier announced today that its subscribers would continue receiving free MLB.TV subscriptions through 2028.MLB and T-Mobile have offered the deal for the past eight years as part of its T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion, which gives subscribers access to weekly discounts and freebies. MLB.TV lets you stream home and away broadcast feeds around the league — live or on-demand. (However, it’s subject to dreaded regional blackouts, so you shouldn’t count on it to watch teams nearby.) In addition, for the first time this season, the service lets you stream minor-league games for your favorite major-league team’s affiliates in the MLB app.Speaking of the minor leagues, the two corporations are partnering on an automated ball-strike (ABS) system, which lets Minor League Baseball (MiLB) players and officials “review, challenge and analyze calls.” This season, T-Mobile will power the system with a “5G Private Mobile Network” during some minor-league games. You may recall that MLB has been experimenting with robot umps in the independent Atlantic League since 2019. Last year, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league aims to introduce the system to the big leagues by 2024. From a labor perspective, it’s hard not to see this as a first step toward automating umpires’ jobs, but at least fans can direct their vitriol over (perceived) bad calls to a machine instead of a human.T-Mobile says its baseball partnership will also include a little-league sponsorship, part of which consists of the carrier donating millions of dollars toward equipment and grants for aspiring young sluggers. It’s also continuing to sponsor the All-Star Week Home Run Derby and batting practice broadcast. Finally, T-Mobile plans to expand its 5G coverage in baseball stadiums across North America, envisioning eventual “immersive 5G-connected experiences for fans” and better in-stadium speeds and reception for its subscribers.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/t-mobile-extends-free-mlbtv-deal-for-subscribers-through-2028-182807920.html?src=rss
A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that “hear” you without speaking. The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard.Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud — and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. “Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible,” said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. “We’re moving sonar onto the body.”The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user’s speech patterns. Then, once it’s ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time “with about 95 percent accuracy.”Ruidong Zhang / Cornell UniversityThe system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. “We’re very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy,” said Cheng Zhang. “It’s small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world.”Privacy also comes into play when looking at potential real-world uses. For example, Ruidong Zhang suggests using it to control music playback controls (hands- and eyes-free) in a quiet library or dictating a message at a loud concert where standard options would fail. Perhaps its most exciting prospect is people with some types of speech disabilities using it to silently feed dialogue into a voice synthesizer, which would then speak the words aloud.If things go as planned, you can get your hands on one someday. The team at Cornell’s Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program. They’re also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements. “We think glass will be an important personal computing platform to understand human activities in everyday settings,” said Cheng Zhang.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-built-sonar-glasses-that-track-facial-movements-for-silent-communication-171508573.html?src=rss
Some Tesla workers shared sensitive photos and videos captured by the cameras on owners' cars between each other for several years, according to Reuters. Former employees told the outlet that colleagues shared the images in group chats and one-on-one communications between 2019 and last year.One such video showed a Tesla driving at high speed before hitting a child on a bike, Reuters reported. Other footage included things like a nude man walking toward a vehicle. "We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids," one of the former employees said.Workers are said to have sent each other videos taken inside Tesla owners' garages, too. One clip reportedly showed a submersible white Lotus Esprit sub that appeared in the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. As it happens, Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought that vehicle a decade ago, suggesting that his employees were circulating footage that a vehicle captured inside his garage.The image-sharing practice “was a breach of privacy, to be honest," one of the former employees said. "And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people.”On its website, Tesla says each new vehicle it builds is equipped with eight external cameras. These support features such as Autopilot, Smart Summon and Autopark. They also enable the Sentry Mode surveillance system that captures footage of people approaching a parked Tesla and other seemingly suspicious activity.The company states in its customer privacy notice that it designed the camera system to protect user privacy. It says that even if owners opt in to share camera recordings with Tesla for "fleet learning" purposes, "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle" unless it receives the footage due to a safety event, such as a crash or an airbag deployment. Even so, one employee said it was possible for Tesla data labelers to see the location of captured footage on Google Maps.Tesla does not have a communications department that can be reached for comment.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-employees-reportedly-shared-videos-captured-by-cameras-on-customers-cars-165703126.html?src=rss
The puck-shaped audio remixing tool Stem Player by Kano started its life as a collaboration with controversial musician Kanye West, but it has expanded and partnered with the estate of deceased hip-hop legend J Dilla. Users will be able to remix and rearrange J Dilla beats via an exclusive catalog of content selected by the producer’s mother, Ma Dukes.The 20 songs added to Stem Player have never been officially released, so your arrangement could end up being the de facto standard. Unfortunately, there aren't any tracks from iconic J Dilla albums like Donuts and Champion Sound. The many legendary tracks he produced for other artists, like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, are also not available on this platform. Rights and all of that.There are other musicians involved with this update. Stem Player has announced some Flea and Salaam Remi tracks are available for remixing, though J Dilla is the guest of honor. To that end, the collection even includes a discussion about his legacy led by his mother. The company also announced it is working on a documentary about the producer and has released a green skin for the Stem Player as a tribute.For the uninitiated, the Stem Player is a puck-shaped device with physical controls to remix and rearrange audio tracks. In this context, “stems” refer to the basic tracks of a song, so you can use the device to change various attributes of each stem, such as volume. This gadget handles the actual raw and unmixed tracks from the artist. It does not use AI to separate each track after they are mixed. The end result? Better stems and more accurate controls.Kano has severed ties with beleaguered rapper Kanye West, but it has added Ghostface Killah to the roster, prior to the J Dilla announcement. It has also recently released a projector used to remix visuals. The company has started crowdfunding to guarantee the release of future products, including a DIY headphone-building kit. All J Dilla tracks are available now, but you need a $200 Stem Player. The custom green skin costs $30 on top of that.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/stem-player-pocket-sized-remixer-adds-unreleased-j-dilla-tracks-165245151.html?src=rss
If you've been looking to scoop up a new gaming laptop but a solitary screen doesn't quite cut the mustard, you should perhaps consider the ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16. It's our current pick for the best gaming laptop with dual displays. Best of all, it's on sale right now. One variant is available for $2,700, which is a whopping $800 off the regular price.This configuration comes with a 16-inch, 165Hz ROG Nebula HDR QHD 16:10 display. It's powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU. The 32GB of DDR5 RAM should help ensure you can play most games without too many hitches. You'll have a decent volume of storage space for your games too, as this ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 has a 1TB SSD.The internal specs aren't what make this gaming laptop stand out, though. It's that second screen that sits between the keyboard and the main display. The 14-inch ScreenPad Plus could be handy for productivity, allowing you to keep an eye on certain apps while keeping most of your focus on more important tasks up top.It might help you keep tabs on the news, social media or a show you're watching while getting some work done. Or you might use it to keep Discord open while you play games or pull up a walkthrough on YouTube if you get stuck. Alternatively, you could use it to monitor your viewership stats while you stream your gameplay.We gave the ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 a score of 86 in our review, which is certainly respectable. The device isn't all sunshine and roses, unfortunately. We felt that it's fairly bulky with high-pitched fans and an underwhelming battery life. The touchpad, which ASUS scuttled off to the right side of the keyboard, is a bit awkward too. Still, for those hunting for a good deal on a dual-screen laptop, you won't find many better options elsewhere at the minute.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-asus-rog-zephyrus-duo-16-gaming-laptop-is-800-off-right-now-161502193.html?src=rss
Apple's AirPods Pro are our favorite option for iPhone users in our guide to wireless earbuds — but at $250, they're not cheap. If you keep tabs on them at Amazon, however, you can sometimes snag them for $200, making them a much better buy. They've dropped down to this price a couple of times this year, once in February and again in March. The 20 percent discount is within a dollar of the lowest price we've ever seen on Apple's latest generation premium buds. Only problem is, they tend to go out of stock quickly, and sometimes pop back up to their list price, so you might want to add them to your cart while the deal's still live.The second-gen AirPods Pro deliver one of the best transparency modes of any earbuds on the market and the active noise cancellation is solid. The sound is clear and consistent, even at low volume, and the call performance is better than a lot of the competition. Of course, where the buds really shine is with their seamless pairing with iOS and integration with Apple's ecosystem. We got six hours and 15 minutes of battery life in our tests and gave the earbuds an overall score of 88 in our review.It's worth noting that a few other wireless options from Apple are on sale right now too, including the third (and current) generation of the standard AirPods for $150, which matches their lowest price this year. You can save even more on the previous generation AirPods which are 38 percent off, or $99.If you don't carry around an iPhone, you may want to check out a few of the other best buds from our guide. Three of them are currently seeing discounts — though none are all time lows. You can snag our best overall pick, Sony's WF-1000XM4, for a 29 percent discount that brings the price down to $198. Our runner up recommendation, Sennheiser's Momentum True Wireless 3 are also $198, or 21 percent off. And finally, our favorite budget option, the Jabra Elite 3 are even more budget-friendly after a fifteen percent savings. Again, those aren't the lowest prices we've seen, but if today's the day for some fresh new in-ear speakers, you may as well save some coin.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-second-gen-airpods-pro-have-dropped-back-down-to-200-154955969.html?src=rss
It’s easy to say “yes” when an app or website asks for your location data just to get past the pop-up and back to scrolling, but it pays to be thoughtful about who you share it with and why. More often than not, it's more information than apps and websites really need to know about you.Like other kinds of personal information, location data is presented by companies as a trade-off: consumers willingly expose where they are, usually for a more convenient user experience; the companies in turn gather crucial intel about customers and, more often than not, resell that data to third-parties for additional profit. Those third parties, according to Cooper Quintin, a security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, can include data brokers and advertisers, as well as law enforcement, bounty hunters, journalists and just about anyone else with the money to purchase this information. It's one of the reasons we feel like our devices “listen” to us — they probably don't hear you telling a friend that you’ve been really craving fast food, but they do know that there’s a McDonald’s nearby, and will serve up an advertisement for its french fries.Because there aren’t federal laws or regulations currently in place to fully protect consumer information, it falls on individual users to navigate how they want that information to be spread. As you install new apps, don’t blindly agree to share location data, even if you think you have nothing to hide. “It's better just not to generate it in the first place,” Quintin said.Is there ever a good reason to share this sensitive data with a company? A good rule of thumb is to avoid giving out location information unless the app requires it to function, according to Megan Iorio, senior counsel and amicus director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. A maps app might need it to give you real-time directions; food delivery apps probably can get by with a simple address. Websites may ask for location permissions to enable convenience features, like a weather service, but will generate the same results from a zip code at a much lower risk. Even with the caveat that sharing location data is unavoidable in some instances, Iorio cautioned that providing apps or sites blanket access is never a good idea. “If you wind up needing location services, then you'll figure that out after using the app, but maybe the best strategy is to just tell everybody no until you actually realize that you need it,” Iorio said.It's also best practice to revoke location permissions for any apps or sites you no longer use, or may have enabled thoughtlessly in the past. You can see what apps use your location data by going into the settings of your smartphone and navigating to the location sharing tab, usually in the privacy and security settings of most devices. That will list all of the apps with access to your location information, and give options to toggle it on or off. Apple, Samsung, Google and others all provide specific instructions on their websites. Popular browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari, also provide specific instructions on how to disable location sharing. Generally it's best not to choose "always allow" or similarly phrased options in-browser — instead wait for the pop-up requesting access and, if it's necessary, share location data on a case-by-case basis.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-dos-and-donts-of-location-sharing-140002009.html?src=rss
The six-part TV drama based on the story of The Pirate Bay, which was first reported in 2021, is going into production this fall, according to Variety. It's being produced by B-Reel Films, the same production company behind Midsommar, and LA-based indie distribution firm Dynamic Television has just acquired the worldwide rights for it. Presumably, that means it will be released to audiences around the world — legally, that is, so people don't have to use websites like The Pirate Bay to get a copy of the series.Before streaming services became widely available, a lot of people took to the high seas to download shows that din't air in their home countries or movies they missed in the theaters. The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent index that allowed users to contribute magnet links others can access, was perhaps the most common first stop for internet users looking for content back then.Head writer Piotr Marciniak described the series as "a classic rise and fall story, a tragedy about flying too close to the sun, but also a timeless story of a generational conflict." It will apparently tell a character-driven tale focused on co-founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Swartholm who established the website as anti-copyright activists. Eventually, they found themselves Hollywood's enemy number 1, chased by anti-piracy agents, lawyers and the Interpol until they were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement and sentenced to prison.As for what viewers can expect, director Jens Sjögren said:"We are thrown between the driving perspectives – quick cuts between the basement full of computers to the conference rooms of Hollywood, from the offices in Washington via the concern felt at government offices in Stockholm, to meetings with financiers at Lake Geneva and then finally we’re back in the safety of the basement. A full throttle journey infused with paranoia, humor and deadly serious technical, emotional and political challenges."The show doesn't have a release date yet, but Dynamic will share more details about it at the MIPTV Media Market event in Cannes on April 17th to 19th.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-pirate-bay-tv-drama-goes-into-production-this-fall-120524996.html?src=rss
The Halo Rise is also a small but significant piece of Amazon’s ongoing foray into health and wellness. For $140 (on sale now for $100) (Update: not any more...), the Rise uses motion sensing to predict and track your breathing rate and calculate how long you’ve slept.Like Google’s Nest Hub, which also uses motion detection to track your sleep, the Halo Rise must be beside your bed, within arm’s reach. When you wake up, Amazon will show you a summary of the last night, including a score and the time you slept. It’ll also congratulate you on doing well or caution you to go easy that day if you didn’t get enough rest.With products like the Halo Band and app features like body composition scanning, mobility and posture assessment, as well as the controversial tone monitoring that monitors how you speak, the company is investing in health management tools. As Engadget’s Cherlynn Low puts it in her review: “The question is whether we’re willing to trade our personal data for the convenience of an all-Amazon healthcare solution.”– Mat SmithThe Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.The biggest stories you might have missed‘Call of Duty’ can detect and ban XIM-style cheat hardwareKobo takes on the Kindle Scribe with improved Elipsa 2E e-ink tabletThe Ram 1500 REV electric truck beats F-150 Lightning with 500-mile range 'No Man's Sky' Interceptor update adds new ships, corrupt worlds and VR improvementsAdobe Podcast's text-based editing turns limitation into liberationTop-down editing makes sense, but you might miss the fine controls.Adobe Podcast, formerly Project Shasta, is a cloud-based audio production tool. As the name suggests, it’s primarily for podcast production, though it might interest anyone that works with narrative audio. The main thing to know is there’s no audio timeline here and no mixer view with channels. The first thing you’ll notice is how it doesn’t look like an audio editor at all. Podcast has a singular focus on audio, so there are no video editing, presentation or live streaming tools you might not need. Second would be some proprietary tools – notably Enhance Speech. With one click, this button transforms garbage audio recorded in the worst of rooms into something that sounds more professional. It’s almost magic.Continue reading.Twitter designates NPR as 'US state-affiliated media''It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way,' the public broadcaster's CEO said.Twitter has added a label to NPR’s main account to designate the public broadcaster as "US state-affiliated media." Such labels have typically been reserved for state-run organizations, such as RT and Sputnik in Russia and China's Xinhua News Agency. The labels appear on every tweet from the accounts they're applied to. NPR, an independent non-profit, says that on average, less than one percent of its annual operating budget comes from government grants. Meanwhile, the UK’s BBC, largely funded by the government, still lacks the label.Continue reading.Why lawmakers are pushing age verification requirements for social media platformsPrivacy experts say the rules would violate everyone's privacy, not just teens'.Utah recently passed two laws that would drastically change how teens in the state can use social media. The new laws will impose strict rules on how companies handle teenagers’ accounts. But among the most controversial aspects of the law is age verification. It requires companies like Snap, Meta and TikTok to confirm the ages of their youngest users to enforce age-based restrictions. Under the rules, which take effect next March, large platforms will no longer be able to simply allow teens to enter their own birthday at sign-up. But experts warn that focusing on age-based restrictions won’t address the core safety issues lawmakers say they want to solve, like privacy. And age verification measures, like those in Utah, pose a significant threat to the privacy of all social media users, not just teens.Continue reading.'God of War Ragnarök' New Game+ update adds armor, level caps and enchantmentsThere’s even a cinematic black-and-white mode.God of War Ragnarök just got a pretty significant upgrade with a New Game+ that is much more than a simple rehash with tougher enemies. This NG+ is packed with features to squeeze more life out of last year’s PlayStation hit. It includes new armor sets that bring unique gameplay mechanics to the table. The Zeus armor increases your magic and spell damage but places you at greater risk of incoming damage. The Spartan Armor, as the name suggests, eliminates all perks and stat boosts, increasing the challenge and leaving no room for error. If that wasn’t tough enough, the level cap is increased for enemies and players. There’s even a new black-and-white mode.Continue reading.Best Buy’s new recycling program will let you mail in your old electronicsBut you’ll need to pay $23 or $30 for a box.Best Buy announced today it’s extending its gadget recycling program to include a new mail-in option. The retailer will provide a box for your used electronics, so you can ship them back for recycling, saving a trip to the store. However, you pay for the privilege: either a $23 small (9 x 5 x 3 inches) box for e-waste weighing up to 6 lbs and a $30 medium (18 x 14 x 4 inches) one supporting up to 15 lbs. After receiving it, you can pack in as many (approved) devices as you can fit, as long as they stay under the weight limit.Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-amazons-halo-rise-sleep-tracker-is-surprisingly-helpful-111505142.html?src=rss
After getting beat to the punch by its primary rival, Google plans to add conversational AI to its flagship Search product, CEO Sundar Pichai told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. "Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs [large language models] in the context of search? Absolutely," he said. Google has already said it would integrate LLMs into search, but this is the first time the company has announced plans for conversational features.The move isn't unexpected, particularly after Microsoft released a version of its own Bing search engine that used OpenAI's ChatGPT AI engine. However, Google's implementation would potentially have more impact, considering its 93.4 percent worldwide share of the search market. Pichai added that he saw AI chat as a way to expand its search business, rather than a threat. "The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before," he told the WSJ.Pichai didn't reveal a timeline for chat AI search, but it's clear that Google lags behind Microsoft. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT prompted Google to declare a "code red" as it saw the AI as an existential threat to its core business. That proved to be warranted, as Microsoft (which owns a large chunk of OpenAI), soon released a version of Bing Search powered by OpenAI's latest GPT 4 model that gave it some uncanny abilities.Google released its own conversational AI called Bard strictly as a chat product on a standalone site and not in Search. However, it was clearly lagging behind ChatGPT, displaying incorrect answers in a Twitter ad. Pichai recently said Google would soon switch to a more "capable" language model in an effort to close the gap.While Google is cutting jobs in an effort to achieve Pichai's goal of becoming 20 percent more productive, the company is accelerating work on new AI products. To be more efficient, it plans to allow more collaboration between divisions like Google Brain and DeepMind, its two primary AI units. "Expect a lot more, stronger collaboration, because some of these efforts will be more compute-intensive, so it makes sense to do it at a certain scale together," he said.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/pichai-google-will-add-gpt-style-conversational-ai-to-search-104200594.html?src=rss
Google will implement a new rule for apps providing personal loans starting on May 31st that could help protect users from abuse and harassment. The tech giant has updated its policy (via TechCrunch) to prohibit cash lending applications from being able to access users' contacts list. They will no longer be able to access people's photos and videos, as well, whether they're saved on the phone itself or an external storage.This is but one of the changes Google has implemented over the past year, following multiple reports of harassment from certain markets, such as India, Pakistan, Kenya and the Philippines. It's common for loan apps to require access to users' phonebooks and media before they lend money. The fact that people can easily install these apps on their phones makes them look like a pretty convenient solution for sudden monetary issues. But since they typically charge exorbitant interest rates, a lot of borrowers end up having difficulties keeping up with payments. That's when the abuse begins.Agents for these services would mass send profanity-laden texts to all the borrower's contacts, including random acquaintances and co-workers, in an attempt to humiliate them into paying. Some would even go as far as to threaten them and their family bodily harm. As TechCrunchpreviously reported, the abuse got so bad for some people that it had driven them to suicide.In an attempt to keep these loan sharks under control, Google implemented rules for India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, and Pakistan, requiring them to submit proof of approval and other documentation from the appropriate government agencies. In the US, Google banned payday loan apps with an annual percentage rate of 36 percent or higher way back in 2019. And in Pakistan, non-banking financial institutions will only be allowed to publish one lending app on the Play Store starting on May 31st.The tech giant tightened its screening measures for lending apps a year ago in the Philippines, where I live. I still see an enormous number of loan apps when I look at the Play Store, though, and still regularly hear stories about users being hounded by their agents. Clearly, the stricter screening rules weren't enough, but Google blocking these application from accessing people's phonebooks sounds like a step in the right direction.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-will-soon-restrict-loan-apps-from-accessing-users-photos-and-contacts-100906959.html?src=rss
April 19th. Open your calendar app and drop a reminder with an alarm for that date if you've been waiting for the console versions of the Final Fantasy "pixel perfect" remasters since Square Enix announced it in December last year. All six games in the series — the first Final Fantasy, II, III, IV, V and VI — are hitting the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch that day, and you can either buy them in a bundle or individually get the ones you want to play.Square Enix originally released the pixel perfect Final Fantasy remasters for the PC and mobile back in 2021 with new 2D graphics designed for HD displays, rearranged soundtracks and new gameplay features. The console versions of the games will also give you the option to switch between the old and the rearranged soundtracks, as well as between the default font and a new pixel-based font designed to recreate the original gaming experience. If you just want to play the games without grinding and running into enemies while exploring, you can turn off random encounters. And if you want to level up without putting too much time into it, you can switch on boost features to gain four times as much experience points.You can pre-order the whole bundle from the Nintendo eShop right now for $75, but you can also get the first three games for $12 each and Final Fantasy IV, V or VI for $18. The PS4 versions will be available for sale later. Whichever console you choose to play on, you can can get freebies (such as themes and avatars) with your digital purchase if you get the games by May 25th. Square Enix is also expected to sell physical releases of the remasters on its store, including an anniversary edition with figurines and an artbook that will set you back $260.
If you've ever been on a voice call and felt the need to punctuate the conversation with a sad trombone noise, then you just might have found a reason to subscribe to Discord Nitro. Today, the messaging app announced four new features for its paid tier, including a soundboard feature that allows subscribers to send audio-reactions to voice channels. Soundboards will be loaded up with audio files curated by Discord itself or uploaded by the managers of individual communities.Most of the other new Nitro perks are fairly subtle: Discord is introducing "super reactions" for Nitro subscribers, which will allow certain emoji reactions to chat messages to animate with a little more flourish than the normal icon. Super reactions are limited, too: Nitro subscribers can use five each week, while Nitro Basic and Classic subscribers can only use two. The company is also giving subscribers 5 new themes (Retro Storm, Strawberry Lemonade, Aurora, Sepia and Neon Nights), and the ability to dress up their avatar with limited-time decorations that overlay flowers, hats or mushrooms on top of their user portrait.Don't have Nitro? Discord says that everyone will be given 2 Super Reactions to try out the new feature, even if they aren't subscribed. Check out the company's blog for a full rundown of the new features.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/discord-nitro-will-let-you-annoy-your-friends-with-soundboard-noises-030020945.html?src=rss
AI normally needs to be trained on existing material to detect objects, but Meta has a way for the technology to spot items without help. The social media giant has published a "Segment Anything" AI model that can detect objects in pictures and videos even if they weren't part of the training set. You can select items by clicking them or using free-form text prompts. As Reutersexplains, you can type the word "cat" and watch the AI highlight all the felines in a given photo.The model can also work in tandem with other models. It can help reconstruct an object in 3D using a single image, or draw from views from a mixed reality headset. Effectively, Segment Anything can limit the need for additional AI training.Both the AI model and a dataset will be downloadable with a non-commercial license. That is, creators can't use it for products. This is primarily for research and expanding access to the technology. Right now, Meta uses somewhat similar tech to moderate banned content, recommend posts and tag photos.The developers acknowledge that the existing model is flawed. It might miss finer details, and isn't as accurate at detecting the boundaries as some models. And while Segment Anything can handle prompts in real-time, it bogs down when demanding image processing is involved. Some more specialized AI tools are likely to outperform this model in their respective fields, Meta says.You aren't about to see this AI in robots or other devices where fast, accurate object detection is (usually) vital. However, models like this may still help in situations where it's impractical to rely exclusively on training data. A social network could use the tech to keep up with a rapidly growing volume of content. If nothing else, this shows that Meta wants to generalize computer vision.Meta is no stranger to sharing AI breakthroughs, such a translator for unwritten languages. With that said, there's pressure on the company to show that it's as much of a powerhouse in the category as tech heavyweights like Google and Microsoft. It's already planning generative AI "personas" for its social apps, and inventions like Segment Anything show that it has a few advantages of its own.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-shares-ai-model-that-can-detect-objects-it-hasnt-seen-before-210002471.html?src=rss
If you’ve been waiting for Apple’s 2022 iPad to go on sale, you can get one now for $50 off its usual price. Amazon currently offers the tablet starting at $399, its lowest price yet.The $50 discount applies to all colors, storage and networking variants of the 10.9-inch tablet. Color options include silver, pink, blue and yellow; you can order it in 64GB and 256GB tiers. In addition to the deal on the base model, you’ll pay $549 for either the WiFi / 256GB variant or the WiFi + cellular / 64GB option. The 256GB / WiFi + cellular model costs $699.The 10th-generation iPad, launched in October, has an updated design reminiscent of the more expensive iPad Air and iPad Pro — losing the Home button and shifting Touch ID to the edge-facing power / sleep button. Its 10.9-inch display is also significantly larger than its predecessor, and it includes a faster A14 Bionic chip that’s plenty powerful for most iPad-related tasks. Additionally, Apple repositioned its front-facing camera to be centered in landscape mode, making your gaze appear more natural on video calls. It also supports the first-generation Apple Pencil (including its awkward charging setup) for jotting notes or sketching.In Engadget’s review, the iPad’s battery life exceeded Apple’s 10-hour estimate, lasting 11 hours and 45 minutes while playing a movie from the iTunes Store. In addition, although it doesn’t support the Magic Keyboard that works with Apple’s premium tablets, you can add the Magic Keyboard Folio accessory for $229, a $20 discount. Despite a few tradeoffs, the iPad’s sale price addresses many of our reservations about it, which centered around its overall value.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-2022-ipad-is-50-off-at-amazon-201413254.html?src=rss
Utah recently passed two laws that would drastically change how teens in the state are able to use social media. The new laws will impose strict rules for how companies handle teenagers’ accounts, including provisions requiring parental consent, and mandates for in-app parental controls and curfew features.But among the most controversial aspects of the law is age verification. It requires companies like Snap, Meta and TikTok to confirm the ages of their youngest users in order to enforce the other age-based restrictions. Under the rules, which are set to take effect next March, large platforms will no longer be able to simply allow teens to enter their own birthday at sign-up. Instead, they would need to go through some other process, like providing a copy of an I.D, before they could access their accounts.While Utah is the first state to enact such a law, it’s unlikely to be the last. Arkansas, Ohio, Connecticut and Minnesota are all considering social media laws with either explicit age verification requirements or other age-based restrictions. At the federal level, Senator Josh Hawley has proposed a bill that would prohibit teenagers under 16 from using social media entirely, and require social media companies to independently verify the ages of their users. Even the US Surgeon General has suggested that 13 may be “too young” for teens to use social media.The proposed laws are part of broader reckoning around how social media is impacting its youngest users. For years, lawmakers, armed with teenage finstas and incriminating research, have made youth safety a central part of their effort to regulate Big Tech. Along the way, they’ve also proposed laws that would rein in algorithms, make it more difficult to post and limit apps’ more “addictive” features.But the latest crop of laws have instead zeroed in on parental consent and age-based restrictions, rather than addressing structural issues like data privacy. Irene Ly, policy counsel for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates for child safety online, says the shift is happening in part because lawmakers have been unable to pass comprehensive privacy bills.“Privacy legislation seems to have a lot more sticking points,” she tells Engadget. “It's hard to find a compromise on all the facets of regulating tech.” But lawmakers have been able to find more broad support — at least at the state level — for age-based restrictions and parental consent requirements, particularly in states that have passed other laws emphasizing “giving rights to the parents.”But experts warn that focusing on age-based restrictions won’t address the core safety issues lawmakers say they want to solve. And age verification measures, like those in Utah, pose a significant threat to the privacy of all social media users, not just teens.Privacy advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), say that there’s no way to enforce age verification requirements without requiring that all users submit to the checks. “It's not just the privacy of young people that's at stake, it's everyone,” Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy for the EFF, tells Engadget, noting that a previous attempt to require age verification was struck down by the Supreme Court more than a decade ago. ”Confirming that everyone is the age they say they are is not possible without confirming every single person's age.”For example, Utah’s law states “the social media company shall deny access to the account” for any “Utah account holder fails to meet the verification requirements.” That means even adult social media users could face being locked out of their accounts if they fail to provide a copy of an ID or submit to another kind of age check.Figuring out how to apply these laws only in specific states would also be problematic, according to industry groups. “Although the proposed legislation purports to apply only to Utah residents, platforms cannot know which users are Utah residents without first verifying their identity,” Ari Cohn, free speech counsel for TechFreedom, a think tank that’s received funding from Meta and Google, said in a statement. “This legislation would be a nationwide mandate that Utah is not permitted to impose.”Even figuring out how to verify users’ ages could prove tricky. Many minors don’t have a driver’s license or government-issued ID. Instagram has tested an AI face-scanning tool that claims to be able to accurately estimate users’ ages based on their facial features (experts have raised doubts about the accuracy and ethical implications of using these tools at scale). But Kelley, of the EFF, says that any form of age verification exposes users to additional data privacy risks.“It's so easy to find examples of these companies taking advantage of data that they explained was going to be collected for one purpose and using it for another,” Kelley says. For example, it wasn't that long ago that Meta and Twitter both admitted to using phone numbers originally collected for two-factor authentication for targeted advertising. Kelley says there could be an even greater risk of something similar happening with any age verification system. “We have no way of knowing whether they're doing that with identity verification information. Whether that's a selfie, a shared driver's license, a call through an API to a credit company — we just don't know.”Common Sense Media has raised similar concerns. Ly says that laws addressing more fundamental aspects of social media platforms would be more effective than attempting to lock out teens of a certain age.“If you can implement some key changes to these companies, like limiting how much data they're collecting and what they're using it for, and then making changes to how their platform is designed, that will create a healthier experience,” she said. “It wouldn't necessitate prohibiting teens from being on the platform altogether.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/why-lawmakers-are-pushing-age-verification-requirements-for-social-media-platforms-190037563.html?src=rss
Sony’s massively successfulGod of War Ragnarök just got a pretty significant upgrade with a New Game+ that is much more than a simple rehash with tougher enemies. This NG+ is packed with features to squeeze more life out of last year’s PS4 and PS5 title. For the uninitiated, a New Game+ is a new adventure that unlocks when you beat the game. In this case, all of your equipment, weapons and skills carry over from your previous save.The changes start with several new armor sets that bring unique gameplay mechanics to the table. The Zeus armor increases your magic and spell damage but places you at greater risk for incoming damage. The Spartan Armor, as the name suggests, eliminates all perks and stat boosts, increasing the challenge and leaving no room for error.Both the Armor of the Black Bear and Ares Armor take the opposite approach, giving players unique perks, like increased defense and an increase in rare item drops. There are also plenty of new customization options for pre-existing armor types if you want to change up your look.
A boatload of HBO series and other Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) shows and movies are now available to watch for free on Roku. The Roku Channel now includes 14 ad-supported channels that are streaming more than 2,000 hours of WBD content, including shows like Westworld, The Nevers and Raised by Wolves, all of which vanished from HBO Max a few months ago.In January, WBD struck deals with Roku and Tubi for free, ad-supported streaming (aka FAST) channels. Three of the cable-style channels debuted on Tubi in early February, but it took a little longer for them all to land on Roku.The channels are each focused on different areas. There's one for fan-favorite shows like the canceled Westworld and Nikita (WB TV Watchlist), another centered around docuseries such as How It’s Made and How the Earth Works (WB TV How To), a channel for classic movies (WB TV At The Movies) and even one for baking competition series (WB TV Sweet Escapes). Licensing out content for streaming on FAST channels will give WBD another revenue stream as it tries to improve its bottom line — WBD posted a net loss of $2.1 billion for the last three months of 2022.The channels are arriving on Roku just before WBD folds Discovery+ content into HBO Max as part of a combined streaming service sometime this spring. Discovery+ will remain as a standalone streaming service in the US. It's believed that the souped-up HBO Max won't immediately become more expensive. WBD raised the price of the ad-free HBO Max plan for the first time in January.The company has yet to reveal the name of the new streaming service, though reports indicate that it will simply be called "Max" (shudder). We won't have to wait much longer to find out, though. WBD plans to spill the beans at an event on April 12th.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/westworld-and-other-canned-hbo-shows-are-now-streaming-on-roku-for-free-183106349.html?src=rss
Stellantis says the upcoming Ram 1500 REV will offer up to a 500-mile range, longer than any electric pickup available. The automaker officially announced the electric truck at the New York International Auto Show today after teasing an ultra-sleek concept in January (which the version you can buy looks nothing like) and a production reveal in February.The standard version of the Ram 1500 EV will include a 168 kWh battery that lasts 350 miles; you’ll need to opt for the premium 229 kWh battery option to reach the 500-mile estimate. By comparison, the Ford F-150 Lightning maxes out at a 320-mile range, while the Chevy Silverado EV can last an estimated 400 miles. Meanwhile, Tesla claims its long-delayed Cybertruck will match the new Ram with a 500-mile range.The Ram 1500 EV also supports quick charging. Stellantis says it can add up to 110 miles of range with only 10 minutes of charging.As far as performance, the truck can go from 0 to 60 mph in as little as 4.4 seconds and has 654 horsepower and 630 lb-ft of torque. Its other specs include a towing capacity of up to 14,000 lbs and a maximum payload of up to 2,700 lbs. In addition, it has a frunk with 15 cubic feet of storage and bidirectional charging (including powering another vehicle, charging a home during power outages and sending power back to the grid). Finally, it can handle up to two ft of water fording.Stellantis hasn’t yet announced pricing, and deliveries aren't scheduled to start until the fourth quarter of 2024. After opening (and quickly closing) reservations in January, you can reserve one again with a (refundable) $100 down payment.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ram-1500-rev-electric-truck-beats-f-150-lightning-with-500-mile-range-180324028.html?src=rss
Online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest got caught sharing confidential user data with advertisers without their consent, as originally reported by TechCrunch. Everything came to light after an internal review revealed a data breach impacting 100,000 users, forcing the companies to issue a formal disclosure to the user base. The violations started in 2017 and were ongoing until last month's review.Monument and Tempest started as two entirely different platforms, but the former acquired the latter several months back. Parent company Monument confirmed not only the data breach but that the companies shared private information with advertisers via a notification filed with California’s attorney general. Data shared with advertisers, without user consent, includes patient names, dates of birth, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, insurance information and more.Unfortunately, that is just the beginning. In a cruel insult to those seeking recovery, the companies also shared data related to appointment information, assessment information and survey responses, which includes alcohol consumption data. Monument continues to tout its commitment to privacy on its website, saying that survey responses are “protected" despite the recent disclosureThe companies blame third-party tracking systems for the issue, stating that they have removed the offending tracking codes from their websites. The companies do not admit to sharing this information on purpose to increase profits, indicating that the tracking pixels provided by third parties did the deed all on their own.Though this is an especially egregious example, it is important to remember that most companies have a less-than-pristine record regarding data privacy, even in the case of medical records. There is a near-endless list of similar violations, like the time a mental health startup shared patient information without consent and when Meta was caught with its own hand in the digital cookie jar. Be careful out there folks.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/two-alcohol-recovery-startups-just-got-caught-sharing-private-user-data-171504445.html?src=rss
Google wants to make it as easy to scrub an app account as it is to create one. The company has announced that Android apps on the Play Store will soon have to let you delete an account and its data both inside the app and on the web. Developers will also have to wipe data for an account when users ask to delete the account entirely.The move is meant to "better educate" users on the control they have over their data, and to foster trust in both apps and the Play Store at large. It also provides more flexibility. You can delete certain data (such as your uploaded content) without having to completely erase your account, Google says. The web requirement also ensures that you won't have to reinstall an app just to purge your info.The policy is taking effect in stages. Creators have until December 7th to answer questions about data deletion in their app's safety form. Store listings will start showing the changes in early 2024. Developers can file for an extension until May 31st of next year.The changes come several months after Apple instituted a similar rule for App Store software. In both cases, the companies are concerned about privacy violations and the ensuing fallout — they don't want users to fall prey to data breaches because they couldn't easily delete accounts or sensitive info when they stop using an app.This also follows growing efforts by regulators to demand more control over services. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently proposed rule changes requiring easy ways to cancel subscriptions and memberships. While the FTC is focused more on unwanted charges than privacy, the message to app makers is clear: provide more control of accounts or face repercussions.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-will-require-that-android-apps-let-you-delete-your-account-and-data-170618841.html?src=rss
Twitter has added a label to the main account of NPR to designate the public broadcaster as "US state-affiliated media." Until now, such labels have typically been reserved for state-run organizations such as RT and Sputnik in Russia and China's Xinhua News Agency. The labels appear on every tweet from accounts they're applied to.“We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as ‘state-affiliated media,’ a description that, per Twitter’s own guidelines, does not apply to NPR," the broadcaster's CEO John Lansing said in a statement. "NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide. NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”
The perpetrators of the ransomware attack against Oakland have leaked more of the data from the hack. The city has confirmed that Play, the hacker group claiming responsibility for the ransomware, has shared a second batch of info on the dark web. While officials aren't sharing more details, The Oaklandsidesources say the dump was 600GB and included confidential Oakland Police Department files (including disciplinary records), council members' communications and city staff's medical records.The first release from early March was a comparatively modest 10GB, but included city employee rosters and police records. The incident was serious enough that the Oakland police union is now demanding $25,000 per officer for the damage done through the leak. The union also wants to pressure the city into tightening its security.The February attack prompted the city to declare a state of emergency and take its network offline in a bid to limit the damage. That left many non-emergency services unavailable, including the systems to issue licenses and permits. Oakland closed some buildings and warned of delayed responses to non-urgent complaints. Access to some systems came back in late February.Play group has been linked to numerous attacks, including Rackspace and the Belgian city of Antwerp. The gang first emerged in June of last year, when BleepingComputer forum users reported attacks attributed to the outfit.The city still hasn't outlined Play's demands. However, the second wave of leaks suggests Oakland isn't bowing to pressure to pay the ransom. That's not a surprising decision. While the exposed data increases the risk of fraud, the city risks encouraging more ransomware attacks if it gives in.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ransomware-hackers-leak-second-batch-of-city-data-from-oakland-attack-163350688.html?src=rss
Air fryers don't really fry — they're much more versatile and handle an impressive range of recipes. If you've been holding back because of price, this might be a good time to add one to your kitchen. The 10-quart Ninja DZ401 is our favorite dual-zone pick in our guide to air fryers and right now Amazon is selling it for $180, or 22 percent off its usual $230 price tag. That's the lowest price we've seen this year and essentially makes the 10-quart size the same price as the 6-quart version. The larger size is ideal for people who entertain or have bigger families.A dual-zone fryer, like the DZ401, has two chambers that can cook two different foods at the same time, using completely different modes. It can also cook the same thing on both sides or just use one side at a time, leaving the other side empty for smaller batches. We like that it heats up quickly, with virtually no heat-up time and runs quietly. It even includes a Smart Finish feature that will adjust the cooking temps of each side so that your two different recipes finish at the same time.The DZ401 has a wide temperature range, from 105 to 450 degrees and six available cooking modes including air fry, broil, roast, bake, reheat and dehydrate. The 10-quart size is large, however. While that's great for cooking up big batches of food, it's not a small unit. If you've got a smaller kitchen without a lot of storage space, this might be too big.If you're still on the fence about air fryers in general, our guide covers the pros and cons of these devices, as well as how to clean them and where to find recipes. If you decide to dive in, the $50 discount might make this a good day to grab one.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ninja-foodi-dual-zone-air-fryer-is-50-off-right-now-162311100.html?src=rss
Amazon is running another sale on its own products and this time around it's on Fire Kids tablets. Those looking for a way to keep kids entertained in the back seat on a long car ride might want to take a look at the latest Fire 7 Kids tablet. The 16GB model has dropped from $110 to $60. That's just $5 more than the lowest price we've seen to date. Doubling the internal storage to 32GB will only cost an extra $5. A microSD slot allows you to add up to 1TB additional storage.The tablet, which is designed for youngsters aged three to seven, comes with a rugged protective case with built-in stand and a two-year worry-free guarantee. Also included is a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+, which includes thousands of books, games, videos, apps and Alexa skills, all of which are ad-free. You'll be able to filter age-based content, set time limits and open access to apps such as Disney+ and Netflix via the parent dashboard.Amazon says the latest version of the tablet delivers 30 percent faster performance than the previous generation and double the RAM at 2GB. The company says Fire 7 Kids will run for up to 10 hours on a single charge and it has a USB-C port rather than the micro-USB port of older models.In case you feel a little more screen real estate is in order, the sale also includes a good deal on our pick for the best tablet for children, the Fire HD 10 Kids. That model is 30 percent off at $140. The Fire HD 10 Kids is just over 10 ounces heavier than the smaller model at 25.2 ounces (716 grams), so it's maybe better suited for resting on a surface than the back of a car.The 10.1-inch Full HD device also comes with a case and a year of Amazon Kids+. Amazon says it'll run for up to 12 hours on a single charge. As with the Fire 7 Kids, this tablet has 2MP front-facing and 5MP rear-facing cameras with 720p video capture capabilities.Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-fire-kids-tablets-are-up-to-45-percent-off-right-now-153710444.html?src=rss
Law enforcement just took down an important hacker haven. TechCrunchreports the FBI has seized Genesis Market, a major marketplace for stolen logins, as part of an international campaign dubbed "Operation Cookie Monster." The UK's National Crime Agency adds that authorities arrested roughly 120 people worldwide as part of the bust, including 19 site users in that country.We've asked the FBI and Justice Department for comment. In a release, the Justice Department says the seizure took down a "key enabler" of ransomware. Beyond the US and UK, the campaign included agencies from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden and European countries like Germany and Poland. Europol and the EU's Eurojust were also involved.Genesis Market was founded in March 2018 and sold logins, cookies and browser fingerprints taken from breached systems. Hackers could not only sign into accounts, but impersonate web browsers to access those accounts without needing a password or two-factor authentication token. So long as Genesis could still reach a victim's devices, it could offer up-to-the-minute data from that victim — a valuable resource for hackers that sometimes have to settle for old and sometimes useless data.The black market shop has sometimes been linked to high-profile cybercrime incidents. Motherboardnoted that the intruders behind the 2021 EA hack said they bought a $10 bot from Genesis to hijack a Slack account at the game publisher.The seizure and arrests won't stop sites from peddling bootleg logins. It won't be surprising if many of Genesis Market's customers turn to smaller marketplaces. All the same, this is a significant action that could make it harder for attackers to simply buy the login data they need. It also comes as law enforcement is stepping up efforts to disrupt the ransomware networks themselves. In theory, digital extortion is a more difficult proposition than it was even a few months ago.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fbi-seizes-a-giant-online-marketplace-for-stolen-logins-151112975.html?src=rss
Amazon may not be known for making generative AI, but it's eager to help others get their technology up and running. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching a generative AI accelerator that will help the "most promising" startups flourish. The 10-week program provides credits for AWS use, access to mentors and other experts and networking events. At the end, startups pitch their work to potential investors and customers.While the accelerator is open to all generative AI startups, AWS recommends that candidates have at least a basic product ready with some interest from customers. Sign-ups are available worldwide through April 17th, and Amazon makes clear that there are no limits on how the AI is being used — it can be used for everything from the legal world through to discovering new medicines.The company hopes the accelerator will serve as a "catalyst" that advances innovation in generative AI. At the same time, it's not subtle about the potential for increased business at AWS. Runway used the cloud computing platform for an artist-oriented AI that contributed effects to Everything Everywhere All At Once. Firms that blossom as a result of the program may rely that much more on AWS as demand grows.Amazon only has a limited amount of in-house generative AI at the moment. Its Create with Alexa tool lets you generate children's stories on an Echo Show smart display, for instance. However, it also faces less pressure to create its own products than tech rivals like Google and Microsoft. It still stands to profit as long as there's plenty of demand for AWS tools, and might see inspirations for its own AI work.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-launches-an-accelerator-to-boost-generative-ai-startups-134746016.html?src=rss
Ever found yourself with a killer podcast idea, only for it to fizzle out once you realize all the hoops you have to jump through just to make it? Learning an audio editing tool is a skill of its own and, while getting your audio masterpiece online has never been easier, today’s listeners are savvy and won’t tolerate subpar sound and editing for long. These are all problems that Adobe’s browser-based new Podcast tool aims to solve.Adobe Podcast, formerly known as Project Shasta, is a cloud-based audio production tool. As the name suggests, it’s aimed primarily at podcast production, though it might interest anyone that works with narrative audio. The main thing to know is there’s no audio timeline here and no mixer view with channels. The first thing you’ll notice is how it doesn’t look like an audio editor at all. In fact, it almost never was.“The goal was to come up with a broader voice strategy for Adobe,” Mark Webster, Director of Product told Engadget. “That could have been creating a creative cloud voice assistant or speaking to Photoshop. But we kind of took a step back [...] it was really about just building services and a platform to make it really easy to create spoken audio.’“The result is Adobe Podcast which is still in beta. Anyone can apply for access, but currently you’ll need to be based in the US.Engadget · The Generic PodcastUnlike traditional audio editors, including Adobe’s own Audition, you won’t work left to right or even really work with audio files at all. Instead you’ll work on your podcasts like you would a text document. And not just because you work top down, but for the most part, you really are just editing a text document. Anything you record through Adobe Podcast will be automatically transcribed and you simply edit the text to make changes (which are then magically reflected in the audio). There are even some extra tools for creating artwork (as seen above).“We don't think of Adobe Podcast as another audio tool. It really is a storytelling tool. When you think about it as a storytelling tool, suddenly all the things that are in traditional audio tools, like looking at the audio waveforms and decibel levels, they're actually not relevant.” Sam Anderson, Adobe Podcast’s Lead Designer told Engadget.Apps like Descript have been doing it this way for a while. And it makes some sense. Podcasts are about what is being said, so it’s logical to work on the text first rather than the raw audio.Not to mention, being able to see what’s being said without endlessly playing it back to find the right spot is also much easier on the ears, eyes and soul. But it’s not without some trade offs.For one, there’s a certain amount of control you have to learn to relinquish. In an audio editor, you can choose exactly where you want to trim a segment of audio to. In Adobe Podcast, you can only highlight text and the finer details of the edit are taken care of by the backend. For the most part that’s fine, but if you wanted to add or trim some silence, for example, you can’t do that here, you’ll have to get creative.Image by James Trew / EngadgetFor example, removing a sentence is as easy as highlighting it in the transcription and smacking the delete key. Similarly, you can cut/paste to move things around as you see fit. But you might not quite get the smooth edit you would if you did this manually in an audio editing app. So, for now at least, you might still have to make some minor edits after you export from Podcast. In the future, the system might leverage AI to make these sorts of edits for you.“I think we could use some really interesting technology to look at the space between words and when you make deletions and just find a way to just do it automatically.” Anderson said.One of the major benefits for online tools like Podcast or similar services such as Riverside Fm and Zencastr is how easy it is to invite guests. In the past you might have had to have a pre-brief with a guest to figure out their audio setup, maybe guide them into recording it locally with Audacity and then deal with transferring large audio files around after the fact.With Podcast, your guests simply accept an invite, much like they would for a Zoom meeting, and then you converse in real time while the local audio is uploaded in the background. The result is an incredibly frictionless way to get local audio, transcribed and ready to be edited in one fell swoop.Perhaps Adobe’s secret weapon here is two-fold. First, unlike the rival products mentioned above, Podcast has a singular focus on audio, so there are no video editing, presentation or livestreaming tools you might not need. Second would be some proprietary tools - notably “Enhance Speech.” With one click, this magic button basically transforms garbage audio recorded in the worst of rooms into something that sounds more professional.In testing this, I recorded a conversation between my colleague Mat Smith and myself. I was using a dedicated XLR podcasting mic (Focusrite’s DM14v) into an audio interface. Mat, on the other hand, was just speaking into his Macbook’s built-in microphone. Once we finished our recording, I tapped the “Enhance” toggle and suddenly it sounded like we were in the same room with the same equipment. You can hear the untreated and treated audio below.Engadget · James & Mat untreated segmentEngadget · James & Mat with Adobe Enhance SpeechNow audio purists might find the treated audio a little too dry or isolated (with no sense of space). Especially right now as there are no controls - the effect is either fully on or off. But Webster explained that in the future you’ll be able to adjust the amount of the effect if the default setting isn’t to your liking.The effect was good enough though that I tried uploading the audio for a telephone interview I conducted for a story a few weeks ago. The result was good enough that I am considering cutting that down into an audio version of the article it was for.Engadget · Matt Moneymaker UntreatedEngadget · Matt Moneymaker with Adobe Enhance SpeechAnother feature in the works is the removal of filler words (uhms & ahhs etc). Again, this is something you can find on rival products, but right now there’s not even a way to edit them out as the transcription doesn’t show them so this is something you’d have to do in post.Handily, Adobe Podcast includes lots of free music for you to use for intros/outros and transitions. Editing them to work with your speech isn’t as intuitive as it could be, but this is an example of why the service is still in beta. You can be creative. For example, if you want to talk over a bit of music and then have it fade up to full volume, you can splice it in two and set one to “background” and achieve the effect that way. Webster explained that they’re figuring out the best way for adding such tools that will guide novices without alienating more advanced users (and vice versa).If you’re wondering if Adobe will add in an AI voice tool so you can not only the audio you have with text, but actually add words by typing them in (something you can do in Descript), don’t hold your breath. Webster pointed out that to make an effective voice model it needs to be trained on enough material so it only makes sense for your own voice. Given that AI voices can be clunky, they decided to just make it really really easy to re-record the line you wanted. After all, this isn't a video where patching over a misspeak is a lot more complicated.Perhaps the best feature of all is the lack of friction between ideas and getting something down on the page. If you can use Google Docs, you can make something with Adobe Podcast. And with the bundled music and mic-enhancement tools there’s a solid chance it’ll sound pretty good, too.For now, Podcast will remain in beta for the foreseeable future, and Webster confirmed that there will always be a free tier. And if you don’t even want to make a podcast, but you like the sound of the speech enhancing feature, you don’t even need to sign up for the beta, it’s available right here, right now.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/adobe-podcasts-text-based-editing-turns-limitation-into-liberation-133001520.html?src=rss
I love to sleep. Then, after I wake up, I love to find out how well I slept. It might be because I’m highly competitive or that I like the validation of an app confirming whether I’ve had a good or bad night’s rest. Despite this, I’ve avoided most sleep trackers because they’re generally too intrusive or uncomfortable. So when Amazon unveiled the Halo Rise, I was excited by its premise. For $140 (on sale now for $100), the Rise promises to use motion sensing to track your breathing rate and use that information to calculate how long you’ve slept. It’s also a bedside lamp, clock and smart alarm, and looks pretty, to boot.DesignIt fits nicely into my life in many ways. First, physically. The Halo Rise is a gray CD-sized disc (remember those? And yes I know the D already stands for Disc) that’s flat on one side and convex on the other and rest on top of a metal stand. The even surface houses LEDs that show the time, as well as an arc of lights that can be set to simulate the gradual glow of sunrise and wake you up more gently.I like the Rise’s clean, modern aesthetic that should blend in with most furnishings. Setup was also surprisingly painless. Like Google’s Nest Hub, which similarly uses motion detection to track your sleep, the Halo Rise needs to be next to your bed within arm’s reach. I was worried that my nightstand wasn’t tall enough for the device, but it was able to work even though it was set a few inches lower than Amazon recommended.Placing the Rise close to your bed is also important because, unlike the Nest Hub, it doesn’t have an onboard mic, which means you’ll have to reach over and hit the snooze button when it goes off. This brings me to one of my small complaints: There are two buttons on the top of the Rise. A small, pinky-sized one for dismissing the alarm and a larger one on its left for snoozing. I know this is how most alarm clocks are designed and it makes sense – if you’re awake enough to accurately press the tinier button then you likely won’t need a follow up. But since there’s no way to vocally stop the Halo Rise, the fact that the buttons are so small and close to each other is pretty frustrating. I accidentally hit snooze so many times and had to run back to my bedroom while brushing my teeth when the device rang again ten minutes later.That’s my main gripe with the Halo Rise’s hardware, and it honestly isn’t much. I also wish it were a bit bigger so the buttons could be easier to hit and the clock font easier to read. But those are the only times you have to physically interact with it, everything else happens in the app.Sleep-trackingEvery morning, Amazon will show you a summary of the last night, including a score of and amount of time you’ve been asleep. Alongside that is a message either congratulating you on doing well or cautioning you to go easy that day if you hadn’t caught enough shut eye. I’ve definitely used the feedback from the Rise as an excuse to get out of working or working out in the last few weeks, when it told me to take it easy after getting just two hours of sleep.Photo by: Cherlynn Low / EngadgetIn general, I’ve found the Halo Rise pretty accurate at detecting when I’ve dozed off and woken up. It actually performed better than Google’s smart display, which would often mistake when I awoke. I don’t like how, unlike most other sleep trackers, Amazon also includes my “time taken to fall asleep” as part of my so-called performance each night. Typically, after I get in bed, I spend some time scrolling Reddit or playing games and I don’t consider that time spent trying to fall asleep. I wish the Rise were smart enough to use its onboard light sensor to determine when I put my phone away and turn off the light. That is when I’m actually trying to drift into la la land, but I guess not everyone sleeps in the dark so this might not be suitable for all.Still, I found the app surprisingly informative. Tapping into details brings up a chart of the sleep stages I was in the night before, as well as a timeline below it showing at which points during the night there were “Light Disruptions.” For me, the results were unsurprising – since I don’t use blackout curtains, my room got bright at sunrise every day. Otherwise, unless I had gotten up and turned on my lamp, there were no disruptions. This page also tells me the average brightness, humidity and temperature in my room overnight.What was most helpful was understanding that my sleep environment was warmer than I thought. I was struggling to fall and stay asleep until the app suggested I adjust it to the recommended range of 60 to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). As someone who avoids using the air conditioner out of guilt, having this information validated my desire and I started to turn it on more often right before bedtime. I slept much better after that, and the app congratulated me on keeping my room’s temperature within the ideal range.To be clear, the Halo Rise isn’t the only sleep tracker that can do this. The Nest Hub also tracks your room’s temperature and light. But instead of humidity, Google uses its onboard mics to listen for sounds of snoring or coughing. As someone who doesn’t snore, but coughs a lot due to dry air, I found it more helpful to get insight on how humid my environment was. Depending on your concerns, your preferences here might differ.Another key difference between the Halo Rise and the Nest Hub is that Google will track daytime naps while Amazon does not. If you go back to bed in the middle of the day, the Rise will not track your sleep. However, on one particular Saturday when I was recovering from a long, hard week, I stayed in bed for hours after waking up and passed out at 1:48pm. I finally got out of bed at about 4:43pm, and the Amazon app actually updated afterwards to add those three-ish hours to my record.Wrap-upEvery morning in the past, I’d reach for my phone, check my notifications and the weather, as well as my horoscope. I know, it’s not scientific and I don’t put a lot of stock in it, but I think of it as a way to start my day off better prepared. Since setting up the Halo Rise, my first check-in has been replaced by looking at the Halo app. It’ll tell me whether I should take my daily workout easy, and how early I might need to get to bed that night.The Halo Rise is also a small but significant piece of Amazon’s ongoing foray into the business of health and wellness. The device sits in the most intimate of our spaces and offers help on a specific area of wellbeing. Together with products like the Halo Band and app features like body composition scanning, mobility and posture assessment, as well as the controversial tone monitoring that monitors how you speak, the company is clearly investing in health management tools. Considering Amazon also recently finished acquiring One Medical and launched its pharmacy in 2020, its ambitions are obvious. The question is whether we’re willing to trade our personal data for the potential convenience that an all-Amazon healthcare infrastructure might bring.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-halo-rise-review-an-unobtrusive-bedside-sleep-tracker-thats-surprisingly-helpful-130037788.html?src=rss
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