The thing you’d worry about happening in an Airbnb happened
Airbnb has been slapped with a lawsuit by a woman who alleges that the apartment that she rented was equipped with a spy camera. Yvonne Schumacher says that her and her partner spotted a light peeping from behind a bookshelf in the living room only after a few days of staying on the property. They found a wide-angle lens camera that was being controlled remotely and was capable of picking up audio and recording at night. By this point, however, the pair had already done what normal people do when they think they’re in the private space.
One point of contention is that the couple had engaged in long conversations in the living room about topics of a sensitive nature. The complaint doesn’t explain specifics, but Schumacher believes that “certain events demonstrate that the oral communications” were recorded by the lessors of the property.
The other issue is that when the renters arrived, they found the master bedroom’s en-suite bathroom to be unacceptably filthy. The pair were forced to walk from the bedroom, via the living room, to use another toilet at the other end of the property. Since most normal people don’t get dressed up to visit the can, there’s now Schumacher has a genuine concern that the renters took pictures of her, naked, without her consent or knowledge.
One of the problems with the sharing economy is that it frequently bypasses most security checks in place of blind faith in people’s goodness. Now, mostly that’s turned out not to be a problem, but it’s clear that this lack of proper regulation is beginning to expose the industry’s dark side. It was only last week that a study revealed that Airbnb lessors consciously or unconsciously discriminate against African-American renters. It’s a similar issue for firms like Uber, which has struggled to screen out people with criminal backgrounds that make them unsuitable to be in a position of trust like driving you home.
For its part, Airbnb has said that it takes privacy issues seriously and that its hosts must comply with all applicable laws in the local area. That probably isn’t going to be of much comfort to Schumacher and her partner, who feels like naked pictures and private conversations could be uploaded to the internet in a heartbeat.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Complaint (.PDF)
Apple Releases First iOS 9.2.1 Beta for Public Beta Testers
Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming iOS 9.2.1 update to its public beta testers, with the software being made available just a day after the first developer beta of iOS 9.2.1 launched. The iOS 9.2.1 beta comes a week and a half after the public release of iOS 9.2, the second major update to iOS 9.
Beta testers who have signed up for Apple’s beta testing program will receive the iOS 9.2.1 update over-the-air after installing the proper certificates.
Those who want to be a part of Apple’s beta testing program can sign up to participate on the company’s beta testing website, which gives users access to both iOS and OS X betas.
The first developer beta of iOS 9.2.1 revealed no significant outward-facing changes, suggesting iOS 9.2.1 is a minor update that will focus on under-the-hood performance improvements and bug fixes to address issues discovered since the release of iOS 9.2.
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SwiftKey Beta updated with support for new emoji in latest Android release
The SwiftKey Beta has been updated with support for the new emoji that came with the Android 6.0.1 system update. Some of the new emoji include the famed taco emoji, unicorn, burrito, and many others.
There’s some bad news for those that aren’t on Android 6.0.1, though. The SwiftKey Beta is receiving initial support for the new emoji, but since the emoji has been added in Android 6.0.1, users not on that version won’t see it in the SwiftKey Beta or the stock keyboard.
This news comes not long after the Internet exploded with excitement over more emoji coming to iOS 9, specifically the taco emoji. Not long after, Google responded, promising to offer more emoji options in Android 6.0.1, and they’ve delivered.
In addition to the SwiftKey Beta getting support for the emoji, it’s also been updated with bug fixes and some performance enhancements. There were previously issues with emoji predictions as well as Flow through space not working when trying to Flow through more than 4 words. Those problems have been resolved in this update.
The SwiftKey Beta is available to download on the Play Store, with the latest update available at the link below.
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Samsung, LG pause from chase for 4K displays
In the spec wars for smartphones, it looks like LG and Samsung may have finally reached the tipping point, at least when it comes to display resolutions. Over the years, smartphone manufacturers have chased different metrics when it comes to displays, first pixels per inch (PPI) and then resolutions, from 720p HD to full 1080p HD and more recently to QHD (2560 x 1440 resolution). The next step would be 4K, or Ultra HD, displays running at 3840 x 2160 resolution. Although Sony has already taken that leap with the release of the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, a new report says Samsung and LG are not ready to make the move with their 2016 devices.
According to sources, Samsung and LG are easing up on the push to UHD displays for a couple primary reasons. First, they are still battling issues like overheating and trying to address the additional energy consumed by such a high resolution display. The second issue involves 4K content. For the present, there is not a lot of 4K content available in the market right now, not enough to help drive demand for devices with 4K screens. The manufacturers may also want to wait for network providers to be able to deliver 4K content using 5G connections, which are not expected to be available until 2018. In addition to these reasons, sources point to a lack of orders for existing suppliers of 4K displays as a sign that the market is not yet ready for companies like Samsung and LG to jump in.
If you were thinking ahead about picking up a 4K equipped device in 2016, you probably will need to look for devices from someone other than Samsung and LG.
source: DigiTimes
via: G for Games
Come comment on this article: Samsung, LG pause from chase for 4K displays
[TA Deals] Charge in every direction with the Twist World Charging Station (27% off)
Chances are you have more than one device requiring a daily charge. And sometimes they all need to be charged at the same time. Now your options are to put them all near one outlet and tangle wires or split everything up into different rooms. It’s not practical, right? So check out the Twist World Charging Station on Talk Android Deals. The four USB ports around the item allow you to charge four devices simultaneously.
- Does away w/ the need to carry many chargers & converters on the road
- Includes 4 USB ports to charge devices
- Eliminates the need for multiple wall outlets to charge multiple devices
- Features a universal AC power outlet ideal for international travel
- Works seamlessly w/ electric outlets in over 150 countries
- Comes w/ built-in fuse protection to ensure your devices charge safely
- Allows for maximum portability w/ light & compact design
- Twists for easy access to the charging port of your choice
The Twist World Charging Station is generally priced at $48, but you get it from Talk Android Deals for $34. You’re also getting free shipping in addition to that 27% discount.
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China tells the world to respect its censorship
Chinese president Xi Jinping opened the World Internet Conference by telling world leaders to respect other nation’s cyber sovereignty. The leader went on to say that every country has the right to govern the web in accordance with local laws, and that China stands against “internet hegemony.” The move reinforces China’s right to suppress information on a whim, like when it shuttered Instagram during the Hong Kong democracy protests. By making it an issue of sovereignty, the country is effectively shouting “back off” to rivals who would dare criticize its heavy-handed attitude toward censorship.
The country is famous for hacking back large chunks of the internet in order to avoid locals spotting any politically inconvenient content. For instance, there are upwards of 100 search terms that are blocked in and around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. That doesn’t even begin to cover its treatment of journalists, and a recent NPR report claims that there are almost 200 reporters sat behind bars for, amongst other things, talking about the nation’s slowing economy. All of that, and we haven’t even begun to mention the Middle Kingdom’s most famous censorship tool, the Great Firewall.
In the interests of balance, let’s see how Xinhua News, the country’s state-sponsored press agency, had to say on the matter. Its correspondent said that the speech ensured China “made sure its voice was heard” in the world arena. In addition, the country’s fun police trawls the web looking for online rumors, pornography and gambling sites “to protect the lawful interests of its citizens.” The website’s most chilling phrase is nestled part-way down, and sounds as if it was copied and pasted straight from 1984 itself:
“There is no “absolute” freedom in either the physical world or cyberspace. Freedom and order must be upheld side by side. Freedom is the purpose and order is the means.”
Dunno ’bout chu, but that doesn’t sound sinister at all.
[Image Credit: STR/AFP/Getty]
Source: Xinhua News, BBC News
Flying the Icon A5, an almost affordable personal plane
As we cut through the skies over the Hudson River and traced a loop around the Statue of Liberty, I spent as much time glancing down at the instrument cluster as I did peering out the window. That might seem like a huge waste of time given the views I was taking in but I couldn’t help it: It’s not often I wind up in the cockpit of a plane looking at dials and readouts, much less ones that make sense to me. That’s because a pilot and I were tooling around in an Icon A5, a $189,000 “light sport” aircraft that’s eager to shrug off the complexity of (relatively) cheap aviation. After nearly ten years of development and fighting for FAA approval, the A5 is almost ready to make the skies accessible to the well-heeled.Slideshow-346097
In a way, the Icon feels like the iPod of personal planes: It’s small, stylish and surprisingly intuitive. The instrument cluster I mentioned before is comprised of eight easy-to-read dials (plus a digital attitude indicator), set in an aggressive-looking plastic chassis that just screams “sports car.” The shiny Icon badge stuck in the dash in front of the passenger seat keeps that visual metaphor alive. Toss in a tablet for navigation and the skies are yours. The seats are comfortable, if a little low. Cargo room? You’re not exactly flush with it, but there’s room behind directly behind the seats for an overnight bag and some sundries. And it’s a looker too, with two folding wings lock in place over a sleek, white-and-silver cabin and a dagger-like tail jutting out from below the seats.
Aesthetics aren’t everything, but Icon co-founder and CEO Kirk Hawkins can’t afford to underestimate their importance. A former Air Force and commercial pilot, Hawkins talks about the deeper connections the A5 can inspire with the easy-going, polished poise of the modern startup hype man.
“Making truly great consumer products like this, that have the ability to stir you emotionally, requires a whole different order of magnitude of effort,” he told me. You’d be forgiven for thinking he just created another pointless new wearable, but he’s serious when he says his team “distilled flying down to its purest form.” Those are some lofty claims, but Hawkins isn’t shy about the time it took to get there. The Icon has been in the works for a decade, and it took a shift in FAA rules to even get the idea off the ground. In 2005 the FAA officially approved the light sport aircraft category and a relatively relaxed set of training requirements for the would-be pilots who wanted to fly them. Now, as a result, we have planes like the Icon that are in some ways meant for everyone.
“The problem with flying is the FAA really over-regulated it 50 years ago. They considered aviation difficult, dangerous, not for the public. Isolated. Then they re-thought all that,” Hawkins said.
Well, fine, not everyone. Those iPod parallels run deeper than style considerations; the Icon isn’t nearly as cheap as some of the other beginner’s options out there. Amateur pilots often earn their first set of wings behind the stick of a single-engine Cessna or Piper, and well-worn classics like a Cessna 152 built thirty years ago can go for between $20,000 and $50,000 on the open market. Almost reasonable. More modern options like the Evektor Harmony, another handsome light sport craft, will probably set you back around $150,000 in good nick. Then there’s the Icon with all its bells and whistles, sitting at the top of the beginner’s heap, at $189,000. For now, anyway. Hawkins says the team is committed to quicker updates than other plane makers, so it’s possible future models could cost less as the company figures out more effective means of production.
The FAA’s about-face also means Icon isn’t alone in its mission to democratize the skies. We’re actually in something of a renaissance for scrappy aviation startups. Massachusetts-based Terrafugia has spent the last decade working on the Transition, a personal plane that will double as a completely road-worthy rear wheel drive car. It’s still years away from completion, though, and the pleasure of eventually taking off from the turnpike should set you back between $300,000 and $400,000 when the Transition is finally ready. Meanwhile, companies like Cobalt have set their sights on customers with even more positive cash flow. The $699,000 Valkyrie-X is an experimental two-seater, but hand-stitched leather trim and some gloriously swoopy bodywork make it equal parts aircraft and art installation.
My own wallet weeps at the thought. Cost aside, though, the Icon is a damned fun plane. The thing about sitting in a compact plane is there’s hardly any material shielding you from the sky; that’s how it feels anyway. We have got the windows open and every time the pilot takes a tight turn or dips to skim the Hudson, I feel echoes of the maneuver in my gut. And when the pilot suggests we stall the plane on purpose to see how the Icon refuses to fall out of the air, I’m suddenly no longer a passenger — I’m dead weight. My eyes, like the windscreens, are pointed up and full of blue sky. The Icon hung lazily for a few moments and recovered easily, but it took me a little longer to get over it. (Thankfully, we never needed the parachute meant to protect the plane when in free-fall.)
A few minutes later, the pilot levels off and asks if I want to take the stick. Forcing back all those childhood X-Wing dogfight fantasies, I grunt a response and keep things level for a bit. After gathering some courage, I gently shift the yoke to the left. Then back to the right. It ain’t flashy, but I’m really flying a plane. Suddenly, those fantasies don’t seem so silly after all. Now I just need to ask my bosses for a raise.
‘Xbox Fitness’ no longer requires the Kinect
The Kinect, once such an integral part of Microsoft’s Xbox One story, just lost a big toehold. You no longer need the depth sensor for Xbox Fitness, a key non-gaming app. The device brings gamification to workouts and forces you to think about form, so the app is more like a streaming service without it. However, dropping the requirement certainly opens it up to more users. Folks who compete with friends might also be disappointed to know that non-Kinect rivals still get a score just for watching the videos. Kinect users can score higher, though, and new workout titles will continue to support the camera. There’s no word on whether Microsoft might offer smartphone body tracking like it does with Just Dance Now.
Another much-demanded new feature is workout downloading. If you buy workouts like Mossa fights or P90x, you can download the content to your hard drive rather than streaming it. For those of us with occasionally weak connections, that should let you get through an intense workout without an abrupt, possibly hazardous stop in the action. The update is now available, but some Reddit users are reporting that not all workouts can be downloaded, so we’ve reached out for more details.
Source: Microsoft Studios
China launches satellite to unlock dark matter’s secrets
Dark matter is that pesky, hidden material that keeps foiling scientists’ efforts to come up with a grand unified theory of physics. China’s space agency has set about to find it with the launch of DAMPE, the Dark Matter Particle Explorer. It successfully made it into a 500 km (300 mile) high geosynchronous orbit aboard a Long March-2D launch vehicle. The DAMPE satellite is essentially a powerful space telescope tuned for the detection of high-energy gamma rays, electrons and cosmic rays. Once ready, it’ll peer into corners of space where scientists believe dark matter lurks.
Astronomers aren’t even exactly sure what dark matter is, but the dominant theory is that it’s made up of weakly interacting particles (WIMPs). While difficult to detect in space because they don’t emit light, they should annihilate into high-energy gamma rays or charged particles that do. Since DAMPE is now the highest-resolution dark matter probe in space, it’s well-poised to detect such particles. “DAMPE will measure the spectra of gamma-rays and cosmic rays with very high energy resolution and then look for possible signals of dark matter annihilation or decay,” says mission team member Professor Fan Yizhong. It could, however, take years for the probe to turn up any signs of the unicorn-like particles.
Source: DAMPE
Apple names Jeff Williams as its first COO since Tim Cook
Apple has just named its first Chief Operating Officer since Tim Cook took over as CEO in 2011. Longtime Apple veteran Jeff Williams (who joined the company in 1998) is now COO, reporting directly to Cook. Additionally, senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller has seen his duties expand, as well — he’s now the leader of the App Store, a responsibility that was previously under the purview of Eddy Cue.
Williams had previously worked as Apple’s VP of operations, so a move into the COO role is entirely logical. He’s been described as “Tim Cook’s Tim Cook,” a recognition of both Cook’s excellence in making Apple into product-shipping juggernaut it is now as well as Williams’ importance in continuing that as Cook moved into the CEO role. In addition to his operations duties, Williams also oversees the Apple Watch and health-related initiatives, including ResearchKit.
The expansion of Schiller’s duties is also a notable change at Apple — the company says that, with his leadership of the App Store, Schiller is in charge of “nearly all developer-related functions at Apple.” It sounds like the vision is to have Schiller help continue to unify Apple’s four platforms, including Mac OS X, iOS, WatchOS and the newly-introduced tvOS. Schiller will continue to keep his product marketing duties, so expect to see him continue to pop out onstage to introduce new Macs and iPhones at press events in the foreseeable future.
Schiller taking the App Store off Eddy Cue’s plate means Cue will likely be able to continue focusing more on Apple’s various commerce channels, including the iTunes Store, Apple Music and Apple Pay as well as Siri, Apple Maps, iCloud and various other Apple software and services. Cue has developed a reputation for being able to jump in and help improve whatever Apple-made internet service needs help, so taking the stable App Store off his plate seems like a logical move.
Lastly, Apple announced a few new members to its leadership team. Johny Srouji, an eight-year Apple veteran, is now the company’s senior VP for hardware technologies, and newcomer Tor Myhren will join in Q1 of 2016 as VP of marketing communications, reporting to Cook. While Srouji might not be a familiar name, his mark is all over the company — he joined in 2008 to lead development of the A4 chip, Apple’s first in-house silicon design for the iPhone. Since then, the A-series of chips has been a hallmark of the iPhone and iPad.
Myhren will be succeed Hiroki Asai, an 18-year Apple veteran who worked in graphic design and market communications. The press release says that he’ll be in charge of Apple’s advertising efforts, a pretty major responsibility for a company as well-known for its ads as Apple.
[Image credit: AP/Eric Risberg]
Source: Apple
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