‘Ghostbusters’ reboot trailer is here

Prime your proton packs, because it’s not long now before the Ghostbusters reboot haunts theaters worldwide. We’ve already seen a few promo photos and set shots from the film, but today we’ve got our first honest-to-goodness trailer. And oh boy, does it have us intrigued. The new supernatural-ass-kicking squad stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, all with distinct skills and personalities. The new teaser runs for about two and a half minutes and features plenty of ghouls and other Ghostbuster staples, such as the iconic uniforms, the Ecto-1, and the classic theme tune. July 15th can’t come soon enough.

Source: Ghostbusters (YouTube)

Medium is working on paying its contributors

Getting paid to write is hard, a situation that’s not helped by so many places asking you to work for free. Medium CEO Ev Williams has let slip that he’s working on a way for his service to enable writers and publishers to get paid. In an interview with BBC News, Williams revealed that his team was “just starting to work on that now, actually.” He added that a monetization feature is being built “right now” and will be available before the end of the financial quarter.

Williams doesn’t seem too worried at the thought that a morass of banner adverts would ruin Medium’s minimalistic, text-heavy layout. When asked, he said “there are ways to [advertise] that are respectful of user experience and privacy.” The Twitter co-founder also said that he saw a lot of potential in “premium, subscription or user-paid content,” conjuring up images of a tip jar on each page or a Netflix-like model. That would put it on an equal footing with sites like the New York Times, which keeps the bulk of its reporting behind a paywall.

Medium has established itself as a modern-day replacement for Blogger, at lest for the rarified technology crowd. It’s become the de-facto soapbox for CEOs to espouse their philosophies, as well as giving disgruntled employees a space to blow the whistle. That’s going to change soon enough since the site is going to become the new home for Bill Simmons’ follow-up to the much-loved Grantland. The Ringer will be the first “premium content” website to use Medium’s technology and it’s likely that Simmons and his team will want to be paid. Hopefully, it means that everyone else can be, too.

Via: The Next Web

Source: BBC News, (2)

American Apparel Launching Apple Pay in U.S. Stores

Index has announced that it is upgrading clothing retailer American Apparel’s point-of-sale systems to enable Apple Pay, Android Pay, and other NFC-based mobile payment services at its U.S. stores. The new systems will also include point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and EMV for Chip-and-Signature or Chip-and-PIN cards.

American Apparel, based in Los Angeles, California, is a popular wholesale provider of basic t-shirts and other clothing. As of September 2015, the company operated 227 retail stores in 19 countries, although many of its sales occur online. The retailer exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2016 with an approved restructuring plan.

American Apparel joins several other popular U.S. brands that have or will adopt Apple Pay by the end of 2016, including Crate & Barrel, Chick-fil-A, Au Bon Pain, Cinnabon, Chili’s, Domino’s, KFC, and Starbucks. Apple Pay is now available at more than 2 million retail locations in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, and China.

Earlier this week, an unconfirmed leaked document revealed MasterCard’s plans to support Apple Pay in Canada, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore in 2016. Apple previously announced that it will launch Apple Pay in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Spain this year in partnership with American Express.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: American Apparel
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Amazon Expands Echo Family With ‘Amazon Tap’ and ‘Echo Dot’

After launching the Echo over a year ago, today Amazon announced two new additions to the lineup of voice-controlled smart hubs that house the company’s personal assistant Alexa. Users will now be able to purchase a more portable version of Echo with Amazon Tap, and even expand the device’s power into other rooms with Echo Dot.

The $130 Amazon Tap is a more rugged, pick-up-and-go alternative to the original Echo, housing built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the company’s Alexa operating system. Instead of interacting with Alexa through always-on functionality, Amazon Tap requires users to tap the microphone button on the front of the speaker to access the service’s voice commands. If connected to Wi-Fi or a mobile hotspot, users will be able to gain access to all of the normal, cloud-based features the Echo grants at home.

Amazon Tap
TechCrunch got a brief hands-on demo of Amazon Tap and came away largely satisfied with its sound quality and battery life:

Amazon demonstrated the sound quality to me before Tap went out today and I can say it did provide an impressive musical experience. Duel-firing Dolby speakers enable Tap to provide rich, 360-degree quality sound.

It’s also meant to tote around and comes with a pretty solid battery life for that purpose. A fully charged Tap will last for up to nine hours of playback or three weeks in standby mode.

Alternatively, Amazon also has created a new household expansion to Echo with Echo Dot. The small, palm-sized device will let users expand the capabilities of Echo to different rooms of their house for $90, or half of Echo’s $180 price tag. Like the flagship Echo product, Echo Dot uses far-field voice recognition to respond to the inquiries of its user while simultaneously being able to detect commands specified towards it over other the din of a room.

Echo Dot
Echo Dot still may run into issues if it’s asked to perform actions in a separate room, and having two Echo devices in the same location may also cause problems. “Dot is meant for one area at a time,” according to Amazon.

No specific launch date was given for Amazon Tap or Echo Dot, but the company is attempting an interesting release plan for the latter device: users will only be able to buy the $90 Echo Dot from an Echo itself or Amazon Fire TV. The $130 Amazon Tap will be available through the company’s traditional online marketplace.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Echo
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Apple Maps Traffic Data Expands to Singapore and Malaysia

Apple Maps has been updated with new traffic data in Singapore and Malaysia, providing users with real-time updates about vehicular traffic in the neighboring southeast Asia countries. As usual, highly congested areas will have orange or red dotted lines along the roads to indicate that drivers may face delays.

Apple has yet to list Singapore or Malaysia under Apple Maps: Traffic on its iOS 9 feature availability website, but the page will likely be updated soon. Apple Maps traffic data is available in 30 other countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, China, and most of Europe.

Tags: Apple Maps, Malaysia, Singapore
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Stop thieves getting your valuables using these smart security gadgets

As gadgets become more valuable and we carry even more of them around with us daily, theft is a big problem. But those smart gadgets, and even people, that need to be protected are starting to benefit from a growing smart security tech front-line.

From Bluetooth padlocks to movement detection home cameras, smart security is available and affordable for all.

So if you want to lock up your bike, secure your home, keep an eye on family, or even keep your new NFC wallet enabled phone safe you may need to upgrade your security.

We’ve collected the best smart security solutions here to help you feel safer knowing your gear is protected.

Master Lock

Master Lock Bluetooth Smart Padlocks

The padlock has been a staple part of a secure setup for years and more recently it’s become more intelligent. Gone are the worries of finding or losing keys as all you need now is an app.

The Master Lock example uses its Vault eLock app to unlock and secure the lock using military grade encryption. But if that’s inaccessible you can do it manually on the lock itself using a directional keypad. The indoor version is £69 while the outdoor model will cost you £89.

Off Pocket

A very modern solution has been created for a very new problem, digital theft. Now that most credit cards and even phones can pay using contactless payments, thieves are adapting. There have been a spate of thefts by people using credit card payment units tapped against people’s pockets and bags to take money from phones and cards.

The solution is already here in the form of kickstarted Off Pocket. It’s essentially a Faraday Cage phone case. You won’t get any signal but your phone will also be totally safe. On top of that nobody can track you, should you want that. Of course you could always just turn off NFC, in the case of Android, but that could get annoying after a while.

Pocket-lint

Logi Circle

Logi has created the Circle as a simple and affordable way to monitor home from anywhere. The camera is battery powered and Wi-Fi connected so it can be placed anywhere and viewed from wherever using a smartphone.

Unlike other offerings the Circle not only alerts you to movement or sounds but also creates round-up videos of the day. That way you can see everything that’s gone on at a glance in a short one-minute video.

So you can monitor the home for intruders, keep an eye on a child’s bedroom or monitor a naughty dog. Inspired and only £160.

READ: Logi Circle review

Sesame smart lock

Say goodbye to keys and hello to smart knocking. That’s right the Seasme smart lock lets you knock a special combination and it’ll unlock for you, recognising your smartphone. Or tap your phone and it’ll unlock. Or to keep it simple, open the app and tap to unlock. All without a key.

Should you want to access the smartlock from online, to open via Wi-Fi from anywhere, you’ll need the adapter. But that means you can open the door when a package arrives and you’re out, for example.

Sesame is $150 or $200 with the Wi-Fi adapter and should ship for June 2016. You will need a deadlock to attach it to and then you’re good to go.

Trax

Securing your family and pets is also something that modern gadgetry can help with. Trax is a GPS device that lets you know where your children or pets are all day.

Trax can fit in a pocket or on a collar and will transmit location data to a smartphone app. The battery lasts all day it’ll work in 30 countries worldwide. Any amount of Trax trackers can be added to the app for multiple tracking.

You can also set up geofences so if your child or pet leave that area you’ll get a notification. It’ll even tell you if the child is exceeding a speed limit, say in a car or by boarding a train. This can all be scheduled too, ideal for setting it on when in school for example.

The Trax is $200 which is about £140 and that includes two years connectivity for free.

READ: Best tech to secure your bike and prevent it being stolen

Sony’s 4K security camera can spot intruders in the dark

What do you give to the person who has everything? The world’s best security camera to watch over it, we guess. Sony’s latest Alpha product, the 850,000 yen ($7,500) SNC-VB770, may fit the bill. It’s a 4K mirrorless, E-mount network camera that can capture “clear color video at 30fps, even when the subject is almost invisible to the naked eye,” according to Sony. It features a full-frame 12.2-megapixel sensor that sounds a lot like the one Sony uses in its crazy Alpha A7S II mirrorless camera. As such, it can capture 4K in dark night conditions as low as .004 lux.

Sony sees a variety of low-light uses for the device, including road ice detection, rail tunnel surveillance, after-hours museum monitoring and nighttime wildlife monitoring. With all that resolution, you can also crop out specific parts of the image and display them as four separate VGA (640 x 480) images, as shown below. It can be controlled over WiFi by a smartphone and video and JPEG images can be sent directly to a LAN via an RJ-45 connector.

Thieves would be proud to be caught on the 35mm f/1.4 Zeiss lens shown above, which runs another $1,600 or so. The point is that you can add high-end glass from wide-angle to telephoto lenses to capture your target in pristine 4K. With a full-frame sensor and fast lens, you’d certainly get lovely images and bokeh, and Sony implied that the camera could even be used for production. With a razor-thin focus plane in low-light, however, we wonder if the cinematic qualities of the camera might clash with its intended use as a security device.

Source: Sony (translated)

UK issues new guidelines for punishing online trolls

Lawmakers in the UK are slowly coming to the realisation that online abuse can be just as damaging as its real-world equivalent. Last year, revenge porn became a specific crime, and the maximum prison sentence for internet trolls was increased from six months to two years. Acknowledging these serious cybercrimes is one thing, but it’s also important to know what exactly constitutes a punishable offence. To this end, The Crown Prosecution Service is proposing an update to its Social Media Guidelines to help criminal prosecutors bring keyboard cowards to justice.

The revised guidelines, which are effective immediately but subject to change at the end of a ten-week open consultation, include a few new and specific offences. Just for reference, revenge porn, cyberbullying and other types of online harassment, communications that violate a court order and those that infer a credible threat of violence were all covered in the previous guidelines, though these categories have been expanded to include obvious crimes like blackmail and grooming.

The updated documentation, however, now states that the creation of websites and fake online profiles may amount to an offence where the intention is to humiliate, offend, alarm or attack a victim’s reputation. “Controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship,” which is tantamount to online domestic abuse, has also been detailed in the new guidelines, having been formalised as a criminal offence in December last year. Online activity that falls under the category of violence against women and girls now has its own section within the guidelines, too.

With these new guidelines, criminal prosecutors have a richer crib sheet to reference when pursuing cases of online abuse. And when the wide-reaching Investigatory Powers Bill that introduces new surveillance powers inevitably makes it into law, the government promises it’ll be easier to catch offenders, too. Maybe we won’t need that cyberbullying insurance after all.

Via: The Huffington Post

Source: The Crown Prosecution Service, Revised Social Media Guidelines

World’s first ‘active’ sleep monitor keeps tabs on brain waves

Neurotechnology company Rythm launched both itself and its first product on Thursday, called the Dreem. The Dreem is a wearable device laden with EEG sensors. However, unlike other systems that utilize similar technology, the Dreem reportedly does more than simply record and analyze your sleep patterns. If, for example, the device recognizes the user is in a specific deep sleep pattern, it will “stimulate sound to keep the user in deep sleep for an extended period.” The $350 system will also reportedly be able to rouse users at the optimal time to avoid morning grogginess. Additionally, it will record and analyze sleep patterns with its associated iOS or Android app.

Potential buyers can sign up for early access at the Rythm website. However, given the lackluster science behind and performance of similar systems, you may want to hold onto your hard-earned cash until the initial reviews are in (or at least until the company finds those misplaced vowels).

Amazon debuts two smaller and cheaper Echos

Amazon has announced two new Echo-ready devices that do most of the same taks, but look completely different. The Echo Dot is a stubby version of the regular Echo while the Amazon Tap is a Bluetooth and WiFi speaker that supports voice commands.

The diminutive Echo Dot looks less like the Echo tower and more like a hockey puck. Amazon says that one of the main requests from current voice-assistant owners what the ability to plug it into a speaker. To that end the online retailer has removed the internal speakers and added an audio port.

Other than its small stature, it has all the same features as its larger sibling including the seven-microphone array, volume ring, mute and action buttons. It also works will all third-party services including a new support for thermostats from Nest, Honeywell and Insteon. For tunes on the go, or at home, Amazon is jumping into the wireless speaker market.

The Amazon Tap Bluetooth and WiFi speaker also supports Alexa voice commands, but you’ll need to press the mic button to initiate speech recognition. But because it supports voice actions it streams Spotify via your wireless network without having to sync with a smartphone. To kick out the jams, it has two speakers for omni-directional Dolby-processed sound. Plus since it’s made to be portable with nine-hours of playback time and three weeks of standby on a single charge.

The Tap sits atop a slim charging dock and has control buttons for volume and skipping forward and backwards through songs.

Both devices are available for preorder today and will be shipping later this month. The $129.99 Amazon Tap is available for anyone to purchase. The $89.99 Echo Dot on the other hand is only available for purchase via an Amazon Echo. So you have to own and Echo to buy an Echo. The company says it has limited stock on hand at launch. Plus, it’s an opportunity for Amazon to see how users interact with a Dot in a home already using an Echo.

No word on when the Dot will be available for everyone to purchase. But it’s important to note that it does work on its own without an full-size Echo.