Google’s testing pollution-sensing gear in its Street View cars
A firm that builds environmental sensors is teaming up with Google to turn Street View cars into mobile pollution sniffers. Three of the search engine’s mapping vehicles have been equipped with hardware to measure harmful compounds in the atmosphere including carbon monoxide, methane and VOCs. It’s early days, but it’s hoped that Google will be able to add this information to its maps, enabling people to see detailed air quality reports for their neighborhood. That way, you could plan your next jog to avoid trouble spots and authorities can visualize where they need to direct their clean-up efforts.
The pairing has already tested the system out in Denver with the assistance of the EPA, who is similarly excited in the project’s potential. In just a month of driving around, the three vehicles managed to collect 150 million data points over 750 hours of driving. In the Fall, the experiments will move to San Francisco where local scientists and communities will be invited to design ways that the information can be used in future.
Filed under: GPS, Transportation, Google
Via: NPR
Source: Aclima
Military drone helped look for missing schoolteacher
The Air National Guard has sent a drone — an actual MQ-9 Reaper and not a small hobbyist machine — to help find a missing schoolteacher in San Francisco. He was last seen riding his blue motorcycle on July 17th. The drone was deployed on Wednesday morning and flew for a few hours, scouring the El Dorado National Forest using infrared and its high-tech cameras to look for any sign of the 46-year-old high school instructor, Edward Cavanaugh. While its efforts didn’t pay off in the end (the teacher hasn’t been found yet), it’s a nice reminder that drones can also be used for good. It’s easy to forget that when you often hear bad things, such as how they hindered aerial firefighting efforts in the same state, how big companies want to use them to inject spyware and how the government uses them for surveillance.
They can be incredibly helpful in search and rescue operations, especially when you’re dealing with locations humans can’t go to, such as collapsed buildings or irradiated areas. The MQ-9 is a large drone with a 66-foot wingspan; it’s even larger than the MQ-1, which you might be familiar with, since the pictures of one that crashed in Iraq made the rounds on Twitter. It’s typically used for military operations and is more than capable of carrying weapons, but it was reportedly not equipped with any while looking for Mr. Cavanaugh. The National Guard has submitted a request for more Reapers meant for domestic missions just recently. Hopefully, that means they get sent to more rescue missions or to aid in fighting forest fires like one did back in 2013 by beaming back real-time images of the situation for more effective firefighter deployment.
[Image credit: USAF Photographic Archives]
Filed under: Misc
‘Fallout 4’ won’t support user mods this fall
One of the biggest surprises from E3 this year was that Fallout 4 would support user mods across PC and Xbox One. That’s still in the cards, but it definitely won’t happen at launch. Of course, that’s because the tools that’d allow you to, say, replace the game’s fearsome bear-like enemies the Yao Guai with 3D models of Yogi the Bear don’t exist yet according to IGN. Publisher Bethesda Softworks’ vice president of marketing Pete Hines says that the team’s focus is on making sure the game ships on time. “Our entire focus is on finishing the game,” he said. “Nobody cares about mods if the game sucks.” Concise! Once Fallout 4 proper is done (and the team likely takes a bit of a break), work on The Creation Kit will begin; it’ll take “clearly into next year,” according to Hines.
Let’s hope that includes support for the PlayStation 4 version, too. Of course if you’re itching for more user additions to Bethesda’s catalog, there’s always Skyrim and the community’s taken to creating all sorts of new stuff for Fallout: New Vegas lately as well.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Via: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Source: IGN
US backpedals on plan to regulate hacking software
After a huge outcry from the security community, the US government will re-write proposed regulations on software used to hack smartphones and computers, according to Reuters. The Department of Commerce wants to heavily restrict the development and testing of exploits, zero-days and other intrusion software, which sounds like a good thing on the face of it. However, security professionals discovered that it would’ve severely limited, and possibly even criminalized, research into surveillance software. That might have made internet security worse than ever by keeping such exploits confined to the black market.
The use of exploit software by governments exploded into prominence with news of a security breach of the Hacking Team. That outfit, which has supplied zero-day exploits to oppressive regimes like Sudan, was itself hacked, with the intruders stealing up to 400GB of data. That included virtually all the source code for its products and exploits, including zero-day attacks on software like Windows and Adobe Flash. Those vulnerabilities in turn forced companies like Microsoft to scramble to produce software patches.
The US Commerce Department stepped in around the same time with its proposed new legislation. Those rules will eventually form America’s commitment to the 41-nation Wassenaar Arrangement designed to curb “weaponized” software. As security journalist Violet Blue reported earlier for Engadget, it’s not just that the government got the rules wrong, they also don’t seem to know what they were doing. “(Its) attempts to regulate are based on poor definitions such as ‘intrusion software’ and on jargon such as ‘zero-days’ and ‘rootkits,” said security expert Sergey Bratus.
The government gave interested parties until July 20th to comment, and companies like Black Hat and Google gave it an earful. Google called the rules “dangerously broad and vague,” while Black Hat said they could “significantly restrict and/or eliminate the depth and types of research curated by many members of our security community, especially those that collaborate internationally.”
President Obama recently called for stronger American cybersecurity
The Commerce Department told Reuters that “all comments will be carefully reviewed and distilled, and the authorities will determine how the regulations should be changed,” a process it said could take months. It added that “a second iteration of this regulation will be promulgated, and you can infer from that that the first one will be withdrawn.” From that, it’s clear that the avalanche of complaints during the comment period had the intended effect. As Blue told us, “we’re only nine days past the closing of the comment period, so it’s kind of amazing to see (the US government) move so fast.”
Filed under: Internet
Source: Reuters
Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant
“Hey Cortana, give me a printout of Oyster smiling.”
It’s a joke, couched in a bit of memetic stoner humor, but I couldn’t help myself. After all, Cortana — the digital assistant baked into Windows 10 — feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness and Siri’s charm. Scheduling reminders? Check. Opening apps? Done. Proffering weather forecasts? You get where I’m going with this. I was almost surprised that she (sorry, “it”) didn’t humor my lousy attempt at a joke because Microsoft agonized over how to give Cortana a personality, to make it feel like more than just a talented, algorithmic guesser in the cloud. I’ve spent the last week of my life talking to Cortana, asking it harebrained questions along with proper requests, and you know what? The company succeeded, mostly.
But first, the backstory. Before it took on the name of a beloved Halo character, Microsoft’s digital assistant was called “Jarvis,” a pretty obvious nod to Tony Stark’s computer-bound companion in the Marvel Universe. The idea was to create something that actually worked like a proper assistant who would keep track of a user’s likes and personality and tried to figure out what they needed most at a given moment. Just to make sure they nailed down the whole efficacy thing, Microsoft interviewed actual personal assistants to figure out what made them good at their jobs. Now, nearly three years and a push onto Windows Phone later, Cortana is finally saying hello to users from PCs around the world and those people are starting to say hello back. For many, this will be the first time they could talk to a computer and get a meaningful response back, so… how well does it work?
To start, you can peck out questions and queries in Cortana’s search box, but man is that dull. Talking to it is infinitely more interesting, if a little hit-or-miss depending on your hardware configuration. Sometimes it seemed to work just as well with a headset as it did through my computer’s built-in mic, which is to say not always great — for every two or three shockingly well-rendered requests, there was a moment where Cortana would shrug her virtual shoulders and admit it “couldn’t help me with that.” Still, that’s not a terrible hit rate, and it should only get better over time.
Now, if you’re anything like me, the first few moments talking to Cortana will be spent pushing her limits, trying to figure out what she can answer, what she can’t and how weird you can get before she refuses to help. Maybe you’ll even turn on the “Hey Cortana” option to get its attention without having to click a button. Then you’ll start poking around in the Notebook, and that’s when Cortana’s reach really sinks in.
You see, the Notebook is where Cortana stores the tidbits it learns about you, and it’ll conduct a quick interview with you the first time you fire it up to get a sense of what you’re about. More importantly, you can pop in to edit your presumed preferences and add new ones if you don’t want to wait for Cortana to figure them out. Sifting through the options can be a little overwhelming if you’re not used to this stuff — not only can you ask it to display info cards for local restaurants, but also it’ll ask for the kind of atmosphere you dig and how far you’re willing to go. Ditto for what kind of news you like, what kind of events you like to attend and whether you drive or take public transit.
After using it — and your Windows 10 PC — for a while, Cortana will start to suss out the consumption trends that make you who you are and surface news articles and notifications it’s pretty sure you’ll need soon. These will range from reminders to leave in time for your next appointment (using Cortana on Windows Phone has given it an understanding of where I live and where the Engadget NY office is) to flight status if it knows you’ll soon be airplane-bound. Giving up the familiar embrace of Firefox or Chrome might be a tall order, but Cortana plugs into Microsoft’s Edge browser too, so it’ll occasionally surface Yelp ratings and location info for, say, a restaurant whose site you’re looking at. That sort of information is what I wanted when I visited the site in the first place, and now I don’t need to navigate some bistro’s shoddy page. Boom.
The info cards that pop up in Cortana’s search window and on the web can be terribly useful, but things can get inconsistent when you’re trying to have a conversation with it. Go ahead: Ask it how far away the moon is. Assuming you didn’t mush mouth your way through that sentence, Cortana will cheerfully fire up an info card that confirms, yes, it’s 238,000 miles away. Ask the same question about the sun, or Venus, or Mars, though, and it just opens up a web browser window with the correct Bing search results. Oh, and asking how far away Neptune was yielded an info card with three Neptune-themed diners nearby in Brooklyn. Erm, nice try?
The thing about natural language processing is that it takes so much context and power to chew on what we’re saying and respond appropriately that it’s still basically impossible for Cortana to tackle every request the way we’d like her to. When Cortana doesn’t quite know what to do with your query, it does something you’ll soon become closely familiar with — it opens a browser and searches that exact phrase on Bing. Even seemingly straightforward requests you’d think Cortana could handle, like “show me restaurants around here,” get punted out to Bing instead of getting processed to highlight results right in the search window. Cortana, you know more or less exactly where I am, and I’ve told you what kind of food I like; why can’t you figure this out for me? We’re told Cortana can handle even more complex feats — like throwing up a flag when you try scheduling a meeting at a time when you’re usually somewhere else — but it takes time to build that sort of personal awareness.
As frustrating and seemingly illogical as those situations can be, the Cortana we’ve got today won’t be the one we chat with in a few weeks or a few months. Since Cortana is so closely connected to Bing, any improvements in how Microsoft’s search and instant answers work will reflect in her behavior — long story short, Cortana is still growing. And here’s the bit you should really remember: Cortana sometimes just nails it. For me, that first “wow” moment was when I wondered aloud what the weather was like in Manhattan (disgustingly hot with a chance of rain), then asked it to remind me to buy an umbrella (success!) while I tugged on my shoes.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it felt like the sort of slice of life a well-paid ad exec would stick in a promotional video. I was that guy. When Cortana recognizes what you’re saying and fits all the little contextual action bits together, it feels like the future is finally being more evenly distributed. This first taste of Cortana can be surprisingly useful, and even a little thrilling, but it just makes me yearn for more and better conversations. Show us what you’ve got, Microsoft.
Filed under: Microsoft
ICYMI: Password via voice recognition, drone delivery & more
Today on In Case You Missed It: Customers at the Netherlands ING Bank can now check their account balance by saying “my voice is my password.” A delivery company named Workhorse is testing out a parcel delivery service with drones, from a base at the tops of delivery vans. And Microsoft researchers have outlined how to record content viewable with HoloLens and a very odd assortment of characters are ready to entertain you.
The bonus video is a DIY hovercraft toy that is half 3D-printed and half Styrofoam for the mechanical failure over water its inventor has sadly, tasted before.
If you come across any interesting videos, we’d love to see them. Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag @engadget or @mskerryd.
Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science, Internet, Microsoft
Former US national security officials back end-to-end encryption
Three former US national security officials have given their support to end-to-end encryption and criticised claims that the government should have backdoor access or “duplicate” decryption keys. Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency and director of national intelligence, Michael Chertoff, a former homeland security secretary, and William Lynn, a former deputy defense secretary voiced their approval in the Washington Post. The trio argue that requiring companies to produce duplicate keys would only increase the risk of cyberattack. In short, the location or holder of the duplicate keys would simply create another potential point of vulnerability and attract hackers.
Even if the government enforced such an idea, it would likely only affect US technology companies. One of the arguments favouring backdoor access is that it would allow the government to catch more criminals communicating online — however, in this scenario it would still be possible for them to use providers working abroad or in secret. “This could lead to a perverse outcome in which law-abiding organizations and individuals lack protected communications but malicious actors have them,” the three argue.
Rounding off their argument is the idea that, should the US government demand duplicate keys to protect national security, it would be difficult to ignore similar requests for the same keys from other countries. US officials wouldn’t have full control or oversight over their surveillance protocols, which could weaken the privacy of US businesses and individuals. The support for watertight encryption follows warnings by FBI director James Comey and the Justice Department about the technology and its ability to conceal criminals and terror suspects. Neither called for legislation enforcing backdoor access, but regardless — a timely reminder about the benefits of robust encryption is always welcome.
[Image Credit: Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images]
Filed under: Internet
Source: Washington Post
Motorola reels off some interesting, and disturbing, facts about our relationship with our phones
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You might remember that when Motorola announced it would be holding an event on July 28th, their open invite included the caption “your relationship status is about to change”. We now know (and we suspected anyway) that Motorola was referring to our relationship with our phones – as an interesting and related aside, Motorola has gathered some facts about relationships we have with our phones and presented them in infographic form.
The infographic includes tidbits like:
- 60% in the entire world sleep while holding their phones (74% in India and 70% in China)
- 17% of people use their phones in the shower (27% in Brazil)
- Only 39% of people refer to their relationship with their phone as happy (19% in China)
- 22% of people would give up sex for a weekend rather than their smartphone
Some of these you can see happening, while others just seems a little bizarre. For the full list of facts, you can see the infographic through the link here.
What do you think about these relationship facts about people and their phones? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Motorola via Phone Arena
The post Motorola reels off some interesting, and disturbing, facts about our relationship with our phones appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
The Razer Serval is now available on the Google Play Store for $80
Gaming on your mobile devices is becoming increasingly more and more popular. It has been for the last few years or so. There have already been a few gaming controllers for mobile devices that have been released in the past, such as the Moga controllers and the Mad Catz LYNX. Now, there’s another player in the market.
After announcing the Razer Forge Android TV, Razer has released the Razer Serval. This is a gaming controller that is compatible with both the Razer Forge, as well as Android devices, and should definitely make gaming a bit (lot) easier and more fun than without one. The Razer Serval is rather intriguing since it’s compatible with both the Forge and Android devices.
The biggest draw for those looking for a mobile gaming controller, is the adjustable clip that allows you to attach your device to the controller. While Moga does this already, it’s nice to see Razer doing the same, and it would be interesting to see how well it actually works.
Now there are two different options if you’re in the market for a gaming controller. You can head over to the Google Play Store and pick up JUST the controller for $79.99, OR you can grab the whole Razer Forge TV Gaming Bundle for $149.99. So if you’re in the market for an Android TV device, the better option may be to just get the Gaming Bundle.
If you already have a Razer Forge TV or the Razer Serval, let us know what you think about it in the comments below.
Source: Google Play via: Engadget
The post The Razer Serval is now available on the Google Play Store for $80 appeared first on AndroidGuys.
The Razer Serval is now available on the Google Play Store for $80
Gaming on your mobile devices is becoming increasingly more and more popular. It has been for the last few years or so. There have already been a few gaming controllers for mobile devices that have been released in the past, such as the Moga controllers and the Mad Catz LYNX. Now, there’s another player in the market.
After announcing the Razer Forge Android TV, Razer has released the Razer Serval. This is a gaming controller that is compatible with both the Razer Forge, as well as Android devices, and should definitely make gaming a bit (lot) easier and more fun than without one. The Razer Serval is rather intriguing since it’s compatible with both the Forge and Android devices.
The biggest draw for those looking for a mobile gaming controller, is the adjustable clip that allows you to attach your device to the controller. While Moga does this already, it’s nice to see Razer doing the same, and it would be interesting to see how well it actually works.
Now there are two different options if you’re in the market for a gaming controller. You can head over to the Google Play Store and pick up JUST the controller for $79.99, OR you can grab the whole Razer Forge TV Gaming Bundle for $149.99. So if you’re in the market for an Android TV device, the better option may be to just get the Gaming Bundle.
If you already have a Razer Forge TV or the Razer Serval, let us know what you think about it in the comments below.
Source: Google Play via: Engadget
The post The Razer Serval is now available on the Google Play Store for $80 appeared first on AndroidGuys.
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