Companies like Alibaba are helping Shanghai deal with a new compulsory recycling program with services like on-demand trash pickup and garbage sorting mini-apps — China's war on garbage is as digitally savvy as the country itself. Think QR codes attached to trash bags that allow …
FBI and ICE have access to 641M photos including driver's license photos from 21 states for facial recognition searches, internal docs and GAO report show — A cache of records shared with The Washington Post reveals that agents are scanning hundreds of millions of Americans' faces without their knowledge or consent.
Inside this concrete slab hides the biggest collection of the rarest pinball and electromechanical games ever made. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]
Pinball is dying, if it's still alive at all. The major manufacturers have moved from creating pinball machines to slot machines for casinos, a business with a much rosier future. With even larger arcades only sporting one or two pinball machines, most likely emblazoned with licensed artwork from a popular movie or TV show, enthusiasts of the game are forced to look backward for their joy, not forward.
"Pinball has seen a steady decline since the 90s. Chicago used to have many manufacturers that cranked out thousands of games each year. In the 80s and 90s, video games became popular and pinball sales suffered," Karl Marsicek explained to Ars. He knows a little bit about the lost art of pinball: his basement houses a collection of machines he has bought and restored. "There is only one manufacturer left, Stern Pinball. They put out about 4 or 5 new titles each year, just a fraction of what manufacturers were cranking out in Pinball’s glory days."
As a hobby, collecting and restoring pinball machines is tough. The machines are loud, large, heavy, and expensive. The problem is, if you can't play a game at your local arcade, the only place left is your own basement. "The many machines that were produced in the '80s and '90s have reached the end of their life cycle and are disappearing from bars and pizza joints," Marsicek said. "Strip mall arcades are just about extinct because of computer games and gaming consoles. So pinball machines are getting hard to find."
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You wake up, and check your phone, and see a new condemnation. Some awful person has said something outrageously insulting. Something actually evil, if you think about it. Something that belittles, dehumanizes, and/or argues against the freedom and agency of a whole category of people.
You add your voice to the furious chorus in response. How can you not? These people may never understand how wrong they are, they’re too ignorant and wedded to their idiocy for that, but they need to know that they are opposed, and their opponents are legion.
We all know what you mean when you say ‘these people.’ The ones who voted for those awful faces on every news site and TV channel, the ones whose names alone cause you to clench with fury. The ones responsible for the awful, unforgivable things happening at the border. The ones responsible for the reports of violence in the streets.
If pushed you’d probably admit that only some of These People are genuinely evil. More than you could have imagined in your worst nightmares five years ago, but still, only some. Others may be prisoners of their upbringing, or their ignorance, or victims of their own hardships, lashing out wildly. But what they all seem to have in common is an incapacity for compassion.
It’s easy to distance yourself from Them. It’s hard not to. The overwhelming majority of the people with whom you actually interact are Us.
You know you should try to feel compassion for Them, as you should for everyone. Not sympathy. Sympathy is very different. But your religion, or your spirituality, or your morality, or simply your belief, teaches you compassion for all. But how can you hold compassion for people who seem incapable of compassion themselves? People who don’t condemn, who actually cheer, what’s happening at the border?
And so every online outrage leaches a little more compassion away, widens and deepens the abyss between Us and Them a little further. You know intellectually that many of these viral outrages stem from bots, programmed by trolls or worse, and each new one does not represent every member of … them.
But you can’t help but grow more certain with each new outrage, in your heart if not your head, that there is a Them. That there are no longer people with whom one can reasonably disagree. That there are now only Us, and Them.
You realize when you think about it that this makes it easier to give people who are notionally Us a pass when they too behave with a flagrant lack of compassion, or judge people’s whole lives by their worst moments, or prioritize the purity of the process they have decreed over any actual results accomplished.
You realize that the growing abyss between Us and Them makes both sides close ranks, makes it harder for people who are Them and yet who have uneasy, even horrified feelings about what’s happening at the border in their name, to at least speak against it. They should anyway. Of course they should. But people are weak. The easier something becomes, the more that people do it.
You understand, on some level, that the online divide is different from the awful things actually happening offline. That the latter matters, deeply, and the former … not so much. That the former distracts both sides from great systemic injustices which have learned to lie hidden in bland terminology, coolly steering clear of the outrage of Us versus Them.
But you slept poorly, you’re exhausted, and you already have so much to do, so many duties to attend to at your frustrating job, so many worries to keep at bay, once you get out of this bed. Maybe all that is because of those systemic injustices, but those are a rot, those are cancer, those are bone-deep, and the evils at the border are an open wound about which something must done immediately. They are responsible for those evils. They must be fought and stopped.
So you add your voice to the furious chorus. And you give more money to those fighting the real fight at the border, because you know that’s what’s actually important. And maybe before you roll out of bed you pause to wonder how much the great online divide represents reality, or how much it prefigures reality; whether They really have all lost their minds and their moral compasses.
And you can’t help but wonder: even if they haven’t, what can now be done?
Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about the cult of Ive and the degradation of Apple design. On Sunday night, The Wall Street Journal published a report on how Ive had been moving away from the company to the dismay of many on the design team. Tim Cook didn’t like the report very much. Our EIC gave a little breakdown on the whole saga in a nice piece he did.
This week was a tad restrained in its eventfulness, seems like the newsmakers went on 4th of July vacations a little early. Amazon made a bit of news this week when the company confirmed that Alexa request logs are kept indefinitely.
Last week, an Amazon public policy exec answered some questions about Alexa in a letter sent to U.S. Senator Coons. His office published the letter on its site a few days ago and most of the details aren’t all that surprising but the first answer really sets the tone for how Amazon sees Alexa activity.
Q: How long does Amazon store the transcripts of user voice recordings?
A: We retain customers’ voice recordings and transcripts until the customer chooses to delete them.
What’s interesting about this isn’t that we’re only now getting this level of straightforward dialogue from Amazon on how long data is kept if not specifically deleted, but it makes one wonder why it is useful or feasible for them to keep it indefinitely. (This assumes that they actually are keeping it indefinitely, it seems likely that most of it isn’t and that by saying this they’re protecting themselves legally, but I’m just going off the letter.)
After several years of “Hey Alexa,” the company doesn’t seem all that close to figuring out what it is.
Alexa seems to be a shit solution for commerce, so why does Amazon have 10,000 people working on it, according to a report this week in The Information? All signs are pointing to the voice assistant experiment being a short term failure in terms of the short term ambitions though AI advances will push the utility.
Training data is a big deal across AI teams looking to educate models on datasets of relevant information. The company seems to say as much. “Our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems use machine learning to adapt to customers’ speech patterns and vocabulary, informed by the way customers use Alexa in the real world. To work well, machine learning systems need to be trained using real world data.”
The company says it doesn’t anonymize any of this data because it has to stay associated with a user’s account in order for them to delete it. I’d feel a lot better if Amazon just effectively anonymized the data in the first place and used on-device processing the build a profile on my voice for personalized . What I’m more afraid of is Amazon having such a detailed voiceprint of everyone who has ever used an Alexa device.
If effortless voice-based e-commerce isn’t really the product anymore, what is? The answer is always us, but I don’t like the idea of indefinitely leaving Amazon with my data until they figure out the answer.
On to the rest of the week’s news.
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:
Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch reporter Kate Clark did a great interview with the ex-Facebook, ex-Venmo founding team behind Fin and how they’re thinking about the consumerization of the enterprise.
Sam Lessin and Andrew Kortina on their voice assistant’s workplace pivot
“…The thing is, developing an AI assistant capable of booking flights, arranging trips, teaching users how to play poker, identifying places to purchase specific items for a birthday party and answering wide-ranging zany questions like “can you look up a place where I can milk a goat?” requires a whole lot more human power than one might think. Capital-intensive and hard-to-scale, an app for “instantly offloading” chores wasn’t the best business. Neither Lessin nor Kortina will admit to failure, but Fin‘s excursion into B2B enterprise software eight months ago suggests the assistant technology wasn’t a billion-dollar idea.…”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week, we talked a bit about asking for money and the future of China’s favorite tech platform.
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Researchers say they have been able to store the digital data of thumbnail-sized images on molecules smaller than DNA and retrieve it with ~99% accuracy — DNA isn't the only molecule we could use for digital storage. It turns out that solutions containing sugars, amino acids and other small molecules could replace hard drives too.
Foldable phones are yet to become the promising evolution they were meant to be, but that isn’t stopping tech giants from embracing the technology. Just a day before its official availability, Samsung postponed the launch of the Galaxy Fold citing issues in its design. Huawei too will be releasing the foldable Mate X later this year. Now, a tweet by tipster Max J., spotted by MSPoweruser claims Sony is working on a foldable device.
The tweet claims Sony is prototyping the design with a foldable display supplied by LG Display, a camera with 10X zoom and a 3220mAh battery. The battery might seem a little less for a foldable device but considering Sony is still at the prototying stage, that might change later. Presently, the device is running a Snapdragon 7-series SoC by the codename SD7250, although it is expected that the final version will house the Snapdragon 855 flagship SoC coupled with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem. Clearly, this will be Sony’s foray into 5G devices.
There’s also another key difference. While Samsung and Huawei’s foldable devices are actually foldable, Sony could be working on a rollable design. Based on a patent illustration Sony received, the design could be in a retractable roll-out form factor. Sony might implement the use of rails to help expand the display on both sides of the devices, turning the smartphone into a tablet.
If there are no setbacks in the production, we might see Sony’s futuristic foldable device in the market by December 2019 or early next year. However, there’s little chance of the phone ever launching in India. Sony’s mobile division has officially shut shop and exited from the Indian market. But this could be a good way to make a comeback.
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The ban on US companies that restricted trade with Huawei is now partially lifted. Google too has resumed relations with the company and so did most other US companies, but Huawei will now be wary of such threats from the west. While the ban was enforced, news broke that Huawei is working on an Android-alternative called Hongmeng OS. Now, Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei told a Chinese publication that the operating system will be more than just an Android replacement. It’s made to interconnect all devices.
The 75-year old executive said the OS works on just about everything including network switches, data centers, routers as well as smartphones. By the sound of it, Hongmeng OS holds good potential for being the OS of choice for IoT devices like smart homes, autonomous vehicles and the likes.
Ren also said the OS has a processing latency of less than 5 milliseconds and admitted that it could possibly be faster than both Android and macOS. However, Ren was apprehensive of the ecosystem Huawei is trying to build around the OS.
Hongmeng OS is facing an uphill battle right now to nurture a robust ecosystem. Apple and Google’s success in the software space can be attributed to the support from their ecosystem, which Huawei lacks presently. But then Ren assured saying the company is also working on making its own app store to get more developers.
As for the ban, not everything is a go for Huawei. During the G20 meet in Japan, US president Donald Trump announced that Huawei is now permitted to resume business with US companies and can purchase components made in US. However, Huawei is still on the blacklist despite the decision and it’s also not clear whether the company will be allowed to operate in the United States. That doesn’t seem to be bothering Huawei much. The company recently bagged its 50th contract in setting up 5G infrastructure at MWC 2019 Shanghai.
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The Huami Amazfit Bip Lite is now available in India. The smart watch is priced Rs 3,999 and comes with a 45-day battery life on a single charge. The watch looks a lot like the Apple Watch and rocks an optical PPG heart rate sensor designed particularly to track activities like running and cycling. Like the previous Amazfit Bip, the watch is compatible with both Android and iOS devices and offers real-time notifications.
The optical PPG sensor on the Amazfit Bip Lite is combined with a three-axis acclerometer, barometer and a compass for activity tracking. There’s a 1.28-inch always-on display and can automatically detect the activity you are doing. It also has multi-sport tracking that tracks four cardio activities including running and cycling.
The smartwatch is also water resistant up to 30 meters and can be used while swimming. It’s also quite lightweight at 32 grams and comes with a curved corner design.
Huami will sell the Amazfit Bip lite via Amazon from July 15. This is the third smart watch from the Xiaomi-backed company to launch in India. The previous Amazfit Bip launched at Rs 5,499 and there is another smartband called Amazfit Stratos.
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This isn’t the first time that we are seeing rumours about a foldable iPad, but new information circulating the internet suggests that we could see the device as soon as next year. According to analysts with inside information, the foldable iPad could be between 11 and 15-inches in size and is also speculated to support 5G. The device is also speculated to support 5G. Apple is yet to launch its first commercial 5G phone. There is no information on a specific launch date.
A lot of companies have been rumoured to work on a foldable device including Microsoft with the foldable surface device. However, only a few companies like Samsung, Huawei and LG have shown off their take on foldable devices. Samsung has quite a shaky launch with the display fault on their foldable device, and it looks like others want to ensure their devices are fault-free when they launch.
Apple has a history of revolutionizing consumer tech. From the first PC to the iPod, the iPhone and even the iPad, all these products have been industry-defining products. It is yet to be seen how the Cupertino giant changes the way we look at foldable devices.
Source/Via
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Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Inside Naver's 1784, a 36-level office tower in Seoul, which has ~4,500 employees working with 120 robots a...
